Interview With Pastor Locke

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Welcome to If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. If not for God with Mike Zwick, man, we have an all-star cast today. We've got Greg Locke first came onto the scene.

He was really big, standing up for the truth, standing up for the unborn, standing up for marriage, standing up politically for what was true, and it seemed like the more controversy that he came out with, the more people watched him. But Greg has a movie that has just come out. I've got Sandy Hightower here, who's going to be leading a revival that Greg Locke is going to be a part of down in Hanahan, South Carolina, on May the 25th.

And we've got Justin Neup here as well. And Justin has a huge deliverance ministry that reaches all over the world with the internet, and he does it in person. But Justin and I actually went to your new movie, Greg, and there was a deliverance, there was mass deliverance that broke out in the movie theater, and it actually happened all over the country.

So, Greg, what can you tell us about this movie? Well, you know, it released on March the 13th, and it was a Fathom event, and it was just a one-night event, and it really, it broke all records that they expected. They didn't expect some movie about, you know, deliverance ministry was going to do anything.

And within 48 hours of the pre-sales, we were already at Fathom's mark. They have a golden ticket number of like 15,000 tickets sold, and they want that the week of the release. Well, we had done that a month and a half before the release, and they're like, oh wow, we got lightning in a bottle here. And so now that it did so well, they're going to do a full on-floor presentation just right after Resurrection Sunday at Easter this weekend. So April 10 and 11, they added 536 more theaters. So now we're in almost 2,600 theaters nationwide.

It's mind-blowing, really, that it's done so well. And in this one, I don't get to do the live media presentation afterwards, just because it was a live event, and most places don't have the ability to be able to add that to the movie. It will be in like the Netflix or Amazon Prime, whatever we end up, you know, giving a streaming service, it'll be in that. But in this one, at least the QR code will come up, and people will be able to download that teaching that I did if they want to do maybe some self-deliverance afterwards. But it's almost sovereignly of the Lord that it's not, because the first time showed people the potential and the power of the name of Jesus. And so now I think in all of the theaters, people are just going to stand up and take authority and start doing what Jesus called us to do. Amen. Amen.

And Justin, you had a few questions, right? Yeah, so we actually, it was amazing. We were able to pack out probably about half of the theater and another half of the theater just with people in our community. And now, like you said, that that first one has come out. The second one, now we're telling everybody, but we had a recent event where we actually invited a couple people that came to that movie together in our church community, and mass deliverance broke out in that community meeting too.

So it's literally like wildfire, you know, wildfire. And so, yeah, so we're seeing it, and I'm excited about it. Just for you personally, you know, the need for deliverance is so massive. Like as soon as we went online, so I'm sure it's at a greater magnitude with you, but as soon as we went online and started doing this publicly, like our inboxes were full with people that were, you know, I'll fly, I'll drive, I'll come and stuff like that. What do you think is the best way to see this generation and people fully equipped to kind of bring this back, you know, not just see it and experience it and then not know what to do when they get home, but what do you think is the best way to help equip people to do this in their churches and in their towns? Yeah, I think, first of all, pastors are going to have to recognize the fact that this is the ancient ministry of Jesus. You know, pastors don't want to talk about it, but the good thing about the movie, and not just because we produced it, but I mean the great thing about the movie is it was so successful that pastors all over America, whether they believe in it or not, are talking about it, and so we've at least brought kind of a global awareness to a ministry that should have never gone away, right?

This should have continued in the zenith of Derek Prince and Don Basham and Wynn Worley, you know, and all these guys. It should have continued, you know, exponentially, but it stopped, and so guys like us, now when we jump on the scene, people say the same thing to us that they said to Jesus, oh, what new doctrine is this? I'm like, oh no, Skippy, this is not a new doctrine. It's been around for a long time, because two things are true about deliverance ministry. Number one, demons still respond today the exact same way they did when Jesus cast them out, and number two, religious people still respond today the same way when you cast them out, and so there's no difference, and so there's been a stigma on deliverance ministry, and so I'm praying that that will lift, and people need to understand that deliverance is not an end-all be-all, right? We use deliverance as discipleship. I tell some people, look, you don't need deliverance. You need discipline.

You need to read your Bible, right? And so we know that not everything is a demon, and that's like the number one criticism we all get in delivering, oh, you think everything's a demon. I don't think everything's a demon, but I would say probably 90% of what you're dealing with is probably demonic, and if you'll let me deal with it as a supernatural situation, you'll find out very quickly as to whether that's what the issue is, and so if it's medication, great. If it's counseling, great, but if it's a demon, you're not going to medicate it out, and you're not going to counsel it out.

There's only one remedy, and that is you cast it out through the power of the name of Jesus, and so we, like you, my brother, are getting so many calls. That's why I had to move into what I call the grace of mass deliverance. Not everybody is graced, you know, for mass deliverance, and some people are way better one-on-one. My wife is fantastical one-on-one. I'm not.

I do. I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, but I'm a mass deliverance guy, and so because we've had so many people standing in line, sending us letters, they're still coming literally every Sunday night by the absolute hundreds for one service. They don't even attend Wednesday.

They're not even there Sunday morning. They're flying in, driving in, bringing, you know, church buses in, addictions ministries are showing up with, you know, van loads of people. Folks are starving, so the church needs to wake up and understand that we can preach all these cute motivational Jesus sermons we want to, but people are in bondage, and they want to be set free, and we got to get past this possession, oppression. Christians can't be afflicted foolishness and say, look, I don't care what you call it. God's people are in bondage, and they don't have to be, and they can be set free in a matter of moments, so I know that's a long way around the barn, but I'm a pastor, and I get to preach. That's why we have you on, buddy. We've got Sandy over here who is actually going to be leading the revival on May 25th, and Hannah, Hannah, I think she had a question or a comment for you as well. Yes, just real quickly, Pastor, well, I don't know if you can do it quickly, but for those that don't know who you are or have never heard of you or think that, you know, well, wasn't Indy a Baptist preacher? Can you just tell us a little bit about the switch up, how things happen for you?

Yeah, absolutely. I was saved in 92 in a Baptist children's home. I was in state custody. I'd been arrested, you know, six times. I was on probation five times, and so I tell people when I got saved, I became the probation preacher because I was still basically on an ankle bracelet for the next year of my life, and so I very rapidly began to preach 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, went off to seminary, you know, worked at a Chick-fil-A, so I was off on Sundays.

I never went to school so I could learn a lot. I went to school because I wanted to be a good preacher, and so I crammed four years into three in North Carolina. I lived in Shelby, and I went to Ambassador Baptist College. I got out, did master's thesis at Baptist Theological Seminary of New England, and so I was, you know, what I tell people, Baptist born and Baptist bred. When I died, I was going to be Baptist dead, right, and I don't demonize my past. I still preach in some Baptist churches, and ironically, a lot of them are reaching out to us now to understand deliverance because deliverance is a game changer. It's changing the face of denomination across the nation right now, and I'm utterly glad of that, and so I was a strict cessationist. I didn't believe in any gifts, no manifested works of the Holy Spirit, certainly no manifestations of demons. I wasn't going to have that, and it's crazy because I had a, at one time I had a bunch of t-shirts, you know, that we would sell, and the number one best-selling shirt we ever sold from Locke Media simply said, demons still flee at the name of Jesus, and it was a number one best-selling shirt, but if it ever would have happened, it would have freaked me out, right?

And so it was a cute slogan on a shirt, but it's not something that I honestly believed until it happened. So long story short, we had began to move more into the gifts of the Holy Spirit and Bible ministry very slowly. You know, we'd already changed the name of our church to Bible Church. We did that, you know, way back in 11 or 12, and so, you know, I began to see very quickly that, wow, I'm an expository preacher, verse by verse, line by line, and that ruined me in a good way, because I began to read things that were in the Bible that I was taught wasn't in the Bible, if that makes sense, and I had a hard time systematically and expository preaching the denominational lens through which I had been taught to view the Bible, and so I just began to change slowly. My wife began to ask questions that it really, it confronted me, and she wasn't being confrontational. People need to understand, I came out of religion, she came out of a ditch of addiction, so she didn't have to unlearn anything denominationally. She just took the Bible at face value.

She was for it, whereas I was approaching it through the back door like, well, you know, it says that, but Dr. Bottleshopper said this, and Wiggleshall said this, and so I had a hard time with that. So again, fast forward to a couple of years ago, everybody knows we do a lot of baptisms. You know, we weren't looking for a bigger church, we weren't looking for a bigger platform, we weren't even looking for more revival. We were in the midst of revival. I had baptized thousands of converts, we were growing by leaps and bounds, you know, through COVID and all of that, all the controversy politically, and one day a nine-year-old girl manifested a demon in our baptistry, and it shook me.

I was like, what in the world? And I knew what it was, but I was denying the reality of what I was seeing before my very eyes, and the movie talks a lot about that transition. And so again, super long story, super short, that night we wept. I mean, we cried before the Lord, because we were just wrecked that this girl could have something so tormenting, and we pastored a very large church and didn't know what to do with it. You know, I preached all these wonderful expository sermons and was afraid of a nine-year-old kid with a cat demon in her, and I didn't know what to do with her. And so that put us on this journey, and we began to fast and pray and weep, and months went by secretly. Nobody knew what we were praying about, we were reading Derek Brent's book, listening to videos, watching guys online, who knows? Anything we could immerse ourselves with in deliverance ministry, we did. And then one Wednesday night, I got up in January, I said, look, I won't preach tonight on deliverance from demons, it's the riskiest sermon I've ever preached, I don't really understand the concept of deliverance ministry as much as I'd like to, so we're going to learn together. And I get emotional now when I think about it, because I thought, man, we're going to lose half our congregation, they're going to think I'm some kind of ghostbuster and I've lost my mind.

But the whole place erupted like a volcano. I mean, they were like, wow, this is what we've been waiting on, this is the key that unlocks the next level of our revival. And at that moment, I told my wife, I said, God had prepared—I always get emotional when I say it—but God had prepared the hearts of our people in the process of while He was preparing me, and I didn't know it.

And so my biggest fear was that people are going to reject it. But the greatest blessing was everybody unanimously accepted it, and then boom, it just put us on the front row of deliverance ministry. And so now, I mean, good grief, it's turned into a movie, and a movie has now turned into a movement. And like our brother said, now deliverance ministries are popping up everywhere, people are reaching out all over America.

So it was a huge transition for me. Five years ago, I would have called me and everybody on this phone call a heretic, because I would call. But God, I mean, just absolutely wrecked my life. I went through deliverance, religion came out of me. The night I went through personal deliverance with Henry Schaeffer, I was immediately—I didn't try, I didn't enforce it, I've been taught against it.

The night I went through deliverance, I was immediately baptized in the Holy Spirit, never experienced anything like that in my life, and it's just been mashed to gas ever since. Amen. Praise God. Amen, yeah. One of the questions that Todd had is, well, and I know that not only you're going to be at this revival, but also Daniel Adams.

Mm-hmm. And what can we expect at the revival? Well, she's going to be in charge of it, and so she's going to lay out the framework of how she wanted to operate.

And then, you know, I think our band is actually coming in, our Global Vision team's coming in to do the music, and I think Henry Schaeffer will be there, my wife and I, Daniel and Heather Adams. And so all of us have really a different grace in the way that we present things. You know, that's the thing I love about deliverance ministry. It doesn't matter what methodology you use, because the main framework is the message, and the message is, come out in Jesus' name, right? The power is in the name of Jesus.

Everybody methodologically does it differently. And so it'll be a long night, but I mean, I think people can expect that there's going to be mass deliverance that breaks out. People are hungry for that, and because of that, there's going to be healing. Jesus never separated His ministry of healing and deliverance.

Really, they were like one in the same. Acts 10 38 says that He went about, by the power of the Holy Spirit, laying His hands on everyone who was oppressed of the devil and healed them. And so a lot of people are praying for a healing they're never going to get, because they don't need healing. They need deliverance from a spirit of infirmity, and when they get delivered from a spirit of infirmity, they will be healed.

And so I think people are going to see healings. I believe, obviously, we're going to preach the gospel, people are going to be saved, and so every meeting is different, but here's what I know. I've limited my travels as of late, because of the movie, and you know, we have a book coming out about deliverance as well, and so I've had to be home a lot. Tonight we're leaving out, we'll be at Jenny Winter's core group.

My wife's going to be speaking down there for a couple of days, but here's what's happening. Now that we're showing up at places, especially when you get a couple of the guys that were in the movie together, or if you get them, the crowds are so unbelievable. The people are just, they will literally stand in line at six o'clock in the morning just to get in these buildings. I mean, they're being turned away in mass. Sometimes I'm showing up places, and as many people are getting turned away as are getting to get in, and it's not a Greg Locke thing, it's not an R movie, it's not a global vision deal, it's just, it's a momentum that God has placed in the hearts of people that are so hungry. They're tired of hearing their pastor say, you can have peace and love and joy, rivers of living water flowing from your belly, and they go home and they're addicted to pornography, and their marriage is falling apart, and they're still, you know, having to smoke weed so they can sleep at night, and they're all painkillers, and their kids are having nightmares, and they're like, why can't I have that peace? Well, they can't, and now that we've kind of broke the mold denominationally, people know they can have peace, and so they're coming to these deliverance ministries in mass looking for help. So I don't know all of what to expect May the 25th, but I promise you, you can expect that God's going to show up and show out, and the power of the name of Jesus is going to work in that meeting, just like it works every single Sunday night under this tent for our mass deliverance services.

Amen. Pastor, one thing I told the guy that's helping us set up all the audio and the screens and stuff, and I told E from there with the band, which we, by the way, are super excited. This is going to be their first premier appearance outside of Global Vision Bible Church. They usher in the Holy Spirit like nobody else I've ever felt.

I mean, I feel it. I know it. It's their their connection with Holy Spirit, but we are going to have a baptismal, and so we're going to be able to do the whole nine yards.

Oh, that's going to be awesome. Praise the Lord. And Greg, one of the things that I loved was at the beginning of your deliverance that you did at the end of the movie, where you were speaking on the silver screen, the first thing that you did was to share the gospel. Amen. Amen.

Yeah, that's important. Your deliverance is the children's bread, and who cares if you get some deliverance, but you don't get born again. You're still going to hell. You gotta get saved. Amen. That's so awesome, and I appreciate your words on speaking into mass deliverance and being so willing, you know, having only really kind of stepped into this in the last, what, year, 18 months or something like that.

Absolutely. Being able to step into that role of kind of pioneering the idea of mass deliverance. I remember when we first got started, you know, this was back in 2016 going to 2019, my wife and I, we were staying up until one, two o'clock in the morning doing deliverances and stuff like that.

We have four kids, so we were running on E, and I remember listening to a Derek Prince teaching, and he said, and it was so comforting because he said my wife and I were doing the same thing, and we were running, you know, burning the candle at both ends, and he said, and then I stumbled across this idea of mass deliverance, and I'm like, okay, you know, there's something to this. So we began to do that in small scales, you know, 10, 15 people, and saw it works. It works like this. It works over Zoom.

It works over the phone. It's the name of Jesus. It has no bounds. So I really appreciate you, you know, pioneering and giving us an example to look at to watch it happen, because I think when people can actually see it in action, you know, and watch kind of how you do it, not to use it as a strict template or anything like that, but just to build the faith of, hey, this works. It's Jesus doing the job, at least until we can meet with them in a deeper session or something like that. I think it's just so encouraging and builds so much faith, you know, for us moving forward in the aspect of training and educating people on this.

Absolutely, and really all it is is I tell people, here's the prescription. Submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you, and so what we're doing is we're just teaching people whatever areas of your life are not surrendered to the lordship of Christ, those are the areas that demons have access and open doors to, and so we have to renounce these things, break, you know, occultic bondages in our life, forgive those people that have molested, harmed, abused us, abandoned us, and once we do that, as you know, it takes their legal rights, it pulls their signature off the covenant papers, and they just automatically come out. So people are like, oh, it's so fantastical. No, it's really biblical. Just submit to God, resist the devil, and he flees. That's what happens, right? And so there's no magic hocus pocus to it.

It's what the Bible clearly teaches, and we were having literal 15-hour church services because the demand was so great, and so I said, look, we have got to figure this out, and so that's why we moved into the grace of mass deliverance, because like you said, and even Derek Prince said this, get involved in the deliverance ministry, and you'll never have to put out another sign. They'll find you out. They'll knock on your door at four in the morning. They'll find you.

They'll find you. Mark chapter one and the word about him spread, and you know, you were saying that, you know, breaking, renouncing, kind of breaking generational curses, things like that, that's where we kind of found ourselves getting in a little controversy where we met a lot of opposition, but one of the very first deliverances we did, it was amazing, amazing, led by the Lord, because we hadn't read any books on it or anything, but we were praying for this gentleman, and the demon was talkative and everything like this, but this thing wouldn't come out, and so we fasted and we prayed, and as my wife is sitting there, she's praying for this guy, and she keeps hearing the word dragon in her mind, and she's like, he's going to think I'm insane if I call this dragon, and I'm over there on the couch hearing in my mind the occult. Come to find out, we just obey the Lord, and we're like, hey, this is what we're hearing, but when she calls out this spirit as a dragon, he begins to, literally, his face puffed up, and he began to manifest and twist and turn, and we're like, what did we just hit? Later, we found out that this guy's grandfather was the grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan, and he cursed his whole family, so we prayed for him again.

This was in the very beginning, took hours, but he ends up getting completely radically set free. Deliverance runs through his whole family, you know, it's just been amazing what has happened, but, you know, a lot of people say that this stuff can't happen. You know, what do you say to people that say generational curses, you know, stuff that are freemasonry, things that have happened in our past and in our families, those things can't affect us, it's all under the blood of Jesus.

You know, how do you respond to those arguments? Yeah, they love that, but I mean, your flesh didn't go anywhere when you got saved, right? So why would we think that generational curses have gone anywhere? It's almost like they say, well, you know, Jesus became a curse on the cross, so therefore he took away all the curses. Well, it's like salvation. He also died for the sins of the world, but that doesn't mean that you're automatically saved. You still have to appropriate the work of Christ, so once we're saved, we still have to appropriate the fact that he broke those curses for us on the cross, and because of that, we have to be willing to break ranks, as it were, with those generational curses. And so when there's witchcraft, occult, new age, Satanism, idolatry of any kind, God is very plain in the first two commandments. If you have these things in your past, if they're in the history of your family, in your lineage, I will visit the iniquity of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.

That's 120 to 160 years. So people have been born into families that are generationally cursed. Just this past Sunday night, you know, we had a young man, he was probably six, maybe seven tops, and just like eczema, abrasions all over his body, and I'm like, when did this start? And they began to tell me, and I told him, I said, look, I can almost unequivocally tell you that somebody in your family was in the Masonic Lodge. Absolutely right. We pray, break off that curse, and I told him, I said, look, I guarantee that they live out of state.

I said, call me in a week or two, a month, whatever. I promise you, this skin condition is going to go away because it's nothing more than a generational curse. And so we've been taught, well, you can't be generationally cursed. And what really gets my dander up is that pastors will preach on generational blessings, but they won't preach on generational cursings, and you can't have one without the other.

That's right. Yeah, so man, I just appreciate that. One thing, you know, I wanted to say was going back to, you know, you talking about getting up with Henry Schaeffer, and then, you know, I've kind of followed your journey of getting connected with the Demon Slayers and Isaiah, and all those guys love them, but it has been amazing to see the unity that has been built, like you said, around the idea of, hey, we just want to see, number one, the name of Jesus glorified, and two, the people that have been crying out captive to be set free. And the beautiful part about it is there's so much criticism against it, but I know all of us, you know, don't have the same theology exactly, like everything's not the same, but we can set some of those peripheral things to the side and say, hey, we're going to gather around this one purpose and one cause. And I've seen such, you know, such a movement of unity around deliverance really hit, and it's causing just an amazing ripple effect.

What can you say about that experience, about connecting with those guys? Yeah, deliverance is absolutely bringing about a unity in the body of Christ, and not a hokey unity, you know, you can believe nonsense, you know, there's multiple ways to heaven, but it's bringing a real theological connection to people, even, you know, like I said, methodologically, if we do things differently, but here's what people don't understand. Since the day of Pentecost, you know, the last 2,000 years of church history, we have seen every kind of revival imaginable, right? There's been laughing revivals, healing revivals, there's been church growth revivals, generosity revival, every revival on the planet except one, we've never seen a deliverance revival, ever. And I believe the last days when God pours out his Spirit upon all flesh, you know, Joel 2 13 is very plain, in those days whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered. And so I think this last day's revival is going to involve deliverance, because what people fail to recognize, and I can talk about this for hours, because I did a whole master's thesis when I was a Baptist on revival history, right? I know about every revival, I named my kids Evan Roberts, and you know, my dogs named Whitfield, you know, I know about all of the revivals of the past, but here's what I also know, every revival of the past that was at the zenith died off for one reason. When deliverance started, they stopped it.

If you look at Azusa Street, Azusa was shut down because deliverance began to break out, and it was too fantastical. And the very thing that put the Pentecostal church on the map is also the very thing that in a lot of ways stopped the growth of the Pentecostal movement, because deliverance didn't want to be talked about. You look at the Jesus revolution, right?

You look at Lonnie Frisbee, everybody's like, oh, he died, you know, he had AIDS, and he was involved in a homosexual lifestyle. Well, I'm here to tell you, he had a grace for deliverance upon him, and Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard Movement let him know very quickly, if people start screaming and hollering and falling down, you lose your job, Jack. And so the Jesus revolution would have been a mightier revolution if they would have moved into deliverance. But it stopped. If you look historically, it stopped, because deliverance and healing were frowned upon. And so because Lonnie Frisbee wasn't able to operate in that grace, he couldn't even fight his own demon publicly, and they ended up destroying him and two entire movements.

Not that it destroyed the movement, it destroyed the revival, because I believe they could have continued. You look at Asbury, everybody loved Asbury until the first demon manifested. And then all of a sudden, the armchair theologians are like, oh my goodness, a demon manifested at Asbury, what are we going to do with this? We're going to rejoice, because if you shut that down, it'll be the very thing that stops Asbury from continuing. And I find it interesting, one of the things I love about that is the one demon that manifests at Asbury and gets cast out, everybody's like, oh my goodness, this woman cast out a demon at Asbury.

And then I watch the video and I'm like, yep, and she's a member of Global Vision Bible Church, isn't that ironic? Well, Greg, our time here has just about come to an end, but deliverance has not come to an end. As the old song says, we've only just begun. And so where you've said in the past, people have tried to stop deliverance. Well, let me say this, people are still trying to stop deliverance in this country. They're still coming against it. They're speaking out against it.

But what I see is that it's only making it grow even more. And so, Greg, I'm excited about getting to meet you face to face. Justin Neupa is going to be down there, Sandy Hightower, Todd and his wife, Anna Jordan. And we are going to have an exciting time.

And I tell you what, man, there is going to be a huge revival. And Greg, you're a big part of it. So thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Pastor.

If not for God. Thank you. All right, for my YouTube channel. If not for God with Mike Zwick, just like, subscribe and hit that notification bell. So you'll be alerted when we have our next video. This is the Truth Network.