Demons manifested when she accepted Jesus

December 9, 2025 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

By Asaiah Logan –

When Yasuko Fleming first prayed to accept Jesus in London in 1993, demon spirits showed up enraged.

“Buddha’s face was there. All the gods I used to pray to were right in front of me,” she said. “They told me, ‘Don’t do that.’ … They grabbed me on my shoulder and pull me back and then I I felt my neck was choked.

After an hour of prayer, praise and scripture reading from the woman who led her to Christ, Yasuko was free.
Yasuko Fleming, from Japan, took a year to study in London. Her landlady was a born-again Christian and invited her to know Jesus.

“I didn’t know anyone who believed in Jesus,” she says. “When she said there is only one God, I didn’t agree,” Yasuko said. “I believed in many gods. It made me feel safe. I didn’t want to get disappointed by one or two gods. I wanted to believe as many as I can so that I feel secure.”

The landlady read her a verse about the people who trust God will not be disappointed. It confronted her directly and convinced her that God was speaking to her.

“When I heard that, it felt like a wall inside my mind fell down,” Yasuko said. “I thought, wow, this feels true.”
So she received Jesus into her heart.

Immediately, the demons manifested and engaged in a battle for her soul that lasted an hour. It turns out that the landlady had been praying and fasting for three days to bring Yasuko to Jesus.

“After that, I felt clean,” she said. “I felt peace for the first time in my life.”

Today, Yasuko leads a Christian art and dance community in Tokyo.

Little by littler, her family members all came to Christ. Japan is 1% Christian and has a strong culture of conserving traditional values, so people are resistant to the gospel.

“It was really hard,” she said. “It’s okay if it takes 10 or 20years Just love your family members. Pray for them. Don’t rush. God is patient.”

She says Japan can be reached one person at a time. “Jesus started with twelve people,” she said. “We can start with whoever is near us.”

Now at All Nations Art Community in Tokyo, she teaches dance and English, runs a café, leads a prayer room, and holds small church services. Sometimes she sings or dances outside. “People stop and watch,” she said. “I can feel the whole atmosphere change.”

Even after all these years, she remembers that first prayer. “Jesus walked toward me,” she said. “And I felt like He had been waiting for me for a long time.”

This article first appeared on Pilgrim Dispatch.

I abandoned Buddhism to follow Jesus Christ

November 20, 2023 / newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Kanishka Raffel, describes how he abandoned Buddhism to follow Jesus Christ.

My family came to Australia in 1972. My parents were Sri Lankan. My mother’s family were Buddhist and so my two sisters and I were raised as Buddhists in Australia, which was unusual then.

I think Australia’s first Buddhist temple opened in 1975 in Stanmore. It was a Thai Buddhist temple and Thai Buddhism is very similar to Sri Lankan Buddhism, so that was where the Sri Lankan community would go.

In my third year at university, I thought I should devote myself a little to the study of my religion. So, I started privately reading Buddhist literature. I visited the temple. I developed my meditation practice. But in God’s kindness, I’d had Christian friends at high school and at university. And so, at the end of my third year at university, I was going on holiday with a few friends and we picked up some of them at the end of a beach mission.

So we arrived on the last day of the beach mission. And after we’d had lunch, the team said to me, “Oh, we’re going to pray now. Maybe you could go for a walk on the beach.” And I said, “Oh, I’ll just stay here if that’s okay.”

That was the first time I saw Christian people in prayer, and it was quite surprising. I didn’t know what they were going to do when they said that they were going to pray. They just stayed right where they were and started talking to God. So that was eye-opening.

“He allowed me to see the vitality, the beauty, the majesty of Jesus Christ.”

Then I said to one of my friends, “What’s being a Christian all about?” And he said being a Christian meant he’d “lost control of his life to Jesus Christ”. Remember, I had devoted the year to serious study of Buddhism and was trying to develop, especially through meditation, control of my emotions and my ambitions and my desires, in order to be released from them. And here was my friend, who I respected, who said he’d lost control of his life to somebody who lived 2000 years ago!

Well, he asked me, “Would you read something if I gave it to you?” I said, “Okay.” And he gave me Mark’s Gospel and John’s Gospel.

When I was back at home after our holiday, in my bedroom, I thought I ought to keep my word to my friend. So, I got John’s Gospel out and began to read it. And as I did – wonderfully – God, in his kindness, convicted me, first of all, that I wasn’t reading a fairytale but that I was reading history. And he allowed me to see the vitality, the beauty, the majesty of Jesus Christ – a person who had friends and enemies, who had compassion and a mission, who was a man of emotions, but also seemingly always in control.

The Lord drew my attention to a particular phrase that John uses. He relates a story, and then he’ll say, “At this, the people were divided.” God really drew my attention to this phrase and turned it around on me, so that I began to ask myself, “Well, you’re not on the side of Jesus. Why not?”

As I read through the gospel once again, my attention became focused on John 6:44. Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them to me, and I will raise them up on the last day.” Although this verse raises questions about God’s sovereign election, what provoked me was the idea of “the last day”. Buddhism taught me to expect that it would take hundreds of lifetimes, through many deaths and rebirths, before I could hope to achieve enlightenment. The Buddha himself took over 500 rebirths. If that was true, then the idea of a “last day” was problematic.

But then, I began to wonder what Jesus could have meant when he said, “No one can come to me unless the Father … draws them to me.” How would the Father draw someone to Jesus? How could this happen? Then I noticed the very next verse. John 6:45 says, “It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.” It occurred to me that as I had been reading the gospel, the Father had been teaching me about Jesus! If I had indeed “heard the Father” and “earned from him” then the necessary thing was to “come to Jesus”. I was being “drawn to Jesus”, and in God’s kindness, I came.

Eventually, I couldn’t think of any good reason for not being on Jesus’ side. In a way that I couldn’t have explained, I just felt somehow that Jesus was for me. And I thought, “Well, I need to be for him too.” And so, in God’s kindness, he saved me.