Questions & Answers
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Question: I had a bad dream last night about all of my struggles at my job. For the past four years, people there keep saying bad things about me. People keep trying to almost "sabotage" everything positive that I do, and I can't find out why. In my dream, when I felt the worst, I suddenly saw your face and you said, "Word curses! Break the word curses," and I woke right up. I got up and went into the other room and began to bind my will and all of my fellow workers' wills to the will of God. I bound my mind and their minds to the mind of Christ. I loosed the power and effects of word curses off myself, just like I heard you teach. Then I prayed blessing and forgiveness and healing on everyone I work with, just like I heard you teach. I felt much, much better and went back to bed. Did I do it right?

Answer: You are kidding, right? This is a wonderful example of the very "present tense" power of the keys of the Kingdom! You did the rightest you could have done. Too often, we think we'll get up in the morning and pray the prayers out of the book, or we'll wait until we can call someone, or we'll something or other. You acted immediately and you used your keys "right now." Far too often, when bad thoughts or old patterns of thinking come into our minds, we rebuke the devil, or we tell him to leave us alone, or we do something else. Sometimes he does need to be thrown out, but when you first bind your mind to the mind of Christ and loose all wrong thoughts coming into your mind, then you are steadied and stabilized to tell him to go. Always use the keys immediately when fear, or doubt, or anger, or confusion show up.

Question: Dear Liberty: I have been fighting a spanking fantasy fetish. I want to be a child again even though I know that you can't turn back time. I have even masqueraded as a child on the internet to fill this need. I am a born-again child of God, yet I do these things and I do not understand why. I want to be free and be the man that God has called me to be. I am dating a wonderful woman and I want to love her the right way. I want to be free of this stupid fetish, once and for all. Help! B.B.

Answer: Of course, we will help you pray. I commend you for your honesty and your openness. Also for your desire to have a godly relationship with the woman you are dating. You're struggling with some wrong behaviors that the unsurrendered soul uses to try to meet its own deep unmet needs. A born-again Christian gets an instant spiritual connection to the Spirit of God (human spirit to God’s Spirit), but the "soul" (the human mind, will and emotions) does not get immediate restoration. The soul needs to be renewed, meaning the will needs to be surrendered to God's will, the mind needs to be renewed to the thought patterns of the mind of Christ, and the emotions need to be brought into balanced healing in the Holy Spirit.

Your unmet needs, as you have surmised, were birthed into place in your soul at a young age when certain "things" that should have gone into the forming of a strong, whole character and identity process just didn't happen. You cannot go back and change or make up for that at this point in your life. You need to move forward. You need to forgive and release those who did not give you the necessary building blocks required for a complete sense of character and identity, even those who intentionally committed wrong acts against you. They failed you because others failed them in the formative years of their character building and identity process.

Imperfect people always create more imperfect people, which is what generational bondage patterns of "treadmill" thinking is all about.

You are embarking on a "guided tour" now (reading Shattering Your Strongholds) to get out of the cycle of your soul using wrong behaviors in an attempt to pacify the force of your deepest unmet needs. This is the treadmill part, for this soulish cycle of thinking does not set you free—it just keeps you going over and over the same old coping patterns that seem to take a little pressure off you for a little while.

As soon as you finish reading Shattering Your Strongholds, I encourage you to get Breaking the Power and start reading it as soon as possible. It will take the principles you will learn to use in SYS and move you into a deeper understanding of why you need to use them and what they will accomplish. Your poor soul, filled with all of its unmet needs, unhealed hurts and unresolved issues from you past, has actually been perpetuating your bondage, locking in your neediness and pain, and keeping God out of the areas where you need healing.

Satan may have taken advantage of some of the open doorways your soul has created in itself by its refusal to surrender to God's help. But you need to understand that it has been your own soul that has been thwarting all your attempts to move forward in complete surrender to and with full overcoming victory in Christ Jesus.

Deliverance would not help unless the doorways in the soul were closed. Working a 12-step program won't help permanently, behavioral modification won't help permanently, medication won't help permanently. Only the surrendering of your own unsurrendered soul's self-defense processes will let God's love, grace and mercy put all of your character and identity pieces together to make you whole and complete—PERMANENTLY!

These principles of binding and loosing prayers are your keys to opening up all of your soul's walls, defenses and wrong mindsets which have been blocking God's help, so that His grace and mercy can finally flow into every area of your being. You can use these keys to cooperate with your own "liberation" from all prior bondage—all of the guidelines and instructions you need are in Shattering Your Strongholds and Breaking the Power.


Question: Do you have any recommendations for me on how to pray regarding the following situation: My husband has been a Christian several years and has been in leadership in our church. After nearly two decades of marriage, he left me and our three children to move in with another woman from church.

I am determined to go forward with God no matter what, but believe that it is God's desire for our marriage to be restored. I am spending time in prayer, using the binding and loosing principles, and also that any soul-ties anywhere in this situation would be severed.

Answer: You say you are praying the soul ties "would be severed." Are you praying in such a way as to ask God to sever them, or are you actually speaking the words of loosing (which also means severing) directly in your prayers? Remember that Matthew 16:19 tells us that Jesus gave US the keys and whatever WE would bind and loose on earth would be loosed in heaven.

This is not cutting God or Jesus out of the answer, rather it is using the keys He's given us as He's directed us to use them. Binding and loosing as this Scripture tells us (instead of asking for God to do it for us), we participate in seeing His will established in situations on earth.

God has always known His will for each of our lives. By establishing our own intent and desire (through binding and loosing prayers) to see ourselves and all others involved in situations come into agreement with His will, we are actually making "place" or room for His desires, plans, and will to be so manifested. Other than making sure that you are in agreement with this, I think you are doing fine and are on target with your prayers.

God bless you, Rev. Liberty Savard

Question: Some time ago I bought your book Shattering Your Strongholds (in an Asian country). At that time I thought it was just another book until, at a seminar in my city, an Australian minister recommended your book to me, having discerned strongholds in my life. I am now reading your other book Breaking the Power. I feel somewhat anxious and fearful.

Could it be that my soul's defenses are crumbling and, instead of running off to another Christian for prayers, I should in fact run to the Lord and rejoice and even dance before Him? "J"

Answer: You have very good insight on exactly what is happening. I am assuming that you have been praying some of the binding and loosing prayers which would account for the feelings of "vulnerability."

God has not "allowed" these feelings to surface in you, so much as they are coming from your soul which is feeling it is losing its power to control your thoughts and your actions. This is a good thing. A little fearful, perhaps, but a good thing.

Don't give up and settle for a life of just surviving—that would fall so short of what Jesus Christ intended to accomplish for you by dying on the cross. He wants you to have life abundantly. Your unsurrendered soul has been stealing it from you and allowing Satan to help discourage you. You can bring your soul back into alignment with God's plans for it and make it close its open doors to prevent any further harassment from the devil.

The keys to this freedom are called the keys of the Kingdom! You are learning about them as you read the books. I encourage you to pray the binding and loosing prayers on pages 131 and 139 for your self out of Shattering Your Strongholds. Pray the prayer on page 171 out of the same book for all of your family members—your wife, your children, your parents and her parents, grandparents, siblings, etc. It is quite important to begin impacting the whole network of family dynamics to break out into freedom. There is a very good chance that other family members are struggling, too.

God knows the plans He has for you and they are for good and not for evil. They are plans to give you hope and a prosperous future (see Jeremiah 29:11).

We're praying. Stay in touch with us.

Question: I don’t want to sound critical or argumentative, but I would like some clarification. I have been a fighting Christian for 18 years. From the beginning, I struggled with strongholds. I belonged to a church that had some very gifted pastors who moved in the gifts of healing and deliverance. I “lived” in pastors’ offices for nearly five years, getting counseled. Many of the root causes of my problems were identified during that season. Many, but not all, of my problems were eliminated during that first ten years.

About two years ago I walked into a well-known national clinic and started going through their program. Some major sin areas were broken as they pointed back at the issues that had been uncovered when I was a new Christian. The only thing they did different that I can see is that they allowed me to express the hurt, anger, rage and other emotions the hurts caused. I am still in a group therapy situation and am pretty much in the home stretch of "recovery."

This leads me to the questions and comments I have. First I would like to acknowledge some of the points that I really believe you have nailed on the head. I was really convicted about experiencing things second-hand. Much of my knowledge about spiritual warfare is “second-hand experience.” I've done a lot of things in the church, leadership stuff, home groups, teaching, preaching, but on the stuff that I really have a vision for, it's all only been second-hand.

The second point I agree with you on is that it's obvious that we can't bind Satan, himself. But I believe that demonic spirits establish hooks or rights to oppress people. You can kick them out or think you are, but because the hook hasn't been removed, they will show up again and again until the hook is taken care of.

The third thing I agree with is that our unmet needs and hurts can hide behind behaviors that won't get dealt with until we deal with the behavior or thought pattern.

Now, my concerns are that the methods you use seem very simple and methodical. I don't have any problems with simplicity or a standard prayer pattern for binding and loosing, but it seems to me that it's so methodical that one hardly needs to directly approach the Lord about these issues.

Answer: Thanks for your honest concerns and respectful questions. I'll do the best I can to offer answers to your questions about my book Shattering Your Strongholds. Some of these questions might be answered by reading Breaking the Power, the sequel book that was released in May 1997. The best way I know to answer is to say that Jesus wants us to become free in Him as simply as possible. The only thing standing between us and our full inheritance as a "new creature," while we’re still here on earth, is our unsurrendered soul.

As I travel and speak across the U.S., I am now saying at the beginning of nearly every message, "You are made up of body, soul and spirit. It's your soul that's been giving your Christian walk all the trouble. Binding and loosing prayers can take care of that!"

The body relates to the physical world and environment around itself through its 5 senses of taste, touch, sight, etc. The body is basically a "follower." It will "follow" whichever other entity seems to be the most in charge, either the soul or spirit of the individual.

The human spirit is that part of the tripartite being of man that needs to be "reconnected" to the Spirit of God, just as Adam's spirit once knew God's Spirit intimately. Adam and Eve fell and lost that intimate connection of spirit to Spirit. The new birth salvation experience opens up (through Christ's shed blood) the spiritual path to a restoration of God's intended communion with man, spirit to Spirit.

The soul is that part of man’s makeup which took over after the fall in the Garden of Eden. I believe the soul (man's mind, will and emotions) raised up and basically stated, "I can do this, I can run things for this life." Over the 6,000 or so years since that happened, the human soul has become entrenched as man's first source of knowledge, guidance and problem-solving ever since.

Man's soul is meant to be a "vehicle" of expression of whatever man's spirit receives directly from God's Spirit. When there is no spirit-to-Spirit connection (such as is restored by the new birth salvation experience through faith in Jesus Christ), the soul takes over running everything it can.

My entire message is to bring attention to how much our souls have been controlling and manipulating us, even after the new birth. It is the unsurrendered soul that opens up the "doorway" for Satan and evil spirits to harass and attack. I believe that 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 and Matthew 16:19 (also 18:18) give us a pattern for how to cooperate with all God wants to do in and through our lives. This pattern helps us to close all “doorways” and shut evil spirits out of our minds, wills and emotions.

My books can be summed up in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, paraphrased here by me: “Tear down your strongholds (your reasoning, logic, wrong ideas, justification, rationalization for why you are the way "you are"—see Thayer's Greek/English Lexicon for exact wording on personal inner strongholds) and your vain imaginations (ideas) and pull down EVERY HIGH THING (erected by the soul of man) that would put itself between you and full knowledge of God.” Matthew 16:19 tells us the keys that Jesus Christ gives us to use, binding and loosing, so we can accomplish that.

I am attempting to teach people to dismantle everything the unsurrendered soul has put into place to thwart their full knowledge of God. My writing, my preaching and teaching, my intent are never to exclude God, rather to exclude the workings of the unsurrendered soul that keep trying to get in the way of fully cooperating with God's will for us.

Romans 8:7 tells us that the carnal mind (the carnal man, the carnal nature, the old man, the old nature, the sin nature, or the unsurrendered soul, all the same thing) does not understand the things of the Spirit of God. The unsurrendered soul is at enmity with God, hostile to the ways of God.

We must personally deal with dismantling, deconstructing, tearing apart the control structure (with all of its subtle deceptions and lies) of our unsurrendered souls before a fully-free flow of God's direction, healing, peace can come through our entire being. These "good things" are received in our spirits from His Spirit, which must then transmit the "good things" of God through our souls (mind, will and emotions). If a soul is filled with traumatic memories, old patterns of self-defensive thinking, wrong beliefs about others motives, etc., it WILL NOT allow a transmission of these things of God. It will not accept the spiritual workings of surrender, forgiveness, letting go, turning away, submission, etc., all of the "processes" of total freedom (body, soul and spirit) as given by God. The unsurrendered soul will throw up "strongholds" to keep such self-perceived dangers to its self-protective devices at bay.

Jesus truly wanted everything about moving into our "new creature" status kept simple. I do not believe there is scriptural basis for great processing, uncovering, analyzing, etc., that which has happened to us in the past. That is man's soul's interpretation of what must be done to get free. That keeps the soul involved in the so-called "healing" process. God never intended healing to be dependent upon or according to the soul's time table.

I hope this has helped some. You've come a long way and that is good, however it happened. The one final thing I would like to say is something I use frequently while teaching. Imagine yourself locked in a big brick building with no windows, no phone, no electricity, no e-mail, etc. All you had was a table spoon to scrape at the bricks to tunnel your way out. You could get out, eventually. But what is a faster, more efficient, easier way to get out? Use a master key to unlock the doors and walk free. Jesus Christ said (Matt. 16:19), "I'll give you the keys of the kingdom . . , binding and loosing . . .you bind and loose 'it' on earth, it will be bound and loosed in heaven."

This is not a shortcut to cut Jesus Christ out of the picture, it is a means of cutting the unsurrendered soul's power out of the picture and getting it back into alignment with God's purposes for our destinies. These "keys" allow us to cooperate fully with God for perhaps the first time in our lives, rather than spending our Christian lives being worked on by God. It opens up a free doorway through out entire being for the Holy Spirit to have His way in our lives.

Question: Your whole idea of us doing all this “liberating” by ourselves bothers me. I don't feel God designed us to be able to walk out our liberation process without the help of others. I see that we were meant to be a family, and that our sins need to be confessed to one another or brought into the open. We NEED each other as well as the Lord in our lives. I have a hard time with the idea that we can come to this place of wholeness and maturity with a "just Jesus and me" attitude.

Answer: Our "family" is meant to provide encouragement, compassion, exhortation, companionship, etc. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that enough encouragement, compassion, exhortation and companionship from our brothers and sisters in the Lord will ever heal us and set us free. It clearly says, however, "Know (which means to fully understand and experience or act upon) the truth and the truth will set you free."

The truth is that our souls hang on to every humiliating, embarrassing, fearful memory, and every act of cruelty and betrayal ever perpetrated against us. It is all stored up in the memory banks of our mind. But often those acts happened days, months, years, even decades earlier. They are only being kept "alive" today by the artificial life the soul keeps pumping into them. It has a very definite purpose for doing that, which I explain in my new book.

When our unsurrendered souls have built strongholds (human reasonings, logic, justifications, rationalizations, etc.) within us, they provide excuses for why we can't just let go or lay down our offenses. They try to ensure that we will hold onto those offenses. We have a “free” will and it is our as-yet-unsurrendered and still free wills that choose to build our defense systems out of these strongholds. No other person, not even God (because He won't cross our free wills), can dismantle those willfully SELF-constructed strongholds within us. We built them, we must dismantle them.

And basically, as new creatures in Christ, that is all we have to do, to receive a full infilling of all that God has been waiting to give us. This is how we actually crucify our old natures, how we actually turn away from old things. This is all Jesus has said we have to do on our own as believers, then we begin to receive all of the Holy Spirit's full help to be whole and free.

Question: When I called Christian Financial Concepts (Larry Burkett) to ask for some advice on where to go or what to do about our financial situation, the lady on the phone told me about your book. I first got the SYS workbook and then the Shattering Your Strongholds book. Even before I bought them, I had begun to bind my husband's mind to the mind of Christ. I could see a change for the better.

Today I prayed for myself, our rebellious son and my husband. I also prayed for our daughter who left home and no
longer speaks to us. I also prayed for our young twins to be released back into our custody. Right now I am physically exhausted and my husband is treating me like I am to be feared. The point I want to make is I did much binding and loosing. How do I find the strength to pray for our whole immediate family each day? Thank you for including a way to contact you so easily. DDC

Answer: Well, bless you, my sister. Keep pressing on, but since you have such a large list of family members who need your prayers so much, you must keep one thing at the foremost of your mind. You MUST pray these prayers the most intensely and the most often for YOURSELF. If you have open doors in your own soul, the repeated counterattacks aimed at you by Satan’s spirits will eventually wear you out. You have already experienced some of that very feeling. Then you will be unable to press through for your family members. We will be holding you up in prayer in our intercessors’ meetings.

Question: What right do we have to bind someone else’s will to the will of God? Or to bind their mind to to the mind of Christ? Isn’t that like witchcraft?

Answer: No, binding someone’s will to your will or their mind to your mind would be like witchcraft. When you bind someone else’s free will to the will of God, you are not attempting to render them “will-less.” You are using the keys of the Kingdom to bring their will into a closeness with the will of the Father that has always been established in heaven for them—should they choose to accept it. They will always be in conflict and soulish-spiritual tension if they are pursuing their free will’s desire to live a natural lifestyle and rejecting their spirit’s desire to live a godly, spiritual life. This is the battle that we all fight, the natural versus the spiritual.

Binding their will to the will of God (which was predetermined for them before the beginning of time as we know it) places them in an immediate proximity to His will that they have not experienced before. They can still choose to reject it, but they will be very aware of it. They will no longer be able to reject His will out of so-called “ignorance,” through self-denial, self-deception and self-rationalization. They will be forced to face the reality of the choices they are making.

Binding someone’s mind to the mind of Christ is the most blessed thing I can imagine to do for someone who is confused, lost, struggling, frightened, and soulishly rebelling against the one totally loving and true Friend they could have. Your prayers of binding their minds to the mind of Christ mean that they will hear the voice of “both” sides of the human story, not just what they feed into their minds from media sources, conventional wisdom of the world, confused and struggling friends, humanistic philosophers or new-age gurus.

One final thought: If you should ever find me standing on the ledge of the fifteenth story of a building, declaring that I am in my right mind and am making a free will choice to dive off the window ledge head first onto the pavement below, do me a favor! Bind and/or cross my will any way you can, or hit me with a brick and render me mindless and “will-less.” Just don’t let me exercise my free will and free thinking at that particular moment, OK?

Question: Breaking the Power." It was given to me a few days ago by a friend and I am enjoying it thoroughly. It is confirmation of what the Lord has been doing in me over the past several weeks. There is absolutely NOTHING worth hanging onto of myself--I desperately want to have more of Him and less of me. Your book has helped me to have confidence that I am headed exactly where I need to go and I thank you for taking the time to write it.

My husband has just left me and our children to move in with another woman from our church. I am determined to go forward with God no matter what, but I do believe that it is God's desire for our marriage to be restored. I have been praying that any soul-ties I allowed between my husband and myself would be severed and I am binding my will to God's will, my mind to His mind, and so on. In the midst of a terrible situation the Lord has been answering those prayers and I am eternally grateful.

I am also praying that all soul ties, all wrong beliefs, deception, self-centeredness and so on would be loosed from my husband and this woman. I am also praying that their wills would be bound to the will of God, their minds to the mind of Christ, and so on. Mostly, I am praying a prayer of thanksgiving for how our Lord will take this situation and use it for His glory. Again I want to thank you for your book. I am using it to supplement my time in prayer, the Word, and worship. I have found it to be confirming the truth God is speaking to me and an encouragement to not let my soul take over (and it certainly would like to!). Thank you for listening and obeying our glorious King of Kings. Our God is an awesome God,

Answer: Thank you for your kind words and the confirmation that these principles do help to overcome the natural feelings and hurt that comes from this type of situation. We will join with you in prayer, our intercessors meet every Tuesday night. The power of right agreement is awesome. Let me briefly address a couple of things and ask a couple of questions.

You say that you are praying that the soul ties "would be severed," that involved wills "would be" bound to the will of God, etc. Are you praying in such a way as to ask God to sever (loose) these things that need to be loosed and that God would bind the things that need to be bound? Or are you actually speaking the words of binding and loosing directly into your prayers? Remember that Matthew 16:19 tells us that Jesus was giving US the keys and whatever WE would bind and loose on earth would be bound in heaven. Marshall's Interlinear Greek Bible says what we bind on earth WILL BE, having already been bound in heaven.

This is not an attempt to cut God or Jesus out of the answer, rather this is using the keys He's given us to use exactly as He's directed us to use them. This means that we are to bind and loose according to God's will. As much as we think we may understand what that is, we don't know exactly what God's will is in every situation. The only absolute we do know is that all of our prayers should be that God's will is accomplished in everything we are praying for.

By using the keys of the Kingdom, as described in the principles in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 through a speaking forth in prayer, we are participating in seeing His will established in situations on earth. These keys do not give us blanket authority to bind and loose whatever we want, rather they are our keys to entering into the manifestation of that which has been previously set by God, or bound and loosed, in heaven.

God has always known His will for everything He knew would be coming up in each of our lives. Certain things that happen to us are a direct result of wrong choices by us and by the wrong choices of others we are involved with (parents, children, relatives, spouses, other relationships). By establishing our intent and desire (through binding and loosing prayers) to see ourselves (and all others involved in situations) come into agreement with His will, we are actually making "place" or room for His will to be so manifested. His will in any and every situation always contains a perfect balance of love, truth, justice, grace and mercy. We must trust that this is so, no matter how much we think we know what should be done.

Other than making sure that you are in agreement with this, I think you are doing great in your prayers. You are right on track and on target. Just don't grow faint and don't let what you see in the natural realm take your eyes off of what God is guaranteed to be doing in the spiritual realm of your lives.

God bless you, Rev. Liberty Savard

Question: I have read your book Shattering Your Strongholds. My teenage son has left home and is living in an unsupervised situation. I have been praying the prayers for him, but I am so worried about him. I know that everything is for a reason, perhaps it is to teach me to be stronger in my faith. Many are praying with me and loosing the spirit of rebellion from my son. I feel if God doesn't do something soon, it may be too late. Please advise.

Answer: I am glad that you have read Shattering Your Strongholds and have been applying the prayer principles found therein. I do not know if you have read the sequel, Breaking the Power, yet. It has a much deeper understanding of why children and adults enter into an attitude of rebellion. Rebellion is an attitude of the unsurrendered soul (the old nature), it is not a "spirit." I am very aware of what the church world has been teaching for years about various so-called "spirits" that are supposed to cause wrong behaviors. Wrong behaviors are manifested symptoms of deeper sources of distress within the soul—unmet needs, unhealed hurts and unresolved issues. These symptomatic "manifestations" are wrong, soulish attitudes, and you cannot cast an attitude out of someone’s unsurrendered soul.

Binding and loosing prayers can definitely help to dismantle and strip away the strongholds, the defense systems, the denial and the wrong patterns of thinking from our own souls—as well as the unsurrendered souls of others who are deceived by their own old natures or who are in denial of their problems. I think you would find several chapters in Breaking the Power very useful and helpful in your prayer life for your son.

I do not think that God is trying to teach you more faith in the extended time frame you find yourself in as you wait for an answer in your son's life. But I do think you can more effectively pray by using the binding and loosing prayers in alignment with God’s will and time frame for his restoration. He is making wrong choices out of his unsurrendered soul (his mind, will and emotions), and is in a carnal state of mind that remains in all believers to some degree, and in backsliders and non-believers to a greater degree. You cannot dismantle the consequences of the wrong choices he is making, but you certainly can help to loose and strip away the faulty human logic and worldly reasoning he is using to deny the futility and error of these choices.

Go back over the "training wheel prayer for others" in Shattering Your Strongholds (found on page 171). We will be praying for you and your son in our next intercessors’ meeting along these very same lines, and agreement (yours and ours) according to the will of God is very powerful. Do not give up and do not neglect praying the binding and loosing prayers for yourself as well. Also pray these prayers for other involved in your son's life, as we need to penetrate the family and social dynamics surrounding our loved ones as they struggle with Christ. I firmly believe that He calls their names, and they hear Him, every time we pray for them. You can help clear away the debris from your son's unsurrendered soul and give him a clear view of Who has been calling his name.

Question: I have been having terrible struggles with lust. I don't want to sin against the Lord, so I'm getting married. I'm studying to be a pastor and don't want to be out of His will. Please pray for me and give me counsel.

Answer: My counsel would be that there are too many unresolved issues in your life to add a marriage relationship at this point. Marriage is not the answer to a struggle with lust. Reciting marriage vows in a legal wedding setting won't bring a relief of being tempted sexually. Sexual temptation in itself is a struggle of the mind and must be dealt with in the soul, by binding your soul to God's will and your mind to the mind of Christ. Then, by loosing wrong agreements, wrong desires and layers over your unmet needs. The physical body is only responding to the messages from the overwhelming need of the soul.

A driving temptation for sexual gratification comes from the pressure of great unmet needs in a life. The total focus and goal of your prayers at this point should be to loose the soul's layering attempts to bury your unmet needs. This must be accomplished for God's mercy and grace to get to the unmet needs that often come from childhood--unmet needs that have nothing to do with sexual issues. But when deep, long standing needs keep pushing for resolution year after year, they increase and become very powerful. This can result in these needs being escalated into drives that surface as sexual, immoral, illegal and violent behaviors.

The answer is not a form of behavioral modification or behavioral "legalization" as in a marriage, for this only results in wrong behaviors (being driven by unmet needs) surfacing in another mode. The answer is to clear away the layers and attempts to bury and hide the needs so God can answer and heal with mercy and grace. Bind yourself to God's timing, to God's will and to the truth of His Word. Seek Him and Him alone at this time. If you are to marry this person, God will see that the marriage comes to pass. But don't get ahead of God.

You say your have read "the books." I trust and hope that you have been praying the binding and loosing prayers in Shattering Your Strongholds and in Breaking the Power. These prayers work and they work best when they are prayed every day. Your focus and goal here should be upon God's will for your life, your destiny and your future work for Him. He must be allowed to do some major healing in your life before you will be in a position to really minister to others. Again, don't get ahead of Him. If you do, then He must began to work on the fall out of inevitable crashing and burning--consequences of following the soul's leadings. Let Him lead you and set things according to His wisdom on timing. Blessings to you, for our God is gracious and good. You will absolutely be in our prayers.

Question: Dear Liberty, our ladies prayer/study group is about to begin using Shattering Your Strongholds, and I had a few questions about the injunction against participation in other counseling or self-help groups during this period. One of our members is working in a well-known Christian weight loss program. Do you see any major conflict here?

Answer: I have reviewed this group’s material on a surface level and it seems pretty good to me. I would have one reservation about it and that is that it seems to reinforce the idea that you must continue to work the "program" to overcome eating problems. I do not believe that. Overeating (as well as some drug use, alcoholism, fornication, wrong relationships, compulsive shopping, etc.) usually comes from self-attempts to feed, pacify, drug or quiet the painful pressure of unmet needs deep in the unsurrendered soul. These inner drives and pressures can be devastatingly powerful in someone who has many unhealed hurts and unresolved issues "buried" in their unsurrendered souls as well. To work a program is not sin, of course, but it is still the soul trying to stay involved in controlling its own pain and need.

Of course I would not suggest that you bar this person from your SYS group. But I would recommend that she read the follow-up book to Shattering Your Strongholds, which is called Breaking the Power, to get a deeper understanding of unmet needs in the soul. There is only one real way to get unmet needs and unhealed hurts "fixed." That is to learn how to strip away all self-protection, self-medication attempts, self-defense mechanisms, etc., and let Jesus Christ get His mercy and grace and healing power into the unmet needs and unhealed hurts. That is permanent. Working a program is temporary, because you have to keep doing it.

Question: A woman I’ve been ministering to has begun receiving counseling in a secular setting. Would this exclude her for the time being from a group study using Shattering Your Strongholds?

Answer: No, it would not. But it could bring up some situations in discussion where you would be faced with needing to deal with wrong teaching she might be getting through secular counseling. This could create conflict in her soul and bring confusion if not handled very gently. Give her some very basic binding and loosing precepts to practice on her own. Particularly those of binding her mind to the mind of Christ and loosing wrong patterns of thinking, the influences and effects of wrong agreements she has entered into and the ensuing soul ties that are created by wrong agreements (there is more understanding of this in Breaking the Power).

This can all be be done with great grace and patience, but you will need to be always praying for the Lord to show you how to gently turn her secular counseling into positive paths to God's truth (rather than directly confronting what her counselor says, with the exception of anti-God, anti-Christian statements, of course).

Question: My marriage partner does not to want to work on or get counseling to save our marriage. We’re both Christians, but what can I do if I’m the only one who wants to fight for the relationship? How should I pray to find out what God wants me to do? Help!

Answer: You did not say if you are familiar with this ministry’s message or not, but I would recommend the prayer principles in the books Shattering Your Strongholds and Breaking the Power. Simply and quickly put, they work like this:

We are each made up of body, soul and spirit. For far too long, we have been taught that the devil causes all of the problems we have with trying to walk in spiritual victory. This is not true, for he only can access our lives when we give him open doors. These doors of wrong spiritual access come into being through disobedience to God—disobedience that is justified and rationalized, rather than repented of and turned away from. This happens in our souls (which are the mind, will and emotions).

It is our unsurrendered soul that is giving us all our trouble. Salvation through the shed blood of Jesus Christ comes instantly to the spirit, reuniting the human spirit in perfect communion with God's Spirit. The working out of the salvation and restoration and renewal of the soul can take a long time if you don't know what you are dealing with. Binding and loosing principles of prayer are the best keys you can ever use to effect the surrender of the soul to allow God to bring a renewing of the mind, will and emotions.

Bind your will and your mate's will to the will of God. Bind your mind and your mate's mind to the mind of Christ. Bind your emotions and his/her emotions to the control and balancing of the Holy Spirit. Bind yourself and him/her to the truth of God's Word. Bind your feet and his/her feet to the paths God has always chosen for you to walk. DO NOT BIND your selves to each other, but instead bind each of you individually to the attributes of God's nature, to the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Loose wrong beliefs, wrong ideas, wrong patterns of thinking, wrong attitudes and strongholds in both of your souls. Loose wrong agreements and soul ties. Your mate should do this for him/her self for the most effective severing of wrong agreements and soul ties he/she has formed to others. If he/she won’t, then you can still impact him/her by your prayers. It just might take longer. There is no such thing as a good soul tie (explanation in Breaking the Power) and they only result in human influence and manipulation of others—even in husbands and wives!

Finally, loose every "layer" of self-esteem, self-defense, self-reliance, soul-preservation "instincts," self-centeredness and self-will off of both of your souls. Then ask God to pour His grace and mercy BENEATH, AROUND, PAST and OVER the walls being torn down in the hidden parts of your unsurrendered souls. We each self-construct these walls and strongholds for self-protection from what we fear the most, i.e., abandonment, betrayal, rejection, deception, pain, neediness, etc. Your soul attempts to bury your unmet needs, unhealed hurts and unresolved issues, which turns these three sources (of ALL of your problems, wrong behaviors and wrong reactions) into "hidden" toxic waste dumps.

They may be out of sight, but the toxic emissions from them are impacting both of your lives every day. Long-standing unmet needs, unhealed hurts and unresolved issues become like toxic chemicals, eating away at the infrastructure of everything that makes you "you," even to destroying your own sense of caring if you live or not. God and God alone can "fix" these three holes in your soul, no human being or material possession ever can. But you must dismantle all of your self-constructed strongholds and walls to let Him get in and do it. He won't override the choices of your wills that erected these defense systems.

Question: A baby has been born to a lesbian in our family. What can we do to help that baby?

Answer: I believe that you need to definitely pray certain prayers for this baby, but you must also pray them for the mother. Let me first give you just a few thoughts on the mother being a lesbian. There is no question that she is in a wrong lifestyle with wrong behaviors involved. I believe that most, if not all, wrong behaviors have their beginnings when people are overwhelmed with unmet needs in their souls and began to desperately seek some kind of relief.

Unmet needs occur when something right and strong should have happened in a life—but did not—as a person's character and personality was beginning to be formed. I don't know if you've read Breaking the Power yet. It would really give you some additional insight on unmet needs, unhealed hurts and unresolved issues in the soul.

Deep, unmet needs of long standing in a life cannot be met by any human being or fixed by any material possession. God alone can meet them and heal the vulnerability they have brought into a life. But Satan is very capable of maneuvering people (who are in bondage to wrong behaviors) into the paths of those who are overwhelmed with need. Someone can step up and temporarily meet their needs, distracting them from their pain and fear. The needy person then returns to that temporary fix whenever the inner pressure gets too strong until it finally becomes a habit or a lifestyle, just like alcohol or drugs.

Then the person must begin to rationalize that wrong behavior, habit or lifestyle in order to alleviate worrying and feeling guilty as they continue seeking its temporary solutions to their problems. That is the beginning of building a personal, inner stronghold to justify the lifestyle and protect the wrong beliefs. I do not believe that wrong behaviors begin from satanic sources, but once in place, rationalizing and justifying them to avoid accountability for them begins to place the person in direct defiance and disobedience to God. This opens up doors of access for evil spirits to begin to harass and attack, thereby compounding and intensifying the need, the pain and the fear. The person returns to the temporary relief offered by the wrong behavior more and more, sliding deeper and deeper into the patterns involved. The habit become entrenched and the person seems to be trapped in it.

This person also enters into wrong agreements with others in the same wrong behavior patterns which leads to the development of soul ties. Soul ties open up new avenues of manipulation and influence from other souls as well as wrong spirits. Everything just keep spiraling downward until it seems useless to try to change. That mother needs to be free from the wrong beliefs she has locked in place within her unsurrendered soul—her damaged emotions, unsurrendered will and wrong mind sets and patterns of thinking. She needs to loose (crush, shatter, smash and tear apart) the strongholds, the influences and effects of the wrong agreements and the soul ties. If she is not in a place where she will do this, then you can start the process of getting her free through your "righteous" prayers. Righteous prayers are prayers in accordance with God's will for a righteous resolution—they are never prayers that condemn, judge or moralize.

The ultimate choice will have to be hers, for the choices she has made that have brought to where she is today have been choices of her own free will. God will not force her to do anything against her free will. But you can loose and strip away the grave clothes of her lifestyle to enable her to recognize, clearly hear and respond to the voice of Jesus Christ who calls to her every time someone prays and asks Him to help.

The baby is being harassed by the same wrong influences and effects that the mother is because of the close relational intimacy with her. I do not believe a "deliverance" for the baby would have any lasting effect, because of the reintroduction of the spiritual harassment impacting the mother through the open doors of access in her soul. Those doors need to be closed. Here is how I would pray for the mother and the baby:

Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, I bring this mother and this baby before you. You have said in your Word (Matt. 16:19) that whatsoever we would bind and loose on earth, would be bound and loosed in heaven. Lord, the original manuscripts of your holy Scriptures tell us that the exact wording of this Scripture says that whatsoever we would bind and loose on earth WOULD BE, HAVING BEEN BOUND AND LOOSED IN HEAVEN (already). Your perfect will and plans for this mother and this baby have already been established in heaven. Now, Lord, I am praying and binding this mother and child to your will, that your established plan for their lives shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.

I bind this mother's will and the will of this baby to your will. I bind this mother's mind and the mind of this baby to the mind of Christ. I bind the mother's emotions and the baby's emotions to the peace and the balance of the Holy Spirit. I bind this mother to the truth of your love and your grace and your mercy. I bind her feet to the paths you have always ordained for her to walk. I loose wrong beliefs, wrong ideas, wrong patterns of thinking, wrong attitudes and wrong motives from this mother. I loose deception, denial and hopelessness from her. I loose the influences and effects of wrong agreements and soul ties from her. I loose the influences and effects of any and all wrong agreements and soul ties of the mother that are impacting the soul of this baby.

I loose all the layers of self-reliance, self-denial, self-protection, self-defense and self-preservation from this mother, the very layers that her unsurrendered soul has used to try to cover over her unmet needs, unhealed hurts and unresolved issues. Lord, this mother has been running from her fear and her pain and from you for a long time. She has built tremendous strongholds, walls and self-protective defenses. She has sought relief from her neediness, her pain and her confusion in wrong places. You will not push down her walls, but you will cause your mercy and grace to flow into any openings we can effect by our prayers of stripping away and tearing at her self-constructed walls.

Lord, please move with great grace, mercy, healing and power in the lives of this mother and her child. Bring understanding and forgiveness and cleansing to her deepest areas of vulnerability and wounding. Bring peace to the baby. Help us, through our prayers, to begin to close the doors of wrong spiritual access in this mother's soul.

ONLY by righteous, non-judgmental, loving prayers, can we cooperate with and be a part of praying into being the earthly manifestation of your answers already established in heaven. Please bring your anointing into every area of this situation and upon everyone involved. Thank you, thank you, thank you for doing this. We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Sincerely,
Rev. Liberty Savard

 

  
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