In this episode of What the Prophets Say, join me Emma Stark and Prophet Sam Robertson as we go into the deep waters of how you deal with discouragement and depression in these days of war and shaking in the earth. We want you to be strong in the Lord. Join us for this key episode of What the Prophets Say. Hello our loyal listeners, family and friends around the world and welcome to another rip roaring episode of What the Prophets Say with me Emma Stark and my sidekick Sam Robertson.
We're glad that you're with us Sam. We are recording this in a cold month in Glasgow in Scotland, but I wonder whether it's fair to say it's nearly every month a cold month in Glasgow in Scotland. It is, but we're in the sort of month where you have to scrape your car in the morning and I had to do that the other day and it was a real ice. Scrape your car, de-ice it, defrost it, take the ice off your wind. Have you been out with a de-icer already? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not today because the day's just been rainy, but the rest of the week and last week every morning. Oh man. Yes, there we go. That's the problem of living in East Kilbride. Because it has its own microclimate of freezing. It always snows where you are. It's on a hill. Yeah. So it's up high. There we go. And we are glad to be back in the studios to record another set and we've got the heating on. It only says 19 degrees. I don't like to sit in a room that's less than about 21. Of course you don't.
So we have this app on the phone that we've got with this house where you put the, and I go on and I boost the heating in our house and David goes onto the app and undoes the boost. This is the constant back and forth in our house. So he's like, have you put the heating on in our bedroom? Uh, maybe. And then suddenly it disappears. There are two things in a house that dads feel very protective over and very territorial over heating and bins.
I have never met a dad in a house who is not pedantic about bins. The rubbish, the trash cans. The trash cans and pedantic about heating. Well can we tell you about David is actually through the window looking at me. He's wondering, I can see his facial expression. He's doing his time out move on because he knows I'm going to expose him here. So we moved into the size and there's like a big drawer that has three different trash cans or bins in it.
And for all the different recyclings that we are mandated to do by our council here. And David is, he's like the bin police and he's written on little cards and stuck them with arrows and lists of what goes in each bin. So there are moments where I deliberately to be irritating, put the wrong thing in the wrong bin. Look at his face now over there. And you hear him sigh when he opens the bin and finds it. Well, he used to just sigh, now it's full blown. What do I need to do?
And he gathers the family round for family meetings around the bins so that he can explain exactly where you put cardboard and glass. And we just, to be fair, we just laugh at him now because it's like a major thing. It's a dad thing. It maybe is a dad thing. He gets very excited on the eve of bin day. Oh yeah. And there's the bin taking out ceremony. Yes, there is. Absolutely.
Every dad does the bin, the trash can taking out ceremony to the front of the house and they have to be perfectly positioned. It's true. It's true. There you go. Seriously, as dads. It's a whole event. I will measure it when I have kids. If I end up becoming pedantic about bins. I'm fairly sure you will because you are quite pedantic about neatness and tidiness already. You are a bit of a neat freak. I am. I'm like in this new house that we have, I'm like cleaning everything all of the time.
And so is Bella to be fair. She's clean. I like to tidy. She likes to clean. That's quite a good combination. That is a really good combination. Oh, so we've got a wee. And do you, are you like, like full blown kill every germ, like bleach? Well that's Bella. Okay. I'm more like, I'm a little bit like that, but I'm more like take up every rug to hoover underneath it. No. Move all the cushions. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Life's too short. Do you hoover behind settees?
Well, I would like to say I do all the time, but when I have a burst, but I do hoover behind well, the city. Oh, burst of energy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I move them. I would move them to get underneath. Right. There you go. Well, well done. You're clearly quite a catch, Sam Robertson. Absolutely. If you even hoover under a sofa. I do hoover under a sofa. Hoover under rhymes. Absolutely. For me, it's about how things smell. So I'm a big one for like a nice scented cleaning spray and a Yankee candle.
I love a nice smelling candle. Yeah. Some of them are very disappointing. They smell and they still be in the first 10 seconds and then it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Now that I've named the brand Yankee candle, I have in the back of my head a slight concern that what if I actually like a dodgy candle cup? What there's something is please nobody tell me everything demonic about Yankee candles because that's the one I buy. That's the one you like.
And then somebody will email me and say, it's like, it's like sometimes, you know, drinking a Starbucks and then somebody says, you're endorsing the siren spirit. I'm like, oh, oh, okay. You're drinking the snake spirit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then we have a coffee shop here called Nero's and I always think of Nero fiddled while Rome burned the Roman emperor. So I that's that is whenever I see the coffee shop Nero's, which is a chain here in is it a British chain?
Anyway, I always think I can't I can't buy a coffee from Nero's because Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Is that do you not think that when you see? No, I do not. No, I do not. No, I can't drink Nero's coffee. And now we're all told we can't drink Starbucks coffee, though I sneakily do. So then I'm left with Costa coffee, which I always think sounds awful because of cost a lot cost a coffee. What are my options for a coffee house? I don't know.
So now buying a coffee, a drive through coffee is problematic. So nobody discouraged me that Yankee candles are demonic because they're a little like guilty pleasure in my life. Yes. Lots of scented candles. Yeah. So if it is the one, just keep it to yourself. Just don't tell me. Don't email. Don't write in. Don't let us know. I don't know if discouragement over lighting candles is allowed in our lives. Anyway, speaking of discouragement, that's the theme.
Sam, we've just talked for six minutes about nonsense. Okay, right. Discouragement. I really felt the Lord saying we're going to get you free today. This is the aim loyal listeners and that a lot of the church, a lot of the faithful remnant, that's you. You're faithful. You can pat yourself on the back. You're a faithful remnant and devoted to the King have been under an assignment that looks a lot like in the days of Nehemiah when Nehemiah in scripture is trying to rebuild the walls.
It's a major project. There's a major rebuilding. It's very much like today. We are building and rebuilding and building the kingdom of God and rebuilding the heist of God, restructuring, reframing. So we're very much in those Nehemiah type days. When Nehemiah is sent by the evil one, two men, Sam Ballot and Tobiah, who come with an intent of repetitive discouragement, repetitive undermining, repetitive weariness. And it's not just like, oh, can I be a bit negative for a day?
And can you deal with somebody who's a bit of a mood hoover who sucks out all the goodness of your life? But they are very strategic in undermining your momentum, in undermining your sense of your call, in undermining a very deep place of your understanding of who you are before God and what you're supposed to be doing. And I really felt like we're in days of war. We know that we'll talk about that in the next few episodes.
But I felt a siege of discouragement and a siege of assignment against and how it looked to me was like the enemy had got Sam Ballot and Tobiah's spirits and was lifting blocks, bricks and was putting them around you to wall you in and the sense of, well, I'm going to knock over that thought that comes against me and I'm going to knock over that other thought that has been building against me.
But because it was brick by brick by brick, I felt like there was quite a lot of them to deal with and that the Lord was saying it was a day to stand together on behalf of each other and to say that which has been built to wall you in, in the wearing dine, the wearing eye, the discouragement must now, as we are here today, be agreed on that it is utterly assassinated and annihilated. Come on.
And this is Nehemiah chapter four, the real scripture where we see the activity of Sam Ballot and Tobiah here who are resisting. I think what I would say as well about these spirits is they rarely come in straight away with an all out, you can't do this, you're going to be destroyed. But they subtly begin in the questioning of, can you really? Are you really able to? And you see it start in the, you know, what are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices?
Will they actually finish in a day? And so it's not even just the all out resistance of what we see later on in the scripture where they're saying we're going to invade and we're going to kill and we're going to destroy so that nothing is completed. It starts in the place of the subtle questioning of, are you really able? Can you really do this? And that's where it starts with your call.
And I think for our listeners, you may have realized that you have been questioning yourself over can I really? And that is not a question of whether or not you're qualified or able. I believe that they are seeds or arrows that have been put in the atmosphere around you to try and get you to undermine yourself. And so there are the spirits that inhabit other people who resist.
But I think there are the Sambala and Tobias spirits that come to your atmosphere and get you to question yourself and you to start to doubt your own ability to build and your own ability to fulfill the call of God. And it's in those spaces where you have to say where that oppression has come in and where there has been arrows sent, you know, and fluttering around my mind of a can I really do that? Will I really be able to achieve that? Will I really be able to do what God has asked?
But we push that out of our atmosphere. Yes, yes. It's interesting. I was at the hairdressers and last week to my usual scalp bleach to get the very blonde hair and I'd sauntered afterwards into the bakery next door and I thought, oh, pick up some nice treats for the family for dinner after dinner. And I said there was no there was nobody else there apart a couple of shop assistants. Very lovely. And I'd actually not spotted the bakery before. So I'd wandered in and must have been new shop.
And I said to them, what what do you recommend? What's really good to eat? For a sweet treat. And they of course started saying about the chocolate brownies. And I said, just like as a knee jerk reaction, oh, my goodness, I can't stand chocolate. And they're like, why? And then without even a thought of where I was, I said, because I decreed it and it became my reality. And so there was nobody else there. So they said they actually they were genuinely fascinated.
They said to me, what what what do you mean? You know, so I said, well, I went on this weird journey where I thought I would test if I spoke something I lied, the impact it would have. So I said for a long time, I hate chocolate. That wasn't true because I really like mint arrow. Anyway, and I actually like mint mint chocolate. I used to like it a lot, quite a lot. And then one day I'd said it as a joke. I hate chocolate. I hate chocolate. It was like a health thought in my head.
But I said it so many times, I went into the garage to pay for a petrol for the car gas station petrol station. And I was standing by the chocolate and I felt physically sick. And I suddenly realized that I had spoken so many times in such a kind of banal, almost like jovial, jokey way, I hate chocolate, I hate chocolate, that I had created a physical response in my body.
And now, whenever anybody gives me chocolate, buys or offers me a chocolate pudding or cake, I, I just I just can't even touch it because I have decreed something that was so almost inconsequential. And so I had that conversation with the bakery ladies and they gave me lemon cheesecake. So that that's good. It was very good. That's my local bakery now. Oh, of course. Yes, of course. Cause you're moving house with Bella into that area. And it was good to know.
And like a spice, a spiced pumpkin cinnamon spice marmalade muffin. Wow. Yeah. With Marscapone on the top. Sorry. Now we are. I was taking notes for my own for your own edification. But the point of all of that is we then had a conversation about the power of the tongue. And they then said, had I tried that in other situations? And I said, well, actually, yes, with my children and I decreed over Peter, you know, you'll be a giant of a man physically.
And now he's got these monstrous size feet, knees tall and breaking all of our family records. So I do think that in all of this, we're, you know, in the I don't like chocolate nonsense that we must really watch that we don't just go, well, they had an off day and they were mean to me or somebody was a wee bit rude to me and go, it doesn't matter.
It really does matter when something is said, whether with deliberate mal intent or a throw away line from somebody else, or you echo it and you internally digest it and rethink it over yourselves. It actually changes your physical frame and it opens the door to depression and ill health and this discouragement portion that we see that the enemy knows what he's doing.
Now, it's not that you can't tell the truth, but I really feel like we've got to, in particularly in days of war, come back to a robust conversation about our conversations and what are we allying in our atmosphere, what are we allowing to hang around us that maybe somebody, you know, it's a funny thing.
Somebody was very rude to me recently and I don't think they meant to be because actually they're a friend, but they said to me, because I had some plumping lipstick on and some, and they just said to me, oh, I really miss, I really miss your thin, elegant lips. I don't like the current shape of your lips, Emma. Now I did think, how do you respond to that? Because that hangs, it's almost inconsequential, but it hangs and I'm very able to go, oh, don't be so ridiculous.
And I told a friend, in fact, a husband and wife team who are down in England and the husband and wife team, I think they'd been long in Christian ministry. This is over the weekend when I was traveling, I was telling them about this comment about my lips and they grabbed hold of me, the pair of them and actually almost over the top seriously went I love your lips and I thought, no, this sounds a bit inappropriate.
But mercifully it was a husband and wife team and they were just like, and I'm like, right, that's enough now. But they didn't stop because they understand how you undo that. And so literally both this husband and wife team who are great friends of mine and I don't get to see them as often as I would like. And I don't even know how I came to share the story. But they were like grabbing hold of me and all they would say to me is, your lips are so gorgeous, your lips are so amazing.
I love how full your lips are. I love your lipstick. I'm like, thanks, but can we just stop this conversation piece now? But they understood that a Samballa and a Tobiah spirit, I think, takes many different forms, this discouragement and that actually there are ways that we need to be robust at curating the atmosphere and how easily something can get under the skin and be a source of great discouragement. Let's look at the scripture together, Sam, and what's the solution here?
We're in Nehemiah chapter four. Yeah. And so you have it all throughout this story in this chapter of the resistance and there's resistance and then the people, you know, there's a prayer that goes up, you know, hear as God for we are despised and this real overcoming. But you see that at the end of the chapter, well, actually halfway through the chapter that Nehemiah is commissioning the people number one into family groups, which is important. That's curate your atmosphere here.
What Emma was saying, get around people who are family, who have your back, who are on your side and whose side you are on and you cover each other. But he commissions them to work with swords at their side. And actually there's a remarkable verse that says that they worked and in one hand they held a weapon and in the other hand they carried materials and so they went to work and they went to war at once.
And these Sam ballot and Tobias spirits, they come out and you deal with them not by negotiation, but by war. And you have to get your war mindset on here and start to say where they have come to me, whether that be to myself directly or through other people, I go to war and I do not permit these spirits to resist what God is building through me. And the fascinating thing here in Nehemiah's story is the stride and see of the violent response. Absolutely. This cannot hang. This cannot stay.
And the understanding that discouragement to the body of Christ is so deeply, deeply erosive that they are willing to and not let it go and not just say, oh, you know what, we'll let that hang a little bit sort of go away and it'll sort of be okay. No, absolutely not. And when I'm reading verse 15, what our enemies heard that we were aware of their plot. In other words, the enemy then sees you know that you're not going to stand for this and that God had frustrated it.
We all returned to the wall, each to our work and the sense of saying I am now aware that I have undergone a campaign, not just of the most obvious discouragement, but of subtle discouragements and now I need to become aware of the impact that is having and I need to war in the spirit and start to say that cannot have access to my atmosphere. That cannot stand. That must not stay. And I, I tear it up and I receive the encouragement of the voice of the Lord.
Yeah. I think, look, we have all probably, you know, myself and you guys listening, we've all probably reflected on maybe some area of wounding in our lives or area of pain or offense or difficulty. Did you just spill that? Sorry. I just took a drink of water and spilled it all down myself. Was that smooth? Sorry. I was hoping you wouldn't redraw attention to my inability to drink through the straw.
But we have all probably had moments where God dealt with a wounding or God dealt with something in our lives that actually came in through something really simple or through something that in the moment you thought that I'm fine with that. I'll just move on. I think that's a statement, something that was slightly offensive and maybe are rude, but it wasn't full blowing, blown an attack against you. And then years later there's a big wounding because we didn't deal with it in the moment.
I think why this is really important right now is we are living in days where there is such a speed of change. There is, it feels like we're spinning a million plates. God is not moving sequentially right now. He's moving simultaneously. Many things all at once are happening and we're watching that across the earth. We don't have the time to sit and or to just assume, well, that didn't affect me. That didn't bother me.
That won't land and move on to then realize it did land and there's bitterness or there's unforgiveness or there's a wounding. And you've got to be quick at saying that is a Sam Ballot spirit. That's a Tobiah spirit. And in the moment saying I'm rejecting it, it's not landing. I'm going to war. I'm taking the sword in one hand and I'm going to cut those ties. I'm going to cut those arrows off and I'm going to push out of my atmosphere. I'm going to push out of my body.
Every curse or everything of just undermining and I'm not going to let anything land. And look, if you are unsure if something has bothered you, there is still no harm in praying to make sure it hasn't. Don't wait until you know it's bothered you. Don't wait until you have a symptom that you have unforgiveness or a curse has landed or something has affected you. Just deal with it anyway, no matter how little or great the word is.
And often it's the little things that are said when you're weary or tired. And you know, I notice in this passage that the Sam Ballot and Tobiah plan to invade just after the workers are saying we're actually getting weary and verse 10, they're getting weary and it's at that point that the resistance comes in to try and undermine.
And I want to say to you, deal with it even if you aren't, even if you think, oh, that's so little, that seems so juvenile, that seems so silly, surely that's not affected me. Deal with it anyway. Don't let the words land and then weeks and months down the line be wounded because of them.
I want to put this, you know, chat together, Sam, into the, as you were pushing there helpfully today's context, we could probably have this kind of conversation about Nehemiah 4 at any point in the history of the church, because most of us have something that's going on where somebody's been a bit off with us. I do think that this is very serious now. You've got to be able to not be shaken. Come on.
What we did in the pandemic a few years ago was a trial run and we were very shaken and there was a complete collapse of a lot of mental health all round about us, particularly as a mom of teenagers. I was aware of the struggle within that generation and the inability to know how to hold a mental space. And now we have to lay hands on our own heads and say, I will hold a mental space and I will not let these things come against me. And the interesting thing with Nehemiah is it's the war.
It's the war mindset that you have to go to in these situations. Now, I think when we hit World War Three and the wars increase and they spill over the current boundary to places that they are in in the world and we are in multiple wars on multiple continents that start to then join up together, you've got to know how to do what David says after the war at Ziklag where he strengthens himself in the Lord.
And part of it is not just can I pray in tongues and can I sing a worship song or can I hang out with my friends, but do I actually know how to go into the spirit and say any atmosphere of discouragement, depression, any words that are loitering in my atmosphere, I clean them out in Jesus name. And there's almost a militancy that needs to come to that. Absolutely. I hope my my sons won't mind me telling this story.
And Samuel, in his previous school before we moved house this year, he had really unpleasant bullying situation with a child who, for obvious reasons, I won't name, but it's just unpleasant. It's just unpleasant. And you obviously, as their uncle, will be aware of all of that and really tough, tough stuff and he moves schools and we talk that to one side. And all of a sudden, I'm away traveling last weekend.
I get this alert in our family group chat on WhatsApp and the child who bullied Samuel has gone missing and he didn't take his bank cards. He didn't take his phone. He was 15, 16 and had disappeared off and had only taken two teddy bears. Well, the spirit of the Lord rose up at me to fight for this child's life. And my elder son, Peter, said that looks like suicide. That looks like it's, you know, he's going to go and do himself some harm. And then my boys are having to wrestle.
How do you think through the life of a bully and what he had sown into their lives and how we'd had to look after our son? And I was so impressed with my boys that their response was he will live to go to war for him. He will live and he will not die. And I'm driving around the south coast of England and every spare moment I'm saying, Satan, you cannot have this child's life. You cannot have this child's life.
Well, by day three, when this child is still missing and the police are right and it's in all the national press and we are all thinking, oh, my, this is going to this is not going to end well. And we're warfareing and we're warfareing. And you're facing then in that moment, the reality of a child's pain as adults. But my boys are facing this whole situation and they're having to go. I release forgiveness for what you said over me, your life counts.
And they were forced by God to deal with unkindness in their own hearts. They were forced into this situation. Do you say, well, that he deserves it? And, you know, and that actually what I go to war against is not necessarily the individual, but I go to war against what is hung in the atmosphere, but what has been wrongly released. But I start to say, you know, over this child, you will be healed and you will be well and you will not take your own life. And so we went to war.
And I think it was the fourth day where we got the news that he had been found and he was alive and the whole family sat when I came back home, just celebrating that the prayers of the righteous were powerful and effective. But at the same time, in my conversations with my youngest son, we were able to finally lift off the impact of the bullying because how many times do you and I lay hands on adults in their 40s and 50s and we're still saying, I lift the effect of your childhood off you.
I lift the effect of the bullying off you. I have to say, I had even prayed that in ministry over the weekend where I was traveling over many, it's almost like a standard thing you and I pray as ministers of the gospel and this sense of I'm going to bless those who have cursed me. I'm going to forgive them. I'm going to release them.
I'm going to not hold a record of wrong, but I am not going to let it impact my life going forward and I'm going to go after their wellbeing and my own wellbeing at the same time. And I think in these days of war, you got to know how to do that because you're going to have to be able to stand stronger than you've ever stood. As the call of verse 18, each of the builders carried their sword at their side. And you've got to do that.
You have to, in this season, have your sword at your side and you are going to war. This is not a season to sit and reflect and to muse and to linger in these moments. It's a season to say, I am going to war. I'm not going to let that depression come at me. I'm not going to let that anxiety come at me. And can I say this? Most of the time, Satan puts in the atmosphere what was once inside of you.
And so if you've had a battle with depression or you've had a, you know, a victory over anxiety, he'll try and put it in the atmosphere so that you go into a guilt trap of, did I welcome it back in again? No, it's in the atmosphere. And he will try and put it there as an oppression. And I want to say to you, you've got to get your sword at your side and be ready at every moment to go to war and to be quick to decree that assignment doesn't get to land in the name of Jesus.
Yeah. Holding an emotional mental space of wellness is now key in these days. And I would love to say to you that, oh, it's somebody else's responsibility. No, it is your own responsibility. It is your own responsibility to not go under and to grab the friends around you and put them in place and say, I'm going to take responsibility. Can you help me do this? Come on. In the measurement of your own internal and mental dynamics that you maintain this space.
And may you know the wisdom and the wildness of Nehemiah who knew what it was to take an entire family, entire people, group, an entire tribe to the place where they pushed back the enemy assignment of discouragement and depression. So we bless you are loyal listeners into that ability in Jesus mighty name. Well thank you for joining us in this episode of What the Prophets Say with me, Emma Stark and Sam Robertson.
We have loved your company and we bless you and we will look forward to you joining us again for another episode of What the Prophets Say. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of What the Prophets Say with me, Emma Stark. If you would like to go deeper with us, you would be very welcome to join our network, the Global Prophetic Alliance.
You can find that at propheticscots.com where we have a comprehensive training program to lead you into deeper realms of the Spirit of God and encounter. If you feel a call in the Pool to Deliverance ministry, you can download my latest e-course which is a comprehensive overview of getting people free from demonic oppression. You'll find that at demonbusting.com. Join us on these different platforms for more interaction with Emma Stark, Sam Robertson and the GPA team.