When Demons Steal Your Testimony

To watch the sermon When Demons Steal Your Testimony | Matthew 9 18-32

Download the Discussion Guide: Download

Download the 5 Day Devotional: Download

Reach that portion of Matthew where things start to get really awkward for us. Doesn't really matter where you fall out on your theological timeline, where you fall out on all of that. You start talking about demons, you start talking about possession, you start talking about Jesus healing, the interaction with those things, not necessarily from afar. You know, we talked about earlier in the Book of Matthew that when Jesus saw the demons who had been tormenting people coming out of the graves, they. They were kind of like the trolls under the bridge, but not the cute trolls that sang songs.

It was the mean trolls back from the Fraggle Rock days, which most of the kids in this room don't understand that. And so here, what we have is we have not only the possession of the demons, but we have a tormenting happening. And not every interaction with the demon in the scripture is a possession. So kind of save us from that before everybody's kind of like, you know, I stepped in it on Facebook this week. I made a statement that was somewhat ambiguous and apparently it was definite.

And so just want to make sure as we go in today, not every time a demon is interacting, is it a possession.

Sometimes there's cooperation with demons, sometimes there's oppression by demons, and sometimes you're just stupid and do stupid things. It's that simple. Thank you, troll. That's where I fall out most of the time, is I just do stupid things and make stupid decisions. You know, had a bad day.

You know, had a bad day. You know, nobody's ever had a bad day in this room. So guess what? Tabernacles is coming up. If you have bad days, we're gonna find out how many bad days you have very, very quickly.

Because it's impossible to live together with people out in the forest for eight days and not figure out, man, is that person legit or is that person fake? You're going to find out real quickly. So by the way, tabernacle still has space left. If I haven't. If I haven't sold it for you already.

So that's fine. Before we can get into Monday night, before we can get into the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Teril, before we can get into the Day of Atonement, before we get into any of these times and we start talking about King Jesus, the kingdom of Jesus, the spirit of Jesus, and how we approach all these things, we're a feast loving church. We love the feast. Why? Because we love Jesus.

Not because we were at Sinai, not because we were in a place where there's an obligation, but because we love Jesus. And we love the Kingdom of Jesus. And because we love the Kingdom of Jesus, we want to do things Jesus way, right? No. Okay.

All right. Awesome. Guys, it's only gonna get worse. We've got like four services in two weeks. So if we're asleep today, then gotta wake up.

Misael's drinking coffee. That's the most interactive I've had so far today. As Misael goes up with the coffee, Tim was staring holes in my head. He's like, dude, I ain't even got through my coffee yet today. Today of all days, I ask that you would please, please, please, please, prayerfully, openly, in your heart and your mind, stick with us.

The topics of demons traditionally put people on both sides of the guardrail. Both sides of the guardrail. The car is wrecked. Everything's a demon or nothing's a demon. Neither one is healthy being.

Apathetic towards demons. Not healthy being. I see a door, a demon here, a demon there. There's a demon everywhere. Not healthy.

Not healthy. And so as we go into Matthew chapter nine, we're going to be in verses 32 and 34 today. And my goal is, with the help of the Holy Spirit, that you can understand and see just how important your testimony is. Say, Chris, why are you talking about the testimony again? Stick with me.

Because last week we saw two blind men. We saw men who couldn't see a thing. Yet they saw Jesus more clearly than the Pharisees who had perfect eyesight. They called him the son of David, the Messiah, the Mashiach, the King, the promise, the fulfillment.

When he touched their eyes, they saw Jesus, told them stay quiet, see to it that he was saying nothing. But they couldn't. Their mouths exploded with the testimony, even though they knew that Jesus asked them not to. And now Matthew continues to tell us about another man who is mute, possessed, and silenced. And do you feel the irony?

The ones who could not shut up, their testimony, they couldn't stop speaking. And the ones who longed to speak, who couldn't say a word.

One man's testimony had spilled over, and we see that another man's testimony was currently stolen. Demons don't care if you read your Bible as long as you never talk about it.

I read my Bible every single day, but I never speak about it. Demons don't have to. Hollywood and American culture has kind of got this thing where, like, the demons mission is basically to fully shut you down. The demons don't have to shut you down if you don't speak.

The demons don't have to impact you if you're not engaged. You're not a threat in warfare if you're not in the war. And sometimes the people who you think are the holiest are the ones who are operating in the spirit of the demonic. We'll see this later on in Matthew.

This is the tension of discipleship with Jesus. Will your life overflow the testimony, or will the evil enemy choke out your voice into silence? And let's be honest, many of us don't need a demon to silence us. We've been really good at doing it ourselves. We let the busyness gag us.

We shame ourselves and others so that we're handcuffed to it. And we let compromise, duct tape our mouths. We're not mute because of possession. We're mute because of permission. And we gather our testimony and we give it away through our silence.

But here, Matthew wants you to see something bigger, something that isn't just about one man's healing.

There's something bigger here. This is about a king announcing a war. Isaiah 35 promised that when Messiah had came, that the mute would sing, that there would be joy. Remember one of the accusations against Jesus, And I know I sound like a broken record, but one of the accusations from the religious leadership was that Jesus was here to nullify the Torah and the prophets. And.

And so as Jesus goes on mission and he does these things, does he care about setting people free? Yes. Does he care about bringing a lifestyle and a kingdom of repentance and deliverance? Yes, he does. But ultimately, one of the greatest missions he is on is to show the people of the book, the people of the Torah who had the prophets.

I am he who they testify to. And so I'm not here to nullify these or to abolish these. I'm to make them whole.

You cannot fulfill the Torah and the prophets separate from Jesus. It is not possible. The Jews have been attempting to do it for thousands of years. And it is absolutely not possible to fulfill the Torah and the prophets without Jesus. Because the Torah and the prophets fulfillment is Jesus.

I might be the perfection of the balance of Christianity and Judaism. I'm not. But let's just hypothetically say I am. I still cannot fulfill the Torah and the prophets. And you cannot do that in a kingdom led by me.

Because all kingdoms led by man, women, beasts, animals, whatever, are under submission to the King of kings and the Lord of lords and his kingdom. It's that rhythm in that cycle. We talk about the feast and the festivals. We're like, oh, I love the feast. The feasts are rhythms of A liturgical calendar.

A liturgical calendar that keeps us coming back to the table. Why? Because I'm still a man in need of a Savior, and humanity had a history of taking things too far. We get to a place where the farther we go away from God, and we're not with God, and we're not with the church community and we're not with fellow believers, the more we become like the world. You could say, chris, that's not true.

I've been doing this for 20 years. The more the adversary picks you out of a church, the more the adversary picks you out of the Bible, the more that the adversary. Adversary takes you away from the family gatherings of Jesus, the more you will get picked off and look like the world.

And today we're going to talk about demons.

Demons operate in a war. When there's multiple legions of demons and there's one of you, there's only one way you win.

The spirit that lives in you. That spirit has to be the one who demons are under the authority of. Yes. Yes. Satan needs permission.

If Satan needs permission, then the demons need permission. Where do they get their permission? The same place we get our permission, from the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings.

We talked before in Matthew that the demons did not question, they did not worry about who Jesus was. They knew right away, who is this Jesus.

We know who this Jesus is, and they testified of it right away.

But we have to be honest that not everything that happens in our life is a demon. Sometimes we do the work of the adversary through our own sinful nature.

So when Jesus casts out the demon, it's not some random act of kindness. It is a declaration of war and an invasion. The Spirit of God has come to wrestle with the spirit of the adversary. And when the Spirit of God comes against the spirit of the adversary, there's only one spirit that remains, and that's the Spirit of God. The kingdom of God had just dropped a bomb on the kingdom of darkness.

Because verse 33 says, when the demons were driven out, the man had spoke. The demons had been given the ability to keep this man mute and possessed. Rob them of his testimony, Rob him of his testimony for so long. And the moment that Jesus comes in and casts out the demon go, the demon leaves. And the man spoke.

The crowd was amazed. And what was their response? The response is, nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel. Guys, guys, come on.

The Bible is a beautiful narrative about the kingdom of God. How beautiful is it when you read Genesis 1 and you hear about the creation story and you think of how amazing it might have been when God was dwelling in the garden with Adam. And when. When God realized that it was not good for man to be alone, that he had put him in sleep and he had fashioned woman out of his side. And he had said, here is your helpmate.

Only to foreshadow that in the New Testament, in the Book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, that we were also going to need a helpmate. Not just male and female, all humanity was going to need a helpmate. The spirit of Jesus Christ. How beautiful is this. How beautiful is the testimony when despair and hope is happening.

And yet this little old shepherd boy picks up a stone and he casts it against his Goliath guy who had been tormenting them for a prolonged period of time. And with that stone Goliath falls. How beautiful are the testimonies of scripture. And yet in this moment, when Jesus cast the demons out and restores the voice to the man, in this moment the crowd declares, nothing like this has been seen in all of Israel.

There is a lot in the Bible that happened before this.

A lot.

And yet they make the declaration with their testimony. Nothing like this in all of Israel has ever been seen. That's pretty amazing. And they were right. Israel had seen miracles before.

Think of the people these people saw. These people had the testimony of seeing the pillar of cloud in the fire. These people had the testimony of seeing the Holy Spirit dwell in the ark of the covenant. And all of the things that happened when you offer the strange fire and they immediately cease. They've seen some pretty crazy miracles.

These people were not anti the power of God.

The prophets had healed, the kings had conquered, but no one, and I mean no one, had silenced demons with a word and restored voices with the same word. The tongue is a trumpet of the heart. It lets us know what's going on in our heart. It lets us know if we're happy or we're sad or we're angry or we're bitter or we're confused or out of the mouth. The heart speaks.

And the demons know that if they can take your tongue, they don't need your eyes, they don't need your ears and they don't even need your hands. You have given them what they need. They have kept you and shut you up from the power of your testimony.

Your voice carries the power of life and death. We see this in the Proverbs. Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are the power of the tongue.

And some of you are living proof of that. You've spoken life over your kids. You've got them involved in healthy church communities. You've created good, healthy, accountable relationships. You've created consistency in their life.

You've been consistent in affirmation, and your children have thrived. Others have spoken curses over your spouses, over your friends, over. Over your children. And you've watched them wither.

You've watched them wither and die.

You've spoken gossip over your church, and it's split.

Don't tell me that words don't matter. The scripture says there's life and death in the power of the tongue, and words are weapons.

If they weren't, then the demons wouldn't have conquered it.

Words can build up kingdoms and they can burn them down. Think of how quickly I've given this testimony before, so I'll give this testimony again. I can't give you all the sins that I've done in my life. I've repented and Jesus cast them from the east is to the west. But think of this.

I was so on fire for the entirety of the scripture that I immediately got to this place where it's like, man, Christmas is pagan. And I don't want to keep Christmas anymore. And yes, I'm holier now because I understand Santa Claus's make believe. I mean, the whole world knew Santa Claus is make believe. But it was new for me, apparently, because now I became, you know, this.

And so I hate Christmas. I hate Christmas. I hate Christmas. And my daughter at 2 goes to my mom and says, mom, you're pegging for keeping Christmas. I destroyed my testimony as a believer in Jesus from the front of the book to the back of the book, by what?

I spoke into life, into my daughter, and my daughter turned around and spoke it to my mom. And honestly, 20 years later, after I've spent I don't even know how many thousands of hours of researching it, I can't tell you Christmas is pagan. I can tell you that I lied because I made up stuff that wasn't facts. I have impugned my reputation throughout the years by making statements that I absolutely believed in my heart that then I found out weren't true.

I'm still a man in need of a savior.

Those are things I wish I would have been robbed of that testimony. I wish I would have just put that one in the back pocket and keep it for later, wash it over in the jeans a couple of times and realize that it's shredded. It doesn't exist anymore. Nobody's ever done that.

Words are weapons. Words can build up kingdoms and they can tear them down. Remember, before we got into this portion of the kingdom of action, Jesus sits down on a mountaintop and he speaks.

And then he immediately takes his words and he puts them in action. The kingdom of God is at hand. What you speak over your children brings life or it brings death. What you speak over your spouse brings life or death. What you speak over other believers brings life or death.

And this world is all about death. Maybe we shouldn't help them.

The enemy is strategic. If the enemy can't get you to blasphemy, you know, we're like, well, I didn't blasphemy. I don't blaspheme the Holy Spirit. No, but you gossiped.

If he can't get you to blasphemy, what he can do is he can settle for your silence.

Because silence is surrender.

And some of us are surrendering every single day without even realizing it.

There is not a single place in the Bible where evil aims for your good. Not one. Listen, there's never a time where the evil of the kingdom of darkness is for your good. It says the opposite. It says that the enemy.

The enemy has tried to steal, kill, and destroy. The Lord works and uses for his benefit. So for those of you in this room who are in some really tough situations in your life, let me tell you, it's the enemy who's trying to steal, kill, and destroy you. But God promised you that if you cling on to him, just like the lady who crawled into the crowd and grabbed that fringe of his garment, if you can crawl to Jesus and cling to Jesus, the enemy will not win. He will not steal your voice.

It doesn't matter whether you're a Baptist, a Pentecostal, a Messianic, a Hebrew roots, it won't matter.

Because Jesus ain't any of them.

Bitterness doesn't just want to make you feel justified. It wants to rot you from the inside.

Porn doesn't want to entertain you. It wants to own you and wants to silence you on what is healthy.

Your addictions, they rob you of the testimony of Jesus. And we remain silent in our guilt and our shame and condemnation. Why? Because lies don't want to protect you. They want to strangle you.

Demons are patient when we are not. They will bleed you slowly into your testimony is nothing more than a whisper.

And yet, Jesus. When the king shows up, Demons don't negotiate. They flee. When the king shows up, they don't argue. They surrender.

So if the spirit of God lives in each and every one of you and is available. Why are we surrendering through our silence to the one who surrenders to the one we have inside of us?

You don't surrender in silence. You fight back.

And before somebody takes a clip and puts it all over the Internet, how do you fight back with the Lord? You cling to him.

You don't take up arms against your brother. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

You cling to him. How do you cling to him? You pray, you worship, you read. You do life with other people who pray, worship, read. And you continue to grow closer and closer to him every single day.

Because I can promise you, there are battles you can win. There are.

And there's battles you were never intended to win.

But the kingdom of God is about bringing light into darkness. And so if the light is coming to the darkness and the demons want to steal the light, well, what is one of the greatest power you have in this world to overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of your testimony? So if they can silence you when the demons try to steal your testimony, they have won for a short period of time.

When the king shows up, demons don't negotiate, they flee. And when they do, testimonies rise from the grave. See, Jesus is playing the long game here. We talked about this last week. We talked about what was happening.

We talked about the fact that why would Jesus not want them to immediately go and testify all over the place? Why wouldn't Jesus want to be in a situation where they had a testimony of who he was? Because he was moving in and out of all of these different nations, all of these geographic and geopolitical areas, and he had a plan. He even says later on in that my time has not yet come. He's very aware of the timeline and the execution of his plan.

Sometimes we just act like Jesus was here to just overwhelm people. He was intentional about everything he did.

And so Jesus knew that the time had not come. Jesus was being intentional. And so guess what? A lot of people thought they had won. A lot of people in the early portions felt like, okay, we won.

We've conquered Jesus, we've conquered this. We, we've overcome. Rome thought they won. The Greeks thought they won. Some of the Jews thought they won.

The Essenes who went out into the valley and out into the wilderness and who were their holiness code out there, they thought they won. And in the end, all things that are demonic, all things that are done in the secret, all things that rob your testimony for Jesus Christ will be thrown into the lake of fire and you will win. Why will you win? Because you will overcome the last battle by the blood of the lamb and the word of your testimony. Okay, they're out there talking now, but the battle is only won for the war.

And the time's not yet.

The time's not yet.

Some of us want the Lord to fight our battle and fight our war right now. And we're Matthew chapter 20, we're not Matthew chapter nine. We get a little angst, get a little frustrated. We get a little nervous. Keep testifying, keep speaking, keep fighting.

Cause God never stops speaking. Never stop fighting and never stop working on your behalf. When testimonies rise from the grave, there's nothing that can compare. Blind men will see. The deaf's ears will be open to hear.

The dead men will breathe life in their lungs. Lepers will hug their children again after being outcasts from the social society. The outcasts who weren't invited to the table will sit at the mat.

Very popular pastor at a church in North Carolina was talking about the man who was laying on the mat who was paralyzed. Very simplistic. The people whose testimony was not of Jesus was of their own righteousness. They were more mad that a paralyzed man stood up and walked. They didn't see the legs moving for the first time.

They only saw the fact that the guy was carrying his mat on the Sabbath day.

All of us have areas of our lives where we're still trying to keep the outcasts out of the table of the Lord. We're still trying to keep the lepers from hugging their children. We're still trying to keep the unclean spirits outside the temple rather than allowing Jesus to eradicate it and restore what's right.

So you can't do anything about someone who allows the demon to steal their testimony, but you can make sure that you don't allow the demon to steal yours.

Chains snap. Demons tremble. Pharisees constantly were choking up their Coca Cola and their pride.

And the mute man who was once silenced preaches his first sermon with a single word. Let that sink in for a second.

We're a visual culture. A man who would sit here every single week in our church, who would love the Lord, who would be present, who would be in this spot but cannot speak, preaches the most powerful sermon of the power of Jesus Christ. Because everybody in this room knows this man can't talk. And he opens his mouth. And when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out.

They're being choked. Being choked. And he opens his mouth. And he says, hi, think of the power, think of the present.

Some of you aren't mute because you cannot speak. Some of you are mute because you have those who are trying to steal your testimony, because your testimony further brings light into the darkness. And the darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can drive out darkness.

Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel because nothing like this had ever happened before. You see, the king was here.

All the cool things in the Bible, all the cool things we experience, they matter little to the moment when the King comes through the door.

When you finally see Jesus. All of the arguments and you know every denomination has them over theology, everybody in the world argues. We take clips of men and women out of context and we put them out there and we testify over and over and over again. All of that ceases to exist. The moment that the king comes back, the moment the king arrives, you stop worrying about all the troubles of the other kingdoms because what you can see is the beauty of the kingdom at hand.

And this is part of Matthew's gospel is all of the things that they could not see, all of the things they couldn't experience. They're now seeking a powerful faith because the power came from the king.

But just like every good movie, there's a plot twist. Dun dun dun.

It started off, remember, the response was all over the place. They were like, nothing like this in all of Israel has ever happened. They went from 0 to 10 real quick on the applause meter, like, so what do the Pharisees do? The pharisees go from 0 to 10 in verse 34. Worship team, you can come back.

But the Pharisee says it is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons. Man, you gotta love the mental gymnastics that narcissists will go through. Satan is casting out Satan.

I mean, I didn't go to college. I mean I did go to college, dropped out of college.

But I don't think you need a four year or an eight year degree to realize Satan trying to cast out Satan doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sense.

Why would Satan cast out Satan?

I don't, I don't know. So, so Jesus is operating under the power of Satan so that he can drive out the power of Satan.

These are smart people here. These are the double masters in other people's wineskins. They are intelligent. The Pharisees are not fools. They are very, very well learned on the scripture.

And the best they got is he heals them by the power of the demons.

That's the best you got.

Really that's not a theology, that's desperation. You can't explain it away like narcissists today, that they accused Jesus of the very thing that they were guilty of. They were bearing false witness. So a man whose testimony had been stolen from him by the possession of a demon, then is in a situation where the testimony of the ones whose voice and testimony wasn't stolen was to bear false witness.

This should be something that causes each and every one of us to be very concerned with what we say.

It should cause us to look inwardly in our motives and our thoughts when we speak on things. Because throughout the Bible, when they could not explain what it was that they were seeing and they didn't want to explain, explain under the testimony of what they were seeing, they immediately bore false witness against Jesus and against God.

The Pharisees testimony wasn't silenced, it was poisoned. And some of us use our testimonies to spew poison into others.

So now the stage is set. On one side you have a king who restores a testimony, and on the others you have leaders who are corrupting it. And right in the middle is ordinary people who must decide and use discernment of whose voice they will believe.

I've heard it say. Anybody ever hear it say silence is golden?

Silence isn't always golden. Sometimes it's demonic. Sometimes. When you hold your testimony back from speaking the truth of the Lord, when you hold your testimony back from testifying of what the Lord has done for you, when you hold it back, you are robbing the Lord of the life that he has given to you in the past. Power that is in them.

This is what abusive people do. They practice evil. And what is one way that you can practice evil against somebody else? In abuse, you attempt to silence their testimony.

So the question you have today is, does your voice echo what the crowd echoed? The awe of what they see Jesus doing? Nothing like this has ever been seen in all of Israel.

Does your voice echo the Pharisees criticism and their cynicism? It must be the devil who's at work.

Or does your voice just remain silent and compromised because of fear or distraction?

Demons rob testimonies, Pharisees slander testimonies. And Jesus counters both of them by restoring testimonies.

The question is, is which kingdom does your voice serve?

Because your testimony is health target, because it's a part of heaven's weaponry.

We come from a place in an origin story as a church that I like to tell the world about. Parts of Jesus, various different parts. They're all parts of Jesus, they're all part of the life. They're all part of the Scripture. Did you know that we're grafted in the commonwealth of Israel?

Did you know that if you're Abraham's seed and your heirs according to promise, which means that we're all part of a. Of an Israel? Did you know that the Sabbath is not on Sunday? Did you know that if you, if you want to live and eat in a way that the Lord says, then you shouldn't eat unclean food? Did you know that?

That before we had Advent and before we had all these other liturgical calendars, God had a calendar with feasts and festivals and cycles and it starts on the Sabbath day. We talked about the Sabbath day before. Did you know all those things come together?

Guys, there is absolutely nothing wrong with talking about parts of Jesus, especially when they align with the Scripture and the Word given to us. But in the end, if our testimony is just one part of Jesus, not the whole of who Jesus is in our life, we are still robbing Jesus and the kingdom of God of our testimony. Because in the end, my identity does not come come in the feast of the festivals. It does not come in being a part of Saturday church. It doesn't come in being married.

It doesn't come in being a father. All of those things are true. All those things make up a part of who I am. But in the end, my identity is found in the God of all creation who is Jesus Christ. And he is more than one of those things.

He is the sum of all of them. By through him, all of those were created. And all of those things testify to him. And when we stop and we look at our our life, when we look at our voice, when we look at our testimony and we don't testify of who Jesus is, then we are allowing hell to prosper while the kingdom of God is being held back. And the kingdom of God is only to be held back by the King in the throne room, where he says that it is not my time yet and I do not know.

And he will be released by God. And the moment we start to try to hold back the kingdom on our own, we are putting ourselves in the position of God. And when we put ourselves in the position of God, we're going to die.

Because we are not God. As much as this world in centuries have tried to be God, we are not God. We are creation. And creation either testifies to the one that's killing creation, or it testifies to the one who created creation. What does your life testify about who does your life testify about?

What? When people see you, do they say. Do they say that that is a Jewish Christian? Do they say it's a man who doesn't eat pork? Or do they say that is a follower of Jesus Christ?

I am the way, the truth, the life. And no man comes to the Father just because they keep the Sabbath on Saturday. No man comes to the Father just because you believe one element of Jesus. No man comes to the Father through anybody but him.

He is the door.

Demons don't care if you read your Bible if your life doesn't testify to the one who gave us the word of God, the power of God, the Spirit of God and the kingdom of God. And some of us today walk through this door with our testimony. Robbed. Carrying the demon who's robbing it. So.

Chris. Oh, that can't happen. Yeah. Yeah, it does. All the time.

Time.

So that's scary.

Not anymore it's not. And the reason why it's not is because our society literally cooperates with them. All day long, I've watched men turn into demons in front of my own eyes. I've watched religious leaders operate out of the power of demons for years and years and years while living in atrocious sin. I've watched men say that, oh, my life is so great.

Only to find out that what they were doing behind closed doors was the most demonic.

Fooled me. Guess who? You didn't fool him.

I don't need to think you're holy. I don't need to think you're righteous. I don't need to think that Jesus lives in your life. If Jesus knows that he lives in your life, then it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. And when you testify that and it overflows from you, the demons cannot rob your testimony.

Your testimony isn't for you. It wasn't given to you. That's like saying an apple tree is reaching out on the branch and picking its apple and eating it. Your testimony is for somebody else to further the kingdom of God through my multiplication. Why?

Because the kingdom of God is about multiplication.

Chris, I'm. I'm ashamed of what I did.

Part of the club. I got the same jacket, same name badge. Hi. Welcome to Sinners Club. My name is Chris.

I've been three hours. Three hours clean from not sinning, I think. Not entirely sure.

Fight back.

Walk boldly. Because if you don't push back the darkness by the power of God that lives in you, there is more of a chance that you will be overcome by the darkness and succumb to the darkness around you, if you will stand with me and respond.