BUILD THIS HOUSE // S03E04 (EPISODE 32)

We’re called to build our house on a solid foundation, but many times we begin to include impure materials in the construction, which weakens our refuge. The occult is pervasive, insidious, commonplace, and often attractive. Many believers don’t even realize they dabble in it, allowing it in. This week, Michelle shares her experiences with the occult and what brought her to Christ in the end (which became a beginning).

BLOG POSTS MENTIONED ON BUILD THIS HOUSE

That Time I Met a Witch

On Nightmares & Jesus

VERSES FROM BUILD THIS HOUSE

Romans 8:28, 2 Thessalonians 2:9, John 8:44, 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, James 4:7, 1 John 4:4, Ephesians 4:14

QUOTES FROM BUILD THIS HOUSE

ANNOTATED TRANSCRIPT

Shea: That’s awesome. Yeah. I, to be real, we just recorded this. Actually: we didn’t hit ‘record’. We went through a whole episode and never activated the mix, but, hey, that’s, what’s cool about it. God works in His way. Romans 8:28, right? This is for the glory of God. So it will work itself out. Um, tonight’s episode is Build This House. Michelle is going to actually take the helm.

Michelle: I’m the guest tonight, y’all.

Shea: Yeah, that’s awesome. We were going to bring in a guest, but we were like, “Eh, you know what? Michelle’s had some experience in this and I think it’s, it’s actually beneficial to hear what she has to say. I think it’s beneficial for us to understand a few things upfront though. We have to understand that what we’re going to talk about tonight is the occult, right? And so when we deal with that, we have to understand who we’re dealing with.

We’re dealing with spirits. Evil spirits. We’re dealing with satan, right? The father of all lies. He’s a deceiver, right? Um, and that’s 2 Thessalonians, 2:9 and John 8:44. He disguises himself as an angel light, right? I mean, look, some of those things that we think are good out there, they’re not so good, but watch, he doesn’t do it by himself. Those who follow him, human or otherwise, practice the same deceit. 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, his manifestations of evil are cunning. There are things that I thought were all right until I studied the word of God even more. And you start to discern these things. We have to be vigilant in this because again, we’re not wrestling against flesh and blood. We like to sit there and think that we fight each other. It’s like, Oh, but it’s their fault. The underlying truth of this, it’s all evil, spiritual it’s warfare.

And this goes right in line with our season. We need to be fighting this the right way. We need to be fighting this on our knees, man. I have done so much better than when I did think I had to be the one carrying the gun and all the magazines military off. Anyways, I’m learning something I’m learning who wins my battles. God, Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit. When I rely on them, they bring things to light. They opened my eyes to truth. They show me where I’m drifting because one thing in my life I don’t want to drift. I don’t want my lines to conform to culture.

Michelle: Most dangerous thing for the believer is when we attribute things that are of the occult to God, get all kinds of confused and twisted and then start to dabble in that realm. Opening all kinds of doorways. We’d never wanted to in the first place, but we are encouraged because we think it’s godly. One of the wisest things that one can do is pray for discernment in figuring that out. And one of the best ways to activate the answer of that prayer medially is to read the word of God. Um, you know, I think a great place to start is the Old Testament because it lists them all out. Those works of the flesh, those abominations, it lists them out pretty plainly, but it, it’s also easy to take those strong words and say, well, I’m none of those things and move on with your day. And for me, it’s interesting because I came to Christ at 23.

And before that I was just a mess internally, a hot mess. Um, and I think that that is why the occult started to grab me because one of the biggest things that you think you have when you don’t have, God has control and you want more and more control. And when you realize that there is some unseen stuff out there that not everyone’s tapped into, but it can offer you more control. It’s attractive. So for me, back in college, I had always been a little interested in astrology just because I saw that it seemed to align to a degree like, Oh, what am I, Oh, this describes me so well, you know, but in college I was going through a dark time and this is a perfect example of the occult being so mainstream that you wouldn’t even notice, like it’s just in everyday life, the school newspaper, right?

With the Sudoku, the comics, all that stuff was the horoscopes at the very top of the page. And I was going through a tough time. I looked up, saw mine, read it. It seemed to reflect my day. Exactly. So the next day I did the same thing, same result did that for about a week. And then I was having trouble. Most of my trouble was guy trouble. And so I started looking at his horoscope and it was lining up with what he was doing. And before you know it, I was religiously checking that horoscope. And yet I also needed more. So, you know, in the world, these kinds of things, it’s never enough. We always have to pursue more and more and more. And so I was going online, reading more in-depth, astrology stuff, getting into that world, learning what, you know, mercury in retrograde meant.

It got to the point where I could tell you, “Oh, you’re a Taurus. Oh, you’re a Pisces. You’re such an Aries. You know—third-tier,” and, uh, I was making about $300 every two weeks. And I dropped over a hundred dollars on these two really in-depth books about strategy. And I was just getting into that world. Like I was like, this offers me insight into people and it can protect me and empower me to make wiser decisions, predict things, et cetera. I, I could’ve gotten into crystals, but I was a little too lazy too. I wasn’t motivated enough Prescott to learn. Right. I was like, wait, amethyst does what he hematite what? And Malia, kite, what? And, uh, I was like, they’re just pretty moving on. But in the back of my mind, I was like, if I wanted to, I could dedicate time to that and get access to more empowerment if I just protected myself with crystals.

Right. But in short that led to a lot of avenues. It opened a lot of doors. Um, disturbing things happen to me that this episode is not about those juicy things that don’t glorify the Lord. So I won’t go into it. But disturbing things happened when no one was around. No human was around. I’ll say, um, to me, that, to this day, I can’t truly explain can’t pinpoint exactly what was happening, but it wasn’t good. And I didn’t attribute it to the fact that I cared about these things, but I know that later I put two and two together that it was because of that. Um, I encountered a, which a friend of mine took me over to a witch’s house and I experienced things there. And it was very like, it wasn’t a super goth house, looked like anybody else’s house. She looked like, just anyone you see at the grocery store said that she could teach me to protect myself. Uh, gave me a demonstration of what that meant by trying to attack me on a spiritual level and to this day. And I’ll link to the blog post that gives you all the details. But to this day, I credit God with protecting me because it’s, I felt it initiate. But then even she was confused at this feeling of like an internal door slamming and kicking her out and I did not do it.

Shea: Isn’t it amazing. She tried to flex power, not comfort, not like, “Oh, let me just warm and fuzzy you,” but, “I’m going to attack you so that you understand the power that I have a power that you could possibly achieve.”

Michelle: It was a seduction technique. Really.

Shea: That’s interesting. I mean—it’s—we want power. We want control. We want to be on top of everything. And I’m listening to this, this story, this truth is your life story. I mean, this story, but knowing everyone’s signs chasing after this power and just amazed though, at God in it, how he came at a moment when they could have changed a lot of things in your life and said, no back away, I’m knocking on this one. She’s going to open her door. And that’s an amazing thing. And I was like, what’s that cliche? Opening Pandora’s box. Yeah. It was not allowed to happen. Yeah. So why do you think God was chasing after you?

Michelle: You know, I grew up in a house that had God in it. I had little Christian inspired and blatantly Christian kids books in the house because both my parents believe in God, no, God let me say, um, but it was not a day to day thing. Like it is in our house with Calia, right? Like theology was not present. And so I never really understood. I definitely didn’t understand what Jesus had done. I did not understand how you got to heaven. And those are the things that count at the end. Like those are the initial things that initiate you into the family of Christ. It was a collection of things and traditions that were the Christianese things that you did when you wanted to be Christian, I guess. So that’s kind of my relationship. But one thing that I knew is God was the winning team.

He humored me. I will say that he had grace for me because as a kid, there would be times I would pray for things. I remember one time, clearly my mom was working hard. My parents had just separated. She needed the computer to work. It was an old computer and it just shut down and all her work was allegedly lost. And I ran into the living room. I think I was 12 or 13. And I just like, ask God, God, please. Like she needs, I was just, it was such a blatant, like, this is what I need Jeanie, give me my wish. Right. But as I’m praying, as soon as I’m done, mom’s like, “It’s on! And everything’s still there!” You know? Like it was, there were a few moments like that in my life that were that extreme instantaneous and miraculous on God’s side that proved to me, God was real.

And so my whole life, even though I never pursued the Bible, I knew God was real. So when I was in trouble and I didn’t have the control and I couldn’t do it, I would go to Him. And that’s eventually how He encouraged me to read the Bible. Cause he impressed on me. You know, you treat me like a genie, but you don’t know me. I can be so much more than that. So that in that loving way, He, He brought me in because of that, He knows, He knew I was going to become a Christian of the true sense. I feel set aside. I’ve heard that from a lot of people who believe that they have survived, incredible things in miraculous ways before they knew Christ at all. And it just seems like there are certain times where we might lead ourselves into just utter foolishness, but He knows the plans He has for us. And He sees us through.

Shea: So what was the turning point? So I know you were sitting there in a witch’s house, obviously you felt something felt a little something didn’t succeed. People are mystified. Did you attribute it to God?

Michelle: I knew I was, I was on guard because, and it was a pride thing because I didn’t like looking weak and I didn’t ever like to be made a fool of, and I didn’t want someone, I just met to just be spiritually tossing me around like a ragdoll. So I was trying to hold it all together, you know? So I played it off. Like it was me, we all okay. Me and her knew it was not me. Don’t know what my friend thought, but, um, I knew it wasn’t me because I did nothing different this the third time, how am I supposed to spiritually fight back against someone who knows how to fight spiritually? You know? But it felt like she could not get any further. She made me very hot and made my heart race just by hovering her hand over my chest. And she was forcefully telling me almost like aggravated frustrated. She was like, push me out, fight me. And in my head, on my hall, it’s like someone telling you to, “Use the force, Jedi.” And I’m like, Oh, I’m no Jedi. And so I had no idea what to do, but the third time she did, it was her most aggressive, but it seemed like that time. She just couldn’t, it’s like a door slamming inside of me and it was not me.

Shea: So you have these experiences, you have astrology, you dabbled in what I call crystal dabbled in crystals. Right? You’ve got it. All. Which when did the genie become God?

Michelle: Um, I used to have a lot of night terrors and nightmares, um, things that seem to almost be reaching me and at the height right before they caught me, I would wake up. Right? Um, and they started getting worse and worse as I dabbled into that world at the same time, I’ll say as unrelated. Cause it’s not blatantly a cult, but I was having guy issues. Of course, you know me, but I was having guy issues. And uh, I had fallen for someone that I thought this guy’s great. I’m not good enough for him, whatever. And turns out feelings, not reciprocated. But I had invested a lot because I was trying to fill that hole. So I was investing in a human being in the way that you should invest in God. Right. So when he turned me down, I was just a hot wreck.

And so one night I’m just like bawling my eyes out to God. Cause of course it’s something I can’t control. So I’m turning back to my genie, begging him. But this time I was wise, I was like, I know he—you’re not going to make him fall for—that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, can you prevent me from ever falling in love again until it’s who you want me to fall in love with because I’m tired of being a fool, like a lovesick fool. And in that moment, that’s when He reached out and impressed upon me for the first time. Like, “You believe I can do that, but you only come to Me when you need some isn’t that limiting that you only come when you have an idea.” And for years I’d been looking into, and I didn’t even touch on this, but for years I’ve been looking into why’s the world getting so dark, why our music, so occult, you know? All that stuff.

Um, and I’d been looking and people were quoting Revelation, but I’d always put it off. Cause I was like, I, I tried reading the Bible as a kid. I never understood it. That triggered me. I can read it. Let me try. So that’s when I found the annotated Revelation that I mentioned back in season two, that’s when I read it. And that’s when I realized what Jesus had done on the cross, all that stuff, you know, about a month into being a Christian, I was laying in bed and I felt so convicted to get rid of my two books. I’d dropped like over a hundred dollars on for astrology. And I was like, but I could get that money back if I sold them on Amazon. You know? And in that moment I felt again, that conviction. So you’re going to sell lies and profit off selling lies. And so I just got out of bed and I threw them away just like all those sources through their spell books away in the new Testament. And so I got rid of a lot of the anime that I loved because there’s a lot of anime. That’s a cult based. The more I look at life, the more I just see it all over the place as just mainstream. But yeah, that’s, that’s how God chased it out.

Shea: That’s amazing. It makes me think of the necessity of God, the necessity of Christ, but also knowing that there’s, there’s a battle that’s still being waged. There’s still a battle that rages, um, he wants to distract. He wants to throw off, he’s a, he’s like a lion or laying in wait, you know, trying to just get after that one person who just kind of like starts to drift a little bit, you know, go away from the herd, you know, go away from the word right away from the hurt away from the word right now. But, uh, so you know, we, we have to put on that armor, you know, if he’s six, of course, you know, famous for the armor, right? So what I’m thinking of this, and I’m thinking of putting on this arm and I’m thinking of things like, you know, James 4:7, we have to resist through the faith of God. Was it over? And when I say that, you had already just, you know, your astrology, I’m going to say this again for everybody: astrology’s been touched by evil spirits in ways that we haven’t gotten into.

Michelle: Right.

Shea: Which we might in the future.

Michelle: Yeah.

Shea: When you started to move away from those evil things, how did you, how did you move forward in that? Because of course, I know you asked the right questions. And so what did you do to fight the residual?

Michelle: So I’ll answer in two ways. So first there was a very conscious effort on the dark side to scare me back into going after the occult to empower myself, to protect myself. I remember once looking up spells to protect yourself from bad spells. So I looked up these things because I was hyper-paranoid that the occult knew, I knew I was coming from me. Right. And I, and I felt that way right before I came to Christ lots building up right before Christ, I experienced a dream and I will link to two blog posts that go the witch and the dream in the show notes. But in short, it was very clear that demonic entities wanted me and they were reaching through into the dream and God had allowed that to occur. Um, cause I was having it while being saved. But the amazing thing is I woke up from that dream, just crying, terrified, just sick.

And again, I felt this impression on me. And in that moment I felt so blessed because it was a Romans 8:28 moment. He had allowed that attack to wake me up to the reality that just calling His name was enough to defeat the enemy and chase the enemy away. So from then on out, when I would have dark dreams, it’s it was like this instantaneous shift. I could go straight and say Jesus in my dream. And I would wake up instantly. Shea’s been in bed once or twice when I’ve woke up calling Jesus’s name out loud, but it woke me up and I was never able to do that before. And since that, that time period, those physical encounters have subsided. What I’ve learned from all of that. And what I’m continuing to walk in is this thing, you know, this episode’s called Build This House and I was looking, I was thinking about dust because it’s the most insidious annoying form of dirt in a house. Right? And I remember, you know, some, at some point people saying flooded rooms are the hardest to keep dust out of because desk and hide desk and land on everything, it’s hard to get it out of the room. And I was trying to find that quote or some kind of study or something that would say that. And instead when I was looking it up, what I found was the number one reason that your room is so dusty is because you have a bad air filtration system. So if you have a filtration system at all, that’s awesome. But if it has never been changed out, if it’s not clean, if it’s already clogged, then it’s just blowing dust back out into the atmosphere. So you can all day be dusting and vacuuming, using energy to keep things clean.

And as soon as you stop, the dust comes back. The next time the air kicks on. And to take that, to walk you through that in a spiritual analogy, you can read the word of God and pray and sing spiritual songs. But as soon as you stop, if your filter is poor, or if you’re overloading a solid filter with tons of dust, then it’s just going to start kicking out and billowing out dust and recovering everything. You just cleaned all over again. So it’s important for us to guard as our Pastor, Dwaine, says, guard your ear gates, your eye gates, because you have—first, you have to have a filter, right? That’s discernment of the Lord. Then it has to be clean, which means you need to be active and vigilant in keeping up this filter, arming yourself with the word and the truth. But on top of that, if you don’t guard, if you’re like great, I have a filter, I’m just gonna take this bucket and throw it in the room. Cause this filter is so good. That’s the same thing as us overloading on the mainstream, that’s inundated with the occult, expecting the filter to just catch it all. When a real measure of how good your filter is is you won’t want to challenge your filter, overload your filter. You know, you’ve got a good filter. Why try to mess it up? The goal is to both have a good filter, but then also avoid things that could permeate it, overload it, pollute it.

Shea: I think it’s important right now for everybody to understand that God is greater than any spirit. You can look that up in 1 John 4:4. He can deliver us from their power. He can deliver us from the influence of cultural tradition or whatever, because why, because we no longer want to be children. We no longer want to be tossed to and fro by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. You can see that in Ephesians 4:14, we want to trust in God. We want to have clean filters. We want to change our filters. Look, change your filters. When I say that, I mean just constantly refresh yourself. Started from the morning. You wake up with God on your tongue, in your mind, in your, in your spirit and your soul seeking God to his ways.

And as you carry through your day, keep Him there. Right there. He’s, He’s there. Just turn to Him, right? Just turn to Him. And at night time, look, give Him more time. There’s never enough time to give Him, right? That is one of the most precious things we have is time. And our time should always be in fellowship with the Trinity. He has got you through so much has protected you from so much. Yes. Thank you Lord. Because that’s the God we serve. Y’all. Put it away. Figure out what stands up to the Bible. It doesn’t stand up to the Bible, build your house on the foundation of Jesus Christ. We start to put in I-beams and support beams and foundations and concrete blocks on top of something that’s completely solid and can’t be torn down. Amen?

Michelle: Amen. This has been a cool fun episode to be interviewed by my husband. It can be tough to walk away from some of this stuff, because just speaking from the world, it was fun to a degree, but God’s more fun. So we want to hear your prayer requests. If you are struggling to let go of something that God is revealing to you is not fruitful. Whether it be the occult or something else that He considers to be unfruitful. We want to hear your questions, your comments. We are totally down to answer them, send us those requests and questions at ThePantryPodcast.com as well as on Instagram and Facebook at @ThePantryPodcast. And you can also go there to support us by buying cool, season three merch as well as the old school merch that’s always there. And you can remember to help us get around other people, buy those awesome ratings, reviews, subscriptions, comments, shares, anything you can think of to spread the word about Jesus and our podcast. So until next time, bye.

Shea: Bye!