TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles - Lockdown Lust: How Covid changed sexual behavior

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Today on TRUNEWS, host Edward Szall welcomes SoulRefiner.com founder Jeremy Wiles, who joins the godcast to talk to the audience about the biggest pandemic of our time, and it’s not COVID, but pornography. Using the latest research on epigenetics and brain plasticity, Jeremy presents the battle plan to be free of addiction through The Conquer Series, now being used by over 40,000 churches around the world. Edward Szall,Doc Burkhart. Airdate (05/07/21)

The following program is made possible by the faithful prayers and financial support of listeners just like you. To find out how you can help, visit www.truenews.com. This is True News for Friday, May 7th, 2021. I'm Edward Zoll. The world is obsessed with a pandemic which threatens to end our lives and radically change society. President Biden thinks vaccinating the world is the solution, but he's addressing the wrong pandemic. A real pandemic has plagued America for at least 70 years. The pandemic of pornography addiction. According to the Kinsey Institute, founded in 1947 by the infamous pedophile researcher Alfred Kinsey,

porn usage rose dramatically during the pandemic, with 20% of Americans publicly admitting they watched at least 17 minutes of porn a day while they were locked up in their homes. Sites like Pornhub became the drudge report for sexual sin and digital red light districts like OnlyFans turned our kids into prostitutes. Even our hospitals fell short treating the walking wounded from the spiritual pandemic. The prestigious Mayo Clinic founded through a partnership between Protestant doctors and Franciscan nuns made the outrageous recommendation that the safest sex to avoid, COVID, is masturbation. And forget your spouse, engaging in sexual activity through online video is how you'll beat the curve. Jeffrey Toobin took that advice to heart, but so did millions of Americans, and frankly, billions around the globe, as we traded God's standard for love for the devil's lies for lust.

Joining me to discuss the true pandemic and the only real cure, our Soul Refiner co-founder, Jeremy Wiles and Doc Burkhart. Hey, Edward, and welcome to the Godcast, Jeremy. Glad to have you here with us today. If we can't have Rick Wiles, we've got Jeremy Wiles. Sure. Thanks for having me. Well, Jeremy, we just completed the Conquer series here in-house. The staff went through a series

specifically designed to help men and members of the church deal with sexual addiction. This is something you produced. It's a success, I tell you. It's impacted my life. Thank you. And why we brought you on today, Jeremy, is that obviously this country has been plagued. It's been plagued by a pandemic. We talk about pandemics all day long, but something that's really impacted us is something we've not even begun to address. There's no vaccine for this. It's so much worse than COVID. Well, Jeremy, tell us a little bit about Soul Refiner, because this is where we were able

to first begin our course, and this is your platform. Yeah, it's essentially an online platform that focuses on the messy issues of life. So, you know, it's not anything new to say that we're surrounded by people who are broken and addicted. And Jesus said that he came to heal the brokenhearted and set the captives free. And so it starts with healing. We have to go through a healing process and that's how we find our freedom. And so the platform Soul Refiner is to help men and women through that process of healing and to get them to the other side. Now, of course, the main focus that we've been concentrating on here at New Zion Assembly has been the Conquer series.

And this is one of the workbooks that we were using here at the church. Conquer series is probably your flagship program. Would you say that? So tell us a little bit about the Conquer series, how it came about, what inspired you to get started with it, and just share with our audience a little bit. So it's a cinematic study. It's 10 weeks long, 10 episodes. And it follows the story of Dr. Ted Roberts, who is a Marine fighter pilot in Vietnam. And Dr. Ted, back in the 60s and 70s, was addicted to pornography. And he came through that. Now he's led thousands of men to freedom.

And so we took the principles that Dr. Ted teaches, and we retold his battle stories in Vietnam through these dramatic reenactments. And we combined it into a, you know, kind of a mini documentary of his life, teaching and interviews, expert information. And it comes with a study guide. And so we've got, I guess it's over 40,000 churches now. I want you to say that number again. How many churches are involved? It's over 40,000 churches now. I want you to say that number again. How many churches are involved? It's over 40,000. 40,000 churches are involved in some aspect of the Conquer series. Now, this is one of the workbooks here that we were using. You also do a lot of work online.

So you have the study guides online and everything. And the platform itself, a lot of the work that the men can do is online as well. There are assessments that they can go through. That was a powerful tool to help people that we were working with and everything. And so it is a very thorough, very well-produced series. But you just don't have the Congress series you have other you know other content as well we'll talk more about that here as we go along but one of the reasons why we wanted to have you here Jeremy is because in the midst of the COVID nonsense that's been going on here for the past years there's been a change that's been taking place

in the sexual morality of people not just here in the United years. There's been a change that's been taking place in the sexual morality of people, not just here in the United States, but around the world. We put up number five for control here. This is an article from The Conversation, and it talks about how the lockdown has changed the sex lives of young adults. And what has been one of the tragic things that we read in this particular article here, Jeremy, is how there is a clinical push to encourage people to engage in self-love, you know, masturbation, however you want to define it. And of course, that goes hand in hand with pornography, no pun intended there. But it's just the idea. Just the idea. And look, the thing with this is we have to kind of laugh at some of this stuff because one,

this is a terrible thing. It's come so far, man. If I were to even grasp what it has done to our generation, we're not even having families anymore. But you think about it, most people spent much of last year on their computer in a romantic relationship with women they don't even know. And its impact, as that Conversation article is noted, you've obviously seen throughout speaking to leaders of Conqueror's right, that men aren't being men anymore. And part of it, a big part of it, is what we're deciding to do in our free time regarding pornography. It's incomprehensible what's happened just over the past 10 years. And the problem was back 20 years ago, right?

Yes. But now with access to high speed internet anywhere, you can access pornography in milliseconds. And, you know, you go back 20 years ago, you had to wait for dial-up connections. Right. And before that, you had to go to the hidden magazines at 7-Eleven and all of that. And so, but now it's instantaneous. And and in fact it's not just instantaneous it's almost forced on you uh you can't go on uh some social media platforms without you know encountering uh images we're not talking soft porn we're talking hardcore porn images that are out there uh that and if they're available to just the general user, they're available to kids too. One of the great things that we learned about the Conquer series was that there is,

there's a lot of programming that takes place in our minds over our lifetime that lead to addictions of all kinds, especially pornography. In developing the Conquer series, what did you discover about that? You know, in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 18, it says, Flee from sexual sin. All other sins a person commits outside the body is, let me pull up the scripture, he who sins sexually sins against his own body. And so I wonder like, you know, what does that mean? And it's, it's the transformation of your mind. When you sin sexually, you're creating neural pathways in your brain that cause addiction.

And so over time, those neural pathways turn into super highways. And you're using pornography essentially to medicate yourself through life. And so it's a lot like other addictions, except that you have no signs on the outer surface that give it away that you're addicted to this stuff. So we've got millions, hundreds of millions of men walking around in plain clothes who are addicted. And you'd never know it. There's no needles, needle wounds, anything. They don't smell like alcohol. Smell like alcohol.

So there's no, like in any other kind of addiction, whether it's drugs, alcohol, or anything else, like you mentioned, there are some telltale signs usually. It's kind of hard to hide those. When it comes to sexual addiction, that can be hidden pretty well. And, I mean, these are stories that are happening in the news constantly, and we're seeing new things. But we're on the cusp of a whole new level of technology You know, we're talking about Not just virtual porn where not only will it be instantaneous, but it'll be instantaneous in a virtual environment

We're talking sex robots. We're talking about we've read articles here in the past few months about the possibility people marrying machines last few months about the possibility of people marrying machines to fulfill their sexual needs. And so we're on, we thought there was a sexual revolution before. It's going to be just a sexual apocalypse as we move forward in the next few years. And is the church ready for it, Jeremy? No, they're not even close. I think 7% of churches have a program to deal with this. And pastors, unfortunately, and this is not, you know, any, I'm not tearing down pastors because they're busy. They're running an organization, but most of them don't know how to deal with it. And they know how to preach on integrity and character.

And those are really important things. But when you've got a guy in your church who's in bondage to pornography, you're not going to pray that away. You're not going to say, well, you need to let me pray for you and your addiction is going to leave. Paul talks about this in Romans and he says, you have to renew your mind. And that's a long-term process. And so we tell men in the Conquer series, it's the hardest thing you're ever going to do. It's two to five years to renew your brain. Um, it's going to take a miracle every single day, but there's hope at the end of that. And you can find sobriety from pornography in about 90 days, you know, stop the acting out, stop doing that, stop medicating the pain and stress in life with porn. But it really takes about two to five years to transform your thinking to a place that you've got a brain that looks different physically. Like you scan a brain in these big scanning machines and you can see the difference between a porn brain and a healthy brain.

You bring that up. And that was something today that we had the opportunity to look at some new information that you've been developing as well. One of the things that we learned in the Con but the actual physical changes that are inherited down through generations that shape us and shape who we are. The Bible kind of talks about this a little bit about blessings and curses going down to the third and fourth generation. And we tend in the church sometimes to spiritualize that and to, you know, yeah, that's a spiritual blessing or a spiritual curse. And there is truth in that, but it's not the whole truth. And you discovered some information in the development, not just in the Conquer series, but some of the other series that you're working on right now that you found absolutely shocking. Tell us a little bit about what you

discovered. Yeah. So it's called epigenetic modification. And this is the information that sets above the genome or the DNA and tells the DNA how to express itself. And so you have certain genes that are switched on and certain genes that are switched off. And depending on how you were raised, you may have certain DNA that switched on from a past generation. And what's really fascinating about this is it gets down to the third and fourth generation. Just like the Bible says. Just like the scripture says. And that epigenetic switch starts to go away. It does go away by the fourth generation. But four generations later. Think about that.

Yeah. So are you telling me that the choices and the environment that my great grandfather found himself in, the stress that he was under, the actions that took place in his life, the choices that he made could have actually physically impacted me genetically now? Absolutely. Unless you choose to be refined through God's word, unless you're deliberate in your thinking and you say, hey, I want to be the man or the woman who breaks these curses in my life. Now it's one thing to just proclaim it. That's easy to do. We all want to do that. And that doesn't break it. That's just the start of it. That's a declaration. That's the realization that there is freedom. Yeah, absolutely. But now after that, you have to start walking in a new direction.

And that doesn't just mean turning from your sin. That means, Hey, I need some other people to come alongside me. Um, you know, I've got a natural proclivity to alcohol or pornography, whatever this is, I need some help. Right. And so we go to God to get forgiveness, but we go to each other to get healing. Yes. And the scripture tells us that it says, you know, confess your sins one to another, that you might be healed. To rely on each other. To rely on each other. Right. Love one another. That's what that's about. Well, and when we were talking in earlier today, I forget who said it, but someone said that the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, but it's connection.

That's right. What do we mean by that? Well, really at the end of it is men are going, I say men, but 35% of women are addicted to pornography as well. Yeah. And so people are going to pornography because they want intimacy. It's really an intimacy and detachment disorder. And that's why you run to an isolated place and you isolate when you want to watch porn There's a shame factor, but it's also you're pushing the world away. You're pushing relationships away

you're objectifying other people right and You're trying to find intimacy in this situation in this fictitious synthetic relationship that you've created. But there's no intimacy there. And so Satan here is waving this baited hook saying, hey, have a bite of this. This is going to be great. You're going to love this. And really at the root of it is emptiness, hopelessness, despair, shame. And you leave thinking that you're going to feel great. And what happens is the shame shows up again.

And you've got to go drink more of this poison. It's a poisonous apple. It's a rotten apple that Satan's offering. And so guys just keep going back to it and going back to it and thinking, okay, if I just try harder tomorrow, if I promise myself, if I make a commit before God, Hey, I'm done with this. Forget it. I'm never going to go back to porn again. You're back to porn. You have a couple of days you're back to it because trying harder doesn't work. Trying harder doesn't work. You know, one of the verses of scripture that for many years I had trouble dealing with was James 1.14. It says, every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed.

And for years that spoke to me that, well, then I'm pre-wired for sin. I'm pre-wired for an addiction, whether it be alcohol or sex or whatever it might be, how do I overcome that? How do I get over that if I'm already pre-wired for that? Maybe help us out a little bit. When you were speaking to us earlier, you showed us a clip from Dr. James Fallon. He has a PhD in neuroscience. And he had an event take place within his office that kind of woke him up to some of this pre-wiring in his own life. You want to set this up for us? Yeah. So James Fallon, we went out to California to meet with this scientist. And he was known for scanning the brains of serial killers. So they would do PET scans and and Charles Manson kind of folks.

Yeah, those type of guys, like the worst of the worst, right? So they'd bring him in, bring these criminals into his clinic, and they'd scan their brains. And he was at the same time doing a study on, I think it was dementia. And Alzheimer's, yes. And Alzheimer's, yeah. And so he had asked some people, his friends and family and others, if he could scan their brains. Because he needed a control group. Exactly. He wanted to look at healthy brains and unhealthy brains. And so one day while he's going through the stack of normal brains in his pile of Alzheimer patients, he's going through and he sees this one scan.

He's like, what in the world is this? I must have got these, you know, one from the serial killer pile got mixed in with the good brains, the normal brains. So he sent the pile back and I'll let you watch it. Right. But it's kind of a surprise on whose it was. Right. So let's watch this. This is Dr. James Fallon, PhD in neuroscience and professor.

Watch this. I'm a brain researcher. I'm a neuroscientist who works on very fundamental things about how the brain connects and all the chemicals, but also about why people are the way they are. Now part of that work took a little turn a number of years ago. Some of my students who then became psychiatrists, they were studying serial killers, really bad guys, very violent murders, who would be brought to the university to have PET scans done, to see their metabolism,

what parts of the brains were active or not, because we were looking if there was something wrong with the brains. Some were impulsive, some were psychopathic killers. I was brought a whole group of scans to look at. I was given these and I didn't know what they were. They were brain scans of people who were normal, schizophrenic, murders, different kinds of murders.

And I went and looked through those, about 70 of them. And after about two months, I noticed a pattern. I said, good grief, man, there's something here. At that time, it just so happens we were doing what we're really interested in, studying schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, looking for new genes that affect people's tendency to get Alzheimer's.

We were almost done with the experiment, but we needed more normals. And the normals, I said, why don't I ask my family? Because my wife's family, many of them died of Alzheimer's. They all agreed, and so we all went in, including myself. We had this done. The scans came back, and I was looking through, leafing through all these scans of my family.

And I went through, and like, normal, normal, normal. You know, I could tell very fast, because I've looked at thousands of these. So I know basic normal. And I got to the bottom, the scan and it was very abnormal and I said okay guys you know I had the pile of the murders on this side somebody switched these scans there's something wrong here in this normal group there's obviously a psychopath and this person shouldn't be walking around we should

you know it's like alert the authorities well they went back and check the machine and everything and they came back and it goes no it's somebody in your family i said you gotta be kidding at this point i had to peel off the label that covered the name and there it was. I was it. I had my name on it. And I had the pattern in my brain. I was a psychopath. A really bad, full-blown psychopath. Now that didn't mean just because you have the brain pattern of one doesn't mean you're a psychopath or a murderer.

But people who do have those things have these patterns. So it's a little subtle difference in the logic of that. Nonetheless, I had those genes. So I said, well, you know, if you got them, but why didn't I turn out still bad? I found these articles that just came out that showed that if you have certain genetic alleles, that if you're abused early in life or abandoned, especially from birth for the first few years, that that interaction of your genes and that terrible abusive environment or abandonment is what epigenetically changes your brain and

creates what later will become a psychopath and probably other personality disorders. Well it turns out if you're treated well and you have these at-risk genes, it reverses it. So it has the opposite effect, it kind of negates it. If you're treated really well or normally, then it turns off many of these genes that affect aggression, violence, low empathy, traits associated with psychopathy and narcissism. Once I saw this, I said, that's it. And I started to look back at my childhood. I got to appreciate how well I was treated.

And I was treated well by everybody. I was like a golden child. I asked my mother, I said, why was I treated so well? Said, your brother, your older brother was born, and then there were five years of miscarriages. Then you were born, and then there were five years of miscarriages. Then you were born and then there were four years of more miscarriages. I was in the middle of ten years of one kid.

They wanted a big family so when I showed up when I wasn't born dead I was a golden child. They treated me so well. Everybody's got the genes but do you have all these alleles for these genes, like warrior genes? And if you have them and you're abused, later on it's bad news. But these new papers showed that if you treat it okay or good, it reverses some of the negative effects. So it makes sense that some child born into a violent world ends up later on in their adolescence, an adult being a very violent person.

It's the epigenetic way for survival. You know, everybody is born with a certain genetics, but not all the genes are expressed. Some are turned on and off. It seems like a way of setting up a child for what you should expect in this lifetime. Is it a nice world? Is it a world with a way of setting up a child for what you should expect in this lifetime. Is it a nice world? Is it a world with a lot of food? Or is it a world that's starving? Is it a mean world? And so that's epigenetics. It's, you know, how

the book is read, how the piano is played, even though the same notes are there. So anyway, it turns out that some of this can be passed on. So it's not just from your mother or when you're born. There's this individual genetics and then there's that pass from your mother, her stressors onto you, but then it goes back two or three generations. So there we see what your father, your grandfather was doing when he was five, six, seven years old. What's called the growth period. And during that growth period, if he was overeating a lot, what happens is it sets up epigenetic changes, marks, that are then passed down two generations.

So then when you're born, you end up naturally fat. Your metabolic body expects to be born into a world that has no food. So the idea is to save all the food you eat, to store it up in fat, just like an animal in the Arctic. It could be affected by what your great-grandfather or great-grandmother did, not only their diet, and whether you get diabetes or not, or you tend to be fat or tend to be very thin. It works both ways.

Or whether you're susceptible to smoking. It can happen because your mother, while you were in utero as a fetus, was under great stress or used drugs or smoked or alcohol especially, or was under a lot of abuse herself. You're born into the world. In the first year or two,

it's like your frontal lobe is open, your social brain, that frontal lobe and temporal lobe. It's opened up to see what is the world I've been born into. And if it's a world filled with abuse and violence and abandonment, that will be taken into the child's emotional brain, limbic system, and that will start through these stressors. These are stressors, abuse, etc. will start changing the expression of the genes you have. And start adding these little methyl groups onto genes to turn them off.

Sometimes on, sometimes off. That then rearranges the expression of your genes to make you now adaptable to this environment. So you're born into a violent world. You're being beat up, you're being abused. I'm born into an abusive world. What's the best defense for me to live? To be violent yourself.

And now take another child, the same child, the same genes. They're born into a loving world. And the social brain opens up from birth onwards, and you've got all this nurturing and love and warm fuzzies and being treated well and being disciplined. It's not that there's no discipline, but this then sets the brain, especially the social brain, epigenetically for a beautiful world. Well, that was Dr. Fallon describing epigenetics. And I think in regard to pornography addiction, many don't realize that that secret sin is going to impact more than just their direct family. As you were saying before the clip, really, it's not just even your grandkids.

It could go all the way down to 100 years later later, the Walses, the Zals, the Burkharts, a hundred years later, they may be impacted by an addiction, a problem, a impurity in us that we haven't addressed. And they may still struggle that very addiction. Absolutely. And Jesus is the curse breaker. That's right. I was just going to say to you, there may be somebody watching right now, listening right now and saying, well, then I'm under a curse. You know, I can't help what I do. I'm born into sin. I'm born with a sinful nature. I'm bred to it. My great grandfather made me this way. Right. So, you know, how would you respond to someone along that line? You're responsible. You're responsible. Yes. You may be epigenetically inclined to be addicted because your mom was a drug addict. Your dad was an alcoholic. Your grandfather was, you know, a porn addict. I don't know. Pick your addiction,

right? Right. But the moment that you give your life over to Christ, the next step is to begin the sanctification process. Right. And so, you know, grace covers our sins, but it doesn't get rid of our problems. The next step here is we've got to go into this refining fire, which is what Soul Refiner is about, and start this really painful process of looking on the inside and saying, hey, God, I want to fix this. I want to deal with these issues in my life. I don't like these things, and I know it grieves the Holy Spirit.

And so refine me, teach me, bring other people around me. And that should be central to our Christian walk is that we're growing in these areas. We're breaking those chains of bondage. Uh, but so many men and so many women try to pray this stuff away and they feel hopeless. They feel hopeless in it. Yeah, they absolutely do. So what we're doing is we're just bringing old biblical teachings of renewing the mind, and we're applying those to 21st century scientific evidence and saying, now, this is how you can do it with a biblical foundation, right? Well, something I found was interesting in our staff going through the Conquer series was it was less about the fear that our actions

day to day, the addictions, the pornography addiction in this case, that that was going to impact the next generation. That wasn't actually the biggest impact for them or why they wanted to even take the information in. It was actually that this gave them hope, that there was actually a way to overcome these addictions. I mean, that speaks really to the issue of our generation. Every single person my age has been exposed to pornography. If you have the conversation now, it's not a taboo conversation in the sense that they all have a reference point. Anybody watching this knows that.

But the thing that is different now is that there is a solution. It's not something you're just going to feel, as you noted, shame just because you wonder, well, why can't I pray this away? Why is this continuously popping up in my life, whether I'm single or married? And Jeremy, I'll tell you, that's something that shocked me. Absolutely shocked me. You've dealt, you've talked with many people going through your course. But what have you heard from the younger generation? Oh, my gosh, man.

The fight is not fair anymore. Like we were saying earlier. What do you mean by that? Well, back in the day, you had to go down to 7-Eleven, get the porn magazine off the shelf. And if you're 15, you're going to have to steal it, right? It's very tough to get access to it. You create fantasies in your brain, which is just as bad. But when you start to soak this stuff in through your eye gate, it creates neural pathways in your brain. And that becomes a template, you know, your operating system, right? You sink that into

wet cement, cement in your brain. And now that's how you operate for the rest of your life. But today you got pornography at a, you know, a touch away on a phone device. You can get VR porn and pick your poison. So in that sense that Satan has provided a new way to inflict bondage like never before. And if you're an older, you know, if you're in your 20s and 30s and you've got younger brothers, cousins, siblings that are in their teens, you've got to be mentoring them. You've got to be reaching out to that generation saying, hey, man, this stuff is poison and it's going to ruin your life. And you better not be doing it now. And I'll hold you accountable. I'll walk with you in this. Right. And so let's do this together and get that trust, earn that trust because they're scared to death. They don't want mom and dad to find out. Um, but they really don't

want to be in bondage to it. And they may not even know they're addicted. And what I'm often seeing is it's usually guys in their late thirties and forties where they start to say, ah, this is a problem in my life because they realize their marriage has fallen apart. Right. Their kids are distant. Um, they're not productive at work. Um, ministry's falling apart, right? All these things are happening. The world's starting to fall apart around them. And they can start to look towards pornography as, hey, that thing is actually bringing me pain, not pleasure. And so they start to wake up. And unfortunately, you've got a long trail of collateral damage behind you at that point.

Because it's not just the secret thing that you do over here. That you've got hidden in a box somewhere. You got hidden in a box. Yeah. No, you have built a profile as an individual that pretty much checks the boxes of all these things, such as you're easily angered. You're short tempered. You've got these buttons that can be pushed quite easily. You isolate, you distance yourself. Instead of letting people in, you push them away. And your home environment with your wife and kids, they feel that. Your children may be too young to vocalize it. They don't know how to explain what they're feeling, but there's this epigenetic environment that's happening from an addictive perspective that they're going to pick

up on this and they're going to start to model this addictive mindset that you have. And now that's becoming programmed in them so that when they get to a certain age, they're going to find something to use to medicate their life, their pain, whether it's abandonment, neglect, you know, some offense, trauma. They'll find something because dad was there, but he really wasn't there. Right. He was present, but he wasn't there. He wasn't connecting. Right. And that's really what's at the heart of this is connection. And what we're learning now is not only will it impact

us in the immediate time frame, but now based on the research, and this is solid research, we'd seen this and some other pieces of information that it impacts you generations later, impacts your family of children, you have grandchildren, great grandchildren. You may never even meet. And that is passed on because of the things that happen in your life. Now open up the genetic profile that was allowed to be activated maybe generations later. But on the other hand, we are all born under a curse, Jeremy. Every one of us, one way or another, we're all born under a curse. Every man is born under a curse. Some of us are more of us than others. We're talking specifically about sexual

addiction, pornography addiction, but every one of us is under a curse. We inherited a curse in our lives, but that curse can be broken. The Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 10, 13, there is no temptation has overtaken you that's not common to man. God is faithful and will not allow you to be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation to also provide a way of escape that you may be able to endure it. And I believe that there are people today

that are watching and they're listening today. God's providing you a way of escape. He's providing you a way of escape. And maybe that way of escape for you that's going to assist you is going to be soul refiner. We have some more information that we going to assist you is going to be Soul Refiner. We have some more information that we wanna share from what we were talking about earlier, Jeremy, but if people go on Soul Refiner and they say to themselves,

hey, I need help, I really wanna break this in my life. What happens when they go to Soul Refiner? What are they gonna see there? Well, we have a waiting list at soulrefinery.com. It's a backslash G-W-L for global waiting list. And you can go in there. You add your name. We've got thousands of groups.

We've got men standing by who are running groups who want to add you to their group. So it's free of charge, a joining group. If you go through the videos and use the study guide, it's like 10 bucks a month, super cheap. And you can be part of a group, whether you go through Conquer Series or Warpath or some of the other courses we have, and it will walk you through a, hopefully a life-changing process. If you put the hard work into it, because it's hard work. If you do the hard work, you will come out the other side saying that's the best 10 bucks I ever spent.

Well, it's work that pays dividends. I can speak again as someone who's gone through the course. And also, it came out in our group is that the way we look at this, it's less that this is like a depressing subject. Oh, I have to deal with my addictions. No, it's actually, it's a liberating subject. You're going to become so strong. You're going to become a warrior for Christ, the full warrior.

Because right now, you're walking wounded by not dealing with these things. Absolutely. I imagine what we can accomplish, our generation facing, really, from everything from the gender revolution to the wars, rumors of wars, and this, of course, this pandemic. We already have a lot on our plate. We have to strengthen ourselves and strengthen ourselves with each other through the word. The biggest thing I think you've done, Jeremy, is you've restarted men's groups. Like, that we would meet with each other, finally, and strengthen each other. And so that hasn't happened.

I mean, for you, Jeremy, you have a group of guys, right? Yeah. Best friends with that you stay in touch with. I've heard that most guys don't. Yeah. You know, of course we're getting wounded by the devil's arrows. We don't have anyone helping keep our shield up. That's what, you know, if you look at social media,

it's just a synthetic form of connection. It's fake. And most social media is actually anti-social media. It is. It drives you away from connection rather than making connection. Yep. How does Soul Refiner make that connection? Well, most likely there's a physical group in your area.

But if there's not, we've got groups that meet online. Virtual groups. Virtual groups. Virtual groups. Yeah, they use Zoom and Skype. And you'll get together with them once a week. Right. You walk through the 10 weeks of the Conquer series. It was kind of like boot camp.

And then if you transition to Warpath, which is really in-depth, it's kind of like Conquer series on steroids. Right. That goes for seven months. So this is like nine nine ten months in your life um but you know you gotta want it you know you mentioned something earlier about that um that frustration that a lot of men have they they've confessed jesus christ they've they've they they love the lord and they want to really serve the Lord. Um, but they are bound, they're bound up with this and they're, but they're genuine in their desire to want to serve God. And they feel

like they're, they're trapped in this, that their, their hands are, are, are tied, um, to somebody out there right now, Jeremy, that's watching or listening. If they're in that situation, what would you say to them right now? Yeah, to any man who's trapped in that level of bondage where you're reaching out to God, you're pleading with him to save you from this. You've got to take it a step further and you've got to get into a group. You've got to follow what scripture tells us to do. You join forces with other men. You hold each other accountable.

Iron sharpens iron, right? Confess your faults to one another. Confess your faults. And so it can't just be words without actions. You've got to go one step further and start doing this really tough work and start being vulnerable to other men. Build trust. Most likely the guy that you're going

to go to, to confess these sins, he might be struggling as well. And you say, Hey man, yeah, we're both struggling with this. What can we do to hold each other accountable? Bury each other's burdens. Bury each other's burdens, love one another. These are all scriptural biblical things. Right. And so the world tries to get us into other social synthetic ways to feel wanted and liked. And scripture has made it very clear that we're to carry each other's burdens. And so you've got to get arm in arm with other men.

And, you know, it is a complicated subject. This is not just a one, two, three. You've got to find at the root of this addiction what you're trying to medicate. Well, and that's a great question to ask about the root, where this all starts at. Because there are some guys and women, too, when they first come to know the Lord, that bondage is broken immediately. I mean, it's done. It's over with. There's nothing that traps them anymore. But for others, it's a process, a long process, and it has to do with dealing with things that happened in the past,

recognizing that we might be prone to certain sins over other sins. But a lot of it too has to do with, you know, the environment that we were raised in. One of the other videos that we watched today was a very wonderful lady that we saw. Her name was Dr. Karen Purvis. She's an international child development expert. And she explained this, laid this out a little. Tell us about Dr. Purvis. You met her in person. Yeah, we filmed an interview with her in Texas. Shortly after that, a few months later, she passed away from cancer. But she was one of the most incredible women that I ever met. And she was kind of the, the leader of the parenting movement across the country. And she had developed a lot of material and, and, uh, quite in-depth studies on parenting and raising healthy children. And, um, one of the

things she was talking about was this epigenetic modification and how even when a woman is pregnant, if she's going through something traumatic, which could be she's studying for her doctorate degree in college and or, you know, she faces a traumatic event, whether it's a car wreck or something that she didn't want, that affects the child. And the child's brain becomes bathed in these neurochemicals, which create a, you know, a fear circuitry within the brain of that child that sets them up to be fearful. Right. And so her scientific information was just amazing what we got to learn over those few days that we spent with her. And we're just going to get just a taste of it here. This is Dr. Karen Purvis speaking with Jeremy

in one of the series that you'll find on soulrefiner.com. Let's watch this. If I thought about three of the major sections of the brain and I thought about the brainstem, like if this was my brainstem, and in the brainstem is the locus coeruleus, it regulates my activity level, whether or not I'm hypervigilant, and so forth. And then there's this limbic system, which is the emotional brain. This is the older brain. And this brain tells me when

I'm safe. This brain's job is to survive. So wherever you drop this child at birth, this brain will modulate to stay alive. Now, there are these lovely facts that we now know that make us think about protecting our unborn even more. We know that this limbic system is active in the uterus. So if mother's anxious, if mother's fearful, if mother doesn't have enough food, this part of the brain is born active on fire. If I finished my PhD, my baby got the not safe message because I was always stressed.

If I built my dream house and fought with the builders every day about what was supposed to be where, my baby got the message not safe because I was upset and upset chemicals bathed this part of the brain. Just bathed it. So at birth, this child is set up for fear behaviors. Then think about the child caught in the birth canal for a number of hours. The child in the ICU. All of these places are places where this part of the brain

says, you gotta do more to keep me safe, because I'm not going to make it. I'm crying, and no nurse is coming. NICU nurses said that babies cry, and we don't come, because we know it's just regular crying. And they learn in a period of days that if they cough, the nurse will come. Oh, there's something medically wrong. So they change their cry and their outcry to a medical. Teeny tiny ones, not old enough to be born yet.

Know this, because they know how to survive. And then there's this lovely part of the brain that's called the frontal cortex or the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain only matures at about 20 if it was mentored by a loving adult. When we create this environment for older children, not little children, but older children, when I say to the brain stem and the limbic system with a smile and a warm gaze. I'm sure thing. Use your words. Tell me what you need and if it's in my power I'll move heaven and earth to meet your needs. I just need words. When I say you're safe, you're in good hands, the limbic system

goes silent. The fire goes out. There are dopaminergic projections in the limbic system that extend into the prefrontal cortex. Someone I mentored and nurtured and cared for, I activate, I mentor the prefrontal cortex and new synapse form. I have to learn by self-reflection

that I have to go back to the very beginning to God's plan, where I mentor this child's brain. Sometimes I have to externally serve as a regulator. Sometimes I can co-regulate. And as I do that enough, this prefrontal cortex comes online. That was a fascinating video. And when we were watching it earlier today, I mean, the emotion that she was delivering that with, you knew that she meant what she was talking about. It wasn't just something, you know, scientific.

It wasn't just something, you know, scientific. It wasn't just something, you know, the research was based on. It almost, you got the sense it was also personal experience for her. She was preaching this from such a well of passion because she knew she had less than a year left. And she was in pain sitting there. We had a heater by her chair. She was going through chemotherapy treatments and she knew that the information that she had was so valuable to people that she had to get it out. And so I felt very honored to film that interview with her. You mentioned that the crew that was there that day,

filming that. Tell us about that. A bunch of grown men. I turned around, they're running cameras and stuff. They all got tears going down their faces. I'm not crying, man. I felt watching that. I just got some wisdom from my grandma. Seriously. What she said about the children

and the ward after being born. Even the practice of not nurturing them. They're crying. You've heard this. You're a father. They tell you, hey, if you're coddling the kid, you're coming in, you're spending too much time,

they're not going to learn how to deal with themselves. Don't let them cry it out. Yeah, let them cry it out. But she's saying, she's an expert in this field. She's saying that actually sets them up to not only experience fear, but their brain and their activity changes moving forward. And that's going to impact someone when they're 20. Yeah. We're screwing stuff up, man. Oh, certainly. You know, if you model your life after the love of Christ and you apply everything

you do, you crucify your flesh every day. Right. And you say, is what I'm doing in line with how Jesus would treat me or treat others, that should be your guiding compass. And yeah, I know, you know, we're not perfect. That's not easy to do. There's flesh gets away with, gets away from us many times every day, but we have to crucify ourselves daily. That's our calling as Christians to crucify our flesh. Right. And the only way we can know what that image of Christ that we measure up to is from his word. We've got to have the word in us. We've got to have that measurement because if science was the answer, this would be an easy solution, right? If science was the answer to this, it'd be just matter. Well, just mix this chemical here and this chemical here and put it in the test tube and drink this

and you're cured of your addiction. If science was the answer, that would be it. But it's not the complete answer. But the information and knowledge can help us get a better picture of what's actually happening to us spiritually. Absolutely. What other things have you learned in the whole process of producing

the Conquer series? Maybe for yourself personally, I mean, what spiritual concepts did you pick up along the way? Well, I think it's important for men to know that freedom is real. You can live a life free of masturbation, free of pornography. I don't deal with that stuff. And I've been free of that stuff many, many, many years. And I've taken polygraphs to prove to other men who say, no, you can't live free of this stuff. I can prove it to you. You actually took a polygraph? Yeah. Wow. Wire me up, you know, because it's important for men to know that you can live free. You can live free and you don't have to be chained to pornography.

And, you know, it's not to belittle men, but really it's it's just a pacifier. We learn to medicate with this stuff and you typically learn that a very young age and so the moment you stop medicating you start maturing at that moment not tomorrow you stop medicating today you will mature today and in two days from now if you go back to medicating you stop maturing so. So this isn't like, okay, well, I've got to, you know, wait five years till I grow up. No, you start growing up real quick because that's what it's really about. It's about growing up. You know, we learn these habits as teenagers. And when we do that, we start medicating at that age. And this shell, this skin, the skeleton continues to grow. But emotionally,

now we're stuck. And so here you are in your 20s and 30s, you get married and you're a teenager. Emotionally, you're acting like a teenager. You talk like an adult. And that's why divorce rates are so high. Oh, certainly. Right. That's why marriages are falling apart. And that's why crime rates are up. I mean, go down the list. Violent crime. Pedophilia. It's all because a lot of it is driven through our sexuality and Satan, the enemy, seeks to wound us in our sexuality because it's so core of who God created us to be. But unfortunately, it's been a topic that most churches have a difficult challenge of explaining. And that's what we're just trying to help with. Pastors got the heart.

They want to do the right thing. And so I'm just trying to come up. They don't have the tools necessary to be able to instruct. They don't teach this at Bible college. I'll tell you that now. They don't teach this at Bible college. I'll tell you that now. They don't teach it at seminary. They don't teach, you know, this aspect of the practical dealing with people sitting in the pew that are trapped, that are in bondage. You know, we can confess for freedom, Christ has set us free, but without the tools necessary to, you know, apply that freedom in our lives. The biggest tool that I'm learning since I've gone

through Conquer series twice now, once as a student, once as leading. And so now going through it, what I've learned out of all this is that the biggest weapon that we have at our disposal is, is the connections that we have with other people, besides the word of God, the word of God is at the core for me on that. But the practical application of the word of God is the fellowship and connection that we make. That is so important because one thing that we really lack in the body of Christ is word we avoid, and that's accountability at every level. And whether it's the preacher you see on TV, whether it's the pastor in the pulpit, whether it's the guy sitting next to you on the pew, we're afraid of that. We're afraid of accountability.

We say, well, I'll let God judge me. Well, there's truth in that. But when we are not accountable, we're in bondage. Absolutely. When we're not accountable, we are in bondage. And that's one thing that's really stood out to me. I'd say that accountability is good. I mean, think about this.

You have a kid, Jeremy. You want to know where your kid's at all the time, right? It's for their own good, too. They never know what they're getting into. But imagine this. You're going out on a dangerous mission. You have your friends, your fellow soldiers with you. They know where your position is at on the battlefield.

And you come under fire. You've got enemies coming at you. Because they know where you're at. Because they know about you. They know about your position is at on the battlefield and you come under fire You got enemies coming at you because they know where you're at because they know about you They know about the mission. They're able to come in and provide reinforcements save you from that situation help you overcome the enemy You don't have accountability. You're setting yourself up for an ambush And you're out there by yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Rambo is not realistic. Yeah, exactly. There you go. So I'll go over the whole, you know, army now. And you actually do that theme throughout Conqueror Series as well, the military theme. And so guys connect with that and the whole idea. And Dr. Ted Roberts, of course, Vietnam vet, fighter pilot. He's kind of a manly man, you know, but even he can take the whole army down.

Oh, sure. Yes. And it's because he's learned to overcome. Right. Overcome his addiction, his bondage. Yeah. So once again, Jeremy, if somebody is watching today and they absolutely feel trapped, I mean, you know, they're emailing you or they're calling you, Jeremy. What do you say to them? This is your opportunity to talk to maybe men and women out there that

they're looking for an answer in this area of their life. They want to live for God, but they feel trapped here. Yeah. I would say that whether it's a pornography addiction or any form of addiction, alcohol, drugs, money, success, pick whatever that poison is. They're essentially all the same. Some are more severe than others. But your old way of doing it and trying to break that addiction doesn't work. Trying harder, using willpower doesn't work. You have a limited reserve of that.

And when it runs out, you go back to the addiction, which fuels shame and guilt. And it takes you right back to medicating the shame and guilt. Yeah, it just it's a vicious cycle. And so now that you know that you've got to do something differently. And there's there's other ministries out there you can get plugged into. Soul Refinery has got, I think, a pretty good solid process and a track record of helping millions of people. Yeah, 40,000 churches have already participated in the Conquer series. What an amazing number.

And there are a lot more churches that need this. 40,000 is just the tip of the iceberg. But there are a lot of people who aren't part of a local church or a lot of people who are de-churched nowadays, Jeremy. If that's you, you can request to join a group. We have that up on the screen right now so you can see what it looks like. So if you'd like to be a part of a Conqueror Series group in your area or a virtual group, you can be. You go to solverefinder.com. The information is on Solverfinery on how you can request to join a group. Maybe there's already one in your local area that you can immediately connect with.

Or if there's enough guys in your area, maybe there could be a Conquer group that would get together in an area. And so one of the exciting things that I heard that Conquer Series is doing, Soul Refiner is doing, is that there are churches that are contacting you overseas outside of the U.S. that want to do the Conquer Series. But they have some challenges in that. You want to talk about that just real briefly? Well, there's hundreds. I think we're over over 100 nations now and probably

thousands of churches overseas. And, you know, there's groups forming every single day because this problem is so big, unfortunately. And so a lot of these churches, they're bringing in people through our global waiting list. They've got men's leaders in their churches saying, hey, our guys have gone through it. I've raised up two disciples out of this, two leaders, and now they're gonna go and start groups. And so it's spreading very organically, kind of like the early church.

That's not a big surprise. That's how we're supposed to be doing it. And they're taking it throughout their nation. One of the exciting things I've heard is you've got local churches here in the U.S. that are sponsoring Conqueror Series groups in other countries. That is absolutely amazing. And there's more information about how your local group, if you are in a Conqueror Series group, how your local group can help other groups in different parts of the world actually get started.

And so it's really pretty exciting. Before we kind of close things up for today, of course, Conquer Series is the flagship of Soul Refiner. But you've got a lot of content, a lot of things happening on Soul Refiner. You want to share that a little bit? We've got series on marriage and intimacy anorexia. We've got a series on betrayal that's coming out to help the wives of the men who've gone through the Conquer series. We've got so much new content that's being released at the moment. A legacy series. War Path is like seven months long so we've got a lot of new courses there and these things take time to to create because we're we're just not zipping through these topics

we're trying to get it right and make sure that what's being taught is biblical but also is effective and it's really important that we don't, we're not just leading people through this strange journey of healing that's not really effective. Absolutely. And I pray that like Jesus's ministry, that you actually raise up an army from the army. I think that as you see on screen,

a lot of your content is, it's kind of themed around famous battles. D-Day, a tank coming over the crest there. I've got to get off that theme, man. It's an effective theme. It's an effective theme because who are the people in society that we gravitate toward? MMA fighters, boxers, warriors, soldiers. You mentioned Rambo.

It's important to mention that because— I've got to get a Rambo movie on there. Maybe. But the point of it is, is that I think one of the most abused in our generation are the soldiers. Fought wars, but also they're fighting their own war. You talk about divorce rate. The divorce rate is the highest in the military. Millions of young men come back to their families and they're leading a broken family now or

themselves have fallen into sin, divorce, and their children are going through what Dr. Roberts went through in your series. Have you had them all to reach out? Oh, yeah, yeah. We've got, I remember in the early days, I remember seeing, we had conquer groups on special ops bases in Baghdad. Really? These guys emailing me saying, yeah, you know, we're going through this. We're in a secret location of some sort. Admirals of battleships who've taken the Conquer series

and spread it through their boats. You know, their ships, not their boats. Wow, thousands of sailors. Thousands of sailors, yeah. So, and then some of these guys have come out of the military. They've taken the Conquer series and now they're leading dozens of groups. And it's yeah, it's kind of blown us away.

But it really shows how big the problem is and that through Christ there is hope and you can renew your mind through neuroplasticity and the renewing your mind through God's word. It is possible. Hallelujah. Yeah. All right. Well, Jeremy, thank you for joining us on today's edition of True News. It's been a pleasure. And I'm sure that's not the last time we speak.

And again, I think I speak for anybody who's gone through the Conquer series and those who hopefully will check it out after this. You've done a great thing here. Thank you, brother. Appreciate that. I pray it continues to grow. Thank you. Well, thank you for joining us for today's edition of True News. It's a tough subject, but sexual addiction is the crisis of our generation.

And we're not going to beat it by voting in virtue or pretending the cancer doesn't exist. The Conquer series, which our team has just completed, is the first step to healing a nation. Please check it out and share it with your friends, family, and pastor. More information is available at soulrefiner.com. That is S-O-U-L-R-E-F-I-N-E-R.com. If you were inspired to take action or simply learn something new today, please help us produce more Godcasts just like this. You can become a partner with this ministry by going to truenews.com.

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