Rabbi Schneider - I Was on the Brink of Insanity. How I Got Out and How You Can Too
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Whether you’re struggling with mental illness, with anxiety, with fear, maybe you’ve got OCD, maybe you’re struggling with loneliness, maybe you’re feeling oppressed all the time, Maybe you can’t separate reality from what’s not real, Maybe you’re dealing with misrepresentations of what you think is reality in your mind. I want you to know all these things spring from the well of darkness, and Jesus wants to put a hook in you right now to bring you further out of that darkness. To deliver you to deliver us all into his marvelous light.
Wash us, Father God, we pray in the name of the Lord Jesus, our Savior.
Listen, everybody feels lonely at times. Everybody deals with anxiety. Whatever it is that you might be dealing with, I want you to understand that thoughts, these thoughts that we’re describing that are the types of thoughts that plague people with mental illness, come to us from the spirit of darkness. Thoughts are a projection of spirit. The Bible tells us in 1st Peter 2:9 that God has called us out of darkness in to His marvelous light. I want to share with you today my journey of coming out of the darkness into God’s marvelous light. And I know that’s going to be a help to many of you.
In 1976, I was a senior in high school. I was a very committed athlete, and I wrestled, and as long as I was in that environment of wrestling, I felt on top of the world. But when I turned 18 years old, it felt as though the world had been pulled from out underneath my feet, and suddenly I just fell into an abyss of darkness. And I also, in an instant, went from feeling like I was in control, from feeling safe, from feeling powerful to feeling like a victim. Because instantly the world felt as though it was bigger than I was. When I was wrestling, my only world was people that wrestled my weight class and I felt in control and on top in that environment, I felt safe. I felt powerful. But when I walked off that wrestling mat, I realized that was not my world anymore. People that were also at 119 pounds, which was my weight class, that was not my world anymore.
Now, my world was the big world, the huge world. Everybody in the world, all the adults, everything had changed. And in a moment I lost my identity and lost my purpose. And it just went downhill from there. So I went away to college and I was getting to a place where I could not remember one good thing that had ever happened to me in my life. I grew up in a relatively happy home, but when I fell into the darkness, this abyss, it was like I was cut off from all positive memories because I realized that going into the big world now as an 18 year old, nobody could help me anymore. And it brought up all these insecurities that had been buried inside me, insecurities about death, insecurities about just being vulnerable in the world.
And I started thinking about, you know what, you’re probably not going to die right now at 18 years old, but how do you know you won’t die? And just knowing that it was possible, it just buried me in darkness and fear the reality that I could die. And I started thinking of all these other realities. Well, what happens to you if you get arrested or thrown in jail? Because I’m a pretty little guy. I’m about 140 pounds, and I thought, man, if you get thrown into jail, they’re going to eat you up like dogs. But all these fears started coming into my mind and the devil just started tormenting me. And even though I had no theological framework or understanding as to the reality of a devil, I had no Christian theology. I wasn’t a believer in Jesus yet.
But somehow, during this period of torment that lasted between 18 and 20 years old, I literally felt the devil laughing at me, and sadisticly making me laugh at myself. The darkness had sucked me up, almost killed me. And I realized that something was going on that was supernatural from the realm of darkness. Even though, again, I had no grid for it. But I just realized something was going on. So what happened, here I was in this state of total darkness, and one night in 1978, Jesus appeared to me in a vision.
Now, keep in mind that I knew nothing about Jesus. I had never thought about Jesus a day in my life. Jesus, to me, was something that was so forward. He was like the man on the moon and I had no attraction whatsoever to know anything about him. I was a Jew. To me, Jesus was for Gentiles and I was a Jew. But when this happened to me, suddenly I found myself in a state of supernatural awareness. In an instant in color, Jesus appeared in the cross. I could see the terrain, that the cross was staked, and there were people in the distance looking at Him as He was being crucified. And then a ray of red light, It came through the blue sky, this ray of red light, then it came down onto Jesus’s head.
And I understood the symbolism. I understood that the red light was coming from the Lord. And I understood as an American that the person on the cross was Jesus, even though I knew nothing about Jesus. I knew nothing about New Testament doctrine. I knew as an American, the person on the cross was Jesus. And in an instant, I realized that God had just revealed himself to me and was showing me that Jesus was the way to him. I instantly got out of my bed and hope entered my heart. That was the beginning of my deliverance out of darkness. But let me talk about the journey, because it did not happen in an instant. It was very slow and it’s happening still, even to this day. Hope came into my heart. I was so excited I could go on and tell you the whole testimony. You can get my book Called to Breakthrough, which I tell my entire testimony. All my books are available on Amazon. I don’t want to get in to that right now, though.
As I continue to press on them, I walk with God. It’s been all about it’s a book about 45 years now. I’ve entered into more and more light. And I want to tell you what has happened to me, what I’ve entered into and how I got there. So first of all, let me share with you I’m not even the same person, so to speak, that I was when I when this first happened to me. I mean, people that know me now, they see that you’re not even the same person anymore. People told me even your voice changed. So I have been transformed. But again, if you want to enter into the fullness of the Lord’s light, you have to understand that it takes work. God is working, but we must work with Him.
The Scripture says We work out our salvation in fear and trembling. And I want to talk about some of the types of things that we need to do in partnership with our maker to enter into his marvelous light. So the first thing that I would say to you is, after Jesus appeared to me in 1978, he became my one focus in life. He became my life raft. He became the only way out I was going under. I went, God threw me that life raft. When he showed me Jesus, He became my everything. And I began to spend all my time focusing on reading God’s Word, focusing on praying, focusing on going to meetings where God’s Word was being taught and were believers were being gathered. I gave myself to pursuing the Lord 100%. I would read whole gospels in one sitting. I would constantly talk to myself and talk to my mind, literally programing my mind with scripture.
I remember at one point I was laying in my couch in my parents apartment one day during this time, and I literally would be speaking over and over again. Jesus is the truth. Jesus is the Messiah. And by the way, if you look at top athletes, everyone will tell you they got there the same way by programing in their mind to see themself winning. The same thing is true for us as believers. We have to program our mind. We have to take authority over what we’re thinking, because if you don’t tell your mind what to think, guess what? Someone else is going to tell your mind what to think. And the one that I’m talking about, that’s going to tell you what to think if you don’t tell your mind what to think is the spirit of darkness.
So I started reading the Scriptures. Reprogram my mind. And as I began to do this over time, I began to more and more get the ability to discern spirit. The Bible talks about the gift of the discerning of spirits. And so if we’re going to bring ourself out of the darkness into His light, if we’re going to break off the mental illness that the devil wants to put on us, if we’re going to break off wrong perceptions of reality, wrong self identities, if we’re going to break off OCD type thinking, anxiety, worry, fear, loneliness, an orphan spirit, all this is going to have to be broken off through the reprogramming of our mind, which comes by the washing of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God through the blood of Messiah Jesus. And we have a role to play in this. God doesn’t do it while we’re just passive. We need to be engaged in the proce… process if we’re to ascend out of the darkness into the light.
And so I began to rise up in the Lord. Revelation started coming to me. I’m talking about being taught of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, I’m going to send you my spirit and He will lead you, Jesus said, into all truth. So as I began to forsake everything, to follow Jesus, I began to get the discernment of spirit, to be able to separate what was coming from the enemy and what was coming from the realm of light, what was coming from the Lord. And I began to separate the two, and I began to choose the light and affirm the light, and at the same time resist and reject the darkness. Maybe, for example, you’re someone that struggles with anger. You need to recognize and have the discernment to realize that the spirit of rage and anger is coming from the spirit of the Antichrist.
And you need to resist it and stop blaming and instead seize God light and hold hold His light and peace in your heart. And the Lord told me Seize My Word and don’t let anything else in. And that’s the same thing I want to say to you Seize God’s word. What you’re reading in the Scriptures and what the Holy Spirit is communicating to through your intuition. Seize His Word And don’t let anything else in. And by intuition, I mean if you’re paying attention and if your ears are up and a tune, the Holy Spirit is going to teach you. You might not hear an audible word, but you’ll begin to understand in your heart what the truth is. You need to seize it and resist the devil.
And the Scripture says, As we do, the darkness will flee from us. Beloved, we’re talking about gaining the mind of Christ. We’ve been given the Scripture tells us the mind of Christ. But again, there is one thing as a legal reality the blood of Jesus has purchased for us the mind of Christ. But we have to enter into it, just like Israel was given the promised land. But they had to warfare and drive out the Amorites, the Hittites, the Jebusites to enter in. Similarly, we’ve been given peace in Jesus. My peace I given to you, Yeshua said. But we need to drive out, worry, fear, delusional thinking and every thought that exalt itself above the knowledge of God to enter into that peace and to find rest, we need to put on our spiritual armor.
And again, this happens little by little. And so keep pressing in. The Lord said to Israel, I’m not going to drive out your enemy before you all at once. But little by little, I will drive the enemy out. Some time into my journey with the Lord, things were much, much better, but I was still very oppressed and I was really hurting. And one night in my sleep, I became aware of the pain that was in my soul. I was in my bed and suddenly it was like the veil of my soul had been torn open and I felt excruciating pain in my soul.
And an angel spoke to me in the depth of my pain and in a really sweet and kind voice. The angel said to me, You’re on the right path. And I cried out to the angel, well if I’m on the right path, why does it hurt so much? And the angel sweetly said back to me, maybe if you cooperate more, it wouldn’t hurt so much. And then I cried back out. When will I be happy? And then the Lord spoke to me. And somehow I just knew the difference between the voice of the Lord and the voice of the angel. So when I cried. When will I be happy? The Lord spoke to me. And He said to me, When you get strong, then you’ll be happy. When you get strong, then you’ll be happy. Beloved, we need to be crying out every day for the power that raised us from the dead. To strengthen us, we need to pray because as the Lord imparts resurrect and strength to our inner man, beloved friends, we begin to rise up from the inside.
And we begin to rise up from the inside, we stop, tolerating the voice of the enemy. It’s like somebody that got picked on their whole life and suddenly something began to rise up in the one that was being bullied. And they said, I’m not going to take it anymore. And one day they stood up and they came against the bully. That’s what needs to happen to every single one of us. More and more, we need to rise up on the inside and come against the spirit of the tormentor, the one that’s assaulting us with lies that steal and kill from our peace and rob us of our identity.
Jesus has called us out of the darkness into His marvelous light, and He wants us to rise up so that the enemy will not rob us of the peace, identity and destiny that we have in Him. If the sun makes you free, you will be free indeed. If you could imagine for a second what you would feel like if you felt completely free and multiply that by a billion galaxies. That’s how free God wants you to be and feel. And we’re entering progressively into that experience of freedom.
If I look at my life now, beloved, compared to what it was 45 years ago. Like I said, I’m a different person. I have so much more freedom. I walk in so much more light, so much more identity, so much more power, so much more relationship. The Lord has blessed me round about it. 360 degrees along. But it hasn’t been easy. It’s been hard. It’s been a battle. And I’m still pressing on because I believe in absolute freedom And I will not stop by the grace of God until I’m 100%, 1,000% absolutely free. In John 8:32, Jesus said this, «You will know the truth and the truth will make you free». Father bathed each one by the blood of Jesus in the Holy Spirit.
And by your Word, Father set us free. We thank you for identity and destiny. We thank you for being our father and our daddy. Father, give us our identity as your sons and daughters. Father, let us see you for who you are and let us know that we are your offspring. That your DNA is in us. We’ll know that that’s going to be enough, Lord, because we know that you’re the best, the one and only God. And when we comprehend, Father Daddy, that we’re your children, we’re going to have everything that we need. Clothe us. I pray in Jesus name with the identity of Messiah, Jesus.