From Darkness to Light: One Woman's Journey out of the Occult, with Jac Marino

the entire premise of the occult is that if you you know eat eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you'll become like god and it just floored me that i hadn't even fallen for some you know new lie this was the this was the first that led to the fall and that's what it was leading to in my life [Music] welcome to the alisa childers podcast i've got a great episode for you today i'm going to introduce you to someone i met recently when i was speaking at a conference at a church in arizona she's the social media director for redeemer bible church in arizona she helps with worship she was up there leading worship for this women's conference and it was just such a sweet time of worship it was just lovely and we began to talk after and she shared a bit of her story with me and after i heard a little bit of her story i thought i really want to have her on the podcast to share with you what god has done in her life and where he's brought her and what he's brought her out of so with that said jack marino welcome to the podcast i'm so glad that you you know you prayed about it and you said i think i think it's it's good to go i'm going to share my story so thanks so much for being brave and willing to do that today thank you so much it's such a privilege and i'm so thankful too well great i want to get in i want to start by just you sharing kind of your background because i think sometimes that's so relevant to people's stories and some of the maybe the movements they've gotten swept up in and that god's brought them back out of sometimes that backstory is so relevant to maybe being vulnerable to believing a false type of spirituality and so tell us a little bit about your growing up did you grow up in a christian home what was that like for you yes i grew up in san diego and i believed i was a christian i started going to a methodist church when i was in preschool i went there for my preschool my dad played drums in the worship band and i believed at a young age that jesus was lord but i didn't know what that meant there wasn't really a depth to my understanding of of what that meant it was just something that i would imagine when i was scared i knew the lord's prayer as i grew up but i didn't have a firm understanding of the gospel or of why it matters that jesus is lord and i just kind of clung to the very small amount of knowledge that i had but when i was that age also i was sexually abused and that led to a lot of confusion and a lot of pain and a lot of guilt and even though it wasn't in my um immediate family it was it was very close to me and so there was a lot of confusion around that and i started rebelling at a very young age um when i was five my parents separated because my dad had a drug and alcohol problem and it wasn't safe for us to be around that anymore but i had a very close and what i considered healthy relationship with my dad so that really upset me and i still remember when my mom took us to that new safe apartment and just hearing that my dad wasn't going to be coming home and just how how much pain there was in that and so even though at a young age i did grow up technically in the church once my parents separated we stopped going to church except for on christmas and easter and but i still thought i was a christian my family still said we were christians i just didn't have a firm foundation of what that actually meant and i didn't see faith lived out how old were you when your parents separated and when kind of seems like you had a bit of trauma at a young age um so how old were you when all that was going on i was five when my parents separated and i was probably around um i honestly don't know how old i was when the abuse started but uh probably around two um and it continued until i was around seven wow so you mentioned that you you you said a couple times i thought i was a christian i wonder if you can unpack that a little bit more for us because i think that can be a really confusing thing for people who grow up in the church like was i a christian and when you process that question in within the scope of your own story um how do you analyze that now from this vantage point looking back um now i don't believe i was truly a christian or that i was truly born again because even though i i think i was just a christian by name i thought that if your family was christian then you were christian if you would also believe that jesus was lord and so it was just a very um wrong conception of what it really means to be a christian what it really means to believe jesus is lord and follow christ and that really followed me throughout my life of me just thinking oh well i'm a christian because i once said a prayer i once believed that jesus was lord and i still do and sometimes i imagine him when i'm afraid but i didn't i didn't have a true biblical faith so for how many years did your family sort of stay away from church with the exception of going on holidays and um maybe this would be a good time to sort of transition into getting into the part of your story where you began to become attracted to the occult or you know i mean i'm sure that wasn't something that happened overnight what did that look like for you well i when i was very young probably around um five or six i started seeing things and i thought that they were the angels of my dad's friends who had passed away but um i somehow found out about aliens and that made more sense to me they were it was just lights in the sky and it was this very deep familiar feeling i felt when i saw them i felt very connected to these entities and i had felt very isolated in the secrecy of the abuse i didn't tell anyone what it what was happening and so i but i believed that these entities knew me and understood me and i had this just deep familiarity with them and then when i learned about ufos from someone i started okay well these must be that must be what this is then which led into me having a fascination for aliens um i didn't share it with a lot of people because i did feel almost like it was special to me or more so that i was special to them and so i really clung to this belief that that these were familiar beings i felt comforted by them i felt like they understood me and even though i was so young this continued and i didn't know that that was new age or anything i was too young for that but it was it was a huge part of my identity because i found so much peace in that and even though my parents had stopped going to church and i wasn't around that those christian beliefs or even the teaching at church i kind of continued down a path of being rebellious acting out and i um when i was seven i received a call from my mom that the person who had been abusing me was caught abusing someone else and i was terrified that i was going to be found out for what had been happening and i just told myself that if i never thought about it again then i could rewrite my life and i could kind of live out my dreams and have a fairy tale kind of by just making life what i wanted to as long as i believed it enough as long as i never thought about the abuse again i could actually believe and and make my life so that it had never happened and that's what i decided to do and so that again left me very isolated but i just told myself i would never think about it again and i went through my life really just suppressing any thought of that the abuse had happened and um when i was around seven that i was somewhere and i really believed that i saw um a dark entity that i believed to be a demon telling me to to kind of follow this this path his path and i knew it was wrong just like when i was acting out before i knew that what i was doing was wrong but i just wanted to have fun have pleasure and do what i wanted to do then but this was more of me seeing something and feeling like i was being summoned down this path i knew it was wrong but i told myself that i'd go back to being who i was supposed to be later i would go back to doing the right thing later but for now i was going to follow this path of what seemed like this weird familiarity and that was a big turning point in my life where i really um started to forsake the very small amount that i knew of the true jesus for this rebellion you're not the first person that i've talked with or heard stories from who came out of a new age type situation or even the occult to connect that with this concept of aliens and um i i believe it was stephen bankars when i was talking with him there that's really what got him into the new age in in the first place and i'm curious if you could sort of unpack that a little bit more for us because i'm going to just assume there's probably a lot of people listening to this or watching this who might have had similar experiences or might even be having similar experiences and and i want to continue with your story as well but i'd love for you to just unpack what is that connection with new age and this whole concept of aliens i remember in the gosh it was the 90s the x-files was so huge and everybody was just obsessed with aliens it was just like this cultural phenomenon and i remember even as a teenager reading a book about a guy that had been supposedly been abducted by aliens and the draw now i was i was a christian a very deep believer in the lord but i remember wrestling with what felt like a really seductive draw into what i was reading in this book and i i became very fascinated with the whole thing and i remember i just read this book in like a day or two and uh it definitely there were spiritual ramifications i i maybe wouldn't have known quite how to identify what those were but there really was like this very seductive draw to it so i wonder if you could help shine some light on what's going on with all of that well i'm very glad that you worded it as a very seductive draw because that's truly what it felt like to me there was just such a pull of this familiarity and i think that's a huge part in the new age is that there's these entities that i now believe are are definitely demons but there's we wouldn't if those kind of things didn't lure us we wouldn't desire them but i was so enticed by the idea that there were these beings that were outside of this reality and that i could have a relationship with them in some sense and it just gave me a sort of promise of control over my reality that if there were these powerful beings i could somehow i was special to them and and that gave me some kind of power and that was a huge pull and also just that there was more to this life if there was life not on earth it kind of gave that the supernatural just is so alluring because it gives the promise of there being more than this physical reality but it it um most of the time denies christ so you are finding yourself enticed by this what you've described as a dark entity where did things go from there well i continued um just very much down a path of rebellion acting out sexually and just living in sin and lying all the time i developed an eating disorder i was bulimic and anorexic i was self-harming and i was just putting on a happy face and how i had a good image to authority figures i tried to keep everything under wraps but inside i was in so much torment i was so unhappy i felt like i had thoughts that weren't my own and i i was just dying for some kind of relief some kind of um peace from this anguish i felt inside and so i was searching for some kind of control over my reality some kind of power from some other way because i didn't want to ultimately i didn't i didn't want christ because i didn't want to obey the bible i wanted to do things my way i wanted to rebel i loved my sin and so i pursued a cult that at that time i didn't know was a cult but more supernatural things so that i could have that kind of power and promise of control over my reality without submitting to the authority of scripture and i once i got in high school i always said that i would never drink or do drugs because i saw it truly destroy my dad's life he was he really struggled with his addictions but i started drinking and doing drugs because i just was desperate to forget what had happened to have peace and to just be able to escape my physical pain i was just felt like i was in anguish inside myself and the first time i drank i knew that i'd made a huge mistake because i didn't want to feel any way but that way for the rest of my life for the first time i forgot the abuse i forgot my pain i forgot all the sins that i committed in that moment at least they were dulled and i knew that's just how i wanted to feel and so i pursued drinking was my new everything and i pursued it like crazy and also drugs and during this time the book the secret by rhonda byrne came out when i was in high school and i was seeking for ways to try to make sense of what i had been experiencing with the seeing things and the aliens and just these experiences that were so personal and they felt like my destiny um and when the book the secret came out it was talking about the law of attraction which was very much that your thoughts can create your life and you can have anything that you want anything that you dream anything that you imagine which was very familiar to me having grown up just with a sincere love for disney obsessed with disney it was such a happy thing for me to be able to escape and think about the magic and the sorcery in disney um and just that kind of came through in the secret but it was real and that excited me that there was this okay there's that but this this makes sense now it's familiar to me because this is real um and at that time i believe it was a top seller it was pretty um i remember yeah so it wasn't secret or weird it was more kind of out there in pop culture but it really did change my thoughts because now i could have this relationship with the universe which kind of brought in the idea of aliens and still have control over my reality and have peace and have all the things that i was really longing for so how far how far did this go for you i remember when we talked uh at the women's conference you even mentioned that you were attending meetings at a mason lodge and uh so so how and i i think it's very intriguing that you said you didn't know it was the occult but you were pursuing this type of supernatural and and i think i want to swing back around to that at some point because i think that especially even as christians um there are a lot of things that masquerade as christianity when when i was studying the new age for a chapter i was writing in a book i i didn't know much about it honestly until i studied it for the first time a few years ago and i was really surprised to see how much christian language is used within new age to try to sell the ideas as you know this is a pro-jesus idea this is this is a christian idea and they use a lot of the same terminology like even concepts of atonement and things like that so i think that's a very interesting point and and for people who are watching and listening i think that's a good warning sign is is you know it's like with false gospels with things like the occult it's not like they always just show up on your doorstep and say hi i'm a false gospel come follow me you know it's usually very seductive it's very tricky there's a lot of mixing and matching with christian vocabulary and things like that and so how like how far did this go for you did you go because i don't i don't i'm learning really your entire story for the first time right now did you end up going into something specific like wicca or was it just more like a broadly defined spirituality new age kind of thing or how would you describe that and how did that sort of culminate before the lord brought you out of it um so i continued in this it really progressed to where i i still would have called myself a christian i still really clung to that i could be a christian if anyone kind of confronted me and god was so kind and gracious to bring people into my life who testified that i was in sin brought me even to awana and i that was so kind but i just loved my sin and so i got in very toxic relationships and in one of those abusive relationships my boyfriend started to introduce me to truly the new age and at that time i didn't really know what it was but he um we started doing psychedelics and i got very into crystals and astrology and just magic and i loved it it felt like it was my path my future my destiny because it was so familiar that same familiarity that i felt as a child with those aliens that same alluring um almost lustful desire or temptation that i felt with these occult things was was with these ideas and so i went full force into it he was a dj and at first it was at clubs but that turned into more burning man type of festivals and just being around the culture there and the drugs and the magic and i was amazed that there was they even were doing things that when i finally did read the bible for myself and just the sexual immorality there um but just all in the guise of no this is good and you're just being free and you're freeing yourself from the doctrine that's so oppressive of christianity you need to be your true self and find yourself and the way to do that is to be open there's no real good or bad you're making judgments that aren't really there it's just really changing my mind about these things and god again was so kind and so faithful that while i was there i knew that it was wrong my conscience bore witness that this is wrong but i kept going because i love my sin and this continued until by the time that relationship ended i was terribly addicted to drugs i was everything i was having um terribly terrifying experiences where i genuinely believed that i was possessed i was asking for these entities to um to take over my body i was trying to automatic write and channel and i just i loved it i reveled in it and after we broke up the things that i didn't want to do because i i just i knew that they were wrong the lord was so gracious to give me that that's that amount of um holding me back restraint but once we broke up before i was saved people really were my identity they were my whole world because i didn't really know who i was and so when we broke up i just was like you know what i need control over my life and the occult the real dark occults promises this control and so if i i i just need to stop being held back by my christian oppressive dogma um and i need to just go full force into this because if i do then i'll finally have this power i knew that there was power behind the occult i had felt it i'd had physical manifestations of it but i knew it was wrong but now that restraint i just kind of snapped and i was living in a studio apartment in hollywood and i just obsessively researched what i believed that these entities were leading me to research through signs which ended up being the ancient egyptian mystery schools hermeticism astrology tarot and kabbalah and just really obsessively looking into these things i had clothes lines across my apartment with just like drawings and i i was just i genuinely had lost my mind and i um ended up being led to this occult order after years of this that was called the hermetic order of the golden dawn and aleister crowley was in it and i knew that he was one of the most wicked men to have ever lived or that he's been called that but there was this entity um an egyptian deity called thoth or toff and i believe that this entity was leading me and it was that same kind of familiarity when i'd see this entity as with the aliens and so everything really did feel like it was my destiny or this was who i was this was always supposed to happen this was fate and the tarot cards for this thoth tarot card had that order on it and i ended up joining this order i um i you know reached out to them and they had an order in la and they met with or one person met with me and interviewed me and it was just so dark and i can't even describe how dark it was just the even the atmosphere just felt so heavy and dark but i was so excited because everything that he was talking about from just everything that he brought up was exactly what i had been led by these entities to study and so it just seemed it all made sense and i was so excited um i felt i had felt so isolated and i think that something the enemy really does is when you get into this stuff you feel so isolated you can't really have conversations but then when when that person came and everything that i had been so into um he was talking about it really made sense to me and so he told me to go to a freemason lodge in la to be initiated and so i did and it was the you know black robes and all and um i was initiated through this ritual into this order and i would it was very dark but i was so excited because i believed that i needed to go into the darkness to shine the light of knowledge in it in order to gain power and so i became a member and i would go regularly there to practice magic and invoke deities which were demons and practice you know magic and it i was i had so much pride in it because i felt like i was special like i did when i was young and i was being really encouraged and told i was moving up so fast and but i was so depraved and i was so wicked and the peace that it had promised just wasn't coming and i was i i was more dark than ever before when i was supposed to be gaining all of this power wow i mean this is just so fascinating and a couple bits of your story sort of jumped out at me number one the the point that you felt special and i i suspect this is a lot more common than people even know about just people being drawn into things like this because of yes the power that you're promised the peace that you're promised but also just sort of creating and carving out this identity that makes you feel uh like you have something special to offer it makes you feel like you're you're especially gifted in a certain way and i think that's a that's a powerful point i'm also curious when you said uh you wanted to to shine the light of knowledge i don't know if you've looked much into gnosticism but that almost sounds a little bit like ancient gnosticism would you say there's a connection there yes there was a huge connection um in the golden dawn it was basically like a big mix of kabbalah and gnosticism and the bible like which is kabbalah using the bible and making it into some mystic thing that it isn't um but it was a mix of that and wicca and a bunch of other things all together um but at the time i was just so excited to learn this hidden knowledge and to gain the power to have control over the universe but ultimately i just wanted control over my life i wanted to make my dreams come true i wanted um i wanted my imagination to become reality which is which is what they basically promised so you're living in an apartment in hollywood and you've been initiated into this order uh it's the darkest time of your life and what happens then how does the lord begin to lead you out of this life yeah um i was just i mean i wish i could communicate how depraved and how just terrible i was and i was truly amazed by that because i was spending hours a day doing rituals and meditations and spells and i was supposed to be transmuting into this higher person into this more transcended more evolved person and yet i was just wicked and i knew it my addictions were worse than they'd ever been i had no control over myself at all and um i was just amazed and so the lord throughout my life was really just so gracious to put people in my life who who kept planting seeds that i i couldn't shake and so throughout this whole time even at the darkest of it i tried to make christianity fit i told myself i was a christian there were a couple times when i you know thought i was pagan but i was just more of an evolved christian but for the most part even when i joined this order i joined it because the symbol of this order had a cross on it and so i told myself oh it must be fine if you're a christian because there's a cross and so just making these distinctions of oh i'm not practicing black magic i'm practicing white magic and just the things that i could do to convince myself yeah i'm a christian i'm just you know i don't the bible isn't my authority you know what i what i believe about christianity is my authority and i believe jesus is lord and and the order actually said that you can be a christian in this order christ is a big part of it and so things just get messed up when you change the definitions of words and i didn't understand that and so but people were testifying and i was i never had peace with what i was doing whether it was in high school or in the bad relationships or in the you know music festivals or in the a cold order i knew deep down that what i was doing was wrong and when i was in this order even when i was being initiated i knew that satan was behind it i but i refused to believe it and i kept telling myself you should just keep going and find out you should just but what if he's not and just kind of the curiosity and the just wanting to find out um and and really just being rebellious i kept going and so that was just so kind of god to that i never felt the peace there but because of that i was i was searching um still and and so i was listening to the radio and a sermon came on and i had been you know reading the bhagavad-gita hinduism is also a big part of it and just other texts religious texts trying to gain truth and so i thought well i might as well read you know some of the bible um and as sermon came on when i was driving i didn't realize it was sermon or else i probably would have turned it off but i recognized it as the truth something in me just was like this is what i've been searching for what is this and at the end i found out it was a christian pastor and i was like what this is christianity i had thought christianity was so old and dumb and just you know not enlightened but this was such rich truth that i was i was floored and i really really could not shake that i had a grandpa that i hadn't visited in years come out of nowhere and visit and just sat me down asked me how my relationship with god was i told him it was better than it had ever been because i was exploring all these paths and i had so much knowledge and he just said you know jesus is the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father except through him and you will go to hell like if you die in your sins um and i was shaking but something in me i knew i knew it was true and so as i'm going as i'm in this order as i'm doing these rituals as i'm trying to justify what i'm doing i i couldn't shake that and so i started reading the bible and i read that you can tell a tree by its fruit and i didn't really know what that meant um but when i was at the order i just knew that the people even though i loved them they were just as depraved as me and it was clear and i just was like very confused that if these people are high up in this secret order that i have so much pride for being in and yet they're just as depraved as me how is this a good thing and then i read that satan masquerades himself as an angel of light which was shocking to me because i had been telling myself this can't be bad if it feels this good this can't be bad if you know the light of knowledge and and all of this these ideas that i'm gaining i'm being enlightened how can this be dark well that was okay then i knew i'd already known but then i really knew but i was still um so prideful that i was like well you know i'm still gonna find out for sure maybe it's not and then just one night i remembered the first um the fall of man in genesis 3 that the lie is that if you eat the tree of the knowledge from the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil you'll become like god knowing good and evil and that is the entire premise of the occult is that if you you know eat eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you'll become like god and it just floored me that i hadn't even fallen for some you know new lie this was the this was the first that led to the fall and that's what it was leading to in my life it wasn't giving me peace it wasn't giving me control you know i was a drug addict i was miserable and i had no control even over my life let alone the universe and i i was just like this is the bible is true this is what it is but i was still so prideful that i didn't turn and then one night just like any other night i was walking across my apartment and i collapsed to my knees and it felt like my soul was being sucked out into just complete absolute darkness and i heard myself scream jesus christ save me and it shocked me to hear myself scream that but i meant it and in that moment i had peace the peace that i had been searching for all my life and i knew beyond any doubt that the god of the bible the father son the holy spirit is the only true god and that i had sinned grievously terribly against him and that truly all the things that i'd been doing were sin against god and i was terrified and i was shaking and i made it over to my bible and i just started reading it um i was i was terrified and i wanted to know this this god that's real and as i was reading at first i still really thought i have this secret knowledge and that really tripped me up in how the occult beliefs really got me is thinking i have this secret knowledge that no one else has so i'm you know above the bible but as i'm reading it fed me everything else had left me emptier than before but this actually was feeding me and so i read like crazy and once i finished reading the bible i realized that i had completely changed on the inside um out and that amazed me because i had spent years doing so many works and rituals and things to change anything and have control over anything but nothing worked it was all um a delusion it was just empty it was deceitful but just the living word of god and this small amount of faith that i had that jesus is who he says he is in the bible and i had completely changed from the inside out and i knew for the first time in my life that i could get sober and that was stunning to me because i genuinely was at the point that i was like it's too late for me um but i and i genuinely didn't believe i could be saved and so just the fact that i had been you know washed and regenerated i was stunned and so i just kind of locked myself in my little apartment and by god's grace i got sober just clinging to him and clinging to him in prayer and he was so faithful in his word just it amazed me and then i got involved in a church and um yeah the rest is history but it was it was truly stunning to me that how the enemy really does this flip that you know this christianity is trying to hold you back but this is you know the truth when in reality god's god is true and and in christ are all the mysteries you know and it's just it's amazing how how how jesus really is the true light and everything else is just a lie well that is such a beautiful story and one of the things that stands out to me about your particular story as you describe being in your apartment and just crying out to jesus christ to save me i just want to note you know you didn't have to have this service where there's an hour of worship sort of prepping the room and getting the mood going you know this was an encounter you had with god um but i've heard so many stories like yours where it's like there you're in your apartment and you cry out to jesus and i think it one of the things that that really stands out to me about your story too is that you know you're in your apartment you're crying out to jesus christ to save you but you also said that in this order that you were initiated into jesus played a role like he was in you know whatever their definition of jesus was invited to be a part of things so what was your view of jesus when you were in the occult uh versus the jesus that you cried out to that night in your apartment well sadly um it was taught that christ was basically osiris um the egyptian deity and we even took communion to osiris in a very similar way and it was basically just terrible blasphemy taking the things about jesus and ascribing them to osiris and almost saying that you know jesus is he is the christ but he's almost like a lesser incarnation of osiris um and just the way that that they would say you can believe in jesus but it's it's not at all the jesus of the bible and so when you when you say that you believe in jesus but it's a different jesus it's so important to describe okay what do you mean when you say jesus what do you mean when you say christ because a lot of the time in the occult christ could be christ consciousness the idea that or the idea that you can become christ we're all christ we just have to awaken and christ just came to show what it's like to have a right relationship with god and we can all have those powers so whether it was in the new age or the occult or that specific order christ was involved but it's not the christ of the bible that's good that's good and if anybody's listening or watching and you want to learn more about specifically the the concept of christ consciousness i have a nearly four hour podcast with stephen bankars on that universal christ christ consciousness if you want to know a little bit more about what that's all about you can look back in the archives for that but jack i want to ask you um if you'll comment on something because part of your story was psychedelics taking psychedelic drugs as part of uh you know i'm assuming to to achieve some kind of enlightenment or spiritual awareness of some sort and one of the phenomenon we're seeing i mean it's not not like this is anything new but i've noticed even in the whole deconstruction movement where people are sort of deconstructing out of christianity and into either non-belief or into some kind of a broader spirituality a new age type thing or progressive christianity whatever it might be i'm noticing it pop up a little more that psychedelics are playing a role and you know what's what's kind of interesting to me when i hear your story and even i've shared my dad's story on the podcast of you know he was searching for god in the 60s as a hippie through psychedelics and eastern mysticism and a lot of different things and then he found he came to christ out of that and now i think it's interesting we're seeing some people leave christianity and try some of this other type stuff and so i wanted to read a tweet uh thread here that i'd love to get you to comment on um this is from audrey assad you know just for many people a beloved songwriter and singer and uh she's sort of been in this process of deconstruction and walking away from um you know it's a nuanced journey and i'm not here to you know dunk on her or anything like that but when i saw this tweet thread it really made me so sad because it seems like when people deconstruct out of the truth they'll try so many different things to try to feel better or be happy or achieve some kind of enlightenment and so she wrote this on twitter she said just over two years ago i took my first therapeutic dose of psychedelic mushrooms i was feeling rather desperate still riddled with symptoms of ptsd and ocd which had finally begun interrupting my daily life with regular anxiety attacks i had become a functional nihilist losing complete touch with religious belief which for me at the time contributed to my feeling low and stuck in a fog i felt i couldn't even know whether love was real a very close friend recommended i try psychedelics and after reading the book how to change your mind i knew in my gut it was for me so just over two years ago in the woods of tennessee i took nearly five grams of i'm not sure how to say this word psilocybin and emerged from that long beautiful brutal night with hope in my heart and healing in my body i began to lose food allergies i stopped biting my nails my eating disorder symptoms went quiet and wildest of all i felt i had met the divine love that undergirds this universe for the first time and the billionth time all at once and jack i'd love to give your to get your thoughts on that because you've been on the other side of that and the reason i want to get your thoughts on this is because i can see how compelling that might be to someone who's had a lot of trauma maybe sexual abuse in their past eating disorders addictions and you know they're they're slugging it out trying to live for god and nothing's working and then they read this and think well that sounds very hopeful maybe that's something i should try what what what what would you comment on that maybe you know my main goal in reading that again is not to dunk on her but maybe if anybody had read that and is tempted to to try something like that out of desperation what would you have to say yeah i read a similar tweet from her a while ago and my heart was just broken because i even think back to the word sorcery in the bible and just how it's pharmakia and i'm sure steven could explain this much better than me but just the fact that it does have to do um with taking um things like that from my understanding and just what a big part that is in in these movements because you there is a response that you have and i genuinely believe it opens up the door to demonic activity um and there's so many times when people take these and even for me you have these experiences and then these experiences start to dictate truth for you but um a lot of the time these experiences contradict christ which is interesting that that's how it is and it another thing is when we depend on anything other than god for for our healing or just at all that's you know idolatry that's not a good thing and um yeah it's just heartbreaking because um those those things are very deceptive and um it's a it's a it's a good way to be deceived yeah and i would imagine too with something like that or even the occult and different types of things people will try it might even feel like it's working for a while you know i think that's the thing that that tricks people is they'll they'll take something like well i feel better you know how could this be wrong and i wrote down what you said you said this can't be bad if it feels this good and i think that that can be a really deceptive sort of um inroad into some of these things that are very spiritually dangerous but they might feel good for a while they might actually feel like hey that worked um you know and and so therefore like you said it starts to dictate truth to you rather than what scripture has to say on things and so um i think that's that's a really important thing to bring out i want to ask you you you mentioned a connection with disney and i i i know that what i'm about to ask you is going to risk really you know this is probably going to be the most controversial thing we we talk about should it i don't know if it should be or not but you know christian parents are all you know divided over things like harry potter and um you know disney and all kinds of stuff that you see and i think you know growing up my parents did a pretty good job with that i remember watching the smurfs and my mom said you know gargamel uh is the you know the villain and he does black magic and uh papa smurf does magic but it's not it's still evil even though it's white magic and she was explaining kind of even as a kid the difference between white magic and black magic and just because papa smurf's the good guy and he's doing sorcery for good and it's white magic it's still evil and then you know she explained how the devil comes as an angel of light i thought she did a really good job sort of preparing us to parse through some of those things um but you know i and i'm just gonna out myself as being one of those people that's i i'm concerned about harry potter you know because i read all the books and you know i i see kids get really sucked into it and it romanticizes a lot of that stuff look and if you're watching and you're christian parent and you're into harry potter don't be mad at me i know you know we're all doing the best we can and i might be wrong you might be right you might be wrong and i might be right we're all doing our best but i'd love to know your opinion jack just on on um you know maybe specifically to christian parents as we because i've just noticed in all of the media that's aimed at my kids uh it was it was i think it was cameron mcallister i heard him say this like it just feels so witchy everything feels really witchy right now you know have you noticed that there's sort of this um influx of positive portrayal of witches and the occult what would your comments be on that yeah it blows my mind that that's going on and i just think it's interesting that these things that god is very clear that he calls abominable god is he doesn't like magic he doesn't like sorcery um but yeah this is what is being pushed on our children and it and it did have an effect on me um at disneyland there's a show called fantasmic and it's awesome and i was obsessed with it and it was i didn't really understand it or why but it had a huge impact on my life and to be honest there's there's a lot of the things that i don't remember about that really dark period in my life and i think that's a kindness of god but when i was driving to be initiated at this freemason lodge i was blasting the music to fantasmic because it suddenly made so much sense all of the occult connections and the way the story is and what it what it really means or like the higher meaning of it and i was just like this is what i've been being how could this be bad if this is my earliest memories are of this and this it all made make so much sense and it put a lot into my justifying what i was doing because how can this be bad if this it just it seemed like it was my destiny and so um and in that you know it's there's just magic and sorcery and the transmuting of darkness to light and that your imagination is everything um i'm trying to think of this song fantasmic it says see see it in your mind and you can find in your imagination and then it goes on but the whole um occult is just you know literally see it in your mind and then you can your you can make your dreams come true by doing what he was doing in the show and so um you know i can only speak from my own experience and when i see it now it's especially clear because it did have a huge effect on me that how when i was in a freemason lodge doing magic rituals it didn't seem that weird because i grew up watching that even the princess and the frog you know like i'm so glad you said that about the smurfs because the princess and the frog the bad guy does black magic but mama odie does white magic and she's the good one well god doesn't god hates all magic there is no good magic but um when you're when i was doing magic i could justify it because it just i just think it's very dangerous um i'm sure that there are christians that work at disney and i don't want to you know draw a hard line but just it is definitely concerning that this is what is being pushed out to kids and and i don't want to say it doesn't have any effect because it had a huge effect on my life to the point that that's what i was listening to and that's what was encouraging me as i drive to put on a black robe and be hoodwinked in a freemason lodge you know yeah are there practices you see in the church that from your background you look at and you recognize a similarity uh that causes you concern where maybe you know i'm just the church at large things that you're seeing uh practices maybe that you're not seeing in the bible but maybe they have some similarity with what you went through in in your story what would you comment on that um well um the enneagram which i know is a hot topic but i was amazed when i was looking back at some of my old material i typed i don't even know what i was looking for but there's a whole page on the enneagram in my order of the golden dawn material and that blew my mind because i had heard the first time i saw the enneagram i was like that looks very cult but just the fact that that it is and it's in you know that material um it blows my mind that it's in the church as a christian thing when it's not um so that which yeah yeah and then you know in the hyper charismatic movement just the sometimes it's hard for me to talk about what happened in the order just because of the the not threats but just the way your promise is secrecy but i know that's um i know uh he who's in me is greater than he who's in the world but in some of the rituals like when you're evoking these demons these entities or deities they would say you are encouraged to like laugh hysterically and act like animals and and when i see that in the church under the saying that this is the holy spirit um it truly amazes me because it is so familiar to me and it is not from a christian um setting that i'm familiar with that it is it is almost i could put what happened in that freemason ritual room and what's happening in a church and they look identical and that is deeply concerning to me and that amazed me when i um was saved and started going to church and and i'm seeing this and i'm thinking no this is not this is not uh god you know yeah yeah that's good and especially i think too because you know there can be counterfeits of the real thing that happen but we don't there's no biblical concept of laughing hysterically and you know i mean there's a couple of proof texts people you know bring out for that but in kosty hinn's book uh not god greet in the prosperity gospel but defining deception the first one you know he goes through some of those scriptures and i encourage everybody to read that which you know you are a member of kosty's church so there's there's a little when i got my phone call coming it said kosty hen calling and i thought wait that's confusing but yeah because you're at the church and that's why that's why it was said that but yeah just you know i recommend um his books i just finished god greeting the prosperity gospel just great stuff um but yeah i think that's that's really the main key it's not like there's this christian practice that the occult is mimicking i mean that could that could happen as well but what you're talking about is something that's foreign to the bible and you know it from the occult and you're seeing it come into the church and that's really a concern and that's a concern for me as well well in a moment we're going to go to the subscriber portion of our interview this is where patreon supporters get to ask questions of my guest as a part of a private facebook group so if you're interested in learning more about our patreon group you can go to patreon.com alisa childers take a look at the different tiers there's different benefits for different tiers you can do that and uh and then get get access to these bonus episodes that are you know 5-10 minutes of extra material with each guest where you get to ask the questions you can check that out jack before we go into that portion though i'd like to leave our guests with some encouragement um you know final word for you what would you say to everybody who's watched this whole thing maybe they've got somebody who's being sucked into some of this maybe they themselves are being sucked into it um just what encouragement would you leave us with today i would just say that no matter what deception you're in no matter what pain you're in no matter what you're going through the bible is true and it is sufficient and we can rely on on on it as the truth and what amazed me and continues to amaze me every day is that you can i dove deep into this stuff and you could too but it would end up being a lie and and it's not going to give you peace or satisfaction maybe momentarily but it's deception it's an illusion it lures you in and entices you but it's not truly good and what's amazing is how truly good christ is and that there truly is freedom in christ and just the peace of god um so i just would encourage you that whatever you're searching for um in the occult you're it's it's a lie and it just ends in your destruction but you can rely on god's word and jesus christ is amazing and you're never too far gone to be saved and i'm just amazed truly by the love of god shown through us in christ amen well i want to thank my guest jack mourinho for joining me today what an amazing story of god's grace and faithfulness to walk her out of such darkness if you're watching on youtube go ahead and subscribe hit the like button leave a comment all of that helps with the algorithms to get this into the news feeds of more people so that more people will come across it and get to hear this amazing message if you saw this post on social media again clicking like share leaving a comment it really helps get the word out if you're listening on itunes leaving a review really helps spotify google all that stuff anything you can do to help get those algorithms going so we can get this into the hands of more people so that they'll hear this message would be great thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 228,141

Rating: 4.8929234 out of 5

Keywords: apologetics

Id: QgemABuo4Rc

Length: 56min 7sec (3367 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021