Sid Roth welcomes Mike Shreve

Sid:  Mike guest, Mike Shreve is red hot for the Messiah, and we teamed up together to do a book that is going to help so many people.  It’s called “Truth Seekers” ten amazing people who found it.  Many of the people that I interviewed on my radio show or my television show and speaking of the television show, I found that there are many people that listen to us on the radio have never watched our television show it’s called “It’s called Supernatural.”  If you like the radio, you’ll love the television show because we reenact a number of things and just go to my website because you can see the show on demand on the web site and there’s no charge of course or you’ll have to schedule to be able to watch it on television.  It’s SidRoth.org and just go to the web site.  Now my guest Mike Shreve was the perfect person for me to team up with on this book.  Why? Because, like myself Mike had a “New Age” background and Mike for those that haven’t heard your story.   I just think that it’s so phenomenal the things that God did.  Here you are minding your own business teaching at four universities in Daytona Beach, Florida and you have something like 200 students; your teaching Yoga you’re enjoying yourself and your picture gets in the newspaper and what happened with this Christian prayer group?

Mike:  Well, actually it was Tampa, Florida and I was teaching at University of South Florida, the University of Tampa, Florida Presbyterian in a school called, New College.  And I was also running the Yoga Astrum and devoting myself to twelve to fourteen hours of Yoga and meditation a day.  Intensely devoted because I was desperate, desperate, desperate to find God.   And to be honest with you Sid, I needed one of these books back then, because I was a truth seeker but all of the Christian books that were written back then about yoga and meditation were all slamming and bashing and none of those books would have helped me; it would have turned me off with respect to Christianity.  But this book is all about a heart to heart sharing of how we, all ten of us in the book, sought after the truth and then found it.  And the way I found it was very supernatural much of it by an intervention.  I was totally immersed in yoga and meditation every day from 3:30 to 7:30 or 8:00 at night; it was all seeking after God.  And then the Tampa Tribune newspaper did a full page article on me and highlighted how I was teaching yoga in the community.  Well a Spirit- Filled prayer group in town saw that article and instead of just bemoaning the fact that New Age was over taking their town, they made it a prayer focus and they cut that article out of the newspaper, pinned it to their prayer board and assigned somebody to be fasting, praying and interceding over me every single hour of every single day.  So for a month I was totally soaked with intercession.  And during that time, I’m sure it was divinely orchestrated and old friend of mine who had left college when I did to seek truth under another guru, he wrote me and told me how he walked into a church and heard an audible voice saying Jesus is the only way and he explained that he was “born again” at that moment; which was a term I had never heard.  Well, I thought about that letter, and I thought about it until I finally decided that you know if there is any element of truth in this I want to know the truth because even if the truth goes opposite to my own logic I’m willing to set my logic aside.  Logically I thought Christianity didn’t make sense, the exclusiveness of Christianity, all the rituals and ceremonies that I was familiar with growing up didn’t seem that potent or that powerful to me.  But I thought I’m going to set all of my preconceptions about Christianity aside and I’m going to dedicate one whole day to Jesus and see if Larry’s right.  So instead of doing yoga that day, I got up at 3:30 in the morning and for several hours read the Bible and prayed.  And I told Jesus I’m not doing any meditation, I’m not reading the Abogada, I’m not teaching yoga, this day is Yours and if You’re real I believe You’ll show me today.  Well, that afternoon I was hitch hiking and one of the members of the prayer group who happened to me a former yoga student himself was two miles away walking in a laundry mat and the Holy Spirit told him to get back in his car and start driving that God had a job for him to do.  Very few people would allow God to change their plans with so little information.  So he gets behind the wheel and starts driving and whenever he felt an impulse he would turn and drive a half a mile and turn again and drive a quarter of a mile and turn again.  And God led him to the very spot where I was hitch hiking and I was still praying saying Jesus, this is your day, if you really died on the cross for the sins of humanity this doesn’t make sense to me but I’m open to it reveal yourself.  When he pulled that van over to the side of the road to pick me up hitch hiking I opened the door and looked in and my heart just leapt inside of me because on the ceiling was a picture of Jesus and I knew that it was my answer.  And within five minutes he was kneeling down with me in the back of his van and I was praying and accepting Jesus into my heart and I was spiritually reborn.

 Sid: Well, what did you do with that 200 plus yoga students you had in four different universities?

Mike:  Well, much to their shock I went back to all of my classes and told them that I had unknowingly misled them and that Jesus really is the only way; and most of my primary followers became Christians also.

 Sid:  Tell me about one of the woman in the book, I haven’t had a chance to meet her, Lorette Willis.

Mike:  Well, Lorette Willis taught Hoffa Yoga for over twenty years and she was a real seeker; she has a tremendous and interesting story.  She apparently had a lot of money at her disposal and so she traveled all over the world going to sacred sites like Stonehenge and the pyramids and places like that trying to find a portal into the spiritual realm where she could be transported into this higher state of consciousness and of course she was teaching Hoffa Yoga too.  And after years and years and years of travel she discovered like the woman of Samaria that it’s not the physical location that will provide you and entrance way into the ultimate reality, but it’s a person.  It’s the Lord Jesus Christ; He said I and the Way the Truth and the Life and I don’t care if you’re unloading garbage in a garbage dump or kneeling down in a church He’ll meet you anywhere that you call on His Name.

Sid:  You know on yesterday’s broadcast we were dealing with reasons why a Christian should not be involved in yoga even if they rationalize and say I’m just doing it for exercise, give me a few of those reasons again because I believe there’s so much confusion.  And as a matter of fact, do you know who’s the author of confusion, the devil because some of these things are so counterfeit and they have so much hidden demonic.

Mike:  Well, there are connections to the demonic influence in yoga.  Let me tell a personal story; one reason I would never do Hoffa Yoga again, even Hoffa Yoga, which is primarily the physical exercise.  After I got saved, after I found the Lord I quit all my yoga classes and went to live in a Christian commune and I would read the Bible all night long.  Well one particular night about a week or two after I was saved, I was laying in bed reading the Bible and I know this sounds farfetched to some people, but I looked up and all of a sudden this form came through the wall, it was a cloudy grey kind of ball accept it wasn’t clearly defined edges about the size of a large grapefruit and it was hovering there on the other side of the room and it rushed and slammed into my forehead and it started trying to suck my soul out of my body.  And I immediately intuitively recognized that this was the demon that I had yielded to when I did meditation and when I had out of body experiences during meditation.  I was paralyzed I could do anything.  I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, barely I had to push my words out and thankfully somebody told me that after I got saved I would have quite possibly encounters with the demonic and they said always remember claim the blood of Jesus and so I finally pushed the words out, I I I claim the blood of Jesus upon me.  The Blood of Jesus be upon me and about the third time I spoke that that force pulled back from my forehead and I spoke it out really loud and authoritatively then and then when I said the blood it fled from the room.  But that experience personally, of course you can’t prove something by just a personal experience but that proved to me on a personal level that I don’t want to go near something.  And there’s an old saying “If you don’t want to get snake bit then don’t put your hand in the cage.  And to me that’s just getting to near the edge of a system that is not Christian, it’s not biblical and little subtle things that they do when they do yoga are connected to the occult when people don’t even know it.  That’s why people need to read this book.  Christians need to read this book.

 Sid:  You know, they have to understand, let me tell you something that happened to me, Mike is when I got rescued from the New Age and Jesus became real to me I saw the true supernatural of God and I wanted nothing to do with it because I had seen things that looked so similar in the New Age.  That’s kind of tricky and we deal with these areas in the book, in fact every Christian listening to me needs to understand the difference between the counterfeit and the authentic.  It’s like the devil had me with the counterfeit as a nonbeliever in the New Age and then after I was set free by Jesus, He still had me captive because I didn’t want anything to do with the supernatural.  Which is everything in the Kingdom of Heaven that we’re supposed to access to proclaim who the Messiah is.