Our Guest Daniel Kolenda
DANIEL: Well, the Bible describes this as familiar spirits. It’s demons, really, it’s demons. And this again is what Paul is talking about. This is what we’re wrestling against. These demonic powers that can’t be seen but they’re very, very real nonetheless. So let me come back to my story with this lady witchdoctor. I’m in the meeting there and she has come to the event to curse me and to kill me. So she’s standing off to my right hand side somewhere in the audience there. I’m preaching, not even aware of her presence. And she’s got these talismans and fetishes and charms. I don’t know what all it is. I don’t even care. But she’s over there getting ready to hurl some curse at me. And all of a sudden, just as she’s about to pronounce that curse, the power of God hits her. She falls to the ground, starts screaming, writhing on the ground like a snake, and foaming at the mouth.
SID: No one touches her?
DANIEL: No one touched her. I didn’t even know she was there. And this is when I became aware of a presence. I see this crazy woman writhing on the ground, screaming hysterically. And what do you think that I do in a moment like that? I keep preaching. And I’ll tell you why I keep preaching. Because there’s half a million people in front of me, we paid for that platform, I’m not going to give it to the devil. He can go find his own platform. So I keep preaching, but we’ve trained the local pastors. See, here’s the important thing. The Bible says, my people perish for lack of knowledge. So we’ve trained those local pastors, what to do when this happens, because we know it’s going to happen inevitably at some point in one of these four or five day meetings.
The local pastors grab her. They take her out back. We have a tent behind the platform. We call it the snake pit. That’s where we cast out all the devils. And the local pastors, this doesn’t have to be some famous evangelist that wrote a book about it, the local pastors are able to cast the demons out of this famous powerful witchdoctor. Because the reality is Jesus said to the ordinary believers, “I’m going to give you power over serpents and scorpions and all the power of the enemy and nothing will by any means hurt you.” So the best part of this… The best part of this, they bring this lady to me on the platform live, this is in real time. The demons have just come out of her. They led her to Jesus. She received Jesus as her savior. And she stands there before me on the platform. And this is how she is introduces herself to me.
She said, “I came here tonight to kill you.” And I thought, “Well, it’s nice to meet you too.” She said, “But instead of killing you, tonight I’ve become a believer in Jesus. Because tonight I’ve seen that your Jesus is more powerful than my witchcraft.” And that’s the great triumph of the gospel.
SID: How old are you now Daniel?
DANIEL: I’m 38.
SID: He has personally documented 21 million decisions for Jesus under his ministry. Is everyone fighting spiritual warfare?
DANIEL: Yes. This is actually the whole Christian life, again, is framed biblically in this worldview of spiritual battles taking place. And when you begin to see this you begin to realize that this is what it’s all about. For example, you read in the Bible, you see there’s Moses and there’s Pharaoh. And so it looks like there’s this showdown between these two men. What you don’t realize is that behind these two men, there are spiritual forces. Really both of them are representatives of a bigger spiritual battle. The war is really not Moses and Pharaoh. It’s not the children of Israel versus Egypt. It’s God versus Satan. And both of them is working through their representative. When you get this worldview, what you realize is that God is working to accomplish his purposes and to defeat the power of the enemy through us, through those that believe in him, through those of us that he saved.
