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American Reformation
We believe the American church needs reformation. To go forward we must go back. This podcast will explore the theology and practices of the early church and other eras of discipleship multiplication and apply those learnings to our post-Christian/secular American culture. American Reformation is a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. Follow us at uniteleadership.org. We consult, bring together cohorts of congregations for peer to peer learning, and certify leaders for work in the church and world.
American Reformation
Encountering God: A Journey of Faith with Ida and Walt Cowart
Tim engages with Ida and Walt Cowart, senior trainers at Restoring the Foundations. They discuss their journey in ministry, the importance of personal encounters with God, and the need for reformation within the American Christian Church.
The Cowarts share insights on prophetic gifting, the significance of joy in faith, and the impact of generational baggage and demonic oppression on individuals. Their ministry focuses on helping people recognize their calling and experience freedom in Christ. We explore the deep connections between generational baggage, demonic oppression, and the healing process.
They discuss personal experiences with accidents and trauma, the importance of breaking generational curses, and the hidden nature of demonic influence. The conversation emphasizes the significance of walking out freedom after ministry, the transformative power of metanoia, and the practical steps involved in the ministry process. Ultimately, they highlight the importance of community and ongoing support in the healing journey.
Welcome to the American Reformation Podcast, tim Allman. Here Today I get the privilege of hanging out with two ministers of the gospel, a husband and wife ministry team Ida and Walt Cowart. Let me tell you a little bit about them. They are a part of Restoring the Foundations. We're going to be talking about this ministry. They have been a part of Restoring the Foundations since 2007. They went through six months of training and they're now senior trainers. You had me at senior trainer.
Speaker 1:We love discipleship, multiplication, so anytime we start talking this is a podcast, the United Leadership Collective about training trainers we're moving toward multiplication and the ministry moving out even beyond, beyond your boundary water. So praise be to God. Before that, walt was in construction. They've been serving in the church, though it sounds like all of their lives. Ida was a 40 year veteran teacher, math teacher and a trainer of other teachers, and they have five sons and 12 grandchildren. Their first grandchild just married. So this is a new season of life for you. Hey, ida and Walt, how you doing? Thank you for being with me today on the American Reformation podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for the invite. We're excited just to share with you kind of what we do and also learn a little bit about what you're doing. Kind of what we do and also learn a little bit about what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Hey, let's have some fun. So opening question for this podcast is we interact with a lot of people across the spectrum in the American Christian church, so, from Catholic to charismatic, where many of us are listening are Lutheran. How are you praying, though, as you look at the broader landscape of the American Christian church? How are you praying, though, as you look at the broader landscape of the American Christian Church? How are you praying for a reformation?
Speaker 3:Well, I think we're praying for anyone who has grabbed onto Christ to begin to encounter him in a more meaningful way, to begin to encounter his love personally, and that cuts across every denomination. And that cuts across every denomination. Every one of us who is a believer has the, the Methodist, and then became a Catholic and now I'm a charismatic.
Speaker 1:So I have a real heart. You've got it covered. I got it covered.
Speaker 3:I have a real heart for all of those people, because I know they're genuinely seeking God. Some people just don't know what to do to find him know what to do to find him.
Speaker 2:Amen, our heart's really just to see people that are broken, people that even though they've received Jesus, they're still walking pretty much with a limp, and try to help them be able to come face to face, have an encounter with the Lord Jesus, so that they know that there's more for them, they can begin to see their destiny, begin to see the calling that God has for their life. And many of us are locked into a pathway that was established formerly in our life, even by our ancestors, and so we thought that was all there could be, and so that's where we stayed. You live in a coal mine city. Your grandparents were coal miners, your dad's a coal miner. You think that's your call, and God's really looking for gold now, and I really believe that part of what we do is help people discover that God has put gold in their life and they can come out and begin to walk in, that they're a valued son, a valued daughter in the kingdom.
Speaker 1:That's so good. I'm curious about your artwork behind you. For those that aren't listening, they're just listening. It's a wooden bridge. It looks maybe a little flimsy. It's got the kind of corded you know you're walking. I'm visualizing this. In the other side there's a tree and I'm visualizing it's probably 100, 200 feet above the ground. It's a little potentially perilous, a little dangerous. Do you use this piece of art? It's quite fascinating.
Speaker 2:Actually we do and we actually positioned ourselves so you could see this. A lot of times we look at it is people could be here and wanting to go into their calling, but you know there's a fear base. I'm scared to walk out. Is it going to support me? But then there's also the call that we're on the other side, in kind of the gray area, not clearly seen, and the Lord's over here beckoning come to me. And so we're going. Can I trust the bridge, even though you're over there? Can I trust that I can come to you? So we've used it both ways. We've had people sometimes a little bit afraid when they've seen it on, when we've done ministry online, but some of them have recognized I'm on that journey of going across and I'm going to make it across. So that's why we've used that.
Speaker 1:I think it's a powerful image. That is the journey of faith and trust and dependence upon the God who is within us, but he's ahead of us as well. He loves to call us to him. In a Lutheran there's a number of listeners here that are Lutheran we can be, I don't know, theologically skittish toward anything that smacks of experience or or feelings are emotions and the way even at seminary sometimes this would get your emotions can lie to you and uh, and so the the kind of and I'm I'm painting with a broad brush here Just love to get your take.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the caricature that we use of those that are maybe in a more charismatic or spirit filled, is that it's all emotion and we're working ourselves up emotionally to get to God. And I think Luther's take was no, god is right there, he's with you, but sometimes so I'm going to, I'm going to I have to challenge sometimes the internal conversation that we have. I have to challenge sometimes the internal conversation that we have. Sometimes our hesitancy to discuss emotions at all leads us to a stunted view of how God wants to work with us. So here's the way I kind of get characterized.
Speaker 1:Some people leave worship and they're like are you a Lutheran or a Baptist, because I'm very passionate about talking about Jesus. Because I'm very passionate about talking about Jesus, and so one of my hopes for our church body is that we would see that passive faith is a gift, that God comes to us, he meets us through word and sacrament. This is a gift and then he calls us to something that feels like joy. He calls us to himself, but it's always through the fear, through the anxiety. There is the call of Jesus, and that that call it fills me with joy. Any response to that, though. I'm just kind of painting with a broader brush about the inter-ecumenical conversations that I'm praying we can have as the wider church.
Speaker 3:Well, I think that sometimes the word joy as the wider church, well, I think that sometimes the word joy we think of it as a happy dance. Joy with Jesus is systemic, it is what flows through you, it is your stabilizing place. It is not an emotion, although it can manifest as an emotion. But joy is that certainty that you have Jesus Christ in you, around you and with you. And I think some people misunderstand how you can express the joy, because we have totally different ways of expressing, because we are totally different people, because we are totally different people. Being of Scandinavian, I'm pretty like, okay, I'm right along the continuum and I don't go very far, and Walter has a different background, but both of us experience the same kind of joy. It's just manifested differently. And I think I'm really grateful that I have such strong Lutheran and Catholic background because it lets me know that that true joy exists for all. It isn't a denominational thing, it's a Jesus thing. That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as far as I am the emotional tigger you know, I'm bouncing and doing it's. I feel like part of it is God gave us emotions and he expressed emotions and I feel like when I look at Jesus, I see a happy Jesus. I don't look at a Jesus that's got a hammer and he's just waiting to thump me. I don't look at a father God as someone who's repelling. I look at him as open arms, inviting, and I feel like, in restoring the foundations, what we want to do is get people back to what it would have been like for them if they were the one in the garden before the fall and they were spending time daily with the Lord, that the Lord was inviting. He was having conversations, he wanted to love them and show care, and so that's what he's doing.
Speaker 2:And I feel like many times we've been raised up with a thinking and a theology that is more suppressed, more restrictive, and it's like people. The joy of the Lord is not demonstrated like. Nehemiah is talking. There should be something, begin to come forward. People were offended by David dancing before the Lord, and so we saw that always through time that that's happened, but I feel like Jesus wants us to be a people that can show that relationship with him, that care, that love that he's given us, that it shines out of our face. I tell people a lot of times we do a lot of prophetic activating, helping people stir their prophetic gifts and their giftings. And I tell them a lot of times people are reading your face. Did you just bite a lemon or something else? And so what is coming out of your face? People read that.
Speaker 3:Well, I think the other thing about joy is that it manifests in our behavior. We don't have to be shouting and yelling and dancing, but we do have to extend love to people. We do have to meet them where they are and begin to help them see the joy in us. That doesn't have to be wild, but it can be. But it's there and they respond to that. If there's an atmosphere of peace and joy around us, they want to be where we are. Okay, what makes you different? Well, that difference is Jesus, and I think that's a fun part of being a minister. It's just a, it's an exciting part. I like it.
Speaker 1:I do too. I like the phrase Jesus is smiling. Feel free to smile back.
Speaker 1:Yes absolutely, and that's the proper nature of God. God is love. God is not. He set his wrath on his son for us and for the world, so that his back would never be turned on us, no matter how dark our days get. He is with us, he's for us and he smiles over us and he's, he's, carrying us through life. It's very, very good. You use a phrase, walt, that, uh, for some may be kind of interesting how do you you said prophetic gifting, you you draw out a prophetic gifting, would you? In our, in our tribe, we don't talk, uh, prophet or prophetess or really a prophetic word too often, though it certainly is in the Bible. Again, it kind of goes back to our hesitancy around kind of over-emotionalism and things of that nature. So what does that look and kind of sound like? And then we'll get into more what Restoring the Foundations does, because I'm very curious. But yeah, could you define prophetic gifting and how you kind of call that out of people?
Speaker 2:Sure, we do a lot of work with Lutherans and Lutheran churches. We have a lot of really disciples that I've trained in the Lutheran church there in Omaha that we're going to see here in another week and a half. But when we look at what Paul was doing in 1 Corinthians, he's calling out a church that really was operating in their spiritual gifts but yet they had some problems. And so when we look at chapter 12, he says I don't want you to be ignorant anymore, I want to begin to introduce these gifts to you. But what Paul did not do was show or teach how to ignite something. So I'm giving you a candle but I never showed you how to light a match, to light the candle. But in the Jewish family or in the early church and stuff, things were not always everything written down, it was just there, was by word of mouth, and they were followed. Because the Old Testament we saw prophets went to school of prophets. They were followed because the Old Testament we saw prophets went to school of prophets. Their parents were prophets. They just followed that line.
Speaker 2:But what we do in prophetic praying is follow that we speak words of encouragement, edification and comfort. There's no one that would be on this broadcast and no one you'd ever meet that doesn't need to be comforted, that doesn't need to be built up and encouraged, that doesn't need to know that Jesus really loves them that day, any people we meet in, let's just say, a Starbucks or at Fry's or any place we go, I try to just speak something that would encourage them. And, ida, a lot of times we'll pick something out there wearing or something and say how much it looks so good on you or something and said how much it looks so good on you. What we're beginning to do is try to introduce, you know, that part of God's love that can just encourage and build somebody up. Prophetic praying is really. It's not preaching or anything. It's beginning to allow God to drop his thoughts into us and speak his thoughts. So it'd be like just talking to Tim right now and just saying you know, god just recognizes the road path you're on right now and he's joining you into a position that no longer you have to just follow him. You can walk side by side together and begin to experience. So, in other words, god is changing that shepherd, sheep position to friends where they can walk together, and that's really what we try to do is try to help people recognize God has put things in them, and I teach a lot about that.
Speaker 2:Prophetic is the one thing that in Corinthians that Paul mentions that you can covet, and the reason you covet it is it's like a pool of water out of Psalms, chapter one, that the tree is planted by the river of life and out of that begins, and that's will lead you into RTF.
Speaker 2:But we'll bring in life to us, and so all these gifts are in this water that God's given us and we need to stay rooted there. And then all of a sudden he will point out or bring out that gift so that we can activate that. And so many people say I don't hear from God, I don't know anything about God doing that. And by the end of the day or end of you know, a couple of weeks or whatever hour we do training, all of a sudden they're hearing from the Lord, they're doing these things, and we've seen a Lutheran church turned upside down there in Omaha, nebraska, where the pastor is hungry for this and he wants more, and so there is something going on. We have to realize that this is God is doing something in the earth today, restoring what has been lost, and that's why we talk about restoring the foundations.
Speaker 3:I just want to point out that you mentioned our picture and often Jesus talked in pictures. Sometimes he drew, but he talked in pictures. And so, as Walter was talking, I saw you on that path. I'm not sure which direction you were going, but the Lord was right beside you. The Lord was walking with you. So that path is secure because he's right there. So often we use a visual, because people remember a visual and then they can take that to the Lord and ask for more explanation. We don't have to give it to them, we don't try to explain it, but when they sit down with the Lord, tim says well, okay, lord, which way am I going on this path that's between you and him?
Speaker 2:Amen, so I hope that answered your question.
Speaker 1:No, it does. It's good. It's good and it's praying scripture over people too. It's nothing other than what we've already received from the Lord in his word, but it's directly applied to that person on their journey. I love the shifting, the metaphor. Jesus is the good shepherd and we are his sheep, to be sure, but it's the shift that Jesus makes with his disciples. You know you, I call you friends, I'm right there. I'm right there with you, and it'll be good if I go away, because then I'm going to send the comforter, the Holy Spirit, the one who will make you his temple and you will be a light to the world, salt to bring seasoning and preservation into the world. And this is all my work. But I'm right beside you as your friend and teacher and Lord. The mysteries of the incarnation of Christ still befuddle me. I mean, there's so much that's just so beyond us. And how Christ, the God who is fully other, the one who spoke the cosmos into being, is the one who calls me his own and makes me his temple.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's quite mysterious and quite wonderful. So let's get into what Restoring the Foundations is all about. Tell a little bit of the story of you getting into it and then some of the main kind of teachings. And what are you offering to those who come alongside you on this journey through Restoring the Foundations?
Speaker 3:Well, we were part of a church in the Seattle Washington area and one of the pastors was gifted with a Restoring the Foundations ministry for both him and his wife and he came back and shared that with the senior pastor and the senior pastor said okay, everybody's going to go through this training which, at a very introductory level, we were mission directors in our church, so we were part of that were mission directors in our church, so we were part of that. We went through the training and there were two, two weekends of training and we promptly came back and put the book on the shelf and said that's not for us. Well, a year later the founders of Restoring the Foundations were in our church and I saw my husband get up and go over and talk to them and said we're coming to North Carolina Because we as mission directors were then strongly encouraged to go through the full ministry, which is a 15 hour format for each person. So Walter committed us to go to North Carolina and we went back thinking we were going to stay for just the beginning part and the founders, jester and Betsy Kilstra, came to us and said we think you ought to stay for the entire training, which would have gone into June and we looked at them and said, excuse me, we're private contractors, there's no salary coming in here. We prayed about it, said yes, okay, we'll do it. Went home for a period of time Walter had a wedding to perform in, I had a couple of jobs in Kansas. The Lord gave us enough money to pay every bill through June and a little leftover to go to North Carolina. So things were paid for and we knew okay, this is the right thing, so we go to the training. We become ministers, not trainers.
Speaker 3:Yet, and we were mission directors, so we were very involved in Mexico. We were going to Mexico five and six times a year, working in a church on our own time yes, working in a church. And the pastor had been introduced to this ministry and he said I need help. So he said okay. So we went down there. We anticipated 30 people. I will tell you, tim, that 200 people showed up for that training and that began. That began what we began to do in in training. We trained the Mexicans. We eventually left a team there who is trained at the level that we are. That's how we truly got started. That's why we became senior trainers, because we knew we had to do that in order to train somebody in Mexico to be able to take over, because we were not called to move to Mexico. And then the Lord showed us that it wasn't just about Mexico, it was about many other things. So I think sometimes we say sneaky Jehovah, and I think that's what happened.
Speaker 2:We never anticipated doing anything but just receiving ministry. And there's a big story in Restoring the Foundations that Walter every day was looking for airline tickets to go home because this was like way too much for him. You know, I can understand construction. You know lumber doesn't talk back to me. You know and I can anticipate what it's going to do, but this was like out of the box.
Speaker 3:Very intense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, going through my own ministry, I thought I was pretty well, you know, in good shape. I, you know I'd been a Christian for at that time oh, my 24 years. And so I thought I knew everything there was to know. Been to Bible college, taught in a Bible college, I'd done a lot of stuff, pastored a couple of years, so I thought I was somebody of Bible college. I'd done a lot of stuff, pastored a couple of years, so I thought I was somebody.
Speaker 2:And boy. To go through ministry and all of a sudden discover I had all these blind spots, these areas that I had not really dealt with. I just put away in a closet and just kept my life going. When those got exposed, then I learned about emotions Okay, because every day I'd be just crying and stuff running out of my face and filling half a garbage can up because I had never recognized these areas. I thought I was really okay and a lot of these things were just things I had inherited and I thought that was the way you do it, just like just anybody that's on the podcast. What leg do you put in your pants first?
Speaker 2:Try the other leg today and see how well you used to keep your balance, Because we just we think that's the way you do it and you do it, and so I just had followed a procedure that was not healthy and God did some incredible things to me during that time and so I think that made me open to really love Ida and that whole new realm of being more open, Even though becoming ministers working together, we had to learn that process for a couple of years. It was a tough process how to really give way in conversations and things but it was RTF. Restoring the Foundations was life-changing for us and then for three of our sons have gone through ministry and really did great things in their lives also.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I went with the certitude of a Catholic and Lutheran background, yes, and lots of peppered with pride, and discovered some things that had happened in my past that had formed who I was. I knew they were there, I knew they were latent, but I didn't really know about them and nobody revealed them to me. But the Lord did and I was like, oh my gosh. And so I went through quite a bit of restoration, personal restoration, and that caused me to Well, and then Walter said we went through two years of back and forth, we're both first born, we're both pretty driven on some levels, and the Lord really sat me down and he said no, you're going to be quiet.
Speaker 3:Well, what happened was in that quiet he accelerated the spiritual gifts that I didn't know I really had. I knew they were there but I didn't understand what they were. That I didn't know I really had. I knew they were there but I didn't understand what they were. And it took me to a level of being able to hear, understand and hear from him while we were doing ministry. It's really difficult to be the one hearing and the one doing the ministry, and so a good team is one who is and Walter's very good about doing the ministry. I do some of it, but my job is listening to what's really there and listening to the Lord. So it changed the whole dynamic for me and for both of us and it's been a really powerful experience for us.
Speaker 2:So what Restoring the Foundation can do for people is we can just keep walking our life the way it is right now, hold the chair down at church so gravity doesn't take it away, and just walk our life, or we can begin to fulfill the call that God has on our life, and I believe everybody has a call. People come to me and they would like me to prophesy what God is doing, and a lot of times I just have to ask them what's he said, what's in his Bible that he's given you, that he said to you that you feel is a draw. And so they describe that and I say well, there's your call, now you just have to be able to step into it. And there's limiters, and it's the limiters that we try to deal with in restoring the foundation, with people that have thoughts of unworthiness and that's come from shame, fear and control, that's come against their life, and so they operate out of pride and performance or whatever it is to try to take the pain away, and so we help them recognize these things and get rid of them. But then the best part is they begin to receive blessings from the Lord.
Speaker 2:So some people believe there's not generational curses. Well then I would have to say, well then there's no generational blessings incorrect, because there's always going to have both sides of this coin. And if we have generational blessings, well then there's generational curses, and what we want to do is there's generational curses and what we want to do is give the generational curses back to the Lord to get rid of and then receive from him the blessings that he's always had. Before we were ever a gleam in our parents' eyes, god already had a thought about us, he already had a plan for our life, and so those blessings have been held, limited by the enemy, blocking them off by sin or you know, which is doubt or whatever.
Speaker 2:And so when that's moved and these blessings come, it is like a dam breaking and the water's just blowing into you. So you can imagine now your root system, which has maybe been in a dry place, now it's in a very fluid liquid and it just exponentially grows. And that's what Ida said. I mean, ida can sit in a room and listen to me, do an interview, and she can pick up every area of what's going on. Holy Ghost just brings words of knowledge and just reveals these things, and I don't always pick them up. I'm listening, but I don't pick them all up.
Speaker 3:No, the other thing we call that life's baggage, which comes because I grew up in a family of non-believers. But I began attending the Lutheran day school at five years old and I was hooked. Day school at five years old and I was hooked, so I insisted on going to church and I had a a wonderful spiritual father in the Lutheran pastor and he, he guided me through life and walked through some pretty ugly things um with me. But I had a lot of baggage because I'm living in a home where there was serious unbelief and I'm coming with, at that point, real churchy stuff because I didn't have a personal relationship with Jesus. So I'm trying to convince my father about Jesus through the church and he's going, sorry, no, that's not going to work. The only time he went to church was when pastor came and played ping pong and he won and dad had to go to church.
Speaker 3:But what holds it? There is then the lies that we begin to believe. So I've struggled with unbelief because that it'll doubt, second guessing. All those things will come back into my thought process because that's what I grew up with, that was my imprint, and what happens is our thoughts begin to run around in our mind and then we exhibit an attitude and beliefs manifest in our thoughts, in our attitudes and then in our actions and then in our habits, and that creates a character. I think I had a mixed character because I was half unbelief and half being in the camp of Jesus and I didn't know which way to go. So I'm straddling and it was very, very challenging when we believe those lies. You can pick up a person who believes something because you'll go oh wow, they're a controller. Well, they're believing a lie about why they have to control to protect themselves. We may not know what that lie was, but we can see it in their attitude, in their face, we can see it in their actions and we can see it in the things that they do. And so we address the baggage. We address the baggage, we address the lies, not everything, but it's opening them up to a relationship with Christ so that he can address this stuff more intimately. And then we take them to a place where we just ask Jesus to reveal the memory and it doesn't have to be a big memory, it can be whatever memory he often the small ones are where the lie got put in place.
Speaker 3:I had a memory of an encounter with my mother, who was quite abusive when I was young and in that memory didn't realize it. But I said you'll never get to me, me. So I made a vow that she wouldn't get to me. Well, you know what that vow came to other people too. I was like well, you're never going to get me. So in that memory I had to break agreement with that lie and I was able to forgive my mother and walk through it. That's what we call a soul spirit hurt. Well, the upshot of that lie was that three weeks before my mother died, she said she had really given me a severe beating that time and she asked forgiveness for that very episode that the Lord had revealed to me, that I had shoved someplace. And I said, oh yeah. And then I was able to say Mom, would you like to receive Jesus? Yes, so that lie being broken opened something from him. She had no idea I had gone through that ministry, absolutely none. So it's baggage lies.
Speaker 2:Heart hurts, life hurts, yeah, and then all of those things open doors for demonic activity to come against us. It just gives a legal right for Satan to send troops just to torment us. And the troops are not the little guys in red suits with tails or something, but it's really. It's like blame coming to us. It's like the whole thing of being isolated. There's lots of ways abandonment, many ways that the enemy comes against us and it's words, but they have a characteristic and that's the demonic characters that we kick out. And legally you can do that according to Mark 16. But what happens is that once you remove their legal right and you've forgiven people for the crazy things they've done and you let them go and you receive these blessings into your life. What happens is these things we become aware of the integration, or how God has always looked at our life, not just in one dimension, but he looks at it in 3D, and how the demonic has come in. And when you're strong in this thing, you can tell them to go and they leave.
Speaker 2:And it is I mean to the point, tim, that one of our first ministries we ever did was with a pastor and his wife that this was for us to qualify, and this guy was big, he's 6'4", 6'5", but he was really kind of bent over and had been that way for years. He was a carpenter and stuff like that. Well, when he had ministry with him I didn't really recognize any physical change or anything like that. But two weeks later we were at his church and I was noticing that he was standing straight up and I was going well, that's bizarre. And so then the following week we went there and I noticed this. I talked to him and he says I just feel really free, the demonic it actually was physically bending him and it was amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean, we saw the physical manifestation as well as freedom that he was having in his life, he and his wife. But there's a lot of things that the demonic wants to hide and we believe there is no. You know that existing and that's his win. But we need to recognize that Jesus is everything, and if it's not pleasure from Jesus, if he's not bringing that joy and love, then we need to begin to say well, what is going really on?
Speaker 3:And so so I just want to explain a little bit about how we're starting.
Speaker 1:No, we're going to find. I love this. It's taking lots of notes. I'm taking lots of notes. This is awesome.
Speaker 3:It's a it's a there is a framework or a structure. Chester Kilstra was a NASA space scientist and he helped build the chair that went to the moon. I think that's right. Yeah yeah, astronauts.
Speaker 2:Right the chair that went to the moon.
Speaker 3:I think that's right the seats that they yeah, the astronauts use Right. And so he constructed a ministry based on this integrated approach. Which is life's baggage or generational sins, ungodly beliefs or lies we believe, soul split hurts or heart hurts, and then demonic oppression. And we approach every one of those areas, no matter the length of the ministry. We have a three-hour format, walter and I do a seven to eight-hour format, there's a 15-hour and every part of it is structured but Holy Spirit at every point.
Speaker 3:In our manual it says be prepared for Holy Spirit to digress, be prepared for what he wants to do, and so we are constantly prepared for things to change, just like you were driving to work this morning and you had to be prepared to make a change. That's what it is. So ministers are trained with that format and then you go and you listen to Holy Spirit while you're in the ministry room and you open your ears, because hearing God's voice for the minister is absolutely critical. It's critical for the person in front of us, but they don't always know that they can hear God's voice. But we know that we and this ministry was based on. It was originally called prophetic counseling, prophetic praying, and it was because that was listen to God. Listen to God. Listen to God.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so hopefully that's what we do. We actually went through classes on hearing how to hear the voice of God and then improving our listening skills. So as we listen to somebody talk, we ask Holy Spirit well, really, what are they saying?
Speaker 3:And questioning is big yeah.
Speaker 2:Creative questions. Open-ended questions.
Speaker 1:That's right. There is so much here. Thank you for sharing. No, no, it's great.
Speaker 1:You know some areas I think of learning for many of us is on the generational. You called it baggage and you know the scriptures speak about generations. We live in such a individualistic world we don't recognize what came to us from, not just our parents. I'm a big family systems guy, so we learned a mode of behavior from our parents which led us maybe to become overly sticky, slash, fused, or to divorce ourselves, to differentiate ourselves in an unhealthy way. So I think there's a lot more to say on generational baggage.
Speaker 1:But then on the other end of your structure, so we move past lies, which the evil one is, the liar to the memories that we hold, the heart hurts, the experiences that keep us stuck, and we need the freedom of Jesus.
Speaker 1:And then we you address demonic oppression. So could you, could you one of the closing questions here, could you draw a through line from generational struggles to the impact of demonic? And we're not talking possession per se, but definitely the, the heavy, the, when I you tell that story of that the pastor who's kind of hunched over, but the, the weightiness Right, it's the weightiness of the lies, of the evil one that we often subconsciously believe, which keep us struck, stuck in in insecurity, in pride, in anxiety, fear, doubts, etc. We it's just so oppressive. So Satan is so alive and well today. We're recording this, actually listener. One day before the election that has everybody kind of up. Every two, four years we get all kind of stirred up and everybody's hyper-focused there and I think Satan loves to pray, put a heavy, heavy weight over Jesus' followers rather than the light of Christ being present for us here. So could you both speak about the through line between generational kind of baggage and demonic oppression?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going to talk about, just illustrate with my own situation, but I'm going to go backwards. One of the consequences of demonic oppression is accident proneness, and my father went through several serious accidents, one of which was breaking his neck which incapacitated him, and he lived with that pain for 25 years. I experienced accident proneness Someone stuffed up the chimney and I was almost dead from gas asphyxiation until someone came into the house and said whoa, this is not okay. I grabbed a burner and was thrown under the table from electric volts along and then I a car crashed into me at 8,000 ton or 8,000 pound truck, and so I had the same kinds of accidents that my father had.
Speaker 3:I didn't understand that that was demonic oppression, the hurts that came to me and I don't know what hurts came to my father, but there was sexual abuse and obviously physical abuse when I was young and that made me prone to believing that I really didn't count much. So I going back to the lies, to believing that I really didn't count much. So I going back to the lies, I believed that I had no right to live. I believed that and I had a loving family, which is very peculiar because I actually had wonderful parents but there was that thread through there of unbelief and my father was involved with some pretty occultic things. He was involved with the Masonic. He was a shriner. My mother was a white shrine. My grandfather was a shriner, my uncle, my aunt. That was the generational curse that came through the line from all of that occult stuff that dad didn't buy into but he did it. He didn't profess to believe anything but he said it and that affected me. My Lutheran pastor said no you don't want to join Job's daughters.
Speaker 3:You don't want to. And he gave me a brief explanation and I trusted him so explicitly I said, okay, I'm not doing that. But that threaded through. Even though I didn't do that, the accident still came at me. I have not had, I've not had an accident since going through restoring the foundations and rebuking that activity that came into my life as a result of the generational curse, the lies I believed, the hurts I had. So that's how I thread it through, because it's a personal thing for me.
Speaker 2:And I know, going through ministry, every person in front of us, and so there's been hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands. We interesting, we're very involved, we know everything about you during that week or whatever it is, and then we've talked to you later and can't remember anything. I'm glad to get rid of that. But we do remember our stuff and you know, in my family line death was early, death was a big deal. My grandfather killed right on a motorcycle. They hit a cow, he went over, he was killed. My dad was in the military. He was in a helicopter in California. The helicopter went down, he and seven guys were all killed, everybody before 40. These are all happening.
Speaker 2:And so, as I'm approaching 30 and 40 years old, I got a million dollar life insurance policy because I was sure I was the next one. I went off a building fell, broke my back. I was in the hospital. They wanted to know should I be calling my parents because you know they weren't sure I was going to make it. And I had a son went off a building. He nearly lost his leg. Another son, my brother. He had a tree on a motorcycle. I mean there was a lot of these things that occurred in our family line and it got to this place that I'm still here and I'm 73 now, that I'm still here and I'm 73 now and I went way past 40. But the thing is that I had to get this point, that I was not going to agree with this lie. I was not going to worry about it. I'm not going to sit here having to have a million dollars in life insurance to cover something. You know, if Jesus can't take care of it, it's done anyway. And so I was able to break all those things.
Speaker 2:And what happens is we've learned in generational things that there can be things that seem like we had a young woman we did ministry with and I mean, if I thought of somebody that was Jesus's sister, it would have been this gal. I mean she had just had no problems. Jesus' sister, it would have been this gal. I mean she had just had no problems. But as we took her through the ministry, we discovered the greatest hurt she had in her life was one time her mom asked her to take the garbage out and she didn't do it. And it bothered her now, 20 years later, that she refused to go do this to her mom and hurt her mom that way. And so I'm thinking, you know, and so everybody's at a different level, of what did this.
Speaker 2:And so then you get over here and you deal with the demonic, and you're dealing with, you know, something that was well. You know, I, this attitude in life, well, I can just push it off to later. So there's this, or I'll get to it sometime, or, you know, my, my time is more important than mom's time. And so all these things, these spirits that come up and begin to torment this young woman, that really, then, all of a sudden, you start seeing, oh, there's a lot of stuff here.
Speaker 2:And so, no matter what somebody looks like or no matter how, any one of us who are listening to this, we all have seated wounds and hurts in our life that Jesus wants to heal. So when we get born again, our spirit man is renewed, but our mind and our will and our emotions are still the old person we see in Romans 12. Paul's really addressing that and is saying you know, we need to be transformed, our thinking needs to change into his thinking. That's why we see Paul say that you know, let this mind be in you, which is also in Christ Jesus. And so it's all about exchanging our thinking pattern, but what happens is that leads to experiences and that's where these hurts are.
Speaker 2:And all of these things open to this demonic. And really we don't see the demonic, we don't recognize it because it really stays hidden. It doesn't come out in a cauldron and is stirring up witches and stuff. It wants to stay pretty well hidden, controlling us. So when we experience that we can break the control. We see this demonic thing and we can tell it to go. And it really in all the hundreds, if not thousands, of ministries we have done, I don't think we've ever seen really manifestations. What happens is you tell them there is going to be no manifestation. I have authority over you, this is our domain and you have to go. And so people will just tell them to go and I'm in agreement. I had an agreement and these things go and sometimes people see sense or feel them. So I'll tell you what I know. People maybe aren't emotional.
Speaker 2:Okay, so we've had somebody sit for two and a half hours, two hours, telling demonic things to go and he just sat stoic, just like Lincoln, you know, in that seat there in Washington DC, just sitting there telling these things to go. He would just say I would call it up. I would say I would say resentment. And he'd say resentment, go. And I would call up you know some disease or something? And he would say go. But no, no facial expression. And so when we got all done and everything was out, he just goes. Oh, that was amazing, that was so wonderful, I feel so good and I was going. Your face never showed anything about that.
Speaker 2:And then we've had somebody that said, can I just kind of stand up Because I really need to be active? And I said sure. And so she acted like she had the sword of the spirit, the word of God, and so she chopped every single. She would tell the thing to go and she would chop at it and go. And so we've seen both these extremes in the ministry room.
Speaker 2:But both of these people experienced tremendous freedom from realizing that demonic no longer had occupancy, they had been given eviction notice and away it went. And you know, we don't send spirits to hell, we don't send them to the eternal fire. We send them to the feet of Jesus and let Jesus deal with them. Jesus has all power and authority over this. We see it really clearly in the book of Jude that you know, you just tell them to go and they, you know, let them, let them and they go. And we have been really we love that sequence, but we've really learned that lies are what hold everything in place. And we live in a world right now that's lying to us and we're believing the lie and that's limiting us.
Speaker 3:And then, of course, Well, the part that's most important is the walking it out after the ministry, because people get a lot of freedom when they're sitting where, because there's an atmosphere of jesus is here and we're focused on him. And then you go back to your life and so we help them with a walking it out program and we will stay in touch with them as often as they want to stay in touch, because it's critical that you know there's someone walking with you and our encouragement to them is to find someone that they can walk along with outside of us, because that's not our role, but getting them started is our role and that's critical because the demonic is not going to. You're still going to. I still have thoughts of unbelief, so I have to tell those thoughts to get lost and I have that power and authority and I exercise it.
Speaker 3:But some people don't understand that they have all power and authority. Jesus gave us that. So the walking out process is probably the most important. Which is why, restoring the Foundations ministers always send the people home with a list of the blessings, a list of the truths, the godly beliefs, a list of the healing that happened with the soul, spirit hurts, so that you can review those and ask the Lord to reveal more, because he will, and ask the Lord to reveal more, because he will. You just have to say this can be a real prayer time for you.
Speaker 1:But walking it out, I have to. That's the most important part and the most challenging. Amen, amen, you're talking about. It requires change, talking about renewing, transforming the mind. There's a book out by Hirsch and I forget the other author's name, alan Hirsch and it's called Metanoia, and Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance. Right, and Jesus comes and obviously John the Baptist starts his ministry preaching a message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, etc. But it's way more than repentance, is way more than just confession of sin, the way they talk about it metanoia, meta above, knowing, above. It's a complete paradigm shift and I think the paradigm, the biggest paradigm shift, is away from.
Speaker 1:There's two kind of core negative emotions that a lot of the other emotions kind of hover around. There's a lot of social scientists that have focused on this. It's fear. It's great, great, profound fear. And then what? When we realize we're afraid? And then Satan loves to lie to us and say we can solve this thing called fear, fear of death, fear of accidents, you guys were talking about that and then we realize how inept we are at solving that fear. But he takes us through the path of pride. So pride is on the one side, fear is on the other, what casts out fear? It's the perfect love of Jesus and it's to have that mind that's set on the love of Jesus and then the way of Jesus rebukes pride and chooses humility. Humility is saying I need more of you, jesus, less of me, less of me speaking. I need more of your community. I need kind, spiritual fathers and mothers who are going to come alongside me. I'm always in need of help. I need help. I can't I can't make it on my own Right and I would pray for leaders. Just every follower of Jesus would have a life that's oriented around the love of Christ, which casts out fear, moment by moment. The lies that we're believing, that want to cripple us from being who God has called us to be, cripple us in our vocations as husband and father, wife, mother, out in the workplace, and then mobilize us with arms wide open to embrace the love and care of a Christian community, as we, not against the world, move out into the world with love and light. It's the following Jesus being claimed by Jesus, experiencing the smile of Jesus, it's the best thing ever.
Speaker 1:And, um, I wanted to have you on because I'm a part of a denomination that that is struggling, I think. I think Satan in many respects has his grips in us and what's kind of keeping us from engage? There's, there's a pride, there's a spirit of pride that's here and that spirit manifests itself in that. Uh, if you believe a certain thing and that I think is wrong, I can't associate with you. You know, uh, association does not equal, uh, advocacy. I know that's a. There's a lot to be said there, but I can associate with myself and not advocate for myself. I can go to war because the spirit of Christ lives within me. I can go to war against the negative thought patterns that I even have about myself and the world and my brother or sister in Christ, and so I'm praying. The reason I wanted to have you on is there's some different language and we could certainly and I'm sure I'll be criticized why don't you say more about this? I, I don't. Okay, it's fine, um to to, to figure it out together. But what I can agree on is that we are believing lies today and it's keeping us and it's a, it's a spirit, it's a dark spirit of oppression over the church. If, if, if, satan can get after the church leaders, our, our homes, you know, if he can cripple us from a spirit of love and humility, the missional movement of the church is hampered right. But if everyone is growing up into Jesus, who is our head? If, day by day, moment by moment, we're practicing the metanoia practice, set your mind on things above. Where Christ is, he's with you, he's over it all, he's coming back to make all things new. If we can have that kind of biblical perspective, the mission of the local church can be so, so profound, so profound.
Speaker 1:I have to say one other thing. I've been preaching right during this, during this season. You know everybody wants a political sermon and you know, get on the stump speech and do all that kind of stuff. And hey, pastor, if you listen to this sermon, why don't you do something like like I had a heavy, heavy spirit of you've got to do these things. And I came out just yesterday and I said here's, here's your serve. Jesus is Lord of the church, jesus is Lord of the cosmos. Now, figure it out. Now we're just going to figure it out and invite Jesus to to help us, help us on this journey by the Spirit's power.
Speaker 1:But anyway, I said a lot there, anything that the Holy Spirit kind of brings to mind, and you and I. I had another guest who was set to come on. He's not shown up, which is great, because if you've got just a couple other minutes, I'd love for you to take me through a five minute exercise, like if I were just to give people kind of an experience of what it would be like if I were coming in as your client, one who was receiving ministry and care. How would you start and or take me to some different spot? But before we get into that, so that's the closing kind of invitation right now, given the time that has been made available to us. Any response? So, as you hear me kind of talking metanoia and those types of things.
Speaker 3:Well, I think that you're right on we talk about in education. You think about your thinking and with Jesus, your thinking has to be with him as you reflect on what's going on in your heart, because your head can say one thing, but out of the heart the mouth speaks and that doesn't always filter through our head. But we often say what's in our heart and that's where Jesus has to work. He really needs to work in that place first, so that when we speak out those negative thoughts it's like oh whoa, that's not where I want to go, and Jesus pulls it back and says no, this is who you are, this is where you're going.
Speaker 3:We've done quite a bit with researching the tracks in the brain that get set because of what we believe. We kind of have a joke. We learned that both of us were trained to eat soup differently. Now that could cause some conflict, and in some relationships it does, but we were able to laugh at that situation. And in this stuff the negative thoughts go beyond the soup. They are what drive us and the positive thoughts can drive us. But those are Jesus thoughts and we have to be aligned with him. If we're buying into the negative things and the negative thinking we're buying into to the enemy. We're clearly on the side of the enemy, yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of what I was saying is a lot about imprint, and that's what we try to help people recognize is that they've had imprints. And that's what you're talking about, this metanoia that we're looking for God's imprint, we're looking for God's DNA thing and what happens is our DNA has been contaminated by sin. You know, back in the garden and we're looking for the second Jesus to give us a blood transfusion here and change that dynamic. So we're not looking to sin now, we're looking to our Savior and there's still. I can sin, but I have an advocate, but I can choose not to sin. But when we're trapped, we don't recognize that. We just recognize that this is the path and I'm destined to have to walk and I've got to go here and I have no choice. And we do have a choice because Jesus came to give us life, and life abundant, and so if I can have an abundant life, that means whatever I'm living right now, no matter how successful or anything like that, there's more with him, and that's one of the things that I appreciate is that there's always more with Jesus. And Holy Spirit is the one who came to begin to reveal this, to begin to comfort us, to begin to give us direction and that I can be free from those things that have attached themselves to me.
Speaker 2:And I think, for listeners, that a lot of us feel like we're OK because Walter felt like he was OK. But you want to get in a face to face encounter with the Lord Jesus and ask him well, lord, how am I doing? And you know he'll love us enough to say well, you know, we need to see a couple things change here. And of course I'm from the South and so it would be more like, hey, boy, we got to change some things where some of us may be more polite, and they'd say OK, son, I want to do something. I've always felt like, you know, he just talked plain to me and just say we need to get something fixed, walter. And, and so that's what we work on, and we continue to go through ministry, even through the years. We continue to go get tune up and continue because all of a sudden we recognize what's causing me. Now the old Walter.
Speaker 2:If she was starting a conversation, I would inject it right away and add it to, because you know I am so much smarter, which is not the truth. She's the ones with a master's degree, not me and I had to realize that what she was saying was absolutely important. And so I had to get healed because something in my past had caused me to feel like I didn't have a voice, that somewhere in my training as I grew up as a kid, that I was voiceless. I was raised up in a military home. You didn't really speak unless you know, and so that whole thing of getting used to I want to speak, I was wrong timed and so I need to get my heart healed out of that and I think, relatively, it's a lot better. Eh, yes, God has healed my heart, that I don't feel like I have to say something that better.
Speaker 2:And because it wasn't anything better, it really was showing the people that we were doing ministry with that it's okay to interrupt, it's okay to be not esteeming the other higher, and so I had to learn, even in the ministry room, that there were things that he revealed, and that's what's good. God continues to reveal and he heals, and that's one of the things you would hear us in a teaching as we take you through ministry is that what God reveals, he will heal. So if he revealed that we have this performance thing, this performing is OK until it's driven performance, but we could get healed of that. What a deal. That's a great thing.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about what the ministry would look like, because there are multiple steps, and I will talk about the 15-hour format, because that's what some people call the intensive, and that was the first one that was developed. So someone makes an initial contact and then we send them an application. The application is quite extensive. It asks for information about your that you know, that you know Just general information about your family, general information about your religious experience, general information about things that you know about your. Was there abandonment in your family? Was there unbelief? Was there shame? Was there fear? The ones that come up most often will be shame and fear and control. So it's quite a lengthy application. A lot of it is just check the boxes. It's well over 20 pages. And that comes to us and then we read it, pray over it, look at it very carefully and then we do an interview.
Speaker 3:The interview lasts up to three hours and in the interview we ask you about well, what do you know about your grandparents, your great grandparents? If you know nothing, fine. And then we ask you about your family before you came on the scene. And then we ask you about your life. You know where you wanted? Um, what was life like between zero and six I go through. Because of the grade levels it's easier for me to quantify by okay before you start school, then all the way up through, and if you had higher education up through, that we talk about, we ask you for a life history. Basically is what we do At that point. Walter's doing the interview and I'm listening, checking boxes, going whoops, we've got to go look at this a little bit more.
Speaker 3:Then we take all that information, pray over it, look at the application. Our notes are quite extensive and then we say okay, lord, what are the key things that are facing this person right now for the healing right now? Not everything. This is what they've said they want for ministry. This is their goal and this is what we see are the critical pieces. And a lot of the critical pieces are what we call sonship indicators, things that have kept us separate from god, jesus or jesus right, separate from jesus, because we've experienced abandonment, anger, performance, uh, fear.
Speaker 3:Just there are indicators and then we create a plan and we will address those open doors somewhere between 15 and 20 open doors, sometimes less, rarely more. We walk them through confessing that this existed in their family line or in their ancestral line or in their parents, and we invite them to forgive anyone that the Lord reveals to them. We don't suggest the forgiveness unless there's somebody obvious and they just didn't do it. Most of the time they're forgiving the same people mother, father, sisters, brothers, grandparents, people who have influence in their life and then we ask them to ask the Lord for forgiveness, because the Lord says if you haven't forgiven, well then don't come to me, because I'm not even going to recognize your request for forgiveness unless you've taken the step to forgive others. So then we invite them to ask the Lord for forgiveness, and then we invite them to forgive themselves, release themselves from the hook they've placed on, because that's idolatry of self if you can't forgive yourself. And so those are the first two steps.
Speaker 2:So, following that, then we would, throughout the paperwork or the whole conversation, we're writing down anything that would be lies that they're believing or something that they're speaking word, curses they're talking out, and so we write that down and we go through and we break agreement and we ask them to ask the Lord well, what is the truth? Because there's facts. Truth, because there's facts, obviously. Yes, my dad died young, my grandfather died young, and so those are facts. But the truth is I don't have to follow that pathway. God has a pathway for my life and I can go with that and I agree with that. So I had to break the lie and agree with God's truth in this whole thing. And so then we go through that, helping people write their own. So as you go through life every day, you discover lies that you're believing. I mean, we have ongoing conversations with people we've taken through over the years. Is that I discovered another lie? I found this thing and this is the truth, and I said we'll share it with me so I can kind of listen to that, know how to pray. And then we deal with the whole thing about soul. Spirit hurts, the heart hurts, and those things usually happen when we're young and they just, they're like a portfolio that we just keep adding hurts to the rest of our life. It just keeps sliding in the thing, and so an event happens. We live the event. So an event happens, we live the event. But now, years later, we probably never recognized everything that was going on, we just experienced that. So, as the Lord takes us back into a memory, all of a sudden we we discover not just the facts of the for me. I was in the Philippines and there was a typhoon water coming under the door. My parents were off at the NCO club, our maid was there with us, and so I had this huge fear that came on me right then of these sudden storms. But as I was in the memory and I asked Jesus you know, I wanted to give this stuff to him All of a sudden I recognized that there was a chair in the corner of the living room that I'd forgot all about until that moment, and Jesus was sitting in that chair, and so he was there the whole time, and so he and I were able to have communication. I was able to go over to him and give him these things, and he took them. But I didn't remember that I never even asked Jesus to help me. I didn't ask anything. I just had this huge fear that the enemy brought in. And so, as we're able to give this, jesus takes them. And what he does is the key component is he heals our heart. I've come to heal the brokenhearted and if he heals the heart, I'll say now, what's coming out of my heart now is an issue of life that I'm able to give other people. Before I had woundedness, I had hurts. I'm protecting myself. Now, all of a sudden, I can give life. So out of the abundance of my heart now, when Walter is speaking, it's going to be life-giving words and things that come out of that.
Speaker 2:And then the demonic thing is pretty simple, because we've taken all his documentation. He has no legal right. So there he is, standing defenseless, and we just tell him Holy Ghost brings him in and we just tell him you go, you go, you go. And a lot of it is just the legal status, that we are now sitting in a seat of a judge and we can tell them to go. So they have to obey. Sometimes we will sense it, sometimes we will feel it, sometimes we will see it, sometimes there's nothing but the assurance that God said you tell them to go and they go and it happens. But there's really this life freedom. All of a sudden. You just feel the baggage has left.
Speaker 2:So we have also a part of the ministry we do which we call On the Line. It's something we taught, actually, at that Lutheran church where they can do it something on a Sunday morning. If people wanted to get prayed for, they could come up and it's a really simple process thing could be up to five minutes. We did it in a Baptist church. We've taught in lots of different churches them procedures on how to pray for people, and so part of it is you would walk up to us and we always do ministry in teams, two of us and we've just asked well, what is the problem? So what you're doing is beginning to give us the problem.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you're telling us okay, I've got this going on in my life. Maybe I've got some pain or I've got this fear I'm going to have some surgery, whatever it could be. And both of us are listening and what we do is we pray two different components. One of us prays to remove the problem. So let's say I had asked you what's going on. So then I just began to speak. So, lord, right now, I just thank you for your presence right here with Tim and I, and I just thank you right now that you're taking this situation that we're facing right now and you're moving it out, and you're establishing inside of Tim, right now, an agreement with you that you're going to lead him, you're going to direct him, and then, all of a sudden, I would turn it over to Ida.
Speaker 3:And then I'm asking the Lord what blessing that you want to bring into this person's life that's going to fill up the space where the fear or the anxiety or the pain has been. And then we speak those blessings, because restoring the foundations is really about blessings and truth and healing, and that's where the emphasis needs to be. And so we can speak that in on the line and they can grab it or not, that's up to them, and then we just close it out, lord, and we just thank you for Tim.
Speaker 2:We thank you for going with him today and blessing him and he's able to receive these promises into his life. Amen. And so we. You know three, four or five minutes, and what you're doing is everything we just talked to you about in the thorough one, the big one, we just consolidate down, but all of it is listening to the Holy Spirit. I mean, we're there, we're his servants and we're there to love you as Christ would love you, and to whatever it is people come and share with us. We take that, we kick it to the curb, and then we and so either one of us, ida, would be the one to kick it out or move it aside, and then the other one would fill up.
Speaker 1:So that's an example of kind of what we do. In a short. I love it, something for professionals. But anybody who's following Jesus and wants to be a minister, an ambassador of peace and reconciliation that's come to them and wants to flow through them to others, could partner. I love that.
Speaker 1:The apostle Paul I was preaching on Colossians chapter four yesterday pray for us that the Lord may open a door for the mystery of the gospel to be proclaimed. May I make it clear as I ought to, ought to speak it like the apostle Paul even had an us it's Paul and Barnabas is Paul and Timothy is Paul and Silas. And so do you have a partner who is? If you're an Ida, who's your Walter? If you're a Walter, who's your Ida? You're partnering in ministry and then you're coming alongside others and it's such an easy to understand way that we pray.
Speaker 1:I got an emotional jug that's filled up with all sorts of lies and those lies need to be dumped at the foot of the cross, given to the crucified and risen Jesus, and then I need to, by the Spirit's power, believe the truth about who I am, who God is, who God is to me, how he views me and the mission, by the spirit's power that he's called me to as an ambassador of peace and reconciliation and love and joy, to live into my calling. That is in our, in our denomination. Anybody smacks of blessings like that is the ultimate blessing to have that new identity restored to you and the mission, the call that God has upon your life, regardless of what your vocation is, what your gifting is, et cetera, that you would be hardwired toward that, toward that, and filled up. We've been emptied of sin, death and the devil, the impact of the evil one upon us. We've been emptied, it's been. I've been crucified with Christ. I no longer live Now. Christ lives in me and now I'm filled up with the Holy spirit, with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera, the fruit of the spirit, because I'm connected to the vine which is Jesus. This has been so much fun.
Speaker 1:Walter and Ida, you are a gift to me, uh, you're a gift to the wider church. I thank you for your faithfulness and answering the call that the Lord has put upon your life and not just being those who minister to hurting people, which is very, very necessary, but being those who teach, other teachers, so that the way of Jesus and ministry can multiply, because there's so much hurt, there's so much pain, there are so many lies, but the days are too short for us to be riddled in fear. The day is here for us to live with the confidence and the humility that comes from Christ, with arms locked, with our brother or sister to our right and to our left, going on mission to make Jesus known and caring for those heart hurts that you talk about, because we all have them. We do, and Jesus wants to heal them as we confess them. So, so good. If people want to connect with you and your ministry, how can they do so, walter and Ida?
Speaker 3:They can reach us at armorbearerministries at gmailcom. We elected not to have a ministries and I can send that to you. It's the same one that you sent the email to we elected not to have a website because we had so much to do. There's no way we wanted to have more. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2:The Lord has brought and we tried to focus in on leaders and helping them because they have influence on a great band. Helping them because they have influence on a great band. But I mean, we, if you look at it, we all really are leaders somewhere in our families and our communities. Um, but it's um, you get one person set free and it's all worth it. You know, and, uh, we, what we've experienced and the testimonies we've had get sent back to us have been really life-changing.
Speaker 2:Now, some people they don't walk it out, they go back to where they were and expect I don't know, I don't know what they expect, but the majority of people they really have moved. I just see dynamic changes in their life and their ministries and what they're doing. And that's really why you're doing this podcast is just to reveal to the people that you're in community with and stuff, that there is opportunity, there's great things that are available and we just don't have to hold the ground that we're standing on right now. We can move forward. God's got great destiny, brother. I want to tell you this is a great mode of allowing people to begin to experience. There is more, and so thank you so much. Both Ida and I, we thank you very much for this opportunity to connect and whatever God has in the future it will be what he wants.
Speaker 3:connect and whatever God has in the future, it will be what he wants. The other thing is we have a profile on restoring the foundations so they can go to restoring the foundationsorg and there are ministry profiles and we have one on there, along with many others, so if they're looking for someone in their location, they might be able to find someone on that website.
Speaker 1:So good. Yeah, walter, ida, thank you for your generosity of time. I know our listeners have been blessed. I have drawn closer to Jesus because I'm closer to you now, so thank you for that. This is the American Reformation podcast. Sharing is caring Like, subscribe, comment wherever it is. You're taking this in from youtube, uh, to wherever other platforms, spotify, etc. And if you'd give us a five-star review for conversations like this, that helps get the word, helps get the word out. Thank you so much, walter and ida. You're a gift to the body of christ. Peace the lord. Thank you.