Spiritual Warfare: Lessons on Deliverance from Spiritual Bondage to Freedom in Christ

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Part I

Getting Ready

Prayer

Free Will

Obstacles

Tools of the Enemy

Part II

Spiritual Warfare

God’s Army

The Enemy

Our Commander-in-Chief

Our Spiritual Armor

Discernment

Solitary Prayer

Part III

The Life of a Soldier of God

Beginning Ministry: First Gifts

Early Life and Family: Guiding Signs

Healing Ministry Expands

You are Nothing without Me

My Near-Death Experience

The Power of the Sacraments

Deliverance

Waging Spiritual Warfare

Special Questions in Ministry

Part IV

Witnesses

Connie’s Testimony

Rosalie’s Testimony

Gracie’s Testimony

Ester’s Testimony

Part V

Deliverance Case Histories

About the Author

Foreword

Now in her eighties, Stella Davis has served the Lord, her family and the Church for most of her life. The following pages detail lessons in spiritual warfare not found elsewhere, and recount her journey of faith from a devout childhood through a holy marriage to the past thirty-five years of her work as a Roman Catholic evangelist who has traveled the globe teaching, healing, and doing deliverances.

By way of background, I first met Stella in 1994. I had recently begun a ministry aiding New Agers who were suffering serious spiritual and psychological trauma due to their forays into the occult. I had been a New Age healer in the 1980’s and was miraculously delivered from it through the prayers of a humble priest working in the ministry of healing. However, because I had not received the help I needed when I had at first tried to contact priests working in the deliverance ministry, my hope in 1994 was to finally find someone who could handle serious cases like mine that required deliverance.

A friend had told me about a lay Catholic evangelist named Stella Davis who had the charism of speaking in the foreign languages of the countries she visited on teaching and healing missions. So I contacted and met with Stella. I then soon began attending her bi-monthly prayer breakfasts and referring many people to her for counseling, healing, and deliverance work. Over these fifteen years, I too have benefited from deliverances and healings at her hands as I have borne battle scars and my own personal weaknesses in ministry and in my daily Christian walk.

Stella’s purpose in writing this book, the sequel to her first book, Giving God the Praise, is to provide teachings on spiritual warfare for both priests and laity through the recounting of her own experiences in ministry and those of her team. As a veteran herself, Stella knew that various texts she had read available to the public and to priests did not treat the subject in the depth she believed it should be treated, especially at a time when evil has so increased, and the need to know how to combat it is so great.

Stella spent much time in prayer in preparation for a book on spiritual warfare, and the resulting text proved to be an important compendium of lessons she has learned over many years of ministry. I was asked to edit the text last year. After reading it, however, I realized that, while thorough, it included only a small portion of the lessons that I and other people had learned from the witness of her life and ministry. I and others convinced her that we did not want these lessons taken to her grave with her. We needed to get more information out to others who needed it!

And so, Christmastide 2006 found Stella and me sitting by the fireside in Stella’s den in Alexandria, Virginia, with a tape recorder and some hot tea. There followed a week’s worth of questions and answers filling up a stack of 90-minute tapes. These conversations became this book.

The following pages are filled with her first-person accounts of ministering to the people of God. These stories will amaze the curious, convert the unbeliever, and inspire those who want to live saintly lives of love and service. While her charisms are many and dramatic, her attitude has always been that she does nothing but what anyone could do through the power of the Holy Spirit.

There is an old saying, When a pick-pocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets. My hope for this text is that Stella will be recognized as a teacher for our time and as a powerful witness for this next century of believers. She is a woman doing work that has for centuries been by and large the purview of priests. Her witness tells us that the Spirit moves where He will, and that all Catholics are called to use the charisms given to them by the Spirit in the service of the Gospel.

The challenges that face the Church and the world today will be met by the graces necessary for building the Kingdom. But, we must first have eyes to see and ears to hear what the Holy Spirit is trying to teach and give us. Presumption is said to be the greatest sin as it stops the action of the Holy Spirit before He has a chance to work His miracles. A healthy suspension of disbelief while reading this book can yield readers great insights and a chance for the Spirit to move as well!

Stella’s theology is simple: believe what the Bible says God is and can do; believe what the Bible says we are and can do; and go ahead and live it. I have seen for myself what this simple equation can accomplish.

I would like to briefly relate one incident that was my introduction to Stella’s charisms. I had lived in Spain as a young person and can speak fluent Spanish. In 1996, I traveled on mission with Stella and a group of women to a poor parish in Madrid. At that time, Spain was suffering from a liberal backlash after the end of the Franco regime. Drugs and sex had taken a terrible toll on children and families. The heartbreaking requests for prayers by people attending Stella’s mission were overwhelming.

During the mission, I served as a back-up interpreter and so knew first hand that Stella could neither understand nor speak the language of that country. It was a great source of pain for her not to hear the pleas of the people around her asking for help.

At one point in a healing service, however, Stella began to speak in perfect Spanish from the pulpit for some twenty minutes. She spoke a prophecy by God the Father, who had a message of consolation for all the parents there that night that He loved their children and that He would rescue them.

It was one of the most poignant and pregnant moments of grace I have ever experienced. Juxtaposed to that graced scene at the front of the church was another scene in the rear of the church. The local seminarians had heard about a wonder worker and had come to observe her. Pulling up chairs in the back of the church, they sat slouched with their chins resting on their hands. Their faces were ones of bemused suspicion.

The lessons in these pages hold much promise for the leadership of the Church as well. A fervent defender of the gifts and dignity of the priesthood, Stella in her own humble way has tried to be a spiritual mother for priests training under or with her, showing them that leadership must come from the heart, with head and knee bent in service. Only in a complete surrender to the Holy Spirit and to the charisms of the priesthood can a priest speak and work with true authority.

During the taping of these interviews, Stella spent much time worrying over the details of food preparation and entertaining. We stopped often to do spiritual or corporal works of mercy: to visit a female ex-convict in the hospital suffering from cancer; to pray for callers over the phone at all hours of the day or night; to answer the door at 11 p.m. and pray for a distraught man seeking deliverance.

The heart of Stella’s ministry, however, are her Monday morning deliverance sessions, often extending hours into the afternoon, Stella conducts deliverances at her home in a chapel. First, they attend Mass at their church, followed by prayers and songs of praise at Stella’s chapel. Those who are in need of deliverance and who have previously received counseling from Stella are taken into the den. Stella and her team have fasted all morning. Remaining behind in the chapel are a number of faithful elderly ladies who bend their heads and begin an endless litany of the Divine Mercy, which has itself proven to be a powerful prayer for deliverance itself.

More details of these deliverances are included in these pages. I would like to merely add one observation. Having witnessed these deliverance sessions over the years, I noticed how Stella would often embrace the people who were being delivered as she called evil spirits out of them, as a mother might embrace a child, with love and tenderness. I once questioned her about that, as I thought it might be harmful to her. She replied that the devil hates to be near a baptized soul with the Blessed Sacrament within her.

This is the kind of power that Stella would have all of us believe in and use. This is a model of authority and the right use of power that the Church certainly can build upon as it recovers from its recent crisis in leadership and trust that has so deeply wounded the cause of the new evangelization.

It would be a tragedy if this book takes its place on the shelves of feminine devotional literature or if Stella Davis is someday made into a statue to be put on a pedestal, or worse, if she is seen as a one-of-a-kind anomaly. This is a serious textbook by a committed Catholic Christian for advanced students of spiritual warfare, both men and women. It is a call to repentance, healing, deliverance…and action.

Clare McGrath-Merkle, O.C.D.S., M.T.S.

Editor, The Cross and the Veil Website

Preface

In these pages, I offer the fruits of my thirty-five years of experience as a lay person called by God into the ministry of healing and deliverance. I hope that this treatise proves instructive and helpful to many, especially to those who have the care of souls. With God’s grace, it will enlighten them, help them in the discernment of spirits, and enable them to see the providence of God in the bringing about of such a work as this at this time.

Extraordinary supernatural phenomena have become more common in our day and cannot escape our attention. Even those who consider themselves enlightened, and who maintain that the power of nature is unlimited, are put on their mettle by the undeniable facts of the preternatural. Intrigues of Satan are as active today as they were when God first called me to ministry. Hence, this book should prove of interest to a wide audience.

It is a pity that in a great country like ours, with its freedom of the press and millions of Bibles, books and magazines, people know less about demon powers than do the citizens of Africa or Tibet or Colombia. Possibly through gross neglect, the ministers of our generation have not informed the people of the reality of demon powers.

There are three sources of power common to human understanding. There is divine power, or power that proceeds from the omnipotence of God; satanic power, or power coming from Lucifer the fallen archangel (Is. 14); and human power, or the power of man. The third power is a neutral force that can be directed by heavenly or demon powers. God has given man the authority and right to choose his lifestyle and destiny.

I believe that sickness—physical, emotional, or spiritual—offers a glorious chance for man to use one of Christ’s most precious gifts, the power to heal through prayer. I believe that the power to heal given by Christ to His Apostles is available to mankind today. This power to heal can and should be an ordinary common activity of Christian life.

May these writings serve for the greater honor of God and to the glory of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Victor over death and hell. And may they also contribute to the honor of the Blessed Mother, who crushes the head of the serpent, and to the honor of my protector and helper, Michael the Archangel.

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protector against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God cast into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the many intercessors who keep me in their prayers, and to the team that helps me faithfully week after week: Cathy Czaja, Ester Pena, Pat Diliberto, Gracie Bryan, Adela Cruz, Rosalie Mainey, Frank Ferguson, and Lena D’Silvia who leads the Divine Mercy. Without you, I couldn’t have done it. I would also like to acknowledge Clare McGrath-Merkle and Mary Ann Parks for the great help I received from them in the writing of my second book. I would also like to acknowledge Diane Hill, Rosalie Mainey and Maggie Irving in typing of the manuscript.

List of Illustrations

1. An 8 year old Japanese girl in her kimono with Stella in Kyoto, Japan.

2. Stella and her interpreter at a conference in Tokyo.

3. Stella with her traveling piano player and Bishop Ishigami of Okinawa.

4. Stella and her assistant with two Protestant ministers in Poland.

5. Stella with a group of children from Warsaw.

6. Stella with some of the members of IAD in Rome.

7. Stella and her interpreter at a conference in Peru

8. Stella praying for a young lady in Colombia. who was spitting nails during her deliverance.

9. Stella praying for a group of young adult singles in Lima, Peru.

10. Stella being prayed for prior to speaking.

11. Mr Proctor, my great intercessor on earth and now in Heaven, celebrating his 85th birthday.

12. Stella takes time with the Lord at the top of the mountain in Medjugorje.

13. Bishop Tamayo and Sister Luz with children from a very poor village in Barranquilla, Colombia, where Stellaís group CWIA is helping to build a church.

14. Stella and Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy.

15. Stella and her deliverance team from left to right. Front: Cathy, Frank, Rosalie, Gracie. Rear: Adela, Ester, Stella. Not pictured, Pat.

PART I

GETTING READY

PRAYER

THIS BOOK CONTAINS TEACHINGS from my reflections on the experiences of over three decades in ministry. The teachings are rooted in Scripture. We know that Sacred Scripture is the Word of God, and that it is fundamental to our Christian beliefs and the way we should live our lives. Scripture helps us in the needs we encounter in our daily lives, at home, in our jobs, in our families, and in our day-to-day relationships with others.

In our Christian walk, we soon discover that we have enemies—the world, the flesh, and the devil. Satan tempts us with the things of this world, and our inner urge welcomes the temptations. We Christians must know and learn to understand how God enables us to overcome the obstacles that cross our paths.

We overcome first through prayer, hoping and knowing that the Lord will answer our prayer: For I hope in You, O Lord; You will answer, O Lord my God. For I said, ‘May they not rejoice over me’ (Ps. 38: 15-16). John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus expected the Father to hear him when he prayed: Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that you always hear me, but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that you sent me (Jn 11:41). A Christian who is willing to encounter Christ and pay the cost will work for the glory of God. We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works (Eph 2:11).

I will speak about prayer, about experiences in my prayer life, and about the experience of working with people in the ministry of healing and deliverance. I hope that you will learn how to pray and what to pray for, and that you will become effective prayer warriors, because I have seen so many people that do not know how to pray or what to pray for.

Do we know that prayer is talking to God? Whether we are crying, singing, or meditating on the Word of God, not only does He hear our prayers, but He delights in them. And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense which are the prayers of the Saints, and they sang a new song (Rev. 5:8). Our prayers are incense unto His nostrils.

When do we pray? And how long? St. Paul tells us to pray at all times, in season and out of season–which means always.

How should we pray? Let’s go to Scripture for this, to Ephesians 6:12: Against the evil principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places. St. Paul’s instructions to us are that we must come against the evil rulers of darkness that are in this world.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus was talking to His disciples about the fact that He would soon leave them. He was about to be crucified. Jesus had been their friend, guide, teacher, counselor, helper, protector, healer, deliverer, and intercessor. He is also all of these for us today. He knew that the thought of His leaving would trouble them, so He said, I will pray to the Father, and He will send you the Paraclete. The word Paraclete can be translated many different ways: Advocate, Counselor, Guide, Intercessor, Protector, and Supporter. He is the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. Jesus was also saying to His disciples: just as I have been all these things to you, now the Spirit will be with you and enable you to be all these things to your brothers and sisters.

A sign of growing up spiritually is the desire to learn how to live in the Spirit and to have the power of the Holy Spirit living in our lives. I know very well myself that if I didn’t have the power of the Holy Spirit in my life, I would not be able to do all that I do for the glory of God. The Holy Spirit in my life gives me Power, Strength, Wisdom, and Knowledge. When I need those gifts, they are there for me to use in the work the Lord has called and commissioned me to do, the work of helping His people. They are His gifts in me to you from the Holy Spirit.

The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things . . .but we have the mind of Christ (I Cor 2:14-16). We are those who have the mind of Christ and the desire to help others.

The next thing we battle with is the enemy. Who is our enemy? Satan and his spirits, the evil principalities of this world. He comes to us in many different forms and ways. Do not look for him in a little red jacket, with a long tail and horns, as the world pictures him. Paul tells us that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (II Cor 11:14).

We have to remember that Satan has been on this earth since Adam and Eve’s time. He came to them as a serpent in Genesis 1:3. Ever since then we have been fighting this battle, and we will continue until Jesus comes back for us. We know we have the Power and the Victory in Jesus’ name.

Paul again tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:4: We do not use weapons made by man to knock down the strongholds. But the divine weapons Paul uses can break the strongholds which keep man from finding God. We must know how to find the stronghold and get rid of it through spiritual warfare. This is what you will find in this book: how Catholics can learn about spiritual warfare and how to discern and look for the enemy. Scripture tells us that if one person can knock down one thousand spirits with his good prayers, two can knock down ten thousand. What’s holding us back? Let’s learn how to go into battle and fight a good fight!

As I lay the foundation for this spiritual warfare, let us learn how effective we can be. Jesus said, Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst and that whatever two agree on in this earth, it shall be given (Mt 18: 19-20). In this battle, we cannot fight alone. We cannot fight effectively as Lone Rangers; but by the corporate body, an army of prayer warriors, we can fight and win. We need to find brothers and sisters who truly believe in prayer, love the Lord with all their heart, not only by lip service, and are living lives that are committed to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our Blessed Mother Mary is ready to intercede with us when we pray with our heart and invite her to pray with us. If we would begin to pray as a great army, think of how many demonic grips we could break with our prayers.

You know that an army has different tactics in searching for the enemy, and so do we. If one way doesn’t work, the enemy tries another, and so do we. In the battle with the Amalekites (Ex 17:10-11), Joshua went to battle and Moses went to the top of the mountain with Aaron. Moses would raise his hands up to God and Joshua would be winning, but when Moses put his hands down, Joshua would be losing, so Aaron would hold Moses’ hands up. So are we to pray, helping each other in times of trouble.

Matthew 26:39: Jesus fell on His face and prayed, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’

Psalm 40:1: I waited patiently for the Lord; He inclined to me and heard my cry.

Psalm 120:1: In my distress I cried to the Lord, that He may answer me.

Whether we are crying, kneeling, lifting up our hands, prostrate before the Lord; whether we are singing, praying in the Spirit (tongues) or praying verbal prayers, saying our Hail Mary’s, God hears the prayers that we pray in faith. How wonderful it is to know we have so many different ways to talk to our Lord.

One thing we need to do, and it is very important, so that our prayers will not be blocked, is to come before the Lord and repent of all sin. We need to ask God to forgive our sins, and we must pray especially for those whom we have hurt. To be forgiven, we must forgive our enemies—our enemies!—those who have done the most damage, the most harm, in our lives. I know it is not easy, but we have to do it.

How to pray:

A. Repent of our sins and our sinfulness.

B. Forgive our enemies. When we truly can forgive, real peace comes.

C. Thank God for all our blessings.

D. Worship and praise Him in song.

E. Now we are ready to begin our prayers.

Some people will start asking God, Give me this, give me that, and then we wonder why God doesn’t answer our prayers. What are we saying here? We are demanding that God answer our prayer just because we are so used to getting everything we want. We simply do not pray as we ought. There is a right and wrong way for everything, even in prayer life. And when we do not do anything to change our lives from sin, or we are just lazy in the way we come before the Lord, how can we expect God to answer our prayers?

When was the last time you said, I love you, Lord!? Let Him know who you are. I thank you, Lord, for today, whether it was a good day or not, because this is the day the You have made for me. Thank you, Lord, for all your blessings. Then count them.

I have learned that when I prepare to go into prayer, I find out there isn’t anything God can’t do. Sometimes it takes a while to answer my prayer, but He always answers. I stay with it no matter how long it may take for the Lord to answer. His time, His way, is different from ours.

Let me give you an example. Two years ago, I found out my grandson was dating a young lady who wasn’t Catholic. To top it off, her father was pastor of their church. I went into prayer. I prayed every single day and night asking God for this young lady to walk away from his life. The more I would see them together, the more I would pray, Lord, please hear my prayer.

Two years later,