I didn’t grow up knowing about inner healing. I didn’t know what it was until the Lord called me into deliverance ministry. Inner healing is going back and exploring the wounds of our souls and discovering where we need to forgive people and release the hurts we have experienced. We could need inner healing from rejection, anger, abuse, unworthiness and other emotional ailments that have built up as strongholds in our lives.

Inner healing isn’t reliving the experiencing and allowing the pain to come forth all over again. It is allowing the forgiveness that Jesus offered us to extend to the person who has betrayed, offended or hurt us. Inner healing is closing the doors to our past so we can move forward in the fullness and freedom of Christ.

But where are deliverance ministries falling short when they minister in the area of inner healing? If we look at the model of deliverance Jesus did in the Bible, He cast the spirits out. Inner healing and deliverance must go hand in hand. We truly cannot have one without the other, and when we do, we are simply masking the problem temporarily.

When we need inner healing, often the issue is one we have hung onto for 20-30 years, such as repeated rejection, feeling shame and self-condemnation. After years of suffering from these emotional ailments, they build up as demonic strongholds in our lives because we did nothing to release them or didn’t receive the proper biblical kind of ministry Jesus released. When an emotional abuse or ailment builds up, and we don’t reject it and dismiss it, it is a legal entry point for a demonic spirit to invade our souls. A demonic spirit must be cast out. Jesus cast the spirits out. He didn’t say get off, stop hindering them or do nothing about them. He spoke to the demonic spirit and gave it a firm, authoritative command, and the demonic spirit had to respond to His words.

I am continually amazed and frankly shocked at the number of people who call my ministry for deliverance, and when I ask what kind of deliverance they have had, and they tell me all the deliverance they have received but that no one ever cast the spirit out. I ask them, and I ask you, has someone ever in your inner healing or deliverance ministry prayed something like, “Spirit of (spirit name, such as anger, control, rejection), go, get out, leave them in Jesus’ name.” We must cast out the demonic spirit that is plaguing ourselves or people associated with the emotional stronghold.

If we don’t cast out the spirit, we are only masking the problem for a little while. What happens is you receive inner healing in a personal situation or altar ministry. You feel good for a few weeks or even months after, but then the same issue arises. The demonic spirit has not left; it is simply lying dormant in your soul until another sin or attack comes against you, and it arises. Let me give you an example. A person struggling with pornography quits pornography. They have conquered the behavior patterns and desire to watch porn. They are free for years; then they get entangled in pornography again. Why? Because the demonic spirits of that addiction such as pornography, lust, perversion and masturbation were never cast out; therefore, the spirits are inside a person’s soul, lying dormant until the next mishap. Our emotional ailments are similar. Unless we cast out the demonic spirits infiltrating our soul, we only experience temporary relief and not the fullness Jesus came to provide us.

Don’t believe every ministry that has the word “deliverance” in its name is a deliverance ministry. “Deliverance” means different things to different ministries. We need to go deep and cast out the demons as Jesus did in the Bible, and not every ministry does that. If you are discouraged because it seems as you have never received the freedom you are searching for, I encourage you to read my book, Discerning and Destroying the Works of Satan, so you can discover through scriptural insights the biblical way to do deliverance and then seek out a deliverance ministry that follows those principles. {eoa}

Kathy DeGraw is a prophetic spiritual warfare strategist releasing the love and power of God to ignite and activate people, release prophetic destinies and deliver people from the bondage of the enemy. She is the founder of Kathy DeGraw Ministries and Be Love Outreach. She is the author of several books, including Speak Out, Discerning and Destroying the Works of Satan, Identity Invasion, Who is Speaking? and Warfare Declarations. You can connect with Kathy on Facebook, or visit .

For Christians, the grieving process is markedly different than for non-believers, Dr. Carol Peters-Tanksley says. And while the deep, heart-wrenching pain can be felt by both, Peters-Tanksley says the believer’s outlook on pain and loss has a much different connotation.

“For the Christian that’s going through grief, it’s about embracing truly excruciating pain of loss and irrepressible hope at the very same time,” Peters-Tanksley told Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of “Greenelines” on the Charisma Podcast Network. “Those two things can coexist.

“The very deep and heart-wrenching pain is real, it’s there. But, at the very same time, those of us who know Jesus, we know that this is not the end. There is the confidence that nothing, even the darkness and the pain of grief and death, cannot extinguish that hope.”

Peters-Tanksley, an OB-GYN physician and doctor of ministry, went through the grieving process in 2016 when her husband, Al, passed away. After God nurtured her through her grief, she felt compelled to write the book The Christian’s Journey Through Grief: How to Walk Through the Valley with Hope, due to be released later this month.

Peters-Tanksley clings to the confidence believers can have in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, which says, “But I would not have you ignorant, brothers, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others who have no hope.”

For the rest of Dr. Carol Peters-Tanksley’s story, listen to the podcast below.

Several years ago, a young man came back to life after being dead for an hour—all because his mother cried out to God in desperate faith. John Smith had been underwater for about 15 minutes, and doctors couldn’t get a pulse for another 45 minutes. But as soon as his mother, Joyce, prayed over him, his heart started beating again. Many call it a modern-day resurrection.

That miracle went viral on the news, and John’s story was recently made into a major motion picture called Breakthrough. The film recently hit theaters, and as of Tuesday, it holds the No. 2 spot right after Avengers: Endgame.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed John in what became one of the biggest podcasts on our network this year. Recently, I also interviewed his mother, Joyce. She recalls the events leading up to the moment she saw John lying dead on the hospital bed. She says she had a strange sense of peace as she approached her dead son.

“I thought I was being very quiet and demure,” Joyce tells me on the “In Depth With Stephen Strang” podcast. “But according to Dr. Sutter and everyone else in the room, everyone in the ER could hear me when I prayed. And I did walk up to the end of my son’s bed, and they said I very boldly and very loudly called out to God and the Holy Spirit that He would come and please bring me back my son. And to quote Dr. Sutter, I did it with a boldness that he had never seen before.”

In my interview with Joyce, which you can listen to here or in this article, she shared with me which parts of Breakthrough were true to the story and which parts were the product of literary license. She says one difference between the film and the true story is that when she was praying over John, she was surrounded by people.

“[Dr. Sutter and Alex, a tech nurse] both have the same story,” she says. “Dr. Sutter says when I walked in the room, something else walked in the room with me. And it was so powerful that not only did it change the atmosphere, but it changed the temperature of the room. … In moments of prayer, all of a sudden, the monitor starts beeping. And Alex had been there for 27 minutes, doing everything she possibly could. She was stunned. She says to me, ‘I’ve got a heartbeat.'”

But a change in temperature and a restarted heartbeat weren’t the only supernatural things Dr. Sutter and Alex witnessed that day.

“Alex said something so powerful moved up John’s body that it was pushing her and the people who were working on John away from the bed,” Joyce says. “They had done everything they possibly could to bring my son back to life, but nothing was working. And it was almost like God had set the table with all these professionals in there and said, ‘OK, you’ve done everything you can do. Why don’t you step back and watch what I can do?'”

Joyce tells me that after John’s heart started beating, she said down, stunned, and thought, This is surreal. I just watched God bring my son back to life.

And it certainly was a miracle. After all, John was underwater for 15 to 16 minutes, according to official reports. And then he had no discernible heartbeat for the next 45 minutes.

Even the way the rescue divers found the body was supernatural. Fire Department Captain Tommy Shine was scouring the lake for John’s body with only a pole and a hook to help. He had searched everywhere he could when he heard a voice telling him to check a place he had already searched. To Shine’s surprise, John was right where the voice had told him to go.

“He did hear a voice telling him to go back and look for John, and it unnerved him so badly that—he had been invited to a friend’s house to have a barbecue, and he wouldn’t even go because of this,” Joyce says. “He did not know what to do with this.”

John’s body was found right near the edge of a drop-off that took the lake from 10 feet to 50 feet deep. If the search team had used a boat, the wake would have been strong enough to knock John off the edge of that drop-off, and the team would never have found him.

Certain parts of the film—such as Joyce’s conflict with Pastor Jason Noble about the church’s music and her riding in the helicopter with John to the second hospital—happened differently in real life. After all, life tends to be more complicated than movies have time to portray. But Joyce says the movie didn’t have to embellish what happened. John’s resurrection stands on its own as a miracle.

“We have 310 pages of medical records and police reports to back up everything that we have put in and told in our story in the book, Breakthrough,” Joyce says. “We wanted to make sure that people knew this was the truth. God did such an awesome job. It doesn’t need to be embellished.”

Joyce shares many more fascinating details in our interview, including how she prayed God would spare her son’s life and give him a second chance if he wasn’t where he needed to be spiritually. In my interview with John, he told me he wasn’t following the Lord at the time he went through the ice, but God used that circumstance to draw him to Jesus.

So I encourage you to listen to my entire interview with Joyce to hear more about this supernatural story. And if you haven’t already watched Breakthrough, I highly recommend viewing it while it’s still in theaters!

As expected, pundits on the left are in an uproar at the president’s claims that a doctor conspires with parents as to whether to execute their newborn baby. In Trump’s words (spoken at a recent rally in Green Bay), “The baby is born, the mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully. Then the doctor and mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”

In response, Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith tweeted, “President Trump keeps telling the same lie about abortion doctors murdering healthy fetuses after delivery. This doesn’t happen. Yet he said it again last night. This is precisely the kind of hysteria that inspires people who murder doctors and patients.”

Julia Pulver, a former neonatal nurse, said this: “When a baby dies in the hospital, it is a very sad thing but it is not something that is ever chosen. It is a horrible situation thrust upon parents who want their baby, who have prepared for the baby, who have framed sonograms sitting on their desks.”

According to Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, “What Trump asserted, for the second time, is false, illegal and simply not happening—nor would it happen.” She claimed that, “The president “not only straight-up lied but also vilified women, families and doctors facing situations every single one of us prays we never encounter.”

And Huffington Post adds this: “The recent focus on the alleged horrors of late-term abortions is especially fact-free. Only 1.3 percent of abortions take place after 21 weeks, and experts say these involve pregnancies that endanger the mother (and by extension the baby) or severe fetal anomalies that are incompatible with life.”

Let’s address these claims one at a time.

First, President Trump said nothing about the baby being healthy (contra the tweet of Smith). Instead, he spoke about the very real situation in which a baby survives an abortion (or, presumably, is born with a life-threatening defect) and is allowed to die. That’s why Congress keeps trying to pass the Born Alive Protection Act.

In its current form, the bill reads, “To amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”

This is a real bill designed to address real, life-and-death situations.

Not only so, but it was Virginia governor Ralph Northam who provided Trump with his main talking points about infanticide.

As Northam infamously said during a radio interview, “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So I think this was really blown out of proportion.”

Yet the left rails on Trump for calling this out rather than on Northam for saying it.

To repeat: These things are really happening.

An official government document dated Sept. 23, 2016, notes that, “In 2002, Congress responded by passing the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush and is current federal law. This law recognized a child who is born alive after a failed abortion attempt as a legal person under the laws of the United States. The legal definition of live birth includes any sign of life, such as breath, heartbeat, pulsation of the umbilical cord or definite movement of voluntary muscles.

“Unfortunately, incidents involving born-alive children being killed after an attempted abortion have continued after this law was passed. Infanticide is unacceptable in a civilized society, regardless of what one may think about abortion itself. It should be uncontroversial for the federal government to supplement current law with enforcement protections for born-alive children after attempted abortions. That is why Congress must pass the proposed legislation known as the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 3504/S. 2066).”

Trump is not lying. These things are happening. They may happen just as he described (with the baby being wrapped in a blanket) or they may not (perhaps the baby is left naked and crying on a table). But they are happening, nonetheless.

Yet, to repeat, there’s no outcry from the left about these horrors. The outcry is about the president drawing attention to the horrors.

As noted by Tony Perkins, “Liberals certainly thought infanticide was real enough in 2002, when protecting infants was so uncontroversial that it passed without a single Democratic opponent. Since then, the CDC’s data only confirms these atrocities— as do mountains of eyewitness testimony, grand jury reports, survivors’ own stories and admissions by doctors like Northam himself!”

Second, what point is made by saying, “Only 1.3 percent of abortions take place after 21 weeks”? What if the sentence read, “Only 1.3 percent of abortions take place after birth”? Would that lessen the severity of the crime? We only kill a tiny percentage of babies once they’re born!

Let’s also put this in real-life numbers.

According to a just-released CDC report, in New York City in 2015, “the number of abortions at or after 21 weeks was 1,485 while the number of homicide victims was 352.”

Shall we celebrate the fact that this (allegedly) represents “only” 1.3 percent of abortions?

These, in short, are the facts: States like New York have passed laws allowing for abortions right up to the time of delivery. Infanticide is taking place. And in countries like the Netherlands, “650 babies a year [are] euthanized so that their parents don’t have to witness them struggle with disability or disease.”

In light of all this, I’m glad that President Trump continues to speak up. He is addressing something terribly evil, and it behooves every person of conscience to stand with him in standing for the rights of “the least of these.”

I didn’t grow up knowing about inner healing. I didn’t know what it was until the Lord called me into deliverance ministry. Inner healing is going back and exploring the wounds of our souls and discovering where we need to forgive people and release the hurts we have experienced. We could need inner healing from rejection, anger, abuse, unworthiness and other emotional ailments that have built up as strongholds in our lives.

Inner healing isn’t reliving the experiencing and allowing the pain to come forth all over again. It is allowing the forgiveness that Jesus offered us to extend to the person who has betrayed, offended or hurt us. Inner healing is closing the doors to our past so we can move forward in the fullness and freedom of Christ.

But where are deliverance ministries falling short when they minister in the area of inner healing? If we look at the model of deliverance Jesus did in the Bible, He cast the spirits out. Inner healing and deliverance must go hand in hand. We truly cannot have one without the other, and when we do, we are simply masking the problem temporarily.

When we need inner healing, often the issue is one we have hung onto for 20-30 years, such as repeated rejection, feeling shame and self-condemnation. After years of suffering from these emotional ailments, they build up as demonic strongholds in our lives because we did nothing to release them or didn’t receive the proper biblical kind of ministry Jesus released. When an emotional abuse or ailment builds up, and we don’t reject it and dismiss it, it is a legal entry point for a demonic spirit to invade our souls. A demonic spirit must be cast out. Jesus cast the spirits out. He didn’t say get off, stop hindering them or do nothing about them. He spoke to the demonic spirit and gave it a firm, authoritative command, and the demonic spirit had to respond to His words.

I am continually amazed and frankly shocked at the number of people who call my ministry for deliverance, and when I ask what kind of deliverance they have had, and they tell me all the deliverance they have received but that no one ever cast the spirit out. I ask them, and I ask you, has someone ever in your inner healing or deliverance ministry prayed something like, “Spirit of (spirit name, such as anger, control, rejection), go, get out, leave them in Jesus’ name.” We must cast out the demonic spirit that is plaguing ourselves or people associated with the emotional stronghold.

If we don’t cast out the spirit, we are only masking the problem for a little while. What happens is you receive inner healing in a personal situation or altar ministry. You feel good for a few weeks or even months after, but then the same issue arises. The demonic spirit has not left; it is simply lying dormant in your soul until another sin or attack comes against you, and it arises. Let me give you an example. A person struggling with pornography quits pornography. They have conquered the behavior patterns and desire to watch porn. They are free for years; then they get entangled in pornography again. Why? Because the demonic spirits of that addiction such as pornography, lust, perversion and masturbation were never cast out; therefore, the spirits are inside a person’s soul, lying dormant until the next mishap. Our emotional ailments are similar. Unless we cast out the demonic spirits infiltrating our soul, we only experience temporary relief and not the fullness Jesus came to provide us.

Don’t believe every ministry that has the word “deliverance” in its name is a deliverance ministry. “Deliverance” means different things to different ministries. We need to go deep and cast out the demons as Jesus did in the Bible, and not every ministry does that. If you are discouraged because it seems as you have never received the freedom you are searching for, I encourage you to read my book, Discerning and Destroying the Works of Satan, so you can discover through scriptural insights the biblical way to do deliverance and then seek out a deliverance ministry that follows those principles. {eoa}

Kathy DeGraw is a prophetic spiritual warfare strategist releasing the love and power of God to ignite and activate people, release prophetic destinies and deliver people from the bondage of the enemy. She is the founder of Kathy DeGraw Ministries and Be Love Outreach. She is the author of several books, including Speak Out, Discerning and Destroying the Works of Satan, Identity Invasion, Who is Speaking? and Warfare Declarations. You can connect with Kathy on Facebook, or visit .

Look anywhere in our culture, and you’ll find sexual brokenness. On the internet and in the media, it’s as if anything goes. Pornography, adultery, unmarried couples living together and same-sex marriage—which was unthinkable only a generation ago—have now become the norm.

And sadly, it’s not just the world that’s steeped in dysfunction and sin. Sexual brokenness has spread throughout the church in epidemic proportions.

Dr. Doug Weiss sees this problem and has dedicated his life to helping people heal. Weiss is a Spirit-filled Christian, a prolific author and a clinical psychologist in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His message of sexual healing is exactly what the body of Christ needs right now.

I recently interviewed Weiss on my “Strang Report” podcast, which you can listen to here or in this article. He argues that the church must receive healing from sexual brokenness in order to be the moral compass to the world that God has called us to be.

“The church is responsible to be the light bearer, the salt in the earth,” Weiss says. “The church is responsible to help keep culture salty like it was in the 1950s. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. The secular world knew biblical principles because the church was the church.”

But unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the church stopped acting like the church. And Weiss says the fruit of that spiritual decline has been disastrous.

“The church has been corrupted by immorality,” he says. “More than half the men in the church are struggling with sexual sin, addiction and pornography. In Revelation 2, it says ‘To him who overcomes, I will give authority over the nations.’ But the reverse of the verse is true too. For those who are corrupted, they lose spiritual authority and power in our culture. We’ve seen that in Europe. We see it in other parts of the world throughout church history. … So if you really want to change culture, you heal the church.”

As the church heals sexually, Weiss points out, not only does it regain spiritual authority, but it also gains strength at the polls. As more people take a righteous stand from a place of personal integrity, we will see immoral laws overturned in our nation.

But how do we heal the church sexually?

“We have to have a positive message about sexuality in marriage and teach couples how to have healthy sexuality,” Weiss says. “And then we have the youth and give them the good news of sexuality and wanting to protect their sexuality. And then we have to have a sexual healing ministry for those who’ve been sexually abused and those who are in sexual addition and those in porn addiction.”

Weiss says you don’t need a Ph.D. to minister sexual healing to the broken. Most people who lead these kinds of ministries are just average men and women who want to see fellow believers walk in healing. Weiss has written many curricula on this topic as well as several books that ministries can use.

He offers intensive counseling for those who want to travel to Colorado. But people can also call 719-278-3708 to receive telephone counseling or visit for extra resources.

“If you just reach out, we will direct you and help you to where you can go to take the next step,” Weiss tells “Strang Report” listeners. “So you can be a part of the healing process for yourself individually or for your marriage, or be a part of the healing message for the church of Jesus Christ in your area.”

Perhaps Weiss’ message spoke to you because you’re wrestling with a sexual issue. Or perhaps it made you think of someone else who needs help in this area. Please reach out and let Jesus bring healing. As more people make that choice, the church will heal—and our nation will transform as a result.

To hear to my entire interview with Weiss, click here or listen to the podcast at the top of this article. And please share this article with your friends. It may minister to someone you never thought struggled with sexual brokenness.

I realize many of you have never ever thought about God—the all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful God—as your actual Father-in-law. He sees all the thoughts and behaviors you have toward your spouse, whether you are with them or absent from them.

Unlike our earthly in-laws, our Father-in-law, God, has unlimited resources for us to carry out His expectations of excellence in serving and loving our spouses. Think through with me, of all He has given to you, to enable you to be an excellent loving servant to your spouse.

First, He gave you the death of His Son so you could break strongholds of sin in your life in order to serve with excellence. He has given you the gift of the Holy Spirit to live inside you to help you be an excellent son-in-law or daughter-in-law. He has given you the Word of God, the Bible, to help you grow daily in the wisdom of how to love.

He has given you a community of faith in the local church. There, you see love being worked out in people’s lives. He has given you finances, time and a heart touched by His grace and love so you can be an excellent son-in-law or daughter-in-law.

God has done quite a bit for me to enable me to be successful as a loving servant toward my spouse. I will never be able to say He did not give me all I needed to love and serve my wife well.

How about you? Has the Father lavished resources and opportunities on you to love and serve your spouse with excellence? The answer is yes, for all of us who call Jesus Lord. How we utilize these amazing resources that God has given to us is up to us, but I do not think any of us can argue that He has not amply supplied resources for us to be in-laws of God.

I love and encourage couples to use prayer. By this I do not mean your daily couples prayer, though it is a great idea to have that in your life. It is true that this practice can only lead to God having good feelings toward you as you bring your spouse to Him every day in joint prayer. I am talking instead of praying directly to God, the Father-in-Law.

Here’s a couple of examples:

“Father-in-law God, I am about to enter the zone here at my house. My wife has served endlessly today and is probably quite spent. Give me wisdom to see what needs to be done with the children, the house or just her heart. Father-in-law God, give me the energy for the first hour or so to serve well with a great attitude and put my needs last for at least an hour or so. Please hear your son-in-law’s prayer. I love you, Jesus.”

“Father-in-law God, thank You for a great husband who worked hard today to provide for our family, as this is one of the ways he loves the children and me. Let my kiss remind him he has a lover, not just a wife. Give me wisdom to know how to encourage him and thank him tonight for what he does around here. I love you, Father, and I thank you for the opportunity to show and speak love to Your son today.”

Imagine if you prayed like this every day for a week, month or years. You would start getting the Father’s heart for your spouse. You would be more grateful and energized in your marriage—at least that is how it affects me. When I pray to Father-in-law God, acknowledging Lisa as His gift to me, it changes my attitude and energy as I enter my marriage and family. With that energy, I feel less self-centered and entitled to get my needs met above all, and almost naturally move toward serving without having a negative attitude about it.

Try the Father-in-law prayer for a while. Each time you pray, check it off on a sticky note or on your phone to validate your consistency. See what this simple prayer can do for you and your marriage.

Doug Weiss, Ph.D., is a nationally known author, speaker and licensed psychologist. He is the executive director of Heart to Heart Counseling Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the author of several books, includingServant Marriage. You may contact Dr. Weiss via his website, or on his Facebook, by phone at 719-278-3708 or through email at heart2heart@.

Christians in Venezuela are fervently clinging to prayer as their country is in crisis, a Venezuelan pastor says.

Enrique Soto, who is currently in the United States for medical treatment, says he speaks with his fellow pastors daily, especially as the uprising gains momentum.

“It’s difficult to describe the suffering unless you see it with your eyes,” Soto says. “Please pray that in the midst of the suffering people don’t lose hope. That the heart of the Venezuelan people may turn to Christ.”

On Tuesday, opposition leader Juan Guiado, whom many countries recognize as Venezuela’s interim leader, called for the military to take action against dictator Nicholas Maduro.

The Venezuelan government calls the actions an attempted coup, but Guiado was not dissuaded. On Wednesday, Guiado called for the “largest march in history,” to protest the regime.

During the protests, a military vehicle plowed through a crowd of people. The scene was broadcast across international news media including CNN.

In the midst of the chaos, though, believers see a spiritual root.

“Our main problem is spiritual,” Soto says. “Many are being touched by the Lord but many still cling to witchcraft, Santeria and all kinds of idolatry. The spiritual war is intense because the late president Hugo Chávez was a Santeria priest himself and made all kinds of pacts and satanic rituals, aided by Cuba’s Castros, in order to hold on to power, and hand Venezuela over to the darkness of communism.”

Soto says Chavez cursed the country when he cursed the state of Israel in 2010. Chavez died of colon cancer in 2013.

Our team has been working in Colombia to help migrants leaving #Venezuela. Read how we are sharing God’s love with people in crisis.

— Samaritan’s Purse (@SamaritansPurse) April 30, 2019

Families are walking from #Venezuela to Colombia in search of hope and healing. Learn how you can provide physical help through our medical care teams.

— Samaritan’s Purse (@SamaritansPurse) April 30, 2019

Right now, you can send urgent, lifesaving supplies to someone starving in Venezuela. Your $25 will provide one person with several weeks’ worth of emergency food plus a hygiene kit, helping to save a life. Give today:

— World Help (@world_help) May 1, 2019

“The Lord has promised us a great revival and the end of this communist regime. Pray for the interim President Juan Guaido who is an extraordinary young politicians who was unknown a few months ago but has demonstrated incredible leadership, wisdom and courage. Pray that the next government will be able by God’s grace to make this country better than it was before.”

All Christina Meredith ever knew as a child was torment and abuse—emotional, physical and sexual—from her mother and other members of her family. She was put into foster care at age 16 and became homeless two years later.

But after discovering Jesus at an early age and maintaining a relationship with Him despite the trauma she faced, Meredith says God gave her heart—and her life—back to her in her early 20s. She later, much to her surprise, won the Miss California beauty pageant and now is a champion for many causes, including foster care reform, through her Christina Meredith Foundation.

As a child, Meredith’s mother physically and emotionally tormented her, but God picked up the pieces.

“I’ve done years of trauma therapy, so I’ve dealt with my junk, praise the Lord,” Meredith told Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of “Greenelines” on the Charisma Podcast Network. “I’m a whole, healthy person who can love and who can be a functioning human being.

“My mother was a broken individual, and she did some terrible things to my father. She did some horrible things to us kids out of her own brokenness. With all the things I went through, the Lord birthed in me and chiseled out of me things that no man can take away from me, dreams that nobody can steal from me. Keep fighting for your dreams because the Lord will bring them to pass.”

For more of Christina’s incredible story, listen to the podcast below.

Several years ago, a young man came back to life after being dead for an hour—all because his mother cried out to God in desperate faith. John Smith had been underwater for about 15 minutes, and doctors couldn’t get a pulse for another 45 minutes. But as soon as his mother, Joyce, prayed over him, his heart started beating again. Many call it a modern-day resurrection.

That miracle went viral on the news, and John’s story was recently made into a major motion picture called Breakthrough. The film recently hit theaters, and as of Tuesday, it holds the No. 2 spot right after Avengers: Endgame.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed John in what became one of the biggest podcasts on our network this year. Recently, I also interviewed his mother, Joyce. She recalls the events leading up to the moment she saw John lying dead on the hospital bed. She says she had a strange sense of peace as she approached her dead son.

“I thought I was being very quiet and demure,” Joyce tells me on the “In Depth With Stephen Strang” podcast. “But according to Dr. Sutter and everyone else in the room, everyone in the ER could hear me when I prayed. And I did walk up to the end of my son’s bed, and they said I very boldly and very loudly called out to God and the Holy Spirit that He would come and please bring me back my son. And to quote Dr. Sutter, I did it with a boldness that he had never seen before.”

In my interview with Joyce, which you can listen to here or in this article, she shared with me which parts of Breakthrough were true to the story and which parts were the product of literary license. She says one difference between the film and the true story is that when she was praying over John, she was surrounded by people.

“[Dr. Sutter and Alex, a tech nurse] both have the same story,” she says. “Dr. Sutter says when I walked in the room, something else walked in the room with me. And it was so powerful that not only did it change the atmosphere, but it changed the temperature of the room. … In moments of prayer, all of a sudden, the monitor starts beeping. And Alex had been there for 27 minutes, doing everything she possibly could. She was stunned. She says to me, ‘I’ve got a heartbeat.'”

But a change in temperature and a restarted heartbeat weren’t the only supernatural things Dr. Sutter and Alex witnessed that day.

“Alex said something so powerful moved up John’s body that it was pushing her and the people who were working on John away from the bed,” Joyce says. “They had done everything they possibly could to bring my son back to life, but nothing was working. And it was almost like God had set the table with all these professionals in there and said, ‘OK, you’ve done everything you can do. Why don’t you step back and watch what I can do?'”

Joyce tells me that after John’s heart started beating, she said down, stunned, and thought, This is surreal. I just watched God bring my son back to life.

And it certainly was a miracle. After all, John was underwater for 15 to 16 minutes, according to official reports. And then he had no discernible heartbeat for the next 45 minutes.

Even the way the rescue divers found the body was supernatural. Fire Department Captain Tommy Shine was scouring the lake for John’s body with only a pole and a hook to help. He had searched everywhere he could when he heard a voice telling him to check a place he had already searched. To Shine’s surprise, John was right where the voice had told him to go.

“He did hear a voice telling him to go back and look for John, and it unnerved him so badly that—he had been invited to a friend’s house to have a barbecue, and he wouldn’t even go because of this,” Joyce says. “He did not know what to do with this.”

John’s body was found right near the edge of a drop-off that took the lake from 10 feet to 50 feet deep. If the search team had used a boat, the wake would have been strong enough to knock John off the edge of that drop-off, and the team would never have found him.

Certain parts of the film—such as Joyce’s conflict with Pastor Jason Noble about the church’s music and her riding in the helicopter with John to the second hospital—happened differently in real life. After all, life tends to be more complicated than movies have time to portray. But Joyce says the movie didn’t have to embellish what happened. John’s resurrection stands on its own as a miracle.

“We have 310 pages of medical records and police reports to back up everything that we have put in and told in our story in the book, Breakthrough,” Joyce says. “We wanted to make sure that people knew this was the truth. God did such an awesome job. It doesn’t need to be embellished.”

Joyce shares many more fascinating details in our interview, including how she prayed God would spare her son’s life and give him a second chance if he wasn’t where he needed to be spiritually. In my interview with John, he told me he wasn’t following the Lord at the time he went through the ice, but God used that circumstance to draw him to Jesus.

So I encourage you to listen to my entire interview with Joyce to hear more about this supernatural story. And if you haven’t already watched Breakthrough, I highly recommend viewing it while it’s still in theaters!