My spiritual journey started off as one on a path of darkness and deception to a path of light and truth. The Lord has not only delivered from the demonic bondage of an occult past and heretical theology, but has also allowed me to experience Him in life-changing beautiful ways I never imagined were possible.

I remember first learning about God when I was in Kindergarten when I had asked my mother where the world came from and was told that many people believe that God created the world. I pondered on that thought for an entire day and felt confident that seemed logical. I was curious about where God came from, what God was like, and why He seemed so silent, but the theological answers to those questions were beyond the capacity of a child.

I was somewhat intrigued about God for a brief time, but what started as a positive spiritual course quickly went far into the completely opposite direction. I don’t remember how it all started, but I quickly came under a very dark influence and was completely intrigued by the idea of Satan being my father. Indeed, I became a child-Satanist. I truly believed and so verbally confessed that Satan was my true father and that I was a son of Satan. I would, in fact, often pray to demons to enter me to give me power. I was obsessed with the idea of having power, being feared, and controlling others, and believed I could obtain that by from demons.

I asked the demons in, and they came in. I became filled with terrible profanity and developed sexual and demonic obsessions. I spent large portions of my time daydreaming about perverse sexual fantasies (such that you would never imagine a child could have) and also constant fantasies regarding all the power of Satan awaiting me. At times, the demons in me would manifest. During those moments, they would fill me a demonic hatred for a person which would sometimes result in a burst of violence. For instance, in the third grade when I got mad at another child, I grabbed him by the throat and completely lifted him off the ground – his feet were dangling as I choked him with a single hand and his classmates beat on me to let him go. This is not possible in the natural for a child to have such strength to lift another child off of the ground completely with one hand. Just before it happened, I felt the surge of a demon giving me demonic strength and filling me with incredible hatred.

In addition to demonic strength, Satan gave me two other occult abilities. There was a particular instance at a restaurant where I conjured up a flame. My brothers kept teasing me when I explained what I was doing, but after several minutes of internal focus that flame shot up in the air. This was at a large family gathering – everyone saw it and was completely shocked. To this day, this event has been brought up again and again by my family members who saw it.

The other occult ability was the ability to speak in a demonic tongue. Almost every day, usually for 20 minutes, I would pace back and forth as I prayed in a demonic tongue. Absolutely no one had told me what “tongues” were – I had never heard the concept in any religion. I didn’t even fully understand it myself, but the ability to do so was given to me, and I was strangely compelled to pray in this demonic tongue daily. The words of this language sounded dark and twisted, and as I prayed in this demonic tongue, it filled me with a dark spiritual energy.

I never showed them to anybody, but I often drew pictures of evil demons and of people being tormented in Hell in terribly morbid ways. Rarely, I would also receive dreams from a demon. These were no ordinary dreams, nor any self-imagined nightmare, for they had a very strong unholy spiritual presence to them. In the same way people can receive dreams from God, the devil can give people dreams as well. These dreams would try to pull me deeper into the occult by planting some sort of dark desire inside of me. Usually these dreams were about the choice between being a vampire or a shapeshifter, but also a strong pull to commit a particular sin. (This may be very hard to believe for those ignorant of the occult realm, but real Satanists when they reach a certain rank, choose between becoming a vampire or a shapeshifter. These “fictional” concepts in the movies actually take their inspiration from the occult. While these are not entirely like their portrayal in the movies, high-ranking Satanists do have the extreme demonic power to become those things. Just as angels and demons can take on different forms, so too, when can they so possess a person’s body can use those same demonic powers to change the occultist’s body. Satan often pressed upon me which choice I would make if I kept on the path of Satanism.)

As a Satanist, I didn’t hate God, I simply rarely thought about Him – He seemed like a very distant figure. When I did think about God, I was filled with strong jealousy. Yes, sadly, I very jealously wanted to be God. I didn’t understand the Trinitarian view of Christ’s Deity, and so when I imagined Jesus, I imagined him as a weak man without real power and wanted nothing to do with Him.

I did not share this with anyone for a long time, but I had also developed homosexual attractions at this young age and actually engaged in homosexual practices. But since I was still incredibly lustful towards women, “bisexual” would be the correct term for my sexual orientation. I was not delivered of these gay tendencies until much later on, which I will get to later.

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The next pinnacle spiritual event in my life that took place was a very unpleasant, yet completely necessary, event to deliver me from my dark past. As I explained earlier in my testimony, I was once a Satanist that invited many demons into my soul, to the point of having demonic abilities. But where had all of those demons gone? Due to my old Baptist background, I was always under the impression that Christians could not have demons. In fact, I feel embarrassed when I look back on the moments when I once assured other Christians that it’s impossible for believers to have demons. I know that may sound logical, but it’s actually not true. There are no Scriptures at all that state this, but since the Bible is not explicitly clear on the issue, many have just assumed it is not possible – an erroneous assumption indeed. The reasoning is that ‘light and darkness can’t mix, therefore the Holy Spirit and demons couldn’t possibly both live in the same body’. Despite this reasoning, the Bible doesn’t actually say that, and I was soon about to experientially discover this assumption was false.

I had come to realize that the many demons I invited in my soul had never really left me. It was not as though they just magically disappeared when I first received Christ in my heart. The reason I never felt them leave was because they never had left. Scripturally, demons have never left a person without being cast out. I wished it were not true, but I could absolutely feel evil spirits inside of me. They were basically in hiding for a long time, but at different times in the strong presence of God is when I could feel them surface because God’s presence had made them uncomfortable, squirmy, and/or angry. What I once wanted inside of me for power, I now desperately wanted out. In short, my pastor met with me regularly over a period of several weeks to lead me into renunciation prayers regarding my occult and sinful past, followed by commanding any demons associated with those things to leave.

Being something completely outside my control, demons would manifest as they came out. This experience was very unpleasant, to say the least. When the demons were commanded to come out, they would often manifest and fight for control for a brief moment. I was helplessly unable to stop them from manifesting – they would make me fall to the ground and shake my body, and they came out in very loud eerie screams and shrieks, sometimes deep growling as well. Although unpleasant and even a scary, I could feel the force of evil leaving me. The light of Christ was freeing me from my dark past.

Each deliverance session was different. (Among evangelical Christians, the word “deliverance” is used instead of “exorcism” to distinguish it from Catholic methods for casting out demons.) Many demons were easy to cast out, but some of them were stubborn. To be honest, I was very scared during some of these sessions. The experience of feeling demons inside you, manifesting your body without your control, and feeling them fight to stay inside of you is a very terrible experience, to say the least. It was common that afterwards I would feel extremely exhausted. This was probably the hardest thing I had went through in my Christian walk at that time. I had invited so many demons into me several years ago, and one by one they were now coming out.

Many people have asked me what I felt like afterwards. It’s difficult to describe, but it was basically like a spiritual “heaviness” that was always there now being permanently removed. Each demon that came out was like taking off a jacket I had worn for such a long time unknowingly. I felt “light”, free, cleansed, and spiritually rejuvenated. Additionally, many things I had dealt with all these years left me because they were caused by those demons. I used to have strange perverse dreams, random very difficult struggles with hate, and various health problems that all left after I was delivered from the demons. I didn’t realize just how much of my strange health problems were actually caused by demons. For example, I used to have strange experiences of feeling some sort of incredibly heavy weight of tiredness and brain fog pressed upon me that was very mentally oppressive – it was sort of like having the worst imaginable jet lag in the world. That went away of course when the demon that would cause it was rebuked.

Demons do in fact cause people to struggle with strong sinful drives and health problems until they are cast out. I thought these things were normal struggles of mine, but realized they were actually due to the demons all along. Although a terrible thing to go through, it was necessary, and consequently I experienced a freedom I never knew was possible. When all was said and done, I continued my spiritual journey in the Lord.