Excuse me, all right, I'm live. I don't know if you got me just coughing and hacking for a second there, but this is the Q&A, the Friday Q&A, 20 questions with Pastor Mike.

I'm Mike Winger and I'm here to try to help you learn to think biblically about everything. Those of you who regularly watch, you may have noticed that my microphone is no longer in my face.

It will take a few weeks of tweaking, but I'm experimenting with a new way of doing things with a different microphone that might not take up as much space than I don't whack it as much with my hands, and I'm free to do more of this because I obviously don't talk with my hands enough.

So here we go. The first question we have for today comes in from

Mufo Sandane who says, what are soul ties and are they biblical? And I can't pretend to speak to everything about soul ties, so let's just think about it a little bit together, and I'll share a few thoughts I have

having not spent a ton of time on it, but having spent a little bit of time on it. It seems first off the first question, what are soul ties is the hardest one?

Because because different people answer this question radically different ways, you have like, let's take for instance the this sort of

perspective on say soul ties that we've got from more like I wouldn't say exactly secular, but let's say not Christian groups. Okay, so there there might be new age beliefs in there might be

no like spirituality without religion, that kind of misnomer, they might be thinking that that's their category, and they'll talk about soul ties as though these these things are

basically like a crush. Sometimes they talk about it like it's a crush. I saw there's a wiki how article on how to identify and deal with soul ties, and they give a list of reasons if you have a soul tie, it means that you think about this person all the time, you feel a special connection to them, you you might dream about them, and I'm like, yeah, that just sounds like a teenage crush, but then there's another category where people will talk about soul ties as though they're like a danger and a threat, and that is more often what we're talking about.

We get from people that are more overtly religious, and even in the more deliverance ministries. Okay, now I'm not against deliverance ministries, but I think that deliverance ministries come with potential problems that at least the most prominent ones, the one you see the most online, at least I see the most online, they seem like they fall into these problems, and the more local ones where it's just, it seems like maybe they handle things with more wisdom.

So I'm just being straight with you guys, this is my impression, but these deliverance ministries, they approach soul ties, it feels like in a very different way.

So to them, soul ties are like these unhealthy connections that may or may not have to do, and some of them might say a soul ties, this connection between your soul and someone else's soul, they're tied together, they'll they'll define it in somewhat vague terms, it's a spiritual connection of some kind,

and it could have been arrived at through like physical intercourse, or maybe just some kind of obsession, they'll even show that you could have soul ties to people, those people, it could be romantic, you know, relationship, or it could be like a leader, it's not romantic at all, but it's just a leader, and you have a soul tie to them, I saw a guy talking about that, it could be a soul tie to a child, I saw a video where I was talking about this, talking about breaking soul ties, and you saying, you know, soul ties to children can be a thing where it's an unhealthy soul tie, and then they'll give you these steps of how to break the soul ties

so the steps kind of come, it seems to me they come from the perspective of like, I'm sort of your guide, your spiritual guide, and I will offer you the rituals and the rules on how to break the soul ties, now I'm a little suspicious of this, but I'm not, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water here, so I have a bit of a conflicting ideas about it, so let me share with you some of the things I wrote down for myself,

some is the fact that some will say a soul tie is simply like a vague spiritual connection between two people, and the more vague they make it, the harder it is to say that it's wrong, but then it's hard for them if they're going to really be that vague, to then justify all their rituals and rules for how this works, how to identify it, and how to get rid of it, because if it's that vague that you can defend it easily, it doesn't really lead to all these sort of, you need the spiritual guru to help you through it,

others will be much more specific than they'll say, hey we've, you know, like I'm hearing you tell your story, and I'm identifying a soul tie, Ah, I see you have a soul tie with that person, and some will go way off the deep end, and they'll actually do,

and I would consider this off the deep end, they'll say you're spiritually married to that person, that person is your spiritual husband or wife, now I'm not saying the majority of the soul tie people do this, but just to understand the fringe, they will actually offer divorces, or you can get a spiritual divorce,

So let's say I'm married to my wife, and there's someone who's obsessed with me, some woman is obsessed with me.

Somebody might conclude that that person is my spiritual wife. They bound themselves to me spiritually speaking, and now I have to have a spiritual divorce.

I'm like, no, I'm in no way validating their obsession by acting like there's an actual connection with me.

That's creepy.

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