00:00:00 - Johnny Sanders

Do you enjoy listening to podcasts and think, man, I would like to make my own podcast? This is where I found myself last year, and I have learned a lot about what to do and a lot about what not to do. I'm offering consulting services to help you launch your podcast, especially if you're looking to make a more Christian or conservative podcast. Find out more information@faithfullyengaged.com. i have a link down in the description below if you would like help on getting your podcast started. Well, welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Faithfully Engaged today. I'm honored to have the Reverend Doctor David Chaka on with us today. So, David, it's great to have you on. Why don't you share just a little bit about yourself?

00:00:57 - Dr. David Chotka

Well, thank you. And let me commend you on pronouncing my name correctly. It's been the struggle of my life. So I'm a Canadian. I'm not very far from the American border. I live in a little town called La Salle, just south of Windsor, Ontario. And if I get out of my house and I turn left and I go west, then I will go about 200 yards and come to the Detroit River, and on the other side is the state of Michigan. So, I mean, I'm not actually, you have to drive north to get into the United States from here. There's a bridge that goes across a funny angle on the water, and actually it goes north. So it's a bit, if you wanted to have a little bit of trivia, it is possible to drive north into the US from Canada at one place. So I'm a pastor and I've written five books. My most recent one is a book called Healing God's Idea For Restoring Body, Mind, and Spirit. And that's published by Whitaker House. So it's easy to get that book. But I've been a pastor all my days. And no, this is not a pitch to millennials. So I'm the father of millennials. I have two millennial kids. Both are adult kids now. But regardless of that, I've had the opportunity to be able to speak to crowds, large and small, young, middle-aged and old, etcetera, etcetera, all across the earth. I've spoken in 17 countries. I'll be traveling to Vietnam shortly to do an event there for pastors who've been in the persecuted church. And so it's a great opportunity to be able to go and share with them. My burden has always been to teach spiritual disciplines and equip it. And in particular, I've always had a burden for the poor church or the persecuted church.

00:02:30 - Johnny Sanders

Let's start there. About the persecuted church, one is just kind of personal for you. Why has that been such a big interest for you?

00:02:42 - Dr. David Chotka

I think it's because my background is Ukrainian. My very first-ever mission trip was to the Ukraine. And as you're well aware right now, there's that madman, thug, murderer, guy who's going across the border, stealing the land. I was there in the Ukraine just when they received their freedom because Gorbachev freed the country. And I watched. I was there twice in two years, and I watched a remarkable transformation from being like a. Like a ravaged, overrun, beaten-down group of people who weren't allowed to get an education to people who turned the place into a world-class place. The difference was remarkable. I saw the airport in 1994, just after they were freed, and it had pieces of metal sticking out of the turnstile, and there was just a concrete floor. There was a fistfight that broke out in the line to get back to Canada. It was this crazy kind of thing. If you want a hilarious story, I can tell you about my first experience in the Ukrainian airport heading home. As it turned out, there was a group of Hasidic Jews standing beside me. And it came the time of day when they had to do a circle dance and throw their hats into the air, and somebody butt in the line, and somebody else broke into a fistfight. So there was a fistfight over here, and there was people doing a circle dance and throwing their hats in the air, singing hallelujahs. And then there was a little lady who was standing there, and my plane was supposed to leave. And as it turned out, she looked at me. I have enough Ukrainian, Russian, and English to be able to make myself French as well. So I spoke in Ukrainian, French, Russian, and English, and I said, I have to go. My plane is leaving. And nobody moved. And there was a little Ukrainian baba standing there with an enormous purse. And she looked at me, and she said, you are not from here. I said, no, no, I'm not. And she said I shall help you. And she took her bag, and she started to spin it like this, and she said, go. Go. And all these people got out of the way of the lady, and I wandered up to the front of the line. I got my passport stamped, and I went through it. So that was a crazy experience at the airport. But it was in a poor, persecuted part of the world. That country had been ravaged and run down and beaten down, and it's the land of my ancestors on both sides. And right now, the same thing is occurring. And were it not for the United States sending arms and the European Union sending arms, what little bits that are left would be destroyed. And Putin's desire is to take it back over again. So, you know, right when I saw it, when I was in the country, and I saw people with my ethnicity. I could speak some of the language. Not the language had changed. My ancestors came 100 years ago, and they spoke small, you know, small town, peasant stock, Ukrainian from a village, and then they mixed it with English. And so I must tell you that when I said things, people would laugh or they'd be embarrassed, one or the other. I did study a Russian university, and so I could speak a little bit of Russian to make myself understood. But that's because the eastern side of the nation had been ravaged. The Russians had taken over land before. They had slaughtered and murdered millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s and transplanted Russian nationals there who were loyal to the communist government. And so that whole part of East Ukraine was populated by people who stole the land, and now they're doing it again. This is the crazy, crazy thing that's going on there. So I go to that country, I see them, they are poor, and I meet the people who have been persecuted, and we're talking about persecuted. We're talking about not being able to have access to a Bible. We're talking about not being able to have access to a scripture verse. And we're talking about people whose husbands and wives were separated if they named the fact that they were Christian, with one being sent off to Siberia and the other being left with no resources, not being able to get work, not being able to get an education. And I met many of these people who had been persecuted. Some of them had lost everything, but they did not give up anything because they loved Jesus. I remember we brought Bibles, and the most amazing thing, when we brought Bibles, and they would look at you and they'd hit the ground and weep because you were giving them something like pure gold. It was most amazing thing. We brought medicine, too, and we brought, you know, supplies and so on and so forth. But when they saw a Bible, a New Testament, or a Bible in their own tongue, they would physically shake out of astonishment. And some of them would break out into tears and crying, and they'd hit the ground weeping. It was such an incredible experience to see that there was a whole different world out there that had nothing to do with a place like Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe, or whatever. Here. I mean, I've got. I don't know how many editions of the Bible on my shelf. And if I can get on my phone, I can download 25 translations, and I can get the Greek text or the Hebrew text, thank you very much. In that place, they had to. They showed me a piece of paper with verses written on it, and, you know, it scrawled there because somebody had read Dostoevsky, and there was a scripture verse in there, and they took that scripture verse, and they put it on a piece of paper, and somebody else heard a broadcast on radio free Europe, and they heard two scripture verses. They wrote those down. And then some communist guy would get up and mock the church and quote a scripture text in order to make fun of it, and they would write the scripture text down, ignore the communist guy, and they'd meet behind a rock somewhere, and they would exchange scripture verses. That was their Bible. That was all they had. And when you see that in person and you meet people who have suffered for the kingdom, and you meet people whose faith is so alive in the Lord, all they want to know is how they can best serve the Lord in a context where they've been beat up and they've suffered, you realize you got to help them. I mean, the pastor, that guy who planted that Bible school, right after the wall came down, he built a church because it was now you're now free. But there were towns of 100,000, 50,000, and 60,000, and they didn't even have a cult in them. Nothing. No churches, no cult, nothing. And so this pastor, his name was Nikolai Kaminsky. He was an amazing guy. He had incredible stories about what he had to endure in order to be able to be a Christian believer. And he would go around preaching the gospel whether the communists wanted him to or not. In that culture, what they did was they said there was religious freedom, and it meant that you could talk about Jesus in your building, and then they closed the buildings down. And so there was no place to talk about Jesus, nowhere. And so he would preach the gospel on a street corner and get arrested, and they would say, why are you doing this? He said because I am not allowed to share my faith. This is not freedom. And they throw him in the prison. There was one time they decided they wanted to get rid of him, and they put him between them. They put him in the worst part of a Ukrainian jail, between one guy who was a rapist and somebody else who was a murderer, and a bunch of guys who were mafiosos. And he looked at the room, and it was an open cell with 300 of these guys, these kinds of guys in the cell. And he knew that he had to stand on his faith because they were going to just beat him up if he didn't, and they'd beat him up if he did. So he knelt down beside his bed and he said, I will pray every morning because now these 300 men who are prisoners arm I perish. And as he was praying, one of these guys started to make fun of him and beat him to a pulp. And so he gets up the next day and he kneels beside his bed and he starts praying to the Lord. And the guy on the other side once again beat him to a pulp. And the two guys took great joy and laughter beating this man up. And then on the third day, once again, he knelt down beside the bed, and the strongest guy in the place looked at him and said, he lives what he believes. And when they tried to attack him, he beat the other guy up. This is what happened in this prison. And then those two men came to faith in Jesus because this man refused to recant his faith when he was being absolutely pummeled into the ground. And over the course of the next year, all 300 people in that room made commitments to Jesus, and he became their pastor. These are the stories that you hear when you go to the persecuted or the poor church. And so I went because, first of all, I went because there was a church up the street that was looking for presenters. I'd done my master's work in Ephesians, and I looked at the two spirit contrasts in that book. I was looking at the Holy Spirit and the unclean spirit and how the two spirits interacted inside the context of the book of Ephesians. And I'd done this. I'd done a 400-page commentary on the Greek text of Ephesians. And that's a lot of work. You don't want it to sit on a shelf. And as it turned out, because I was Ukrainian, I met a pastor who was actually an English guy in a different tradition. He was in the Pentecostal church. I was in the congregational church in those times. And he said, we're going to the Ukraine. We're teaching people in two-week runs. And he said, you're Ukrainian? I said, yeah. He said, you just finished a thesis in Ephesians. I said, yeah. He said, do you want to teach that in the Ukraine? And so I went to my church, and they said, yes. And that began this whole thing with the movement toward helping the persecuted church. And after that, I joined the Christian Missionary Alliance. I don't know if you know the worldview of this denomination. The denomination is if there is a persecuted or a poor or an almost non-existent church in an unreached people group, the alliance will send workers in there. And if the field has more than 2% believers in the field, that means the church is strong enough to stand on its own and the alliance withdraws. And so when I joined the movement, I didn't know that, and I joyfully discovered this amazing thing, that the goal of the alliance is to go into the least reached people groups all across the planet so that there can be a gospel witness in every nation, every people group across the planet. Because Jesus of Nazareth himself said, this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in every nation, and then the end will come. The end will not come unless the gospel is preached in every nation, every tongue, and every people group, all across the planet. Jesus of Nazareth has made his commitment. He said that in Matthew 24, verse 14. So there's the passion, there's where it came from.

00:12:52 - Johnny Sanders

That's fantastic. Fantastic of that. There's the personal side of things, obviously, with your, with your heritage of that connection there. But also. And this kind of leads to those of you who are tuning in, listening to this, or watching it. There's the global church. That's something that is on, in the West. I know you're, you're in Canada. Most of those who listened in are probably in the United States. Not that they're that certainly, that we have it all figured out. We certainly don't. But there is certainly a larger amount of Christian influence in the West, although we're seeing some, some losing of that, which is a topic for another day. But sometimes our eyes are so focused on the church, we think of our local church or within our denomination or our state or country or whatever, and we forget about the global church, the catholic church, little c, in that way, of the universal church, the global church. And they are our brothers and sisters as well. We may not know them, but they.

00:14:05 - Dr. David Chotka

Are because they've suffered and because they've cried out. The Lord hears when people cry out from the depths of their being. In fact, the healing story of my wife, which is part of what's in the healing prayer book, came because of our desire to help the persecuted in the poor church. So as it turned out, I was working away in my office, and I had a prayer time where I was seeking the Lord. I was praying Psalm 2, and Psalm 2 says, ask and I will give the nations to you. And I said, oh, isn't that a marvelous messianic psalm? It's all about Jesus. Then the Holy Spirit said to me, I want you to ask me for the nations. I said, lord, I'm not the messiah. There are days when I have delusions of grant. I think I'm better than I am. It lasts 20 minutes. And then my wife and I have a discussion, and she wins. Or my daughter tells me off, or my dog doesn't listen to me or something. I'm not the Messiah. It's just so clear. And the Holy Spirit said I want you to ask me for the nations. And so I fought him on this, and eventually, I started to cry out, and then I said, lord, I'm going to pray for my country. And then he asked me to pray for yours, for the United States of America. And I said I want to pray for the United States of America. They got all kinds of Christians. They got 30 million southern Baptists. We have 30 million Canadians. I mean, this is crazy. There are 16 million assemblies of God. How many millions and millions of Methodists are there? And so I said this to the Lord and all the publishing houses and all the theological training institutions and all this, and Canada has nothing like that. Nothing. We're one 10th your size, you know, and so. And the Lord said, I am sending you, and then I'm going to send you across the earth, and you're going to work with poor churches across the planet, people groups whose names you do not know, whose names you can pronounce. Do you think you had a hard time with my name? You should try to pronounce some of those African names and some of those Asian names. At any rate, I found myself in Atlanta talking with a bunch of people who were primobilizers from across the earth, and among them was the Ugandan bishop who had planted 48 churches. And he was in the part of the country that had been ravaged by war for more than 20 years. And so there were people in that town who never had a day in school because there was a war zone. They'd never been to a dentist. They'd never been to a doctor because it was a war zone. They had never had the opportunity to play a game in the park down the street because it was a war zone. I mean, we're talking about a demoralized society. This pastor was a little bit older and had a little bit of education, and he wanted to educate the pastors and the leaders in those towns to become renewal centers for the northern part of Uganda. So we asked if I would participate in that we had joined together with two American churches. We went over there and it had been ravaged by two nasty men, Idi Amin and Joseph Kony. Joseph Kony was the horrible warlord who went around raping children and making the children rape other children and killing people, etcetera. It's horrible. And that was the region that was ravaged by him. And I met people whose hands were cut off and whose eyes were gouged out and whose nose was cut off and whose tongue was gone. I mean, we're talking about. And if somebody had the ability to read they could become the mayor of the town because they had a little more education than all the rest. And so we went into that place and this pastor who was the organizer gathered 750 leaders and asked me and my church to feed and house them over a three year, in three one week windows, over the next three years to teach them and lead them and guide them. In fact, the reason I wrote my first book, this one was to give to them. I wrote this. The content of this book is on the Lord's prayer and how the Lord's prayer works in the context of Jesus's teaching. So I took each keyword and I examined how the word was used all through Jesus teaching. And then I wrote that back into the prayer because it's actually a highway to everything that Jesus ever said, thought or did. So I taught that to the Ugandans. And then in the third year that I was there, we gave 16,000 of those to the Ugandans away. We found people to fundraise and give it away. And so, but I mean, again, once again I was face to face with people who were very poor, who had had everything taken away, who had been murdered and hurt and wounded and, and you named all kinds of atrocities that taken place and their faith was profound. So I mean we participated in crusade evangelism as well. And I saw miraculous, marvelous healings happening with people who had nothing. I watched a lady who was sitting on a dirty board. She'd been carried by four people and sat down by the front of this area. And I was sitting 15, 20ft away from this lady. There was an area for people who were like me, who were not used to Ugandan heat. And we had a little banner over us and five or six of us under this little tent. And I watched this lady, she was so paralyzed. I watched a fly go up her cheek and land in the corner of her eye and her eyelashes did nothing, not move while that fly took a drink. It was just these 3 hours of her totally paralyzed. The preacher gets up to preach, and then he says this, the healing anointing of the Lord is upon me. He walked down and he touched the paralyzed lady's hand, and then he went back to the platform, and suddenly her hand began to move. And then every part of her body started to move. And there was a lady who was free over from me. Her name was Elizabeth Queen. So we teased her by calling her Queen Elizabeth, you know, that kind of thing. So, she got up and walked over to where that lady was starting. Her body was actually starting to move after it had been frozen in place for 3 hours. And he, she takes this lady by the hand and she gently massages the two arms, and then she gently rubs the legs, and then she gets the lady to stand up, and the lady stands up and her eyes start to move and her body starts to move. And every part of her body became limber. She started to walk like she had stumps for legs like she was learning for the first time. And within 25 minutes, she was running across that field. It was the most amazing experience of watching the power of the Lord move in a context with people who had absolutely nothing. I want that kind of faith to come back to America and Canada, not to drive us to the depths of despair where we have nothing and we have no choice except to cry out but to believe in God for the incredible and the astonishing because millennials don't believe it. If I'm arguing, they won't give a rip. Listen, a millennial talking to me about Jesus won't give a rip about my argument. They'll want to know if my faith is real. They want to know if when I pray, something happens. So here's what happened with the Uganda thing. So my church spent about half a million bucks to try and help this group of people. We went three years in a row. We gave them all those books, we gave them their meals, we gave them their travel stuff, we gave them their gas money. We gave them the ability to be able to sleep in a safe place. We got them clean water, etcetera. And we educated them for three days and then sent them home. It was about half a million bucks over three years. And the tribal leader of this thing invited himself to come and preach in my church. He said, oh, David, David, David, listen, I'm free on the following dates. When are you going to fly me up to your church to preach? So, you know, you don't want to lose the relationship with the guy? I took it to my elder board, and my elder board said, to me, well, is he anointed? I said, oh, yeah. Is he tribal? Yeah, he's that, too. He thinks like an African tribal leader. He doesn't think like an American or a Canadian. He doesn't operate that way. And so the elders board said, well, is he anointed? I said, well, he's planted 48 churches, and he's got me to go over there to train all these pastors. And now these pastors are changing their communities. I think that deserves an audience. And they said, yeah, it does. So why don't you warn the congregation what African tribals talk like and bring the guy in? So I have to tell you something, Johnny. I was scared out of my ever-loving tree. I thought they were going to fire me if he said something weird, now, he only said one thing weird. And we had, we had to backtrack on that one thing. But regardless of this, he flew into my church and he's telling deliverance from death war stories. Now, what you don't know is that my wife was afflicted with something called FSH, muscular dystrophy. Her mother had it, her sister has it, her niece has it, she had it. And it's a. It's a plateau decline form of genetic disorder. Your facial muscles sag, your shoulder blades go out of position, and you get chronic pain between 16 and 20. You start to lose your mobility, and by the time you get to 20 or 30, you have trouble going up and down stairs because you can't lift your legs to be able to do that. And at this stage, it was a plateau decline thing. So you'd be fine for a little bit, and then you'd hit a rapid decline. You'd lose a lot of ground, and then you would decline at the lower level, and it would just go on for two or three more years, and there'd be another rapid decline until eventually, you wind up in a wheelchair. You don't die young, but you wind up with not being able to do all kinds of things. In fact, right now it's. FSH is becoming known because the founder of Lululemon, the multimillionaire, has just made a major donation to the FSH research fund because he has it. And now he can't lift his legs to climb upstairs, and now he has to take hold of a banister to pull himself when he wants to go up a stair, etcetera, etcetera. So he's trying to find a medical cure and praise the Lord for guys like him. But regardless of this, my wife has the affliction her sister has the affliction, her mother has the affliction, and her niece has the affliction. It is genetically endowed. Now, we are not in a position for her to be able to raise her arms above her shoulders because the affliction does that. The muscle cord hollows out in the center of your being. You lose your ability to be able even to stand up. And her face was sagging. And she had friends who'd come over to clean the house, etcetera, cetera, because she just couldn't do it. So we have this guest speaker. He's in, okay, and he's talking to listen. I can't tell you the number of times I prayed for her healing. I can't tell you the number of times. And we would pray for other people's healing and they would get well while she was declining. And we lived in this crazy kind of overlap between these two ages where we would, we would see the lord moving power and touch someone, and we would see a decline in her while she was praying for the other. It was this crazy taste in your mouth, what's going on here? Why does it work for them and not for us? And then we came to a theological conclusion that has served us in good stead. We made the decision not to seek the healing, but to seek the healer with our diminishing capacities and to let the Lord, who is the healer, determine how that healing would flow. And so we took this decision and, and we do this trip to Africa. And, you know, so we bring this guy in and he's up speaking and we have three services, a Saturday night, a Sunday morning at nine and a Sunday morning at eleven. And, you know, the guy was absolutely amazing when he was talking. And so, by the way, we weren't looking for anything other than to serve the Ugandans and try to help them rebuild. That was our desire. So as this guy is speaking, he's telling about deliverance from death, war stories. We're talking about, you know, life and death stories. And everybody's sitting on the edge of their seat as he's telling these narratives. And of course, the punchline is always, somebody prayed and somebody was saved. You know, somebody's life was spared, some bullet missed them. And, oh, by the way, this, this village met the Lord as a result of this and that kind of thing. So all the Saturday nighters walk up to us at the front and they say, you need to tell more stories, different ones. Tomorrow morning we're coming back. So, they all showed up for the 09:00 service, which was the typical, you know, classical conservative kind of. Kind of service where they have their hands beside them. In their pockets, they sing the three old hymns, and they want three points in a poem, right? Well, this guy gets up, and now we got the Saturday nighters mixing with the conservative crowd, and he starts telling more deliverance from death war stories. And everybody's on the edge of their seats, and they walk up and say, we're staying for the next service. So the 11:00 is the relaxed crowd, the sleeping crowd, who want to wave their hands and arms and sing hallelujah and Kumbaya. Anyway, we're in the crowd, and it's overstuffed. We're talking about a sanctuary that seats 450, and there had to be 650 people in that place, lined up along the walls, sitting on the steps at the front, up and down the aisles, and people in the overflow at the back. There's just no room. And he's telling more of these deliverance from death war stories. I'm sitting on the steps at the front next to him, and my wife has two rows out. She has not been able to raise her hands this high for more than 20 years. And then he's telling one of these stories, and he stops, and he looks at me, and he says, David, David, what is ma. I thought master of arts. I don't know. He said, no, no, I haven't got something right. I must stop. I must pray. And he puts his head on the pulpit, and of course, everybody's waiting for the end of the story that he was in the middle of telling, and they're waiting, and it went up. It felt like forever. Probably was about a minute. But then he looks up, and he looks at me, and he says, it's a wasting muscle disease. It starts in your head, and it goes down your face, and it makes your face sag and your shoulder blades go out of position. You get chronic pain between 16 and 20, and it's a plateau, declined disease. And if you damage a muscle, you never get it back. You don't die young, but you die in a wheelchair. And I realized he was describing the medical condition my wife has. And I look at her, and then he says this, whoever has this Jesus has just healed you. And her arms went above her head for the very first time in more than 20 years. Her hands were above her head, and all the pain vanished from her body. It was gone, just totally, completely gone. So I'm looking at her, and I'm looking at him, and of course, we have friends who are visiting from out of town because people had come to stay with us to hear this guy preach, to see whether or not they'd be part of the build team. We did construction crews, too, when we went and did our work there. And so they were part of this. And we've known each other for decades and decades. They've not seen her be able to do that for a very long time. We're all in awe. Now, the doctor who was our doctor was in the same doctor clinic as one of my elders on the elder board. We went to the doctor, and he'd known us for five years, and he'd been giving adaptive therapies. But there is no cure for FSH muscular dystrophy, just adaptive therapies and painkillers and I medications and machinery that we can use to improve our ability to be able to walk or manage. He could not believe it, and he waited three years before he wrote the doctor's note to say that all traces of FSH muscular dystrophy had vanished from her. Jesus healed. He healed my wife when all we were trying to do was to serve the poor. As a result of that, the Lord sent somebody back, and there was a boomerang that came, and the blessing flowed through the sacrifice, and this thing just happened. So I have to. So, I mean, that story, by the way, is in the healing prayer book. So healing prayer is real. Now, what I don't want to do is to give you an automatic formula that says healing prayer always happens. That's not true. What I will say to you is that God initiates and we respond. And by the way, neither you nor I can bluff a miracle and pretend it happens when it doesn't. But all of us can cooperate when the Holy Spirit's presence and power show up and God wants a miracle to happen in the realm. And I've been a participant in many of those. In fact, just a week and a half ago, there was one that happened a week. Of course, it's not in the book because it happened a week and a half ago. I was preaching in your country in Nebraska. I was in Nebraska, and I had gone to an event in Omaha, there was an outlying church that picked me up, and I did a Sunday service in a little town. And as it turned out, the pastor of the church said, look, you're here. Do you want to do the Sunday school class for the adults? I said, sure. So I did the Sunday school class, then I did the Sunday service. I was launching a Zoom class that I was doing in the afternoon. And then he wanted me to do the evening prayer meeting. And of course, we had huge attempts. The whole congregation came for this. But the one I want to tell you about is the one that happened in the afternoon. I had made a commitment to a group of people in Edmonton, Alberta, to teach a class to them after I'd been at a three-day conference. And so I was to launch that class on May 19. So it's what, two weeks ago? About two weeks ago. Anyway, it was Sunday afternoon and I was going to do that at 03:00 central time. It was 04:00 Eastern and 02:00 Alberta time. That's in the province of Alberta. Anyway, the bottom line was I had to do this class and I was in this other church and there was a free afternoon. And then the pastor, whose name is Matt, he looked at me and he said, well, look, why don't you invite some? It's the first session. I said, yeah, do you want some of our people to attend the class? I said, well, they're more than welcome to say, well, just invite them and, you know, you can do it in my living room. Anybody who wants to come can come in or somebody wants to sign up, they can sign up. I said, oh, that's a great idea. So we're in the living room and he's trying to get an HDMI cable to attach to his television so that I can get my screen from my computer on the television. And of course, we're bumping around the living room trying to make things work. And he's bending and twisting ways, yet doesn't ordinarily do it. And he's wincing in pain. And I said, Matt, what's wrong? And he said I've been struggling with gout for three months. They haven't been able to get past this. I'm ashamed to admit it. I have to change the way that I eat. I don't want to, but I'm in this terrible pain and I can hardly move. I think I'm the candidate for prayer, for healing. And right at that moment, the presence grew inside of me. My hand began to tingle and I looked at him and I said, my heart's burning strangely warm. Do you want me to pray for you? He said, oh, please. Now, at that point, eleven or twelve of his people had gathered in the living room. One of them was his daughter, 16 years old, together with anchors from his congregation. And it was a kind of a young, middle-aged church with kids and teenagers. So here's what happens to this girl. Is even pre millennial younger. This would be Gen Eight. Again, I don't know what you want to call that. She's like 16, 17. Anyway, as we're sitting in that living room, I become aware that the presence of God is on me. And I said, may I put my hand on your leg, Matt? He said, will you please do? We had got the tv set up. I put my hand on his kneecap and I feel this presence. And then I look over and I see the girl and she is weeping for her dad. And the power of the Lord is on this girl just going up and down. I can just see her shining with the presence of Jesus. So I said, Bethany, I do believe the Lord wants you to be the instrument to pray for your dad's healing. Would you do that? And she looked at me and she went, you've never done it before, right? So I said, come on over here. So she comes over. Meanwhile, all these people are gathering in the living room. And she puts her hand on her dad's ankle where the pain is concentrated. And I said you need to pray for him to be healed. She said, how do I do that? He said, pray this way. So I gave her some things to say. I said, in the name of Jesus, we rebuke the sickness. In the name of Jesus, we ask for the healing power of the Lord to flow. In the name of Jesus, heal my dad, I said. And as she did this, her whole body filled up with power and it flowed through her hand. Coolness filled his leg and 85% of his pain vanished. While twelve of his people from his church watched as the young lady was doing the prayer time for her dad. He had to drive you back to the airport the next day. And as he's driving, he said, you know, it's all gone now. It took 24 hours. 85, 90% of the pain vanished as soon as she prayed. It's all gone now. It's completely vanished. So what I want to do is what I just described to you. I want to train people how to be attentive to the presence of the Holy Spirit when God himself wants to intervene and produce something that's in harmony with his purposes. I want to teach people to listen to the voice of Jesus. And to cooperate with the anointing of the spirit that lands on people from time to time as God commands them to be able to do this. The bottom line is I had to trip into this stuff. Nobody taught me, you know, how do you hear the voice of Jesus? Well, listen, I preached in 17 countries so far. I've preached to tribals. I've preached to high European culture. I've preached to people who are, you know, living in Latin America and Australia and Indonesia and Japan. I've preached to high culture, low culture, and everything in between. I've been in poor parts of the world. I've been in wealthy parts of the world. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to men, women, children, whether they're young or old or in between. It doesn't matter what denomination we're talking about. If I ask this question, the answer is always the same. How many here want to know they're being guided by Jesus? Every hand in the room goes up. Then I'll say, how many here struggle with knowing they're being guided by Jesus? Every single hand goes. It's the same answer. How do you know when the Holy Spirit's given you the tap on the shoulder for an assignment, and there's this blank look that comes across the room? So what I've done over all my years of walking with Jesus is to chronicle and write down those times when I've experienced spectacular guidance or mundane guidance or banal stuff or the ordinary. And I put these together into an amalgam that teaches people how to pay attention to the movement of God's presence and power. And so this book. Hey, are you there? It's me. God is a book that I wrote about how to pay attention to the voice of Jesus. And so this one, I think, is the primary one. I give 25 different ways that the Holy Spirit speaks to us. It's primarily nonverbal. And then at the end of the process, I put a process together. It looks just like that. And I walk people through a discernment wheel. And by the way, it's shaped like a wheel because it gives direction, okay? Because God's guidance is always. Is always moving you forward to become more like him. And I teach people how to do that. Then I would encourage people to take a look at the healing prayer book. This is the book where I talk about paying attention to those signals. When you are in a time where somebody needs prayer for a wounded heart, for a wounded spirit, for a wounded body, for a wounded mind, for damaged emotions, for a damaged body, for damaged relationships, we walk through all of them. It's a co-write with the president of Asbury Theological Seminary, Maxie Dunham. And so he is an upper-room author. He's 90. He'll be 90 in August. He's written 50 books. This is his first co-write. And in the book, we describe what it's like to enter into times of prayer for healing. So there you go. That's, that's who I am. That's what I do. Johnny asked me a question.

00:36:53 - Johnny Sanders

Fantastic, fantastic. What, what I'll say here, something that really stuck out, especially, with you and your wife, is seeking, seeking the healer. What, a powerful statement. Now to seek the healer. And instead of solely just the healing, I know that's something that talked about in recent sermons at the church I go to that if we solely approach God as do this for me, do this for me, do this for me, and that's it. We stop there. We're treating them like a genie. And that's not true. We seek the healer. He is who we worship. And that, and I love that, that mindset there, that mindset shift, that it's not just about the miracles, about the gifts, the blessings. Those are great. We love those. But it's about you. It's about God and the love that he has given us and how cool it is that he blesses us in different ways. So fantastic advice there to seek that healer. I know you mentioned these books. Are there any places where people can get these books or to be able to learn more about you and be able to be in contact with you?

00:38:19 - Dr. David Chotka
Yes. So actually, the healing prayer book is published by Whitaker House. That means you can get it anywhere books are sold. So if you go to books, a million, you can get it there. If you want to go to Walmart, you can order it there. If you want to go to your Christian bookstore, they're the largest distributor of Christian books on earth, actually. So if you have a Christian bookstore in town, use ask for the healing prayer book. You'll find it. You can go to Amazon, you can go to their shop, the Word in the United States, shoptheword.com is their website. But if you want to be in touch with all the other stuff that I do, I go to a conference. I do conferences and events. If you want to have me come to your church, pay me an airfare, and then take up an offering, I'll come. I do three-day workshops on healing prayer, and on the Lord's prayer. I do three-day workshops on hearing the voice of Jesus. In my mind, hearing the voice is the most important of the bunch because everything else that we do comes out of our obedience to Jesus, everything else that we do. And if we can understand we're being guided, the rest doesn't matter. Big assignment, small assignment, in between assignments. If you know, you're being guided. The rest doesn't matter. So they would, it's very easy to contact me. You just go to the website. It's a triple w dot spiritequip. Spirit is spelled like holy spirit and equip is spelled like equipment, spiritequip.com, because the ministry is to equip people in spiritual disciplines. And so there's books there and there's my coursework courses they're offering there. There's, there's, every now and then there's free giveaways. I think right now on my website, there's a free download of the first chapter of the audiobook on healing Prayer because there is an audiobook available for this, too. And so if you want to hear the first chapter to see if you want to consider purchasing the whole thing, then you can download it there from the website. You have to give us your contact information and in return, we will send you the first chapter of the healing Prayer book and audio. And it's a very simple matter to book me. You just go on to spiritequipped.com, click on events, and push the button, and you can have me come to your church or speak at your gathering.

00:40:16 - Johnny Sanders

Fantastic. Well, I'll definitely include all of that down in the links below so you guys can check that out and be in contact with Doctor Chotka and be able to look at some of his materials and everything. Once again, thanks so much for, coming on and sharing just some, some pretty incredible stories with us.

00:40:34 - Dr. David Chotka

You're more than welcome. May the Lord bless your listening audience and you as well.

00:40:39 - Johnny Sanders
Absolutely. Thank you again to everybody who tuned in today, and we will catch you on the next episode.