Okay. We're going to be preaching on overcoming fearful experiences. Now, I did a teaching some years ago on fear.

It's part of our counseling series. We covered things like fear and worry and depression. So I handled general mechanics of overcoming fear.

But what I would like to look at today is specifically overcoming fearful or traumatic experiences in life, which we didn't actually have time to cover at the seminar. I'm going to read two scriptures quickly. First one from Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 2, looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.

And he sat down on the right hand of the throne of God. And then also in the book of Hebrews chapter 4 and verse 15, our own passage says, for we do not have a high priest who cannot feel compassion for us in our weaknesses, but came under all the same kinds of testing as us, yet without sin. It has never come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may take hold of kindness and discover grace to help when we need it.

We live in a sinful, violent world where many things can go wrong in our lives. Now we have built into us mechanisms to avoid the difficulties in life. The emotion of fear protects us from suffering by preventing us from experiencing painful events where it's under our control.

When you fear something, you avoid it. You don't deliberately get into it. So fear can be actually a kind of a protective and even a positive mechanism in our lives.

The trouble is the way things are set up in the world. It's not always possible for us to safely avoid these things. Every day we face the possibility of bad experiences that are outside of our control.

Many of these experiences bring great pain, and some even results in deaths. I'd like to look at the occurrence of bad events in our lives. They're usually called trauma, and they often leave scars on our lives.

The medical industry has given it a term. They call it PTSD, which stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. They always like to give medical terms and analyze these, and they can quite adequately describe the effects, but quite honestly, they don't really have a cure.

You can't take tablets to overcome PTSD. You can take medication to help with some of the symptoms and effects, but it's something much deeper than the physical. Trauma has an effect on both our bodies and on ourselves.

The main effect that takes place in the body is shock. Shock can be mild or can be severe. Often it leads to low blood pressure, which makes the person sometimes get into a state of mental confusion.

They don't know what's going on. If you've had a traumatic event and you go into shock, very often you don't know where you are. You don't know what happened.

Moments later, you wonder where you are. It can be a very traumatic thing. Some people even faint or pass out as a result of shock.

It's scriptural. I'll read you a passage in Luke 1. It says, There will be signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, and upon the earth nations will be distressed and perplexed, the sea and the waves roaring. Speaking about the end times, there are people fainting and passing out from fear and anticipation of those things that are coming on the earth.

The dynamic powers of heaven will be shaken. When we're faced with fearful possibilities and anticipation, it can have a very powerful effect on our bodies, the point where we can't even pass out. Now, shock can kill you.

It can't be that bad, but shock doesn't last forever. It has a period of time and then it goes away. However, the effects on the soul are far more marked and not as easy to deal with.

Within the soul, there arises a fear of that event happening again. Sometimes flashbacks of the event in your mind and in your memory, where you find yourself reliving that event. Nightmares, where you keep seeing things over and over again.

What happens psychologically in terms of what I've taught is you create a template. A template is created as a result of an event, whether it be positive or negative. In this case, a negative event creates a template and in the memory is locked not only the event, but all the emotions associated with the event.

Now, when there is a template, there exists the possibility of a trigger. A trigger takes place when later on you face a similar set of circumstances to what existed when the template was created. You'll find yourself feeling the same emotions, thinking the same thoughts, and almost reliving the experience.

That's how flashbacks take place. They actually are created by a similar set of circumstances being arranged. So the next time you face just what may look like a similar set of events to what took place, the trigger ignites and suddenly all of these emotions come out of you and you may find that intense fear begins to grip you once again.

Now, what's the effects on our spirit? Presence of a spirit of fear. Scripture says God has not given us a spirit of fear. Fear doesn't come from God in that sense.

It's reverential fear, yes, but fear of punishment, fear of pain and suffering. It's motivated by demonic forces and there are some demons that are dedicated specifically to the task of creating fear because Satan wants you to fear. He set up the world in such a way that some people are stupid enough to read books and watch movies filled with fear.

Horror movies are a whole genre out there. For the life of me, I don't know what possesses people to take out movies that incite fear in them. Some people seem to thrive on it.

Satan makes sure of it because fear is his power. Spirits of fear are quite numerous. It's one of Satan's main tasks is to create fear.

Now, when that happens and a spirit of fear takes a hold of you, it opens the door to a curse and that curse then begins to block the power of your spirit. Now, your spirit has within it the ability to receive from the spirit of God and to communicate to you what God's doing, what God's planning to do and even to warn you of what Satan's trying to do. Those of you who are prophetic have it much more strongly developed and you can be very sensitive in the spirit where God shows you and warns you of impending disaster and problems that are coming your way.

Now, that's coming via your spirit. But sometimes disaster strikes and you are not warned. No sign, no dream, no prophetic word, no revelation, no sense of something's wrong.

It just happens. And you think, Lord, where were you? Uh, Lord, why didn't you warn me? Lord, you could have told me about this. I could have avoided it.

Was I out of tune? No, all that happened is there was a curse in operation. And when a curse is in operation in your life, all your prophetic revelation dies. All the sensitivity of your spirit gets locked in and blocked.

And God is speaking loud and clear, but you're not hearing it. So when disaster strikes, don't start feeling condemned and saying, well, how did I miss that? Lord, why didn't you warn me? I used to struggle with this because I know God warns me ahead of time. God can't even warn you to change your lane in the traffic and take a different route because he knows.

We can be that sensitive that God leads us every step of the way. Well, when a curse comes into your life, your spirit is blocked. It stops working.

One of the first signs is fear. I want to look quickly at the mechanics of trauma and fear. We daily face fearful possibilities.

And as I said, we can avoid most of them by anticipating. And we can handle minor scares and negative experiences. We can handle them up to a point.

We prepare ourselves for it. We shake ourselves off. We pick ourselves up and we go on.

If we couldn't do that, we would never make it through this life. But what happens sometimes is an unexpected event catches you by surprise. Now, that may have come as a result of a curse being in operation and you were not aware that it was a curse.

Whatever the case, bam, suddenly something happens that you did not expect. And when this happens, something very significant takes place. Like I said, from a psychological viewpoint, a template is formed.

If you've had similar experiences that in the past, a template is enhanced and a further link is placed in that chain. And we learned all of this in our seminar on any healing and how these things take place. But the Lord showed me something just this week that I'd never seen before.

He showed me that when such an event takes place, a weakness is created in your psyche. He showed it to me as a picture of like a hernia. You know, when the stomach wall begins to burst, it breaks open.

Many years ago, my navel started to get bigger and bigger. A hernia began to form. It started small, but it got bigger and bigger until I had this huge bulge going out.

There was a break in the muscles of my stomach wall that were allowing the inner parts to bulge out. And that now became a point of weakness. I would try and hold it in with a belt and push it in, but it just came back out again.

And I had to go for surgery and have them put a mesh in there and sew it up. Lost my navel in the process. You know, the Veggie Tales.

Have you watched Veggie Tales? Story of Vegetables. It's a Christian movie created many years ago. And I remember there was this guy, he was like a butternut or something.

And he used to sing this song, I want to tell you something, I ain't got no belly button. There we go, my theme song. I ain't got no belly button.

I don't generally walk around public with a bathing suit on. Otherwise, you see, I don't have a belly button, just a very ugly big scar there. Because I had a hernia, you see.

Now, what happens when you have a traumatic event, a kind of a spiritual hernia takes place in your soul, in your psyche. There comes a tear, a point of weakness, which now makes you more susceptible to attack from the enemy and specifically a spirit of fear. And now because you have that weakness, that spirit of fear takes advantage of it and will continue to attack you in that area.

And to deal with it, you got to do two things. You got to get rid of the spirit of fear. But you also got to get rid of the weakness.

You got to get that tear healed, just like you would have a hernia healed and sewed up. And that's a supernatural thing that only God can do by his spirit. And so the Lord has showed me that part of inner healing, where we deal with traumas, is to actually pray with people for the Holy Spirit to come in and heal that wound, that tear that took place that is opening them to the attack that's causing this continual fear and the PTSD, the effects of the trauma.

Now, a spirit of fear, all that it does is it amplifies. It amplifies the emotion and the fear. And that can often lead to paranoia, where you look at a person and think, man, you're crazy.

You're afraid about nothing. What's wrong with you? It's just a simple little thing. They're going crazy.

And sometimes that paranoia leads almost to paralysis, where you're so frightened you can't move. When you get paralysis in your spiritual life, you've got a problem. Satan's got you where he wants you, and God cannot move you forward.

And if God is calling you or telling you to move in a direction, and that direction takes you straight into an event related to the trauma that you had, you'll freeze up and you'll fail to enter into what God has for you. So this is a very important thing for us to deal with. Now, every one of us in our lives have faced events, unexpected events that took place.

There's a whole range of areas where fear can enter in and where trauma can take place. I'm just going to share with you a few of my own experiences with these. Along the line, I hope I'm going to touch on some of yours.

Bring them out. And as I'm speaking, I want you to allow the Holy Spirit to take you back and to remind you of those traumatic events in your life. And I want you to examine whether perhaps there was a tear there in your psyche, a weak point that is still there that Satan is still using and still trying to attack you.

And I know there's many here today who have just that. Because we've all been through these experiences in life. How does it come about? The effects of a curse.

Well, what are the symptoms of a curse? I've talked on this in detail elsewhere, so I don't have to go into detail now. There are three things that are the sign of a curse. Theft, losing something valuable, or someone violating your personal space and actually taking something that belongs to you real theft.

Destruction, things breaking. I had an experience at one time in my life that whenever I bought something new, I bought a lemon. Something went wrong and I had to take it back.

Just seems that just, you know, in the world they say, you know, it's just my luck. Just my bad luck. You know, if I bought one, I'd buy the dud.

But you see, that was a curse. You need to get dealt with. Perhaps you're always having accidents.

Perhaps you're always knocking things over, tripping over things, breaking things. People say you're such a klutz. There's a curse in operation there.

It's a sign of a curse. Perhaps you are being actually physically attacked from without. You bring harm and pain and destruction to your body.

These are all signs of a curse. The third element is strife. And strife means violence and attack.

If you're a small, weak person, you become a target for the bullies. They thrive on picking on you because they know you're too weak to fight back.

If you're a woman, you face the possibility of rape. These days you face that even as a man. These are violence, strife, things that come against us from without.

And wrapped up in all of that is a fearful expectation of evil. You're so afraid that this is going to happen. It's continually in your mind. You're continually afraid.

And this first little sign of any of these things coming in your life, you become filled with fear. If that's been your experience, I can tell you right now there's a curse in operation in your life. And some of you today experiencing that right now.

There's a curse in operation in your life. Today the Lord's going to take that curse away and he's going to set you free. He's going to break that power and he's going to take away the fear and he's going to heal that split that's allowed the enemy in.

And he's going to restore you, make you whole. Otherwise your fear becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Book of Job 3 verse 25, Job says, for what I was terrified has arrived.

What I dreaded has come upon me. Your mind's continually filled with fear. What's the pictures in your mind? You're seeing that negative event.

Not only are you seeing it, but you're saying it. You're expecting it. You're saying it'll probably happen to me again.

It's just my luck. It's the way things are. You're licensing all the wrong forces.

You don't realize it. You're actually creating the very thing that you fear. And you need to face that fear.

You need to acknowledge it. You need to do more than just struggle with it in your mind. And I've taught on this in dealing with fear.

I'm not going to cover that today. We're going to cover it from a different point of view. But if you are continually expressing your fear, that fear will bear fruit and it will fulfill exactly what you are declaring.

All the more reason to get rid of that curse and to get rid of that fear once and for all, so you can start walking in the blessing of the Lord. I'm going to ask the Lord just to reveal to you right now, before I continue, some of those areas of trauma in your lives and some of those things that you're afraid of. Father, by your Spirit now, I ask you to bring back to memory those events of the past that still are there.

Those fearful experiences of the past that still cause those feelings of fear and trepidation and anxiety. I ask you to reveal them so you can remove them now from your people in the name of Jesus, because you're going to set them free, Lord. You're going to set them free.

And so, as we, by revelation, see these things, the light of your revelation shall come into the darkness and dispel that darkness once and for all. In Jesus' name. I grew up with a fear of water.

The first time I came to a swimming pool, my mom tried to pay me to get in the pool and I wouldn't. Why? Well, I'm not sure, but I was told I was born blue, so I must have suffocated or half drowned during birth. That left an experience of fear in me, that I feared water.

It took me a long time to overcome my hatred for swimming. At school, they'd force us to go swimming. I'd find every excuse under the sun to not do it.

Why? I don't know, but sometimes events take place that we don't even remember. When John was still very small, we had a house with a pool, and one day he reached over into the pool and fell straight into it. It started sinking down there.

But I dived in with my clothes and all immediately to pull him out and rescued him. John was afraid of water for a long time after that. Today, he's a fish, he swims all the time.

But it left a fear of water, of getting into the pool. As far back as I can remember, I had a fear of the dark. My mother tells me that as a baby, they would leave the light on and I would lie looking at the light and fall asleep.

As I became older and I was on my own, I was terrified of going into my room by myself. I would hide my head under the blankets in fear, and if I could, I'd sleep with the light on all night. Perhaps that's why I like sleeping in the afternoons.

I developed a habit of sleeping when it was daylight. I found it very easy to fall asleep. As soon as darkness came, I didn't feel like sleeping anymore.

Something small, it just had a major effect in my life. Of course, my parents telling us ghost stories didn't help. My dad had some real, oh yeah, tell you what.

I remember him telling us the story of how he had to come home from work late one night, and they lived the other side of the cemetery. As he walked past the cemetery, he felt something cold take a hold of him. He walked very quickly until he got to the end of the cemetery, and then it left him, and then he ran home.

Stories like that on a young mind. I tell you what, I don't want to be near cemeteries. I'm afraid of ghosts.

I'm afraid of demons. I'm afraid of spirits. It left a scar on me, which for years I struggled with.

To make it worse, I had a fear of death. At first, I thought this came about because when I was very young, my grandmother died. She died at a fairly young age of cancer, and the whole family was surrounded.

I'm told that I was one of her favorites, and I loved her and always cried for her, but I don't remember that far back. But no doubt I was probably also there when she died. The only pictures I ever saw of her was in her coffin.

I was afraid of death, and as I grew up as a believer knowing about death, as I became a minister knowing about death, my biggest fear in ministry was that somebody would die, and I'd have to take the funeral. My sister had a baby that died, and my older brother, he was in ministry. He took the funeral, so we were there for the funeral.

I remember us going to see the undertaker and chatting with him, and he told us some of the things undertakers do with dead bodies. I don't know how many funerals I went to, but somebody was always dying. I hated going to funerals, and the worst experience I had was a young guy in the church committed suicide, and my uncle was an undertaker, and he had the body, and so he arranged for us to go and see the body on display in the funeral parlor.

Why did they take me there? They asked it. It was lying so peaceful, and suddenly something went ding, and it was like something hanging against the wall, and I jumped. Man, I was terrified.

I couldn't wait to get out of there. I remember playing on the roof of the place, so one day my cousin, his daughter said to me, you see over there is where my dad, she said, you see behind those windows, that's where they keep the dead bodies. I was terrified of death.

I just couldn't shake it. I asked the Lord to pray. I prayed to the Lord, and I tried to ask him to take me back to that memory probably of my grandmother dying, which probably was the cause of it, and I overcame it up to a point.

Somehow there was still something there, and actually I only became fully aware of where it came from when my mom died. Now my mom was a strong woman of faith. As she was suffering physically, she was facing death, but she fought it like a tiger.

She fought and stood and took her faith and said the devil's not going to get to me, and I thought, man, she's got such commitment, such faith, but the truth of the matter, she was afraid of death, and he realized that afterwards. The night she died, as she was lying there on her deathbed, apparently she suddenly looked into the corner then said, mommy, I believe the Lord sent her late mother to come and get her and to assure her, it's okay. You don't have to be afraid of death.

You're going to a good place. As she died peacefully, she went off. I think I got that from the womb already.

I guess the experience of my grandmother dying made it worse, but that fear of being with me for year after year, and I thought I'd kind of overcome it, but I still didn't like the idea of death and fiddles. I'd rather not be a pastor where people die. I don't even know where the cemetery is or how to do a funeral service.

I don't want to, but not long ago, very recently, I had a dream, and in my dream, my mother was dying, and it was a horrible negative dream, and I woke up feeling every part of my body, where I was going to have a heart attack, where I was going to die, and I felt that intense fear of death. I realized Satan's been using that against me for years. Every time he wants to get me, every time I want to go on for the Lord, suddenly I will get a pain, an irregular pain, somewhere where I don't normally get it.

See, I get the usual ones. I know what's causing them, and I know they'll go away because they've been there before, but when I get a new one, I think maybe this is it. This is the big one.

The fear grips me. I struggle with it. I realized that spirit of fear was still there, and so I brought it to the Lord, and I said, Lord, enough now.

I'm sick of this. God opened my eyes in the spirit, and I saw the demon. It was a ruler demon, one of these big gorilla-looking things.

It wasn't a small demon. It was huge. It's been with me, folks, for 69 years.

Now I finally saw it, and I dealt with it. I saw it walk out. The Lord removed it from me.

You may have something that's been with you for many years, and you just eventually accepted it, because that's the way things are. You had a weakness. You had a demonic power there.

Now I started out in the ministry. I was very strong on deliverance and dealing with demon powers, and then the Lord took me back into teaching. Now he said he brought me full circle, and he brought me back.

This next seminar is going to be very different. It's not going to be about teaching. It's going to be about setting the captive free, and the Lord showed me that each person has areas.

They've got these tears and these scars. They've got demonic powers that are attacking them. Each one of us sometimes have had things that have been with us for years.

Sometimes those demonic powers have given us natural abilities, which we welcomed, and we thought, that's going to help me to overcome my weakness. This must be a gift from God, but it's not. I'm not talking about possessing demons.

That's something very different. Demon powers, folks. As I began to pray and say, Lord, how am I going to Lord showed me like I would see a person in an x-ray vision, and I would see them, and I would see all the demonic powers that are attacking them and are associated with them.

Now that includes traumas. It includes hurts. It includes the flesh.

It includes many different things. It also includes sicknesses and diseases. We're going to be looking at the spiritual realm quite a lot of detail in this seminar.

God's going to set people free of things they've had for years. Sometimes the very sicknesses that you've had doesn't just require a simple gift of healing. It requires you to be set free of things that have entered in, perhaps even as a result of traumas, and we'll look at that shortly.

Okay, I must go on. How do you feel of rejection? It seems I was always never accepted by other people. I was small and frail and useless, and I finally got into being in the public and school and being involved with other kids.

Nobody wanted to play with me. Nobody wanted to be associated with me. Rejection is often based on your appearance, whether you're too ugly for them or you're too beautiful for them, so they don't want to associate with you because you're a threat.

People reject you. I had a fear of, sorry, I didn't have, there's sometimes a fear of accidents. Okay, now, I haven't had ever a really major accident.

I did have one once where I was riding on a motorbike, turned to the guy behind me, and he said, hey, look, and I looked and suddenly the car in front of me had suddenly stopped, and I didn't have time to apply brakes, and I went straight over the handlebars and into the handle on the back of the car and cut my whole chin open. That's why I wear a beard. There's a scar here still.

The guy who sewed me up was a horse doctor, and he didn't do a very good job. I know that because when he was finished, the nurse came and said, man, that was a horrible job. I could have done better, but it was just in the outpatients.

I remember after that event, sitting there in the hospital, all patched and sewed up, and I suddenly felt, I thought, what's going on here? I looked around me. I said, where am I? What happened? I didn't remember a thing. Shock began to kick in.

Okay. It wasn't a serious trauma, but my mom, she had something very different. She and my dad, my younger brother and sister went on holiday down to the coast.

My mom was driving the car, one of those old cars. It was going at 70 miles an hour, which is pretty fast for one of those old cars. I think she was even overtaking somebody at the time, and one of the tires burst.

Total blowout, and that car went skidding, hit a culvert, went over into a drift, rolled several times. The grace of God, they escaped. It was a few injuries.

The biggest injury was in my mother's psyche. My mother was terrified of traffic and driving. After that, to the point where she was paranoid.

We kids would be riding in the car, and my dad, he was a pretty good driver. He was not reckless. Every five minutes, my mother was like, be careful.

Sometimes she'd even get mad and start swearing at him. Very uncharacteristic of her. That fear would grip her.

Why? Because the trauma of that accident had never been healed. I think my mother still died with that fear. I don't know, she overcame some of it because when she remarried, she was riding the back of a motorbike with her new husband.

I don't know if she overcame some of it. But that fear of an accident, when you've had an accident, a bad experience like that, it leaves a scar. You can't explain it, but you're afraid at every possible event.

When you're out on the road in traffic, you're afraid that something's going to happen again. That trauma has left a scar, a split that needs to get healed. There's a spirit of fear in operation there that you need to get rid of.

I was always picked on at school by the big bullies because I was small and weak. And it became the story of my life. And when I went to the army, even they picked on me.

Sometimes they picked on me just because I took a stand for the Lord. At a fight with the sergeant, because he said, we're going to collect money for the end of the year party. And he said, anybody object? I said, I object.

I don't go to parties. He said, why not? I said, I'm a Christian. After that, he hounded me.

He pushed me. He said, you will go to the party and you will pay. I said, I say so.

The story of my life. I think I kind of expected it. It's always been there.

If you face death, if somebody has died unexpectedly, if you face a divorce, and those usually happen unexpectedly, they're both actually very similar. It can be a traumatic event. Having been through a divorce, I understand the trauma of divorce.

So often I'd find, I'd go around, I'd meet people as customers in my work. And you'd get chatting with somebody. And you'd share about divorce, about some of your experience.

And they would nod their heads and say, oh yeah, I understand. I've been there. I suffered that as well.

You can see they're still hurting. Still hurting. Sometimes they're too afraid to get into another marriage again, in case the same thing happens again.

Can you see it? Can you see that scar that's been left as a result of a painful, traumatic experience in life? The Lord can heal you and set you free. You don't have to continue with that fear, that weakness, that somebody that was close to you and important, died unexpectedly. For me, that happened when my grandmother died, even as a young child.

Yeah, I was always crying for her, and now she wasn't there anymore. A young child doesn't understand what's happened. Where did she go? What happened? Somebody you may have relied on or looked to, you saw your future with that person, and now they're gone.

Anybody who's been widowed knows this one. You're left with a trauma. You're left with a fear.

You're left with a scar. And time heals the memory, but all it takes is the trigger, and that memory comes back full blown. It's still there.

In my early teens, we used to help my mom with the housework. When I was younger, we could afford a house servant, but then things got tough financially. So, my brothers and I, my brother and I, we were enrolled in housework.

Each one had our task, and mine was to wash the dishes. See, why I still wash dishes? That just actually became a habit for me. I've done it for so many years.

I was standing there the one day, washing the dishes in one of these old metal sinks. Tap's coming out of the wall. Here's the sink.

And my mom was ironing, and on the sink, she'd place the little stand that the iron has. Those days, it was like a metal thing with a bit of asbestos on it. And unbeknown to any of us, one of the contacts in that iron had moved across and touched the outer part of the iron and created a deliberate short of the full mains.

And as my mom put that iron on the metal stand, it connected with the sink. I had one hand on the sink, and I reached out to touch the tap, which was a total earth. My hands were wet, so there was a full and powerful flow of the mains through here to there, straight through my heart.

I just remember the whole world going like that, and I could only shout out, Mommy, I'm dying. It was a matter of seconds, and I was gone. Gone, gone.

Stopped breathing. They couldn't feel my pulse. The Lord in his providence had caused my dad to go on a course at work just a few months before that on first aid.

He used to practice on me. Now, let's lie there. You know, Master Mouth, those days, they used the Hog Nielsen, where they push you from the back of your ribs, then lift your arms.

I was lying on the ground. My dad was squashing me. I was the one he practiced on.

Well, you know, the Lord knew he was going to do more than practice on me. My dad had never done that course. I would not be here today.

I struggled for about 15 minutes. There was no breath. There was no pulse.

Technically, I was dead, and the Lord, in his grace, he brought me around, and then finally, I began to breathe again. My heart began to beat again. And I don't remember going to heaven or anything, but I do remember when I opened my eyes, I thought, oh, I'm back here again.

It's like I travelled through time. Apparently, I jumped up and said, oh, it's going to happen again. It's going to happen again.

I can tell you that that kitchen was a place I was not even going to walk in. That sink, I was not even going to get that close to it. To touch that tap was terror for a very long time, and I guess I got out of washing dishes for a while, but what a price to pay.

The fear in me. You know, some people, they get a kick out of getting electric shocks. You know, you get these little devices that shock you.

I tell you what, I had a healthy respect for electricity after that. The slightest little accidental shock would send fear through me and bring the memory right back again. Terrible, terrible experience.

Near-death experience. I'm sharing these so that you can help identify some of your own. Now, as a young man in what was then Rhodesia, a country that was being attacked by terrorists coming into the country to take over, as a young person, I was required to do national service.

So at the tender age of 18, after leaving school, I received call-up papers to go and do my national service. We were fighting a real war. There was a chance of getting killed.

Fortunately, I became a signaler, so I stayed in the headquarters. But I had friends that were going out there and interacting with terrorists. In my group, most of them got killed with wild animals because they were stupid, trying to take photographs of elephants.

But I kind of escaped that fear. But then I finished my training, and then you were required every year to go and do several weeks of boot camps as a continuing process. And this time, they never sent me to the headquarters with the radio.

They sent me out into the bush with these guys. You know, you have the possibility that any moment, terrorists could walk in. Each day, as the sun went down, as the sun went up, they have what they call a stand-to, where you lie, each of you facing outwards with your rifles cocked, ready in case terrorists appear.

A frightening experience for a young guy who's never trained to be a soldier. And I hated those camps, largely because I also had bullies that picked on me. And I remember there was an emergency situation, and they said we could get called up at any moment to go on one of these camps.

And so we had to pack all of our kits and place it in the storeroom at the local barracks, so that if they needed us, they could call us at a moment's notice, we could just come pick up our kit and go. Needless to say, I was filled with fear. I was filled with fear that any moment I could get a phone call to go out to the border to do your duty.

That fear had an effect on me that I didn't anticipate. I came down with rheumatoid arthritis. I left knee began to swell up, pain in my hips.

The doctor first examined me. He thought I had rheumatic fever because rheumatoid arthritis affects the blood in the same way. But I got out of the camp.

I welcomed sickness. Big mistake. I didn't want to be healed.

I wanted the doctor to give me a letter to say, this man is no longer suitable for military service. Do you know how many years I struggled with arthritis? Because I opened that door to fear. Fear.

Fear is devastating. It's deadly. You cannot afford it in your life.

I grew up poor. Our folks were never wealthy. They weren't well educated.

That poverty mentality that I grew up with remained with me throughout my life. And later on, as I began to earn money, I got into debt to buy the things that I could never afford before. But the fear of poverty and the fear of loss became a self-fulfilling prophecy that brought me to the brink of a financial situation where they came and took back everything that I bought.

You know what it's like when they arrive at your home? And they say, I'm taking that, that, that, that, and that. It's gone. Fear.

Fear. You can't afford it. I grew up with a fear of the law.

You're riding along merrily and some cop steps into the road. You were speeding. I don't know why, but it just affected me so badly.

You know, some people, they get all angry, the cop, because he fined them. I felt so bad, so guilty. Whenever people pointed out my failures, I felt so bad.

I was filled with fear. The thing that I feared always seemed to come upon me. I was so afraid of doing wrong and I was never the kind of person who would do wrong.

You know, I had kids who'd go steal the fruit from the house next door. I could never do that. I always ended up getting into trouble without even trying.

I was the goody two-shoes, but things still went wrong, because I was so afraid of it happening that it did. I got into a heavy financial situation, began to get summonses from law courts to appear in court to try and make an arrangement to settle the debts that were outstanding. Oh, how humbling, how fearful.

It's a horrible, horrible experience. These are some of my experiences. I'm sure you've all had your own.

I've shared, tried to share a widespread to try and cover everything so that you could try and identify on some of them. By now, I think you should have started to look and see. What are some of those things that you've had, some of those traumatic experiences that you've had, and how many of them are still there? How many of them are still troubling you? How many people are still stealing from you? How many things are still being broken through destruction that shouldn't be? Now, the children of Israel walked for 40 years and their shoes didn't wear out.

So, your car shouldn't break down unnecessarily. Yes, it will eventually. You've got all these things happening all the time in your life.

It's a curse in operation. Are you afraid? Do you daily face life being afraid that this could happen again? It's time to get rid of it once and for all. So, let's look finally at how to heal these traumatic events.

We've looked before at the process of inner healing, and that means reliving the events in the presence of the Lord Jesus. Now, if you think you've had it bad, you have not been rejected by your own people, you have not had people spit in your face and put thorns into you and knock nails into your hands and feet. The scripture says that Jesus suffered all of these things on our behalf, and Jesus knows what it's like to face trauma.

His whole life was one of trauma, even his birth was trauma. So, we're not dealing with somebody who doesn't understand. We're dealing with somebody who's been there as a human being and understands what you're going through, and there's no condemnation.

Even if you missed it and you sinned and you failed, it's easy to deal with that. Just forgive me Lord, let's be cleansed. But we need to take Jesus with us into those traumatic events of our past, and then we need to build faith using the word of God, because faith overcomes fear.

The word builds positive pictures, but I want to tell you something, positive pictures are very difficult to create. When you are fearing something and you are seeing the worst, how easy is it to change the picture of your mind to see the best? I would say almost impossible. We tried it.

When you're seeing something negative in your mind, when you're fearing and you're anticipating, and all you can see is the negative, if you could just change that picture to something positive, you could license the power of God to create the good thing. You're probably lucky if you can hold it for five seconds in your mind before the fearful picture comes back again. I lived this one through bitter experience, having been through some really fearful things, even way back in Mexico, and the Lord showed me that if you will take his word and the promises of his word, and if you will create positive confessions from that word of the promises of God, that when you speak those words, they'll change the pictures in your mind.

What is it that you're afraid of right now? If it's fear of loss, fear of poverty, oh, I can see them coming to repossess my car. We'll change it. Lord, I thank you that you give me a new, better car, fully paid for.

I can see that, but in my mind, I try and visualize it while the pressure is on, because I'm behind in my payments. I do it. But if I take the word and speak it over and over and over again, the word begins to build faith in me, and the word begins to build positive pictures in me, and those positive pictures form the force of hope, which combine with my faith and love and actually release the power of God to create those very things in my life.

Philippians 4 verse 6 says, be anxious about nothing, but in everything through prayer and petition with giving of thanks, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will keep watch over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. You need to identify the chain of fear. You need to find the original template and see how it was created.

As we taught you in inner healing, and as you remove that first one, the whole chain comes out. You don't have to re-examine all the events. Find the first one and deal with that.

God will heal you and take it out of you. Then we must ask the Lord to heal your soul, to heal your psyche, to mend that spiritual hernia that you've got there, to close it up and seal it so that that weakness is gone, so the enemy no longer has license. Then we need to come against the spirit of fear, spirits of fear that have been attacking you.

Now you need to confess and renounce any sinful responses that you've had which may have given Satan license. You need to close all open doors, and that sometimes may even involve breaking spiritual links with people that have become an open door in your life to those things. Then we need to command the demon power to leave.

If you go through that process, God's going to set you free. He's going to heal you of all the traumas of the past. He's going to take away the fear that's been bugging you perhaps for years, and blessings going to be released in your life.

You ready to get that? You ready to do it? We're going to do it now. We live in a world that's full of potential hurts and traumas, and every day we face these events, we've got to deal with each one as they occur. When an event is serious enough to cause that tear in your psyche, identify the template that was formed, locate that first event, and invite Jesus back into that memory.

You should be doing this daily. Put the past to sleep, then move forward. Then you face the next event in faith, and hope, and love.

We're going to end by coming to the Lord in prayer. I want you to reach out to the Lord now for those traumas that he showed you as I've been speaking. You can continue this afterwards, and if you need personal prayer, we can pray with you personally as well, but we're going to do this together first.

Okay? Father, I just bring each one to you now. We've all had our experiences in life. We've all got these tears in our psyche that have made us susceptible to the attack of the enemy.

Oh, Lord Jesus. Oh, Jesus, I'm inviting you now in your love to manifest yourself to each one. I want you to go back to that event now, and I want you to see Jesus standing with you in that event, because that's the only way you can change it.

Psychologists say if you can relive an event with a happy ending, the pain of the event is removed. Well, the only way you can get a happy ending to the event is to see the event ending with Jesus. You can't change the event that happened.

You can't change the memory it happened, but you can change the final effects by seeing Jesus in there, taking your hand and helping you to step forward from that point. As we go back to those memories now, each one of them, one at a time, is go back to the earlier ones in your life, ones that may even have gone back to childhood. Let's start with that.

I want you to go back there and see yourself as that little child facing that terrible experience that scarred you and left you weak and helpless. Now, see the Lord Jesus taking his arms of love, putting them around you and holding you close and shielding you and protecting you from that event. He's saying, I'm here.

I was there even though you didn't see me. I was there and I'm still here and I'm covering you and I'm protecting you. The most common things Jesus often said was, fear not.

Fear not, my child. Don't be afraid, I'm here. I will never leave you or forsake you.

I've been there all along, even though you didn't realize it. Don't be afraid anymore. Give that fear to me now.

Let me heal you of that hurt, says the Lord. Holy Spirit, now I'm inviting you to go into those hurts and back into childhood. In each one now, I'm asking you to seal that rift.

Close it up. Make it strong. Make it whole.

Take away the sting, that negative experience. Thank you for it, Lord. Let's move on into the second phase, which is the adolescent phase of our lives.

Let's look at the traumatic events that took place then. Let's give it to Jesus again. Okay, there's some here that are quite strong.

Okay. Holy Spirit, reach in now. Just give it to him.

You don't have to carry this anymore. You've carried this load for so long. You don't have to carry it anymore.

He's going to take that load from you now. He's going to set you free. Thank you, Jesus.

Thank you, Jesus. By your power, I break this power of fear. I come against the spirit of fear and the lying evil that has filled the mind of your child for so long.

You're a liar, Satan, and I command you to take your lies back to hell where they came from. You leave God's child alone now, now, in the name of Jesus. I ask you to lift that load now, Lord.

I ask you to put a shield of protection. We set the angels guard for your child now, in Jesus' name. Let's look at all the later experiences after that, later teens, early youths, even later life.

Maybe things even that happened recently, all can be removed together, all going to be removed together. I'm going to give them to him now. I'm going to lay them at his feet.

Say, Lord, I want to be what you made me to be. I want to be the person that you designed me to be. I'm not going to live in this fear of the past.

I'm not going to live in the traumatic events of the past. I'm not going to allow this fear to stop me from rising up and becoming what you've called me to be. No more.

Satan, no more. Your time is up. You're going to leave now, right now, right now.

Thank you, Jesus. Reach in now and heal that rift. Heal that wound.

Some of those are brokenheartedness, somebody who's hurt you, somebody who's rejected you, somebody who's mistreated you. Sometimes we have to let go of the anger and the fear and the bitterness. Just give that to him.

That's his job to take it away. Let him heal you now. Let him heal you now and just take away all the stress, all the stress.

Some are being affected physically by these things. As God deals with these things, your health's going to change. Probably health problems that you've had for years will suddenly vanish away because the root of what caused them has been removed.

Speak your peace now, Lord, on each one in the name of Jesus. I speak total peace. I speak total assurance.

I speak love and joy and assurance to each of your children now that you have healed and set free. That head that's hung down will be lifted high and the insecurity, which maybe you thought was humidity, but it wasn't. It's going to be gone.

You're going to face the world. You're going to be strong, not in yourself, but in him. You say enough.

I'm not allowing this to hold me back anymore. I have not entered into all that God has for me for fear of what people think, of what people are going to say, of what people are going to do. But now I'm going to do what God is telling me to do.

I don't care what anybody says. I don't care what anybody thinks. I reject the voices of the past that put me down.

I reject them now. In the name of Jesus, you stand tall and you take a sword in your hand. You start reigning, if you're a king or a queen, in him.

You can reign over these things in your life once and for all. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for your word.

Thank you for the power of your spirit. Thank you for the truth that sets us free. Thank you for each one hearing this right now, Lord.

Those present and those who are watching the recording afterwards, just reach out to the Lord now. Just reach out to him. Let him touch you.

Let him heal you. Let him set you free. Let him break these curses in your life once and for all, that you can walk in full liberty.

In the name of Jesus, I'm Holy Spirit and finish what you started. Thank you, Jesus. You're the author and the finisher of our faith.

You're the author and the finisher of our victory and our healing now. And I thank you for it in the name of Jesus. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you, Lord. May we grow from strength to strength now. I'll give you the praise for it and the glory.

In Jesus' name. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen.

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