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Chapter One

Moving Mountains

I'm in the mountain-moving business and I'd like for you to join me. If you don't know what that is, please don't feel bad. I had never thought of it before God appointed me to this work and, quite frankly, I'm still learning. It's not a deliverance ministry in the traditional sense, although I've seen people delivered. And it's not specifically a healing ministry and certainly not a Word Faith ministry, although I've seen people healed. It's about helping people get free of strongholds (repeating negative patterns and triggers people can't overcome) and all the thoughts and imaginations that taunt us and exalt themselves against God.

This is about getting free. If Christ came to set us free, and if freedom is our right as children of God, would you want to miss it?

This work involves six disciplines, and all of them are things you should be learning anyway as you grow in the faith. They are nothing unique, they all align with Scripture, and it doesn't matter if you've completely mastered all the learning or not. If you understand God's Word and are willing to stand on it, you can move forward in faith, and God will bless you. The six disciplines in random order are:

• Learn to move mountains (big or small) with faith.
• Understand and recognize the enemy and how he works.
• Learn to hear God in the many ways He speaks.
• Develop an identity based on who Christ says we are.
• Renew our minds and use that in our warfare.
• Understand our authority in Christ.

These are the six elements that work together in harmony so that in the power of Christ we can, by faith, tear down strongholds and thoughts and imaginations that exalt themselves against God.

Is that scary? Yes, sometimes it is. When I talk about moving mountains, maybe you cringe. It seems so big, but it is a normal part of the Christian life. It's just that people seldom talk about it. And once you move a mountain, you will learn that God is so much bigger than that, and what seemed so big is pretty small compared to God's awesome power. Each one you take down makes you stronger for the next until you won't think twice about asking God to do incredible works. Don't be intimidated by the challenges in front of you. They are the stepping stones to a deeper life in God.

The Lord first told me that He was teaching me this back in 2013. He promised me that He would send people who needed help, especially those who were struggling with strongholds. I was to ask Him how to pray for them, and He promised to provide instructions and wisdom for prayer. Then in about 2016, I received a prophecy for my husband and me from a beloved Christian who described us sitting back-to-back with lit torches in our hands. God said that He was going to send us people who were struggling with darkness, and we were going to help break those chains and bring the light of Jesus back into their lives. Isn't that really what all Christians are supposed to do?

The six principles in this book are interwoven around each other because they are inseparable. I will move back and forth among them as I explain them because they cannot be taken apart. Standing on the promises of God requires knowing God. Knowing God requires having our minds renewed. Tearing down strongholds requires knowing our authority in Christ. If you understand that they are intertwined, you won't find it hard to follow along.

Tearing down a stronghold or defeating the enemy is not all that complicated. Getting to the place in your Christian life where you're comfortable doing it is another thing. And that's where this book will be so helpful. It takes a while to acquire the boldness to accept our authority in Christ and use it effectively. I moved into this very slowly, as you probably will, because I was unsure of what I was doing, and quite honestly, I had many doubts.

It All Starts with Believing Faith

I have known the Lord for over fifty years. Early on, my spiritual mother made me memorize Bible promises, especially those that applied to my daily life and spiritual and emotional needs. "Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2 Peter 1:4).

Secondly, she taught me to pray and believe without doubt. I was taught not to stop praying until I believed God had heard and answered. That's not to say that He answered exactly when I prayed, but I wasn't to stop praying until I believed that He had heard me and would answer me in His timing. Then it was time to praise Him for the answer and wait expectantly for the fulfillment of my prayer. I was taught that this was faith: asking God, believing that He would answer, and then waiting for that answer.

God always answered. It might take a day, a month, or even years, but He always answered.

Praying through until an answer comes is difficult. Praying with faith and praying for faith are two entirely different things, and I had to learn how to do both. So will you. They are basic to the Christian life, and I was drilled on it regularly. Little did I know how blessed I was to have someone teach me that. At the time I didn't understand that I was learning the first lesson that would lead me to ministry many years later.

Faith and believing prayer came easily for me after I got the hang of it. When I had children, God showed me how much He delighted in answering prayers for my children. We once saw Him restore a cat to life who had (we thought) dropped dead and who had no breath according to the mirror we put at his mouth and nose. I am not making an outrageous claim; I'm only telling you what I saw. But after praying for that cat and waiting for an answer, he suddenly got up and walked away. It turned out that he had a seizure disorder and died a few months later, but my kids saw God raise that cat to live out what was left of his short lifespan. Trust me, we never forgot it. And we felt that day that God had moved a mountain because we had prayed and believed.

Another time I ran out of gas on a cold, rainy, dark winter night. I was only a block from the gas station, but it was too miserable to get out and drag a four-year-old and a baby through the rain. My oldest wanted to know what we were going to do, and I told her that we were going to pray for enough gas to get to the gas station, which we did. And when we were done praying, I turned the key, and the car started! I drove it to the edge of the gas station and, as it headed down a little hill, it ran out of gas again but rolled right into the pump area before coming to a stop. God had answered, and the mountain had moved!

I had no idea that there was more to the spiritual life because faith and believing prayer summed it up for me. I was happy to rest there. But, after reading books about persecuted Christians in communist countries along with Andrew Murray, Rees Howells, Derek Prince, Dave Wilkerson, and many others, I became convinced that I could live a deeper life in Christ if I desired it and was willing to press in with prayer and the Word. I wanted to go deeper into the Lord, and I wanted to learn more about Christ because His answers to prayer were often astounding. I wanted to see what God would do if I believed. I wanted to experience that perfect love that is poured out on us when God touches our hearts. I wanted to experience the Christian life in its fullness and, as wonderful as that is, I had no idea that going deeper with God comes at a cost.

I was in for so much trouble because the hard lessons are usually learned in adversity. "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee" (Isaiah 43:2).

When we are left with no answers, problems beyond our control, circumstances we cannot change, and pain in our heart that no one can heal - that's when God does His deep work and makes Himself and His power known. This is the fertile ground for learning how to move mountains by faith. God used fire (adversity) over and over again in my life to teach me the six disciplines on the list. One step led to another and then another, and I began going deeper with Christ into places I didn't know existed. That's not to say that if you commit to learning these principles that you are going to go into darkness. But you will have challenges moving forward, trust me.

Don't doubt for a minute that you can do this. The Word says that we can do all things through Christ, and I can testify to the fact that if I can, you can! There is nothing about you that makes this impossible, no matter who you are or how weak or strong you are. No matter how big your mountain looks, God is bigger; and He is on your side. He is your strength on both the right hand and the left.

Maybe you have a background like mine and have had to face many mountains. I came to the Lord with more problems than most. Honestly, I was a real mess. I was born to two alcoholics who so traumatized me that I lived with stress and anxiety so deep within me that it ruled every area of my life. I battled depression at times, and I had so much fear that I spent much of my life biting my nails and wondering what bad thing would happen next. I had real issues.

I had many unhealthy emotional and thinking patterns, a lot of strongholds, and occasional overwhelming darkness in my life that I had not defeated. They were so embedded that I didn't know how to recognize or overcome them. There were other challenges, as well.

So, if you're one of those people like me who have deep-seated strongholds and emotional or thought patterns that you're harassed by and cannot change, I know that there are very few people who can explain how to get free. But God's provision is in the Word, so you can learn it. You must be willing to pray through until an answer comes. And that can take time, months or years sometimes. You will need to stand on the promises and believe God. And sometimes you get desperate and completely throw yourself on God and give up relying on your strength. If you do that, He will always come through.

I can't count the number of times I threw myself on my bed in desperation and told God I was not moving until He touched my heart and lifted me up. Sometimes trials go on for weeks or months, and they wear us out. When they do, we can become very discouraged, and we need the Lord to lift our heads. One time I waited and prayed for three days, although I did get up to eat. I stayed there and prayed until He answered, and He did! He set me on a rock that was higher than my enemy, giving me a new perspective to look at my struggle.

And let's face it. Doing the work is hard, and I think that's why many Christians don't go down this road. Or maybe it's because they aren't as damaged as I was, and they don't need as much help as I did; but I can't help but think that we all have strongholds and problems to overcome. Also, it's not as common in the church to see people overcoming their strongholds as you might think it is. I believe that Christians are sometimes afraid of confronting their problems in the power of Christ. Or they just don't know how.

What happened to the power of the Holy Spirit in the last thirty years, and why do so few Christians know who He is and what He can do? "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" (1 John 5:4-5).I think He had me asking those questions because He was preparing me to learn these principles and teach them to others.

If the Word says that we are overcomers and we are not overcoming, however slowly, then something is wrong. If our time in the Word is not renewing our mind or we don't have our identity rooted in Christ, we are missing something.

If you perceive yourself as worthless and if you believe that is a true story about who you are, the devil will harass you about that every time you have a problem, causing you to fight the wrong battle. I am sure that you have those things in your life that repeat over and over, binding you with their stronghold on your life. Trust me, I've been there. If you want to find victory, you will need to change what you think about who you are. You must be taking on the identity of a child of God as described in Scripture.

I've had to learn that I'm not that girl who got into trouble and flunked out of college and then spent decades trying to make up for my failures. I am not that girl who listened to her drunk mother cry night after night and who believed that she had no value to her mother or anyone else and was nothing more than useless humanity. I am not that person. The truth is that I am what God says I am. I am an overcomer. I am accepted in the beloved. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. But if I don't take that mindset into a spiritual battle, I'm going to be fighting the battle about my identity until I do. And so will you. Why not take it head-on and save yourself all that trouble?

This journey of faith is powerful, and it brings freedom, victory, and joy. But it takes time because it doesn't happen overnight, and you won't be instantly perfect. You'll make progress as you use your tools, and sometimes you will have great victory. Other times, you'll fall flat on your face, but you'll get back up and try again. If you hang in with it and keep learning and going to the Lord and the Word, you will succeed.

Remember, Christ came to set the captives free and to destroy the works of the devil, and most of the church is a captive in some area of their life. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound" (Isaiah 61:1).

Do you have areas in your life where you are afflicted or feel bound? Do you have a broken heart? Do you sometimes feel like you're being held captive in a prison, and you can't get free? Do you have patterns that repeat over and over in your life? If so, there is good news. Christ came to set you free, and you can learn how to participate in finding that freedom.

Christ will not wave His magic wand over you and make everything all better.

Wishing it will go away won't do much good.

I suppose you could ignore it, but only at your peril. If you've been doing that for a while now, it's probably not working.

So, maybe there is another way. Maybe today is the day to make that choice for a new start and take this journey with me because freedom in Christ is waiting for you. These principles you will learn will lay the groundwork for your own harder battles as well as the battles you will fight for others. They are the beginning of a life of overcoming that will take you down challenging roads. If you can stand on these six principles, God can use you to do incredible things. If you keep your focus on God, He will increase your strength and make you mighty for warfare. And you will come to a point where you will recognize the works of the devil and be able to sort them out from the works of the flesh. You'll recognize God's voice so when He tells you to do something that seems crazy to you, you'll obey.

I want to share a story with you. A few years ago, my husband and I had a friend who had been in the ICU for six weeks with septic shock. It did not look good for him, and he wasn't improving. One day we were praying, and the Lord told me that we needed to pray for our friend, and we needed to do it right then. I didn't know what to pray, so I asked the Lord, and He told me, "Pray and command the angel of death to leave and command your friend's vital organs to start working correctly again, to repair, and to be healthy in Jesus' name."

I had never done anything like that or even imagined that I ever would, but I had learned and applied the six principles above, and I was willing to go out on a limb with God. I learned to know His voice, and I knew He was talking to me. That moment in time is an example of how intertwined the principles are that I'm sharing with you. One builds on the other, and they work in concert. If I didn't know God's voice, I would never have known what to pray; and if I hadn't built my faith, I wouldn't have believed that God would answer my prayer.

So, my husband and I prayed exactly what God told us to pray, not knowing what was going on with our poor, dying friend. We prayed and we believed, and we left it with God. We knew He was going to do something extraordinary.

We found out the next day that the day before, the doctors had taken our friend's family aside and told them that he would not make it through the day. His organs were shutting down, and he was going to pass. The doctor wanted them to say goodbye before it was too late.

Then the strangest thing happened. When they walked into the hospital room to say goodbye, his organs began working again, and his situation turned from deadly to much improved. As the hours passed, he improved even more. It was so dramatic that everyone was shocked, even the doctors. He didn't die that day. He got better and, after much rehabilitation, is back to living his life.

That experience taught me the value of hearing and obeying God, no matter how crazy you may think His directions are. Had I not laid the groundwork over the previous years, I could never have done that. And it was nothing my husband and I did, other than obeying God and praying what He asked. He had seen fit to include us in this healing for our friend, and we were incredibly blessed that He trusted us enough to make us a part of this miracle. God is always looking for people who are useful in His kingdom.

This type of prayer was part of a normal Christian life in the first century. It's the normal Christian life in the underground church today. Could it be so for us in America? Should we be seeking God in this way? Is this supernatural life still available to anyone who asks?

Take this journey with me, and I'll show you what God has shown me in the Word and in the experiences He has engineered in my life. The biblical principles you'll learn will make you strong and fit. You can be a mountain mover and help change lives. Want to join me?