In an exclusive interview with Charisma News, Tai Locke shares her powerful testimony of how she went from addict to deliverance warrior with her husband, Pastor Greg Locke.
Tai Locke, who pastors Global Vision Bible Church with her husband, Greg Locke, shared how she came to Christ in the middle of a bleak and dark drug addiction. However, when she finally laid everything down at her Savior’s feet, her life was changed forever.
“When I met the Lord, I had an encounter with the Lord in a ditch. I drug overdosed,” Locke said. “When I got born again, the Lord did a drastic transformation in my life very immediately after that encounter with Him.”
Because Locke didn’t grow up in the church and had no context of Christian culture coming into the faith, she took everything the Bible said at face-value. She didn’t doubt that God could still heal or perform miracles. She had already experienced His Holy Spirit transforming her life for His glory. However, after marrying Greg, she learned that cessationism was an actual struggle for him as it is for many people who have been taught over the years that the gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased when the apostles died.
“I never realized what an inner struggle that was for him until he openly began to, from the pulpit, begin to repent of not… believing in the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” Locke said. “That was honestly kind of a shock to me because he never quenched the Spirit of the Lord in me. He never told me one time, ‘No, that’s not what we believe,’ he never did that. He allowed me to express my heart and my spirit to him.”
Soon, both Tai and Greg were believers that the Holy Spirit was still at work in this day and age. The biggest change came when Greg felt the Lord ask him to lay hands on Tai and pray for the healing of her back, an area she had been dealing with pain for years. Not only was Tai healed, but this was the beginning of the next step toward God’s plans for their ministry.
“That was a pivotal moment for us,” Locke said. “I believe it was from that moment that we are where we are today.”
Locke shared how she became more interested in learning about deliverance ministry because of her own questions she had about spiritual bondage in Christians. For her, the day that a young girl manifested a demon during a baptism was a turning point for how she would forever see God’s call on her life.
“I wept all day after church because I couldn’t find her,” Locke said.
Seeing a young child around her own daughter’s age under such oppression and demonic takeover was unshakable for Locke. She addressed to her husband how deeply this occurrence cut her to the core.
“I can’t continue in ministry and see those kinds of things and not be equipped to help someone that is in that situation,” Locke told her husband. “And that was the moment for us. We began to fast; we began to pray.”
The Lockes’ church has now experienced 80 weeks of revival as people have been delivered from demonic influence and found freedom in Christ. For Locke, the next thing she is focused on is sharing about the glory of the Lord with others for the discipleship process to continue after deliverance. She believes we are in a time of harvesting, and this work cannot be neglected.
“My fear is that in these days with so many people looking at the gifts of the Spirit, so many people looking at deliverance, my fear is that we’re going to miss the glory of the Lord,” Locke said. “The harvest is plentiful, and the laborers are few.”
Locke believes this is the time that Christians must seek the presence of God and share Him with the world.
“Now it’s harvest time, to go out into the highways and byways and compel them to come in,” Locke said. “I mean out on the streets, that when we go to Walmart, you know, or we go to the gas station, that the glory of the Lord is so evident on us that people begin to ask questions…we cannot contain the glory of the Lord in a building.” {eoa}
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Abby Trivett is a marketing copywriter and coordinator for Charisma Media.
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