If you belong to Jesus and something dark still seems to have a grip on you, the fear itself does not prove you were never his. Scripture speaks of believers who are sealed by the Spirit and still struggling. Freedom, where it comes, tends to come through honest prayer, safe people and wise care, including medical and mental health care. This guide will not diagnose you. It gives you room to tell God the truth, to read one Gospel story slowly, and to take one small step out of hiding.
You can use it alone over a few quiet sittings, or with a small group across one or two meetings. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone anything. Every writing prompt can stay on your own page. The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Jon Thompson, a pastor at Sanctus, a church in Toronto, and the author of a book called Deliverance.
Before you begin: if the darkness you are carrying includes thoughts of ending your life, please set this guide aside and call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US. That call is part of caring for the life God gave you. The study can wait.
Say it to God before you try to explain it
Frightened people often want the explanation first. What is this? Is it spiritual? Is it me? Those questions matter, and this guide will come to them. But the Bible gives the frightened a different starting place. It lets them complain to God out loud.
Psalm 13 opens without any explanation at all: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1-2). The psalmist repeats “how long” four times before he asks for anything. Trust does arrive by verse 5, “But I have trusted in thy mercy,” but it arrives after the complaint, not in place of it.
Jon Thompson points to the Psalms when people ask whether there is a right prayer to pray. His answer is that written prayers exist for people who cannot find their own: “Why did God give us the Psalms? Because sometimes we don’t have the words.” He also gives frightened believers explicit permission to be afraid in front of God. “And so my encouragement is, if you’re afraid of this conversation, that’s okay. Tell Jesus you’re afraid. Tell ’em you’re terrified. Tell ’em you never wanna see anything in your life and then say, could you help me with my fear?”
Notice what that does not require. It does not require you to understand what is happening or to sound brave. It asks only that the fear be said to Jesus rather than hidden from him.
For a first reading: Read Psalm 13 aloud, slowly. Which line could you say today without pretending? Which line can you not say yet?
The fear underneath the fear
For many believers the worst part is not the struggle itself. It is the question the struggle raises. If something this dark can touch me, was I ever really saved?
Thompson’s answer starts by separating two ideas that the English word “possessed” tends to blur. In his teaching, “possession is about ownership.” A Christian, he argues, is owned by Christ, and nothing changes that title. Whether a believer can be troubled from within by something that does not own them is a separate question. Thompson argues that they can. Other faithful Christians read the same passages and conclude that believers face the devil only as an outside enemy. Jude 3 Project does not settle that disagreement. Jude 3 teaches that the spiritual world is real and that Christ has authority over it.
For a frightened reader, the order of those questions matters more than which side wins the debate. Paul writes to believers who still struggle with anger and still need warnings, and he tells them that they are sealed “unto the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). Elsewhere he names the very powers people fear: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Thompson makes a comparison here that is worth sitting with. When a believer loses their temper with their family, he observes, no one concludes that they were never a Christian. Christians already accept that the Holy Spirit lives in people who still sin. A struggle, of whatever kind, is a sign that sanctification is unfinished. It is not a ruling on whom you belong to.
Eighteen years, and still among God’s people
Read Luke 13:10-17 in one sitting. Then read verses 11-13 again: “And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.”
Several small details carry pastoral weight. She is in the synagogue on the Sabbath, among worshipers, under the reading of Scripture. Her condition has lasted eighteen years. Jesus sees her and calls her before anyone asks him to. When the synagogue ruler objects, Jesus calls her a daughter of Abraham whom Satan had bound (Luke 13:16).
Thompson reads that title as a sign that she was in right relationship with God, and he calls this passage the turning point in his own thinking. Other interpreters take it as a mark of covenant belonging within Israel. He grants that the event comes before the cross. Both readings agree on the part a frightened believer most needs: she belonged among God’s people the whole time she was bound. Eighteen years of struggle did not remove her from the family. Nor did it make her invisible to Jesus.
The passage does not promise that your relief will look like hers or come on her timetable. Thompson is careful on this point. Speaking of a woman with chronic pain who found relief through prayer, he immediately adds that “not every sickness is connected to the demonic.” His rough sense of how often the devil is involved is “less than some people want, and more than what other people wanna admit.” A guide that promised you a dramatic ending would be claiming more than the story and the speaker claim.
When the church has handled this badly
Some readers come to this subject already wounded. Someone told them their anxiety was a spirit. Someone prayed loudly over them and left them more ashamed. Or someone dismissed real spiritual distress as nothing at all.
Thompson names both errors. He rejects the habit of attaching a spirit to every diagnosis, saying it “makes people feel like second class citizens.” He also works alongside doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, and he says that “many, many people I’ve prayed with have genuine mental illness and also the demonic are connected to them. And so it’s actually both at the same time.” Jude 3 teaches the same refusal of either/or: it will not spiritualize what is medical or medicalize what is spiritual, and it urges people to seek qualified care and prayerful support together. Jude 3 also teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. A doctor’s evaluation does not compete with prayer.
If you have been hurt before, Thompson acknowledges what returning costs: “So if you’ve been in an environment where things have not been handled well, to have this conversation takes a double effort to be okay with it.” You are allowed to go slowly. You are allowed to say no to anyone who offers you a formula, a rush, or a public scene.
One more caution matters for anyone who has been harmed by another person. Thompson includes trauma among the ways he believes the demonic can gain ground, and when he does, he calls it “even more upsetting, more unfair, more unjust.” He is naming an injustice done to someone. He is not assigning guilt to the person who was hurt. If someone is hurting you now, your safety comes before any study or prayer session. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. No minister gets to make reconciliation with an abuser the price of being prayed for.
A practice: one honest page, one safe person
Thompson ties much of the struggle he sees to hiddenness, and he goes back to the garden, where “Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). His pastoral claim is that “when you come into the light among healthy people, the demonic lose power because there’s no place for them to live.” Whatever you conclude about the debate, coming out of hiding is safe ground. The word that matters in his sentence is healthy. This practice moves toward light in steps you control.
- Write your own Psalm 13. Use three short sections. First, your “how long”: what you are carrying and how long you have carried it. Second, what you are asking God for. Third, one sentence of trust you can honestly say, however small. If you cannot write the third part yet, leave the space blank. The psalmist’s trust came after his complaint, and yours may too.
- Pray one short prayer, every day this week. The tax collector’s prayer works when nothing else will: “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13). Thompson suggests adding a request for people: “Hey, I’m scared I’m alone. I don’t know what this is.” Then ask God to bring people into your life who will understand it and handle it well.
- Make two short lists. On one, write what you have already brought to a doctor or counselor. On the other, write what you have brought to prayer with another believer. If one list is empty, that is likely your next step. You do not have to decide yet whether the cause is spiritual, medical or both. That is what the people on both lists are for.
- Choose one safe person. Look for someone who keeps confidences, does not panic, does not rush to label you, supports medical care, and prays without performing. Tell them as much or as little as you choose. Scripture puts confession and prayer together: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). That verse invites honesty among trusted believers. It does not require you to disclose everything at once.
Lisa Fields described something on the praying side of this. When she sensed that a friend’s trouble went beyond what anyone had assumed, she asked herself “how can I shift to pray in the right direction for this person”. A safe person prays that way: attentively, for you, without needing to be proved right.
Questions to talk through, or to keep
Answer only the ones you want to. In a group, anyone may pass.
- What were you taught, growing up, about whether a Christian could be troubled by the demonic? How has that teaching shaped how you read your own struggle?
- Which line of Psalm 13 felt closest to the truth for you, and which felt furthest away?
- The woman in Luke 13 was in the synagogue for eighteen years. What does it suggest to you that she was present among worshipers while bound?
- When have you seen a medical or emotional struggle mislabeled as spiritual, or a spiritual one dismissed? What did each mistake cost the person?
- What makes a person safe to be honest with? Which of those qualities do you see in someone you know, and which could you offer to someone else?
- Thompson tells listeners to search the Scriptures rather than take his word for it. Which part of this subject do you want to study further before you settle it?
If you are guiding a group
Set expectations before you open the text. No one will be asked to share personal struggles. No one will be diagnosed. This session is a Bible study, not a prayer ministry appointment, and no one will be prayed over without asking for it. If someone discloses danger to themselves, or abuse they are facing now, stop the study. Stay with that person, and help them reach 988, the domestic violence hotline, emergency services or a pastor, as fits the situation. The material will keep for another week.
Thompson’s word to leaders sets a useful posture: “Our responsibility as leaders is not to dismiss experience. Our responsibility is to interpret it.” Interpreting takes time, more than one perspective, and often a professional. Keep group members from settling one another’s situations aloud. Keep the debate over whether Christians can be demonized from turning a hurting person into a test case. Thompson himself says “don’t believe a word I said,” and points people back to Scripture and church history. A group that holds the question with that kind of humility is safer for everyone in the room.
For the hours when you are alone with it
The fear tends to be loudest at night. Thompson closed his conversation with Lisa Fields by speaking to that moment directly: “And so when you’re alone at 3:00 AM and you’re scared, I want to remind you that the spirit of Jesus who’s risen from the dead is in you and you are not alone.” He went on, “And it is not a fight between you and that weird thing.” Then he described the honest prayer of a person who admits they cannot handle it, and the Spirit’s answer: “He’ll go, of course you can’t. That’s when things change.”
Change may be slow, and it may come through a counselor’s office, a doctor’s visit, and a friend who keeps praying, as much as through any single moment. The psalm you wrote can stay unfinished for now. The one who walks with you through it is not unfinished. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).