God speaks to your spirit through an inner witness. Do you know what I mean by an inner witness? Well, let me give you a prime example of something that happened to me years ago.

I got up one morning, and everything was going well in my life. My personal life was fine. My business life, social life and public life were all fine. The ministry was great, and everything else was wonderful. To tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be a great day.

But soon after I got up a heaviness came on me, that blah kind of feeling you sometimes get. I don't know how else to say it. I wasn't sick in my body, and I wasn't depressed. I just felt this heaviness on the inside of me. So I began to rebuke the devil.

"Get out of here, devil," I commanded. "I come against you in Jesus' name. I bind you. I bind you, devil from hell. Get out of here!" But, instead of going away, the feeling got worse and worse. I just got heavier, even though there was nothing wrong with me.

I must have bound the devil for about 35 minutes, and nothing happened. Finally, the Lord said, Jesse! I knew that voice.

"What?" I said.

What are you doing? He asked me.

"I'm over here binding the devil, Lord," I said.

No, you're not. You're binding Me, He told me.

"I'm binding You?" I asked.

Yes, that feeling in your spirit is Me. I want to use your spirit right now to make utterances and groanings that cannot be mentioned. That's the Spirit of God inside of you, not the devil.

What happened was that the Holy Spirit wanted to make intercession through my spirit with utterings and groanings that could not be mentioned—and I was binding it. I was binding God, thinking it was the devil.

How many of you have ever experienced such a thing? It's in the Bible: "Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Rom. 8:26 NKJV).

Don't always assume that the weight you sometimes feel inside is the devil. Oftentimes the Holy Ghost will move upon you like He did me. He may give you deep, deep urging to pray for someone who may be in trouble.

It might be somebody in China or a brother in Siberia who is going through a wasteland. It could be for yourself that you're praying. The important thing is that you realize you're hearing from God, and those groanings on the inside are from Him, not the devil.

If the Holy Spirit moves on you to pray like that, be sure to pray long enough for the heaviness to lift off you. You will get to the point where you're released from that burden to pray, and when that happens, it means you've done your work. Whatever it was you were praying for has been resolved, and God will get all the glory.

Source: Jambalaya for the Soul by Jesse Duplantis
Excerpt permission granted by Harrison House Publishers