CHASING PHANTOMS AND THE SPIRIT OF OBSESSION
I had difficulty figuring
out what I wanted to do for my vacation. I wanted to go on one, but I couldn’t
settle on anything. It shouldn’t have been so hard, but somehow it was. I had
such an idealized picture of what a vacation should be that I had a hard time
letting go and letting God open a door for what would be best for me. It turned
into a major problem.
In my mind, the image of
the ideal vacation was from the past—an image, a phantom from my youth—having a
great time camping, fishing, and floating down the rapids. But every time I
tried to duplicate that kind of vacation, it didn’t measure up. The
image pulled at me so much that I was getting really aggravated, and everything
I planned fell through. I needed a vacation so desperately that I was exhausted
just thinking about it. It started as a desire, but I let it become an
obsession and idolatry. I’d put it on a pedestal and focused on doing everything
I could to make it happen.
The Holy Spirit
interrupted me in the middle of my intense aggressiveness and let me know what
I was doing, so I instantly stopped seeking the vacation and sought God
instead. I looked up the word “idol”: “a phantom, an image in the mind.” I told
myself that I had to just let the old phantom image go, that past vacations
with the family are now memories, and really great memories, but still
memories. I couldn’t continue chasing ghosts. I had to trust that God would open
doors for new kinds of vacations. I knew He would want me to have a great
vacation, so I quit trying to figure it out myself. It ended up that God gave
me an amazing vacation on an island trip with my sister and my mom.
Chasing a mirage doesn’t
deliver true results. The Bible calls this “vanity.” “Walk not as other
Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (Eph. 4:17). The book of Job
puts it this way: “Let him not trust in emptiness, deceiving himself; For
emptiness will be his reward” (Job 15:31). The vanities (illusions) are
all around us, promising things, looking good, baiting us, but they don’t deliver.
They are only air. Living in Las Vegas, I see this all the time.
There’s one casino we’ve
nicknamed “the sex hotel.” The young guys come in, and you can see the hunger
and expectation on their faces. I watched one guy in a restaurant start
flirting with a waitress in a way that he fully expected her to take him in the
back room for sex right there on the spot. It was kind of hilarious but sad,
too. The billboards advertise sex, so the guys come in expecting to get it, but
it’s a phantom. They can look around the casino’s main floor and restaurants
and be sorely disappointed. Visions of their imaginations trap them.
I had been caught up in
chasing the illusion—a mental and emotional image I had of the perfect
vacation. But my picture was something that really wasn’t available in the same
way as I saw it in my mind. I wanted to understand how this delusion was working
on me so if I got tempted in this way again, I would be able to recognize it
and stop it more immediately. I thought about how being obsessed by this
phantom idea made me feel and act; I had become totally crabby and irrationally
irritable. I felt like I was being squashed in a vise grip.
The dictionary says a vise
is a “screw, that which winds, consisting of two jaws opened and closed to hold
or squeeze with.” That’s exactly how I felt. The idol, the image, the vacation
mirage had me in its jaws and was squeezing. Obsession is a demon that makes people
feel pressured and unsatisfied until they get what they want (or die trying!) The
spirit of obsession follows the devil’s objectives, as stated in John 10:10a: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to
kill, and to destroy.” Obsession is just one of
the demons that Satan utilizes to destroy as many good people as he can.
When I looked up the word
“vise,” the dictionary said it could also be spelled “vice.” I realized
that a v-i-c-e (a fault or harmful habit) works much the same way as a v-i-s-e
with people’s minds. The vice gets a grip on the mind and won’t let go. We
usually don’t even know the real reason we got trapped by it in the first
place.
God tells us that His
desire for us is to be free. Paul wrote to the Galatians: “Stand fast therefore
in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again
with the yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1). The “yoke of bondage” is the obsession,
the vise grips of the unprofitable bondages the world puts on people, rather
than the freedom that comes with Christ and walking by the Spirit.
The world is a big
billboard of phantoms, and we’ve been bombarded with them since we were
young—things we were led to believe were right for us to seek and seize. They
were presented to us through all kinds of media, including books, magazines,
TV, the internet, religion, our parents, teachers, peers, and our cultural and
ethnic backgrounds, to name a few of the sources of these phantoms. We have
even combined what these sources put out and developed our own versions of
certain ideas or pictures of how we think we’d like things.
My recent picture was of a
vacation I idolized and obsessed over. Another example comes from when I was
twenty-one. I had the idea of having twelve kids. I figured since I really
liked teaching Sunday school classes with lots of kids, I would love having
twelve of my own. But that was my imagined scenario, and I
didn’t check it out with the Lord. I also dreamed of being married by the age
twenty-five, and I felt devastated when that didn’t happen.
One of my friends used to
envision herself having one perfect job—one that she would absolutely love and
would do it all her life. It didn’t happen. Women often fantasize about what
they want in the perfect husband and take the chance of missing the best
husband for them—the one God sends. People get an idea of what they see as
their perfect family, but then they end up as a single parent, step-mom, or a
step-dad, and they may feel that their dreams have been forever shattered, and
they have a hard time coping with the reality of the new family they’ve been
given. And then, if a person does not cast out that spirit of obsession, the
obsession spirit is glad to bring in the more domineering spirit of addiction if
it can, and we all know what sorrow and destruction to individuals, families,
and friends a spirit of addiction renders.
We’ve all had dreams we
thought were our own, but sometimes those visions of what we want don’t come
from God, but rather from the world’s enticements. When we insist on pursuing
these things without really checking them out with the Lord, our thoughts and
actions can turn un-Christ-like, and we get further away from God’s good path
for us. It gets harder and harder to see the truth. Paul says: “I warn you
beforehand, just as I did previously, that those who do such things shall not
inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:21 AMP). That’s because when we’re chasing
phantoms we’re off track and can’t be enjoying God’s great inheritance at the
same time. Paul isn’t saying that we’re not going to heaven if we get trapped
by a delusion. It’s just that our lives aren’t going to be as free and
satisfying in this life.
Unfortunately, many of us
only find out that something is wrong for us after we’ve repeatedly sought it
out, and it still isn’t doing what we wanted. These illusions disappoint and
fail us so many times we finally just can’t ignore them anymore. That’s when we
need to take some bold action.
It’s no time to be
apathetic. Romans 13:11 says: “And that, knowing
the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our
salvation [wholeness] nearer than when we believed.” It’s time to
examine what we think we want and make brave changes if necessary. Philippians
4:13 says: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” Why
wait when we can turn some things around right now?
If we truly seek the Lord Jesus Christ, he will not fail us.
He will help us to
recognize what ideas and visions are dangerous illusions and what images are
solidly from Him. If we let Christ be with us when we take a closer look, we’ll
see where the visions come from: tradition, family, culture, peers, the media,
the Lord, or some other source. Once we know where they come from, it’s a lot
easier to deal with them. If they’re not from God, we must get rid of them. He’ll
provide us with something better for sure!
Love, Carolyn
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