The Man Warrior King Podcast - Confident Christian Men and Passionate Marriages

When it feels like God has left you behind, rock bottom can convince you that sickness, defeat, and disappointment must be His plan. In this episode, Matt shares the season when his health, marriage, finances, and faith collapsed at the same time—and the biblical shift that helped him fight again.

You'll learn:

- Why “God is controlling everything” can keep Christian men passive
- How to test inherited beliefs against Scripture
- Why God’s promises require your agreement and action
- Three keys to rebuilding faith when your circumstances still look defeated
- How Matt moved from bedridden despair to praying boldly for others

🔥 FREE TRAINING — “Frustrated to Desired”
The masterclass helping Christian husbands reignite attraction and connection:
https://www.skool.com/man-warrior-king-4628/about

📘 The DNA of a Man (Book):
https://go.manwarriorking.com/dna-2026/

📝 The DNA of a Man Tactical Guide (Workbook):
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⚔️ The Masculine Husband 1:1 and Group Coaching (apply for a call with Matt):
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👑 Follow Matt Hallock and Man Warrior King to end powerless Christianity and build attraction that lasts:
https://www.youtube.com/@manwarriorking

Chapters

00:00 When It Feels Like God Left You Behind
04:22 Rock Bottom in Health, Marriage, and Faith
10:45 What Scripture Says About Sickness and Healing
17:10 Key 1: Question What You’ve Been Taught
17:18 Key 2: Think and Speak God’s Promises
23:36 Key 3: Stop Calling Defeat God’s Plan
24:56 Book and Free Marriage Training

🎬 Watch and Subscribe on Youtube:
https://youtu.be/KRI_4RBfSo4


Creators and Guests

Host
Matt Hallock
Founder of Man Warrior King and author of The DNA of a Man

What is The Man Warrior King Podcast - Confident Christian Men and Passionate Marriages?

Faith and masculinity meet kingdom living to help Christian husbands rebuild their confidence and masculine strength, so they can enjoy attraction-filled and passionate marriages.

You want to live a life on fire and on mission.

You want to be filled with such conviction and drive that you stop caring about what ANYone thinks.

You want to face each day alive, authentic, and fully present in every moment: with your wife, kids, on the street, at the gym, at work.

You want to bring yourSELF to the table, and to stop bringing the watered-down, nice, what everyone wants version of you.

You want that self to be a man who is burning in passion for Jesus, unafraid to bring his kingdom to anyone in your path, no matter the cost.

You want to love the one in front of you without fear, without needing love back, and without reserve.

You want to experience God for real, to not just believe, but to KNOW that he’s got you and that he’ll show up on your behalf. That he’ll show up THROUGH you.

You want to get to the end of your race and say, “Yep…I gave it everything. Jesus, you know I’m all in.”

...And you want to know just how to get there.

Welcome to Man Warrior King. Congratulations. You are among the violent taking the kingdom by force. You are among the chosen, answering the call to rise above your self. You are in the forge being stripped down and strengthened—and you WILL rise stronger, solid, unshakeable.

You are a man. You are a warrior. You are a king.

Matt (00:00)
Good afternoon. Welcome to another episode of the Man Warrior King podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hallock. This episode is a little bit different than normal. And if, like I said in the opening, if you know what it's like to feel discouraged and left out by God, and this is for you, there is hope in the story that I'm sharing with you today, because I know what it's like to have been at the bottom, the rock bottom.

of my marriage, rock bottom in my finances, rock bottom in my health, rock bottom in my emotions and mental state, rock bottom in my connection with God.

And I've been at all of those rock bottoms at the same time.

And I know there are many of us out there.

who battle the same kind of discouragement, the same kind of feelings of disappointment that God has let you down, that the abundant life that Jesus talks about either is a sham.

And he was full of it when he said that.

or in its best light, it's not applicable for this life. It's only supposed to be yours for the next life.

So either we get bitter or we resign ourselves. Bitter that the abundant life isn't for me ever. And it was a lie. Or we resign ourselves to, well, this must be how my life is supposed to be like now. And I'll settle for having some sort of abundant life after I die someday.

And my desire for you is that you wake up the fight again.

But I don't want you to do that just because I say it. I'm going to share with you my story, parts of my story in order to hopefully give you some, some new fire.

about 11 years ago, no, sorry, 15 years ago in 2011, 15 years ago, if I'm getting my timeline correct, which obviously I might not be, but it was one of the lowest seasons of my life and my wife's. We've been married since we were in high school. No, we've been dating since we were in high school. Man, I can't get my words straight.

And we got married before we finished college. Okay. So we now have been with each other for far longer than, than we were apart in our lives.

So 15 years ago, you, if you were to just flip on the camera and watch the movie of my life, you would jump in, in the middle of me and my wife and our oldest daughter living at my mom's house in California. Having recently moved from California to New York to do a class and a half of seminary and then from New York back.

to California as my health was deteriorating. And as we were feeling released by God to leave New York and move back. what was intended to be a temporary setup of living in my mom's house turned out to be a good deal longer than we had planned.

And as we were there, if you were to jump in on our life, you would see me barely a hundred pounds. I had been six foot three, one 70. Okay. Barely a hundred pounds. You'd see me with a cane sitting around me somewhere for next time I had to get up and hobble to the bathroom for like walking like 10 minutes from the couch to the bathroom. You would.

You would see me taking a bucket with me to bed at night because when I had to wake up to pee, it was way too excruciating to make it to the bathroom.

and took too long and so I'd use the bucket in the middle of the night and dump it out in the morning.

You would see that I couldn't pick up my daughter.

because it hurt too bad. You would see that my wife was emotionally spent at her end because all of her dreams for life were just moving farther and farther away as I withered away.

He would see us going to doctor visit after doctor visit.

only to find the next doctor eventually getting to a point where he tells us, I'm sorry, I don't know how to help you.

You would see.

My wife and I trying our best, but fighting a lot. You would see me hurting her emotionally a lot. You would see me still begging her for sex, even though I was not giving much of anything to her. You would see me in self pity. You would see me in defeat. You would see me frustrated and angry with God.

You would see me bitter at my wife. You would see her angry with herself for feeling the way she did about me. You would see her wondering if she was ever going to like me again.

And let me tell you when she and I started out in our relationship, we, that was never a question. was like, we didn't understand how anybody could end up having a hard time in marriage because we were so madly head over heels for each other, passionate for each other. The fire was always there.

And now here we were. I felt like there I was losing my wife and she felt like she couldn't get herself to like me.

We spent a couple years after living at my mom's house, living at a church that had a residential program and we were supposed to be mentors to the interns as we were living there and we were to an extent, but we also were still very dysfunctional in our marriage. A lot of fights, a lot of disconnect, a lot of pain, a lot of heartache. remember many days, seasons of like just wishing I would get icon.

And during this time I would still, I still had a cane. I still had days of intense pain, seasons of intense pain, bouts with pneumonia that scared my wife to death. Like a lot of challenge.

And it was like, no matter what we did, no matter how we tried.

Couldn't find progress.

Night, Asgard.

Please, please Lord, do something.

There was a moment.

when I was bedridden and this was still when we were at my mom's house. By the way, after we lived at that church, we went back to her house for a couple more years.

And there was a moment when I opened up my computer and I looked on Bible Gateway and I looked for everything that the word had to say about sickness, health and healing. And to my surprise, what I found was that God does not want his children sick.

And

If you are somebody who's

not open to hearing that then you might need to move on.

But if you are someone who is hurting, who is desperate,

Get out and.

If you are someone who's hurting and desperate, then here's what I want to encourage you with at the moment. One of the keys to your breakthrough is going to be calling into question everything that you think, everything that you've been taught, everything that you believe. I'm not talking about deconstructing your faith. I'm talking about reconstructing it because here's the deal. You and I have inherited

a version of Christianity that has been passed down to us through some generations. And right now, many of the prevailing Christian mindsets in the world today, they are not biblical and they are not helpful and they will lead you to you into a path of death, not life. You might still get saved. You probably will. I'm not calling into question your salvation. I'm calling into question your experience.

in this life and your experience of the power of God and your experience of His presence. And if you are not willing to call into question what you've been taught and hold it up against the light of God's word, then you probably won't get breakthrough because the way that the normal way of Christian thinking

It keeps people passive, weak, stuck, sick, poor, and disconnected from their lives.

Because in this place where I could hardly move, I would sit in the passenger seat of the car in the parking lot of Chipotle. Well, my wife would go in and order food for our family. And I'd watch families walk out with dads holding their kids on their shoulders, jogging through the parking lot, laughing, whatever. And here I was breaking on the outside and the inside because I couldn't.

And Christians have the audacity to think that that's God's will for a man.

It's abusive.

if that's the way a father treats his son.

But see, I had thought.

that if you don't get healed, must be God's will somehow for you to be sick. must be his plan to use it in your life in some way. I had picked that up through osmosis or direct teaching. don't know, but it was what the way that most Christians think in our culture, to be honest, they think that God's in control, which means whatever's going on in your life is part of his plan. And that,

is from hell. That lie is from hell.

He has a plan. He has a will. He is in charge. There is nobody higher than him, but he's not controlling all things and his will, his desire for your life is not automatic.

So as I was looking at Bible Gateway and I looked up everything the Bible says about sickness, health, and healing, what I found was that God does not want me sick. He heals all diseases. Jesus bore my sicknesses and carried my infirmities. He said His word and healed them. His words are like healing to my flesh and my bones.

We can lay hands on the sick and they'll recover. If anybody is sick, let them go to the elders of the church and they will pray the prayer of faith and the Lord will raise him up.

I don't remember Jesus ever saying to anybody, you're asking me to heal you, but for you, I'm sorry. That's not my will. Now, if you watch the chosen, it shows that that's not Bible.

for all of its merits, that injection may literally kill people because it's going to steal their faith for health and healing when the Bible gives them the grounds to stand on for health and healing.

So as I saw this, I began to think differently.

So first key to breakthrough, question everything you've been taught and hold it up against the light of God's word. Second key to breakthrough.

Choose to think and speak according to God's promises for you, not according to how you feel, how you've performed, or what your circumstances are like.

So I began to think and say to myself and pray, God, thank you that sickness has no authority in me because you tell me that it doesn't. And so I refuse to let this debilitating condition of body wide arthritis and pain ruin me. My life will not be defined by sickness. It won't be defined by endless hamster wheel from doctor to doctor to doctor. I will.

do a victorious life where I won't just obsess over this forever and I will be better.

And I wish I could tell you that my body is miraculously well with no symptoms or anything. And it's not. And this is, this is why you need to listen to me uniquely because I'm not going to present to you a fakery that, and try to hide the struggle of life. I'm not going to try to hide from you the fact that sometimes the promises that are clearly ours, they just aren't showing up.

I'm not going to hide that from you. That's not helpful to you at all.

The truth is this life is difficult and there are enemies that come against us. And sometimes we don't know yet how to beat them. And yet God has promised us we can. So even though my body isn't miraculously well, it did start getting stronger. I'll tell you that I wasn't bedridden.

I came out of it. We were still seeing doctors and doing treatments and stuff. So I'm not, I please do not hear a fake story. We've been, we were doing other things in the natural as well, but I promise you my coming out of bedridden life was hand in hand with my reawakening of my faith.

And even though my body wasn't, you know, healed, was like, well, Satan, you're going to regret the day you've ever messed with me. And I'm going to go pull everybody I can out of the grip of sickness and even injury and all of it. I'm going to pray for everybody. get a chance to pray for.

Because you messed with the wrong guy. I don't have quit in me.

And I did. I was scared.

But I, but I, but I began doing it. Why? Because I knew that if I said, I believe this thing, I had to act on it.

And I had been to the bottom and I've, and I've seen the hell that sickness is, and I didn't want it for anybody else. And so motivated by love for them and hatred for the devil, I began to pray for everybody I could lay hands on. And it was not because suddenly God zapped me with lightning out of nowhere and like filled me with this, with his spirit in this way that like was just magical. And I was a new man. I was the same.

me.

Sometimes the charismatic version of our faith is seen as this pie in the sky thing. That's either wacko for people, or if you don't think it's wacko, you think that it's gotta happen to you by God because you look at all these superhero leaders of the faith and all the amazing encounters with God they've had, and you just wish God would do it for you. You want to know

My encounter with God in this time, it was in His word and in hell on earth where I met with Him. And you know what happened? Because of the truth of His word, I decided I'm not agreeing with hell in my life anymore. And I'm only going to agree with what He says about me.

I didn't feel different except I was angry and I made a decision. And whether you've had your miraculous encounter with God or not, everybody has the ability to make a decision.

I'm going to live this way. I'm going to obey Jesus and I'm going to heal the sick. I don't feel electricity running through my hands. Who cares? They're sick and they need to get well. If they get healed, even though there was no flash of light and no tingliness, no nothing, it doesn't matter. The miracle.

And I told you, I ain't, I'm not going to give you a fake story, but I've had dozens and dozens of healing miracles now since then. Cancers going away, E. coli running out of a child's body who was dying in the hospital. make my mechanic years ago whose leg was due to be amputated, getting saved. I've had x-rays that show bone on bone in joints now showing

perfectly healthy normal joint tissue, all these things. The stories, there's more than I'd remember.

But anybody can live that way.

Part of the discouragement that I felt and the depression that I felt and the defeat that I felt was due to the belief that God had this as his plan for me. And you want a third key to breakthrough. It's stop believing that God's plan for you is perpetual struggle and defeat without breakthrough and victory. Stop believing that

that fighting for the fulfillment of his promises in your life is selfish and wrong. Stop believing that if you're going to get breakthrough, then it's up to God and he'll do it in his time. No, you want breakthrough, then believe this, that the fulfillment of God's promises are always yes and amen. Actually, it's yes in Christ and we utter our amen. The problem with you not getting the promises

is that God has said yes to you through Jesus, but you don't say amen back. You don't say, okay, God, so be it. Let those promises be mine. I agree with you and I will not stand anywhere else except on this ground of faith about this.

All right. Well, I'm all fired up, but I have an appointment starting. So that's got to be just part one.

Part two is next time. I love you.

IF

You need more of this. Can I encourage you to pick up my book, The DNA of a Man?

I'll put the link down below. It's changed 12,000 ish men's lives already. It has, uh,

led to a whole bunch of messages I've gotten from guys saying, thank you. Thank you. I've never seen it this way before. I've never felt this kind of freedom before. I promise you, I had no idea it was going to have that effect, but it, but I think it'll change your life if you pick it up.

Also, if you need help in your marriage, got a free training for you. I'll put a link to that below too. All right. Come back for part two. Love you. See you.