Derek Prince - Can A Pessimist Become An Optimist?
You know, somebody said everybody is born either an optimist or a pessimist. And I know full well what I was born. I was born a pessimist. Furthermore, I was brought up to be a pessimist. I mean, my parents were good people but in my home if you weren’t worrying, you should be worrying about the fact you weren’t worrying. And I was saved, baptized in the Holy Spirit and had a ministry, but I had not overcome pessimism. And the expression it took in my life was depression. And although other people were getting saved, I was struggling ceaselessly against this dark cloud that settled down over me.
And I did everything. I mean, I knew the Scriptures fairly well. I knew that you had to reckon yourself dead and I reckoned myself dead so many times it just didn’t have any meaning. But it didn’t solve the problem. And then one day I was reading Isaiah 61:3, and I read: ...in place of the spirit of heaviness the garment of praise... And when I read the phrase, the spirit of heaviness, the Holy Spirit said to me: That’s your problem.
And I suddenly realized I wasn’t dealing with myself. It wasn’t my mental attitudes; it was a person that was tormenting me day and night. And I realized he was a person that had known me from childhood. He knew my every weakness, he knew just when to attack me. Furthermore, I realized that it was what we would call a familiar spirit. It was a spirit that had come down through my family. I identified exactly the same condition in my father. And I called on the name of the Lord and I was delivered from that demon.
Oh yes, I was saved, I spoke in tongues, I preached the gospel. But I needed to be delivered from a demon. I was so ashamed of that that I didn’t tell anybody for ten years. And then the Lord forced me out into the open by confronting me with a demon possessed woman in front of my pulpit on Sunday morning. And I had just been preaching that no matter what the devil does, God has the last word.
There was this woman writhing like a snake in front of the pulpit, the same woman that used to play the piano for our worship meetings. I knew I either had to prove it or stop saying it. And that was when I was thrust out into the open. And, that woman was delivered. But it took me ten years from the time I was delivered myself before I was willing to face the issue in public. But why I say that is because once I was delivered God showed me He had done for me what I could not do for myself. But He would not do for me what I could do for myself. And He showed me I had to change the way I thought. Every time negative suggestion or reaction came to my mind I had to meet it with something positive out of the Scripture. And that did not happen overnight, it took at least three years. But by the end of that time I was no longer a pessimist.