The Prince of the Power of the Air, Part 1

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Praise the Lord. Welcome to the Sound of Faith. I'm Sharon Knotts, thanking you for joining us today, because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Today's message is a panoramic view of the evil influences and supernatural authorities driving our current chaotic culture, especially the anti-Christian America media, the prince of the power of the air.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: This morning, we're going to begin in the book of Ephesians chapter 2.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: I got to tell you that I was stirred up to put this message together after reading some other men of God's words, that the Holy Spirit has put on them, and so he put it on them, and then he put it on me. So, I'm going for it.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: I'm just giving you a warning. So, you know, get ready. And here we are in Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1. And you has he quickened, and that word means made alive, who were, were, past tense, dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience. So, we know that we were born dead.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Everybody here was born dead, spiritually speaking. We were all born in sin, shaped in sin and iniquity. And our whole life, until we came to Christ, whatever age that may have been, and different for each one here, I'm sure. Until that time, we were under the influence, the rule and the dominion of an evil spirit that's now working in the children of disobedience. Those were all present tenses. Past tenses was good for us when we were. But the fact is, even now, there's a spirit that's working in the children of disobedience. When we were under that influence before our salvation, we walked according to the course of this world. We walked according to this dispensation, the age of this world, the rule, the agenda of the prince of the power of the air. Now, the word power here in Greek is Exousia, which we all know means authority. We walked under his authority.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: He had rule over us. He is a prince, and that is a strong Greek word, Archon, and it means just what it says, he's a prince. He has authority over a dominion. And the dominion that we see here that the prince of the power of the air has is the air. And in the Greek, the word is AER, air. We bring it over AIR, but it's air. And it refers to the atmosphere.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: If we would flip over to chapter 6 and look at verse 12, which we all know well, but we'll read it. Ephesians 6:12. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood. We're not wrestling against people.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: But against principalities. That means princes that have dominion. Against powers, Exousia.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Authorities, against the rulers of the what? The darkness of this world. There's darkness in this world and there are rulers that are ruling in the darkness of this world. It's plural, so we know there are territories where certain rulers are ruling, but they're ruling over darkness.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Against spiritual wickedness in high places. And it would have been better there if it had been translated in the heavenlies, because that's where Satan's realm is operating. I know we always say he's in the pit. Not yet. Not yet. It's coming. It's coming.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And like my dad, Brother Hardy, always used to say, we're not going to quit. Well, he actually he said, we ain't going to quit. Let me be, you know, authentic. Authentic Archie Hardy, we ain't going to quit till we put him in the pit.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And we know he always used to say, he told the Lord, if you don't already have somebody, I want to be a candidate to help throw him in the pit. I'm sure a lot of folks want to be that one.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: So, we're wrestling, we're in a wrestling match.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And it's against the spiritual wickedness and the rulers of the darkness of this world. And spiritual wickedness in the heavens is what we are up against. So, this person, the prince of the power of the air, of this atmosphere of this realm in the heavens, where Satan has his domain, which we know is not where God is. God is in the highest.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: The third heaven, where we know both Paul and John went and had revelations, Amen, and told us about their going there. But this person is also called the prince of this world in John 14:30. He's called the God of this world in 2 Corinthians 4:4. And he's called the prince of demons. And Jesus said that. He's the prince of demons. That Jesus said in Matthew 12:24. This is none other than Satan, the adversary of God.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: We know we're told in 1 John the first chapter, God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Satan is his adversary, the prince of darkness. Not only does he exercise authority over this world and over its systems, he exercises authority over the air, the lower atmosphere, the lower heavens. And you know, in our present digital age, almost everything that we do is controlled in some way by radio waves and satellite beams.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: You know, think about your TV, all the electronics in your house, your computer, your cell phones. I mean, people have become so digitized today, they have refrigerators that tell them when they're out of mayonnaise. Did you know there are such things? I don't have one, but some people cannot turn their lights on in their house, unless they tell Alexa to do it. And you can laugh about that, but that happened to my mom. So, Todd is trying to help my mom out, and, you know, she knows nothing about digital stuff. She can't even open email. But Todd is trying to help her out, and of course, you know, he's going to know everything there is to know electronically. So, he fixed it so that in her living room, all she had to do was say, turn on the light. Well, something happened with her power or her internet coming into her home, and so it wouldn't work. And do you know that she could not walk over there and turn it on manually?
R. G. Hardy: Trouble.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And she kept telling everybody, you know, me or Benny or Sarah, somebody needs to come over here. I'm sitting in the dark. And we're all thinking to ourselves, why are you sitting in the dark? Why don't you just get up and turn on the light? But he had that particular lamp that's right next to her TV chair, so that you had to do it by command. That's the age that we're living in.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And you know there are some people that their whole house is digitized like that. And so everything in your home is coming to you and coming to us by some kind of wave that's in the atmosphere. You know, how does that picture on your TV get there? There's waves in the atmosphere and beams coming down from satellite. And you know, the generation that's coming up now, the millennials, that's all they know. They have no idea what life is without all of that.
R. G. Hardy: Right.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And this domain is being controlled by the prince of the power of the air. The spirit of Satan is operating through the authorities and operating through the control of much of our media. Now you wonder why you see and hear all the ungodly things that are on the media. The anti-God, the anti-Christian, the anti-Bible, the anti-faith. Let's just say anti-good. Because the ones that are in power and position have the spirit of the prince of the power of the air, operating through them to bring forth his agenda.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And that's why things are becoming increasingly hostile towards Christian and biblical teachings and biblical values and morals and therefore people of faith. Why is there so much hostility? We live in a nation that says everybody has a right to believe what they want to believe. You know, I can't make you believe what I believe and you can't make me believe what you believe and that's okay. Everyone has that right. But our right is being systematically, our right is being eroded.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And they are now actively, not undercover, not covertly, but actively and overtly, they are trying to silence preachers of the Gospel. Think, now, some of you are my age or around my age. Those of you are real young, just, you know, maybe sometimes you go on some of those cable TVs and you watch some of those old time shows that when television started in the 1950s, you had shows like I Love Lucy. And you know, it's still a classic.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best, and Ozzie and Harriet, and those kind of shows.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: They were all family oriented. Family oriented. But think about today. The shows have so much sexuality in them. And not only that, many of the shows belittle the family structure. Either they don't have a father at all in the show, or if they do, the kids and the wife berate him, put him down, he's made to look like a dunce. Disrespectful.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Imagine if back in the time of Father Knows Best, if one of the daughters got pregnant and had an abortion.
R. G. Hardy: No, trouble.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Back in the 1950s.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: No, it would have been absolutely unheard of. See, it started off a subtle erosion, subtly, but now it's overt and very pervasive. In the last year, I'm telling you since the new shows have come on for this last year. I'm sure you're going to agree with me. The LGBT agenda has managed to so influence the producers and the writers, you can't watch one show without them putting in the story some kind of homosexual relationship. And folks, it doesn't have to have anything to do with the storyline at all. It actually can be a little awkward to work it in. Because it doesn't really go with the storyline. But they have to put it in there. Commercials now.
R. G. Hardy: Yes.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Commercials. You can say, well, your children shouldn't be up at 9 o'clock. Well, there's commercials now. Outright homosexual contact. Now I'm use the word contact.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: They work it in somehow. And you would get the idea from the way this is being pushed and in every show, you would get the idea that half of the country's gay. And that's not true. It's a very small minority. But you wouldn't know that based on what you're seeing on television.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: See, it's an attempt to normalize it, to normalize the aberrant lifestyle, that's really only of a small minority. You know, the other night, there's a medical show that I follow, because I am intrigued by medical shows, when they get into this person's got this and they always usually put in something that's you never hear about, and I find it interesting. And so I've I've been following one of those shows. But the other night when it came on, as soon as it started, the very first opening scene, I thought I had it on the wrong channel. Were two men rolling around in bed in passionate lust. To open up this medical show that I've been following. I couldn't believe it. I had to switch the channel for a while and come back and see if it was safe to watch the story that I normally would watch. It was shocking, and it was cringeworthy to viewers like me, who follow these shows and all we want to see is the medical issues and the personal interactions that we would come up against that are normal and everyday.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: But oh, the media's getting bolder. And they're pushing the envelope further and further. And they're bowing down to the very powerful LGBT agenda. And little by little, people are becoming accustomed, accustomed to seeing it. So that after a while, they won't be so shocked or offended by it. That is what is behind it all.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And let me tell you folks, the authors and writers of these storylines and story plots are not just Hollywood writers and New York producers. It's the prince of the power of the air. Who's driving this. They're just his pawns.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: He's behind it. Think about your evening news that you watch every night. Especially the 24-hour cable news stations. Folks, let's be honest, they have abandoned journalistic integrity. They have totally abandoned it. They will print outright falsehoods. It was a day when if a reporter did that and didn't check his facts and and printed something like that, he would be booted. He'd be booted out of that job and nobody else would hire him.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: There was a day when that would have been the case. But now, when they print outright falsehoods, and somebody calls them out on it, they refuse to acknowledge it or correct it. They let it stand and they come out with some off the wall reason.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And when they get away with it, that only makes them more aggressive. And more manipulative, hiding the truths and sadly destroying some people's reputations. Destroying people's reputations. Honest people with their twisted half-truths. You know, a half-truth is just as dangerous, sometimes more dangerous than a lie, because a lie is more easily recognized and proven to be a lie. But when you got a half-truth, and you go to try to validate it, you can find, well, that part is true. So, maybe this part is true. The devil is clever.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And again, these are all being energized by the prince of the power of the air. Some of the names that some of these news anchors on the cable TV stations call Christians is mind blowing. The derogatory things that they say about Christians and Christian leaders. And they spit it out there. And nobody calls them down on it. And maybe a bunch of people get on the internet and it'll burn it up saying you're calling them out, calling them out. They don't care. They don't care if a half a million people get on there and say you lied. They're just going to get back on there next time and say something else.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Because they have an audience that receives it because they are under the influence of the prince of the power of the air. It's the same way with radio. You know, Christian radio in America has been a staple since January 2, 1921, when the first Christian station. Let me get the call letters right, KDKA, came on the air in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Christian radio.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And our country was blanketed with Christian radio stations. You know, you could travel across America, east, west, north, south, you could listen to Christian radio the whole trip. You could go from one station to the next as you went from one territory to another.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: Christian radio reigned in America. But, let me tell you an interesting fact, this came out in 2002. In 2002, more Christians listen to Christian radio than even went to church. There were 141 million listeners to Christian radio and there were 132 million Christians who were attending church. That's how prevalent Christian radio has been in America. But folks, in recent years, there's been a shift. And stations that were once Christian broadcasters for decades and decades are now being sold and bought up by secular buyers who are changing the formats from Christian radio to secular radio. It is happening continually. Even our radio ministry, Sound of Faith, has been hit hard in just the last few months. And we have lost three major markets. The Norfolk, Virginia area, the Dallas, Texas area, which is huge and for which we got a lot of support. And, believe it or not, the Portland, Oregon area, from which we get a lot of support. All three of those stations have been sold. And the Christian format abandoned. And so, of course, I'm scrambling to try to find stations to replace them. They either are none, or maybe if one or two, and they're already completely filled and sold out because everybody's trying to jump on another station too.
R. G. Hardy: Amen.
Sharon Hardy Knotts: And this is happening. And what does that mean? It means scores of preachers, scores of gospel preachers who had these very important outlets.