A Pastor's Secret Battle With Dark Spirits in Seminary

Pastor Steve Wohlberg tells Bradley about the night he gathered his own set of Ellen G. White's books, carried them into the woods behind his dorm at Andrews University, and burned them. Steve walks through the pride that built up during his seminary years, the demonic opposition he says he felt the moment he decided to pray for the Holy Spirit instead, and the 40 years that followed that decision. The conversation ties his testimony directly into the show's subject of spiritualism and the spirits behind modern UFO and paranormal encounters.

Steve grew up in a Jewish home in the Hollywood Hills and got pulled into the Hollywood nightlife as a teenager. At 20, in 1979, he read the Bible and then Desire of Ages, was captured by the chapter on Gethsemane, and accepted Jesus as his Savior.

He trained for ministry at La Sierra, pastored for a year in Bakersfield, and was sent to Andrews University for his MDiv. During his second year there, his Christian experience went dry. Scripture and Ellen White's writings stopped reaching him the way they had before.

A roommate, drawing on Christian psychology books, suggested Steve take a complete break from Ellen White's writings. In 1985 the two of them carried his Spirit of Prophecy books into the forest behind Berrien Springs and burned them.

Steve moved to Pacifica, California, in 1986 to pastor two churches, still spiritually empty. One night, alone in his apartment on the edge of the Pacific, he prayed a desperate prayer and says he heard a small voice tell him to pray for the Spirit of Truth to guide him into all truth, a direct echo of John 16:13.

He describes an immediate mental picture of grimacing faces warning him not to pray that prayer, and his decision to pray it anyway. He connects what followed, physical sensations he describes as deliverance over many years, to a long study of pride in Scripture, from Lucifer to Laodicea.

Steve eventually returned to reading Ellen White's testimonies and says the conviction that followed reshaped his marriage, his ministry at White Horse Media, and how he views the end-time need for the Holy Spirit, tying his personal story to Matthew 25's wise and foolish virgins and Luke 11:13.

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