A new show will soon go live on the Charisma Podcast Network: Self Talk With Dr. Ray Self.

Dr. Ray Self is an author, president of the International College of Ministry and former senior pastor. He believes all of God’s children were created and designed for a particular purpose and place. Dr. Self describes this place as your “promised land.” He believes that throughout a person’s life, Satan uses individually designed schemes to keep people from finding this special place of fulfillment and success. Satan wars against God indirectly by opposing God’s plan for His children. Schemes are his weapon of choice.

“So that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes” (2 Cor. 2:11, NASB).

This show will help people overcome their personal scheme. A scheme could be rejection, fear, illegitimacy, worthlessness or something else. This evil plan plagues a person throughout their life until it is exposed and broken. The purpose of the scheme is always the same: to stop God’s plan for His children.

Self has keen insight into what makes people tick and how to help them live successful and fulfilling lives. He believes it is vital for our families, our community and our nation that everyone find their promised land.

For many years, Self was a successful businessman but always felt like a square peg in a round hole. No matter how much money or success he found, something was still missing. After an incredible encounter with the Holy Spirit, he left the corporate world and committed his life to ministry. He knows what it is like to be to have worldly success, lose it and then find real happiness in God’s plan. Self says, “You can tell when it is of God because it is always bigger and better than anything you could ever imagine.”

There is a battle to be fought, but by God’s truth and power, we will ultimately prevail. Wise counsel, prayer and the name of Jesus give us the victory!

Watch for Self Talk With Ray Self, coming soon to the Charisma Podcast Network! {eoa}

Dr. Ray Self was the founder and senior pastor of Spirit Wind Ministries Church, Olive Branch, Mississippi. He is the president of Spirit Wind Ministries Inc. which is the 501(c)(3) covering for the International College of Ministry He was the founder of the School of Prophets (Olive Branch, Mississippi), director of Christian Counseling Center (Olive Branch, Mississippi) and is the former senior pastor of Faith Victory Church and Christian Academy, Covington, Tennessee. Dr. Self is also a former instructor with Memphis Bible College and Spirit of Excellence School of Ministry, Memphis, Tennessee. The father of four children, he now lives with his wife, Christie, in Winter Park, Florida.

Simon Sinek, noted marketing guru and motivational speaker, discusses what he calls “The Golden Circle” in a TED talk. The outer circle is the what, the next circle was the how and the center or bullseye was the why.

“He made a point,” says author and visionary Bryon Easterling on a recent episode of New Era Explorers podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “He said most of us spend our lives operating out of our what and our how. And very few of us actually get to our why—why we actually do things.

Sinek approached this concept from a marketing background, but the concept of “why” intrigued Easterling, and he worked with a pastor and life coach to help him determine his own why. “By the time it was all said done for me … It was so clear, once I got there. I want to live out of heartfelt, life-giving moments. I want to connect people and myself into heartfelt, life-giving moments. And everything I’ve ever done in life that has meant something to me has been through that,” Easterling says.

But knowing his why doesn’t change his commission, or what God has called him to do, Easterling says. “It takes the function of my commission and places it second. It places it as a part of it. … People always say we’re human beings, not human doings; and I’m going, ‘No, we are both.’ We are both human beings and human doings; it’s just where you start.”

Knowing his why, Easterling says, has “created a way for me to start as a human being, as a part of my internal person, how God has created me at the core of my being. It makes me unique.”

To hear more from Byron Easterling on the concept of knowing your why, click here for the entire podcast. {eoa}

As a black man growing up in the largely white city of Shelbyville, Tennessee, Pastor Jason Scales has experienced racism firsthand. Everywhere he goes, he’s a minority. But he doesn’t see himself as a victim, and he has an answer for believers who may be struggling to deal with the current racial unrest.

He tells fellow pastor Caleb McCall on a recent episode of the Recovery to Recovered podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network about a recent conversation he had with a Caucasian pastor. Scales says the pastor tole him, “‘I’m going to tell you the problem with African Americans. It’s probably going to offend you.’

“I said, ‘But look. Tell me. Tell me,'” Scales says.

“And he said, ‘You guys have bought into the lie that we don’t want you here, but you’ll take everything we give you.’

“And in that moment, I had a chance to be offended,” Scales says. “I wanted to flex my muscle. I have two degrees. I’ve made a decent living for myself. I’m a full-time minister now; I took a pay cut to be in full-time ministry. I’ve never been on any social welfare program, anything like that … So I’ve never asked for a handout for anything.”

Scales says he could have defended himself using those same words, but “In that moment, the Lord said, ‘Don’t you take that route. You’ve got to choose kingdom over culture’.

“My citizenship is in heaven. Yes, my flesh was offended. .. In this time, in order for the kingdom of God to be manifest, it’s not going to be manifest in our flesh. There’s no power in my skin, me being black, you being white,” he tells McCall. “Power is in the kingdom of God. And that’s what unites us as brothers in the Lord. And that’s why you choose kingdom over culture.”

To hear more of Scales’ thoughts on choosing kingdom over culture and learn about his new book, Socialish, listen to the entire podcast here. {eoa}

As president and founder of the National Institute of Christian Leadership, Dr. Mark Rutland has multiple opportunities to pour into leaders across the globe. In his experience in working with organizations, he sees a tension between “vision” and “mission.”

“I do believe in mission; you should have a mission statement,” Rutland says on The Leader’s Notebook podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “I think it’s important, but a mission statement can devolve into being nothing but a plaque on the wall or a banner that hangs in the auditorium at a church. It has very little energy; it’s not the resource that drives the organization forward.

“In my view, the constant emphasis on ‘mission, mission, mission’ that I hear often causes an organization or leader, leader, particularly, to feel I keep preaching the mission. I keep talking mission, I keep sharing mission, and we’re still not going anywhere,” Rutland says. “We’re just getting better and better at articulating our mission, but it’s not taking us toward anything. That’s because that’s not the job of mission. That’s the job of vision.”

And this is where churches, organizations and businesses get trapped, Rutland says. He uses the Hebrew people during their years of bondage in Egypt as an example. “What is their mission?” he asks. “To know God and love Him. And you can do that; one can do that as a slave in a foreign country. A slave can know God; a slave can love God. So one could get better and better and better at knowing and loving God in bondage, and never escape bondage. Never get out of Egypt.

“So along comes Moses. And what he expresses is not a new mission,” Rutland says. “What he expresses is a fresh vision. ‘Follow me,’ he says, ‘and God will take us to the land that He promised to our fathers, that He swore to give to Abraham.’ And then he describes the vision, graphically, the land that God gave to our fathers that flows with milk and honey. So the energy is in vision; the policy statement is in mission.

For more wisdom from Dr. Mark Rutland on the tension between mission and vision, click here to listen to the entire podcast.

“How could Jesus love a girl like you?”

That’s the question a trusted adult asked author and speaker Billie Jauss after her father’s death while she was still a teenager shattered her heart, depleted her faith and moved her into some dark decisions and dangerous directions. “By the grace of God, I lived through the many crazy things I did,” she says on the Start Small, BELIEVE BIG podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “But I carried with me so many regrets of the bad behavior, so much shame because of my choices.”

But could God love her? And can He love us despite our past actions? Jauss explains, “We’ve all done things for which we are ashamed. We live with the tension of what we have been and what we want to be.

“Isn’t it interesting that in Philippians, Paul urges us to ‘forget what is behind and strain toward what is ahead’?” Jauss asks. “We’re not to take the past with us. We don’t have to have it all together. Our lives don’t have to be perfect.

“Perfection is something that I have struggled with over the years. I want others to think the best of me, I want to fit in with the crowd. But when I finally realized that all I needed to do was say yes to Jesus, that’s when it all started for me,” she says. “That’s when I felt the most secure, the most loved, when I realized that God knew who I was, saw everything that I had done, everything that I had said. He knew every thought, every question, every doubt, but yet through all of that, He loved me. He loved me because I had been made in His image.”

For more of Jauss’ teaching on how knowing God can bring us the peace and confidence we seek, click here to listen to the entire podcast. {eoa}

When we watch the news with a biblical lens, we gain insights and guidance for our prayers. That truth lies at the core of Dave Kubal’s Headline Prayer podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network.

In a recent episode, Kubal, president of Intercessors for America, discusses the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle. He says CHAZ is “basically a new country, six square blocks ceded to a mob of protesters after the police chief was forced to abandon the station there. News reports indicate that rapper Raz Simone is one of the leaders in this new land. … The police department apparently will be replaced with the ‘people’s department,’ where the new leaders determine their own laws and will enforce them somehow.

“This is a perfect illustration of a truth that has played out over and over again throughout history,” Kubal says. “There will never be an absence of authority; a vacuum of authority will always be filled by somebody. This also illustrates the necessity for the rule of law to be enforced. But when emotions are high, facts are irrelevant and very unpersuasive. For the most part, those involved in rioting and looting, and defacing public and private property are being driven by the motions and feelings of injustice. Right facts are immaterial. The protesters would just feel more outraged if you faced them with facts.”

To learn more about the CHAZ uprising and how you can pray effectively, listen to the entire podcast here. {eoa}

Our nation remains in one of the most unusual seasons it has ever seen. And believers must remember that prayer is a huge key to unlocking everything from racism to the coronavirus pandemic. Even today’s traumatic events may reveal more hope than we may recognize.

Pastor Becky Jones, co-host with her husband, Pastor Preston Jones, of The Prayer Room podcast on Charisma News, says, “A lot of the unrest that we are seeing our nation It is truly, I believe, a sign of revival and reformation. That is happening right now. … And I truly believe this is the beginning of so much more that is actually getting ready to hit the land. Yes, and this is truly the beginning. And this isn’t just something we’re going to see. But I truly believe it’s a catapult of what God is doing.

“As far as in the body of Christ, He is gathering those who will see and understand the times and seasons that we are living in today. And I see him just unifying us,” Becky says. “More than ever, it’s really interesting because I see many denominational barriers being broken right now. I’m seeing how the churches are really leaning into the Holy Spirit and asking for strategies, because we need strategies from heaven. And really, the strategies and blueprints are only going to come through the prayer room.

Preston agrees. “The ripple effects of what we’re seeing right now, the effects of what we are we’re experiencing in our land, are coming from the prayer room,” he says. “And so I want to let you know that the prayer that you are praying … it has power. It has power to change; it has power to redirect; it has power to create; it has power to create creative miracles.

“When you begin to pray … when you lock yourself away, things can truly, truly happen and change,” Preston says. “That’s where change begins.”

To learn more about the ripple effect of prayer and its power to transform, click here for the entire podcast. {eoa}

Author, speaker and leadership trainer Jessie Seneca, founder of More of Him Ministries, endured nearly 20 years of a debilitating disease called Cushings Syndrome before God restored her health 11 years ago. Her years of pain included pain, emotional and psychiatric problems, multiple hospitalizations and even the removal of one lung.

So what does Seneca say is the most important thing she learned through her season of suffering? She tells host Angela Donadio on the Make Life Matter podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network, “When the rubber met the road with my disease, it was all about knowing God’s Word. And [my season of illness] was when God really got a hold of me [about] getting into His Word on a daily basis and making that an important part of my day.

“I tell leaders this all the time: The most important bullet point on your agenda is your quiet, secret time with God,” Seneca says. “Because so many times we get set on what we’re planning and organizing and implementing that that can overtake our time with God. And we can’t allow that to happen.

“In that season of darkness, God was calling me into a deeper relationship with Him and how important that is. … No matter when women hear me speak, Angela, I will always tell them the importance of getting into God’s Word, because that’s where transformation happens. And that’s where preparation happens,” Seneca says. “So I think the biggest things for me is I learned through all of it the importance of God’s Word, because [there are] some times you’re not going to have the Bible with you as you start to learn God’s Word and make it a part of who you are, and memorize some of those Scriptures.

“As you lie on those beds, or as you walk down a dark corridor or whatever it might be, those Scriptures can flood back into you and give you encouragement. And I know that He is right there with you, walking beside you, going before you, having Him behind you and just guiding you.”

To hear more of Jessie Seneca’s story as well as her teaching on the transformative power of God’s Word, click here to listen to the entire podcast. {eoa}

Though many Christians believe the Lord still speaks through dreams, others don’t. How do we know how to interpret such seemingly subjective experiences through a spiritual lens?

Former pop music star Corry Robinson, whose label mates included The Backstreet Boys and Brittney Spears, seeks to answer that question and more in his new book, The Dream Speaker. And host Tammie Southerland on The Voice of the Burning Ones on the Charisma Podcast Network asks him the question many of us have: “How do you know that is the Lord? How do you know it’s not pizza?”

“I did not set out to write a book,” Robinson, who left the secular music industry when he surrendered his life to the Lord, says. “I was really compelled to just write my story. And in doing so, it occurred to me that the genesis of my salvation experience was a dream. Even before the encounter with God’s glory that set me apart to Himself, at the root of it, at the very beginning of it was a dream. And as I realized that, and I’m writing my story, the best I can describe it as that something from heaven came upon me. And the Lord begins to open my understanding to the Scriptures and … how He has always dealt with humanity, and that has been through the realm of dreams.

“In fact, even the covenant that we enjoy with God was given to Abraham in Genesis by way of a dream. … and so [dreams are] a medium, if you will, where the Lord bypasses the senses,” Robinson says. “And He can speak to us directly without the traffic of our emotions, everyday occurrences and the things that we’re so distracted with.”

But God speaks to more than just believers in dreams, Robinson says. “It’s not just to the Christian; it’s not just to the preacher; it’s not just to the prophet or the apostle. Everybody dreams. And so since that’s the case, because everybody sleeps, at least the vast majority of us, because everybody dreams, God has an inroad to the life of every human being. And He’s able to speak to us whether or not we’re saved.

“The Bible talks about Pharaoh—the first time we see an unsaved person have a dream that was from God. In fact, Pharaoh was the God of Egypt. He was the one that the Egyptians worshipped. And so this man who received worship as a God, the Most High God releases a dream to him. And then He raises up a dreamer in Joseph, to give him the interpretation. And when Joseph gives Pharaoh his interpretation, Joseph says … ‘God has shown you what He is about to do.’

“And so if God can speak to a man who thought he was God, received worship as God, in a dream, then who are we to despise the communication of God in the night?”

To learn more about how God speaks through dreams and how to properly interpret what He says, click here for the entire podcast. {eoa}

Trends in worship music seem to change almost as often as trends in popular music. And that may be part of the problem, says Pastor Jason Daughdrill of Gateway Church in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

In a recent episode of his Jason Daughdrill Podcast on the Charisma Podcast network, Daughdrill asks Spirit-filled worship leader Catherine Mullins about what he calls, “a shift.” What this involves, he says, is “some of the rawness and the vulnerability of worship leading and even worship songs are becoming maybe a little less experiential in nature or even, for lack of a better term, prophetic in nature. And we’re becoming a little more polished, and a little more broad. … Do you recognize the shift? Do you see the shift, and if you do, what do you think is the reason for it?”

Mullins, who led worship at The Ramp Church in Alabama and at the Lakeland Outpouring, answers in the affirmative. “Yes, I’ve definitely seen the shift and I’ve had questions about it. And I think really, there are multiple reasons; I don’t think it’s just one cut-and-dry answer of why that’s happening.

“First and foremost, I think it’s very easy, just as a musician, singer, it’s very easy to feel the pressure to perform, the pressure for excellence,” she says. “Right now, we have a beautiful shift in the church. And even in the charismatic world, a beautiful shift of really going toward excellence, which I believe is in the heart of God.

“You know, I like machines. I like all of that. You know, there’s a laser show going on in heaven, a light show going on in heaven around the throne, it talks about that [and] describes it in Revelation,” Mullins says. “So all that’s great and creative, and I believe in the heart of God. And as charismatics, I think we were a little bit lacking for some seasons in excellence. And so I think it was really cool that we kind of did that pendulum shift. But I think sometimes … we’ve got to be so careful that we don’t go too far.”

To hear more of the discussion about the tension between excellence in worship and Spirit-led spontaneity, click here to listen to the entire podcast. {eoa}