It's not just my ghost

I was sitting in my office one day at the church I pastored in Indiana when a lady from the church came in and told me that she needed the name of a good Christian shrink for her son. I asked what the problem was and my heart began to race as she told me that for months her son has been telling her that a woman visits him in his room every night. I questioned her about this woman and she said the her son claims it looks like a woman from Bible times but that he could not make out her face. He also said that she never spoke to him, just watched him. I asked this mom to sit down and I told her my story that I have detailed in my blog the last two days. She just wept. She had been telling her son that he was crazy when in fact he had a spiritual issue going on in his life. I met with her son and took him through the same steps I had gone through and to my knowledge the visitations ceased.

I have been amazed at the stories I have heard people tell me over the years after they have heard my story and felt that they finally had someone who would understand. For example, two twin teenager girls came into my office and told me about their fear at night as they would hear dishes rattling in the cupboards and be visited by dead relatives.

I had a lady one time who had grown up in a satanic cult where she was conceived to be a breeder but the amount of abuse she suffered in her childhood prevented her from ever getting pregnant. She came into my office one day with a look of fear and asked me how she could get out of her salvation. She no longer wanted to go to heaven. She went on to tell me that her mom, who had been the instigator of her childhood abuse, had recently died and that she had visited her the previous evening and told her that she was in heaven waiting for her to abuse her more. As a result, she wanted out of her Christianity. She in no way wanted to go to heaven if her mom was there waiting for her.

I remember as a youth pastor getting a call one evening at Youth Conference from one of our teens and he really sounded scared. I ran to his room. It was the end of July and the heat was horrible and there was no air conditioning in this guy’s room. But when I entered the room, it was like the temperature was 40 degrees colder and these big teenage boys were huddled together shaking. They had been playing the game called Dungeons and Dragons when the temperature suddenly dropped and right out from the game board in the middle of the room appeared a demon.

Ghosts are not the sprits of humans who have died. Nor do I believe that they are angels as in Scripture angels never came to haunt and they always clearly identified themselves and appeared most always in human form. Than what are ghosts? I believe they are demons. I hear stories like mine all the time of visitations, many of which supposedly are from dead relatives. Are these really dead relatives? No. We will see over the next two Sundays here at Grace that I do not believe that the spirits of dead people come back to visit us. Then what are they? I believe they are demons sent to deceive and sent to cause fear. In my blog tomorrow I will share why we do not need to be afraid of “ghosts”.