The spirit of rejection is the thing I have seen run hardest and deepest through the people who have come to us for inner healing and deliverance — and Day 8 of the Hearing From God series is the day we finally name it head-on. Greg Locke and Scott Bitcon bring decades of ministry into this session, and what they build together is the clearest picture I know of why some people get delivered and then end up right back where they started — and what actually has to happen for the freedom to hold.
I brought this day into the series specifically because hearing God and deliverance ministry are not separate subjects. Sometimes the word of knowledge is the only thing that makes the right ministry possible. Greg Locke’s story about a drunk man at an altar is not primarily a deliverance story. It is a hearing-God story. And it is the one I keep coming back to when people ask me why hearing matters.
Important note before we go further: depression, anxiety, and self-harm are real clinical conditions. A deliverance session is not a substitute for medical or psychological care. Anyone experiencing thoughts of self-harm should contact a doctor or a crisis line first. Greg Locke himself says it this way: “If it’s not a demon, get medication. If it’s not a demon, talk to a therapist. If it’s not a demon, get treatment.” That is the right posture, and I want you to hear it from him before anything else.
The Man Nobody Could Bind — Mark 5
Segment 1 of this day opens with the account in Mark 5 that people call the maniac of Gadara — the man living among the tombs, tearing apart chains, crying out, cutting himself with stones. The town had tried to hold him down repeatedly, and it had never worked. Their solution was more of what was already failing: more chains, stronger shackles.
“He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him.” — Mark 5:3-4 ESV
The man was not the problem. Something had moved into a man, and the whole town aimed their response at the man. That is still what happens most of the time. We address the behavior — the drinking, the rage, the pattern that is destroying a family — and never get to what the behavior is growing on.
When Jesus asks for the name, the answer is Legion — for we are many. A Roman legion was several thousand. Mark’s point is that this was not one thing. It was many things living there together. Scott Bitcon’s sessions say the same thing decades later: people carry a lot of wounds, and there is often something sitting on each one.
When it was over, the people found the man sitting, clothed, and in his right mind. Mark tells us they were afraid. That is what real deliverance looks like — not a spectacle, but a man sitting down. And then Jesus sent him home to tell his own people what the Lord had done for him. The man who had been cutting himself with stones that morning became the first missionary to that whole region. The deliverance was not the end of his story. It was the start of his assignment.
Scott Bitcon: Seven Thousand Sessions and One Rule
Why Inner Healing Has to Come First
Scott Bitcon has conducted more than 7,000 exorcisms and deliverance sessions and has done inner healing work with over 700 pastors. I brought him in to train our ministry team here at B2T Ministries, and his full training course is available free in the Courses section. The pattern that volume revealed is the one thing I want every person reading this to understand.
A demon attached to a wound cannot be expelled until the wound is healed at its root.
Not “should not.” Cannot. You can pray with real faith and genuine authority in the name of Jesus — and it will not hold, because what you are commanding is not standing on the person. It is standing on the wound. Take the authority away, and the wound is still there, and the ground is still there, and what was on it comes right back. This is why people get delivered and then end up right back where they started. The ground was never removed.
Bitcon teaches a three-part model of the person — body, soul, and spirit. When trauma comes that a person cannot cope with in the moment, they dissociate. Part of them goes away. That withdrawal is protective — it is how a child survives something no child should have to survive. But it creates a split in the soul, and that split holds the pain and the memory at the age they were formed. A wound made at six is still six years old inside the person. Most of these form in childhood. Bitcon teaches they can form as early as the womb.
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3 ESV
God does not treat a broken heart as a sin problem. He treats it as an injury. Isaiah said the same thing seven hundred years before the cross:
“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” — Isaiah 61:1 ESV
Jesus walked into the synagogue at Nazareth, opened that scroll to that exact passage, read it out loud, sat down, and said it was fulfilled that day:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” — Luke 4:18 ESV
What Hebrews 4:12 Means for Someone Who Can’t Find Their Own Wound
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” — Hebrews 4:12-13 ESV
In context, the writer is warning people not to miss God’s rest the way Israel did — nothing is hidden from God, His word cuts to where you actually live. But sit with what that means for someone whose wound formed before they had words. You cannot find your own wounds. That is the whole problem. They are buried under years of coping. You do not know why something small sets you off, and if you did know, you would have fixed it already. He does. He sees the split. He knows the memory, what was said, how old you were. Nothing is hidden from Him — including the part of you that has been in the dark since you were six.
David prayed this deliberately:
“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” — Psalm 139:23-24 ESV
He is not asking God to surface sin he already knows about. He is asking God to find what he cannot see himself. That is the same prayer Bitcon’s method is built on, three thousand years later.
What happens when Jesus comes into the memory in a session is not uniform. Session after session, what He says is short. “It is not your fault.” “I have this.” “You’re fine.” “I’m here.” Some people do not hear anything at all — they just feel the weight lift. Something that has been sitting on them for thirty years simply is not there anymore. Some people see Jesus walk into the room in that memory, take the child by the hand, and walk out of it. Do not go into this expecting one specific experience. God meets each person the way He knows they can receive it.
Then the Ground Is Gone — Then You Use the Name
Once the wound is healed, whatever was attached has nothing left to stand on. That is when you use the name of Jesus — not before, because before the healing there is still ground, and a command without ground removal does not hold. After the wound is healed, there is nothing for the spirit to return to, and a believer tells it to go in Jesus’ name and it goes:
“Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.” — Luke 10:19 ESV
Jesus said that to seventy-two ordinary followers. The authority was never the missing piece. It was the order that was missing.
Not all ground comes from wounds done to us. Some comes from sin we chose — strongholds we built and lived in. Those get dealt with through confession and repentance:
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” — 1 John 1:9 ESV
Greg Locke: Hearing God for Someone Else
The Man at the Altar
Here is the story I keep coming back to, and why I structured Day 8 the way I did. A man came forward at one of Greg Locke’s services. He was visibly drunk. Everyone in the room had the same read on the situation — pray about the addiction, get him help for what everyone could see. Locke did not go there. God told him the man had a problem with his father.
Not a hunch. Not pastoral intuition. A word of knowledge — specific, unprompted, arriving in the middle of a live service about a stranger Locke had never met. The father had left. What was running underneath the alcohol was rejection: the deep, pre-verbal belief that he had not been worth staying for. Locke put his arms around the man and held on, telling him to forgive his father and that his Father in Heaven loved him and would never leave him. The man wept in Locke’s arms, releasing his spirit of unforgiveness.
Think about what that physical act did to someone carrying the specific wound of abandonment. The thing he believed about himself was that he was not worth staying for. And a man he had never met wrapped him up and did not let go. That is the exact opposite of what the wound had been telling him his whole life, arriving in the one language that particular wound understands.
What Generational Curses Actually Look Like
That man’s father left. Somewhere behind the father, something started. That is what a generational curse looks like — not a fate, not a punishment. A pattern with ground under it, passed down because nobody in the line ever healed the wound that opened the door. The man was drinking. His father left. And something that may have started generations earlier was still running in that family, calling itself normal.
“The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” — Ezekiel 18:20 ESV
God told Israel to stop saying the fathers ate sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. These patterns are not destiny. They stop in the person where the healing happens.
The Spirit of Rejection — Why It Holds So Long
The spirit of rejection is the one I see run most consistently through the people who come to us for ministry. It gets there early, before a person has any framework to question it, and it does not argue. It states itself as fact: you were not wanted, you are not worth staying for, nobody is coming back for you. Because it arrived before any defenses existed, it does not feel like a belief. It feels like something you simply know about yourself. That is what makes it such stable ground — you cannot fight a thing that does not feel like a lie.
“Even if my father and my mother have forsaken me, the LORD will take me in.” — Psalm 27:10 ESV
David names the worst version of abandonment and answers it directly. That is the exact answer the wound of rejection has needed and never received. It is not a hypothetical comfort — it is a confrontation with the lie.
The Word of Knowledge and What It Cost Locke to Say It
Here is the part nobody talks about when they talk about words of knowledge: you cannot verify them before you say them. Locke had no way to know before he opened his mouth whether the man had a father wound. He could have been wrong, out loud, in front of a congregation. He said it anyway, and the man’s response confirmed it instantly.
“For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit.” — 1 Corinthians 12:8 ESV
Paul lists the utterance of knowledge among the ordinary operations of the Spirit in the church — not a specialist office, something given to whom God wills for the good of someone else. What this day has taught me is that hearing God for yourself is preparatory. What you do with that hearing, when it is someone else standing in front of you who needs it, is the point.
This is also where I want to point you toward the B2T Ministries story — how we got here, why inner healing and deliverance is a central part of what we do, and what Scott Bitcon’s training has meant for the people Paula and our team have been able to reach. If this day is landing for you, that context matters.
Can a Christian Have a Demon?
I want to be honest here rather than confident. Locke and Bitcon both address this, and serious Bible-believing people genuinely disagree. Some hold a believer indwelt by the Holy Spirit cannot be under demonic influence. We distinguish oppression from possession — belonging to Christ is settled, but that does not mean every wound is healed or every foothold surrendered. I am not going to tell you which position to adopt. Study the texts. What both sides agree on is this: God wants that thing off you. Do not let a theological debate keep you sitting in something Jesus died to remove.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for the man in the tombs — that You went to him, that You did not send more chains, but You sent Jesus to heal him.
Thank You that You still tell us what You see. That in a room where everyone was looking at the obvious thing, You told Your servant about an earthly father. We would have prayed about the drinking and sent that man home unchanged.
Come to the places we have not looked at in years. The ones still held at the age they were made. Break what has run down our families and called itself normal. Let it stop here, in us, because You healed the thing it was standing on.
And give us courage to speak what You show us about someone else. Make us more afraid of staying silent while someone stays bound.
Thank You that You came to heal the brokenhearted and set the captives free, and that You have never treated those as two different jobs.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Get Help or Go Deeper
Inner healing and deliverance sessions through B2T Ministries are free. If you want to ask a question or schedule a session, contact Paula Holwegner at pholwegner@hotmail.com. Scott Bitcon trained our team, and his full training course is available free in the Courses section on the community. See the full Hearing From God series index for all twelve days.
Questions About the Spirit of Rejection, Generational Curses, and Inner Healing
What is the spirit of rejection and how does it enter a person’s life?
Greg Locke and Scott Bitcon both identify the spirit of rejection as one of the most common roots they find in deliverance work. It enters early — typically in childhood, before a person has any framework to question what they are being told about themselves — and it establishes itself not as a belief but as a perceived fact. You do not feel like you are choosing to believe you were unwanted; you feel like you simply know it. Because it arrived before any defenses were in place, it sits undisturbed for decades. The spirit of rejection is also one of the most common things feeding generational patterns — a father’s wound of rejection passes to a child not through guilt but through the same unhealed ground reproducing itself in the next generation.
What are generational curses and how do they actually work?
Locke and Bitcon define generational curses as repeating patterns across family lines — abandonment, addiction, rage, poverty, a spirit of death — not as inherited guilt (Ezekiel 18:20 is explicit that a son does not bear a father’s iniquity) but as inherited open ground. A wound was opened at some point in the family line, a demonic attachment formed on that wound, and because nobody ever healed the wound, the attachment and the pattern passed to the next generation through the same unresolved pain. The pattern stops in the person where the healing happens. It is not fate, and it is not something that requires a special prayer formula — it requires healing the wound the pattern is standing on.
Why does inner healing have to happen before deliverance?
Bitcon teaches this from observation across more than 7,000 sessions: a demon attached to a wound cannot be permanently expelled until the wound is healed at its root. Command it to leave with real faith and genuine authority, and it may depart temporarily — but the wound remains, the ground remains, and the spirit returns to open ground. The order is not optional. Inner healing removes the wound so there is no ground left. Deliverance then removes the spirit that was standing on it. Bitcon’s training for our B2T Ministries team is built around this sequence: heal first, command second, and in that order only.
How to break generational curses — is there a practical process?
Locke and Bitcon both say how to break generational curses is not a formula or declaration. The mechanism is: identify the wound the pattern is standing on, bring Jesus into that wound through prayer, receive His healing of it, and then command whatever was attached to leave in Jesus’ name. Luke 10:19 makes clear that the authority to do this belongs to ordinary believers, not specialists. The pattern in a family line ends in the generation where the wound is healed — because the ground is gone, the attachment has nothing to stand on, and there is nothing to pass forward.
Can a Christian have a demon, or does salvation prevent all demonic influence?
Greg Locke and Scott Bitcon address this directly in Day 8 and present it honestly: serious Bible-believing Christians disagree on this question. Some hold that a Spirit-filled believer cannot be under demonic influence at all. Locke and Bitcon distinguish oppression from possession — salvation is settled, but unhealed wounds and unconfessed sin can provide ground for demonic oppression that was not dealt with at conversion. Both positions are held by careful readers of the same Scripture. Study the texts yourself. And wherever you land, both sides agree: God wants the oppression removed. A theological debate should not keep anyone sitting in something Jesus died to take away.
What is demonic oppression and how is it different from possession?
Demonic oppression, in the framework Locke and Bitcon work from, refers to external demonic influence — affecting emotions, thought patterns, behavior, and physical sensation — without the internal habitation and control implied by possession. The distinction matters for Christians especially: this ministry teaches that a believer’s salvation and standing in Christ are not threatened by oppression, but that wounds and sin can provide ground for influence that was never cleaned up. The practical result of oppression — elevated anxiety, rage, shame, guilt arriving at volumes the present moment never earned — is what Bitcon describes as the sound of a demon tormenting an unhealed wound.
How does a word of knowledge work, and is it available to ordinary believers?
A word of knowledge, as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12:8, is a specific piece of information given through the Holy Spirit — not through observation, experience, or intuition. Greg Locke received one in the middle of a live service about a stranger: where everyone saw a drunk man, God told Locke the man had a problem with his father. That word was what made it possible to reach the actual wound rather than the visible symptom. Paul lists the utterance of knowledge among the ordinary gifts of the Spirit, given as God wills, to whom He wills. It is not a specialist gift. The cost of acting on it is willingness to be wrong in public — the same exposure that keeps most people silent when they receive something.
How do I know if a strong emotional reaction is a wound or just a bad day?
Bitcon identifies the sign as disproportionality: a reaction that is a ten when the situation warranted a two or three. That gap is the indicator. The emotion is not overreaction in the ordinary sense — it belongs to the age the wound formed at, arriving in an adult body in a present-day situation. A six-year-old’s wound produces a six-year-old’s level of pain, regardless of how old the person is now. Bitcon also looks at spontaneous memories — a painful recollection surfacing for no apparent reason during ordinary life — and treats those as the Lord raising something for healing rather than random rumination. The practical instruction in Day 8 is simply to start noticing and writing these down, without pressure to fix anything yet.