Is Your Gift from God or the Devil? - Part 4
Your spiritual gift is from God. There is no doubt about that.
“Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above; it comes down from the Father of lights [the Creator and Sustainer of the heavens]”—James 1:17 (AMP)
But Satan will sometimes try to neutralize your God-given gift by making you afraid of it.
Satan Uses Fear to Provoke You to Shut Down Your Gift
For example, God often speaks to people in dreams. He has always spoken to people in dreams. God even used dreams to protect His own son when He directed Joseph to take Mary and the baby Jesus to Egypt to avoid King Herod’s reign of terror in Matthew chapter 2.
In their efforts to shut down the abilities of people to hear God’s messages through dreams, devils often cause people to experience nightmares or night terrors. Nightmares are dreams that are inspired by demons. Their intentions are to instill fear in people and cause them to reject dreams and dreaming. If these devils succeed in shutting down their dream lives, this can prevent people from receiving God’s messages through dreams.
Unbelievers don’t have any way to protect themselves from these terrifying night experiences, but after we come to know the Lord Jesus and understand how to use His authority to resist the devil (as we’re told in James 4:7 and 1 Peter 5:8-9) our dream lives can be essentially free of nightmares and interference from devils. Then our dreams can become a direct pipeline of regular communication from God.
As another example of how fear sometimes can shut down spiritual gifts, people with gifts to be able to see into the spiritual realm will often see demons before they see angels. Sometimes this will cause people to avoid seeing anything in the spiritual realm, rejecting this spiritual gift. This can effectively shut down their “seer” gift before they experience some of the amazing and incredible things that God wants to show them.
Satan Tries to Hijack Spiritual Gifts
Before you become comfortable in using your spiritual gift to receive insight from God, Satan may try to hijack your gift and lead you to believe that it came from him. Satan’s goal in these situations is to deceive you into believing that he is the one with real spiritual power so that you will turn to witchcraft and occultism for revelatory insight.
John Paul Jackson had amazing revelatory gifts. Even as a child, he knew that certain things were going to happen before they happened. His childhood friends would sometimes play a game in which they asked John Paul to reveal things about them that he could not possibly know without spiritual insight. He was also a highly gifted dream interpreter and often received very specific prophetic knowledge about people and future events. I even experienced him “hearing” my thoughts and responding to my thoughts without me having to say a word. Other people also had similar experiences with John Paul.
But in his younger days, before he understood that he had a gift from God, Satan tried to hijack his gift and persuade him that truth would be found in the occult realm.
He recounts this story in an episode of his Dreams & Mysteries TV series entitled The Mystery of Prophets & Psychics.
As a young man, John Paul Jackson was looking for an apartment to rent. As he walked into the office of one apartment building, the manager suddenly pushed her chair back and remarked, “Oh my! You have a gift!”
John Paul, not understanding what she meant, said “No ma’am. I’m not bringing a gift. I’m just here looking for an apartment.”
The manager asked John Paul to give her his watch. As she took his watch in her hands, she began to rub it and concentrate. Then she began to tell John Paul that a woman he had previously dated would try to come back into his life. Many people would have taken this as a supernatural sign that he was meant to be with this woman, and that he should get back together with her.
John Paul was a Christian, and even though he didn’t understand that he had a gift from God, he knew enough to reject what this occultist was telling him. On the way out of the office, he thanked God for showing him who he should *not *marry, and he threw the watch into the nearest dumpster.
Later John Paul met Diane who became the perfect wife for him. Diane supported and encouraged John Paul throughout his remarkable life and ministry. If he had married the woman that the occultist manager had spoken to him about, his life might have followed a very different—and darker—path.
That was not the only time that John Paul had an experience in which an occultist was used to try to persuade John Paul that truth could be found in the realm of darkness. We shouldn’t be surprised if servants of darkness try to masquerade as guides to spiritual truth.
“For such men are counterfeit apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, since Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. So it is no great surprise if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness, but their end will correspond with their deeds.”—2 Corinthians 11:13-15 (AMP)
**Reference: **
Jackson, J. P. (n.d.). Dreams & Mysteries - The Mystery of Prophets & Psychics. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWn0YOjsbXc
**Back: **What If We Have Revelations of Bad Things?
