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Getting To Know Matt & Katie Spinks | New Blog Series Intro - Part 2

In starting our new series of Jubilee blogs and videos, we thought it seemed appropriate to revisit our personal story, especially how we were first awakened to the Gospel, the true Jubilee!

This is also available in Matt’s book “High On God,” chapter one.

So, I grew up in a semi-typical American home and family, Christian, kind of. Parents separated, Dad went to jail, moved around a few times. I ended up attending Lutheran schools for the most part, all the way through high school. I always kind of had an awareness of God. Looking back, I’ve always had somewhat of a strange inclination towards God. I did my homework as a youngster, because somehow I knew that “God” wanted me to do it. I used to talk to God, but never felt that much response. I was raised learning about Jesus and grace. It wasn’t much of actually communing with God, but general Christian teachings were present. (Does this feel like a cheesy summer camp testimony yet? LOL!)

In high school, I had two youth leaders. They were both very passionate, encouraging men. They always attempted to inspire me to live my life fully for Jesus Christ. They shaped me to have godly vision and plans for my life, to be a youth pastor or missionary or the like. They never pressured me, but encouraged me toward a spiritual life vision. I had always known that I wanted to love and serve God in some way. The problem was that high school, and life in general made me pretty disillusioned with the world. I saw a lot of hypocrisy in my religious schooling, and a major lack of passion in the church. I also had this pervading sense that as long as I was still in high school I would never be able to do anything that really mattered. Still, I didn’t want to drop out. I figured that I at least needed to finish school. But, I stopped trying to get A’s in my classes, began to just have fun as much as I could, and go to parties, etc. The last year of high school especially was experiments with LSD, DXM, marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs. I also spent a lot of time listening to and playing music. To be honest, though, I was all over the place in my head.

I would lead our high school youth group’s worship gatherings on my guitar, while at the same time being high on LSD. It was a strange time. I did not feel great about using drugs and being a youth leader at the same time. I wanted to live for God in purity. I did wonder if drugs could fit in there somewhere. A lot of my Christian high school friends were pretty confused in many of the same areas. We believed in grace and God’s love, so why couldn’t drugs, sex, and questionable living be included in there somewhere too? We didn’t know, and no one around us offered much clarity. We weren’t exactly talking to the adults around us about it, but amongst our friend group we were pretty confused.

Around the same time, through our youth group’s mission trip to Mexico, I encountered some radical charismatic type believers and missionaries. I met young people who were living together doing mission work and spending all day worshipping, praying, and telling people about Jesus. It made so much sense to me. I saw a glimpse of a new world. I so wanted to be a part of a group like this. They had more joy and passion than I had, for sure. They also seemed to be living honest and open lives with no double standards. Their way of life absolutely appealed to me! So, I made plans to join this mission organization and immerse myself in a new life-style. These missionaries lived as if they were hearing God, communicating with God in supernatural ways, and had a whole different culture of dedication. As soon as I was finished with high school I signed up to join this group of missionaries. I started off right away for a distant country.

As soon as I arrived, my training started in a whole new paradigm and culture of following Jesus. It was way more focused, intense, and dedicated. I joined a group of new students from around the world who were also being trained in missions school together. This year, 2001, was a very powerful time for me.

I remember, as I arrived in the foreign land, and was just getting to know my new school mates, going out to the beach with a friend who had also just recently quit doing drugs. We sat by the ocean and discussed if we thought that we could remain drug free, and how this new life was going to be for us. We both asked ourselves, “Is there not a way to be at least as high on God as we were on drugs?” We both were not even 20 years old. And, we both were sincerely asking one another that question. We promised that if we ever found out answers we would let each other know. It was such a genuine question, but we literally had no idea how to get high on God. We imagined it must have been possible. But, we honestly had no clue. I remember thinking how far away that reality felt. It was as if really living high on God would be only for the super spiritual person, or maybe for just a few special people that had figured out some weird secret. It took me until seven years later to encounter my first glimpses of someone who was experiencing these realities. I met a lot of spiritual people, but this experience did not seem to be happening with anyone. If anyone was experiencing this, they were keeping it quiet. I pretty much forgot about the whole thing for a long time. My first encounters with those who were high on God weren’t until the year 2008.

Anyhow, I continued on with this missionary group, completing six months of their missionary training. At the end of the training I returned home to Fort Wayne, Indiana to pray about where to go on assignment. The night after I arrived home, I did have a truly profound life changing experience. I experienced something I now believe to be the baptism of the Holy Spirit. All of a sudden, I began speaking in tongues, reading some of the thoughts of the people around me, seeing a bit of the future, and hearing God speaking clearly. It was amazing! It truly changed everything! I immediately went to my parents and told them everything I had ever done. I told them all the old secrets that I had kept from them, the drugs and other stuff that’s not really worth mentioning here. I began to really be focused and passionate for God. I have never abused drugs again since 2001, never again having a problem with alcohol abuse either. For the next seven years I helped lead youth revivals, lived in foreign countries, ran missionary schools, preached Jesus, built homes for homeless families, and was involved in all kinds of ministry work. Yet, as seemingly great as those years were, I was never overwhelmingly happy. My life is significantly different now, in some pretty incredible ways. I’ll get into that here soon! Holy Spirit!!!

During those seven years, I was absolutely dedicated to Jesus Christ. I still am to this day. However, what I am about to describe has often been hard to explain. It often confuses people. How I could have been so dedicated to God and yet lived day to day with such a feeling of lack? It can be especially hard to explain because depression has become so normal in today’s culture. No one would have even classified me as depressed, but compared to now...I truly was!

What do you mean depressed? What are you actually experiencing now? Isn’t it just a little warmth or a bit of future hope? I may try to use many different words, pictures, or ways of explaining, not because anyone reading this is stupid, but because I get asked these questions so many times, everywhere I go. In fact, the majority of this book will be to attempt to clearly explain what is different about my life now! As one of our friends once said, “The only problem left with this Good News is how to put it into words!”

One way to describe my experience is this...

During those seven years I was mostly driven by what some call the “fire of God”. I was mostly doing things responding to need and lack. I was motivated by a consuming passion to fix the world. I was trying really hard to get everyone “saved”. Needless to say, it was like carrying a ton of weight around with me all the time! I had a genuine ache inside me to see everyone whole and free. Now it’s not a bad thing to care deeply about the world, but it always felt like something was missing. As I went to bed most nights, I would lie awake thinking over and over again about what more I could be doing. I would think about how much the world needed to change. I had so much “fire”. That same fire of passion remains to this day, but I see now that there’s something profoundly different about it. There’s another side of the God-life besides working for God. There has come much more clarity now. That’s what this book is about. I really want to communicate a realm that has been revealed to me, to us, to the planet!

For those seven years, I was driven to help people, yet I myself was not happy. I was trying to serve and bless everywhere I went, but I did not feel full and overflowing. I knew all the Bible verses about, “my cup overflows”, and “the fullness of joy”, but I could not really describe how that felt. My message to others was always about getting more of God, opening the heavens, changing the world, or how to release the supernatural. My life and message had a certain underlying theme of how we were all off track and needed to get things right in order to save the world. I had so much passion! I loved God and others genuinely! Yet, my view of reality was not leaving me fulfilled! It definitely wasn’t producing happy healthy lives around me. My life was definitely not “joy unspeakable and full of Glory” as the Bible says in first Peter chapter one verse eight!

I would lead church meetings, and often we would have amazing music, amazing messages, and yet I felt dis-satisfied at the end of every one. I would go to bed frustrated at night. And, trust me, I tried everything I knew to shake this feeling. I kept thinking that maybe I just needed to serve God more or do more to change the world! I tried multiple long periods of fasting, intense weeks of study and seeking God, serving in far-away countries, organizing city church leaders in unity, repenting for everything I had ever done, etc. Nothing felt like it was working. I was just never seeing enough change in myself or the world. I felt like almost everyone was missing out on God. If I wasn’t doing enough in all my efforts, then surely very few of my fellow humans could be experiencing the real kingdom of God on earth. Like I said, no one would have considered me depressed. I seemed like the model of a good person. My frustration made me all the more motivated. I just became more and more disciplined. I just kept believing that eventually I would “break through.” I was so intense, and was forcing my intensity on my friends and all those around me. I would always be looking for an opportunity to challenge them to more prayer, more Bible study, more service to God and to humanity. I look back now and see that my intensity was hurting as many people as I helped in those days. However, I was doing everything that good spiritual leaders around me would have recommended.

It was during these seven years, that I played a significant role in starting up a small home based spiritual community in Indiana. I gathered as many friends and like-minded folks as I could to attempt to live as Jesus followers in a radical way. We started to meet in homes in 2005 forming our own dedicated group of believers. And, as you may have guessed, it didn’t take long before I was challenging them at every turn to do more and more and more! We met seven nights a week! I had them scheduling every hour of their day out on paper, showing it to others in the group for accountability. We all became convinced that we needed to make sure that each of us were growing more intense and disciplined each day. We wanted to see more supernatural activity. We wanted to hear God more clearly. We wanted to see our city and world changed! The intensity continued. I was a part of several local and international ministries. I was putting every ounce of energy into it.

I was married during this time, and my lovely wife, Katie, joined right in with me in our intensity. We criticized and even dis-associated ourselves with “hypocritical” family members. We wondered how long it would take until the world would change, if ever. We were not going to be a part of that old system. We would call out and challenge anyone who we thought was a part of that system. We were speaking the truth in love, so we thought. We weren’t even always rude. We still probably looked quite spiritual to many people. Many folks commended us for our dedication. They said that we were great examples and very humble Christians. We didn’t really care about that stuff though. We honestly just wanted God to be glorified and we were going to do whatever it took to get the most people to glorify God. (My wife was much sweeter about all this than I was, just for the record, hehehe!)

BUT THEN WE GOT HIGH!! AHHHHHHH!!!! YAY! LOL!!!!!!!!!!!

In the year 2008, everything changed! The burden was lifted! We began to have a completely different experience of God, life, and everything! And, here’s how. Here’s how the hammer of the Most High fell upon us, LOL...

On the very first day of 2008, we were at a large spiritual gathering for prayer. During one of the meetings, a whole group of us began to speak in tongues. As we did, I felt literal spiritual winds blow through my belly, my body, my soul. The whole rest of the day I was in some sort of trance, and could really the spirits of people around me, literally I felt them. I also heard God in an amazing way that day, more clearly than ever before. Something opened up for me there. It felt amazing, and I was very aware of having a tangible relationship with God in some kind of new way. However, that wasn’t the biggest thing to happen to me that year. Really, I didn’t even feel high there. That experience of love was still just scratching the surface of what was about to happen in the next few months.

Something else worth noting happened at that same gathering as well. It was there that I met my first group of “God stoners”! (That’s just a random term I am using, not an actual title they had. LOL!) Now, at first I didn’t really know what was going on with them. It was a group of 12-15 young people that I kept running into, in the midst of countless thousands at this huge spiritual gathering. Yet, these guys were easy to spot because they were always laughing and falling over. You could always pick them out of the crowd. They also kept using their finger to poke the people around them. Whoever the person was that they poked seemed to get high and would start laughing and fall over as well. These guys would stand in one spot together for a long, long time laughing and just falling down and just kind of praising God in the spot where they were.

I decided to observe this group of whackos. To be honest, they made me pretty upset and irritated. But, I couldn’t figure out why they bothered me at all. They were just laughing and falling. Why was this making me upset? I did know that I had never seen or experienced this myself, so maybe I just thought that they were faking it, or maybe I just didn’t like what I couldn’t understand, or something like that. I remember watching them for like an hour. I was obviously struck by what was going on. I kept wondering if this kind of behavior was beneficial in any way. I wondered if their lives were fruitful. I saw something later that day that really spoke to me in that regard. This same group of people prayed for a man in a wheelchair. They prayed with him, and hugged him for like an hour. He got up out of the chair! He was healed! They seemed to be the only group at this entire massive spiritual gathering with the kind of power flowing through them to heal someone so afflicted. Still, I just thought to myself that these people were pretty weird. At the end of the few days gathering, I couldn’t quite figure out what truly bothered me about them. I decided not to give it much more thought.

My wife and I had gone to the gathering together. We left feeling encouraged, but mostly, life was the same as ever for us. We were becoming more disciplined, we thought. We kept becoming more and more intense, spiritually.

Then, something started changing. Within a couple months of that gathering my wife began to seem a bit intoxicated when we would pray together. It wasn’t every time, but sometimes. We had been watching some videos from a particular female missionary in Africa who would often behave drunk when in prayer or while preaching. So, at first, I thought that my wife was just copying this woman. Maybe she was trying to act more spiritual or something I thought. At first, I would take my wife aside and try to tell her to stop. My wife was getting high on God, and I would rebuke her for it! I remember rebuking her so harshly one evening that I made her cry. She was just genuinely being touched and influenced by God, but I didn’t understand it. So, I tried to shut her down. Thankfully, that only lasted a couple of months. We were both about to get blasted in a wonderful intense way!

On with our story! At that time, we would often lead city-wide prayer gatherings around our region. We would help with leading music and singing. This was all still during early 2008. However, one of these gatherings was about to have an interesting turn of events for us! We had been asked to lead the music and prayer for a gathering on a local college campus, to pray for the campus and “contending for revival”. As it went along, about half-way through the gathering, I felt to sing a particular song with lyrics about opening up the flood gates of heaven. I was really feeling determined to keep singing this song until we saw something powerful happen. We literally sang that same song for like 30 minutes, but nothing noticeable happened. I broke several guitar strings from the intensity with which I was playing. Eventually, the meeting ended, and we all went home.

The next day a married couple who we had just recently met called Katie and I over to their house to share some food and prophetic experiences with us. We had seen some cool things in the lives of these guys. They were humble and yet powerful in the things of God. So, we excitedly drove over to their house to hang out. They shared several experiences and words with us that day. They prayed for us, and even laid hands on us to release some spiritual impartation. The most powerful thing for me, though, was a comment from the man of the house, a comment made almost in passing. It was a statement that has forever changed my life. He began to describe, kindly and with much appreciation in his voice, the city-wide prayer gathering from the night before. The couple had been present there and seemed to have enjoyed it, at least somewhat. The man began to talk about the song that I had sung about opening the floodgates of heaven. And, here’s the statement he made that changed my life forever. He said, “It’s really great to sing a song about opening the floodgates of heaven, you know, as long as you know that the heavens are already open.” I laughed, and said, “Yeah, totally, of course!” Truthfully, I was struck to the heart at that moment. The words he said there resounded within my heart and mind for days afterward. This was the first time that I had ever truly realized the truth of what he had just said. We finished our beautiful time of fellowship with the couple and went back to our home. Yet, that phrase stuck with me. To this day, I can still feel it! I am so grateful to GOD!!!!

While I pretended to understand what “the heavens are already open” meant, it was obvious that I didn’t understand it at all. Surprisingly, this was finally the beginning of my journey down the rabbit hole of the genuine message of Jesus Christ. A spirit of revelation was coming over me in a powerful way! I was hearing the Gospel for the first time! This message was somehow standing out as strikingly different from what I had previously believed! Let me say that, even as you read, this may seem like no big deal at first. I have come to see, however, that many people are just like me. I had previously thought that God wanted me to get the conditions just right before He would heal and restore the planet. I had come to know that God wanted healing, joy, life, and passion in people’s lives. Yet, I thought that these things would only be made real if we could, “rend the heavens”, and get God to come down, or if we could make something really happen through our prayers or fasting strategies. Maybe then this heavenly life could be ours and our cities and world would be transformed!

All of a sudden this new message was rocking the understanding built previously in my life. I had valued God and His Presence coming to us supernaturally. I knew that God was the solution to all life. The issue was that I thought that something was stopping God. I was totally convinced that there were massive spiritual barriers and hindrances of many different names and sources. I had been taught, or somehow come to believe, that God’s presence and blessings were at best only partially accessible. Now my heart and mind were being opened to a new possibility. What if heaven and earth were totally unified and open to one another? What if the Glory of God was all around, already flowing to all His creation like a waterfall, like a river?!?

This was early 2008, a time I now look back to as the greatest turning point of my life. It was a big set up! Not only did I see new things demonstrated by a new message that was changing my life, but at the very same time I was being introduced to a whole new community of folks who were experiencing this reality.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention by name some of the people I was introduced to at that time. Through two different friends, my wife and I began to plug into the conferences and work of Georgian & Winnie Banov, John Crowder, Benjamin Dunn, and Heidi Baker. You may be familiar with these Glory folks, or you may not. But, they had all either loosely or directly been associated with the Toronto Blessing movement of the 1990s. It was a controversial revival that has proved out to have borne amazing fruit over the years that have followed. It was marked by great joy, laughter, and tangible experiences of the Glory of God.

During this time, one friend gave me a book by John Crowder, and another friend recommended Mr. Crowder’s videos. Through John Crowder, I began to listen to the music of Benjamin Dunn. Through both of these guys we began to attend conferences with the Banovs, and Heidi Baker.

While we were hearing from these ministers, my wife and I began to experience heaven! They spoke of a heaven that was nearer than we had ever dared to believe. Over the early months of 2008, believe it or not, we would be laid out on the floor just laughing and being overwhelmed, not by any change in circumstances really, but by a tangible felt Presence of God. Simply put, we would get overwhelmingly HIGH! Both my wife Katie and I had done drugs in the past. This was far greater! We began to feel a whole body buzz, a euphoria, a deep joy, a love for all, and so many more things which will be described later in this book! The only way to sum it up is to say, “We were high!” When we would gather with like-minded believers we would get so wasted, so jacked up as we would celebrate! It would then remain when we were alone, and on even into all kinds of circumstances. We began to feel God’s heart so powerfully. We felt a love that was so far beyond what we had been able to muster before! Oh my GOD!

At that time, Katie and I would have a daily prayer time where we would spend an hour or two together each afternoon. Normally, it had been filled with pleading and crying out for so many things in prayer. All of a sudden, it was as if we were struck mute. (We actually were completely mute sometimes!) We would come to our prayer time already so overwhelmingly happy. All we could do was just sit and smile. There was just an absolute sense that Jesus had already finished it all. At that time we thought, “What more is there to pray for?” Heaven had come down! Was heaven already on earth? We laughed, smiled, and sat there in the tangible warmth of God.

This truly was the most transformative time of our lives. It was as if we had finally heard the best news in the cosmos! It changed everything. We became such satisfied people. We became such happy people. We felt so whole. And, the feeling of being high was constant! We would wake up stoned, and go to bed high, on God alone. It was amazing. It was exhilarating. It has never stopped!

After that time, we have continued to learn and experience so much more depth to this God-high. We learned a lot more about the Trinity, and the Person & work of Christ. We began to see miracles. Our local home fellowship community was rocked, and many began to get high with us. People moved from around the country to join our community, to live high 24/7 with us. It has been a wild journey! It has not been without persecution and challenges. Yet, the Glory has remained! The Presence is still so thick, it’s incredible. Heaven is here to stay!

“Friends, drink, be intoxicated with love!” - Song of Songs 5:1 (HCSB)

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