We never had big numbers come out, you know, but Dell said, when you look at it, Dell's my husband.
When you look at it at percentages, he said, we, we actually had a pretty high success rate.
You know, he said, you don't have a lot of people coming in, but most everybody that comes in is getting saved, healed, filled with the Holy Spirit set free.
That's awesome.
You know, so it was while we were there that the Lord said that you need to redefine your idea of success.
God promises in Joel 2, 28 to pour out his Spirit on all humanity.
Welcome to global outpouring where we contend for that promise outpouring.
We equip for that outpouring so that we may engage in that very outpouring.
I'm Philip Bus and I'm Sharon Bus.
Welcome to the podcast today.
We have with us a very special guest today, Linnea Chastain, and she is a tent revivalist.
You're going to hear some amazing stories today about how God has redefined success.
Thank you for joining us today.
We're so excited that you're with us.
But before we get started with our guest Linnea, we want to encourage you, if you haven't already done so, to go to our website, globaloutpouring.net,
and make sure that you have subscribed to our email lists, any one of them or all of them.
We have lots of different opportunities for you to choose from.
And we've got other wonderful things on our website, a wonderful bookstore and our blogs and just amazing things that you can participate in and avail yourself of these resources.
And we also have our live streaming that we do on Friday nights.
And when we have events on YouTube and Facebook, we just encourage you that if you're liking what you're hearing,
you can get more of it by going to our YouTube channel and our Facebook page and our website.
So Linnea Chastain, we are so glad to welcome you.
It's good to be here, Sharon.
It's really fun.
I don't know how many years we've been neighbors and didn't know about each other.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Quite a while. We've been living in Jasper in this area since about 2011 when I came down to go to seminary.
Wow. Wow. Well, you came when you say you came down.
Yeah, you came from someplace quite far away, right?
Yeah, we came from Alaska. I grew up in southwest Alaska and spent a lot of my life there.
We moved there when I was five.
And I lived there until I was 28 years old and came to seminary.
And I met my husband up there at a fish cannery.
We were working in the same area.
He was doing refrigeration for them.
And I was working for the Department of Fish and Game.
And we had a mutual friend that convinced me that that guy is kind of cute and you ought to talk to him.
And by the end of the summer, he had me convinced that I loved him.
And so we got married.
And then he was originally from this area.
He grew up in Newton County.
OK. And so so when I went to seminary up in Springfield,
we decided that it would be better to live in this area and then I could just commute up for classes.
Oh, is that what you did? Yeah.
So we've been living here ever since.
OK, so let's roll it back and talk about your upbringing in Alaska.
What was that like?
It was interesting. I didn't realize how interesting it was until I moved.
You know, you don't you don't realize how different the culture you grew up in.
Is until you're in a different culture.
True. You know, and so I grew up in a good Christian family.
I was blessed in that my parents always went to church.
My grandpa was an old school Pentecostal minister.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so I grew up seeing the Holy Spirit and seeing the things of God from a pretty young age.
I saw my first supernatural healing when I was eight and saw a woman's leg grow out two inches.
She was sitting right next to me because my parents were out of town.
And my grandpa used to always make me sit in the front row when my parents were gone.
So he could keep an eye on me. Yeah.
Well, then that way you can keep an eye on what God was doing to. Yes.
Yeah. So I was really blessed with that.
Had a good family that taught me to read my Bible and to trust the Lord and to believe in the Holy Spirit, to use the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
You know, I got saved when I was five years old.
I was sitting in church and listening to the pastor speak.
It wasn't my grandpa at that time.
And I just all of a sudden at five years old, felt this overwhelming feeling that I need Jesus.
You know, and I started to cry and my mom asked me what was wrong and pulled me in her lap.
And I said, I don't know. I just have to have Jesus. Wow.
Glory to God. And so we prayed together and I accepted the Lord.
And then later on, when I was 14, I ended up getting baptized in the Holy Spirit.
And the Lord called me to ministry from a fairly young age.
But I did like a lot of people do. And I ran away from it, you know, because there's there's advantages and disadvantages to growing up in a ministry family.
You know, and go into my grandpa's church, you know, as you see a lot of really great things from God.
But you also see you see a lot of the mistreatment. Yes.
Of ministers, too. Yes.
And at the time that I came to the place where I knew I was called to ministry, I was not real thrilled with the church.
Yeah. Well, you know, the problem is flesh. Yeah.
The problem is immature people. Yeah, it was.
And the issue I was having is that I was too immature myself to be able to separate what people are doing versus what the church is and should be.
Yes. You know, to me, at 18, 19 years old, that was all one in the same.
The church is the people, the people are the church. And I don't like none of these folk.
And so I quit going for a while. But, you know, I never walked away from the Lord.
I never stopped seeking a relationship with him.
And so what I started doing is I was going to school in Sitka at the time and they were right on the mouth of a sound.
And there was this place down on the beach near the college across the street from the college that had these huge rocks like the size of cars.
And I would go and sit out there. And I wasn't sure how to have a relationship with the Lord, how to hear God, how to separate what people did from who God is.
But I knew that I don't want to turn away from God.
I know I need him in my life, but I don't know how to navigate this.
And I was going to a secular campus at the time. I didn't have anybody around me that could help with those questions.
I tried talking to an advisor, one of my professors one day, and she was like, well, I'm really spiritual.
And she thought that was the same thing as being Christian. But she was into all kinds of new age and Buddhism and stuff.
And it's like, yeah, that's very spiritual. That's not what I'm looking for.
It's just the wrong spirit. Yeah. Yeah.
And so I would go and I would sit out on that rock and just beg the Lord to talk to me.
You know, I just just say something, show me something so that I know it's you.
And slowly I started to learn how to hear his voice.
And then one day I was in my room and I hadn't gone to church in a couple of years unless I was home with my parents, because you do that.
That's just not allowed. You're at my house. If you stay at my house, you're going to church.
Yeah, I understand that. Yeah.
And so I hadn't gone to church in a couple of years and I was just trying to figure it all out.
And I was in my dorm room one day and plain as day, I heard the Lord speak to me.
And he said, you need to make a decision because I'm not doing this with you anymore.
Oh, wow. And I said, well, I didn't know we were doing anything.
And he said, I've let you go for too long being lukewarm.
You say you're a believer, but you live for yourself.
You have nothing to do with my kingdom and my people.
You won't make yourself a part of the community.
He said, you need to decide. You're either all the way in or all the way out.
Wow. Wow. That's right.
And so I just sat there for a while and there had been some issues that had come up in my life.
And I don't want to get into all that because that's just a long, long story.
I was bullied a lot in school and had some other things happen to me that shouldn't happen to anybody.
And then my grandmother died my freshman year of college and she'd really been my rock through my life.
I mean, that woman had more faith than anybody I've ever met in my life.
And she passed away. She had cancer.
And she really believed up until the day she died that the Lord was going to heal her.
And I'd seen him heal somebody when I was eight years old.
And so I believe that, too. And then she died.
And I couldn't understand why at 18 years old, I had to lose my grandma because I still needed her.
And I couldn't see God's purpose in that. So I spent a lot of time mad at him.
Disappointed.
Yeah. And feeling like, you know, the Bible says one thing, but then my experience is something else.
And so I had that moment in my dorm room with the Lord and I ended up kind of striking a deal with him.
I said, OK, I will give it one year.
I'll transfer schools. I'll go to a Christian school.
I'll get involved with the church.
I'll go to Bible studies. I will throw myself into this 100 percent for a year.
And either you're the God you claim to be in this book or you're not.
That's quite a challenge. He's up for that.
He is. He is. And so I transferred.
I went to Evangelical University in Springfield and just completely immersed myself in the things of God.
I mean, I think at one point I was going to church, some kind of church service or Bible study, like nine times a week.
That's immersion.
You know, and I got involved in a church and in a youth group.
And I was in this place where I didn't want to give up my relationship with God.
But at the same time, I kind of wanted him to be wrong because because if God's who he says he is, then I can't live for myself.
And do what I want to do. Yeah.
You know, and so I didn't have a car or anything. So I went to this church that was close to the school.
And the second I walked in, I said, yeah, I'm not going to go here.
I'm not going to leave right now because that would be rude.
And this is a very small church and they'll notice.
But I'm not going here. It was a bunch of old people in a tiny, musty, smelling church.
And the only people that looked to be anywhere near my age were these four people sitting up on the front row.
And so I sat in the very back service that already started.
And I felt like the Lord was telling me you need to go here.
And I was like, no, I grew up in a small town. I'm finally living in a city.
I just went here this Sunday because I promised you I would do this.
And this is the only church I could walk to.
As soon as I get to know in somebody with a car, I'm going to go to a big church where you can get lost and get lost.
Yeah, there's yes, there's safety in numbers.
Yes, at least one thinks so.
And I just felt like the Lord was saying you need to go here, you need to go here.
And so I said, OK, if you want me to go here, I'm not going to church anymore where I don't have friends because I'd experienced that in Sitka.
I started going to church there and I couldn't for the life of me make a friend at church.
Well, I said, I'm not doing that anymore.
Been struggling with rejection my whole life, not doing the rejection thing anymore.
Said, so you have to make those four people up there be my friends.
I said, so if I get out of here and get back to the dorms and nobody's invited me out to lunch, I'm not going here.
And then what happened?
So church is over and as soon as the pastor dismissed everybody, I'm making a beeline for the door.
You didn't give him a chance.
Oh, yeah. No, no, I don't want to go there.
And so I had like this notion in my mind that it's like if I can get across the street, I'm scot free.
So I start just walking as fast as I can across this parking lot to get across the street.
And this lady comes out of the church and it turned out she was Mary Beth and she's one of my great friends now.
We've been friends for years and years and she's just this really outgoing person.
And I'm almost across the street and she goes, hey, hey, you girl.
And I turned around and she said, come here.
I said, great. I went back over in a second. I got into the edge of the parking lot.
She said, hey, we're going out to lunch. You want to go with us?
And my inside response, I'm sitting there going, no, I don't want to go to lunch with you.
But but my mama raised me to be a good Christian girl.
And when somebody invites you someplace, you go.
And so I went out to lunch with them and we ended up being great friends.
It turned out that the four of them were the youth leaders at the church and they were working on building a youth group there.
They had one student. And so I started going to church there.
And and for a long time, there was another guy that started coming there.
We had six youth leaders and one student.
I love it. But the pastor believed that they were going to bring in youth there.
I mean, everybody, everybody that went there was a member of AARP besides the six of us.
And so American Association of Retired Persons.
Yes. Yeah. Yes. And so so there weren't even really any young families or anything there.
And so we just started doing outreach. And in one semester, the Lord just worked and we went from one student to 35.
And they were all students from that neighborhood.
Most of their parents didn't go to church. They were just kids that we found on the street and asked them if they wanted to go to church.
We started doing an after school program on Tuesdays with them where they could just come to the church right after school.
And we'd help them with homework and and let them listen to music and just hang out.
So they'd have someplace safe to go. A lot of their parents were experiencing various problems of their own.
Sure. You know, and so it was creating issues with the kids.
And it was a really important time for me because I learned I learned to love people like Jesus.
Oh, wow. You know, because it's ministry gets in your face real fast when you're ministering to kids that call you at two o'clock in the morning and say,
can you come pick me up? My house is locked and my mom's not here.
I don't know where she's at. Wow. And it's two a.m. on a Saturday. And you go and pick them up.
And they say, well, can we please go to McDonald's? Because I've not eaten anything today.
Oh, my. And having to minister to these kids, you know, kids that you pick them up in the van and and it's like, well, we got to go pick up Josh first
because he doesn't want people to know what goes on at his house.
And we got to spray him down with Febreze and stuff before he gets in the van so that people don't know his parents are doing drugs and smoking weed
because he doesn't want to go to church smelling like weed.
You know, we have to go send a separate car to pick up the girls in this family so people don't know they live in a motel.
Wow. You know, and you you learn to get over yourself.
Yeah. Real quick. And I realized that all these issues that I'd taken with the church in my past and the way I was treated,
the way that I saw him treat my grandpa, you know, and just convincing myself that this Bible doesn't really have much of an effect on anybody's life.
It was all just so small and petty compared to what these kids were going through.
They had so much bigger issues than I had ever had.
And here they are coming to church, loving Jesus, loving me in spite of all of my issues.
You know, and I I learned what it really meant to be a Christian and to wash people's feet.
Yeah. And to forget about myself for five minutes.
Sure. And make somebody else more important and stop thinking about, well, how can this serve me?
How can God serve me? And start looking at how can I be a servant to this kid right now?
How can I be a good influence? How can I take this life that's really messed up and give them at least one little bright spot that they can look forward to?
Yeah. And the Lord just completely changed me through that experience. Wow.
So at the end of the year, you were all in. I was. Yeah, I was.
By the time the end of that year came, I couldn't go back. He'd been transformed.
You know, I mean, it's like the old saying goes, I'd seen too much. Yeah.
Yeah, that's true. So then did you go back to Alaska?
I did after I graduated. I would go at home in the summers and at Christmas and stuff.
And I planted a youth group there at the church I was going to.
And Dale and I met and we lived in Alaska for a couple of years after we got married.
And we felt like the Lord was calling us to live somewhere else. We were living in my hometown in Dillingham.
I got laid off from my job due to budget cuts. I was the newest person in the newest position.
And so I was the first to go person, first to go.
And so so I got laid off and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do.
And we ended up back in Sitka for a few months.
I was driving a taxi there and I decided this this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.
But and I knew I was called to ministry. I told my husband that.
But I ran away from it because I didn't want all the nonsense that I thought went with it.
And I didn't want the responsibility. I didn't think I could do it.
You know, the Bible says that the shepherd is held accountable for the flock.
And I I didn't feel like I knew enough of the Bible and knew enough about the Lord and how to follow him to lead people right.
You know, it's like I don't want to go to heaven and be in trouble because you told all these people to do this.
And it was wrong. Yeah. You know, and so I just ran away from it.
And one day I came home from work and my husband had my laptop open and had the application for seminary pulled up.
And he said, you're going to apply for this right now. And you're going to go to seminary.
What a husband. Wow. What a husband. That's awesome.
And so so I applied for it. And and I tried to make excuses.
I got to looking at it and said, well, Dell, I can't apply for this. My GPA is not high enough.
And he said, you're going to apply for it anyway. You got to do this.
He said, if the Lord doesn't get you in, then fine, that's on him.
He said, but you need to at least apply.
And so I put in my application and they called me back a week later and they said, if you want to start this coming semester, I mean, it was December.
And they said, if you want to start in January, we'll start you on academic probation.
And if you can do OK, the first semester you hear and pass all your classes will keep you on and bring you in and regular admittance.
Wow. And so so we had about two weeks to pack up all our stuff and buy tickets and move down here.
Wow. We ended up staying with his mom and bought an RV to stay in
and went to seminary and spent about three years going to seminary and just really immersing myself again in the Bible and in church and and stuff.
And about a year after I'd been in seminary, Dell's hip got healed.
It used to come out of socket all the time. Oh, tell that story.
And yeah, that story. Come on. This is a great story.
He came back to Jesus when we started dating and he didn't grow up in church, didn't go there a lot.
And so he didn't get taught a lot of the doctrines of man that I got taught.
So he's silly enough. He was silly enough to just read the Bible and believe what it says.
Wow. And so he was laying in the camper one day while I was in class. He had the day off and was reading his Bible and saw where Jesus said that you will do everything that I've done and even greater things.
And he said he was laying there thinking about it. He thought, well, I just read through this whole book of whatever one it was was in.
I don't remember if it was Matthew or John or one of the Gospels.
And he said, well, what Jesus did was he went around healing people, right?
And he used to be able to feel when his hip was going to come out of socket and he knew it was going to happen.
And so he put his hand on his hip and he said, Jesus, heal my hip.
I mean, he didn't know how to do all these big fancy prayers that they teach you when you grow up in church and that you have to be all eloquent and everything.
And so he just said, Jesus, heal my hip. And it got all hot. He felt this strange kind of electricity feeling go through his body.
And and he went for a walk and his hip felt fine. And it never came out of socket again.
And it used to come out about once a month. Wow. And it never did come out of socket again.
The Lord completely healed him. And we've learned since then that for whatever reason, the Lord really enjoys healing him because he does it all the time.
I love it. And so we started looking into healing.
After that, I came home and I had no idea any of this had happened.
And he asked me what I knew about healing. I'd grown up in a Pentecostal church.
My grandpa was a pastor. So he figured I must know a lot about this.
He said, well, what do you know about Jesus healing people?
And I looked him dead in the eye and I said, I know that he does that.
Kind of end of story. Yeah, yeah. Little broad there.
And he said, you don't know anything else about it. I said, I saw a woman get healed.
I saw her leg grow out when I was eight years old.
My grandpa prayed for and she had one leg that was two inches shorter than the other one.
And I sat and watched her leg grow out. And I said, I that's everything I know.
Wow. And I was I was going to seminary at the time at a Pentecostal denomination.
He said, well, what classes can you take? And we looked it up and there weren't any.
Oh, my. Oh, my.
And so we got to looking online.
And at that time, it's been interesting to us to watch the explosion of things about healing and deliverance online now,
because even back in 2011, you couldn't find hardly anything.
I mean, even videos of Catherine Coleman and Oral Roberts and stuff, it just wasn't there.
So we started looking things up and he looked up online, just healing ministry and healing classes.
And the first result that came up was for this guy, Rocky Sprague, over in Bentonville, Arkansas,
that was teaching a free one day class on healing.
Wow. And he asked me if I wanted to go.
And I told him, I said, OK, let me tell you something about these kind of things,
because I grew up in Pentecostal circles and I know how this is going to go.
OK. Said I've been to not healing stuff, but I've been to spiritual warfare stuff
and all kinds of special teachings and seminars and things before.
And I said, this is how it goes.
There's a reason this is free.
And I said, it's going to be one of two things either.
It's because it's totally legit.
The Lord works through him.
He's a good teacher.
And he's just adopted the philosophy that freely you've received, freely give or dude is kooky as the day is long.
And we're going to get there and it'll be in a teeny tiny room.
And we will not be able to leave without making a scene.
You got it figured out.
Yeah. And I said, I'll go with you.
I said, but you have to go into it understanding that this is either going to be really good
or it's going to be funny story for the grandkids later on.
And so we went and the school was really good.
And it was just the teaching was mostly scripture and just walking through what Jesus did and
pointing out that, you know, this is about your identity in Christ and your authority in Christ.
And once you start to understand that and you've been baptized in the Holy Spirit, that you can do all kinds of things.
And it's not really about having power.
It's about just fulfilling the Great Commission and using this as a tool to bring people to Christ.
Amen. And we really liked what he had to say.
And so we decided, well, let's go here on a Sunday sometime and see what this guy preaches like.
And so we went there a couple of Sundays later and we really enjoyed that service.
And next thing we knew, we'd been there for 10 years.
And we'd sat under him and he taught us everything that we knew about healing and deliverance ministry.
And I was going to seminary and he was teaching me everything that I wasn't learning at the school.
You know, and he helped father me into the ministry.
Beautiful.
You know, and so while we were going to church there, we felt like the Lord was telling us to go into tent ministry.
And at the time, everybody thought we were nuts.
Yeah.
Except for Pastor Rocky.
You know, and people we told people it's seminary.
I think we're going to buy a gospel tent and do tent ministry.
And they said, well, that went out in the fifties.
You can't do that anymore.
People do TV and they do convention centers and stuff that you don't you don't do tent ministry anymore.
But we just we just couldn't get away from it.
And so we ended up coming into a little bit of money and we decided we were going to spend it on ministry.
So we bought us a tent and RV and a box truck and started.
I think it was in 2019 or 2020.
It was right after covid.
We did our first one.
I believe it was in 2020.
Wow.
So you could take you could do an outdoor meeting and during covid.
Yes.
You could do an indoor meeting, but you could do an outdoor meeting.
So we set up in Oklahoma and did our first tent meeting.
We were there for two months and ended up working with a couple of churches there.
And that was our first revival and saw people healed, saw people set free.
And then we took the tent down and it was a couple of years before we could find someplace else to put it up
because we found out because of all the covid and everything, you couldn't put a tent up on public property.
Oh, my goodness.
So a couple of years later, we had some people we knew approach us and said,
well, we have this big piece of property, about 10 acres that we've been taking care of for three years,
praying for the Lord to do some kind of ministry there.
And if you want to come and set up your tent, we'll do tent revival there.
So we spent last summer out in Kirbyville, Missouri, doing some ministry out there for the summer.
And again, just saw the Lord moving.
You know, we never had big numbers come out.
You know, but Dell said when you look at it, Dell's my husband, when you look at it at percentages,
he said we we actually had a pretty high success rate.
You know, he said, you don't have a lot of people coming in,
but most everybody that comes in is getting saved, healed, filled with the Holy Spirit set free.
Oh, that's awesome. You know, so it was while we were there that the Lord said
that you need to redefine your idea of success.
Yeah.
You know, because I'd gone I'd gone to seminary and one of the drawbacks is that you learn that success is numbers.
You know, if you have a big church with lots of people, you're successful.
If you have a small church with a few people, you're not.
And that's not just that seminary.
It's the mentality of the church in general.
I was reading a few months ago that there was a poll taken of what ministers believed were the marks of success.
Oh, yeah.
In their ministries.
And it wasn't even like a Christian poll, you know, something that Barna or Pew or somebody took.
And they said that the top four indicators for church success when they polled these people was the size of the congregation,
the size of the offerings, the square footage of the building and the number of programs.
Oh, mercy. Flesh, flesh, flesh and flesh.
Well, and that was my thing is, you know, and I looked at that and I thought, you know,
this all has to do with the quantity of people you have coming and not the quality of believers you're producing.
You know, you might have two thousand people coming to your church, but how many of them are reaching out to the lost?
Right. How many of them are being healed and set free from the things that are keeping them back in life?
How many of them are growing in Christ? Right.
You know, how many of them are really ready to meet the Lord and have an understanding of the gospel?
You know, I was sitting with a couple of friends of mine once and he was talking about a buddy of his
and there had been this girl that had been going to their church for a while and she'd grown up in church
and they were talking about the gospel.
And she said, all of a sudden, this girl stops him in the middle of the conversation and says, hold on a second.
You mean to tell me that you believe Jesus died on the cross like dead, died, dead, gone,
and was put in a grave for three days and that he got up and came back to life?
You really believe he came back to life?
And my friend said he looked at her just gobsmacked and he said, well, yes, that is the basic premise of the gospel.
And here you have this woman who grew up in church. Right. What kind of church was that?
Didn't understand that the basic premise of the Bible is in the gospel is that Jesus was crucified as a payment for our sins,
that he was in the grave for three days dead and that he came back to life and ascended into heaven. Right.
She had no idea that he was really dead and that he came back to life and that he's alive.
He's not Buddha. Right. He said all these good things and then died.
He's not Confucius. He's not, you know, Vishnu, that some made up demonic entity or whatever.
You know, he's he's alive and living in heaven. Right.
And when your indicators for success are about the quantity of people, you miss that.
Yeah, you do. Wow. And the people follow that same mentality and think that it's about numbers and money and programs and people being happy with what you're doing.
You know, and so then we don't learn to take myself off the throne and have an obedient heart. Right.
And the Lord had been pounding that into my head for years of just obedience, obedience, obedience,
and that faith and obedience is never an either or. It's a both and. You can't have one without the other.
You cannot have faith and a disobedient heart.
And so the Lord started talking to me at this last tent revival we had and he told me before we ever even opened it up that you have to change your idea of what success is.
Right. Because I was looking for numbers. Right. You know, I was looking to make a living at ministry.
Yeah. Mercedes Benz. Yeah, well, yeah, the ideas that we get about success.
You know, if you don't get those ideas from God, you're not going to have the right ideas because God defines success in terms of the fruit that comes when you sow the seed.
You know, you sow the seed. You might have to plow the ground before you even sow the seed.
You might have to pull weeds and pull the thorns out of there and scare away the birds so that you can have a good harvest and a harvest that comes 30 and 60 and 100 fold,
where you've got something to show that it's multiplied. Yes. And that it's changed people's lives. Yes.
Now, you talk about being set free and you talk about deliverance.
How did you get into that and what was significant in your life about that?
Well, I kind of fell into it. I asked to be in healing ministry. I did not ask to be in deliverance ministry.
I don't know anybody that asks to be in deliverance ministry. It just kind of happened.
While I was in seminary and really my whole life, I'd mentioned earlier that I'd been boldly laud as a kid and dealt with some things.
And so I became depressed and it got worse and worse over the years. And I just couldn't find any solutions.
I didn't want to take medications because I didn't want to be one of these people, you know, that every time I act a certain way or do certain things,
you know, that people don't like, they're going to put their hand on my shoulder and go, well, Linnea, did you take your pill today?
Oh, you're acting a little off, you know, or it's like, well, now I'm not allowed to be sad or angry because
if I act like I'm upset about anything, it's did you take your pill today? Oh, wow.
And so I prayed and prayed and prayed about it. And I just wasn't getting any answers.
You know, I was praying and trying to just stop letting myself think that way and be that way.
I would have these these racing thoughts all the time that were negative, just about everything that had ever gone wrong in my life and why
everything that I should have done different. This is everything that's going to go wrong.
I had this attitude that everybody's out to get me. Everybody's out to stop me from doing whatever it is I need to do.
You know, people would say things to me and if there was any way I could take it as a negative, that's how I took it.
Oh, wow. So I was just offended all the time. You know, so high strung, I could play notes only dogs here.
You know, and I was just absolutely miserable.
And it wasn't because I didn't love Jesus. I did. I was going to seminary at the time.
I committed myself to being a minister, but I was miserable.
And I got so depressed that I was starting to have suicidal thoughts.
You know, and I would drive to seminary from Jasper.
And if you've ever been in this area, you know about the ravines that go down the side of the road.
And no guardrails. And there were days I would have to talk myself out of just jerking the wheel and going off into the ravine
because I was just miserable and tormented in my mind.
And I didn't know how to make it stop.
And so I had another one of these moments with God where either you're the God in the Bible or you're not.
And I saw a quote from Cory Tenboom once that she'd been in the worst of the worst places in these internment camps that the Nazis had,
and she'd praised God there and that she had learned that if you depend on the promises of God, that they will never, ever, ever fail you.
And so we'd started going to Rocky's church and we were starting to learn about healing and deliverance and stuff.
And long story short, I got to a point where I just decided I can't do this anymore.
I cannot. You know, I was 30 years old at the time and I thought to myself, you know, save for something tragic happening.
I'm going to live another 40, 50, 60 years.
And I said, I can't go that long like this. I can't do it. I don't want to.
And so we went to church one night to a prayer meeting on Halloween.
And I was sitting there and just trying to figure out what am I going to do?
And I started talking to the Lord and I said, OK, well, here we are again.
Either you're the God of the Bible or you're not.
And you said in this Bible that you can set me free.
Yeah.
You said that if I have some kind of demon that's tormenting me, that you can set me free from that.
And I said, so tonight's the night. Amen.
Either you're going to set me free and we're going to continue on with whatever path it is that you've put me on for ministry or I'm done.
I am not going to preach your word anymore if you won't fulfill it in me.
Wow.
I said, I can't go around telling people that you set people free when you won't set me free.
I feel like I'm lying to people.
I said, so you've got to do this for me tonight.
And so I went forward and I asked the pastor to pray for me and I told him what was going on.
And all of a sudden it was like this bright white light.
You know, when you close your eyes and you look at a light, usually you see red because of the back of your eyelids.
And all of a sudden it was just this bright white.
And I went back in the floor and I just laid there for a few minutes.
And when I got up for the first time that I could remember, my mind was quiet.
Wow.
Up until that point, I had no idea that it was possible to think nothing.
Because I mean, I always just had this racing stuff in my mind.
Wow.
You know, and just constantly this voice in my mind is everything that was ever wrong.
Everything you're going to do wrong.
This is how messed up you are.
And if people really knew you, they wouldn't love you.
And this is why you're worthless.
And you're never going to amount to anything.
You're never going to be a good preacher.
You're never going to accomplish anything.
Your husband doesn't even really love you.
And if, you know, just constant.
Accuser of the brethren.
Constant all the time.
And all of a sudden it just stopped.
Glory to God.
And I couldn't believe it.
I just sat there in the floor for probably 20 minutes.
Just bewildered that all of that that was going on in my mind wasn't even me.
Wow.
And so then the pastor taught me how to rebuke things when they try to come back.
And I've been free from it ever since.
Praise God.
You know, and so then I came to this place, you know, where once something like that's
happened to you and you know for sure that God can do it.
Then I went on the other side of the pendulum where now I've got to pray for people.
I've got to pray for them to be set free because I can't sit here and watch somebody and know
that they're depressed and know that Jesus can set you free from that and not pray for
them.
It felt morally wrong to not pray for them.
So then I started having Rocky teach me how to do deliverance ministry.
And we ended up getting into that.
And so now we do that in our 10th ministry.
We don't do a lot of advertising of it, you know, just because it kind of freaks people
out and they get the wrong idea.
You say deliverance and they think of the exorcist and what people's heads are going
to spin around and say, well, Lenea is not here anymore.
You know, and that's hardly ever how it is.
You know, it's a much quieter ministry when you just let the Holy Spirit take over and
do it.
And the Lord started moving through us in that, started setting people free through
my husband and I, healing them through us.
And we've just had fun ministering.
It's been a great time going to different churches and places and ministering and getting
a front row seat to what God's doing.
Beautiful.
Awesome.
Beautiful.
That's exciting.
So you wrote a book about that, didn't you?
We did.
I wrote a book about Leviathan and behemoth.
I started it a couple of years before COVID came because the world, I mean, the world's,
everybody knows the world's been going nuts for a while.
Yeah.
And they just seem to be getting crazier.
Yeah.
And somebody asked me to look into Leviathan and behemoth because I didn't know what it
was about.
And in the 10 years that we were going to Pastor Rocky's church, I'd kind of become
the research pastor, you know, where they would give me some little nugget because I'm
just, I'm an absolute Bible geek.
I just, I love it.
I love doing the research and figuring stuff out.
And so I started researching Leviathan and behemoth and I wasn't finding a whole lot
on it.
I said, well, it's a hippopotamus and a crocodile.
And I was reading through the book of Job and I was like, that just, that just doesn't
make sense for the story.
It just doesn't make any sense that he's talking about a hippopotamus and a crocodile.
We already talked about how he has, God has control over all the animals.
Why are we bringing this up again?
And so I started looking into what the ancient Jewish understanding of it was.
And one day I used to work nights at a hotel and the Lord said, well, if you'll sit down
with your Bible, I'll walk you through this verse by verse and tell you what it means.
And so he took me all the way through Job 43 and told me exactly what it meant.
I wrote it down.
And as I went through looking at what the ancient Jews believed, it lined up exactly
with what the Lord told me.
And so I wrote this book called Spiritual Bondage, Understanding Leviathan and Behemoth.
And what I found is that there are a couple of demonic spirits and all the things you
see going on in the world today is caused by Leviathan and Behemoth.
Leviathan is a spirit that twists.
It takes things and it twists them and turns them around.
It starts dissensions.
It causes pride to come in so that people become unteachable and don't want to hear
what anybody else has to say.
And then Behemoth comes in and sets up systems to perpetuate those lies and keep them in
place because the devil isn't omnipresent like God.
He's not everywhere all at once.
He can be one place at one time.
So he has to set up systems to keep things going, to make it look like he's in more places
than he really is.
And that's what Behemoth does.
So you have all these Behemoth systems in the world to perpetuate the things that the
devil wants to happen and he uses Leviathan to start them and then Behemoth to keep it
going.
And so this book is about how Leviathan and Behemoth work in the world.
And then right now I'm working on a second book about Leviathan and Behemoth in the family
and how they work through families and twist things and cause disunity and dissensions
and splits in your family.
Keep parents from being able to have the husband and wife relationship that they're supposed
to get parents separated from their children, you know, warring between siblings and aunts
and uncles and family feuds and things and how Leviathan and Behemoth are behind all
of that.
And then the important thing in the book is that both of them go through and show you
how to pray against that and break the influence of Leviathan and Behemoth over your family
and over our nation.
Wow.
And you said that you wrote some smaller books.
Yeah, I've written a couple of what we call mini books.
They're just these little glorified pamphlets that you can stick in your back pocket.
One of them is about the armor of God and how to wear that and what those things really
mean because God doesn't do anything on accident.
There's a reason that the helmet of salvation is a helmet.
There's a reason that the belt of truth is a belt.
And the book walks you through that.
There's one about how to start hearing the voice of God that talks a little bit about,
you know, sitting on my rock in Sitka and how I learned to hear the voice of God and
that you can do that too.
There's one called, Are You Reborn or Reincarnated Through Christ?
Oh my.
A lot of us live as though we're reincarnated through Christ instead of reborn because when
you're born, you're a brand new being.
And that's what the Bible teaches.
You're reborn.
You have a new father.
You have a brand new life.
All the past stuff has gone away and behold, all things are new.
But we live like we're reincarnated where in reincarnation you die and you come back
as a new creature.
But what that creature is and becomes is dictated by who you were in your past life.
Wow.
Oh, that's so good.
And so the book walks people through finding their identity in Christ and learning to live
as though you've been reborn and unhitching from your past.
Oh, that's so good.
And just letting that fall away and being a truly new creature in Christ and not living
as though you're reincarnated and I'm still accountable for who I was in my past sins.
Wow.
That's tremendous.
So how can people get your books?
They can find them on Amazon.
If you just search for Linnea Chastain on there, they'll come up and then you can also
message me and we can send them to you.
We can take money through CashApp or working on being able to take online payments.
But the easiest way to get them is just through Amazon.
Okay, that's tremendous.
Now you're going to be at our glory tabernacle coming up here.
You've already started setting up the tent.
Yes, we are.
And you're starting on March 29th.
And you're going through, well, you're going until the Holy Spirit says stop.
But there's a sort of a soft stop planned for the 14th of April.
And in the meantime, we're going to have the eclipse coming through.
And so we have Jesus Camp scheduled for that weekend and you're there with your tent bringing
the word of the Lord and it's going to be glorious.
So has the Lord showed you anything specifically about what he's got planned for that weekend
or for those days?
He hasn't and he doesn't.
The Lord never tells me what one of these revivals is going to be like.
He sends me into him blind.
That's good.
Blind faith.
My husband and I have developed this saying that's just how we do our tent ministry is
just whatever walks in the door next.
That's what we're ministering to.
And so we just go where the Lord tells us to go and we set up.
And of course, we pray about the sermons and stuff.
And I preach whatever the Lord tells me to preach.
But we don't go into it with any expectations of any kind of theme or what it's going to
be.
We just let it be whatever the Lord wants it to be.
What we really try to do with our tent ministry is just create a space where people can experience
the presence of God.
Because at the end of the day, it's not about me.
I can't get anybody saved.
I can't heal anybody.
I can't get anybody set free.
But God can.
There's all kinds of apologetics.
But if somebody really doesn't want to believe in the Lord, there's nothing I can say that's
going to convince them to come and follow Jesus.
But God can.
And a lot of people don't follow him because they've never experienced his presence.
And we really believe that if we can create a space where they just experience God and
you just let God do what he does and speak to them however he wants, move however he
wants, that he'll reach their heart himself.
And my job is just to be a conduit for him to flow through.
And so when we set up our tent, that's what we do.
We pray in there and we just try our best to create an atmosphere where the Holy Spirit
is there and free to move as he pleases.
And we just minister to whoever walks through the door, whatever you're going through, whatever
you're dealing with, we'll minister to you.
We'll pray with you.
And we just let the Lord do what he's going to do in that.
Beautiful.
That's wonderful.
Well, would you pray for our listeners?
Absolutely.
Father, we just thank you for this time that you've given us together to speak your Word
on this podcast.
Father, we ask that you would bless this podcast, that it would reach people, that your words
would go into the hearts of the people, Father, and change them for you.
Father, that your conviction would go out and reach people and show them where they're
straying from you and bring them back to the path.
Yes, Father, we ask that your healing power would go out by the Holy Spirit and that if
there's people listening to this that need healing in their body or their mind or their
emotions, that your Holy Spirit would begin to move in them right now and heal those things.
Father, that every cell in their body, every emotion in their heart, every thought in their
mind would come into alignment with you and your will in Jesus' name.
Father, we ask that anybody out there in bondage would be set free right now in Jesus' name.
Father, the depression that's overwhelming our nation right now, that the anxiety overwhelming
our nation right now would go in Jesus' name, that it would lift, the darkness would lift
off of these people and they would be free in Jesus' name.
Father, I ask that you would reveal yourself to people like you never have before, that
you would light the fire in their hearts and stoke it into a blazing inferno that can't
be put out, Father.
Lord, we ask that you bless everybody who listens to this podcast, Father, that you
would give them the words to speak to the people around them and be a witness to the
people that they encounter during the day.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen.
Thank you so much for being with us, Linnea.
We're so grateful.
Thank you for having me.
And we look forward to these meetings that are coming up and we're just going to see
what God is going to do.
All right.
Amen.
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Until next time, this is Sharon Buss and I'm Philip Buss.
God bless you with this overwhelming loving presence.