What are our Spiritual Gateways?

The following is an excerpt from my book, "How to Defeat the Enemy of Your Mind" available on Amazon in Paperback and E-book:

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In this chapter I want to talk about various gateways within our tri-part being. Our being is composed of three parts: body, soul and spirit. Each part contains several gateways through which many things can enter into us.

We will go into detail about each gate, as each one is tied into a particular function of our body, soul and spirit. This will help us in understanding how soul invaders infiltrate us and how it affects us.

[Revelation 3:20] Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. (NIV)

What is the door? What is this gateway? First we need to look at the fact that we have many gateways within our being. Our spirit has eight gateways, our soul has seven and our body has five.

Before the gateways can be functioning correctly and cleansed; they must also be aligned in the proper order. Our body should be servant to our soul; our soul should be servant to our spirit; and our spirit should be submitted in servant-hood to the Lord Jesus Christ.

This happens when we take seriously the following Scripture:

[1 Thessalonians 5:23] May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (NIV)

We see here in this Scripture that Paul is expressing a sanctification process in our spirit, soul and body – thoroughly and completely. Essentially he is saying that we should seek and allow God to cleanse all of our gateways within our spirit, soul and body. Remember, sanctification is a process and involves setting these areas apart for God and for His purposes.

It stands to reason that if Paul is admonishing us to ‘sanctify’ our spirit, soul and body – that we must work diligently to do our part to keep our spirit in communication and operating with God via the Holy Spirit, and also to do our part to diligently work with keeping our soul and body sanctified as well. This is exactly what exorcism and deliverance achieves.

So, what exactly is a gateway? A gateway is a place of authority where dominion is exercised. Whoever (or whatever) controls your life’s different gateways will exercise authority, dominion and control over you. Consider if we have inadvertently given demonic forces legal access and rights to sit in those gateways to dominate us?

Perhaps our ancestors may have given legal rights to a demon to sit in those places? And consider that the legal right might still be there… So then it stands to reason that we must rid our gateways of evil influence from demons, and soul invaders.

[Matthew 11:12] … the kingdom of heaven suffers violent assault, and violent men seize it by force [as a precious prize]. (AMP)

In this context we are currently talking about, this Scripture can be interpolated for our situation to have the following meaning: to be violent is to take the Word of God and use it to dispossess what has control over the gateways in our lives. In other words, we are aggressively using the Word of God to command and overthrow demonic forces out of our life and gateways in Jesus’ name.

Let’s take a look specifically at the eight gateways of the spirit-man within our being. Through these gateways, the presence of God can enter into our spirit-man. They are as follows:  Revelation, Intuition, Fear of God, Prayer, Reverence, Faith, Hope and Worship.

In order to move in greater realms of authority, it is necessary to flow through all of these gateways together. However, most believers move only in two or three – limiting their power and authority and restricting the flow of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

[Hebrews 4:12] For the word of God is living and active and full of power [making it operative, energizing, and effective]. It is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating as far as the division of the soul and spirit [the completeness of a person], and of both joints and marrow [the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and judging the very thoughts and intentions of the heart. (AMP)

We need the Glory of God to penetrate our spirit so that our soul can be changed. We must discipline our body to submit under the soul so that this process can take place. If our soul is dominant over our spirit, then our spirit is in bondage – at the mercy of our emotions and thoughts. Remember, the soul is the mind, will and emotions of a person. It is not suitable for our fleshly and worldly thoughts and emotions to override the unction’s and purity of the Holy Spirit attempting to communicate with our spirit-man. This is why our spirit-man must be number one (of our tri-part being).

Now let’s look back at the potential that demons and soul invaders have to oppress us. We know that through sin, demons have legal rights to possess and torment us. Let’s use one of the gateways as an example. The demons, in addition to soul invaders could gain access through the gateway of revelation and make the person think they are receiving and hearing from God accurately, while in reality the demons are twisting what God is sending in and even speaking their own false revelations.

Soul invaders and demons will sit in these gateways and tweak anything that passes through to deceive us. This is why some people think they feel things in the Spirit – and even think they hear God telling them something, but in reality there is something or someone having authority and dominion over that gateway causing that person to believe lies and go off course. This could create a host of problems – exactly what the demons want. Trying to tell a person they aren’t hearing from God accurately because of demonic interference whilst they are believing with every fiber of their being that they are, can sometimes be a great battle of grand proportions. It could make them feel angry and become defensive if they are basing their identity, self-worth and value based upon their level of spiritual accomplishments. It could also make a person feel totally ashamed and defeated, causing them to slump into condemnation and depression.

This is why we have to only confront when the Holy Spirit leads us into doing so – because we could really destroy someone if we address situations outside of God’s timing. God knows exactly what is going on and how everything is being affected. He’ll deal with it in the perfect timing when that person is in a place that they are ready to receive God’s truth.

When our soul is dominant over our spirit, the things God is trying to deposit into us is either stifled or gets filtered through the soul before it touches our spirit. The condition of the soul will then affect and twist what God is trying to show us. This is why the soul must be submitted under the spirit.

The enemy will always attack where the weakest link is – or where there is an opening. Gateways fall under this category. If we experience a deficiency or lack of any of these gateways, it could be that the gates are under siege by the enemy. We may not necessarily be in sin – but could be under a witchcraft attack that oppresses any of these gateways.

The gateway of revelation could be affected by such a siege attack when you experience hours of sitting before the Lord but can’t seem to press through and receive anything. The gateway of prayer might be under a siege attack by demons or the influence of soul invaders if you can’t seem to focus on praying or can’t hardly pray at all. When we experience these types of attacks we must learn to redirect the flow through the other gateways.

For example, if our Prayer gateway is under siege we should direct our soul and spirit to focus on the gateways of Worship, Faith and Hope. As the siege becomes unsuccessful, the attack will lift and the gateways can be cleansed and restored. This can be coupled with spiritual warfare to destroy the enemy forces at work at the gateways, to bring about freedom in those areas.

As we mentioned earlier, there are seven gateways of the soul. They are as follows: Conscience, Reason, Imagination, Mind, Emotions, Choice and Will. The soul is more vulnerable than the spirit because the spirit-man is born again upon receiving Christ into your heart and is transformed instantly, becoming the place where God dwells within. Demons cannot enter into your spirit-man once it is truly born again because that is now the temple of the Holy Spirit. They can however sit in the gateways that lead to your spirit-man.

The soul is more vulnerable because this is the mind, will and emotions of a person. The soul is not instantly cleansed upon conversion, like the spirit-man is. How we know this to be true is because when we receive Jesus we still have pain, wounds, trauma, mindsets, experiences, habits and a variety of “stinking thinking” variables floating around within us.

If it weren’t so, we would all have perfect emotions and behave exactly like God would – and our minds would be totally transformed instantly never having a bad thought or a sinful thought cross our minds, in addition to our will being perfected in that we would make holy and righteous choices in everything we did.

Obviously this is not the case. However, we steadily and daily work at getting closer to this goal until God bring us home into Glory and purifies us completely. Allowing the sinful nature to control our minds leads to death. But allowing the Spirit to control your mind leads to life and peace.

[Romans 8:7] the mind of the flesh [with its sinful pursuits] is actively hostile to God. It does not submit itself to God’s law, since it cannot (AMP)

Therefore, the biggest battle is in the mind. The only way to have real life is to let Christ reign in our mind. It is these gateways of the soul that are most commonly and actively influenced by demonic spirits and soul invaders.

When it comes to the gateway of the Imagination, this leads to the eyes of our heart. The world today, especially within the education system, has trained us out of using and valuing our imagination. Our imagination was given to us by God so that we could see what He is doing. In other words, so that we could see visions, see dreams, and see within the heavenly realms on the “screen” of our imagination.

The common misconception is that anything in our imagination is false or fictitious. The world has more or less given a sort of stigma on the word ‘imagination’ because the general consensus is that this is a thing of a child, imaginary or something that is too farfetched to be contained within reality. Come to think of it, that sounds exactly like the kind of childlike faith God is seeking for.