The teaching in the first school year dealt strongly with battling against the devil, and I practised this to the best of my ability. “The devil won’t leave me alone until he realises that I mean business resisting him ….” This is how I thought about it, and having learned such expressions, it made me fight with all the strength I could muster. It was my responsibility to fight against the devil. Jesus had already done what He had to do against him when He took the devil’s weapons from him down in Hell, and now Jesus had, in His grace, given His weapons to me. Everything depended on whether or not I used these weapons to conquer the devil in my own life. If I did not do this, I could not expect any help from Jesus, because He had already done everything that He had to do.
The main weapons I had been given were commands against the devil in the Name of Jesus, authority to bind the evil spirits in Jesus’ Name, confessing the Word of God, “war-tongues” (this is aggressive speaking in tongues directed against the devil) and “travailing prayer” (prayer-travail is screams and groanings designed to break the devil’s grip and bring to birth the answer to prayer in the spiritual realm). To partake in the power (the anointing) which has been poured out in the Faith movement was also supposed to help me, so was “laughter in the Spirit” (this is convulsive laughing for no apparent reason), as well as very intense singing of the worship-songs.
After having learnt to scream at the devil in a prayer class, I went out into a local forest and started to scream as I had never screamed before. In a man-to-man combat, I yelled at the devil using all the force I could possibly mobilise. After about half an hour, I noticed that somebody from a nearby residential area was out wondering what was going on. I quietly disappeared another way. The screaming had not improved my condition, however.
In the long term, I was supposed to get help and strength by partaking in the Word of God. I did this by listening to what was considered to be anointed teaching and by reading the Bible myself. It was very important that any teaching I listened to was anointed if it was going to help me and, therefore, I was afraid to listen to any other teaching unless it was in agreement with the Faith teaching. I had become afraid to trust my own judgment regarding any interpretation of the Scriptures.
As time went on, I became more and more exhausted and less confident. I felt I was fighting a hopeless battle against the devil. It seemed much more likely that he would conquer me than that I would conquer him. I came to the end of my tether and could not go on much longer. I began to consider how I could possibly go on living if this torment within me did not come to an end.
