Abracadabra? What the Enemy Learned at Your Table, Part 2

I didn't set out to put astral projection and abracadabra in the same episode. Two things happened within a few months of each other, in two rooms that have nothing in common, and once I saw the pattern I couldn't unsee it.

Deuteronomy 18 lists eight forbidden practices in one breath. God didn't name one. He named eight, because people rarely stop at one. They arrive at the eighth having started somewhere that felt like nothing at the time. That's the question Part One left open. How does it actually get in?

The door opens on a word, long before it ever opens on a ritual.

Third Eye Is Not a Christian Term

Candace Owens has an audience in the millions, and a great many Christians in it. She said on her own program that she can astral project, and she used the phrase "third eye" in the same breath. Third eye is not a Christian term. It is not a biblical term. It comes out of Hindu and New Age teaching about the chakras, tied to the pineal gland, and the entire industry built on it sells psychic development, energy work, and astral travel. When that phrase turns up in the mouth of somebody who would tell you she rejects New Age spirituality, something has already come in the door.

Abracadabra Is a Charm, Not a Faith Word

Second word, different room entirely. Pastor Jamal Bryant taught his congregation that a magician visiting his daughters' second grade class told the children the word abracadabra means "I create what I speak," and he tied it to Romans 4:17. He took the sanctuary into it: if you want to see the hand of God in the month of August, abracadabra, let all my bills get paid. Ten days later Donnie McClurkin answered it from his own pulpit, without using the name, preaching that you cannot mix witchcraft with holiness.

Abracadabra is not a faith word. It never was. The oldest known use of it is a charm, written on an amulet and worn around the neck to break a fever. That is incantation, where the saying of the word is itself believed to carry the power. And that is the opposite of prayer.

Prayer is a son asking a Father. The power is in the One who hears, not in the syllables that leave your mouth.

The moment you move the power from the Father to the formula, you have crossed into something else, and you did it without meaning to, because all you did was repeat a word. I'm not saying the two examples are equivalent. Third eye imports an entire cosmology. Abracadabra imports a mechanism. Same door, different sized package. But nobody at either place converted to anything. They said a word. That's how it always goes, the vocabulary comes first, and the system walks in the door behind it while everybody in the room is agreeing.

When a Pattern Won't Break

I've counseled a great many people, and I've come to watch for one thing in particular. When a person is fully aware of a pattern in his life, and that pattern is destroying him, and he has done everything he knows how to do about it, and it still will not break, I believe you are likely dealing with demonic influence. All four conditions have to be present. He sees it. It is killing him. He has genuinely tried. And it holds anyway. The thing working against him has his number. It knows the weakness, the hour, the season, the particular disappointment that opens him up. It has been in the house a long time, and it took notes.

I have to fence this in immediately, because I've watched the ditch on the other side hurt people too. Not every hard thing in your life is a demon. Some of it is the flesh. Some of it is sickness that needs a doctor. Some of it is a decision you made with your eyes wide open. A believer who sees a devil behind every flat tire and every difficult coworker has stopped walking by faith and started walking by fear, and fear didn't come from God either. Discernment is not suspicion. Suspicion sees an enemy everywhere. Discernment sees clearly.

The Test Is Not Accuracy, and It Is Not Power

So how do you tell the difference? Scripture gives you a test, and it sits in the same passage that names the household spirits.

"And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." (Isaiah 8:19–20, KJV)

That is a text test. It is not a feelings test, not a goosebumps test, not a did-it-come-true test. You hold what was said up against the Word of God, and if it does not agree, it does not matter how accurate it was, how anointed it sounded, or how hard the room responded. First John 4:1 says the same thing as a command, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.

Now some of you hold that the gifts of the Spirit closed with the apostolic age. I'm not relitigating that here. But I will say this. Most of you affirm the enemy is real and that we wrestle not against flesh and blood. You've kept the doctrine. What some of you have retired is the equipment. Discerning of spirits sits right there in First Corinthians 12, among the gifts the Spirit distributes, and if you've written that gift out of the present tense, you are asking believers to fight an enemy you admit is in the field with no means of identifying him. In any battle, situational awareness is the difference between the soldier who comes home and the one who does not.

Closing the Door

A believer can be influenced. A believer cannot be possessed, because the title to your life transferred at Calvary. What the enemy holds is whatever access you handed him, and access is a door, not a deed.

"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." (James 4:7, KJV)

Submit first, then resist. People try to resist without submitting and then wonder why nothing moves. General repentance closes nothing. You have to name the specific thing, the practice, the word, the agreement, the habit, and shut it.

Conclusion

The thief came for your house. Christ came for your life. Take inventory of your house this week, and mind what you've made familiar.