Why I refuse to pray against a person
There is a sentence I have been hearing for thirty years, and it always has the same effect on me. A brother comes to see me after a night of prayer, his face closed, and he says: "I know who it is."
He knows who it is. It is his aunt. It is the old man in the neighbourhood. It is his father's second wife. It is the cousin who succeeded too quickly. And now that he knows, he wants to pray — but what he calls praying is asking God to strike.
I always stop him there. Not because I doubt his suffering: it is usually real, and heavy. But because the prayer he is about to make will not set him free. It will bind him.
What the text says, and what it does not
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”Ephesians 6 : 12
That verse is quoted everywhere. It is rarely taken seriously.
Paul wrote it to people who had real enemies — neighbours who informed on them, masters who beat them, authorities who imprisoned them. He does not tell them "you have no adversaries". He tells them: your adversaries are not your adversaries. What is fighting you does not live in your neighbour's flesh and blood. To aim at your neighbour is to shoot wide.
And that is precisely what the prayer of accusation does. It aims at a face. It misses the structure.
A post, not a person
When I teach on the gatekeepers of a family's destiny, I start from Isaiah 22. Shebna held a post in the king's house. God did not curse him: he drove him from his station. "I will drive thee from thy station, and from thy state shall he pull thee down" — and the key passed into other hands.
That is the nature of this fight. What holds a family is not an uncle's malice: it is a function occupied in the unseen realm, a door held, a key kept. A function can be taken away. A human being cannot.
That is why, among my twenty petitions, not one is prayed over a person's name. Not one. This is not caution, it is accuracy: you do not depose a face, you depose a post.
Three reasons never to speak a name
The first is that vengeance does not belong to us. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." (Romans 12 : 19) That is not a suggestion for mild temperaments. It is a claim of jurisdiction: God reserves this case for his own court. The believer who pronounces a curse over a name is not fighting for God; he is taking God's place.
The second is that the Master's command is explicit. "Pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." (Matthew 5 : 44) Jesus is not talking here about unpleasant people, he is talking about persecutors — about those who genuinely do harm. If there were an exception, it would be there. There is none.
The third is practical, and it is the one thirty years have taught me best. The believer who prays against a person never heals. He stays attached to the one he fights. His attention, his sleep, his conversations all revolve around that man or that woman. He believes he is waging war; in reality he is maintaining a bond. I have watched whole families spend ten years praying against someone who, in all that time, never once thought about them.
If a name rises in your heart during the watch, there is only one right thing to do with it: turn it into intercession for that person's salvation. It costs something. It is also what cuts the bond.
And when it is not a gatekeeper at all
This part has to be said, even though it is uncomfortable, because leaving it out does a great deal of damage.
Not every family difficulty is a spiritual attack. There are children who fail at school because they cannot see the board and need glasses. There are marriages that come apart because two people have not spoken to each other in four years. There are illnesses that need a doctor, debts that need a budget, quarrels that need reconciliation and sometimes restitution.
Spiritualising those situations does not resolve them: it prolongs them, and it adds to people's pain the guilt of not having "prayed enough".
Discernment is part of the fight. Prayer never excuses us from practical obedience. A man who fasts against a spirit of poverty while refusing to keep his accounts is not fighting: he is hiding.
What I ask of those I accompany
Three things, always, before a night of this kind.
First, write down what you observe, not what you suspect. "Three divorces in this family in twelve years" is an observation. "It's my aunt" is a suspicion. We pray over the observation.
Second, check what belongs to the natural order. Is there a doctor to see, a debt to regularise, an apology to ask for? Do that first. Heaven does not replace what God gave us hands to do.
Third, decide in advance that the watch will name no one. That decision is made cold, before entering into prayer, because in the middle of the fight emotion speaks louder than doctrine.
The purpose of this fight was never a man's ruin. It is the deliverance of captives and the glory of God. The day prayer aims at a face, it has already changed sides — even if it is sincere, even if it is loud, even if it is made on your knees.
Depose a post, yes. Reclaim a key, yes. Curse a name, never.
This text expands the warning that opens the night-watch manual "Je destitue tout gardien des ténèbres de la destinée de ma famille" — twenty prayer petitions founded on Isaiah 22 : 19-22.
Scripture quoted from the King James Version.