Battling the Unseen Enemy vs. Deliverance

So...I had an "experience" this week.  I've been sick...flu or something.  I skipped Sunday School but drug myself to church Sunday morning and wished I'd stayed home in bed.  And now that I said that, it's helped me to realize yet another aspect of what I'm about to say.

Sunday's message was about discouragement.  The pastor was sensing someone discouraged, someone walking with God and yet it seemed nothing in life was working out.  That would've been me, except I wasn't at all discouraged.  I was very sick for sure, but I haven't had any problems with discouragement for months now.  So I went home and went to bed and slept until 8 p.m.  LOL

Upon waking however, I began to have discouraging thoughts.  I brushed them off.  By Monday morning, I was getting worse in my mind, and yet feeling some better physically, not 100%.  I cried to God because of how I was feeling the old stings of depression.  I came into work for an hour and left to take the day and finish recuperating.  All day I battled depressing thoughts.  Tuesday morning I cried some more, even worse in depression.  I woke in the middle of the night crying last night and felt all the old negative thoughts.  I managed to fall back to sleep.

When the alarm went off this morning, I felt fine, no depressive thoughts.  And I had a new thought of how this came suddenly after Sunday's message and then cleared with this new thought.  The thought was of whatever spirit of discouragement the pastor was preaching on managed to hit me during my weakened state of sickness.  And the further thought I mentioned I just got typing this....I really felt I should've stayed home Sunday but really don't like missing church and force myself to go.  Perhaps this was another way God was showing me that it's ok to miss, and I'd have perhaps been better off just this once.  I mean, I think I've stayed home sick twice in over three years because I really hate missing.  I was even there Wednesday feeling this illness coming on and I was miserable and then forced myself to go again Sunday morning when I felt even worse than Wednesday night.

So I felt absolutely my old self again this morning (or my new self?  LOL) and in prayer, I still don't feel Deliverance ministries are the ticket.  By that, I mean....God ALLOWS things.  Just like allowing satan to afflict Job.  Do we really believe we can pray it off of someone?  I think what God was showing me is that sometimes the discouragement isn't just flesh but it is spiritual and we CAN rebuke such spirits once we recognize what they're doing.  Sometimes discouragement is just our flesh from circumstances and being in an imperfect human body.  But we certainly do battle the unseen enemy and we have to fight it away, but having another command it to leave if God has allowed it?  Yes Jesus commanded the demons out, but He didn't go around naming all the demons of oppression, discouragement, etc.  God didn't command depression and discouragement spirits out of Elijah.  That was simply Elijah's human reaction to fear.  God strengthened Elijah, He didn't command a spirit out of him.  

Perhaps deliverance works for some, I don't know.  But I do wonder if sometimes when we bring it up, we can open a door for the spirits to get into our thoughts.  Like the pastor preaching on discouragement and that discouragement overtook me while I was in a weakened state of sickness.  I had no issue with discouragement before the sermon.  But hearing of it opened the door to let it play on my thoughts maybe.  And sometimes it can open a door when someone tries to pray deliverance and command out spirits that aren't there if they're not careful to recognize what is of satan and what is of the fleshly human mind.

I think it's a fine line tightrope we have to walk and use discernment.  We need to not swing fully into any position, believing everything is of satan...all our thoughts, all our circumstances, all our feelings, etc., or believing everything is flesh and there are never any spirits at work.  That one deliverance ministry I checked into last year preached that it wasn't your do, but your "who"...they blamed everything you did or thought wrong on satan.  To me that is telling us to never accept responsibility for our own actions.  If there is no responsibility to accept, there is no remorse for our actions, and without remorse, no repentance or a desire to change.  Yet not every thought that crosses our mind is something we're responsible for either.  It is whether we choose to entertain that thought or act on it that we become responsible and we can no longer blame satan once we cross that line.