Dana Free is the author of “What Every Christian Needs to Know About Spiritual Warfare” – a practical, biblical approach to combatting demonic forces.
But like many accomplishments, this book was born through the fire. On a recent episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess interviewed Dana about the wild circumstances that led her to author such a book.
Dana was raised with a “full gospel understanding of the power of the Holy Spirit” outlined in Acts and 1 Corinthians, but when she got married, she didn’t realize the journey ahead of her would require her to step into the spiritual gifts in ways she never imagined.
Her husband became a meth addict, but because Dana viewed marriage as “covenant, not contract,” she stayed and asked the Lord for guidance. He faithfully led her to “the right places, the right people, the right books, [and] the right sermons” that taught her how to “fight back spiritually.”
She realized that her husband’s drug problem was a spiritual problem. Substance abuse at its root, she explains, is really about “abandonment or rejection or depression.” “The enemy just uses the drugs to keep [people] bound and destroy their life.”
But once she started fighting back with spiritual weapons, the opposition got stronger. “The enemy did not like what I was doing to stand and fight against generations of these problems where they had had a good foothold … so they threw everything they could at me to try to get me to leave him and write him off,” she tells Rick. “I saw almost everything that can come against a marriage happen.”
“When you were dealing with these demons, did they ever present themselves to you?” Rick asks.
While Dana never saw a physical manifestation of a demon, she was physically assaulted by one. Once, when someone was performing witchcraft against her and her husband, a spirit attacked her in her home.
“I did have that spirit come in my room and press me down in the bed and try to choke me where I couldn’t say the name of the Lord Jesus,” she recounts, but “once I said his name, it lifted and then I tore into it.” When she told her husband, he thought she was crazy, but shortly after, the spirit returned and did the same to him.
Many Christians mistakenly believe that spells, brews, and incantations that have been so absorbed into mainstream witch lore are just fictional. But they’re not. The forces of darkness have real power, just as God’s forces have real power.
“[Christians] have this power of the Spirit and that gets counterfeited by the enemy and the occult into witchcraft,” says Dana, noting that the witch behind the spirit who attacked her and her husband was “reading tarot cards,” which is “divination.”
“The New Age and the white witchcraft,” which involves “crystals … the third eye, yoga, meditation — all these things that people really don’t understand” — are luring people, but especially “the youth,” into darkness, she warns. “The enemy doesn’t care. He will take whatever open door he can get.”
This seemingly benign witchcraft is extremely successful at snaring the secular, who are “drawn to the supernature,” but it’s also snaring Christians who either mistakenly write it off as silly, or become drawn to it themselves because “they’re not seeing [the power of the Spirit] in church,” Dana says.
“What do you think is the biggest mistake that people of faith are making when it comes to spiritual warfare?” Rick asks.
“Ignorance” is Dana’s answer.
“That’s why I wrote the book,” she says, “because when I talk to your average Christian, they’re clueless.”
To hear more about Dana’s book and the story behind her husband’s hard-won deliverance, watch the episode above.
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