Freedom in the House

If my story does happen to trigger something difficult in your life, then please come for prayer after it's over. We have some of our Sozo team members here and pastors and leaders here that would be glad to pray for you. You know, when you get saved, you might have a broken arm, right? Does that broken arm necessarily get healed? Maybe.

But have you ever seen that not happen? All the physical stuff didn't go away, right? So sometimes all of the emotional broken heart is not necessarily healed. The minute you give your life to Jesus, now you have the healer and the process begins. But it is a process.

There are several scriptures that I want to read because I don't want to get out of here without reading them. One is in Jeremiah, chapter 9, verse 22, where God asks a rhetorical question. Harvest is past, summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the brokenness of the daughter of my people, I am broken. Do you know that if you have any brokenness in your heart, it breaks God's heart, too.

I mourn, he says. Dismay has taken hold of me. And here's the rhetorical question. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?

Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored? And the answer to that question is, sometimes we don't make room for people to get healed. Sometimes we just expect other people and ourselves to. Okay, we're going to church now, right? We're going to put on our pretty clothes, and we're going to put on our pretty face.

And the first person greets, say, hi, how are you? I'm wonderful. How are you? Now, you might have gotten in an argument with your husband on the way to church, or you might go home Monday and you're depressed again. But Sunday, we've got that face on.

But I'm thankful that we're in a house. And everybody say, there's a physician in the house. Oh, let's try that again. There's a physician in the house.

This house makes room for the healing of the brokenhearted.

This house makes room for you to be vulnerable and honest about where you are. There's no pretending. Well, there may be some pretending, but you don't have to pretend. There are places to be honest, be open still, be loved still, be cared for and helped along in your healing journey. And Sozo is one of those resources.

So I'm very thankful to the leadership of this house that made room for this kind of Ministry. Now, 16 years ago, I'd never heard the word Sozo. How many of you had heard the word sozo 16 years ago. How many you had heard the word five years ago?

One or two? How many of you? This is your first time you've ever heard the word sozo. Okay? The rest of you is somewhere in between five years and now.

Okay, I'm a teacher and I like students to talk back. Well, I was a teacher, but anyway, so I had never heard of it either. But God had spoken a word of prophecy over my life 24 years ago. No more than that now. Okay, I should be able to do this math 39 years ago.

And I'm just going to read that word, not the whole word, but part of the word of prophecy to you, just to show you how words of prophecy sometimes work.

And I do believe by the spirit that as I read this prophecy, I want you to open your heart. Because prophetic word is never for just one person.

So if something in your heart is receiving this, just open your heart and receive it.

And I need to find the clinics because I probably will cry. There's one. Oh, thank you so much. I might not need the whole box. I've read this like a hundred times, but still I tear up because the word said it wouldn't make me.

It would grip my soul. And it does. And the Lord says, daughter, I love you with a love beyond your grasp. I care for you. This has been a hard thing for you to grasp, but I love you, I love you, says the Lord.

And I'm going to make that so real that those words won't be just words, but they will grip your spirit and grip your soul. And you'll know that God cares. You'll know what love really is. And I'm going to give you a revelation of the love of God. Not a man made love, not a worldly love, but a real agape, the real love of God.

And you're going to get such a revelation of the love of God that you're going to be able to turn around and minister it to others. You'll be able to minister to others. For I'm going to birth something in your spirit. In your teenage years, you went through a situation that was a real trauma in your life. And I had to heal you.

And I've been delivering you. But now the Lord says, I'm going to restore you what the devil has tried to use to destroy you. I'm going to turn it around and I'm going to make it a grace in your life. And you're going to deliver and you're going to set Free. Oh, hallelujah.

And you're going to minister to and you're going to bring miracles. And the Lord says, there's hundreds, hundreds of young ladies you're going to minister to and restore and establish and you're going to pour out my grace in their lives, says God. And the Lord says, daughter, everything the devil has tried to come at you since birth to the present to destroy, I'm going to now take it and destroy him with it, because I'm going to convert it and bring anointing and bring a deliverance, saith the Lord. And I've called you to it. And you're going to do it by my grace and power, because I've called you for this hour.

That was a pretty good word. Would you say. Would you be feeling pretty happy at that point? Ooh, God's got my number. He knows what I want, he knows what I need.

And I'm going to do miracles. I'm going to kick the devil. Well, okay, so let's go on a few pages.

Same prophet, for those of you who are familiar with the prophetic realm and some of these. This was Bill Hammond, who's called the father of the prophetic movement. So he's. He was a pretty big dude that came to our place and ministered. Let me just say one other word.

I felt a word of wisdom for you here that the scripture says, forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us. And the Lord said, just told me for you to meditate on that. There's some people indebted to you, there's somebody that's affected you that you need to release in your spirits and it's from the past back aways and you need to meditate on it. And the Lord said, He didn't tell me what it was. He just said, forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.

Then he went on. I could tell he was trying to fumble around and figure out what it was, but the Lord just wouldn't tell him. Thank God. You wait on the Lord and the Holy Spirit will quicken it to you. And it's going to be a key to release some things.

The devil's had a legal right to come in and harass you over this matter because he said they haven't forgiven from their heart. She mentally has, she verbally has, but she hasn't cancelled the debt. You should cancel the debt.

Well, that was a pretty sober word. And be honest with you, I just really couldn't figure out at the time, what the prophet was talking about, I like the first part, second part kind of challenged me a little bit because I didn't. I thought I'd forgiven everybody. I mean, I said, I forgive, I forgive, I forgive. But apparently it was a little more to be uncovered there.

So it would be 24 years before these prophetic words that the Spirit spoke began to come to pass. And the breakthrough came when I was introduced to an inner healing and deliverance ministry called Sozo, Sozo Ministries, a unique inner healing ministry. The main aim is to uproot those things that are affecting your relationship with God. Things that the demonic might attach to things like wounds, lies that you believe, judgments that you've made, traumas that you've experienced. Certainly people you haven't forgiven.

The doors of sin that you may have opened through sexual sin or occult involvement, or walking in fear, bitterness, and unforgiveness. So finding all those things has been a journey for me. And I say all, but there's probably still some I have. I'm still uncovering things. You know, it's a journey, it's a process.

You know, no one's ever completely healed this side of heaven, I don't think, because, you know, if you do get healed, something else is going to come at you next week, you know, and you have to make sure broken hearts get healed, but they can get broken again, right? And so we have to always be on. Scripture says, guard your heart. So we have to know how to guard our heart. What do I need to guard my heart against?

What do I need to be on the lookout for? I had a really good friend back in 2008 that I'd been friends with for 20 years. We'd done ministry together, and we had done showers together and parties together. And she's just a really shop together, you know, just one of those really friends. This is just a good buddy.

And she came and told me one day that she was moving to Black Mountain. And I said, yeah, somebody got a sad face on. I see that back there. That's the way I felt. I said, lord, I really hope you've got something good up your sleeve, because this is really tough for me.

I don't want to lose this friend. So after about three months, she called and said, you know, I haven't seen you guys in about three months. There's some kind of conference at my church this weekend. Why don't you just come up? If it's not good, we'll go shopping.

Sounds like a plan, right? And I said, well, what's the conference about? She said, I don't know. It's some kind of prayer. It's not a weird prayer.

I've never heard the word before. I don't even know what it is. So I go up there to this conference not even knowing what I'm going through. Don't you love how the Holy Spirit works? God just kidnapped me, said, here we go, girl.

Getting ready to burst that prophetic word open in your life? By the way, I have put this thing on the shelf. Any of you ever gotten a word from the Lord and just couldn't figure out how to make it come to pass? So you just tuck it away? Okay?

I'm getting tired of trying to figure that one out. Put that one on the shelf. Let's see what happens down the road. If the prophet missed it, God bless him, he missed it. And I really forgot about the Word until I went to the sozo conference.

And actually the Greek word means saved, healed, and delivered sometimes in the scripture. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be sozoed. The Greek word is sozoed, that the world might be saved. It said of the man who got free of the demons that he was sozoed, he was healed, he was delivered.

Instead of the woman with the issue of blood, she was made whole. She was sozoed. So sozo represents the full package of what Jesus died to give us.

So the first night we went to the conference, and it was amazing. It didn't take long to realize this was an inner healing and deliverance conference. Now, I had been in some deliverance ministries before, and quite frankly, I was a deliverance ministry dropout.

It just didn't work for me to learn this whole chain of demons that control this and this whole chain of demons that control. I'm like, ee, I don't think I want to mess with those guys. You know what I mean? And so I just dropped out.

If it's going to happen, God, you have to do it some sneaky way, which he was able to do. But this was different. This was the most gentle and loving approach to inner healing deliverance that I had ever witnessed. The goal was to find the roots of the issues in our souls to which the demonic is attached. And these issues give the enemy an opportunity to influence our perceptions about God ourselves.

And Life itself, self. The Word tells us to have a renewed mind, right? Take our thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ. Sozo helps us with this process so we can walk in freedom from the enemy's influence and strongholds in our thinking. So once we understand where our wrong thinking comes from, where our lies come from, how the enemy gained his stronghold, it becomes more of a fair fight.

Fight to stay free. We had a session this morning, and the girl drove here from out of town. So none of you know her, but on the way here, she saw the signs that said Orphanage Road. And the Lord spoke to her and said, you're leaving the orphanage today.

She came in. She was Christian since she was 5, raised in a Christian home. But her parents, as all of us do, do the best job we can, right? But all of us make mistakes. All of us.

God is a redeemer. He can and he will redeem your mistakes. So please don't take any condemnation home with you tonight on your Parenting. If anybody should take it home, it would be me. Okay?

I made a bunch of mistakes before my heart got healed. And unfortunately, my children were grown when my heart got really healed. So I deal with that now. But God is still a redeemer. God is still a redeemer.

And he can and he will redeem my mistakes and your mistakes. So don't let the enemy lie to you. There's no hope for you. There's no help for you. This girl that came in this morning, she was sitting in the back of the church because she felt like God wanted to speak to everybody else, but she was somehow disqualified, qualified.

And it had to do with her parents, the way they raised her. They were Christians, but they were very legalistic Christians. So she didn't feel the love. She didn't feel the love bonding. And she felt she could never.

Nobody could work any harder in the church than this girl worked. But she was just never enough. It's never enough. God's never had me with me, and it was just heartbreaking. It was just heartbreaking.

This is what she said at the end. Thank you for giving me your time, energy and service. I know today I left the orphanage and I'm never going back. Amen. Amen.

We've seen it happen over and over and over and over now. So is there the answer to everybody's issues, problems, questions that can make all your problems go away? No. But as I said before, it's going to help, you know, how to fight. It's going to be more of a fair fight instead of having These gut level reactions that come out of nowhere and you don't know where they come from.

And I'm going to tell you about one in my own life. In a minute, those automatic reactions are healed. And the enemy's going to come at you, but you're going to see it coming at you from the outside, not the inside, but the outside. You're going to be able to say, hey, hold on a minute. We dealt with you.

This is no longer your territory. Get out of here and leave me alone. Amen. Or better yet, I say, hey, why don't you just go talk to God about that because he and I already settled it. Or sometimes I say, you know, devil, thank you for that lie, because you are a liar and nothing but a liar.

So I know the exact opposite of what you just told me is what's about to happen. So you got to turn his tactics on him. Don't be nice. Don't be nice to the devil. He's our enemy.

He hates Christ. He hates God's creation. So we don't have to be nice to him. I know our mamas told us to always be nice and polite. If you can't say something good about anybody, don't say anything at all.

But when it comes to the devil, you have my permission, you have Pastor Terry's permission, you have Pastor Nathan's permission, right? To tell the devil, get lost, get out. Amen. Say that again. What did you say?

Said push off.

All right, so yeah, you're right to get feisty with him.

All right, so the first night, a tool called the Father Ladder was introduced. And basically this tool explains the effect that our family has upon our upbringing. Our earthly father set the grid on how we relate to God as father and the lady we did this morning, God was distant. She knew he was there, but he was distant. By the end of the session, we go back and I say, close your eyes.

She closes her eyes and said, when I say, father God, what do you see? She said, I'm peeking around the corner. And he's saying, come on, girl, don't you love it? I just love it. I just love it.

From being distant to peeking around the corner. So he said, now you gotta go home and you gotta practice that. Practice being in his presence. Practice getting closer. Just ask him, can I come closer?

He's not gonna turn you away. Do you have something you wanna say to me, Father God? Is there a lie I believe about you? Is there a lie I believe about myself? And talk to God in those ways and he'll walk you through all of those questions and bring healing to your mind.

All right, so our siblings set our grid on how we relate to Jesus as our friend and brother. Most of us relate to Jesus, most of us pray to Jesus. Because if your family's messed up, you go out and find a good friend, right? You just find a good friend. Your good friend listens to everything, understands everything, accepts you right where you are.

So that's why God sent Jesus to be a friend to us, because he knew we needed a friend to bring us to Jesus, to the Father and our mothers. And this is where we don't always realize this. Set the grit on how we relate to the Holy Spirit. Because mothers to be the comforter. She used to be the teacher.

She used to be the nurturer. You get a boo boo. What does she do? Oh, she kisses it away. Right?

How many ban bans would you like on your little boo boo? You know, that's mama. Whereas dad's gonna say, you broke your toe on that table. Bad table, smack the table, you know? Right, right.

Is that what dads do? Not all of them. Some dads have more of a mother heart than mothers do. More of a comforting heart. I should say it that way.

More of a comforting heart than. But that's what mom's supposed to do. So if mom was difficult, we might be scared of the Holy Spirit. We ministered to one lady one time. She said, I'm just afraid the Holy Spirit's gonna embarrass me.

I don't want to get too touchy feely with the Holy Spirit because he might embarrass me. And we're like, okay, well, let's ask Father God, Father God, why do I feel like the Holy Spirit's gonna embarrass me? And immediately she had a flashback when she was a little girl getting off the school bus. Her mother had an alcohol problem. Her mother was in the front yard.

Any children in here totally unclothed, drunk embarrassed her. Can you imagine all of her friends seeing that? So she was scared to death of the Holy Spirit. So we prayed with her. We released some forgiveness prayers towards her mom.

We broke unhealthy soul ties with her mom, let her mom off the hook for being the fixer of her pain. Let mom go. Mom was going to make things right. She would have done it a long time ago. Right?

We do the best we can. Got to let us off the hook sometime. You got to let us go. And brought healing in her life. And she became a seeker of the Holy Spirit after that.

So that's the Father Ladder. So then we broke out into groups and they were going to practice on us. We were going to practice in our group doing sozo with each other. So my father happened to be a broken man who carried anger and a lot of pain from his childhood. His father died when he was a young man.

He and his older brother had to quit school. I think he was in sixth grade grade when he had to quit school and go to work in the cotton mill to support his mom and the other siblings. So he's very frustrated with life and unfortunately he turned to alcohol for his comfort. And he wouldn't step foot in a church because all the hypocrites there. Right?

Familiar story. Don't ever let a hypocrite come between you and God. You go anyway, sit in front of the hypocrite. Okay.

So this produced a lot of strife in our home. So my home was anything but secure, safe. So I had some things I needed to forgive my father for. And God nailed me that night. I got nailed as the one to get minister to.

And my friend Susan went up on this trip with me. She's not here tonight. Oh, thanks Susan. Are you. You're not here.

And I didn't tell her I was going to be speaking. So I don't tell people when I speak. But she got nailed too. We both got nailed. And it felt really good for both of us to release forgiveness to specific things.

Like I simply forgave my father for not ever really surrendering his heart to the Lord and not raising us in a Christian home. We're not honoring my mother for introducing the spirit of chaos and fear into the home. We had to walk on eggshells. We never knew when we were going to do something to make him angry and have that burst of anger. So when we got home that night, we knew there would be no shopping the next day.

We were going back for. Because this freedom thing felt good. And you know, there was not one demon mentioned in that breakout group. I'm not saying that you don't have to rebuke demons. I do.

We do. But it didn't have. It doesn't always have to happen. Jesus got rid of demons sometimes without addressing them. Matter of fact, if you actually study the miracles of Jesus and when he prayed for people, one third of the time he addressed a demon, 2/3 of the time he did not, he would say something like, be healed, your faith has made you whole.

Be set free. Because the demonic knew who he was. The demonic Recognized his presence. So I don't think we always have to address demons to get rid of demons. Am I making.

Stephanie, are you disagreeing with me? No, she's. She's okay. All right?

Because if you get rid of the thing they're tormenting you about, then they have nothing else to attach to. Jesus said in the book of John, the enemy's come to me. He's found nothing in me. Amen. Nothing that he can attach to, no spirit of offense, no bitterness, no unforgiveness, no willful sin, Nothing in me that he can attach to.

And isn't that where we all want to be and then where we all want to live so that he can't even get to us now? He attacked me in other ways. Oh, yeah. It's a spiritual battle on this side of heaven. It's always going to be.

But most of it is he attacks people that I love. That's most of my spiritual battle now, is fighting him off of people that I love and people that need to be saved. So Susan and I went home, and we just could not wait for everybody to go to bed. You know, people like Chatty Cathy women get together, and it's chatty. And she and I were like, ooh, we just want to go upstairs and practice this some more.

So finally, everybody went to bed. We went upstairs, and we opened doors in our heart that had been closed for years, and we shared things with each other we never had the freedom to discuss with anyone. We led one another through forgiveness prayers that we had seen modeled that evening. Another tool we learned about that evening was presenting Jesus. As we look around the room of a memory, we ask Jesus, where were you?

What do you have to say to me in this memory? Jesus presented himself to our memories in beautiful ways and spoke powerful words to us that brought healing to those places. When I was in one of my memories, which was an abusive situation when I was four or five years old, I saw Jesus. When I say I saw Jesus, you know, the Bible says. Well, let me just read what the Bible says.

But whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now, the Lord is the spirit. And where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all with unveiled face beholding, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image. From glory to glory.

Just as from the Lord, the spirit, the Lord was opening up the spirit realm to us. That night, we were not having open visions. We were not in heaven seeing God on a throne, but we were in spiritual places. Does that make sense? You've seen that.

The Bismo commercial, where they open it up to see your world differently. Kind of like looking over into the Spirit and. And Jesus can manifest himself in the Spirit to you. And you see it in your. I don't know, your perceptions, your thought life.

You see him there. What is he saying there? And so that was kind of what was happening to us. But Jesus walked into that room and picked me up.

And he carried me to the most peaceful place I had ever been. He carried me to the arms of the Father.

And the Father just held me.

I can still feel it. He just held me. He says, it's going to be all right.