The Sons of Sceva Had the Right Words and It Went Badly

I want to start by admitting something that took me about eight years to notice about my own praying.

There was a season when I said the name of Jesus at the end of every prayer and I was not addressing anybody. I was closing a circuit. I had learned, correctly, that we pray in His name, and somewhere along the way that true thing had quietly turned into a mechanism in my head, and I was operating it.

Nobody could have told from outside. The words were right. The theology I could have written down on paper was right. And if you had stopped me and asked who I had just been speaking to, I would have had to think about it, which is the whole problem in one sentence.

What broke it was not a rebuke. It was a passage in Acts that I had always read as a strange piece of local color and had never once read as being about me.

What actually happened in Ephesus

Luke tells it plainly and without commentary, which is his way of letting a thing land.

Paul is in Ephesus and unusual things are happening. And some traveling exorcists, seven brothers, sons of a chief priest, hear the formula and decide to add it to their working vocabulary.

Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. (Acts 19:13, King James Version)

Read the wording of what they say. Jesus whom Paul preacheth. They do not say my Lord. They cite a source. They are quoting somebody else's relationship the way a person quotes a recipe.

And the answer they get is one of the strangest sentences in the New Testament.

And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? (Acts 19:15)

Not what are you saying. Who are you. The question is about identity, and it is asked because the words were correct and the identity behind them was not there.

You have a name to speak in that was never a mechanism, and it works because of who is behind it rather than because of how it is said, and Acts 19 is where that distinction gets made in the plainest possible way, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a true doctrine from hardening into an operation.

Why Luke put this in the book

It is worth asking why this story survived at all, because it is not flattering to anybody in it.

Luke is writing an orderly account for a man named Theophilus, and he keeps this. He keeps a scene where the correct name is used correctly by people who have no standing to use it, and it goes badly for them in a public and undignified way.

I think he keeps it because the church was about to spend two thousand years being tempted by exactly this. Every generation of believers discovers that certain words are associated with power, and every generation contains people who reach for the words and skip the Person.

That is not a fault peculiar to unbelievers. It happens fastest in the people who have been in the longest, because we are the ones with the vocabulary.

You are not the first person to find a true thing turning into a lever in your hands, and Scripture put the warning in the book before you needed it, and Acts 19 is where it sits, and the Spirit is the one who shows a person their own hands before the habit has cost them anything.

You were brought into a relationship rather than issued a set of terms, and that has been true from the first day, which is what Galatians 4 means by being known of God. The same Spirit is the one who keeps the vocabulary attached to the Person who gave it.

Notice how Paul phrases that verse, and notice that he corrects himself in the middle of it.

But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God. (Galatians 4:9)

He starts to say that they know God, and then he turns the sentence around, because the load bearing fact runs the other direction. The knowing that holds is His of you.

What the difference actually looks like

I have been asked what the practical difference is, and it is smaller than people expect, and it shows up in one place.

A formula is directed at a result. A relationship is directed at a Person. Both of them can produce identical words, and they are told apart by what happens when nothing comes back.

A person operating a formula will adjust the wording. That is the tell. They will wonder whether they used the right phrase, whether the order was wrong, whether it should have been said with more conviction. The whole diagnostic loop stays inside their own mouth.

A person speaking to Someone will keep speaking to Someone, because a relationship survives silence in a way a mechanism does not. That is not a higher grade of faith. It is just what people do with people.

You have already been speaking to Someone on the days you could not tell, and the address was never made valid by your certainty about it, which is the plain sense of 2 Timothy 2:19, and it is the Spirit who has kept the line open while a person was busy checking their own wording.

You are held by a foundation that stands whether or not you can feel it working, and 2 Timothy 2 says the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, the Lord knoweth them that are His, and the Spirit is the one who bears witness with your spirit that you belong to Him.

Which means the repair for what I am describing is not to say the name less. It is to remember who is on the other end of it.