Suicidal Thoughts: Exposing Satan’s Spiritual War for Our Minds - Dr. Matthew Sleeth

A decade ago, on July 8th, 2011, Nancy and I walked outside the hotel where I'd been teaching a group of pastors in Florida. We gathered with a crowd outside. Just a few miles away, the last space shuttle was blasting off as it headed towards the International Space Station. It was incredible. You could feel the power rumbling inside you. May 4th is the launch day of Hope Always, a book about how to be a force for life in a culture of suicide. I don't think there could be a better moment for this book. We hear daily about violence and murder, but did you know that for every murder there are two and a half times more suicides? That's one suicide every 10 to 12 minutes. Are we going to normalize this, or are we going to fight back against this darkness and despair? A month ago, Canada passed a suicide law instructing physicians to help somebody commit suicide, even if death was not imminent, or just because they have a mental illness. Our society stands on a dangerous precipice. So I'm unbelievably encouraged by the response to this book, and I want to thank all of you who have been helping to launch Hope Always. Dr. Matthew Sleeth, a former emergency room physician and chief of the hospital medical staff, resigned from his position to teach, preach, and write about faith and health. Dr. Sleeth has spoken at more than 1,000 churches, campuses, and events, including serving as a monthly guest preacher at the Washington National Cathedral. Recognized by Newsweek as one of the nation's most influential Christian leaders, Dr. Sleeth is the executive director of Blessed Earth and author of His newest book, Hope Always, How to Be a Force for Life in a Culture of Suicide, released in May of 2021. This information and this program on The Counterculture Mom Show today will be life-saving. Thank you for tuning in. I'm Tina Griffin. Suicide prevention is the theme of the week. I'm with Dr. Matthew Sleeth, executive director of Blessed Earth. Dr. Sleeth, how are you doing today? Welcome. Wonderful. Honored to be with you, Tina. You know what? We should have been taping for the last hour. We would have had three episodes already taped. We were yakking. We were yakking. And I'm like, got some life-saving tips from you already. So I'm on fire and I know you're on fire and you will absolutely be back on to talk about what we just talked about. So everybody, you're in for a treat. Dr. Sleeth lives in Lexington, Kentucky with Nancy, his wife of 40 years. You guys rock. That's like a record on the program here. And your grown children serve with their families in full-time ministry as medical missionaries in Africa. That is phenomenal. Tell us more about your family upbringing years. How did you grow your kids to be medical missionaries out there in Africa? First of all, I've been married for 45 years now. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. And yes, I have two grown children. My oldest, Clark, is a physician and he is a baby-saving machine. He is involved in that and has been not only at the level of care physically, but also designing the equipment that the third world needs, incubators and that type of thing that makes sense in a third world culture. And he does that with his wife and they have three children. Then I have a daughter who is married and her husband is a pastor and she works for a ministry called Heart of Africa and they have one adopted son. And how do we raise kids that are doing okay? I get asked that question a lot and I have to hedge because I did not become a follower of Jesus until my children were rolling up on junior high and in high school. And so I wouldn't recommend that you raise your kids as pagans like I did, and then all of a sudden everything changes. But it has made me think, what were the things that made it so they could change? What were the things that made it so Christianity was something they could own and one of those things was that I did not bring my kids up in front of a television or computer. We were a reading family. We were a book-based family. And doesn't that work out great when you join a faith that's led by the word and that you're called people of the word. We're not people of the screen. We're not people of the magazine. We're people of the word. And so very first thing I would say that we did right was to raise a book-based family, if you will. My wife is an English professor by training, so that was pretty easy. Another thing that I think helped as far as my children becoming Christians was that I was a physician. And at its heart, medicine is something God is very fond of. I got asked a question in a college auditorium once, you know, what does God think about medicine? And since three-quarters of all Christ's miracles were healings, I think he's pretty down with that. And I think the other thing to remember about that is that the largest single portion of the New Testament is written not only by a physician, but the only non-Jew to write a single word in the Bible. So God is about healing. And I think they saw that. They didn't ever see cynicism around medicine or patients or anything like that. So, Tina, I think those things helped them become Christians and own that for themselves. And I can't repeat the raising them as a pagan for the first 12 or 13 years, but... They know what not to do because now they saw the difference of before and after. And if you change that significantly once placing your faith in the Lord and wanting to guide them in the right path, the right way, after you place your faith in Christ... I just had a conversation with my kids about three or four days ago, constantly thinking in my brain, oh my gosh, I wish I would have done this different. Or a parent said, I'm better over here. I wanted so many more hours or more books in their head about this topic. Or talk to them and ask critical questions during the dinner table. I wanted to do a lot of different things. And some of that was out of my control. But I wish I could have done something different. And the Lord kept telling me, now you know what you can do. You have the space to do it. They're going to see the before and after. And also, the experience of what could have been better still was an experience where they know maybe what they don't want to do or what they want to do more of once they're a parent that I could have done more of. So sometimes I'm too hard on myself, basically, too. So I hear what you're saying. And for parents out there thinking, right now, my kids are on tech a lot more than they should be. I just had a friend visit me this morning and we talked for an hour and a half. Part of it was that. If you don't have two parents on the same track with raising kids, for example, one says less tech and more books. One says who cares and is a best friend instead of a parent. Or if you are a single parent and you feel overwhelmed and so the tech becomes a babysitter even though you don't want it to become a babysitter. But today they're hearing you say that and saying, if it's not too late and my kids are teenagers, what can I do where they're not going to buck the system and buck me if I'm telling them, I know you've been watching 10 hours of TV a week or playing 18 hours of video games a week. We're now going to ax that where it's 30 minutes twice a week if you do your homework and get your music done and you're getting great grades and you're going to fill that time now with scripture reading, leadership books, and podcasts about entrepreneurship, for example. How can we as parents take them from cesspool of junk on entertainment and media and move them over to a God-designed, book-based, Bible-based family like you did? I think let's take the scenario that I gave my kids phones when they were two years old and internet connection when they were four and worst case scenario. I think if you realize that that's not the right path, I think the first thing to do to save your kids is I made a mistake and I'm going to fix it in me first. I know that my children were interviewed by somebody writing a book from the Barna group and the question was, why are you kids like super Christian kids or something? What made it so that that happened in your family? And my daughter's response is in that book and she said, I saw my dad do really hard things for his faith. So, because I became a Christian very late in life, God called me out of clinical medicine, in other words, a job that paid well, but they saw that it was something that was important enough that I was willing to give up being chief of staff, head of the emergency department. The other thing is, I personally think that my brain is wired to become addicted to all the stuff we're talking about. And so, I got rid of television when I became a Christian. We have not had a television that connects to anything. We can play a DVD on it. That's it. Because personally, I will just channel surf until I'm mouth breathing like a fish and there's nothing good that happens there. Some people may be able to control that. I just said, we're pulling the cord. We're pulling the plug. So, I think if you've kind of raised your kids in a way that you regret and you still have some say in their life, I think you say, well, I did something wrong. Watch me walk through this process. Learn from my mistakes and then we'll work with you. Don't expect them to be better humans than you are. For over six years, I've been sounding the alarm regarding the dangers of EMF exposure, primarily coming from the towers that were implemented during the pandemic. I've interviewed countless experts on the show that confirm my research. Besides harmful 5G radiation, we are constantly bombarded with EMF exposure from Wi-Fi routers, smartphones, laptops, smart appliances, all contributing to massive sleep issues, headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, brain fog, heart palpitations, and even increased cancer risk. I've been using two Waveguard devices for over six years. I have the key home, which gives me whole home protection, and the key shield when I'm on the go. Waveguard uses depolarization technology to significantly reduce EMF radiation without blocking your Wi-Fi or cell signal. Protect your family now. Use code TINA at 20% off all devices at waveguard.com. 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It even went higher for the ratings, the number of people taking their lives after COVID. What compelled you to write this phenomenal book on this topic? And the book you have to get your hands on, everybody, is Hope Always, How to Be a Force for Life in a Culture of Suicide. Yes and amen. What compelled you to write that book? First of all, just the magnitude of the problem. It has grown so much in the last couple of decades. So that was one, and having dealt with that day in and day out in a clinical setting in the emergency department. The second is that my worldview is a Christian worldview, and I looked at the books available, even the Christian ones, and what I was seeing was secular thinking that was baptized. By that I mean, no one went to scripture and said, what causes suicide? Where does it come from? And I said, well, God, if you really want me to write this book, you're going to have to show me something in scripture that isn't in any of those books. And so I started reading through the Bible, and I do this for every book I write. I read from one end to the other of the Bible. It's way better than a word search. But I'd gone no further than a page into the Bible, and I saw something there that wasn't mentioned in a single book, and that is where suicide comes from. Adam and Eve were in paradise, and Satan came to them and said, why don't you kill yourself? Because they had been told that in the day that they did what they weren't supposed to do, which was to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that they would die. They would surely die. They would be committing suicide. And so they made a conscious decision to do that. We as humans, as fallen humans, make a conscious decision most of the time not to choose life but death. We might do that slowly. We might drink ourselves to death, eat ourselves to death, work ourselves to death. But God wants us to choose life. And when I looked, Satan throughout scripture, every time he interacts with somebody, is trying to get them to kill themselves. Even when he interacts with Christ, and we have that recorded in scripture, one of the ploys is to get Jesus to kill himself. Yes. When Satan enters into Judas's heart, he not only betrays the Lord, but Judas kills himself. And so the one thing, and this may not be the time to say it, but the one thing I say every time, especially I'm in front of college students, high school students, is if you ever hear a voice telling you that you would be better off dead or the world would be better off dead, that is the voice of Satan. That is the voice of humanity's arch enemy. You run in the opposite direction. That is not just a thought in your head. That's the voice of Satan. I completely wholeheartedly agree. And my husband has heard that many times over before we got married with his suicide attempt and he survived, should not have survived it. And after we were married, he still had demonic voices telling him. And I told him exactly that. I said, that is a demon. That is Satan speaking to you. Where we were a couple of years into our marriage and there was alcohol for the first 14 years of marriage. It was absolutely hellish. Hellish. Someday we will be sharing our story. And he told me one time that he was driving down the road. We had a sharp curve with like a cliff near the Bible school where he lived, ironically, near a Bible school going to New Tribes Mission in Missouri. And he heard a voice that said, go ahead and miss the curve. Just go straight down the cliff. Drive straight. No one's going to miss you. All these demonic thoughts, voices in his head. Of course, he didn't listen to them, but he was so close to multiple occasions because we lived right just past that curve. So Satan is always trying to kill us off. You're absolutely correct. Do you believe a saved and a non-saved person can both hear that voice? Absolutely. Satan wants everybody in his pocket. We know from clinical research that Christians and non-Christians think about suicide at the same rate, but Christians act on about four times less. This has been since Emile Durkheim wrote like the 1896, I think it was published this book. We know that a committed Christian is about four times less likely to take their life than somebody who's an atheist. And so everybody's hearing those voices, whether they're Christian or not. They're just there. I think only the Christian is capable of understanding this is my arch enemy, and there's another side, and that's somebody who wants us alive so much, he's willing to die for us. Satan will never die for you. He's all excited when you do take your life. This is such an interesting conversation. So I believe a person that's saved and believes in Jesus cannot be possessed. I know that there can be oppression. So if a person that's a believer, a Christian, hear demonic voices saying, kill yourself, how are they able to hear that voice unless is that considered demonic oppression? Is there a demon in that person telling them? It's hard for me to wrap my brain around how a Christian can't be possessed, but at the same time hear voices saying, kill yourself. Where's the voice coming from? Is it in their mind? Is that a demon right outside their ear, whispering into their ear or yelling in their ear? Can you walk me through the technical aspects of demonic attack on a specific believer telling them to take themselves out? Those are very good questions because when you get into medicine, you have to be very specific sometimes. When I say they're hearing a voice, I do not necessarily mean they're hearing an auditory voice, but the voice, if you will, of the background of culture is that you're a mistake, none of this matters, might as well check out early. That's just pumped at us in every movie, play, etc. That's not the same as somebody hearing an auditory voice as sometimes a sign of way more serious mental illness or possession, spiritual illness. What I'm talking about is the voice that says, you don't have to be nice to somebody. It's kind of almost like we've got that one on one shoulder and Christ over here on the other. We are, as scripture says, in the middle of a battleground, and it's a spiritual battle. So, it doesn't have to be an auditory voice that you hear, but it is the philosophy of the world that you're a mistake, that none of this matters, and that ultimately life is meaningless. Christianity is that you're a plan. You're not a mistake. Even if your parent didn't plan to have you, you are a plan, and God wants you to be saved. I believe he wants everyone to be saved, the scripture says that, and Satan wants you to be dead. And so, when I talk about voice and you're hearing it, it doesn't matter whether it's an auditory hallucination or the culture speaking, the message is the same and the response has to be the same. That's the voice of Satan. I'm going to go in the opposite direction. Since 2019, we've helped over 500,000 persecuted Christians. We support over 1,000 widows every month. We train and equip village security teams, saving lives before attacks even happen. Others report the crisis. We run toward it. When evil shows up at their doorstep, we can make sure they are not standing alone. For just over a dollar a day, you can stand with the persecuted. Go to equippingthepersecuted.org or call now, 1-833-933-4059. That's 1-833-933-4059. James 5.16 reminds us to confess our sins to one another and pray for each other so we may be healed. It's not enough to admit the church body has a hidden porn problem. Church leaders need the tools to help people find freedom. The healing church book by Covenant Eyes cuts through the confusion. Here's what to expect from this phenomenal read. Learn why sex isn't the real problem regarding pornography. Discern how porn undermines ministry in the local church. Understand how porn affects men and women differently and how to help them. The church has a choice. It can ignore the porn problem, or it can lead people by grace to the foot of the cross, where strongholds are crushed and strong servants arise. Get your free copy of the healing church book in the mail today. Scan the QR code on the screen or text the word victory to the number 66866. This book is a must read for ministry leaders, parents, and counselors. Text victory to the number 66866. Together with our friends at Covenant Eyes, we can help the church conquer pornography once and for all. Matthew, your book is a must read, especially in the culture we're living in today, which is a culture of death. Hope Always, How to Be a Force for Life in a Culture of Suicide. We can get it on Amazon. Five star. Everybody get it today. What is in that book? What can we expect? It's going to be a book that is written by somebody who's trained in medicine, but also is a Christian and utterly committed to following the scripture. And so there's going to be more scripture, I think, in it, particularly following, as we've talked about, what is Satan's plan and what is Christ. Your website, matthewsleethmd.org. Matthew Sleeth, S-L-E-E-T-H-M-D.org. You made a great point of adding in the mix what we can do if we know if someone is suicidal, showing the red flags, or we ourselves are suicidal. 988lifeline.org is a great website to check out. 988lifeline.org. If you know of anybody that needs to hear this message, grab the URL off our website, counterculturemom.com, and send them this actual episode via URL. Text it to them so they can actually watch it. Say, hey, I thought of you on this, or what do you think of this episode? But get this life-saving content out to your friends and family who need it most. Keep up the excellent work. I'm watching you. Parents, do you feel overwhelmed when it comes to keeping up with a constantly changing technology and its influence on your kids? Are you wanting a healthy media diet in your home? Let our team do the work for you. Just download the CounterCulture Mom app and get our notifications right on your phone. Know how to navigate the cultural chaos. After downloading the app, click yes for receiving notifications so you're not left in the dust. You can download the CounterCulture Mom app at Google Play or the iTunes store. You can also send us a message if you see insanity you need to report, and our team will send a notification through our app so that no one is left behind.