Derek Prince: My first wife, Lydia, who is now with the Lord. When I came to know her in the 1940s in what was then Palestine, she was one of the boldest and most committed Christians I had ever met. She had been a successful schoolteacher from a well-to-do family in Denmark. She left all that and came to Jerusalem in obedience to God, not knowing what He had in store for her. In 1928 she took a little dying baby girl and nursed her to health. (This story is told in my book Appointment in Jerusalem.)
For the next twenty years Lydia maintained a home for girls without parents, as a woman on her own in a culture where women are generally considered inferior. During those years she had faced riots, bandits, economic privation, primitive living conditions and opposition from Jews and Muslims, but she had never wavered. She continued that life of victory-whether in the pressures of post-war London, on a mission station in East Africa or traveling with me in ministry-right up to her death in 1975.
Yet one episode in her life surprised me. In the 1970s she and I ministered to hundreds of people needing deliverance, and we saw many glorious victories.
One time after a particularly powerful session, we were returning to the apartment the church had made available to us, but Lydia refused to take the elevator. Instead she chose to walk up four flights of stairs. When I questioned her about this, she replied, "I don't feel comfortable in an elevator."
We talked a little more, and she recalled an incident in Denmark when she was five. She had been playing in a cupboard under the stairs in her aunt's house, and the aunt, seeing the door open, closed and latched it. Finding herself a prisoner in the dark, Lydia became hysterical. She began to scream and pound on the door. The aunt came to her rescue quickly, but in those few moments a demon of claustrophobia-a fear of confined spaces-had apparently entered Lydia.
As soon as Lydia's problem was brought out into the open and identified as a spirit of fear, we prayed together and she was completely delivered. She never again had a problem with elevators.
We were both astonished that Lydia herself could need deliverance after helping set so many others free. But it taught me that we need to be ready to respond to the Holy Spirit's prompting even if it does not suit our theology! If Lydia and I had not prayed that evening, she would never have come to full victory in that area.
So I am no longer taken aback by demonic conflict
even in mature Christians. I have learned, for example, to look for demonic activity in some physical infirmities. At times I have had a sore throat, cold or sinus congestion and prayed for healing with no obvious change. I would endure a week or two of frustrating infirmity before the conditions cleared up. One day, however, I was reading about the time Jesus entered the house of Simon Peter and found Peter's mother-in-law sick with a high fever. "So He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. And immediately she arose and served them" (Luke 4:39, emphasis added). Why would Jesus rebuke a fever? Clearly He saw in that fever something more than a mere physical condition.
- Derek Prince ( They Shall Expel Demons)