Jesus warned His followers that we would suffer
tribulation. Sometimes we don't always recognize it
for what it is when it hits us. Welcome to Skywatch TV. This is a
kind of unique broadcast for Tuesday, February 28th, 2017.
Joining me in studio, two of the other men here at Skywatch TV,
men I'm proud to call brothers in Christ, Jake Rohutsky and Josh
Peck. Thanks for having us.
And the reason we're casual
and don't even have the signs on behind us is because this is just an informal
conversation. This grew out of a conversation that we had this morning here.
We're actually recording this on Monday. Last week was kind of an interesting week here
for us at Skywatch TV where I think we can safely
say that after all of us kind of compared notes toward the end of the week
that something was going on that wasn't happening in the natural
realm. That was affecting us all in the natural realm.
Something spiritual was definitely going on. Ephesians 6 tells us that we're going to
battle against these things. That our true enemy actually,
our principalities, powers, all these spiritual things are our true enemy.
Boy, we definitely saw that this past week because
it didn't really come from any person or any one kind of
thing. It was something more spiritual in nature.
It operated a little differently for everybody.
We don't want to alarm anyone. We're all physically okay.
Everything's fine Skywatches. All the equipment is working.
I think that's really the point is that all of us felt something emotionally
and even physically. I was getting ready to shave Thursday morning
and felt the sense of this fear, this dread
that came over me. Something really bad had happened. Somebody that I knew and respected
somebody that I loved had had either something happen or something
change. It was just a sense of fear that I even felt in 20
years. Then I came out and I said to Sharon,
this is what's happened to me. She said, as funny you mentioned
that because I've had that same feeling off and on for three days now.
Jake and I, you were really going through some stuff last week.
Basically, just huge attack from the enemy
last week. It's by God's grace and His hand upon my life
that basically, I'm functioning. I'm happy. I'm full of the spirit.
Basically, the devil sometimes tries to sift us.
We've talked about that. The thing that I
thought was strange. I come from very liturgical church denominations.
High church. Oregon, no piano. Congregation doesn't make any noise
during the service except what's printed in the bulletin. When you have the
congregational prayer, Pastor says this,
very ordered. Generally,
I don't remember spiritual warfare or even
the workings of spirits in our lives ever being taught or preached
in the churches when I was growing up. It wasn't until I was in my 30s and after
I met Sharon that we began attending churches that talked about such things.
Something like, what happened to me? It happened Thursday or what happened to you?
And I know we've got some of the ladies here in the office felt the same thing.
Dreams even. Very disturbing dreams involving all of us at Skywatch.
The response
was, see a counselor, take a pill,
get a better night's sleep, and it'll all be fine.
And there's a lot of people out there in the traditional workforce.
They're out there in America doing your job, doing whatever, and what happens is
the enemy comes against you. And the problem is if you're a believer
in a secular workplace, you have got a target all over you.
And if you're a believer that's walking in truth, you're walking out God's purpose for your life,
you're going to come under severe attack. And that world is not going to
be sympathetic of your plight. They're going to want to say you need to see a psychiatrist
or whatever. But the bottom line is your trust and your hope is in Jesus
Christ and in Jesus Christ alone. And basically it is by
girding up your mind in the Word of God that you withstand the
attacks of the enemy. One of the tools he
tries to use is attack your mind to put imaginations
to just basically attack you in your thought realm. Some people he attacks physically.
That deep check that Derek had in his spirit was
an indicator to him and to share it into others that there was a spiritual war going on.
So we don't need to ignore that. You know, if you have a check in your
spirit and something doesn't feel right, first thing you need to do is pray.
And so this has been a valuable lesson for me this week and I know everybody
else here at Skywatch is that we really need to be more in tune
with spiritual discernment. When something isn't right, when
something we feel like something's headed our way, we need to be in prayer.
Because the Bible says the devil is going around like a roaring lion seeking
whom he may devour. He's looking to devour you. That doesn't mean he
has to. You have a responsibility to stand upon the Word of God.
You have to cast out imaginations. You have to fight back
with the spiritual weapons that God has given you. And that's a really
good point. You need to pray. And that was something that we've been guilty of here.
And again, in my upbringing, it was not the first response.
First response is you're feeling something physical. Well, there must be a physical answer.
Exactly. Same here. But we were guilty of, and I know all of
us pray, you know, at home we pray and our prayer was.
But anyone who's doing something positive for the
Lord should expect to be a target.
And here we are coming into work every day and getting down to
our list of things that we need to get done. Because we're busy,
which is good. But we waited until
we got smacked in the face. Before we finally...
maybe we should pray. So
this is us kind of having confession time here a little bit. And this is why we're not
setting this up as a show. This is not a show. This is us just
kind of talking and continuing a conversation that started about an hour ago here in the
office. So we have committed now, and the reason we're doing it too
is also to be held accountable. To start praying together every morning.
Absolutely. Well, I'll tell you guys something. And I forgot to mention this
a few hours ago when we were first talking about all this. But this past week for
me, a lot of these texts have manifested as
just this terrible constant sickness. It seems like the past,
really the past couple of months. Right. Seems like I'm just constantly getting a cold
or the flu. And I never had that problem before.
It was a rare occasion if I ever got sick at all.
But this past time, and I'm guilty
of praying thing too, because you know, I kind of pray about it, but I never really
prayed with anybody or like actually like, okay, we're going to pray this thing out.
It was like, well, I'll go to the doctor. I'll take some medicine. And you know, that worked
for a little while, maybe, but then it would always keep coming back. Well, then
I think it was maybe Friday. It was before the weekend. Thursday
or Friday when you and I prayed together, Derek. I think it was
Friday. And that was one of the things on the list.
And I know, Jake, you've been like amazing, a huge prayer
warrior in my life praying about that too.
This weekend, something happened, and I just started
feeling better, which is like that doesn't, that past couple
months, it's like that hasn't happened. It's either I feel sick or I feel a little less sick.
But you know, and I'm sure you remember
Thursday and Friday, I was coughing a lot and sneezing a lot and just all over the place. Well, I couldn't come in this morning.
I feel great. So the prayer worked.
You know, Christina does like natural
kind of, I don't know. She tells me what to eat and drink and I do it.
So I'm sure that that helped too. So I'm sure that that helped too.
But yeah, that was the first time that I actually thought about, you know, maybe it's a good idea
to actually sit down and pray with somebody because I grew up similar to you
where for me, it was really traditional Baptist. And I'm not saying anything bad about them
or anything. And I know that you're not with yours either. But for me,
we didn't really, you know, we'd pray before meals or before bed.
We didn't actually like, it was all kind of
scheduled stuff, you know, a scheduled rehearsed kind of stuff where we basically knew
there wasn't like if some new thing came up, oh, let's get together and pray. That just
never happened. And so I know with me, I'm
still getting used to that knowing that it's the right thing to do.
So yeah, confession time for me too. I definitely haven't been
praying openly enough, at least not as much as I should.
In the bottom line, guys, we're on, you know, you and Sharon talk about it all the time.
We're on a spiritual battlefield. And if you're doing anything for God, you're going to get
hit. So equip yourself and be prepared. Be ready to stand
defend the faith, whatever it is that you have to do. But also trust
in God, because He has you in His hands. He will deliver you
from every temptation. He'll deliver you from every snare of the
devourer. Most of all, protect your family time. Protect.
Don't get so caught up in doing work for the Lord or doing things for God
or doing things to evangelize that you neglect your free time
that you neglect your time with the family and you neglect your time with God. That's another trap
that ministers fall into. I mean, we've learned, there's just a plethora
of things in this last week that God has been showing me about myself
and where I'm at and where we all are here is that we have to
protect ourselves. And all of us
have things that we need working on. I'm a little older than you, fellas. You may not look it.
You may be surprised you put that in mind. Just a little older than these guys.
But I'm a lot closer.
There were a couple of nights last week
where I was finding myself awake in the middle of the night and couldn't
come back to sleep. In fact, had another one of those nights last night.
But last night I was just, I think last night was just, I had
ideas and I needed to follow up on. So I was actually researching
ancient texts from the ancient Amorite city of Mari in the middle of the night.
But last week it was something different. I was like, why am I lying here awake?
Well, if you watch the daily updates, you know that one day last week I addressed
a particular belief that is going around the Internet
of Christians that is causing some division. And my
point was not to debunk or to
criticize anyone who holds that particular view. But to suggest that because
we are essentially a camp surrounded by the enemy, we know
that we're in a world that was
delegated to the watchers, the 70 sons of God.
You can make a case that God has inherited the nations now and is in the
process of reclaiming those nations, but those entities, those fallen
angels and their demonic cohorts are still
active in the world today.
We are behind enemy lines. Our camp is surrounded
and yet we're finding others who are building
walls inside the camp to separate us from one another.
And keep us from providing that covering fire that this
joint prayer that we held this morning will do. That prayer
at home with our wives and our children will do. We should
be worried more about looking outward and trying to get the wounded
off the battlefield into the camp than spending our time
dividing inside the camp. And trying to shoot our own.
Well, in that broadcast, that program generated
some pushback from people who felt that I was attacking them, which was not my intent.
But I was lying awake
in the middle of the night formulating arguments to comments on
YouTube, which was exactly the wrong response.
And that's the enemy working on me to try to get me in the game of building
those walls up inside the camp. Yeah, I've been there.
We were talking about before we started recording, I love quantum physics.
That's like my deal. I love it. I love other things too, but I really
like, I get excited about quantum physics.
I don't, it would be really easy for me to fall in the trap
of if somebody doesn't see what I see in the scriptures.
There are like a few different places in scripture where I can see it as being
possible examples of different things that quantum physics talks about.
May not be, but there are some examples
that I think could be. It would be really easy for me to
get so excited
and fervent about that that I could allow the enemy to destroy
that for me, destroy that excitement. All of a sudden, now I feel like I have to
defend it against everybody because nobody sees what I see. And I
have this amazing thing that nobody else wants to
accept. So they're all my enemy and it's really easy to fall into that trap.
And I'm not saying that I'm perfect because there was a time in my life where I would have been
built in the walls right along with everybody else.
God needs us to wield His sword. Yeah, exactly. And it took
years for God to get that out of me and
I can only speak for myself and I'm not speaking for anybody else out there watching,
but speaking for myself, I can look back on that now and see that
all of that was operated from pride.
Yes, and that's what it is with me. That's what it was. And that's what dawned on me
at like 3.30 in the morning one night
last week with the Holy Spirit saying, ah, now you've got it.
Because it's an intellectual pride. I have to be right. That means you have to be
wrong. And that is absolutely the wrong response.
And it's not that we're saying that the theory is prideful or that having a different view than somebody
else is prideful in and of itself. It's not. It's how you
treat other people who don't agree with you. And the Bible is very clear on
it. Share the hope we have in Christ with gentleness and respect.
Yes, exactly. And yet what we find inside the body of Christ is that we're
not even sharing the hope we have in Christ with other people because we're too busy
bashing other believers. Exactly. And that's what
was keeping me awake at night trying to think, how can I diplomatically bash other believers?
And that's not what we are called to do. That's right. But
the enemy trying to exploit that and again these other attacks this week and again
we're not telling you everything because we haven't talked to everybody. We don't want to glorify
and we've not talked to everybody who we're sharing internally so we don't want to share
anything. But there's not like big deep dark secrets or anything either. No, no, no, no.
It's just general things. This is the first time in my life where I have been part of a group of people
where we can sit down and I can think of off the top of my head six different
people here at you know maybe seven
where we're all at the same week. Yeah, I was feeling that thing too. And then
again the slow realizations like well duh we've been talking about being on a battlefield
for years and
lo and behold we're getting shot at. Yeah.
But we didn't pray first. We waited until the
enemy fire and maybe that's you know kind of like James has
counted all joy. So hey maybe we've kicked over an enemy ant nest or something
and they're getting ticked off. And it would be really easy for us to you know
blame the enemy or blame somebody else or put all you know shift all the
but I think if people really want change if they really want joy and
to affect some sort of change or if they want even people to see their point of view
regardless what it is it can't come from victimhood
and playing the blame game and everything. It's got to come from
self introspection and yes thinking like
okay what can I do obviously I'm not getting through to this person with whatever
you know I'm saying so how can I communicate this better.
Most of the time maybe even all of the time but at least most of the time
it's because it's got to be communicated through love. That's
well put. And the reason we felt compelled to do this today instead of a news update
you know for one thing what we're talking about here is more important than anything we could say about
the Oscars or you know the situation in the Middle East. That'll be here again tomorrow
but if you're feeling something like this just know that you're not alone
and just because we're on this side of the camera doesn't mean that we're somehow
immune to it that we've overcome all this and that we've got all these answers figured out because as we just
share here. We're susceptible as anyone else.
I heard somebody once very wise say you know being a Christian doesn't mean
you are holier than everyone else. It just means you're one of the beggars
who's figured out where to find the free meal. And now our job is to tell
everyone else here's where you go.
So hopefully this has been of some help to you, a blessing to you. Tomorrow we'll be back with
the regular daily news update and
if you're ever running into things where you need some help or
prayer, D. Gilbert at SkywatchTV.com. If you want to get ahold of me
I'm at JPEC at SkywatchTV.com. God bless
you and we thank you for watching. This is SkywatchTV.
.
