Israel Embassy and DC Prayer Gathering

0:00 Hello everyone, I'm Stephen Strang and welcome to this edition of the Strang report for, for Thursday, February 1st, 2024. You know, I've been doing this podcast since 2015 for many years, just audio and now video as well. It's kind of interesting to learn and just watch as the, as the audience grows. In fact, I'm up to around 25,000 shares or, or actually likes. We're live and I guess we don't edit out these little mistakes. But if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so. Subscribe below, hit the little bell so that you're notified when we're live every Tuesday and Thursday at 4pm Eastern time. Sometimes when I travel or when things come up, we'll tape something, but then we run it live at that time. You know, I read something recently about Joe Rogan. You probably know him. He's got the biggest podcast of all time. And of course, everyone who's in the podcast business one wonder what his secret is. Well, probably only he knows the secret, but, but he described it. He just does his podcast on things that interest him sometimes on health, sometimes on politics, sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's a book author. And as I was listening

1:35 to them recite this, I thought, Hey, that's kind of what I do. Or at least it's what I like to do. I like to write or to do a podcast on things that just interests me. I've been a journalist since I was a teenager. That's counting high school, but I was a teenage journalist, so to speak. And then I went to the University of Florida, got a degree in journalism and worked for a number of years in newspaper journalism before I had an idea to start a small magazine called charisma, which became of course a platform and has opened a lot of doors for me. I've been able to interview, as you probably know, four different events, interview several heads of state, travel the world. And it's been a very interesting ride for nearly five decades, if you can believe it. And with the, in the podcast world, you know, I'm always getting advice from people. Some of my staff says, you need to do a podcast on what's trending. And I guess to some extent I do pay attention to what people are interested in, but I'm not doing this to just get likes. I'm doing it because it's part of my overall ministry. What we do here at charisma media is kind of my platform to where I can articulate what's going on or to deal with things that I think are very serious to the body of Christ.

2:56 In fact, if you've been following me and probably some of you who are watching have been following the fact that I've done a couple of podcasts recently on the international house of prayer in Kansas city that is going through a real upheaval, a scandal, so to speak. And I was purposefully very low key about it. But just recently, a report came out in general Kurt Fuller actually gave me kind of an exclusive last week where he made a statement that they put on, on social media. And then he did an interview with me a few hours later expressing his opinion. Well, I'm not going to talk about Mike Bickle or international house of prayer Kansas city today, but I just thought I'd mention it because Michael Brown, Dr. Michael Brown, who is one of the most brilliant people I know who is a longtime friend of international house of prayer Kansas city and has been there to minister several times and has some real insights and also some some opinions. And he agreed to be on my podcast next week. We're still working out the details. Now I want to mention my book Spirit led living in an upside down world. This is my latest book. You can go to Steve Strang books.com and get all of my books, including several that I wrote about Donald Trump, which I will be talking about not today so much, but I just reread God and Donald Trump the first one. And I'm

4:27 going through some of the others I wanted to remind myself now that the election season is heating up those books sold very well. I did a lot of national media that I'd never done before. I was on Fox several times on CNN on MSNBC twice as I recall, even the New York Times reported on it, believe it or not. And I'll be talking about my books because many of the issues, in fact, all the issues that I talked about in God and Donald Trump, especially from a spiritual perspective, which is how I write books, they're still valid. But this is not about politics. It's about the upside down world. And that's really what I'm going to talk about today is the upside down world and what we do with it.

5:19 And I poured myself into this book. I write about the work of the Holy Spirit, how we need the Holy Spirit to deal with the upside down world, both personally just to survive and to thrive, but also to stand up with what's happening in the culture to redo to rebuke the enemy, you know, in our culture, in the world, we see the natural world. That's how people look at it. There are people who say there is no God. That's their opinion. But you know what? The spiritual world that we don't see is more real than the physical world, the natural world, which we do see. And it's the important part of life because it's the part that's going to live forever. And that's what I deal with in spirit led living an upside down world. I've talked about it before. We run a little commercial on the podcast. Obviously, you can buy it on Amazon.com or you can also buy it on our own website, which is called my charisma.com or you can get it at Steve strength books.com. Any book you buy from our company, charisma media on my charisma shop and so forth is signed. I signed a whole bunch of books so that all the orders that come in are signed. Some people like that.

6:36 Now I'm going to talk to you about the upside down world because the last two days I was in Washington, DC for two very different but very important meetings. The first one was that the Israeli embassy. It was on Tuesday. And I was invited with about a hundred other leaders for a private screening of a very disturbing film. I call it a film. It wasn't really edited. There was no music. It was raw footage of the atrocities of Hamas that happened on October 7th. Israel was attacked. They say that more Jews were killed in that one day than any day since the Holocaust. But there's people who are actually saying that it was Israel who did the atrocities. And I think they wanted some leaders, most of them being Christian leaders, some Jewish leaders there as well, to see the raw footage.

7:39 Some of the raw footage was taken from close circuit TV. Some of it was from body cam footage from some of the terrorists. They must, I guess, when they killed some of the terrorists, they maybe were able to abscond with it. Some of it was things on social media that the terrorists posted bragging about what they'd done. In fact, they got a cell phone that had a call that was recorded. And it was one of the terrorists bragging to his parents. They had just the audio, of course, but bragging to the parents and they had the translation saying that they would be so proud of him because he had killed 10 Jews. I mean, it was sickening to think that human beings think like that. There were also videos from cell phones from some of the responders when they came in and there were dead bodies everywhere kind of showing the carnage. They showed one of the dead people head being cut off. This was something that terrorists were bragging about. They told us that they didn't show some of the worst.

8:48 They made us leave our cell phones out of the room. We could not bring briefcases in. They were very secretive about the whole thing. I guess they didn't want to fall it into the wrong hands. I think they wanted to alert people and to get their support. Now, as far as I was concerned, everybody in the room was very pro-Israel. That's really why they were invited. I never had any questions about the atrocity, but I had no idea. Even though I had heard about it, I'd read about it, I'd seen some things on TV. It was horrible. In my whole life, I have never seen anything so gruesome. To think that it was real. Now, I don't really watch blood and guts movies. I just don't. Over time, you see things here and there. I had never seen anything in a movie like that. The few things I've seen on a war never showed that kind of carnage. It's very, very concerning. Probably even worse than the carnage in a way is the way that the world is turning on Israel. It's just upside down. Here you have terrorists who had a plan to kill men, women, and children.

10:01 They showed children. They did not show the children being killed. I'm going to get it and show that. They showed a dog being shot. This was just raw footage edited together. They did say at the end that they showed 139 people who had been killed. They said that was about one-tenth of those who were killed all on October 7th. Of course, people have been killed since then. Israel has got to defend itself. These people don't want just a second. It's not a two-state solution. Some people think, well, it's just a political thing. No. They want to eliminate the Jewish people, eliminate Israel. Israel has got to defend itself against this kind of terrorism. Now, that was on Tuesday. I actually flew up for another meeting on Wednesday, January 31st. It was at the Museum of the Bible. It seated about 500 people. It was totally full. It was a national day of repentance and prayer.

11:10 It was filmed. In fact, it was live-streamed. It happened so recently that I wasn't able to get any clips of it. I did take a few photographs, but I wasn't really there to report on it. In fact, I took something to take notes. After a while, I decided, you know what? I'm not here to take notes. I'm here to pray. I'm here for spiritual reasons, not journalistic reasons. I did decide that I would share it with you because this is part of my life this week. It was a tremendous event. I think that I can describe it without being too specific.

11:52 One of the reasons that I went was that some of the leaders, Jim Garlow in particular and Tony Perkins, had read Jonathan Cohn's book, Halt, Return of the Gods, in which he talks about how these pagan gods encouraged baby sacrifice, the god Bale, drew God's people away from God. I mean, he goes into it in much more detail than my few comments. Also, there was a goddess of sexuality that had to do with transgenderism, with parades through the street, with the rainbow. It's rather remarkable that some of the things that we see in current society have roots in paganism. Well, paganism was around when Jesus was on earth. I've been to the part that they call the decapolis, the ten cities. It's kind of between Galilee and the north and Jerusalem in the middle part of Israel. I've been there and seen the ruins of the ancient Greek temple. It was in the decapolis, which the road from the north to the south went right through the decapolis. It's where Jesus was when he asked his disciples, who do you say that I am? You know that Jesus was very aware of what went on. There was horrible paganism and debauchery that happened even in Israel and Jesus' day. Well, when the early church came, first of all, it was persecuted and the Roman Empire tried to stamp it out. But the Church of Jesus Christ is still here and the

13:28 Roman Empire, which is arguably the most brutal empire in human history, is totally gone. Those pagan religions are gone too. Jonathan Cahn calls it the biggest exorcism in human history. I never really thought of it that way, but it really was an exorcism because there are no temples to Zeus. There is no worship of these pagan gods in the way that it was back then. But Jonathan Cahn says that what happened was it was kind of like a vacuum. He says that in our day, these gods, these evil spirits, because we believe they're evil spirits, we believe in spiritual warfare, they've come back. Jesus told a story about a man who was delivered of demons and it talks about the house being swept clean, but they didn't keep it swept clean and the demons came back seven times worse. And Jonathan Cahn's premise, this is over simplification, but his premise is kind of that these evil spirits, these pagan religions, so to speak, are coming back seven times worse than they did before.

14:41 And when you read Return of the Gods and you need to read it, if you haven't already, it's available everywhere. In fact, it's been out now about a year and a half and it's still continuing to sell almost as well as when it first came out because people are reading the message and it was important to these leaders, Tony Perkins and Jim Garlow, to give a book to everyone there. And so our company donated some books and generous to donor had already donated water to get the books in the hands of leaders and every person there was given a copy of Return of the Gods. Jonathan Cahn came down from New Jersey and was very, very eloquent in articulating the message of the book. And the first, and he told me later that when he left the stage and the whole, you have to understand this was a five hour prayer meeting. It was very well organized. I didn't count the people, but there had to be 70 different presenters at least who prayed for different countries, different things in America and so forth. And some of the early ones that prayed were members of Congress.

15:54 And the very first one was Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. And he prayed powerfully. He spoke a few words. He is truly a believer by his reputation and of course everything that he says. And there are a number of other members of Congress. Most of them were unknown to me because they come from different parts of the country, but they were obviously all very concerned about America and they were praying. And really the whole thing was that we were repenting on behalf of our nation and praying for God's mercy so that revival could come because really the only way we're going to get things turned around is if revival comes back to our country. I was encouraged that there are people in Washington who are still salt and light. And I think that they were encouraged with the support that they had there in that room and many, many other people praying. Many people were watching it on the live stream. There are, I'm going to say millions of people who are praying regularly as I do that God will turn things around in our country because the Bible talks about when good is called right and right is called evil. And those are the days that we are living in and we need America to turn around. And I'm so encouraged that so much

17:25 prayer is going up. I was encouraged by the response and the enthusiasm. There were a number of people representing their countries who came up and prayed. People flew in from Europe, several members of parliament, different governmental leaders. One of the most meaningful times to me other than when the congressmen and a couple of congresswomen were praying was when they had a bunch of Canadians come. And they didn't do introductions, but they just briefly told because we basically didn't know who these Canadians were. And the fines and the arrests and the restrictions that the government has done is absolutely mind boggling. In one case, one of the men had been fined $52 million. And basically what he did was he stood up to some of the COVID mandates about having church. And I mean, it sounds like I'm exaggerating. And later I'm going to probably interview him. His name is Arthur Pavlowski. He's one of the people that I knew beforehand because I've done two podcasts with him. But the thing has accelerated since I even did my podcast and he agreed to do another podcast, which we'll do in the next week or so. We'll do it by zoom. And he is now suing the Canadian government for millions of dollars for violating his rights.

18:55 You know, they have rights in Canada too. They don't have a constitution that says iron clad as ours is and their government is ever so much more socialist than ours is. But it's concerning because there's not that much difference routine Canada and the United States and what's happening in Canada could happen here if we don't pray and if we don't work and if we don't stop it. And I just encourage you, everyone who's watching, you must have some interest in this or you wouldn't have watched this long. I encourage you to pray. And before this podcast ends, we will pray together and believe for a change in our country. There's many ways we could change one of the ways is at the ballot box. The event I went to yesterday barely, you know, I'm thinking real quickly. I don't remember anything being said by about politics, but there it was an awareness that we who are praying for change have to get act and get out and vote. And and our leaders are not going to bring about the change, but the Bible says to pray for Godly leaders so we can live quiet and peaceful lives. And we've got to get policies in there to shift because right now even the State Department is pressuring other countries for foreign aids and so forth to, to with policies that are leftist policies that are ungodly policies are championed by the Biden administration.

20:33 And it's just wrong. And a lot of these countries don't want to go along with these woke policies. If we vote in new leadership, a lot of that will change. There's a lot more that I could say. And as we move toward the election, of course, I will do podcasts on the election, but it's not my purpose to beat that drum. I, I'm concerned about the spiritual well being. I'm concerned about you and your spiritual well being just like when it comes right down to it, our relationship with God and how we spend eternity is the ultimate thing, regardless of whatever happens to everybody else in the world. Now is responsible human beings and responsible Christians. We have to do our part to try to change things. We still have many, many freedoms in this country. We've lost them. But you know what? One of the reasons why we're where we are is because we haven't stood up earlier. So I'm grateful that leaders like Jim Garlow and Tony Perkins have stood up and called this meeting. It was very, very well represented. A lot of major leaders, Steve Green from Hobby Lobby was there, Michelle Bachman. I'm just quickly thinking of some of the names that you might recognize. And you can probably go online. If I thought out ahead, I would have maybe told you maybe we'll put it down in the remarks below about how you can go and watch the entire thing. I'm sure that it'll be available. If you have the time, it's really probably worth watching

22:05 the whole thing. It seemed to me that they had a very professional film crew there who I'm sure shot it correctly. I'm honored that they asked us to participate with Jonathan Cahn's book. I hope that it opens people's eyes. I hope it helps get out the word because a lot of people know that something's wrong. They don't really understand it. They don't really know what to do. And Jonathan Cahn's book called Return of the Gods really does give some answers. And I believe that Jonathan Cahn was led by the Holy Spirit to write that book. So in the last few minutes of this podcast, I went to pray. We pray sometimes on the podcast.

22:50 It's not really my format. Maybe it should be more, but let's just join together. You know, you may be watching this later. In fact, we know that most of the people watch it later rather than when it's live. But put your comments down there. Put what you're praying about. And from time to time, I stop and read all the comments and sometimes answer. So put comments down there. And if you have prayer requests, put your prayer request too. But let's join in prayer together. Father God, we come to you. I come to you in the mighty name of Jesus. Thankful that we can come before God Almighty, that you hear and answer our prayers. And Lord, there are many, many people who are concerned about the direction of our country. And Lord, it's not just our country, but in some ways it's all of Western civilization because America still kind of leads the way and influences what happened. And Lord, it's not just politics. It's not just policies. We need people turning from our wicked ways and pursuing God. Lord, I just pray that those who are standing for righteousness that you'll make them strong, even some of these people that I mentioned in some of these other countries like Canada, just help them and strengthen them, Lord, while they're standing up for what is right and good. And Lord, we just humbly ask in the name of Jesus for a revival to happen. Lord, we repent of our sins. Lord, forgive us for the sins of our nation. Forgive

24:27 us for our sins individually. I just pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Well, thank you for watching the Strang Report. Please share this with others. Write your comments. Subscribe if you don't subscribe. Hit the little bell. I'm watching our subscriptions grow day by day. We've got some exciting things planned. We will be dealing with the International House of Prayer, Kansas City in a number of ways in the next couple of weeks. I will be interviewing Arthur or Arthur, he says he's Polish, Arthur Pavlowski, and also Dr. Michael Brown. I don't very often announce ahead of time on what's coming up because sometimes we're a little bit serendipity in terms of our podcast, but I think that you'll want to do it. And if you're watching this later, you can, you know, it'll, those podcasts will already be online and you can go watch them after you hear what I have to say. So I'll close by thank you for watching and pray God's richest blessings on you and those you love.