Episode 25 — The Death and Resurrection of Our World: Who Is Going to Kill One-Third of Mankind? (Part 3)

In this powerful episode of Tectonic Ministries, we continue unpacking Revelation 9 and the prophetic judgment where one-third of mankind is wiped out. But today’s focus goes deeper — into the heart of anxiety, trauma, emotional suppression, and healing through Scripture.

Mark Johnston from Game Changer Intensive joins us again to share his remarkable testimony of deliverance from addiction, abuse, and emotional isolation — and how God transformed his heart and ministry. We explore how generational beliefs, emotional blockages, and faulty identity ("I am my body") keep many Christians from true healing.

Most importantly, we dig into how Scripture offers both a spiritual and practical path forward.

📖 Key Bible Verses Referenced:

• Revelation 9 — The Sixth Trumpet and judgment of one-third of mankind
• 1 Peter 5:7–8 — “Cast all your anxieties on Him…your adversary the devil…”
• Psalm 142:7 — “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise Your name.”
• Psalm 42:5–6 — David’s self-talk: Hope in God, Praise Him, Remember Him
• Galatians 2:20 — “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
• Romans 12:1 — “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices…”
• John 11:35 — “Jesus wept.”

Through real-life examples and biblical truth, we discuss how the Western stoic mindset has disconnected men (and women) from emotional vulnerability, which the Bible never forbids — but instead invites.

➡️ If you're struggling with anxiety, disconnection, or emotional isolation, this episode is for you.

Explore more about Mark’s ministry:
🔗 www.gamechangerintensive.com.au

🕊 Don’t forget to like, comment, and share if this blessed you — and subscribe for future episodes diving deeper into biblical prophecy and personal restorati

"Follow us for more discussions on faith, scripture, and prophecy.
https://tectonicministries.com/

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode with Tectonic Ministries. We still have our special
guest here with us today, Mark Johnston of Game Changer Intensive. And we're actually
going to focus more on what Mark's ministries actually are and do.
It's obviously, it's a very poignant subject for today's society and we thought it
was such an incredible opportunity while Marx with us to actually discuss what you
do basically on the day to day. And we're going to be discussing and looking at
anxiety, what people go through on a daily basis, its prevalence and essentially how
to deal with it on a scriptural basis, essentially from what God has intended for
us and for our minds and for our inner beings and yeah how we actually deal with
that in the way that there is God honoring and essentially God glorifying. So Mark,
could you actually give us, a couple of episodes ago you actually gave us a brief
little intro, but would you mind actually sort of expounding more on maybe just give
us a little synopsis of your background and what led you into doing what you're
doing now, so I don't understand? Yeah, so I've come out of a life of heavy
addiction, verbal, physical, mental, sexual abuse,
a very dysfunctional background, so there's a lot of trauma and I did not know at
any time how to process that. It was never really taught.
Emotions was not even mentioned in my family environment,
nor were they shown. So I just assumed that you just try your hardest,
just use willpower and if You know,
just express it in a way that is obviously the worst way of doing it and that was
with anger and rage and When all else fails use your fists essentially pretty much
and it worked really well At the time anyway. Yeah, I'm sure it didn't lead to any
negative consequences. Oh, there was many of those Well, this is actually um,
I'm sure Dan you can probably relate to a lot of what we're gonna what we're gonna
talk to and I might even throw it over to you a little bit and we can talk about
some of your background and how God's helped you kind of come through 'cause you've
probably got some similar stories that you could share with Mark about your
upbringing 'cause it wasn't, you certainly didn't grow up in Buckingham Palace.
So from there then, okay, what
And the catalyst, I guess, that would kind of brought you into where you are now
in the ministry of what you do with counselling, etc.
I think for me, because there was no real scriptural teaching around emotions,
I discarded emotions. Emotions to me were there They weren't something that I was
even willing to look into as far as I was concerned Galatians 2 20 says They've
been crucified with Christ. It is no longer. I who live Christ lives with me in
the faith and now live by live by the Fathers son of God so in my mind, it's not
about how I feel it's about what I believe and that is The truth,
but it's not the whole truth So, I went on this journey where I rejected emotions,
but what I found is I wasn't really able to bond with people, I wasn't able to
relate to people, and a lot of my belief systems were based on performance.
If I was doing good, God would accept me. If I failed, then He would reject me.
So, I went on this massive many where I would seemingly look successful,
but then it would always end in failure.
So when I started navigating into the concept of belief systems, that's where I
think things changed for me. I didn't believe that belief systems were based on a
lot of what we feel. So if you say to people, "Well, God loves you," The majority
of them would say, "But I don't feel it." So I didn't register that as a belief
because what people feel is what they do. So it's not basically just trying to use
your willpower against this stuff. So I remember being in groups and processing
people's behaviors and we're talking about some pretty extreme cases. We're talking
about homelessness, rape, incest. we're talking about prostitution, drug dealers,
cooks of methamphetamine, jailbirds, and we're sitting in these groups and I
discovered something because someone was sitting there, you know, telling us about how
their woes were with how they felt and it was difficult and overwhelming. And I
just had this thought, your emotions aren't going to pack their bags and go on a
holiday for you.
And so over time, I discovered, hang on, what are we doing with what we feel?
Because scripturally, it says that it's OK to express ourselves, but it's not OK to
live from it, to believe in it completely. We have to trust God at the end of the
day, despite how we feel. So when I see, for example, a verse like 1 Peter chapter
5, verse 7, it says cast all your cares or cast all your anxieties on God. And so
what I would do is in a frantic, overwhelmed state, I would just tell God, I'm
overwhelmed, I'm struggling, I can't do this, but I never seem to bond with him in
that frantic state. So there was something missing where I was not given myself
permission to be honest with him, because I was brought up around certain word of
faith teaching that says, no, you don't talk about your problems, you don't talk
about your ways. You don't talk about what's really going on for you because if you
confess that, then the devil's going to jump on that and use it against you. So I
had this belief system that I was opening the door for the devil, but when I
looked into the scriptures and I found that casting your cares upon him was legal
spiritually, it was okay. The father gave me permission to share with him what was
going on for me because he cares for me, not because he's going to reject me.
That's when I started realizing that when I got really honest with God and real
with him, I felt a genuine connection with him. So look at the verse straight after
1 Peter, chapter five, verse seven, verse eight, because your adversary,
the devil roams around seeking whom he may devour, and It says resist instead fast
in the faith, because your whole brotherhood around the whole world are going through
the same suffering. So right after casting your cares, it talks about your adversary,
the devil. So we don't realize sometimes that when we don't process things properly
in the context of relationship, we're not really bonding. So we could have two
people in a room, but it doesn't mean they're bonding. They could have some kind of
connection, but not bonding. And I think that's the difference between those that are
trying their best to please God and those that believe and trust God and God is
pleased with them. Big difference. So that's where it all begun for me. Where it
initially begun was when I learned about a sort of communication.
I feel overwhelmed. What I see happening is you keep talking over me when I'm
talking, what I'd like to see happen is that you wait your turn to speak and what
I'm prepared to do is let you know how that makes me feel. So we learnt the
assertive communication model and I realised, hang on, if I can share with someone
what's going on for me in a safe, healthy way, why can't I do that with my
Heavenly Father? It's not what I believe, it's just what I feel, Lord, I feel this
way, but ultimately I trust you.
So I discovered something so profound it opened my spirit up in a way that nothing
else had in the past. - We actually see a severe lack of that in common dialogue,
I think these days where everyone's defaulting to just a fence and attack and
there's not an openness to actually just go hang on a sec. Can we just talk about
this face to face? I'm going to tell you how I feel. It's not a personal attack
on you, but I just need to let you know X, Y and Z. But it's not actually,
there's no room for that now. It's essentially it's almost glorification of self.
And like what we were talking about actually in the previous podcast is in order to
subjugate subjugate, essentially to denigrate the opposing party because we look at
each other as enemies in that. I think because there's so many people walking around
completely broken and it's just a defence mechanism. Yeah. And so we can't actually
dialogue on that. And it is, like you say, it seems like such an alien concept to
be able to, but you look at particularly in this course to mind Old Testament
Scriptures where you see dialogue between man and God and it's very open.
Yes, it is. Very raw. And it's like, hang on. Very honest. Yeah, that doesn't seem
right. And God goes, yeah, but consider this or whatever it is, whatever the context
is. And there's certainly nothing in Scripture that says, do not speak to God like
this. That's right. It's actually, it's encouraging. No, you need to open yourself up
and up and actually share that. So before we get too much into the weeds of
dealing with that, can we have a little bit of an overview of what you do now on
the day -to -day, what your ministry does? So for those watching, if they want to
know more, how can they find you and what would they expect if they kind of engage
with your ministry? So I'm a counsellor, so the name is game changer counselling
under the banner of game changer intensive. So just for clarity, I do counselling
under the living wisdom model, which is David J. Riddell from New Zealand,
which is dealing with the belief systems. For example, we call them King Lies,
or the 19 subconscious misbeliefs. I don't belong here. I'm not enough. I am my
body. There's 19 of them. I
and then relinquish it. It's a very simple model or someone with OCD,
for example. With the OCD, we teach the client to resist the ritual,
going to the door 20 times and locking it. And then secondly, tolerate the anxiety.
And then thirdly, get to the chief thief beneath, which is the belief system driving
it. I'm gonna die, someone's gonna break in, I'm in danger. So it's dealing with it
in a very straightforward manner. And so outside of that, I have done my due
diligence to do a deep dive into scripture. So I would say that game changer
intensive is scriptural and spiritual intelligence. It's going into the scriptures,
not just reading over them and getting reasons for why we do what we do and how
to deal with those things that we don't know why we're doing it in the first
place. So I'll go deeper into the verses. And so I've written courses and also an
anxiety course that I've just done with videos describing anxiety and different ways
that anxiety comes into your life but from a scriptural perspective. So I've done
that with a whole bunch of courses that I'm doing, but in a nutshell, that's what
I'm doing. - Yeah, great. And we were actually, that reminds me, we were speaking
earlier about how we as Western culture can help.
they're doing something else. Whereas essentially the culture in which Jesus is from,
the Jewish, it is intrinsically linked. - Yeah, 100%. - And so that a physical
manifestation of something is actually, can actually be a representation of something
that is spiritual going on. And so you're essentially taking these physical principles
of how to have strategies to deal with these things and tying them in with the
relation to how that actually plays out in a spiritual sense, correct?
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean you don't have to look at Romans 12 -1, it says to offer
your body as a living sacrifice, wholly and pleasing under God. It didn't say wholly
and pleasing under yourself. It says wholly and pleasing under Him. So this is your
reasonable service. In other words, I've bought you with a price your body is not
yours. It's actually mine. So you know exercising and all that it's it's great But
godliness is superior. Yes. God wants us to be godly not just physically Healthy so
to speak But it's important nonetheless So yeah, definitely Well,
yeah, I think this is a good time to tie in what we were speaking about before
again before we started this conversation. And my own personal journey in the,
in relation to that physical realm is that myself, my sister brother and brother -in
-law have been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. And so I've started really
looking into how to essentially fix that.
I don't want to touch pharmaceuticals. I've got no interest whatsoever in popping
pills for the rest of my life, so my personal belief is that God has provided us
with the tools and obviously the sustenance and nutrition necessary to fuel our
bodies. And again, this will tie back in when we come to it, but I've started
eating organic and just getting good clean water and all that sort of stuff,
and honestly a good 90 % of the symptoms of this disorder have gone, completely
rectified themselves. So I, at the worst, our youngest was,
she would have only, well, from newborn. I was having major issues in my right side
of my body and I could barely hold her and she's a tiny little thing. She was
very small baby and I would, my bicep would cramp. And I would have to put it
down. I literally couldn't hold a newborn child. The inflammation and tension in my
body. And now I'm back to training at the gym and pretty much doing every movement
that I want to in the gym. Just from basically taking the food back to the source
as God intended it to be and living in that form. And in that,
a lot of the study I've been doing has come to a realization that, I was listening
to a podcast the other day, and this human biologist was speaking to a dietitian
who was saying he's having a lot of people come to him with anxiety. And it's
prevalent in the world now. And he's saying he hasn't met a single person yet that
hasn't had a gut health issue associated with that. What he didn't explicitly say is
that fixing the gut health completely removes any chance of anxiety but it said it
has plays a big role and this comes back into what you were saying before is that
if we are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice we are to treat this
physical with the respect that it's due placing above it obviously the spiritual as
it says in Scripture, but it's not, God is interested in what happens with our
bodies and so unfortunately as Christians I think we can end up going too far down
one track and it's all spiritual, everything's spiritual. And so if there's a
physical manifestation of something it's like oh well that's just a separate issue.
Whereas what you're saying is that, and essentially what I'm trying to correlate here
is that no, they are intrinsically linked. And as we said before,
there's an outworking of physical from the spiritual. And that God is interested in
both. He's absolutely wants you to. Otherwise, and we said this before, why do we
have a physical being in the first place? He could have just created spiritual
beings to be a part of his larger family. But no, he's given us a life here to
live on this earth and he doesn't, he's not interested in us being afflicted either
by physical sickness or a mental illness. Yeah. Yeah, and so I think it's... And I
think too, the other belief that I didn't mention is, you know, there's a belief
that most actually have in the world that we're living in right now and is I am
my body.
I find this a major issue. I am my body and no you're actually a spirit you have
a soul and you live in a mobile home yeah yeah yeah and that mobile home can be
trashed or you can actually take care of yeah you can be trailer trash you can
actually take some pride in it and actually look after it with ties back into what
we were saying before now I actually want to hone in on one thing now that we've
kind of got the background of who you are and what you do.
I hope this resonates with other people because this really stood out to me.
When you were speaking about before, you're struggling and I don't know if this
certainly obviously wouldn't be isolated to men and you can speak to this, but I
think men would possibly struggle with this or is that bonding and that emotional
connection and actually breaking through that? You touched on it briefly as to how
how you actually found a breakthrough in that. Can you expand more on what, when
you were talking about that earlier and how that? - Yeah, well, I think you've got
to start with the belief or the assumption. It's generational to, you know, We don't
cry in this house. That's a family motto. We don't do hugs. Don't cry around here.
That's actually a motto. That's your formative belief system. So there's no chance of
getting that through to a man if he's connecting it to weakness. Now you go to the
prisons and say, hey, you know how you're feeling? They're like, you don't show any
feelings because it's all about control. It's all about power. You can't show
weakness. Well there's no difference for those that are outside of prison because
Psalms 142 verse 7 says bring my soul out of prison that I may pros you. So we
have these internal prisons in place without even realizing it. So there's a massive
disconnect and especially if say you know you've got a son who's inclined more
emotionally instead of intellectually then you're going to shut that down instead of
curving it in the right direction, encouraging it, instead of him being overly
emotional, you can train him to acknowledge his emotion but not live from the
emotion. It's okay to share, it's okay to debrief. I counseled father and the son
and the father was absolutely beside himself when he just made a comment at a
cricket match and his son took at the heart because he was so sensitive.
because there's no point telling people about this unless you can actually show them
what they truly believe. That's why there's blockages. So where did it all start for
me? When I learned a certain communication, which is the healthiest form of
communication. So I used to punch people and then say, what are you looking at?
That was my form of communication. I didn't have any tolerance for people. So I've
come a long way. Well, we've made it this far. So let's just say I had to learn
how to relate to people and I was never educated how to do that and there was no
good examples. So where this began is I phoned up my mum.
I said, mum, I just want to have a chat with you. I just want to let you know
how I felt in my childhood. So I was bashed with a pool cue at the age of eight
or nine for having a shot on a free pool table in the kids room. There was no
questions asked, nothing at all. And I got flogged with a pool cue,
crippled on the floor in traumatising pain and weeping and crying. And no one was
there for me. I didn't even tell my mum about that.
So we see this generation how they meant to express or talk about or relate to
What's meant to be normal if they think that that's normal? It's normal not to
speak out. It's normal to stay silent You get what I'm saying. So when I said to
my mom, this is how I felt as a kid The first thing she done. She said, don't
you dare go putting guilt and shame on me. I Said mom. I said,
this isn't about you. I said, this is about me. I've never shared with you what it
was like for me as a kid. And the walls came instantly down. I went, wow,
she thought I was attacking her. See, she's never heard me express my heart. Or
another time in the car, I'm two years, you know, doing really well in my life and
away from the old life. And I said, oh, I'm really struggling. So as far as
vulnerability, men don't do vulnerability. It's not on their number one list, right?
Because vulnerability could also be associated to weakness
or being attacked. So I said to my mum, I'm struggling. This is what I'm going
through. And straight away, she's going, oh, son, I'm so proud of you. You're
amazing. You're listening now, and I'm just going, why Is this not something that
I'm enjoying you say back to me and I'm getting agitated?" And I stopped the
conversation and I said, "What's going on here? What's your problem? Why do you keep
speaking like this, like it's all positive when I'm trying to share with you
something that's deep?" She turns around and she goes, "Oh, son, to be honest with
you, I'm absolutely terrified.
I'm terrified that you'll go back to your old life." I said, "Mum, since when did
I ever reach out to you? "Any time I went back to my old life "and say to you
that I'm struggling." She said, "You never have." I said, "We're not used to it,
are we? "We're not used to being vulnerable. "We're not used to relating to each
other." And she said, "Son, I won't do that to you again. "If you share something
with me, "I'll let you share in safety and peace "and I'll hear you out and pray
for you." - Yeah, wow. - So it broke broke the walls, it built bridges, and that's
the biggest problem we have. People don't feel connected, they don't feel bonded.
That's why we have bonding disruptions. On that note, I was actually listening to a
very interesting podcast the other day, and for anyone who may have heard this,
hopefully we can speak into this a little bit, Matt Walsh was speaking with Tucker
Carlson, And they were discussing some things and most of it I thoroughly agreed
with I've got a lot of respect for both those men But they were discussing being
stoic essentially, stoicism yes, and Matt Walsh's comment was if I had terminal
cancer my wife wouldn't even know and I was like, oh wow Gee, that's a bit extreme
like I Certainly agree with him that you know you don't walk in the house after a
heavy day and it's go oh everyone at work hates me and it's not in your wife's
role to exactly to hold you up as a man and and you know she's not your mum
she's not gonna put a little bandaid on your knee and give you a kiss on the
forehead and all that sort of stuff you've got to be able to be a man who can
stand on his own two feet but there is has to be a balance there because I went
home and I spoke to my wife about this after listening to this podcast And she's
like, "What? There's no way I would not want you to tell me what you're going
through." Exactly. We're in this relationship to share the burden and to actually to
journey through things together. Otherwise, we're just housemates. And G'day, how are
you going? Yeah, good dinner. But it's called two hips in the night, not two ships
in the night. Yeah, fine, okay.
If you get what I'm So can you can you speak a little bit into that from your
perspective of what you've seen because you're seeing both sides of these You're
seeing massively men who Well both sides of it in in a number of aspects both
sides as in men who are overly emotional and men who are Locked up essentially and
can't access that and it's just a keep everything shove it down It's yours to deal
with. No one else needs to know about it. But then also men who have gone through
either being over -emotional or locked up and then come out the other side where
they have a healthy balance. Are you able to speak a little bit into that, the
extreme form of that stoicism where you share nothing, it's yours to bear,
all that sort of stuff. From a biblical perspective, what would you speak into that?
I think it comes down to a hardened heart. And I think it takes time for the
heart to be transformed because until you deal with the beliefs that hold the heart
together, we're not being transformed. You know, I know Christian men today that
they've got no empathy, they've got no compassion or at least they don't show it.
And so there's some kind of blockage there and God wants to remove those blocks.
Jesus moved with compassion. Do you know the shortest verse in the Bible? Jesus
wept.
But no, we've got to hold it in. We've got to be strong, but Jesus wept. So when
it comes to what you call as the stoic or stoicism, it's the head cut off from
the heart. What happens is we can end up intellectually becoming dominant so we
don't have to feel. It's called intellectualism. It's a defense mechanism to protect
yourself. But then we have what we call emotional directed reasoning everything is
based on how we feel and The lie that is underneath that feeling is my feelings
would never lie to me Try and tell that to an inner anorexic person.
You're gonna die. No, I'm not I'm overweight. I'm fat Because of how they feel so
this is the extreme They base everything on what they feel or they base everything
on what they think with no consideration in between. So this is where we need a
balance with our head and our heart. This is where we need to be strong as men
and also pick our moments when to be vulnerable and to share not to overshare and
that's the healthy balance. So that's what I would say when it comes to that. And
King David didn't have an issue at all. He lamented before the Lord. You know,
the way I like to picture lamenting is, you know, you've got an oil sump in your
car, yeah? It's got some dirty oil in it. See, the way us believers are believing
is, oh, we just jammed new oil into the engine and it's just going to just get
rid of the old oil. But That's not the way it works. We've actually got to take
the bolt out, let the old oil drain, put the bolt back in,
and then let the new oil in. And so this is what it's like when we connect to
Heavenly Father. Heavenly Father, I feel like I'm about to sink under all this
pressure. I feel like I'm going under. I feel completely powerless. God's saying, "I
know that's not what you believe, but at least you're sharing with me in a
vulnerable state. You're coming close to me. This is what's going on. But despite
how I feel, you put the bolt back in and you start letting the oil come where the
old oil has been let out. So it's getting rid of the old oil and let the new oil
come in. I trust you no matter how I feel. I worship you,
just like King David in Psalms 42 verse 5 and 6, right, says, "Why are you
downcast on my soul? Why are you disquieted within me?" And he told himself four
things. So it's been able to express but not over process.
So what happens is if it's always based on how you feel, then you're going beyond
the limits of what we're meant to truly believe. So that's when it becomes
dangerous. But King David told himself, he asked himself the question, then he told
himself four things. Number one, he said, hope in God. Number two, it says that he
was to praise God. Then it says, number three, that he was to wait on God.
And number four, he was to remember God on Mount Hermon, which basically saying,
remember Remember David, all the things that God had done in the high places prior
to this event happening. Don't remember all the bad, remember all the good. So this
was to try and get him out of a place of depression and despair. So I think the
balance in all this is being able to express in a very simplistic way and then
praising God, waiting on God, hoping in God and remembering Him in that moment. So
you're building your faith. I like this verse. So Paul's in prison, right? Imagine
what it's like in prison. - And particularly back then, there's not modern prison.
- Atrocious. - Yeah. - We don't consider how much Paul went through. He says, "I bear
in my body the mark of Jesus." This guy was beaten from pillar to post. And he
said in his letter, especially to the Philippians while he's in prison, He said I'm
persuaded. So I think the missing link is persuasion.
So we've been good at talking about the high praises of God. You know talking about
praise, worship, prayer, profession, confession but we've missed the missing ingredient
to our own spirit when it comes to a guilty conscience and that is reassurance and
persuasion. So when Paul said, "I'm persuaded," in the Greek it's a Greek word
"pitho." And Rick Renner, who's a Greek scholar, he says this word "pitho" could be
translated as self -talk. He said, "It also means to speak oneself into a position
of faith." So when I think about you saying what's the extreme,
the extreme is overthinking and the extreme is over feeling. So when you get the
balance of both, where you can express yourself in a simple way and think in simple
terms and go back to the scriptures, that's where we balance things out and that's
where we grow up. As they say, too much of the spirit, you blow up, too much of
the word, you dry up, put the two together and you grow up. That's a good way of
putting it. - Sorry, just a little bit slower for everyone listening again, so that
one again. - Okay, so too much of the spirit, you'll blow up. - Yeah. you know
producing fruit we become a fruit cakes yes okay and then you've got too much of
the word and you dry up okay and then you put the two together
voila you grow up yeah that's why we're not growing yeah just around a balance yep
I think that's that's a great place to leave it for But for now, I think that's a
really good summation of just some, if someone is out there listening now that is
struggling with anxiety, depression or any of these things that we've discussed,
that's a really, really good foundational platform to start from. But obviously, if
you really need help, reach out. Where can people find you and your ministry?
www that are you. Yeah, that's the main website. And we'll put all that description
in the link, so all those links in the description, as well as some of the
scriptures that Mark's quoted here today as well. So yeah, thank you very much for
joining us and we'll see you again soon.