/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

I really thought this sin was being put to death in me. I recently had an experience that felt like I was dying and I was failing to really trust God in the midst of it because of the poisonous ideas I had been exposed to in the occult. I realize I have not dealt with this issue and I have no idea how to. Anyway, let me explain what happened.

I took a full dose of medication I hadn't taken in some time. It was an antipsychotic I don't need that was given to me because my spiritual experiences were stigmatized as schizophrenia. Ironically I was also diagnosed with depression because I was once possessed and believed my soul had been taken from me, making me despondent and nervous for half a year of hospitalization. The irony was that I am never depressed now because I have since been forgiven and restored to faith. Thus they totally exposed their own incompetence by validating the so-called "depression" which, from their perspective would have to be the result of a schizophrenic delusion. Nevertheless, I had an appointment coming up and I wanted to be able to say I had been taking my medication with a clear conscience. I didn't really believe the medication could do anything to me but the problem is I was doing work for a guy at my church who lived outside the city and sometimes I would forget the medication and get major withdrawl. So first I started taking one pill and then I forgot to take it altogether for some time. So I took the two pills and it was a shock to my system. I started out by appearing drunk or high and by the time I got off the bus and was walking home it was like my whole body was shutting down without my consent. So I freaked out and I got the impression I was even maybe dying and I really felt like I was having an experience like John Wesley did with the Moravians in that I was afraid and unprepared to go (though for completely different reasons). I remembered King Hezekiah and asked the Lord to add more years to my life. Eventually a woman helped me by calling an ambulance (Glad I don't live in China). I told the ambulance I didn't want to go to the hospital, that I was experiencing physical duress and I merely needed a ride home. They gave me a courtesy ride. This experience has shaken my faith quite a bit and I have hardly had peace since, as I know the mistrust of God I had still within me. Let me explain.

I studied the occult for about 6 months before the Lord supernaturally called me out and gave me a tremendous experience of deliverance in which it was excruciatingly painful to pray because I had demons with legal grounds over me. I didn't know about deliverance at the time but I would not pray because of the pain and then I saw myself in a mirror and it was like a hideous doomed creature manifesting in my countenance. I freaked out, prayed through the pain and eventually threw up, and then the Holy Spirit came unto me. This was how I became a Christian. I really thought I had forsaken the ideas I was introduced to in the occult. I had adopted a posture of Fideism to protect myself from trying to reason everything out as I attempted to as a neoplatonist. There is no doubt in my mind the occult has not been "hidden" by the devil but, providentially, by God almighty, because of the deceptive intellectual appeal of the ideas contained within it. The best way I could describe it is like rick and morty (no don't worry, I don't watch that garbage) cosmology: multiple realities, many of them nested inside each other with deceptive lesser cosmic potentates running them. I mean, some of this seems "reasonable", to me at least. For this reason I had tried to turn my back on my own reason as a way of discerning any ultimate truth. But it seems because of the above episode, its apparent that I have only managed to ignore these ideas and speak and exhort and warn against them but I truly haven't been able to get past the stumbling stone of accepting the Lord Jesus as ultimate. In a sense I haven't loved him with all of my mind. I am quite terrified and I now find these ideas racing through my mind and all I can do is call out to God and one time in church I felt I had to get alone and pray in tongues. I really don't feel much peace now, it is robbed away by remembering my own disgusting, cowardly pride on that day and thus my susceptibility to my old futility of mind. I understand if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, but what if your mind does? What then? How did St. Augustine do it bros?