Skyfall 2023 - Unmasked by Pastor Nancy Odle

Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.

1. 0:00:00

   I wanna introduce, y'all just don't know, she's the hardest working woman I've ever known. She's not a pushover. She loves me more than anybody ever has in this whole world. If there was to be a picture in the dictionary of loyalty, it's my wife. If you wanna fight, say something bad about me in front of her. Um, I assure you, and I don't say this, I'm not just blowing smoke or making up stuff, but God brought her into my life so she could make me a better man so I could do what God's called me to do. And her presence in my life has made me a better man. So I introduced my wife, and yes, Pastor Fivefold Ministry called Nancy, not because she's a pastor's wife, she was called by God. If you got a problem with woman preaching or teaching, you don't understand the scriptures and I have a whole teaching on that to correct you. All right? Now I'm all red and blushing and grinning and it's like our first date. We even made the cashier feel a little awkward when we went through a grocery store line because we were smiling at each other so much. So I love my man. I love God, I love my man, I love my family. And so here we are. The Lord really laid something a little bit different. Some of you have heard my testimony if you have been at other conferences, if you have watched the videos. You've heard my testimony. I'm not gonna go into it completely tonight, but I've named this unmasked from fear to faith. The Lord really laid something on my heart and that's the condition of the church. I know that here we've got a lot of truth, we've got a lot of things going on, we share a lot of things. I mean, probably most of you evangelize and do all these things, but we really need to take a look at our hearts, take a look at what we're doing, make sure that we are completely walking in the light. That's what the Lord really laid on my heart. This is what church people look like to those on the outside, to those on the inside.

2. 0:03:02

   I didn't have a lot of experience with denominations because I grew up in a charismatic word of faith church from the time I was six. So that's all I really knew until we came to Opelika and learned about Baptists. Now, nothing wrong with Baptists, but one thing that I learned from a lot of the people I encountered is they were fake. I mean, there was a lot of fakeness. Not bad as in I'm trying to manipulate you or whatever, but they had some deep issues, but they were expected to look like these people. It's all right, it's okay, everything's good. Put that smile on and just go to church, even if you're ripped out inside and dealing with all kinds of issues or you're dealing with abuse or you're dealing with an alcoholic husband or whatever, they just, it's thumbs up and a fake smile on your face. So I started kind of putting together some things here, pornography in the church. When you start just even pulling up statistics about the different issues in the church, you just really, it's mind blowing. 15 mind blowing statistics about porn and the church. And I'm not gonna read through all of these, but Christians are just consumed with these secret sins. You've got pastors, youth pastors. There was one, I can't remember if it was Brownsville or another conference. They were talking about Christians coming for a Christian conference and how the hotels would say, whenever the Christians came in back in the day, you'd rent the porn from the hotels at night, whatever. And it would skyrocket when the Christians were in town. And yeah, it is a wow, it is a wow. But nobody's talking about it. Nobody's addressing it. You don't have a lot of people who are coming out and confessing it. Here's another one, divorce in the church. It's rampant, it's rampant. You see this one, Christian, religious composition of divorced or separated adults, Christian. 74%. Look at these other non-Christian, look at the percentage on those. 1%, 1%, 1%. Unaffiliated is only 20%. It's huge in the church. Addictions, alcohol, gambling. I knew a lady who had, you know, I never really even thought about gambling and addiction like that, but I knew a lady years ago who could not even drive down a certain interstate because there was a billboard for a casino and she could not resist. She would drive past, and she was a sweet, older, I mean older Christian lady. And she would drive past it and be just compelled.

3. 0:06:03

   She just could not not go to the casino. Marijuana, all kinds of other drugs, prescription drugs. Our churches are filled with people who are just numbing themselves and they'll go to church on Sundays, thumbs up, smile, how you doing brother? And they just smoke pot the night before. Then you got these kind of issues. You see the hulk, anger issues, depression, unforgiveness in the church. And I've said this before, we're gonna have a lot of people show up when it's their time to stand before the Lord and get turned away because they held unforgiveness against people. That's a huge one, you know. Secret past, criminal past, things like that. I'm gonna pause right here because the hulk, is the hulk in the audience? Rachel, come on up. I'm gonna ask, this is one of our, actually not just one of our ministry school students. This is our valedictorian this year. Give her a hand. This is Rachel Jerry. And so speaking of these secret things, she's been in the church. She loves the Lord. Spirit filled all of these things. But I want you to hear her testimony. And then I'll keep going after that. Thank you, I've never been called the hulk before. But it does kind of fit with my story, so. Well, I wanna thank Pastor Nancy and Pastor Dean for inviting me to share this testimony here at Skyfall. And this is the testimony of how I was set free from spirits of death and suicide, even as a follower of Jesus Christ. John 10, 10 says that the thief comes not but to steal, to kill, and to destroy. And that's exactly what the thief Satan was set out to do with me in my life. So I gave my life to the Lord when I was about five or six, grew up in a Christian family, went to church. But that didn't stop Satan from feeding lies into my mind from a very early age. And these lies really made me hate myself. And robbed me of what the truth of God's word said about me. And really each lie was like a little brick that just built up these strongholds in my mind. And they would be things like, I'm not good enough. Nobody cares about me. I'm a failure, I'm worthless. Nobody notices me, I'm not capable. Maybe some of you have some of those thoughts. And these were, when I say I believe these things about myself, I mean, I believed it. They were impenetrable walls. Nothing anybody would say or do could change my mind. And even reading God's word, I believed it was the truth but I believed it was the truth maybe for somebody else, not for me, because I wasn't worthy of it.

4. 0:09:06

   And these strongholds really made me susceptible to be really tormented by demonic intrusive thoughts of destruction and suicide. And all the enemy needed was the opportunity or that open door. And that first open door came when I was 13 years old. I was dealing with a second parental divorce, one of my parents divorced for a second time. And my heart was broken and I felt abandoned by the step parent and step siblings that left. So I remember I would sit outside at the end of the driveway and I would watch, like waiting for them to come back and they weren't coming back. And in one of those moments, it was the first time I heard a voice say to me, when you see the next car drive by, you just go out and jump in front of it. And I didn't know anything about demons, spiritual warfare, oppression. I wasn't taught about it. And I didn't know it was even possible to be attacked in this way. So I thought it was my own thoughts, but now I know it was demonic. And I just wanna say, I don't believe that every single person that has suicidal or intrusive thoughts is being attacked by a demon or has a demon oppression. But it is a very common cause. And I'd say probably one of the most common causes. And it's far too ignored and people can be set free by Jesus Christ. So starting at the age of 19 and in the years after that, suicide just began to surround me. I lost a good friend to suicide and then a classmate and then a student in the college dorms that I was in charge of and failed to counsel when she really needed help. And I had an ex-boyfriend that threatened suicide when I ended the relationship. And on top of that, I was just constantly crippled by the fear of my loved ones dying. And then in 2014, I did lose a very loved family member to suicide. And this was so incredibly heartbreaking and confusing for our family. And on one hand, I wondered, how can someone do this and leave their family behind in such pain? But then on the other hand, I thought, I know how someone could come to this point because I felt it. So in my early adult years, this demonic voice in my mind would start to speak to me more often. And to be honest, it really didn't happen very much in my teenage prodigal years and I was living like the world. It got much worse when I completely surrendered to Jesus. So I don't understand how people can say

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