We can all learn to live assertively. It’s not something inherent, it’s learned behavior. This is great news, isn’t it? It means that anyone, no matter how passive they’ve been in the past, can learn to be assertive!
The Free from Ahab miniseries
Free from Ahab Part 2: Who Was Ahab?
Free from Ahab Part 3: Passive, Aggressive, Assertive
Free from Ahab Part 4: Jezebel and Ahab—The Match Made in Hell
Hello Readers, hope all’s well. It’s time for the next post in the Free from Ahab miniseries.
Last week I wrote about the abusive Jezebel-Ahab relationship that so often forms between the victims of these two evil spirits. This week I’ll be writing about how the Ahab spirit victim can break free from the chains of their passivity and live assertively. In other words, this week I’ll be writing about how to fight back against the Ahab spirit.
Step One: Jesus
For a victim of the Ahab spirit to break free of their curse of passivity (which is a kind of slavery of its own), they need to learn how to live assertively. And yes, this is something that can be learned. I can tell you that myself, because I’ve learned how to do it.
If you turn to Jesus for healing, He will help you. One of the things He will do is direct you to where you need to go, to the resources that will help you.
He will place bits of wisdom in your path that will educate you to your own situation. It could be books, YouTube videos, even this blog of mine! These little bits of wisdom will resonate with you and what you’re going through. If you follow them and learn what they have to teach, then you will heal and turn your life around. This is something that Jesus wants for you, of course, because He doesn’t want any of us suffering from an Ahab spirit, or stuck in the abusive relationship with a Jezebel that I described in the previous post. When we turn to Him in faith and repent, He will give us the healing we need.
So that is the clear and indisputable step one. Turn to Jesus in faith. Confess your sins and repent of them. Ask Jesus for healing, having faith that He can and will help you. And He will help you, but like I said, He will lay out a path toward wholeness for you to follow. Don’t worry, it won’t take forever. And when you finish the path, you can live a healed, assertive life free from the chains of the Ahab spirit and its passivity.
OK, what happens after step one?
New Behaviors
The next couple things are all intertwined. The Ahab spirit victim must learn to live assertively, heal their emotional wounds, and break free of their Jezebel-Ahab relationship if they’re in one.
Living Assertively
We can all learn to live assertively. It’s not something inherent, it’s learned behavior. This is great news, isn’t it? It means that anyone, no matter how passive they’ve been in the past, can learn to be assertive!
Now what does “assertive” mean? I wrote an entire post on this subject in Part 3. Please check Part 3 for the full details. In short, assertive is the perfect balance between passive and aggressive.
In short, passive is not standing up for yourself and letting others run all over you. It’s avoiding confrontations and arguments that need to happen, especially in relationships.
In short, aggressiveness is trying to dominate others and yelling at, insulting, or abusing them to have your own way. Aggressive means running all over people to get what you want at any cost. Sometimes society mistakes aggressive behavior as being assertive, but this isn’t true at all. Assertive people can get what they want without yelling at or abusing anybody. Assertive people stand up for themselves while using all their communication tools to deal with other people in a respectful way.
I like this definition of assertiveness from Steve Sampson’s Discerning and Defeating the Ahab Spirit (AFFILIATE LINK):
Assertiveness has so much to do with “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) and also with having a healthy respect for yourself.
Steve Sampson, Discerning and Defeating the Ahab Spirit, Page 154
This definition mentions “speaking the truth in love,” as in, not avoiding confrontations that need to happen. And it also mentions having respect for yourself, which is what God intended.
When an Ahab spirit victim begins learning how to be assertive, they should start with cultivating a healthy sense of self-respect. This will give them the foundation for being able to stand up for themselves (because they respect themselves and their needs). Next they will need to start standing up for themselves in various situations. Perhaps starting with minor, inconsequential situations if they need to.
Also, they must learn to initiate the arguments and confrontations that need to happen in their relationships, instead of avoiding these. An Ahab spirit victim will “sweep everything under the rug,” choosing to tolerate abuse rather than confront the perpetrator about it. The Ahab spirit will do anything to “keep the peace” and avoid arguments and confrontation. Of course, this leads to tolerating abuse. The Ahab spirit must get rid of this behavior to become assertive.
But if they stick with Jesus Christ, seek Him out and walk with Him, Jesus will help them and teach them. Much like the next item on the list.
Healing the Wounds
I wrote about this in last week’s post. So I’ll simply say it again. Here’s what I wrote:
So if emotional wounds are an open door, we have to heal those wounds. In the case of the Ahab spirit and the Jezebel-Ahab relationship, not healing their emotional wounds will cause Ahab to keep getting into this abusive relationship.
[…]
Thank God we have Jesus Christ on our side! Jesus Christ will heal us if we turn to Him. He is the only one who can truly do this for us, but that’s fine because He is all we need. When we turn to Him and ask Him for healing, He will begin to guide us on a path. He will direct us where we need to go. If we need therapy, the LORD through His Holy Spirit will direct us there. And so on.
This quote about healing from emotional wounds is from Part 8 of Cast Down Jezebel:
Healing these wounds will take time and effort. It will take determined and steady prayers to Jesus Christ for healing. The person will have to come to terms with how they were hurt. Various kinds of therapy, most especially talk therapy, may be called for besides the prayers. That is like us doing our part while Jesus works in our hearts on His part, something that only He can do.
Most of all, there will need to be forgiveness. The person under attack must forgive all those (living or dead) who harmed them and caused these wounds.
Forgiveness is possibly the most important step when it comes to healing emotional wounds. This is because not forgiving means holding on to the pain of what happened. That does not help us to heal and move on in the present, the time in which we all live. Forgiving means letting go of that pain, and the need for payback, a need which can never be satisfied.
First things first though. Turn to Jesus and ask Him for healing. He will help you.
Once an Ahab spirit victim becomes aware of their wounds, and aware of the cycles they’ve been trapped in, then they can start healing. They can start to change their ways. They can start to throw off the demon. And they will see their abusive Jezebel-Ahab relationship for what it is!
That about covers it, I’d say. As for that abusive Jezebel-Ahab relationship, that’s the next thing on my list.
Leaving Jezebel
Even if an Ahab spirit victim heals their wounds and learns to live assertively, as long as they’re together with a Jezebel spirit they’ll continue to be beaten down and abused. They can’t heal and grow while still being in an abusive Jezebel-Ahab relationship. The Jezebel spirit is evil, and bystanders will get contaminated by its evil from association.
God never calls us to remain in an abusive situation. That doesn’t glorify God in any way. Once the Ahab spirit begins healing, it’s time for them to leave this abuse behind. Staying in the abusive situation will not allow them to grow, spiritually or otherwise. And a large part of the reason God healed them was so that they could find the strength to leave their Jezebel.
To fully heal and live a changed life, the Ahab spirit victim must break free of their Jezebel-Ahab relationship.
It’s highly unlikely that the person with the Jezebel spirit in the relationship will repent and change. It’s possible, but too unlikely. The Ahab spirit needs to leave, which is kind of like their first test of their new assertiveness. When dealing with someone who can’t or won’t change, the assertive thing to do is leave them.
All of Part 4 was on the topic of this relationship, so you may want to check that post for more info. One of the things I wrote there was that with their new wisdom, the Ahab spirit victim should learn to recognize the red flags of an abusive situation. They should be less likely to get into such a situation again.
As they look for their next relationship, they should remember these eleven basic human rights in relationships that Steve Sampson proposes in his book Discerning and Defeating the Ahab Spirit (AFFILIATE LINK):
It is helpful to take a moment and examine whether or not we are living passively by looking at this list of human rights. Do not expect that these are extended automatically; those with a Jezebel spirit rarely extend you these rights. You must assertively stand up and claim them for yourself.
Steve Sampson, Discerning and Defeating the Ahab Spirit, Page 218-219
1. Each person has the right to be treated respectfully.
2. Each person has the right to say no without explanation and without guilt.
3. Each person has the right to slow down and take time to think.
4. Each person has the right to change his or her mind.
5. Each person has the right to ask for what he or she wants.
6. Each person has the right to ask for information.
7. Each person has the right to make mistakes.
8. Each person has the right to make choices and accept the consequences of those choices.
9. Each person has the right to own and express his or her feelings.
10. Each person has the right to ask for help.
11. Each person has the right to maintain a separate self that is accountable to God and independent of the expectations, approval or influence of others.
Finally, we must determine that we will not tolerate those who try to take away our power.
This is a great list to make sure of before getting into a relationship. Watch the other person’s actions, and see if they can live up to these eleven requirements. If you look carefully at the list, you’ll see that all eleven things are exactly what an abusive partner will deny you in a relationship. They do this to stop you from asserting these rights.
The Ahab spirit victim must change their ways. They need to be assertive, and leave. Staying in the same situation will gain them nothing, it’ll only be more of the same. More abuse. The wicked Jezebel-Ahab relationship only drains the Ahab and leads to a life of sin. This doesn’t glorify God at all. God wants us to heal and grow beyond that, to fulfill our true purpose!
Clean up Your Life, Close Your Doors
An Ahab spirit victim who can make the changes above is well on their way to being free from this demon. But there are still some things to do. Besides seeking out Christ and walking with Him on this journey, we also need to clear out the sins from our life. We need to change our ways.
I wrote about this in Part 8 of the Cast Down Jezebel miniseries on the Jezebel spirit. I wrote:
But the fact is that sins of any sort create an opening for Jezebel and other demons.
What, then, is the relationship between the works of the flesh and the works of demons? When a man yields to temptation he sins in the flesh. Through such sin the door is opened for the invasion of the enemy.
Frank and Ida Mae Hammond, Pigs in the Parlor, Page 34
So what does this mean?
As we fight back against the Jezebel spirit, we must reform our life and change our ways. We must truly repent of the sins that opened the door for the demon, and renounce those.
So to fully clear the Ahab spirit out of our life, we must make the same changes as with the Jezebel spirit or any other demon. We need to repent of our sins and overcome them. We need to cut those sins out of our life. This includes our mental life too. Sins start in the mind. We know from the Gospels that if we consider doing a sin, we’ve already sinned in God’s eyes because we’ve committed that sin in our heart (Matthew 5:28). So cleaning up the sins from our life includes cleaning up our thoughts. We shouldn’t think about committing sins. This is probably the hardest part of changing our ways, but we need to rely on Christ and try our best.
As I mentioned in Part 2, a common way the Ahab spirit gets into people is through pornography. The Ahab spirit loves pornography, as it’s a covetous spirit by nature. It’s never content with what it has, it always wants more. The more perverted the pornography, the better for this spirit due to its twisted nature.
Watching pornography attracts the Ahab spirit, and once they have the spirit in them, porn keeps a person a victim of this demon. Their taste for pornography will get more and more perverted as the Ahab spirit exerts its twisted influence. Eliminating pornography from their life is a critical step for an Ahab spirit victim who wants to recover. If they don’t cut porn out of their life, the spirit will only come back (Matthew 12:43-45). So a victim who seeks to recover must wage a war on pornography, rejecting it, renouncing it, and refusing to tolerate it in their life. Thankfully they can lean on the LORD Jesus for help, which is necessary to break free from this or any other addiction.
As for a few other final things, besides going to a deliverance minister to receive deliverance from the Ahab spirit, the victim must be repentant and serious about walking with Christ. They should be praying and reading God’s Word every day. They should be spiritually growing and trying to seek Christ as best they can. In other words, they should display a clear attitude change and be walking a more spiritual path. The difference should be visible.
For one thing, they should definitely appear happier. The Ahab spirit and the curse of its passivity truly is a kind of bondage and slavery. When a person breaks Free from Ahab, they won’t let the world push them around anymore. They’ll be assertive, able to stand up for themselves out of self-respect (which is self-love). They won’t stick around to continue being abused by the Jezebel spirit in their life. They’ll discover who they really are in Christ, and start walking a positive spiritual journey with Him.
It’s a path that leads to healing, wholeness, and happiness. A passive life isn’t a good life. Things can be so much better! Turn to Christ now! Learn to live assertively and break Free from Ahab! Your real, better life awaits you.
I hope you enjoyed today’s post. That’s it for today, and that about covers what I have to say about the Ahab spirit. I believe that next week I’ll write a recap post for this miniseries. So stay tuned for that!
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Until next time, be strong and do good!
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