SID: Remember the old story about the emperor’s new clothes? Do you remember that? Well Bert, your wife had a dream which is kind of on that order. Tell me about it.
BERT: Yeah, it was very significant at the time she had it and it still is today. In this dream, she was on this church property and the pastor was giving her a tour. They were having like a picnic-like fellowship on the grounds and the pastor was showing her around. And then they went into this large kitchen. He actually called it a cookhouse where they were preparing this food. And my wife knew what the food was because she had had some of this food, these rice dishes and these things that she had in Africa. And she told the pastor, she looked up at all this food that was being stored on all these shelves, and she said, “How come you’re not serving this food to the people?” And he said, “It’s strange food. They’re not used to it.” And so after that he took her back out on the church ground and there were all these weeds and tares that were growing up all over the property. They were crossing over on this little stick bridge, this little garden bridge and she noticed these weeds and tares were coming up under through the wood, and it was hard to even cross that bridge. And then all over the ground it was getting harder for people to walk. They were getting entangled in all these weeds and all these tares. And then my wife was very distressed after the dream and asked the Lord about it, and the Lord said, “These weeds and these tares represent festering sin, complacency and compromise that it’s gotten into the body of Christ because of certain truths and themes that are not being preached.
SID: Well here’s what I don’t get. We have more Bibles in the United States of America per square Christian than any country that ever lived. Now we have the Internet, and where you can get free copies of almost every version of the Bible right on your own Internet. How can we be missing these major themes?
BERT: In the West, we separate knowledge from application. The Bible is an eastern book and in the East, you know because you’re a Jew, they did not separate application and knowledge. You did not know something until you applied it. But here we, our supreme authority, has not been the Word of God. Jesus has not been the supreme authority in our lives and people are, you know, Paul prophesied. He spoke of it. In the last days, people are not going to endure sound doctrine. They’re not going to have ears to hear the truth. They’re going to keep to themselves teachers because they’re going to have itching ears. Paul said, “Some will depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of the devil.” We’re living in that time. We’re living in the last of the last days. And I’ve seen a major departure from biblical truths. I mean, I’m not talking about minor truths. I’m talking about major truths, major themes in the Bible.
SID: God told you, actually spoke to you that there is a diabolical plan so that major areas of the Bible are just not talked about today.
BERT: Yeah. He said there’s been a diabolical silence on holiness and because people just misunderstood.
SID: What is holiness?
BERT: Holiness, to me, the essence of it—what happened with Adam and Eve? When they first fell, the first thing they tried to do was what? Hide. To me, holiness does not hide. The essence of holiness is transparency. It’s an unveiled face. It’s when you’re open and honest before God. And then out of that will come a lifestyle of holy living. It’s not what you wear, how you dress, the outward blessings that you have. Holiness is the nature, it’s the character of God, it’s the outshining of God in a person, and it’s beautiful.
SID: You’ve researched the nuggets that people of old that had normal, according to the Bible, ministries, like Smith Wigglesworth. Give me a nugget from Heaven.
BERT: Well there’s many of them. Wigglesworth said, “If anything in this world fascinates you more than God then you don’t have what God wants you to have.” He said, “Anything that cools your affection for God is worldliness.”
SID: So how does someone that is a mixture, we’re humans, there’s degrees of mixture in every human, that’s going to a seeker sensitive, lukewarm church or one where there’s no power, how do they have a fire on themselves and a fire in their home?
BERT: Well we know today that God doesn’t dwell in a temple made with human hands. He dwells in each one of us. If a person is born again, especially if they’re also filled with the spirit, they are the Temple of God. God lives within them. And it’s being aware, developing a consciousness, an awareness of God’s presence 24/7 that you really learn to experience the presence of God. And there’s an infilling that’s not just a one-time infilling, we call the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues, but it is a stream that should never run dry. We should be being filled continually. The Bible says in Ephesians 5, “Do not be drunk with wine with excess, but be filled” or be drunk “with the spirit.” Talk about Smith Wigglesworth, he came to place at the end of his life when he said he could get drunk any time he wanted to on the Spirit of God. And when he was around sinners and people that were not informed or were ignorant of these things, he could just sober up like that. I tell you, what a way to live that a man got to that point where he could tap into the Spirit and get drunk any time he wanted to.
SID: Okay. How can we have it in our home, what he had?
BERT: It comes through praying in the Holy Ghost. It comes through spending time in the Word of God. What was it, those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, remember after the resurrection in Luke 24, what caused their hearts to burn? It said, “Did not our hearts burn when he spoke the Word of God to us, the Scripture to us by the way?” In other words, it was a revelation of the Word that caused their hearts to burn. Well we know that the Word of God is an all, God is an all-consuming fire, but the Word is a fire. So you know, these spiritual exercises being filled with the Holy Ghost, praying in the Spirit, meditating on the Word of God, just spending time with Jesus, we need to give ourselves to inspired utterances, not just in tongues, but we need to be speaking and singing to ourselves. The Bible says psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. That’s almost a lost art in the church today. We don’t do it.
SID: So many things are lost. You have to tell me about Father Nash. Most people never know that name, never know that name.
BERT: Father Nash was the prayer partner of Charles Finney. He went, wherever Charles Finney was sent to preach, he would go like a week or two before him, sometimes gather one or two other praying, very skillful, prayerful people, and they would enter into deep intercession together. I’m talking about groanings, and travail, and giving birth to what God wanted to do in those meetings. And they knew it was time to bring Finney, to summon Finney, they would look out the window when, in the time when many people were outside on the sidewalks, on the street. And when men started bowing down and kneeling on the ground in conviction they knew it was time to bring Finney.
SID: You know, he had an easy job. As a matter of fact, you told me that when Father Nash died, what happened to Finney?
BERT: Oh he stopped, he quit the ministry. He knew the power engine in his ministry, the power behind his ministry was Father Nash’s prayers.
SID: Okay. I want to find out what he believes, being a student of revivals and awakenings that we’ve never even seen in our generation to this degree. Is there hope for America? We’ll be right back.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth