Dead Man Talking Mediums and Necromancy

Creation Fellowship

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:02

Okay, so Dr. Blevins, I have a joke that might be appropriate for tonight.

00:12

So what do you call a little, wait a minute, a little psychic who's running from the law?

00:20

A little psychic who's running from the law? I don't know.

00:27

A small medium at large. A small medium at large.

00:35

Okay, with that, I'm Terri Camerizal here with Creation Fellowship Santee.

00:42

We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how

00:49

God created the universe and all life from nothing in just six days a few thousand years ago.

00:55

We've been meeting most Thursday nights here on Zoom since June of 2020. We've been blessed with presentations by pastors, teachers, doctors, prophecy speakers, cartoonists, scientists, apologists, and all around smarty pants people who love the

01:10

Lord and have a message to share. You can find most of our past videos by searching for us on YouTube, Creation Fellowship Santee, that's

01:18

S -A -N -T -E -E. You can also find our BitChute channel, which is

01:23

Creation Fellowship and Rumble is CFS 2020. You can like and follow our Creation Fellowship Santee Facebook page so you get notified when we go live and have scheduled upcoming events.

01:34

And you can also sign up for our email list by emailing creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com

01:40

so that you don't miss any upcoming speakers. Most of our speakers naturally are here to talk about creation topics, but from time to time, we're blessed with some off topic presentations such as the one that we have tonight.

01:54

Since it is the season of Halloween, we decided to find a speaker who could talk to us about topics such as the occult and mediums and psychics at large.

02:06

So Dr. Brady Blevins serves as a senior apologist at Watchman Fellowship.

02:12

Brady is a former senior pastor with over 15 years of ministry experience. He has written a number of profiles for Watchman Fellowship while in the pastorate and since has joined the staff.

02:24

He has a heart for sharing the truth of the gospel to those who have been deceived by counterfeit Christianity, the occult, cults and false religions.

02:33

In addition to the time spent in church ministry, he has also served as a college professor and administrator over the last 11 years.

02:41

And so with that, I'm happy to turn it over to you. All right, well, thank you so much. Yeah, I work for a ministry called

02:47

Watchman Fellowship and remember it's Watchman Fellowship, not the

02:53

Watchtower, okay? We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. But no, seriously, our ministry does focus on false religions.

03:03

We wanna look to help to be able to equip you whenever you have maybe a

03:10

Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness at your door, maybe a Muslim coworker, or maybe you run into somebody who's involved in the occult.

03:21

And what's interesting is that, a lot of times we don't, the occult's not like the super exciting topic for some people until all of a sudden they realize what's actually at stake.

03:37

And we're actually surrounded a lot more by the occult than what a lot of people give credit for or realize.

03:47

And so I wanna just dip into this topic and the reason why that we don't see, people maybe aren't as interested into it, is in it, excuse me, because they don't really know what the occult is.

04:01

I mean, it's like, wait, hold on. So it's not a cult, it's the occult. What do you mean? Like, how do you spell that?

04:06

O -C -C -U -L -T, like, what is that? Well, I wanna look at a definition. I kinda give a working definition, if you will.

04:15

And it's this, the occult's a body of science, which is not widely known to the general population, consisting of hidden knowledge about the workings of the human psyche and the laws of nature, both seen as the physical laws and the unseen, which is the spiritual laws.

04:33

And that's a pretty good definition. Watchmen though, we try to drill down a little bit more and we try to really look at this word and understand what it means.

04:46

Because when we're looking at the actual word occult, it just means that which is hidden from view or covered up.

04:53

But we wanna just kinda make it crystal clear. And so we always tell people it's the ability to gain knowledge or power from supernatural forces apart from the

05:04

God of the Bible. And that's an important thing to consider because it's trying to gain knowledge or power supernaturally outside of God.

05:14

So there's a couple of different ways that this is done. Take for example, tarot cards. These are allegedly tools that can be used to guide you through life.

05:26

The history of the deck is really lengthy. In fact, I wrote a profile that was published earlier this year on tarot cards.

05:35

And it's kinda interesting because, when we're writing these stuff, first at Watchmen, we look to try to get the best of the best that we can to write on particular topics and subjects.

05:50

But one of the things that's really important for us, regardless of what the topic is, is that we reach out and we try to find somebody who is involved in a particular discipline and have them read it.

06:01

So I got finished writing this tarot card profile. And so what I do, I go to the metaphysical bookshop and I go talk to some tarot card readers.

06:10

And the first one I handed to was an elderly lady. She was working there at the counter.

06:17

And I explained who I was and what I was doing and asked, hey, can you just read this and tell me if I got it right or not?

06:23

You know what I mean? I'm confident in my work, but you wanna still man the position.

06:30

And she got done reading it and she says, honey, I think you're ready to read tarot.

06:36

I just started laughing and said, I don't think so. But what are tarot cards?

06:42

They consist of 78 cards. They're divided into two groups. You have the major arcana and there's 22 cards that are considered the major arcana cards.

06:53

So then you have 56 minor arcana cards. When we're talking about major arcana, we're talking about life events, major life events, minor arcana would be like minor life events.

07:05

And so what the whole idea is, is that you can use these cards to be able to understand and really get an idea of what's going on in terms of what's in your future.

07:22

Although they're not used necessarily to tell future. You're not gonna find a tarot card reader who's gonna say, well, we can tell these, we can tell your future by these cards, but instead they can give you knowledge about what's happening.

07:38

And so, you look at the major arcana cards, they're interesting because they're characterized by images such as the fool and death and the hangman and temperance.

07:52

And what's purported is that the journey of self -development begins with the fool or your earliest awareness.

08:01

And then it works through integration, which is the other 20 cards. And then it culminates at the world.

08:09

And so as you're turning over these cards, these major arcana cards are supposed to be telling you about major things in your life.

08:18

And so it's a way for you to be able to gain information about that. Now, the other cards in the deck, the other 56 cards, the minor arcana, these are life events.

08:27

And understand these are just like playing cards. They have four suits, but instead of hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, it's wands, swords, cups, and pinnacles or circles.

08:43

And each of the suits have a meeting. They're numbered, except rather than being number two through 10, like a deck of playing cards would be, they're numbered one through 10 and they include a king and queen, but a knight and a page instead of an ace and a jack.

09:02

And so again, every part of these cards have some type of meaning attached to it, whether it's the elements that are being presented or whatever the case is.

09:17

But here's the interesting thing, as you think about this, that if you were to go and get a reading, and of course there's different types of decks, and I mean, the colors that are used in the deck, all this has a very subjective meaning to them.

09:36

In fact, when I was doing my research on this, I asked a couple of different tarot card readers.

09:42

I said, okay, well, let's say that as improbable as it is, that I got a reading with a

09:50

Rider Waite deck and I drove across town and I got the exact same cards come up, would

09:58

I have the exact same reading as improbable as that would be? And they also will know, of course not.

10:05

And I mean, of course the red flag should be coming up if this really is some kind of surefire way and not some kind of farce or something to be put in.

10:15

But really where this works off of, and you can't really understand tarot cards without talking about Carl Jung, who was a

10:23

Swiss psychologist, and he talked about archetypes. And now archetypes are represented by universal themes, carrying, varying by culture.

10:33

This could be literature, art, dreams. And so he believed that shared concepts or archetypes permeate the collective and conscience which hold these mental patterns, memory traces that are shared by all human beings.

10:51

And what those who deal with tarot cards, they say, yeah, yeah, this is exactly what these major and minor arcana cards are dealing with.

11:01

And so they try to cling to his work. And so you say, okay, well, how does all this stuff work?

11:07

Well, if you were to go and get a tarot card reading, what they would do is they would have you shuffle the deck. And so as you shuffle the deck, your energy is being put into this deck.

11:18

And so that's how the right cards come up. And then they would lay them out into a spread. Now, there's all kinds of different spreads.

11:24

What you see on your screen now is a three -card spread, and hopefully you can see my cursor here.

11:31

So in a three -card spread, this would be the past, your past, and this would be the present, and this one would be the future.

11:39

And so even with this, the colors would have, meaning the fact that this card is upside down would have a meaning, the number that's associated with all, all of this stuff has a meaning, but there's all these different types of spreads, different tarot card readers use.

11:53

And so, again, this is an occultic practice, just trying to gain knowledge along the way.

11:59

But yet we got to realize that this is, at best, it's just, you know, something people do to try to gain knowledge.

12:11

At worst, this is a demonic activity that is a tool of Satan to draw people away from the truth.

12:20

But I want to move over into another tool of the occult that I think is even more sinister than tarot cards, and that's the

12:31

Ouija board. The history of the Ouija board is fascinating. Some say it dates back as far as 551

12:40

BC with the Chinese. Some have put it with Pythagoras in 540 BC.

12:46

Here in America, it came more around the 19th century as kind of the occult heyday, if you will, kind of during the

12:57

Civil War era. In fact, at one point, they said that there were more Ouija boards than prayer books in the college dormitory.

13:07

But the Ouija board and the occult really kind of got a new breath of life into the 60s and 70s here in America.

13:16

But going back to the origination of the Ouija board, the whole concept of this, and these are known as talking boards, people would put their fingers on the planchette, and the planchette is this little kind of tear -stripping shaped item here.

13:38

And, you know, you put it on there, and then you ask the spirits whatever question, and it can be yes or no, and they can spell out the answer.

13:51

And this is a very dangerous tool because this is just another form of necromancy.

13:59

You're trying to speak to the dead. And we'll talk a little bit later about the specifics behind what the

14:05

Bible has to say about it. But what's interesting is that the history of the

14:10

Ouija board, in fact, I want to kind of go back here. Notice if you can look on your screen here where it says

14:15

William Fold. He didn't bring the

14:20

Ouija board to America. It was really a guy by the name of Elijah Bond, but William Fold bought the patent for the

14:29

Ouija board from Elijah Bond, and he owned ultimately a company, a novelty company called the

14:38

Southern Novelty Company in Baltimore, Maryland. And of course, it later became to be known as the

14:44

Baltimore Talking Board Company, which is the original name of the

14:50

Ouija board here in America. And he just started selling them hand over fist. Well, then this is where the

14:56

IRS gets involved. In fact, how most Americans view the Ouija board today has more to do with the

15:04

Internal Revenue Service in our federal government than it does anything else.

15:10

So what happened, because when he started selling these, he said, no, this is a religious item, even though he was a

15:19

Presbyterian. He says, this is a religious item, and this is what he started to do. He's selling them, but there's no taxing involved.

15:29

And the federal government wants to get involved on this. They wanna get their piece of the pie. And so they say, no, no, no, this is nothing more than a toy or a game.

15:41

And so therefore, you can't do this. You're gonna have to pay taxes on it.

15:50

And so this thing got in court, the Supreme Court decided not to hear it, but the lower courts did.

16:02

And what's interesting is that his attorney made the claim that this was not a novelty and shouldn't be taxed.

16:13

And when he took the attorney, said that this is the case, but yet the court came back and said, we contend that it, the

16:22

Ouija board, is a form of amateur mediumship. We understand that that's what you believe, that it's some kind of form.

16:34

We're not willing to go that far, but we realize that it's probably something more than just a game, but yet, surprise, surprise, they sided with the

16:45

IRS. In fact, we have a profile on this one as well.

16:52

It came out a few years back and I can make those links available for you and you can send it out to the group.

16:59

But probably the biggest thing in our culture today is psychics, because,

17:06

I mean, you gotta think there's a lot of different TV shows over the years, personalities, whether it's Sylvia Brown, James Van Pregg, the

17:15

Long Island Medium, just to name a few. I mean, Crossing Over with John Edwards, that was a big show back in the nineties, especially.

17:26

You know, you turn on the TV and you see these people and it can really be, it can really be just mind blowing what they're doing.

17:39

And you hear the term often used as psychic, but then like, you know, with the Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo, you know, you hear this word medium.

17:47

So a lot of people say, okay, well, what's a psychic? What's a medium? James Van Pregg, for example, and this is

17:53

James Van Pregg, if you're not familiar with him, in one of his books, he gives the difference between a psychic and a medium.

18:00

In fact, he says, you know, all mediums are psychics, but not all psychics are mediums.

18:07

And so he makes the difference. And so when we're talking about a psychic, he would say, this is a person with, well, he would say supernatural powers.

18:17

I'm going to say alleged supernatural powers. And so what they do is they claim to be able to gain hidden knowledge through the five senses and emotions.

18:27

So they claim to be able to, you know, and this is kind of where you start getting into like clairvoyance, you know,

18:33

I can see clearly and you can go down the whole list of the senses and whatnot.

18:39

Now, a medium, on the other hand, it claims to be this intermediary between the physical world and the spiritual world.

18:49

So medium claims to be able to kind of go into this metaphysical area, beyond the physical, into the spiritual realm.

18:59

And I think one of the most important questions that we have to ask is, are they really able to do this?

19:06

Is this something that they can do? And we should look no further than the Bible for our answer.

19:12

In fact, I want to turn your attention here to Luke chapter 16, and beginning in verse number 19, we see a story that Jesus is telling.

19:22

And this is what he says. There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen, who feasted sumptuously every day.

19:31

And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus covered with sores, who desired to be fed with that which fell from the rich man's table.

19:41

Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side.

19:48

The rich man also died and was buried. And in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw

19:56

Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out,

20:01

Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue for I am in anguish in this flame.

20:11

But Abraham said, child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things and Lazarus in like manner bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in anguish.

20:23

And besides all of this between us and you, a great chasm has been fixed in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able and none may cross from there to us.

20:37

And he said, then I beg you, Father, to send him to my father's house for I have five brothers that he may warn them lest they also come into this place of torment.

20:51

But look at what happens here. But Abraham said, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.

20:57

And he said, no, Father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.

21:04

And he said to him, if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.

21:13

Now, notice what happens in the story. So you have this conversation going on between the rich man and Abraham.

21:24

And he's desiring that someone come back from the dead to give warning to his family.

21:30

But Abraham's response is important because he says, listen, there's this great chasm, there's this great gulf that's fixed between us and you.

21:40

You can't come to me, I can't come to you. And most importantly for our conversation tonight, those who are deceased cannot come back to earth.

21:51

And so as a Christian who knows that the Bible is true and trustworthy,

21:57

I know because of what the Bible says that these folks, they're not talking to our dear dead aunt

22:05

Edna. They're actually talking, if they are hearing something and if they are making communication, it's not with our dead relative, it's with the demonic spirit.

22:17

Obviously a demonic spirit posing as a deceased loved one to this medium along the way.

22:26

And so as we think about this passage, really what this passage is helping us to understand is that death seals our destination.

22:36

In the Bible says, I mean, Hebrews chapter nine, it's appointed unto men once to die than the judgment.

22:42

I mean, we don't get, there's not other opportunities along the way to be absent with the bodies, to be present with the

22:48

Lord for the believer. There's no going back and forth or anything.

22:53

But what happens is when we watch TV and we see these folks, it really,

23:01

I mean, they're able to like tell people stuff about themselves that no one seems to know.

23:09

I mean, it seems like they're really doing something supernatural that they're able to, I mean, it seems like they're doing it.

23:16

In fact, one time I was talking with my sister -in -law and she goes, Brady, she goes, okay,

23:21

I know it's not real and I just started laughing because I knew exactly what she was gonna ask.

23:28

And she goes, she goes, why are you laughing? What am I gonna ask? I said, I go, my psychic powers are telling me that you're gonna ask about mediums and psychics.

23:37

And she started laughing and she goes, that's exactly what I was gonna ask about. And she goes, how do they do it?

23:45

And this is why I told her, I said, first of all, you gotta be careful what you watch on TV because if you believe everything you see on TV, then you're gonna believe that Superman can fly and a

23:55

DeLorean can take you back to the future. So there's a lot of editing and stuff that can go on, but I mean, hey, let's just be honest for a moment.

24:07

Not all of it's editing. So how do they do it? Well, I'm gonna show you an example in just a minute.

24:13

We're gonna show you how this can be done, but I wanna show you the three ways that this is accomplished.

24:19

First of all, there's something that's called a cold reading, all right? Now in cold readings, what the person does is they just pose general questions to a large crowd.

24:29

And so you throw something out there and then you look for the answer. And so what happens is, is a lot of times that when you throw the question out there, people will start asking questions.

24:42

And what happens then is if you're a really good listener and you can kind of hear between the lines, if you will, you can ask more questions, gain more information.

24:56

And sometimes if you just keep your mouth shut, they'll tell you even more. And then you can use that information to make some really good deductive guesses as to what they're doing.

25:10

And so what I wanna do is I wanna show you a video a few years back when it was the

25:15

Kelly and Michael show. Teresa Caputo, the Long Island medium was on their show.

25:21

I'm not gonna show you a clip from her actual show. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you a clip from the after show that was posted online.

25:29

And I want you to just watch this really short interaction here. Welcome to our web exclusive with Teresa Caputo, the

25:39

Long Island medium, who is going to read members of our audience. She's been doing it earlier in the show today. And now there's so many people, so little time.

25:47

So are there any spirits coming through right now? Oh, there's always spirit. I don't know who, did somebody lose their husband over here?

25:54

Who lost the husband? Because this is before, okay. Because when I was standing over here, this is where I got confused when

26:01

I went with the younger male before with the husband, because I heard husband over there and I knew I was over here. So then

26:06

I had switched. Okay, so unfortunately you lost your husband.

26:12

Your husband, step on. Was your husband ill prior to his passing? Because what happens is, you know, people say, oh, of course he was ill.

26:17

But you know what? What I've learned is being a medium, people leave the physical world in many different ways. And the first thing that your husband said was that he wanted you to know how much he appreciated every unselfish thing you did for him.

26:29

He says, I wish I told you that more here in the physical world. He said, you loved and cared for me in a way that I was able to leave the physical world with dignity and grace.

26:37

And you're not a nurse, is that correct? Correct. And he says, but you gave me that. And he says, and I wanna thank you for that.

26:43

The day that he became sick, you dropped everything and cared for him. And you know what he just said to, oh, I think your husband, he's funny.

26:49

He goes, because I like them to communicate with their personality. He goes, you know what? I could be a bit stubborn, Teresa. I go, oh, really?

26:56

Now, what's what was with the oatmeal? What did you use to make him eat a certain food or something? Okay, this is my meaning.

27:03

My meaning in signs and symbols, it doesn't mean that they're incorrect. It means that it might just have a different meaning for you.

27:08

So what happened is I saw chocolate all around his face. That's my symbol for somebody was either diabetic or they were not allowed to eat certain foods here in the physical world.

27:18

So whatever it was that he was not allowed to have, because he just now showed me himself full face, rosy cheeks, that's my symbol for where someone's physical appearance has changed.

27:27

So whatever it was that he was not able to prior to his departure, he left with the physical body and he's able to do on the other side.

27:35

Now, I wanna talk about who's wearing the picture of someone. Okay, so I wanna go through this for just a moment and I'm gonna pull out a share screen here for just a second.

27:46

Let's kind of go over this for just a moment. First of all, she's posing a question is, does someone over here lose a spouse?

28:01

Lose a husband specifically, okay? Now, let's just think about this. This is being recorded in the middle of the week during the school year.

28:13

What kind of people do you think you're gonna get as a whole in this audience? You're gonna get people who are retired.

28:21

I mean, my wife at that time, our kids are a little bit older now, but I mean, yeah, we're not going anywhere in the middle of the week.

28:33

We're certainly not gonna go to a taping of Kelly and Michael during the middle of the school.

28:39

So yeah, your odds are probably pretty good. And then notice, so as she's walking over there, what does she do?

28:46

She's like, well, yeah, you know, see earlier when I messed up, no, no, that wasn't really a mess up.

28:52

This is, I knew this was it. This was where spirit, you know, sometimes I just don't listen well.

28:58

And so she's already kind of explaining away a mistake. And then she goes over there and she asked three questions.

29:05

Did you catch that? She asked three questions. So the first one was, was your husband sick when he died?

29:11

Now, listen, she knows that's a ridiculous question. All right, this is obviously an older lady, okay?

29:18

And she knows that people like me are gonna say, yeah, you're not really stretching it too far, right?

29:27

I mean, come on, seriously. And so she preempts it by saying, now listen, people leave the world in all kinds of different ways.

29:34

I mean, listen, it's either going to be unexpected, you know, some kind of accident, right?

29:44

Natural causes, okay? I mean, suicide, there's not that many ways people really die.

29:54

I mean, so she's really throwing out a high probability question, okay?

30:01

And then her next question that she asked is, well, you're not a nurse, are you?

30:09

Now, think about this for a moment. All right, and I did the numbers on this.

30:15

So if you take the number of women who are old enough to be a nurse, okay?

30:20

So you take our population, now we gotta go down to the women. Now we gotta look at women within the working class, okay?

30:28

I mean, you've gotta be what? You gotta have a nursing degree. So you gotta be at least 22, 23 years old to be a nurse.

30:36

How long are you gonna work as a nurse? You know, maybe 60s or something, maybe 70 at oldest, you know?

30:44

So if you look at this, and I went and looked at all the census numbers, she had about a 97 .5

30:52

% chance of getting this right, that this woman wasn't a nurse. But notice how she asked the question.

30:59

She said, well, you're not a nurse, are you? So one time I was speaking in Orlinda, Tennessee, okay?

31:07

It's a very small farming community, far North Tennessee. It's almost in Kentucky.

31:14

In fact, it's just a few miles from the border. And so I'm in this little bitty farming town, and I'm giving basically a presentation very similar to this one.

31:29

And I showed the clip, and I had two ladies in front of me. And I'm like, okay,

31:35

I'm gonna pick the one on the left or the right. So I'm gonna pick this one. And I say, well, you're not a nurse, are you?

31:43

And the woman goes, well, actually, yes, I am. And of course, everybody just starts dying laughing because I mean, here we are.

31:50

I mean, we're like 30, 40 minutes away from the nearest hospital, okay? They don't even have a doctor in their town.

31:57

At the time, okay? In fact, I think that there was less, I think there was like 900 people or 800 people or something total in the town, which included the outskirts and the farming areas.

32:11

And so, I mean, highly improbable that this would happen. And so when everyone stopped laughing, including myself,

32:18

I said, no, this is perfect. I said, so what if the lady had answered, yes,

32:23

I am a nurse? Well, she would have said, notice she asked the question, you're not a nurse, are you?

32:30

And she said, yes, but you know what? I thought that you might be because spirit is giving me the sign and it shows me that you took very good care of him.

32:41

And that's the kind of care that you would only get from a nurse. So you see that if you are quick on your feet, you word questions the right way.

32:57

Yeah, you can get through this. You can absolutely do this.

33:03

It's not hard. Yes. Do you suppose that the sign she saw was a dollar sign?

33:12

Possibly, possibly. There's no telling. Well, and for her,

33:19

I mean, she's made a ton of money. And what's interesting about Teresa is she claims to be a

33:24

Catholic. And I'm just thinking, you know, I mean, as much as we could go in and talk about Catholicism and some of the stuff involved in Catholicism in some of the occult practices that are in the church in different areas of the world, you know, you think that it would be some kind of issue with them, but I digress.

33:48

But notice the one question that she asked specifically is, you know, was the dietary question.

33:57

So I'm seeing, was there chocolate on it? Did he not? And the woman's like, no, uh -uh. And then she stops and she is now, listen, it's not that I'm wrong.

34:08

I mean, can you imagine that? I'd love to, hey, I wanna go back to school and try that with my professor. No, see, it's not that my answer to your question is wrong.

34:17

It's just that the way I see it, it may be different than the way you see it.

34:23

And what you believe is the right answer is actually what my answer is. And that's essentially what she's saying to this lady.

34:32

And I don't know if you caught this or not, but you notice the lady next to her friend is starting to tear up as she starts to give this woman this wonderful, beautiful message allegedly.

34:47

I thought that was the lady she was talking to. I thought the lady crying was the one that was supposed to have the husband with the chocolate around his mouth.

34:56

Yeah, the lady on the right was the one she's talking to with the gray hair. The lady to her right or left was her friend.

35:05

And I mean, her friend's just, I mean, she's eating it up. I mean, she's just like, oh, wow. And this is what's interesting is when

35:12

I first started studying the occult, it was psychics and mediums specifically,

35:19

I noticed that, man, these responses are always good.

35:25

And so I started reading a bunch of books. I mean, from all the psychics I could finally, or mediums rather, finally

35:34

I'm reading a James Van Praagh book and I finally get a negative reading.

35:40

And I go, here it is. This is the first negative reading. And then

35:47

I'm getting excited going, okay, so they do give some negative ones. And then right at the very end, it was like a complete turn on the dive.

35:56

But, hey, I really appreciate it. It's like, oh man, every single one of these readings you ever hear, you never hear a reading where they go, you know what, you were a big jerk and you abused me when

36:08

I was sick and about to die. You put the pillow over my, you never hear anything like that.

36:14

And so why? It kind of goes back to what you said, could she be seeing a dollar sign? Well, yeah, you're not gonna make a lot of money like that.

36:22

But if you're given this positive, think for a moment. You know, this last year, year and a half has been really rough all around the world.

36:32

I'm sure at this point, we all know someone who's not only got COVID. I know a couple of people who have died from COVID.

36:39

In fact, about a month ago, a guy I went to college with, he died, he's 39 years old, leaves behind five kids.

36:51

Just as sad. The Saturday before last, a very, very good friend of our family, my wife and I, a couple that we've had over to our house many, many times for dinner and games.

37:08

He died unexpectedly, 42 years old. And in fact,

37:15

I did his funeral this past Monday. How much would one of those two widows give if they could have just one more moment, just one more conversation, and I love you, to hear a message from their husband?

37:37

How much would they pay for that? I mean, how much would you give? I mean, everybody in here,

37:44

I mean, listen, if you've lived long enough that you got a little wear on the tread of your life, you've lost someone.

37:52

I mean, I've, you know, I got the opportunity to have all four of my grandparents into my mid -twenties.

37:59

You know, I lost my last one in May of 2019. I'd love to hear from them.

38:06

I'd love to be able to show them my kids and have a conversation and how they've grown up.

38:12

And I mean, I got an 18 year old and a 16 year old and one's in college and the other's in high school and doing great.

38:19

Wouldn't we love to have that conversation? This is what these people pray on.

38:25

This is why we need to know this subject, because some people, even

38:32

Christians, are willing to take the bait because the longing that they have for that one that they've lost is so great.

38:44

That's the depth to this. Now, a question that I get from time to time, and I wanna bring it back up to you guys now, is this question of, does anyone question them?

39:03

And the answer to this question is yes, they have been questioned.

39:09

So I wrote a profile on James Van Praagh a few years ago, and he's very famous.

39:20

His heyday was really in the late 80s and early 90s. His fingerprint was on a couple of big time television shows.

39:28

He had a TV show himself. He was author of a number of books.

39:34

He's made a little bit of a comeback. One of those housewife shows had him on a couple of episodes, and so he kind of got a little limelight again.

39:46

He was challenged in a sense, okay? Now, you had the James Randi Educational Foundation.

39:53

They actually put out a million dollar challenge that was out there for a number of years that no psychic or, in fact, they even put a financial report out there that showed their bank account where there was over a million dollars, so they're good for the money.

40:09

I mean, you think if you're a real medium, hey, this is, man, this is just, hey, let's go get a million dollars.

40:18

I mean, if somebody says show us evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, we'll give you a million dollars.

40:25

I'm gonna go try to beat Gary Habermas to the punch, right? You know, I'm gonna go show some facts, okay?

40:33

But what happened was is James VanPreg had been out to an

40:42

ABC affiliate in Seattle, and he had performed a reading on one of their employees, and he had seven hits on 29 misses.

40:57

He, man, the lady was crying, and it was just this very emotional moment.

41:05

You know, big deal, right? I mean, it was, oh, it was just huge. Well, then there was a guy by the name of Michael Shermer.

41:12

Now, Michael Shermer is a, he's a skeptic. He's not a Christian. He is definitely not a

41:17

Christian. He went back to the same ABC affiliate in Seattle, went to the exact same lady and said, listen,

41:27

I wanna do a reading on you, just like James VanPreg did. But I'm gonna tell you,

41:32

I'm a skeptic. I don't think any of this is real, but I think that I can do just as good a job as James VanPreg, and she agreed to do it.

41:43

Well, he asked, instead of asking 35 questions, he asked 19 questions, and he had seven hits with only 12 misses.

41:55

So he, I mean, he blew VanPreg out of the water. I mean, he did a much better job of doing the reading.

42:03

Now, how did she act during his reading? There were no tears. It wasn't emotional or anything like that.

42:10

Now, listen, the law of averages says that if you ask the right questions and you're good enough, you can get some answers correct.

42:20

I liken it to like shooting in the dark and then turning on the lights and going, yes, that's exactly where I'm meant to shoot.

42:30

This is, in essence, kind of what they're doing. So that's a cold reading. That's how you would do a cold reading.

42:36

The next kind is a warm reading. Now, a warm reading is, and now this was,

42:41

I think, a lot more impressive years ago because this is where they use research. And so,

42:48

I mean, nowadays you can get on Facebook and some social media, pretty much find out whatever you wanna find out about somebody.

42:56

We're not near as private as we used to be or maybe as we should be.

43:02

But so what they would do is like, let's say you were gonna go hear some great psychic or something or medium.

43:09

You wanted to go be part of the show. Well, you would call up Ticketmaster, if you remember that, to get your tickets.

43:17

And what would they have you do? You had to pay by credit card. Well, now they have your information.

43:26

Well, now you can use that to go find their address.

43:32

You gotta have the address, right? Well, now you could go out and, man, you could pay somebody to go dig through their garbage.

43:40

You sold them their ticket so you know where they're sitting. And so what happens is, is you could have something like this happen.

43:49

You might even send somebody to their house. And so then what happens is when the show comes, they're wearing like a little earpiece or something.

43:57

They're like section A, row eight, seat 29. That's the

44:03

Smith family. That's Doug and Charlotte Smith. They're from Santee, California, whatever the case may be.

44:15

And so you walk over there, okay, spirit's guiding me here. This family right here, you two, you're married, aren't you?

44:25

Yes, yes. Well, let me do something with you. I wanna channel the spirits and just to kind of get you in the mood, just to kind of show you that this is all legit,

44:38

I wanna do something called a remote viewing. And then what happens is, is they begin to describe, okay,

44:47

I'm in front of your house. You have a one -story ranch -style home.

44:55

Your door is, your door's red. Okay, your door's red. Okay, I'm coming to your door.

45:03

I'm opening your door. Now I see I'm in a small entryway.

45:08

You have a little table there to the right. Above the table, there's a mirror and you have two kind of candlestick things on each side.

45:18

And you have portraits. It looks like one is a portrait of your kids.

45:24

You have two kids, one boy, one girl. And then

45:30

I see another couple over here. I'm thinking that might be your parents. Okay, now

45:36

I noticed that you have blue carpet. Okay, now there's a step down and I see a fireplace.

45:46

To the right of the fireplace is a table. And now the whole time, I mean, the couple's like, yeah, you're right.

45:52

How do you know all this? I mean, how's he doing this? I was just gonna say that I think you got it all right for me, but okay.

46:02

There you go. And so how do they do this? Well, here's the deal.

46:09

What this couple doesn't realize is that about four weeks ago, about a couple of days after buying their tickets to this, somebody came to their door fainting that their car was broke down and they needed to borrow their phone.

46:23

And they allowed this person to come in, use their phone, they used their phone, and then they left.

46:30

They were there three or four minutes. Well, this person's job was to walk in, to notice the color of the carpet, to notice what the entryway looked like.

46:42

What were the first things that you would see? And they go back out to the car, they write this stuff down and they give this research information to the psychic or medium.

46:54

And thus, there's how you get your remote viewing. That would be a warm reading. Now, the final kind of reading is known as a hot reading.

47:02

Now, this is where you actually have people planted in the crowd and they're actors. And so you have this kind of stuff going on.

47:13

And so whenever psychics are giving readings, they almost always focus in on three areas, either health, wealth, or relationships.

47:22

And when you think about it, these are the perfect areas to be interested in because,

47:28

I mean, everybody is interested about the future of their health or a loved one's health.

47:35

I mean, listen, if you know that something's gonna go wrong in your body and you know it ahead of time and you can do something to preempt it, like,

47:43

I mean, if I knew I was gonna have a heart attack in an hour, I would not be here right now.

47:48

I would say sayonara and I'm gonna be up at the hospital going, hey, I'm gonna have a heart attack here in 20 minutes. Can we do something?

47:56

Everyone would like to know their financial prognostication. And basically, everybody's in a relationship.

48:04

So you might not be taking a giant leap to tell a young man or a young lady that they're gonna meet someone special.

48:11

Well, sure they are. At least in their opinion, they're gonna meet someone special. So most people, you know what

48:17

I mean, don't marry on the first person they date. So in all reality, they're probably getting married gonna meet, you know, a couple of somebody specials or at least they think so before they actually commit.

48:32

So you can see how it's easy to weigh in into these areas.

48:38

But now the question I wanna focus on because I don't wanna use all of our time. I know we gotta do some Q &A and I don't wanna spend all your time.

48:46

So let's look at it like this. How should we respond to mediums? And now this response,

48:52

I'm going totally with what the Bible says. This isn't just my ideas or anything like that. The Bible tells us that we should test the spirits.

49:00

1 John 4, one says, beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God for many false prophets have gone out into the world.

49:11

That's important. Anybody claiming to have any kind of spiritual interaction, we gotta ask them, we gotta test the spirits.

49:19

It's kind of like, I know we're not here to talk about Mormonism, but there's a lot of, Mormonism is actually from, began with occultic practices by Joseph Smith.

49:29

In fact, he was even put in prison for some of the stuff that he did, but prior to starting

49:36

Mormonism. But even Mormons will say, if you just pray, Moroni 10 .4,

49:41

if you just pray and you ask the Holy Spirit to give you a sign concerning the Book of Mormon, you will receive that sign.

49:49

And my question is, how do you know it was the Holy Spirit and not a deceiving spirit? Well, it's the same thing.

49:56

When you're talking to this medium, well, how do you know that, how do you know that it's not an evil spirit trying to deceive you?

50:06

How do you know? How does this work? Well, that's the issue. That's the problem at hand for the medium.

50:17

They don't know. They can't know. Now, as Christians, it's really easy for us to know if the spirit claims to be, well, first of all, there's one

50:26

Holy Spirit and there's thousands upon thousands of evil spirits.

50:33

So first of all, second of all, if what this spirit is communicating to you is in opposition to God's word or contradicts

50:43

God's word, then you can be certain that it's not the Holy Spirit that you're communicating with.

50:51

All right, next, the Bible tells us to avoid mediums. In fact, Leviticus 19 .31

50:57

says, do not turn to mediums or necromancers. Do not seek them out. And so make yourselves unclean by them.

51:04

I am the Lord, your God. Finally, we should heed the scripture's warning.

51:14

You say, well, Han, what warning are you talking about? In Deuteronomy chapter number 18, verses 10 through 12, the

51:21

Bible gives us a warning about dealing with folks like this. And this is what the scripture says.

51:28

There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead.

51:47

For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations, the

51:53

Lord, your God is driving them out before you. I don't think the

51:59

Bible could be any clearer than what we see here in terms of how we should respond to those who claim to do these practices.

52:11

So, should a believer go get a tarot card reading or a palm reading or go to someone who gazes into a crystal ball?

52:21

Absolutely not according to the Bible. According to the Bible, we shouldn't play with the

52:27

Ouija board. That's trying to communicate with the spirits. That's trying to be someone communicating with the dead.

52:36

Should we go to a psychic or a medium? According to the Bible, absolutely not.

52:41

Because what we can know for certain is that death seals your destination.

52:48

And so, when a person is gone, when someone dies, their soul leaves their body, they're either in the presence of God or they're in Hades, aka hell.

53:03

That's where they are. You're one of two places according to scripture. So, I don't know how we're doing with time.

53:12

I don't know how this works as far as Q &A is concerned. Let me see. I'm listening, so I'm not looking at the time.

53:21

It's 1040, so that's 740. Usually we end at eight o 'clock

53:29

California time. Where are you located? I am in the great state of Texas.

53:34

So, it is 940 where I'm at. Okay, so we would be down about 10.

53:40

So, if you've got about five or 10 more minutes of information, then we can do some

53:46

Q &A. Yeah, we can talk a little bit more about that. So, one of the things that you find with the occult, and you'll see this, you see this come in within our culture.

54:01

Let me look at my time here, okay. Our culture has this desire, this desire to be able to gain knowledge, to be able to make some kind of connection.

54:15

And how we've seen this come in is so much through like the movies.

54:22

And I mean, this is the Halloween season, if you will. And so, so much of this has been commercialized in such a way that I think we as believers, we need to be careful.

54:37

And we need to take it seriously. But as we approach others, we need to be very winsome in how we handle this.

54:50

While inside we may be like, waving the alarm bells and going nuts because we realize the depths of this and the serious nature of this.

55:02

We need to be able to kind of steal a word from the Christian apologist,

55:07

Greg Cockel, who wrote the book, Tactics. In the book, he said, put a stone in their shoe. Ask questions, especially if the person claims to be a

55:17

Christian. You know, you might wanna ask them something to the effect of how do you balance what you're reading or this movie you're wanting to go watch or this practice that you're doing or going to see the site?

55:33

How do you match that up with what the Bible says? Or ask them this question.

55:39

Have you ever considered what the Bible says about going to someone who claims to be able to communicate with the dead?

55:46

And then give them these verses that we brought up today. 1 John 4, 1,

55:53

Deuteronomy 18, verses 10 through 12, Leviticus 19, 31, just to name a few.

56:02

So how do we do that? How does this work?

56:10

And try to get them to a place where they can start thinking about it. And we don't wanna come across as, oh, this is so satanic and you gotta get out of it right now.

56:21

We feel that way, but a lot of times, people will start to kind of pull away and be like, man, I'm just having a little bit of fun.

56:27

And so we wanna think about how we approach people with this and kind of what they're thinking and what's going on with this.

56:37

How do they see this? Some of the other stuff that I've noticed is these practices are often thought to be kind of like just for fun.

56:49

I mean, I've spent time at like metaphysical bookstores. And you go and you see this stuff that's around there and it's playing within the spiritual realm and it's all these different things.

57:05

In fact, you see a lot of this come through by way of pantheism.

57:10

And it would be interesting to do this, but you would be surprised to know how much pantheism as a worldview influences and is really kind of the major worldview that's being taught through the majority of our movies.

57:28

In fact, at the school I teach at Arlington Baptist University, in my introduction to the

57:35

Bible class, the very first lecture I have is on worldviews. And when we get to pantheism,

57:42

I just show them clips from movies and say, hey, this is what's out there. This is what you're seeing.

57:48

And so what happens is now all of a sudden they're starting to introduce these other religious ideas.

57:54

And the scary nature of this is that even if you're just playing with it, you're opening yourself up to a demonic realm.

58:07

Now, one thing that we have to understand is that Christians cannot be possessed.

58:14

If you have the Holy Spirit residing in you, a demonic spirit cannot come in.

58:21

Now, in the same breath, you can be oppressed. And so I think it's important that we realize that just because we're saved doesn't mean that we have a freedom to run around with this.

58:33

In fact, even as a Christian who's spent time studying the occult, listen,

58:40

I don't come at this lightly. Whenever, especially as I was researching and learning about the occult,

58:48

I spent a lot of time in prayer. Probably the one I bathed in prayer the most was when

58:55

I was digging into the Ouija board. Not so much that I was scared to do it, but I was very careful in how

59:05

I was moving forward. And I really wanted to make sure that I was walking into this with it bathed in prayer and the protection of the

59:19

Holy Spirit as I walked into it. And I was very thankful that during all my studies, nothing weird happened or anything like that.

59:28

Of course, now that I'm a couple of years past it, hey, it'd been kind of cool if something weird would have happened.

59:33

It would have given me some great stories, but I'm okay with being a little bit boring. I read enough crazy stories and scary stories in all my research to it, but we've got to avoid the temptation though to be able to want to get what

59:56

God is offering us by taking a shortcut. And as believers, if we have a loved one who's a believer and they pass away, the hope that we have in 1

01:00:13

Thessalonians 4, 13 through 17, that chapter ends with, therefore comfort one another with these words.

01:00:21

Well, what's that comfort? That if you believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, we're gonna be reunited, okay?

01:00:30

There's a time coming where the dead in Christ will rise first. We will join them together.

01:00:39

You're gonna get to see your loved one again. It's a farewell and not a goodbye. And you're gonna get that opportunity to be able to have that conversation again and to talk with them.

01:00:52

So listen, we always get in trouble when we try to shortcut

01:00:58

God, whether it's through money, sex, power, whatever the case may be, we'll always get ourselves in the most trouble when we try to shortcut the good that God has for us.

01:01:11

And when it comes to being reunited with our loved ones, it's the same thing. Shortcutting God, I never thought of it that way, but I think a lot of us pointing finger at me, try to do things that, oh,

01:01:29

I think God would want me to do this. Yeah, it's a real temptation at all times.

01:01:38

You're anything but boring. This has been very interesting. And we have to take care of some business first because otherwise

01:01:46

I'll forget. So if you could tell us where we can reach you, if your website, oh,

01:01:52

I see your website right there. If there's any book you wanna advertise or something that you write or anything that our audience and our future audience, we get a lot of traffic on Bitchute, because Christians and conspiracy theorists, we all go to Bitchute.

01:02:16

And so anyways, lots of people will be viewing this. So tell us how we can reach you.

01:02:23

All right, well, let me do this. I'm just gonna throw up a slide here real quick and I will put this information.

01:02:30

So as you saw before, our website is watchman .org. Let's see here.

01:02:37

But we also have a podcast and you can text the word podcast.

01:02:43

I'm gonna put the number up here to 50700. I'm gonna put a couple other things up here too.

01:02:53

We talked about, you know what? I think it was before the recording started. The first Thursday of every month, with the exception of November, we have the

01:03:03

Atheist and Christian Book Club. And we talk about all kinds of stuff, whether it be creation arguments for the existence of God, the problem of evil seems to come up all the time.

01:03:15

Those are some great places to, those are some big topics that we talk about.

01:03:24

Listen, if you wanna be a part of it, you can absolutely do that.

01:03:30

It is completely free. We don't charge to be part of the book club and it would be a blessing to have you around.

01:03:37

Of course, you know, we love having Christians there. I'm gonna go back. You actually have to read a book though. Well, you know, sometimes you do.

01:03:45

Sometimes we'll pull YouTube videos and we'll do it that way.

01:03:51

And so you can, if you didn't get a chance to read the book or something of that nature, you can watch those videos and get caught up.

01:04:02

A couple of things. We have a podcast first Monday of every, or excuse me, on Monday, every single

01:04:09

Monday, we have a new podcast drop. We cover a lot of topics. Probably this last year, we've been a little bit heavier on the kind of the science side.

01:04:20

And we'll have both sides of the topic come on.

01:04:29

And so we try to give everybody the opportunity to be able to think through the subjects and to kind of work through it and understand it.

01:04:43

But we also cover a lot of cult topics too. We've had kind of some of the who's who when it comes to Christian apologetics on there.

01:04:52

If you would like to be part of the Atheist and Christian Book Club, you can go to watchman .org slash Zoom. Then we also have profiles.

01:05:04

We put out six profiles every year and we've been doing this for, wow, for almost 30 years now.

01:05:11

It's kind of hard to imagine that. Now what profiles are, is they're four page scholarly quality articles on cults, the occult,

01:05:22

New Age spirituality, counterfeit Christian groups, controversial doctrines and teachers, big players on the field, whether it be somebody like Lawrence Krauss or Richard Dawkins.

01:05:37

And we've been doing this for over 25 years. So you can kind of do the math and think that that's gotta be somewhere.

01:05:43

It's well over a hundred profiles, okay? We're not quite, I don't think we're to 130 yet, but we're pretty close to it.

01:05:50

And so we cover everything from acupuncture to Zoroastrianism. And my favorite thing about the profiles is they're completely free because I'm cheap.

01:06:01

But listen, when I tell you they're free, I don't mean give us your credit card and then there'll be free.

01:06:07

No, no, I mean, they're absolutely free. We'll email them to you or we'll snail mail them to you. However you'd like to receive them.

01:06:14

In fact, you can even text the word profile to 50700 and you can get some of our past profiles.

01:06:25

Listen, it's my favorite thing that we do as a ministry is the profile. And I think it may be the best thing we do as a ministry.

01:06:32

And it is completely free. So take advantage of this resource.

01:06:38

And that's at watchmen .org, subscribe. That's where they would get that. Yes. Or text profile to 50700.

01:06:45

Yes. Awesome. Yeah. And so can y 'all see my screen by any chance?

01:06:50

Okay, yeah. So yeah, what you see up there is exactly what you need and you can come and take part of it.

01:06:58

And we have other resources for sale there on our website. And of course you're always welcome to that.

01:07:05

But I wanna make sure that I give you some tools in your toolbox, because if you only have one tool and that's a hammer, after a while everything's gonna look like a nail.

01:07:14

So I wanna turn you onto these items and make sure you take advantage of them, okay?

01:07:20

Because there's no reason not to. And thank you very much. And that's what this ministry is about.

01:07:29

First Peter 3 .15, always be ready with a defense.

01:07:36

And we do need those tools. And just so I don't forget, we are

01:07:41

Creation Fellowship Santee. I am not good at this.

01:07:47

I like being behind the scenes. But anyways, our ministry is Creation Fellowship Santee.

01:07:52

We meet on Thursday nights at 6 .30 Pacific, 9 .30 Eastern. You can email us at creationfellowshipsantee

01:08:02

S -A -N -T -E -E at gmail .com. I run that mailbox.

01:08:07

I do not spam you. I send out one email a week.

01:08:13

And if we don't have a class, I don't send out an email. So that is where you can reach us on Facebook, Creation Fellowship.

01:08:20

We have a public page and a private page. And then we have three video platforms, Rumble, BitChute, and YouTube.

01:08:30

And if you have any questions that you're going to ask that YouTube would find not welcome, we ask that you ask them after we stop the recording.

01:08:42

So I'm gonna go quickly to our first question, Brady, from Facebook. And that is, is

01:08:49

Halloween dealing with demons or the dead? How do you describe Halloween? Yeah, we actually have a profile on Halloween that would give you even a greater in -depth answer than what

01:09:02

I'm about to give, but it goes back to All Hallows' Eve, Saw -Weem. And you see it even across cultures, which

01:09:10

Disney has tapped into these past couple of years with their one going into the

01:09:16

Mexican culture. But yeah, it's an idea, this concept and belief.

01:09:23

You find it with the Druids as well, that there was this day in this time where the spirits for this short period of time were allowed to walk the earth.

01:09:35

And so that's where you get into the wearing costumes is so that you could, in essence, hide from or deceive these spirits.

01:09:48

Also not so much a pumpkin, but they would carve potatoes with scary faces.

01:09:54

And that was to be put out there to scare away the spirits. And so that was the idea.

01:10:00

Now, what we have here in America is really what we do with all spiritual holidays in this country.

01:10:06

And that's we commercialize them and we fantasize them. So with Christmas, we have

01:10:14

Santa Claus. With Easter or resurrection, we have the

01:10:20

Easter bunny. With Halloween, it's really more about going out and getting candy and dressing up like some body or something.

01:10:31

And so you - So that's where that dressing up came from though, that back in the day that you would dress up and try to hide.

01:10:41

You would be hiding from the spirit or you would be the spirit hiding from the people? No, no, this was all meant to protect you and to keep you from having any problems with the spirits.

01:10:54

Okay, and you do have a profile on that. So a person could text or go to watchman .org.

01:11:01

Yes, in fact, let me just mention that real quick. So if you go to watchman .org, you can go over on the sidebar, you'll see a little tab there that says profiles, and you can click on that.

01:11:14

And we have a very generous sampling of past profiles. And I know that one's on there.

01:11:21

Now, if you want the whole collection, we offer that hard copy for $60 or $59.

01:11:28

But we have a digital version that's $25. It's on sale right now for $25.

01:11:35

And the cool thing with the digital one is that it can go on your phone, your tablet, your computer, anyone who lives in your house in the same domicile as you, they can have it on their phone, their computer, their tablet, and it's still just the $25.

01:11:50

And from that, you can actually email or print the profile from your phone, computer, or tablet.

01:12:01

We made it digital, oh golly, I guess about five, six years ago. And it's so cool because when

01:12:10

I was in the pastorate, people would say, hey, what do you know about this or that?

01:12:15

And I'd go, man, I got a profile on that. And then if we were at church, it was great. But then when

01:12:20

I was a church planter, I didn't carry my big old giant three -ring notebook that's now almost 600 pages with me.

01:12:27

And so now I get it on my phone. And so now if somebody asks me about a profile, hang on just a minute, and a couple of taps, boom.

01:12:36

Here, type in your email address, or you can actually text it to somebody. That's a new feature that we put out a couple of years ago.

01:12:44

So now, hey, here, I'll text it to you. Oh man, that's fabulous. And it texts them a PDF of the profile.

01:12:51

And so yeah, but the Halloween one is definitely one of the free samples.

01:12:57

We try to make sure that the most popular ones are some of the free ones there on the website.

01:13:04

Okay, and I just wanna clarify for the audience profile that he's speaking of is a description of the topic that we're talking about, any topic on the occult or whatever.

01:13:15

So you can get those profiles. Now, one of our regulars, Alpha Rat on the screen, but his name is

01:13:22

Jeff, and he says he never goes for the medium. He only goes for the large. But he has a short testimony.

01:13:31

Is that correct, Jeff, that you wanna give, and you wanna give it on the recording? Yeah. All right.

01:13:38

I just wanted to share this because anybody who might be dealing with this might need to know.

01:13:46

Brady, I really appreciate your discussion. And I especially think that was well said, what you said about never try to shortcut

01:13:56

God because there was a point in my life when I did just that. I was raised as a

01:14:02

Lutheran, and I got disappointed with the Lutheran church because the church that I went to only covered maybe 15 % of the

01:14:13

Bible. We got the gospel, but we didn't get any foundation for it.

01:14:19

And I started struggling with questions, and eventually

01:14:25

I left the church because of that. And I thought I could have a relationship with God on my own.

01:14:32

And what happened was at some point I bought a set of tarot cards.

01:14:39

Oh, wow. And I thought they were fun. And I started dabbling in it, and I started playing with that kind of stuff.

01:14:46

And over the years, things got, I don't know, my life just started going south.

01:14:56

And at some point somebody came into my life and asked me, do you know God? And I kind of had to look at him and say, well,

01:15:04

I think so, but I'm not really sure. And he started interacting with me on spiritual things in a

01:15:11

Christian way. And at some point I got very convicted about something that was happening in my life.

01:15:20

I don't know if it was something he said or what it was, but I got convicted.

01:15:26

And I went and I took my tarot cards and all my other cultic stuff, and I took my blowtorch and I burned it all.

01:15:35

And I - Yeah, they did that in the Bible. Yeah, well, this is serious, because after I did that for a few minutes,

01:15:45

I felt really good. I thought, well, I've done something spiritually right for a change.

01:15:50

And I thought God would honor me for that. But then I went back into the house and I tripped on my shoelace, sat down and tied it, and the doorbell rang.

01:16:02

I went to the door, there was nobody there. The phone rang, I answered it, there was nobody there. I walked to the kitchen and I tripped on the same shoelace again, having just tied it.

01:16:14

And that went on several times. The doorbell rang again, nobody there.

01:16:21

The phone rang again, nobody there. And I'm thinking, this is really weird. But I thought, okay,

01:16:27

I'm just gonna settle down, I'm gonna eat something. And in those days,

01:16:32

I would take a little bit of frozen chicken and put it in my, I had a little toaster oven.

01:16:39

I think you remember these little things. It's, you know, this is before microwaves, but I would take a couple of pieces of chicken and put it in there.

01:16:48

And it would be 30, you know, 15 minutes and I'd flip it over and 15 minutes later, it'd be done.

01:16:54

Well, I went back to it 10 minutes after I put it in there. And it was scorched, it was black scorched.

01:17:04

And I pulled it out and it was still frozen in the center. And I'm thinking, this is just too crazy.

01:17:10

And then I threw it away and then I was walking back in the living room and I tripped on my shoelace again.

01:17:16

Oh, wow. But here's what I did. I called this friend of mine who was helping me through the spiritual things and he wasn't home.

01:17:29

But I left a message on his answering machine. And I said, I don't care what time of day or night you get in, but please call me as soon as you get home.

01:17:38

And I put the phone by my bed and I crawled in under the covers. This was like two in the afternoon. But it was, this is what was going on.

01:17:49

So I just stayed under the covers. I prayed a lot and I read my

01:17:56

Bible and eventually I just fell asleep. But my friend called me faithfully at about midnight that night.

01:18:06

And he says, I got your message, what's going on? And I told him what I did. I told him what was going on.

01:18:12

And he just says, okay, we're gonna pray about this. And he quoted me some scriptures. And he says, you did the right thing but you need to know that God is on your side and God is more powerful than these demons.

01:18:26

They don't have a place in your life. So that was profound. After that,

01:18:31

I had a perfect peace and it was awesome. And I just wanted to share that. But I also wanted to say that periodically in the course of my life,

01:18:40

I still have events where I know I'm being hounded by demons. It's like, once you open that door if you don't shut it all the way, they will find a way in and they will pester you to no end.

01:18:53

So you get the victory over that. And that's why we have Brady tonight and explaining to us why.

01:19:00

Does everybody know somebody? I used to do paranormal research. My aunt took me to Edgar Cayce Dream Center.

01:19:07

Really? Yes. We got a profile on him. Yeah, I know. And I saw things as a child in my mind that kids shouldn't be seeing.

01:19:19

And so this has been in my past. Maybe that's why I'm so fascinated by it.

01:19:24

I'm not gonna give any big confessions or anything, but this is real. And we need people like you explaining what's going on because sometimes, our flesh brings us into a lot of things, okay?

01:19:38

We've got a lot of bad luck because our flesh is, you know, fleshy. But there are spirits that you can attract just like Jeff said.

01:19:50

So I think - I wanna say one last quick little thing. Okay, because I've got other people.

01:19:57

I know we're running out of time here, but I just wanted to put a plug in for Karl Payne's book.

01:20:03

It's called Spiritual Warfare. It's by Karl Payne, K -A -R -L -P -A -Y -N -E.

01:20:09

I just read that a couple of months ago. And that is really profound. If somebody is dealing with spiritual problems, this will give you victory.

01:20:19

It's very well written book. Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your testimony and telling us about that because you're hitting on the important thing and that's we're all better off not to open the door to begin with.

01:20:32

Yes. So very good. All right, I know you got more questions. Oh, yes. I'm reading through them.

01:20:38

I've got some comments. Let's do it this way because I don't have my glasses on and I can't find them.

01:20:44

If anybody has a question, unmute and go ahead and let's ask Brady and let's wrap this up in about 10 minutes, okay?

01:20:52

Go. Diane, did you have a question?

01:21:00

Some people might not wanna be recorded though. Oh, yes. Yeah, let's stop recording. And thank you,

01:21:06

Joyce. Terri usually does this. Terri's been just, she's a good announcer and she's good with,

01:21:12

I like to send emails and that's what I like to do. So Terri, if you wanna go ahead and stop live stream,

01:21:18

I will stop recording and then we can be a little more free in our speech.