My Two Demonic Encounters

When I was living in Africa back in 1999, I had two demonic encounters within a week of each other that forever convinced me of the reality of the unseen world. They both took place at a youth camp in Botswana led by Louie Giglio and Chris Tomlin who had come out from the States.

The first encounter was more distracting then anything else. We were in the main auditorium at camp, with a room full of African teenagers. We were just about to finish a time of worship. We’d sung several songs and we were at a good spot; we were focused, we were engaged, we were worshipping. It was a quiet moment in worship, when music was being played softly while we were resting in the words we had just sung. All of a sudden, two girls on the front row jumped up and began to speak in tongues loudly. Now, I’m not saying that speaking in tongues is of the devil, but the way they did it, the volume, the way they hijacked the entire moment off of God and put the focus on themselves, how they distracted everyone in the room from truly worshipping to merely being spectators to their show of supposed spirituality, had a demonic influence. I remember my heart stirring within me and me being overwhelmed with the thought, “This isn’t from God. What they’re doing is not from God.”

The second encounter was a little more pronounced. At the end of this same camp, we brought the leadership on stage to thank them. We also brought the kitchen help on stage to thank them for cooking for us for the past week. Now, we were out in a remote village, so the cooks were just some of the ladies from that village. Some were believers, many were not. We presented each of the cooks with a Bible. When they got to the fifth or sixth lady, something happened. When we presented her with a Bible, the moment her hands physically touched the Bible, she began to scream. And it wasn’t a normal scream. The only way I can describe it is a deep, guttural yell. There is no way that scream could have humanly come from that body. It was demonic. An unearthly scream came from her the moment she physically touched the Bible, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and all of my spiritual alarm bells went off.

The pastors there knew what to do; they had seen it before. They quickly ushered her out of the room and spent the next several hours in prayer to exorcise the demons out of her. Now I know, many years later, you might be tempted to discount these stories, but I’m telling you what I experienced, what my soul confirmed to me: there is a spiritual world out there, filled with spiritual beings, including demons. Some of you have experienced encounters that you can’t simply explain away.

QUESTION: Have you ever encountered what you believed to be a demonic presence?