Steve Hines is the author of “Salt, Light & Kids: Parenting Well in Today’s Culture” and a longtime friend of Rick Burgess, BlazeTV host of “Strange Encounters” — a podcast centered around spiritual warfare.
On the latest episode, Steve joined Rick to share stories from the period of his life when God gave him a daunting assignment: casting out demons.
Steve grew up in “a church that was more law-driven than spirit-driven,” but in his mid-30s, he started seeking the Holy Spirit, asking questions such as, “How does the Holy Spirit affect my life? What are the gifts of the Spirit? What are the fruit of the spirit? And how does this all manifest itself?”
He embarked on this journey alongside a few of his good friends who were asking the same questions and experiencing the same desire for depth in their faith.
“So we started getting together roughly once a week, and we would just praise and pray and worship and talk and no agendas, but it was just a transformational period in my life and the life of these friends of mine as well,” he tells Rick, noting that these gatherings took place for about four years.
One night during this period of meeting with his friends, Steve experienced “an overwhelming prompting from the Spirit to pray for God to reveal His will in a dream.” That night he “went right to sleep and all of a sudden was in the middle of a dream that was surreal in that it was so real it didn’t feel like it was a dream.”
“In the dream, I was casting out demons out of people,” he says.
A few weeks later, the dream became reality. Steve’s group had begun inviting other people interested in seeking depth with God to join their meetings. One night, a newcomer became “physically agitated” during worship.
“All of a sudden, he started making sounds that were not of himself and his eyes were not of himself,” says Steve, who knew immediately that this was what the dream was preparing him for.
The group understood that they were in the presence of a demon but “didn’t know what to do.”
“We started laying hands on him and praying over him and anointing him with oil, and as this went over half an hour, it got more and more physical, more and more violent,” says Steve. “We ended up actually having to restrain him physically because it was getting so violent.”
“We kept praying and invoking the name of Jesus over him … and after a while, as it got more and more intense, all of a sudden, he just went limp,” he says.
“We knew what had happened: A demon had been present, and we cast it out through the power of the Lord.”
But the group’s experience casting out demons was just beginning. As they continued to invite more people to join their group, the same experience occurred again and again with different newcomers.
“It was always so consistent,” says Steve. In each case, the afflicted person “would have been fighting us if we hadn’t been restraining them, and the language would change and it would be kind of guttural … and the eyes were always really crazy because you could just tell that it was not them looking at us.”
When under demonic influence, their physical strength would become remarkable. “It would require three or four of us to bear-hug them or sometimes hold them down on the ground,” says Steve, adding that the language they used was “the foulest language you could ever imagine.”
He compares the experience to the Christian horror film “Nefarious,” which was co-written by BlazeTV host Steve Deace, based on his 2020 book, “A Nefarious Plot.”
“The actor who portrayed the guy that was possessed by a demon was exactly like what we experienced,” he tells Rick.
After it became clear to the group that casting out demons was an “assignment” they’d been given from God, they began inviting people who they suspected might be experiencing demonic oppression or possession.
From a freakishly strong man with an OxyContin addiction who left “blood on the floor” to a sex addict who had “laughter coming out from inside [his] body,” Steve has experienced things most of us couldn’t imagine.
To hear his story, watch the episode above.
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