Guest Ministry with Ps Lucas Connell

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
Welcome to the City Lights Church Podcast. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing today, we hope this message inspires you to follow Jesus. You can find out more about City Lights Church at city-lights.church.

**Lucas Connell** (0:24)
Excellent, everyone doing well? Yeah, good. What an amazing new building. How cool is this?
So good. So good to be here today. And why don't you just, just for a moment, I'd love to pray for you. Why don't you just put your hands like that if you're okay with that. Father, I just thank you for your Holy Spirit. God, I pray today that as we open your Word, God, I thank you that Holy Spirit is in this place right now. God, and I pray that you would do significant things in people's hearts. God, we open our hearts to you, and we say, God, have your way today. Do something transformational, Father, that we would literally leave this place knowing that we're different, not because of a message that a man spoke, but because of what you, our heavenly Father, does in each one of us, God. So we thank you for that in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, well done to the five people getting baptized as well. Can we give them a massive round of applause? So exciting, fantastic. Well, I want to share a word today, and I've shared my story many times. I think this is the fourth time that I've been here. But really, just quickly for those that... Give me a wave if you've never heard me speak before. Yeah, I look like half the crowd. Either that or I just wasn't that good last time. And then once I start getting going, you're like, oh, I know, yeah, I've heard you speak. Anyway, but I grew up in Melbourne, and I grew up in a family of addiction, and my parents did drugs, a lot of my relatives did drugs. At 12 or 13, I was doing drugs, marijuana, beans drinking. By 15, I was injecting amphetamines. At 16, I took an acid trip where I overdosed at a house where they were involved in satanic worship. I overdosed for three hours. I was tormented by demons. I wasn't a believer, I wasn't a Christian. That experience left me with what psychologists have diagnosed as drug-induced psychosis, where for the next about five years, the television would speak to me, the radio would speak to me. I was suicidal. I almost took my life at 19, but I had one lady who was the only believer in our whole family who had been praying for me for 17 years that I would encounter the love of Jesus. How amazing is that? 17 years. Don't ever stop believing because who knows God can do miracles. And so, in a moment, I had an encounter with Jesus at 23 years old, where I encountered the love of the Father in such a profound way. In that moment, I had just been a Christian two weeks, I had actually moved to the Gold Coast. And in that moment, God completely set me free of every addiction. And you know, don't you love that? That what took the devil 23 years of his downward destructive demonic cycle just took God one word. One word to say, it's done, it's broken. And so I was healed in a moment. And you know, but what I want to speak on, share a message called lost in religion. And I want to, God kind of revealed to me the reason why I ended up becoming a drug addict, in a sense. What society would call a junkie that was mentally ill. And there were lots of things that caused me to end up being like that. But you know, there was obviously my parents' role model, not great behavior. The friendship groups that I was drawn to, the decisions that I made, that I was responsible for. But God kind of showed me that, you know, the real key thing, and it's probably, it's common to many people in the room, is the simple fact that when I was five years old, my dad left. I still saw my dad, but as a little boy, that moment something happened within my heart that I felt like my dad's love was taken away. And so again, this is, God revealed this to me once I become a Christian, is that what happened is I started to look at my earthly dad and went on a quest to try and get back his love. And so I watched in my subconscious what he valued, and he valued excessive drinking, excessive drug taking, sleeping around, being the person at the party that would make everybody laugh. And as a little boy growing up subconsciously, I thought if I can get really good at those things, maybe I'll get my earthly dad's love back. But you know the story, it didn't get me his love back, instead caused me to become what society would call a junkie that was mentally ill.