Steve Hemphill is the former CEO of a seven-figure tech company, lifelong cessationist, and now one of the most unusual ministers in America.Hemphill tells BlazeTV host Steve Deace that his life changed after his father suddenly passed away of a heart attack, leaving behind an “ancient safe.” What he found was a sealed envelope addressed to him and his brother.“It said, ‘If you boys find this envelope after I’m dead, do not open it. It is not important. Destroy this envelope without opening it, Dad.’ And it was dated about five months before he died very suddenly and unexpectedly,” he explains.“So, we burned it without reading it. And I think about it every day.”“I became very curious about heaven because of the envelope from Dad. It made me curious about what was in the envelope. But that also led to a curiosity about what’s eternity really like,” he explains.As Hemphill began looking deeper into the Bible, he began to realize that spiritual warfare is real.“If you don’t have the Holy Spirit, you got a demon spirit instead. In other words, only people with the Holy Spirit can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’” he says, recalling a run-in he had with a retired professor from Stanford.The professor walked into a Burger King, saw Hemphill there reading the Bible in a booth, and began to say “some very strange things about the Bible.”“So, I gently interrupted this guy and said, ‘Dr. Smith, let me ask you a question. Is Jesus Lord?’ This guy got so angry at that simple three-word question that he jumps up out of the booth and starts running circles around the Burger King dining room there, screaming at me at the top of is lungs, ‘No, who is Jesus? I don’t know who Jesus is. I’m wasting my time talking to you,’” he recalls.“I looked up at him and said, ‘Sir, I’m going to pray for you that someday you can know Jesus as Lord.’ And that made him even angrier. He leaned into me, and he’s spitting through gritted teeth, and he shakes his finger right in my face,” he continues.“He says, ‘Don’t you dare pray for me.’ And I don’t know why I did this because I’ve never done it before or since. I smiled and said, ‘I can pray for you right now. You can’t stop me.’ And he screamed and ran out of Burger King and slammed the door,” he adds.“So, that was the story that turned the tide for me and began to open my eyes that there’s modern-day situations where demonic activity is still happening,”This recognition of spiritual warfare eventually led to Hemphill using “stakes,” which refers to putting the word of God on evil land.“My buddy was a Christian, and this guy he was friends with was not a Christian. And so, when I met the guy, I said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s your spiritual warfare problem?’ And he said, ‘I have demons on my property, and I’m getting ready to commit suicide,’” Hemphill tells Deace.“I said, ‘Let’s take some tent stakes and write Bible verses on them and hammer them all the way in the ground on the four corners of your land where this is happening. Let’s read the verses out loud to honor God and pray and ask him to make all these bad things stop in your life and see what he does,’” he explains.“The next week he became a Christian and wanted to be baptized. And that was just bizarre to me. It was hard for me to swallow,” he adds.But when another woman came to him for help after having terrifying demonic dreams every night at 3 a.m., he tried the same thing. Her nightmares stopped.“Next thing you know, they’re asking me to stake out this public school. And we did that, and all the problems went away there. The guy causing them died of a heart attack immediately, 30-year-old guy,” he explains. “I can’t make this stuff up.”Want more from Steve Deace?To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
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