In an exclusive Beyond The Article interview with Charisma Magazine Online, Jennifer LeClaire shares what the power of prophetic witchcraft looks like and how you can break its bondage over your life.
One of the first things LeClaire warns against from her own personal experience is the danger of those in ministry using the prophetic for their own reasons instead of delivering an actual message from the Lord.
“It’s something that I experienced some years ago where I was in a church that started off good, but the pastors there had been so hurt, betrayed … and they began to become very controlling and using prophecy as a weapon to control,” LeClaire says.
LeClaire was threatened that if she ever left the church, the Jezebel spirit would overtake her.
“She said to me, ‘Well, I see a Jezebel spirit superimposed over your body,” LeClaire says. “And if you leave this church that spirit is going to take you.”
The Holy Spirit never leads us into manipulation or coercion of someone else’s will, thoughts or emotions. Other spirits will lead us into this direction, but God will always allow us to make decisions for ourselves, even if they go against His greatest desires for us. One of the reasons LeClaire shares this story is because of how imperative it is for us to test the spirits to see if something is truly from the Lord or not.
“We have to be a people who press into God and have such an intimate relationship with Him to where we can hear the spirit behind the words,” she says. “First John 4:1 says very plainly to test the spirits or try the spirits to see if they are from God. We’re not supposed to just blanketly believe a prophet. … It’s about their alignment with heaven, and we need to do a better job in this social media age of testing the spirits.”
LeClaire says these false prophetic voices can easily fall into spewing curses on people’s lives or tickling someone’s ears with the things they want to hear, even if it means providing them with a false sense of assurance of words that God did not speak over their life. When these curses were released over her own life, it caused her to serve with a cautious mindset in fear of what might happen if she didn’t do something in a specific way.
“I remember when they did that, my first instinct was to try to serve more, to be better, because I love these people,” LeClaire explains. “And I thought, ‘Well, they must be right.'”
One of the deadliest reasons many people find themselves stuck under a power of prophetic witchcraft is because there is a familiar spirit operating in the atmosphere that knows their weaknesses.
“This is very dangerous; a familiar spirit begins to speak to them, and they really believe it’s the voice of God,” LeClaire says.“ So a familiar spirit is a spirit that’s familiar with you, it watches you, it knows things about you … [people subject to these spirits have] opened themselves up by listening, aligning, sowing into false prophets.”
While most prophetic voices will not abuse their gifting, it is because of these false prophets that Scripture warns against that we must look at everything and compare it to what the Bible says about the truth of the gospel and how God desires to speak to us.
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Abby Trivett is a marketing copywriter and coordinator for Charisma Media.