Spiritual Warfare Against Sexual Sin: Understanding Your Legal Authority

Everything we've walked through this month has been spiritual warfare. We just didn't always call it that. Today, let's zoom out and give you the bigger picture, because understanding how this actually works will change how you fight.

Legal ground

"...and give no opportunity to the devil."

That word "opportunity" is really the word "place": territory. And notice it doesn't say the devil takes a place. It says you give him one.

Practically, that means the enemy can't just do whatever he wants in your life. He needs permission. Even in the book of Job, Satan had to ask God before he could touch anything Job had, because Job was a righteous man and the devil had no right to touch him. The same is true for you. Demonic activity in a believer's life isn't random. It's almost always operating on ground that was handed over, knowingly or not, through specific choices.

SOUL: the four most common doors

Marcus Warner gives a helpful acronym for the doors we open:

• S: Sin. It gives the enemy a foothold because it's agreement with him in action. If you're harboring sin (feeding lust through what you watch, deliberately holding onto anger or greed), the enemy has a place to work.
• O: Occult. This gives direct access, because it's seeking power and knowledge from a source that isn't God. Witchcraft or occultism isn't something to play around with, even in silliness or symbol.
• U: Unforgiveness. It keeps you legally tied to whoever hurt you, because as long as a debt is still open, some part of you is still anchored to that wound.
• L: Lineage. This one surprises people. It means patterns of sin or bondage passed down a family line, generation to generation, until somebody finally deals with it. It doesn't mean you're guilty of your parents' sin, but Scripture says the sins of the fathers can be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who reject God. You can carry weight based on what authority figures in your life did, and the enemy comes around trying to collect on that.

Every one of those doors has a remedy: sin is answered by repentance, the occult by renunciation, unforgiveness by forgiveness, lineage by consciously cutting it off in Jesus' name.

Confess, cancel, command

Once you've identified where you've yielded ground to the enemy, here's the simplest response:

1. Confess the specific sin or specific involvement.
2. Cancel, out loud, any claim the enemy has built on it.
3. Command: tell the enemy, in the name of Jesus, that he has to leave.

Notice the order. Most of the frustration men feel with this stuff (feeling like they're shouting into the void, like nothing's happening) comes from skipping straight to commanding without first actually removing the legal ground underneath it. Once the ground is gone, the eviction is usually not a fight at all.

I'm not talking about dramatic movie-style scenes, or Elijah-and-the-prophets-of-Baal power encounters. I'm talking about realizing the unseen world is genuinely real and powerful, but your authority in Jesus is both normal and greater.

You actually have authority

Not because you're a pastor, not because you've been doing this a long time: every believer carries the same delegated authority, whether you're one day into your faith or thirty years in. That authority works three ways:

• Binding: using your authority to restrain interference.
• Loosing: releasing the bonds unforgiveness and old sinful ties have wrapped around a life.
• Evicting: the actual command to leave, but only after the ground has been dealt with. Try to evict something that still has legal standing, and you'll wear yourself out for nothing. Deal with the ground first, and the eviction is usually the easy part.

This isn't about becoming obsessed with demons, seeing one behind every bad mood. That's its own trap. This is about being sober-minded: alert, but not afraid. You don't need to go looking for a fight. You just need to know how to stand when one finds you.

For a deeper look at this topic, Marcus Warner's book "What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare" is a short, practical resource that goes further than we have space for here.

This is Day 33 of Victory Over Pornography, the final day of Level 4. Tomorrow, we move into Level 5: increasing joy in the Lord. Continue to Day 34 →