It's Supernatural

Sid:  I want everyone everywhere to be normal, and my guest Graham Cooke and myself are saying “We just want to be normal.”  And most Christians that I meet have so many layers Graham of tradition and so many layers of religion that there’s just plain not room for God.  Now the normal paradigm in Christianity today is, and I’m going to use a very godly man as an example Billy Graham brings somebody to a Billy Graham meeting.  Billy has an anointing that will cause them to say a prayer which I don’t see this prayer really as the objective from the Bible, but they say this prayer, praise God they’re saved.  Now I happen to know statistically 98 – 99% of the people that say this prayer a year or two later aren’t even in a church anymore.  I almost question.  There’s something wrong with this picture compared to the Book of Acts, what’s wrong with this picture?

Graham: I think… I love Billy Graham’s ministry I think that he’s an amazing.

Sid:  Well, you’re named after him right, I’m just teasing. (Laughing) This is Graham Cooke that I’m talking to. (Laughing)

Graham:  The difficulty Sid is where people who bring people to Billy Graham’s ministry don’t always take responsibility for following up so that people do come into a direct encounter with the Spirit of God with the Lord Jesus Himself.  You know there’s no breakthrough without follow-through. A lot of these people are not followed up adequately.  They’re not taught what relationship with God really should look like, they’re taught to go to church, they’re taught to read their Bible and they’re taught to you know well just do the best you can kind of thing.  Join a small group, go to a Bible study. They’re not taught about some of the magic and mystery of actually walking with God that you can hear His voice, that you can have encounters with Him.

Sid: You know what I love about your new book “Approaching the Heart of Prophecy” you have some of the early church fathers known as the mystics and some of their nuggets are so wonderful.

Graham: I know they are amazing, ay.

Sid:  Really and truly what we’re talking about all this week is having such intimacy with God that you’re lead by His Spirit and we have such intimacy with education that we’re led by our mind and that’s the rub.

Graham:  Yeah exactly.

Sid: Okay, now I’m going to get a lot of people upset at me if I don’t go back to that second dream you had you’re a brand new believer you had your dream to go a house with words of knowledge. You see the woman in your dream you knock on the door and sure enough the same woman you say “I’d like to pray for your washing machine and she say’s come on in.”  You pray for the washing machine and it works, the second day you go back and it’s not working and you pray for it again, you figure oh this is my lot in life I’m going to be she called you this and the idiot that prays for one washing machine the rest of my life.  And then God spoke to you and said “Tell, her to pray and she did it and she got the same results.  Now you had a second dream and so you’ve find the house, you knock on the door what did God tell you about that particular house?

Graham: There was a man there who was unemployed he’d lost his job. He was in his mid to late fifties and he was in despair.  It was at a time when the British economy when, you know the whole economy was really in a very poor state; the manufacturing there were hundreds of thousands of people out of work and of course he’s in his late 50’s with very little chance of actually getting meaningful employment facing him and he’s acutely depressed.  So I knock on the door and there’s the guy exactly in my dream and so I go to my little routine “I am a Christian, I believe God speaks I had a dream about you and this is what the Lord said to me.”  And he interrupts me and his language was quite abusive and so on and so I listened and tells me this blank blank dream that God gave you.”  And I said, “Yeah, and do you have anything better to do, give me two minutes, it doesn’t make any sense you don’t have to do anything.”  And he went “Oh go on then.”  And so, “In the dream I saw you getting a hold of the local newspaper on Thursday evening” which is like when all the jobs are displayed in the paper, in the newspaper And I said, “On page 45, third column across, second advertisement down God is going to give you that job.”  And he looked at me and relayed the dream and he said, “This is what you are telling me I just got to buy a paper, get page 45 third column across second advert down God’s going to give me that job!”  And I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”  So he let me have it in no uncertain terms how stupid I was and you know and the language is extremely industrial (laughing). So I gave him some money for the newspaper and I said, “Well, I’ll come back on Friday and you can tell me if it doesn’t work you can tell me to my face how stupid I am and how’s that?”  And so he took the money so I went home and went back on Friday opened the door, he’s clean shaven, he has a shirt and tie on, he beams this smile at me and says “You won’t believe it, you won’t believe it come in let me tell you.”  And I get to hear his story and years before he was working for a particular company and he got head hunted to go and work for a better one with a much better salary benefits and so on and so he left.  He was about two years into his new job and they were taken over by a bigger company and his particular part in the business was downsized and he was unemployed.  In the intervening period the first company he worked for moved offices, they’d had a fire and their personnel records had been destroyed; anyway long story short, the company that’s advertising the job is his old company advertising his old job.  And so he calls them on the phone they remember him and say they’ve been trying to get in touch with you, he’d moved of course because he got a better house, a better job better house.  And so he ended up getting employment back with his old company and his old job.  (laughing)

Sid:  Now, as I understand it these experiences that you were having were the nucleus for you starting a church where God was accepted.

Graham: Yeah, and so these are my first converts basically.

Sid: So you started a house church.

Graham: Yeah, exactly.

Sid:  But you don’t know anything, you’re not even raised in the church you don’t even know, you don’t know how to run a service; how did you do it?

Graham: Well, we just we sat around we made some coffee, basically the first few times we just talked about who God is, who God was, and I just shared about what I was learning about Jesus and the gospels and the Book of Acts.  And talking about you know the thing that I like about you know the Lord when I read the scriptures is that every time He showed up everyone was astonished; everyone marveled.  So for me that’s the normal that we should be totally astonished by who God is. So we just used to read the gospels together and the Jesus said and the things that Jesus did.  And for me I knew the audible voice of God and what it sounded like I could say well, “This is how Jesus would have said it, you know, He had this kind of voice. And so we would just pray together, we would practice listening and we would encourage each other. So in the early days… then people began to be added and then we began to get some Christians coming who had experience in churches and say “Well, you need to do some worship and I would say “Okay great what does that look like?”  And so we started to learn songs and we started to sing and it’s a whole process really began.

Sid:  How large did it get?

Graham: Not very big it probably grew from to about 160 or something like that.

Sid:  But these were people that you were reaching right off the street.

Graham: Yeah, and what was interesting to me was that I began to find that the people that we were reaching off the street were much easier to deal with then people who’d like came from established church backgrounds.  You know they were much more open to understanding who God is in terms of how I saw Him; then some of the other people who began to come to meetings because they were new and because they were fresh.

Sid: Graham I believe someone could take your new book because it’s really a work book it’s called “Approaching the Heart of Prophesy” and they could follow the lessons, due the exercises, get these nuggets that you’ve learner over all of these years and start doing the same thing you’re doing with the same person helping them the Holy Spirit.

Graham:  Oh, yeah because in the book Sid there’s a great workshop on how to hear the voice of God and how to practice it. If you follow the workshop you’ll hear, yeah.

Sid:  Will you ask the Holy Spirit what He wants to do at this precise moment for our people?

Graham: Sure. Father I thank you, I thank You for who you are, I thank you for Your heart.  I thank you that You are so intentional about everything, You’re the One who always says, “I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare not for your calamity, to give you a future and a hope, Jeremiah 29:11.”  And so we love Your Word Lord because it’s such a mirror image of Your heart, so Holy Spirit I thank You that right now You know whose listening and You know the things that You want to do in the hearts and minds of people right now who are intent upon searching for You.  So we ask you to bless this time in Jesus Name. Amen.  Well Sid the first thing that occurs to me really in my heart is let’s go with that last story in particular and I’m just going to pray for people who are unemployed right now and who know visible means to support their family.

Sid:   And I believe that they’re going to be such miracles. What we’re going to do is we’re going to ask you to come back tomorrow and pray for those that need a job and need a miracle but I believe that we are going to push this gift and you’re going to speak to every single person that listens tomorrow.