Let me say something that will ruffle some feathers. I need to say this because it is true, and people’s freedom depends on it: Christians need deliverance.
Not all Christians and not all the time, but far more believers need deliverance than the church currently acknowledges and far more urgently than most leaders in the pulpit are willing to address. Saved people are sitting in church services every Sunday, yet simultaneously living under demonic oppression because nobody has ever helped them identify or confront it. They leave every service the same way they arrived: bound.
They have been told implicitly or explicitly that what they are experiencing cannot possibly be demonic because they are saved. So they keep blaming themselves, keep trying harder, and keep wondering why the Christian life—which is supposed to be abundant—feels so heavy, repetitive, and utterly exhausting.
This article is for them. It is also for the leaders and believers who have unknowingly kept them in that place by refusing to engage with a ministry that Jesus modeled, the early church practiced, and the Holy Spirit is still powerfully moving in today.
Grace That Sets Free, Not Grace That Looks Away
Before I go any further, I need to clarify where I stand theologically because this chapter will be misread without it: I am a grace man. I believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. I believe that salvation is by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8–9). We cannot earn salvation or maintain it through performance. I believe the love of God toward His children is not conditional on their perfect behavior. The gospel is the most liberating truth in the universe, and I will never preach anything that adds a works-based burden to what Jesus has already fully accomplished.
But grace is not a license to sin. Grace is not permission to remain unchanged. Paul addressed this directly and emphatically in Romans 6:1–2:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?
Grace is not a covering that makes sin consequence-free in this earthly life. When a Christian chooses to walk in sexual immorality, they open a door. The blood of Jesus covers the guilt of that sin the moment it is confessed and repented of—yet the soul tie formed through that union does not automatically dissolve. The damage to the mind, the fragmentation of the soul, and the demonic foothold that was created require deliberate, specific spiritual action to address. Repentance closes the door; deliverance removes what came through it.
This is not a contradiction of grace; it is grace working in partnership with truth to produce actual, experiential freedom rather than just positional freedom that never changes daily reality. Grace is the power of God that enables transformation. God does not want you to be positionally free while practically bound. He wants you walking in the full reality of what the cross purchased, and sometimes that requires a deliverance process to bring the practical reality into alignment with the positional truth.
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Grace and truth belong together. Jesus came full of both (John 1:14). Truth without grace crushes people. Grace without truth enables them to stay in bondage while feeling spiritually comfortable about it. The grace I preach—the grace I have experienced personally—is the grace that changes you, empowers you to walk differently, picks you up when you fall, and propels you forward rather than leaving you where you are.
And it is precisely within that framework of grace and truth working together that the ministry of deliverance makes complete sense for the life of a believer.
Jesus Said He Came for This
There is no ambiguity about why Jesus came. He announced it Himself at the beginning of His public ministry, standing in the synagogue in Nazareth and reading from the scroll of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.
—Luke 4:18
Who did Jesus have in mind when He was talking about the captives, the oppressed, and those in need of liberty? Jesus was not just speaking of the pagans outside the synagogue or the Romans occupying the land. He was reading this in a Jewish house of worship to God’s covenant people—people who knew the Scriptures, kept the Law, and belonged to God. He was telling them that liberation was His mission and that some of them needed it.
If the Son of God showed up in a room full of religious believers and announced that setting captives free was central to His assignment, what makes us think that the people in our church buildings today are any different? The captives Jesus came for are not just the obviously lost. They include the saved who are still bound.
The Enemy Hates You More Because You Belong to God
The comfortable Christianity of our age tends to gloss over the fact that the devil does not treat believers and unbelievers the same way. He does not have to work very hard on those who are already walking in darkness. They are already in his territory. But you—a blood-bought, Spirit-filled child of God, carrying the authority of the name of Jesus and the potential to pull others out of his kingdom—are a direct threat to everything he is trying to build.
He hates you with a specific, targeted hatred. And if he can find an unguarded door—any area of your life where sin has not been repented of or any wounds that have not yet been healed—he will slither through it like the serpent he is and do as much damage as he possibly can before he is discovered and evicted.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
—1 Peter 5:8
That word devour is not mild. It is a violent, total consumption. The enemy does not want to inconvenience you. He wants to consume your calling, relationships, health, mind, and, ultimately, your effectiveness for the kingdom of God. His strategy with believers is not possession, as we established. It is an oppression so sustained and so comprehensive that the person’s life and destiny are effectively neutralized, even while their spirit remains secure in God.
People leave this world every day who were saved but never free. They went to heaven, thank God, but they never walked in the fullness of what Christ had called them to do on this earth. The enemy succeeded in stunting their destiny, not by stealing their salvation but by keeping them in chains they never learned to break. That is a tragedy the church must stop accepting as normal.
The Prodigal Christian
One of the most powerful pictures in all Scripture for understanding why Christians need deliverance is the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. We often read it as a story of salvation. It is. But it is also a story of deliverance.
The prodigal son was not an outsider. He was a son, a legitimate heir, with all the rights and inheritance that came with that identity. He chose to leave. He took what belonged to him and walked into a far country where he wasted everything in reckless living. While he was in that distant place of sin and destitution, he found himself living among pigs, the most unclean animals in the Jewish world. And he was eating what the pigs ate. He had not lost his sonship. His father had not disowned him, but his choices had brought him into conditions utterly incompatible with his identity as a son.
That is a picture of a believer living in sin. The identity is intact. The Father has not changed. But the person’s choices have led them into a place of profound spiritual defilement and bondage, surrounded by the unclean and eating what was never meant for them. And the enemy—who did not create the situation but absolutely exploits it—is right there in that pigpen, reinforcing the lies, deepening the chains, and whispering that this is all they will ever be.
The son came to himself. He repented. He returned. The father ran to meet him—restoring, covering, and celebrating.
And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.
—Luke 15:20
That restoration is real and available to every prodigal Christian. Take notice: The son had to leave the pigpen first. He had to decide to return. For many believers, deliverance is part of that return: the spiritual removal of what moved in during the season of wandering.
God does not stop running toward the returning prodigal because that prodigal picked up spiritual baggage along the way. However, the baggage still needs to be dealt with. Grace covers the sin. Deliverance removes what sin lets in.
Don’t Go Back to What Christ Freed You From
Paul’s letter to the Galatians contains an urgent warning for the believer who has tasted freedom:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.
—Galatians 5:1
The word “again” implies that the person who was once entangled was set free and is now being warned against returning to what they were freed from. Paul knew that freedom, once received, is not automatically self-sustaining. It requires a choice to stand in freedom, guarding and refusing the pull back toward what was.
Proverbs 26:11 puts it bluntly: “As a dog returns to its own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” That image is deliberately unpleasant. God is not being cruel. He is honest about the nature of returning to sin after freedom. What you were delivered from was spiritually toxic. Going back to it is returning to the poison you have already been healed from. And the consequences of that return are not lighter the second time; they are heavier because more is known and more has been given.
The believer who has experienced deliverance and then walks back into the sin that was the open door is not just making a moral mistake. They are reopening a door they fought hard to close and reinviting what was cast out. Jesus described this dynamic in Matthew 12:43–45, where the unclean spirit returns with seven more wicked than itself, and the state of that person becomes worse than before. This is not God punishing the returning prodigal; it is the natural, spiritual consequence of reopening doors the enemy was already familiar with.
The solution is not fear. It is not legalistic self-monitoring that replaces one form of bondage with another. The solution is intimacy with the Holy Spirit—staying so close to God, so full of His presence, and so consistently renewed in your mind that the things that once had power over you lose their appeal entirely. Real grace does that. It does not just cover sin; it removes the desire for it.
The Good News in All This
Here is what I want every Christian to carry away from this chapter: The fact that you may need deliverance is not a mark of failure. It is not evidence that your salvation is incomplete or your faith is deficient—it is evidence that you live in a real world with a real enemy who has been working against you and that some of his work in your life has not yet been fully addressed and evicted.
Here is the even better news: The same God who saved you wants you completely, experientially, and daily free, not just positionally while practically bound in your emotions, mind, relationships, and body. Remember, His grace is the power for transformation, and that transformation, in many cases, includes a deliverance process that removes what sin let in and fills those spaces with the glorious presence of the Holy Spirit.
You do not have to remain in the pigpen. The Father is already running toward you. Come home and let Him restore everything the enemy stole during the season you were away.
Abundant life is your inheritance. Claim all of it—not just the salvation but the freedom.
Daniel Adams did not arrive at deliverance ministry through a seminary classroom. He arrived at it through a body trained for a different kind of confrontation entirely: first as one of the youngest correctional officers in Virginia’s history, then as a professional cage fighter chasing a career built on reading an opponent and refusing to back down under pressure. What he lost along the way is as much a part of this book as what he gained: a marriage that ended in his early twenties, a season of addiction and recklessness following his parents’ divorce, and years spent carrying an unexplained fear he had no language for until he was old enough to trace its roots through both sides of his family line.
That history is why Adams does not write about generational bondage, soul ties, or spiritual oppression as problems belonging to people he cannot understand. He has stood on both sides of the deliverance room: as the one who needed to be set free, and, more than a decade later, as the one leading others into the same freedom. His first deliverance happened by accident, in his own living room, before he had any formal framework for what he was witnessing. Thousands of sessions across multiple nations followed.
Today Adams leads The Supernatural Life, a global ministry community built around discipleship, deliverance, and the conviction that the freedom Christ purchased was never meant to stay positional. His new book, Delivered, is available on Amazon.com.
