It's Supernatural

Sid:  Joel is a nice Catholic from Boston, and it’s a hot day. There’s a tent meeting. A revival is going on. Now Joel is not interested in spiritual things. He just thinks that maybe he can go in that water and cool off. Is that really the way it was Joel Richardson?

Joel:  Everything except for the good before Catholic. I was raised Catholic fairly nominally. By the time that I was nineteen, which is when I came to the Lord, I was very far even from my Catholic roots. When I was nineteen, a friend of mine and I had driven from South Boston to the suburbs of Memphis, TN. It was just one street over from Elvis Presley Blvd. We pulled up to a grocery store, and in the back of this field next to the grocery store was a big old southern holiness tent revival. It was a hot day in the end of August. We had a little truck with no air conditioning. When we pulled in I had the bright idea to get baptized and cool off. My friend thought that that was a good idea. The end result was that we found the preacher. It was in between services. This was a revival that was going on for a few days. We got baptized, and of course we stayed for the meeting. There were various individuals that knew that we didn’t belong there. We had long hair at the time. I was a little South Boston hippy drug addict I guess you could say. They began trying to minister and witness to us. As the meeting went on, numerous people were being touched by the Holy Spirit. Different people were being healed. I’ve always been a skeptical individual. I was watching this and there was one gentleman who really caught my attention. He was an older gentleman who went up and he said that he had been blind most of his life. Even from a distance you could tell that his eyes were sort of white, blue, gray. He didn’t have pigment in his pupils. As the preacher prayed for him, he asked the man if he could see. Very hesitantly the man said that he thought he could a little bit. Instead of giving testimony and jumping up and down, he walked off stage and wandered out into the cars. They were all parked in the field. I followed him.

Sid:  Why?

Joel:  I was curious. I wanted to see. It was my opportunity to interview someone who said that they were being healed. He caught my attention. You could tell that he was looking around, and that he himself was pretty mystified. You could see the look of shock on his face. Something had happened. As I walked up to him, he was fifteen yards off kneeling down in the grass, I could hear sobbing and weeping like a little baby. This gentleman was probably in his sixties. I walked up and began to ask him what was taking place. He sort of interviewed me a little bit. He said that he had been blind his whole life. He could see for the first few years as a child. His hand reached up to the sky. He was just praising God. He was just weeping and he said, “Right now, I can see the stars.”

Sid:  That had to have such an impact on you, and then, that very same evening, were you saved?

Joel:  I was saved. I knew at that moment that I had to take all that was taking place seriously. I knew that no matter how much I would like to write it all off as fanaticism, I knew that something had taken place. This man was being genuine. As I went back into the meeting, the preacher was reading from the gospels. He was reading from the sermon of John the Baptist. He said, “The ax at the root of the tree has already been laid. Therefore bear in keeping with repentance lest you be cast into the fire.” At that moment, the Holy Spirit confronted me and He told me, “If you don’t repent of your entire life, your entire life is a lie. If you don’t repent tonight, right now, if you don’t completely give Me your life, you will spend eternity in hell. You will go to hell.” My response, which shocked me, was, “Absolutely. You’re right. My entire life is a lie. If I don’t repent I will end up going to hell and deserving it.”

Sid:  You know what is so obvious to me? You were set up by God, Joel. Then you became a believer. You were minding your own business in a large meeting of about seven thousand people. The prophet, who was speaking, calls you out. What does he say?

Joel:  Fast-forward several years, and my wife and I are sitting in the back of a very large auditorium. He calls both of us out. He told me that because of my faithfulness in my season of waiting on him in intercession, the Lord is going to release me into revelation and He’s going to essentially download revelation from His heart and mind to mine. He’s going to begin opening up the scriptures. This is tied into another prophecy that my wife had received that she would marry someone with new insights into the end times and that I would actually release revelation concerning the end times.

Sid:  Now you are actually doing this right now. Are you as amazed as the people you talk to of this revelation you’ve been getting? Because it’s different than most people that are teaching end times.

Joel: To a degree it is. One of the things that I continually hear as people read or listen to my material, is they say, “I had a dozen ‘aha’ moments.” I always respond by saying, “Me too as I’m writing.” Winston Churchill said, “If you want to learn about a subject, then either write a book or teach about it.” When you take the time to prepare, pray and study, when you seek the Lord in order to teach others, you yourself are taught in the process. In the process of putting so much of my material together, I have also had numerous “aha” moments.

Sid:  It must just pop out like a revelation. I know when this happens to me, I’m as mystified as excited as the people that hear it.

Joel:  I’ll tell you something personal, Sid. When I was a child, I had a repeated dream throughout my childhood. It was that I would discover a secret panel in the house that I grew up in. I would discover a secret room. I would always wake up from this dream with this intense sense of excitement that I had lived in this house my whole life, but I had never known that there was this secret room in my house. As I become an adult, I still have the dream, but it’s changed. Since becoming a believer, I have a dream that as I’m reading the Bible, I open up the Bible and I find a new book. I say, “Wait a minute. Where’s this book been? I’ve never seen this book.” As I begin reading it, it’s exciting, and there’s this energy on me. Every time I have that dream, it usually follows that as I begin opening up the Bible, I’m not literally finding a new book, but it’s as if the Lord’s opening up His books that are already there. He’s releasing understanding and revelation.

Sid:  I can tell you, Joel, that as I watch your DVD series, I am so excited the way you unfold and tie in end time Bible prophecy with current events. You have facts about who is the great harlot. You have facts about who is Babylon. You kind of connect the dots of things that we know the ingredients of, but you put together. As a matter of fact even before we share anything, I’ve got to ask you this question. I know no one knows the day or the hour that the Messiah is going to return, so I’m not stupid enough to ask you that question, but based on the information that you have in these DVDs, could everything occur in your lifetime?

Joel:  Personally, I absolutely believe that if I should live long enough that absolutely, the Lord will return in my lifetime. I do believe that He’s at the door, and I believe that we need to be about the work of the Lord as a result.

Sid:  Now you have spent over a year in the Middle East in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. You must have had a fit when President Bush kept referring to Islam as a peace-loving religion.

Joel:  Yeah as the great religion and the religion of peace, I carry a very hard message.

Sid:  Our time is up.