If you are in the occult, the occult has stained your worldview, affecting how you perceive reality. Your vision is clouded by idolatry and pride, and you are ever-focused on harnessing occult knowledge and power.
Leaving the Occult
If you want to get out of the occult, you first have to cut off the practices. But here’s the problem with that. Cutting off a practice does not mean that you’ve changed your worldview. Worldview goes deep. Your lens through which you perceive reality is based on what you value most, what you have chosen to put on the throne of your heart.
If the occult is on the throne, this poisons your values, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. This then pours out into your behaviors and actions, which lead to habits and addictions.
Simply cutting off a practice without doing the work to reform and change your worldview will leave you apt to fall back into the occult. Just cutting off a practice does not necessarily mean that you’ve come to a heart-felt understanding of why it's a sin.
If you choose to place Jesus on the throne of your heart, you will experience healing. However, it takes time, dedication, fortification, formation, and active walking by faith in order to reform that occult worldview and form a Christian worldview. This is the essence of the Holy Spirit coming in to change you completely so as to shift your motivations in doing any action you might be compelled to do. This does not happen overnight and can be further complicated by any demonic attachments or afflictions that are present as you are leaving the occult behind.
There are some critical theological formation pieces that must be locked into place to build that foundation upon which a person leaving the occult can start to reform the occult worldview and start to build up a Christian worldview. Here are some critical pieces to lock into your mind as you get started.
Humankind and the Choice to Choose Evil
Evil is the absence of good. God created the world with perfect order, and because of the free will he gave to mankind, we chose away from God and turned toward evil. This was the beginning of sin entering the world. That black, corrupt, tarnished condition has stained our souls since that first sin in the Garden.
The core sin humans experience is pride. In the very beginning as sin entered the world, mankind exercised his free will to go about living his life his own way, in disobedience to God’s word and path. Pride puts the self at the center and refuses to trust and obey God (St. Augustine’s Prayer Book). Pride refuses to yield or surrender to God’s plan, promises, protection, and inheritance.
The next big sin that humankind commits is idolatry. Idolatry places other things above a person’s relationship with God. Idolatry lifts up created things up to an improper place of reverence. Idolatry is the worship, consideration, or deep reverence toward an object that God created instead of focusing our minds, hearts, and souls upon our Creator. God created us to love Him above all things, giving us free will to choose Him or not.
Salvation and Sanctification
Humans, at the core, turn to pride and idolatry, and are prone to wander away from God’s perfect peace, God’s perfect truth. God is the well-spring of eternal life. Through pride and idolatry, humans continue to turn toward that which is in an active state of perishing, things that are spiritually dead and have no value to offer us eternal life with God.
The only way that we can actually enter the Kingdom of God is through the perfect Blood of Jesus Christ, which delivers us from evil and transfers us into the Kingdom of God’s beloved son Jesus, in whom we have redemption through his blood which results in the forgiveness of our sins. We could not, through pride or idolatry, find our way to Heaven.
It was only by God and through God that we could be restored to righteousness and receive the undeserved gift of eternal life. We are sinful creatures prone to sin, prone to selfishly focus our eyes on the things that draw us into death. So God came to give us a perfect subject of our focus, the cross of Christ, which draws us to Him and into the Kingdom of God.
Grace Period: This Time of Imperfection
We are currently in this time of imperfection, a grace period, where God gives us a chance to choose Him or not. After this time is over, Jesus will come to draw his people into his eternal Kingdom forever. Until then, we must use our free will to choose God, to get to know him through seeking him, through living for him, by loving him with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and by actively leaning into him.
This way, our souls are sanctified and perfected so that we can bask more in His light, in shades, from glory to glory. We must seize and hold fast and retain without wavering, the hope we cherish and confess, and our acknowledgment of it, for he who promised is reliable and faithful to his Word.
We must not place our attention on the perishing things of this world, and fall into darkness and evil, the absence of Light, which is Christ.
False Salvation and False Sanctification
There are many things in this world that darken our minds and lead us away from the Light of Christ. We must discern the difference.
The Blood of Jesus is the only way into the Kingdom of God. When we continually lean into our belief in the efficacy of Jesus’ blood and his salvific work on the Cross, we become made holy in gradations. We receive the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and become sanctified by His Blood, by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us over time.
There is counterfeit salvation and sanctification that is served up lie after lie by the occult in droves. Satan wants to trick humanity into thinking that we can receive salvation and be sanctified (made holy) by beliefs and practices that fall short of the Blood of Christ. The Blood of Christ is the only way for our souls to be grafted to God and by continually returning to this reality we are perfected. In contrast, Satan tells us that we are gods that can save ourselves and that by a litany of occult beliefs and practices, we can evolve our souls… without Christ.
This leaves the human trapped outside the Kingdom of God, deluded by lies, thinking that they are actually heading somewhere valuable for their soul when they are actually just doing things useless for salvation, all the way into perdition. Satan wants us distracted and destroyed. He sends out spirits of delusion and anti-christ as a means to draw people away from the efficacious Blood and to become looped into warped ways of illogical unspiritual thinking.
Satan loves to elevate the human mind and human body, tricking us into thinking that we must idolize both. This keeps us locked in this world, that which is in an active state of perishing. Through the Blood of Christ, we enter into locking our eyes upon the unseen, upon the eternal, upon the hope that we cherish and confess, that is to say, our deep knowing that Jesus is coming back to establish his eternal Kingdom forever.
Satan’s Counterfeit of the Holy Spirit
There are demonic spirits that Satan sends to counterfeit the Holy Spirit. These spirits serve to trick humans into thinking that occult practices are actually invoking the true Holy Spirit. The counterfeit spirits can elicit feelings of tingling and euphoria and can cause a person to think that the occult practices are making them holy when it is drawing them into the opposite through witchcraft.
A person can only discern the difference if they are actively tethered to the Word, and are continually leaning into building a Christian worldview. Through sin, a human’s conscience is marred, and their thinking is distorted. The Holy Spirit declares that Jesus Christ is Lord, and is the spirit that leads all humanity into the full truth. Any spirit that leads anywhere short of that is not the Holy Spirit.
Satanic Signs and Wonders
Dismantling an occult worldview is particularly difficult to accomplish, because of one key factor. Satanic signs and wonders. The occult creates a situation where a person does something to call forth or in occult power or knowledge, and then they look around to see what will happen. At this point, they are seeking a sign or wonder. They are seeking some special correlation with the outside world and the thing they are trying to manifest.
When a person engages in the occult, two things can happen. Either the person assigns significance through faulty perception to something, therefore leading them to believe that witchcraft is valuable for salvation. The other thing that can happen is that a demon actually responds and issues a display for the human, laying out in front of them a lying sign or wonder that leads that away from God.
Perceiving something that works draws a person to being snapped into the cycle of seeking deeper into the occult. Here at Spirit Sanctified, we call this “occult snapping.” At this point, there is a belief attached to the experience. These experiences can be extremely hard to break free from for a person trying to leave the occult. They can often be obsessed with stories of their occult life, and it’s hard for them to contextualize what happened. After so many experiences that have programmed their thinking into an occult worldview, they have many distortions of thinking because they have had intense things happen that led them to believe lies. Also, a point here is that satanic signs and wonders are extremely traumatic and destabilizing. Seeing something that you can’t explain often causes a person to throw off previous beliefs and draw into occult programming.
Only through deep dredging up of those circumstances, and reorienting a person toward the truth, that is, Jesus, a person can begin to break apart these lies. These lies actually serve as hooks for demonic attachments, because through occult sin, a person has literally made demonic pacts and agreements.
These phenomena are exactly why occult worldviews are so hard to dismantle. A person has to intensely humble themselves and submit themselves to the authority of Christ and be ready to persevere while in the woods. Deliverance is a process.
STAY TUNED for topical breakdowns of how to get free of certain occult practices.
About The Author
Teresa Yanaros, a degreed journalist with a passion for Jesus, has dedicated her life to investigating media, exposing occult lies, and driving home the truth of Christ. Earlier in her career, Teresa was a successful author who gave speeches and practical workshops across America, after publishing a book that investigated the phenomenon of modern American online spiritualism and attempted to reconcile her Roman Catholic roots with new-age practices. She then had a radical deliverance experience from the occult and now coaches Christians who left the new age to follow Jesus. With over 1M views on her YouTube channel, Teresa has impacted viewers across the world who seek to look deeper at spiritual warfare and how Satan deceives through occult traps in media. After going #newagetoJesus she attended seminary classes and continues to research, investigate, and share information about the new age deception, occult deliverance, spiritual warfare, and Christian theology.
INTERESTED IN THE ACADEMY? If you are a Christian who left the new age, apply to join the CLARITY ACCELERATOR ACADEMY. The Academy takes the entire process from start to finish of getting oriented after leaving the new age, grounding into theology and spiritual warfare, deprogramming new age lies, renouncing Satan's influence, remaining delivered, and establishing a firm context for Christian living and spiritual formation, bible study, how to pray, how to share the gospel, how to build your testimony, how to share your testimony, and put it ALL into this academy. IT WORKS. People's lives are being transformed by this framework, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Jesus, for deliverance!
Teresa is the founder of Spirit Sanctified.
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