This is an article written for Fulness magazine by Jack Taylor, Southern Baptist author of The Hallelujah Factor.

What are strongholds and how do they get there?

Several lines in a powerful contemporary anthem boldly declare the truth that "Every stronghold of bondage must fall beneath our feet. Every prisoner held captive must be free. For deliverance has come through the power of God's Son, it's the blood-bought, the church, the redeemed." Jesus wants men free from the deceptions and bondage of the enemy. It is for the practice of freedom that He has set us free.

Psalm 104:26 says that God made the whales to frolic, little squirrels, birds, puppies, colts kick up their heels and frolic. If God so consistently purposed for the animals in His creation to frolic, you can be certain He intended the same for men.

My eyes began to be open to a significant part of God’s plan to restore men to that freedom to frolic as I was seeking to learn how to pray for the lost. By sovereign providence I discovered a tract that referred to the importance of binding the strongman (Mark 3:27) and the necessity of pulling down strongholds (2 Cor 10).

The tract focused on the account of some missionaries who had come up against a wall impeding ministry both to the tribes who worshipped heathen gods, and to their own backslidden families. God showed them that breaking through the wall would be a matter of doing battle in the authority of the Spirit against the powers of darkness.

Boldly they began to bind the strongman -- not just the devil, but the strongman, which was the demon in charge of a particular stronghold. They asked God to show them strongholds, pockets of resistance against the gospel, well-organized entities that hinder the promotion of the gospel. They began to see themselves in concerted prayer stealing into the enemy’s camp and binding the strongman in charge of that particular camp, bringing those who were in the camp up to God for prayer and releasing them in prayer. Miraculous breakthroughs began to happen in the mission.

God has given believers the authority to discern strongholds and to pull them down because the existence of spiritual strongolds and the presence of the enemy are real. For too long Christians have operated under a deception concerning strongholds. Not knowing what they were and how they can be dismantled, they have thought strongholds were a part of their lives, their spiritual anatomies, their beings.

Roy Fish, professor of evangelism at SWBTS, and I began to apply the principle during a meeting in the church he was pastoring in Ohio. The results were dramatic. As we prayed for lost people in the church and community we asked the Lord to show us strongholds of enemy activity and deception that were keeping men and women from coming to know Christ.

The passage we quoted was 2 Cor 10:4-6: "For the weapons of our warfare are not of flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete."

We prayed for each prospect until God gave us light on the nature of the stronghold in which they were held. We then stormed that stronghold in prayer, demanded it be pulled down, cast down imaginations that were part of that stronghold, put down the high things that were against God in the thought processes and brought every thought into captivity.

The Lord revealed a stronghold of procrastination. This man for years had favorably received a witness and attended meetings yet never responded to be saved. The Lord said, "He wants to be saved and he is planning on being saved, but there is a deceitful thought process that tells him that he can get saved any time he gets ready, so why hurry." We pulled down the stronghold of procrastination and came to a point of relief in our praying. The next night he responded immediately to the invitation to accept Christ, testifying that he had been under conviction since he awakened that morning.

We stood against a stronghold of morality -- of human goodness -- which had kept another man blinded to the gospel. The next day he settled the issue in his home and declared it publicly in the service that evening.

I began to reason that Paul’s words to the Corinthians about strongholds were addressed not only to the lost but also to Christians. God is in the business of crushing strongholds.

Strongholds include fear, tradition, jealousy, rejection, peer group approval, resentment, bitterness, all kinds of phobias -- over one hundred phobias have been named, and unreasoning fears. Many of us have one of those lurking in us. Many times it comes out in a dream or a nightmare. We are terrified by it and we are never quite free from the realization of it.

Strongholds are sometimes expressed in physical maladies or are detected in a rucurring proneness to sin, about which you may wonder, "I don’t know what made me do that." Something in you is programming your behavior.

A stronghold may fit one of a variety of definitions or descriptions. It may be like an inner child of your past. It may be something in your background; an episide that ocurred that you have locked away in the closet of your mind. Although you have locked it away, it is there as an episode, feeding and controlling certain behavior. It is a stronghold.

For some Christians a stronghold manifests itself as worry that comes too easily, because it was programmed into them. Others easily get depressed, discouraged, or willingly accept misery as a permanent part of their lives.

When Joshua and the children of Israel came into Canaan, there were still thirty-one different kings and thirty-one different kingdoms for them to address. Christians come into God’s kingdom when they come into Christ and Christ comes into them. But Christian growth dictates that you are going to come against little kingdoms in you where the devil and his demons have control. You will be free as you address these.

Of the first believer that I led in destroying a stronghold in her life I asked the following question: "If there is a stronghold in your life, it is protected by defense mechanisms of logic and thought processes you use to defend yourself. Your thoughts are not captive to Jesus or else they would not be rendering you miserable. What do you believe would happen if today He pulled down the stronghold, cast down imaginations, put down high things, and brought into captivity every thought?" She answered, "Why, I wouldn’t have a problem." I asked her, "If that is the case, what do you believe would happen then if we prayed back to God what He said in His word is His will?" I then introduced her to the passage, "This is the confidence we have before HIm, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him" (1 Jn 5:14-15).

To make a long story short, we bowed our heads and I said, "Now what we are going to do is just pray. I am going to lead you in a prayer of confession and we are going to trust God to do it, just like you trusted HIm when He saved you and you called on Him."

So we prayed. "Father, in the name of Jesus, I come against this stronghold of rejection. All of these feelings that have rendered her miserable I pull down in His name and I cast down every imagination that has perpetuated rejection and protected it. I put down high things that have exalted themselves against God’s knowledge and we agree that every thought in her mind is brought into captivity." I led her in a brief prayer, and we were through.

When it was over I asked her, "Do you believe it is happening?" "I sure do. I feel totally different." Well, it didn’t make any difference whether she felt different or not. She just needed to know that she had prayed, had a transaction with God, and God was freeing her.

Our Victory Over Strongholds

Since that time, I have prayed with literally hundreds of people. A woman called me expressing horrible fear of storms. As we began to talk, the Lord revealed to her that as a child she was in a terrible storm in which, though she was not injured, the devil used the threat of bodily injury to deposit fear in her mind. With every subsequent storm, she had been engulfed with irrational, unthinking fear.

We came against the stronghold of fear. We cast down imaginations. We put down high things. We brought every thought captive. I said, "Now I want you to believe when we are through that you are free. I want you to proclaim that you are free. I want you to know that we have dealt with it God’s way and God has done it."

A little while later I received a letter from her. She said, "I’m sitting in perhaps the worst thunderstorm I ever remember. There is lightning, the thunbder is rumbling, the wind is blowing, and I want you to know that I am not having one nervous heartbeat. I am free!"

God is not joyful about His people being in bondage. Jesus Christ came to set the captive free. You do not have to have another deposit of grace to your account oto make you free. God’s grace is availabel to you to make you free.

Your stronghold can be demolished, whether they appear as personality traits like terminating friendships, recurring jealousy, pronesness to gossip, a root of bitterness, some fear in a spiritual area that prohibits or prevents growth, or some issue that keeps you from really going through with God. Behind these you can suspect a satanically constructed stronghold in your life, and a strongman guarding it.

Recognize the stronghold. Be honest about it. don’t hide it. We tend to want to hide things. That is one of the things that keeps us from getting free. There are problems you have deep within you that maybe no one knows about but God and you. You have tried to push it aside and get on with progress only to discover that always breathing over your shoulder, always looming over your life. About the time you make some spiritual progress, that thing crops up again and it is two steps forward and three steps backward, and you wonder why. I believe there are strongholds in every life.

A number of years ago a friend of mine was called to one of the leading churches in Florida. I had preached about strongholds in his former church. A month after he went there, my wife and I went to see him. We went to the church auditorium. The church, though it was in one of the great thriving areas of Florida, was as dead as a stick. There wasn’t any excitement or growth. I said, "I tell you what I want us tod do. I want us to pray through this auditorium. I want us to pray around the grounds and in the Sunday school classrooms." As we began to pray , the Lord began to show us strongholds and we came against them.. God began to move and to bless that church, which today baptizes between eight hundred and one thousand people ayear. The Spirit of God is moving in that church. God will show you things. God will lock this in your heart.

We need not fear all the strongmen of the devil or the devil himself. In Jesus’ name, we will bind up every spirit that is not of God. We will tear down their strongholds, crush longstanding fortresses and each vain imagination and high thing. We will bring thoughts into captivity and we will enter a new era of freedom..

Taken from Fulness magazine, date unknown