Archive for October, 2019
Our Guest Jesse & Amy Shamp
SID: You know Jesse and we had a couple of meals with you and Amy. It’s hard to believe but at 14 you overdosed in drugs and alcohol, you’re rushed to the hospital. What did the doctors say about what was going on?
JESSE: Well, I came a half an hour away from death. It was a really close call. It was a miracle my father found me in time. See, I was raised in a Christian home, Sid.
SID: You told me you were running from the call of God.
JESSE: Yes. I was–
SID: Not walking, running.
JESSE: I was running. I was much like Jonah, I was running. I kept running, even after my overdose. I was in and out of jail, I was in and out of rehab. Twenty years old, Sid, I found myself in a jail cell. I told the Lord, “I surrender. Whatever you call me to do, I’m going to do it.” That was the greatest decision I ever made.
SID: The judge said, “I’ll tell you what. You can either go to prison or you can go this place called Teen Challenge.” You’re not a dummy, “I’ll go to Teen Challenge.”
JESSE: That’s exactly right.
SID: What did that do for you?
JESSE: After I got out of Teen Challenge, I went into a season of extended fasting and prayer. I just began to seek the Lord. Day after day I would pray in the Holy Spirit. I was really challenging myself. I would go into my prayer room and I would pray one hour. The next day I’d day I’d pray two hours, then three hours, four hours.
SID: What happened to you? Tell me some of your experiences.
JESSE: The Holy Spirit visited me and it was so strong, it was so powerful. The fire of God just came on me. I remember that fire coming in my hands. It felt like the love of God. It was the overwhelming, consuming fire of God’s love. I was just totally wrecked. I remember just crying out for souls and asking God to send me to the nations. And then I began to ask the Holy Spirit, “Teach me how to worship.” The Holy Spirit started teaching me about worship, and how to minister to the Lord, and how to just praise and worship the Lord. As I did, Sid, every day that I would go into my prayer room, the glory cloud would build more and more each day.
JESSE: One day in my prayer room I said, “Lord, I want all that you have.” I was so hungry, and I was desperate in this season of fasting and praying and just contending. I had this vision of this white cloud that came out of heaven, and it rolled over my body. I mean, it just … I was engulfed in this cloud. This encounter was so powerful, Sid, so intense, I told the Lord, I said, “Please make it stop. I just can’t handle anymore,” because I really felt like I was going to die in the presence of the Lord or be translated like Enoch.
SID: Amy, is that true? In the meantime, she’s got her own life going on. They weren’t married at the time, obviously. You’re pretty young, you’re 17. Your friends were, I guess, lovingly kidding you saying, “Calm down a little. You’re going too far with God.” Why were you going so far to the point where it intimidated them?
AMY: Well, I grew up in a small town, population 4,000 in Alabama. I didn’t really know anything about the supernatural or miracles. But I knew that there was something more, I knew that God had more for me and I was hungry. Hunger will take you places that nothing else can. I got filled with the Spirit when I was 17 years old. My friends were just … I was so hungry for souls I would go out and buy Bibles and give Bibles away. I was praying in the Holy Ghost and they didn’t know how to take that. Yeah, they said I was too saved is what they would call it.
SID: Tell me about the first time you were asked to speak at the church.
AMY: I was 17, I got filled with the Spirit. Within a month I was asked to speak at my church. I shared just what I knew, my testimony. Young people were coming forward to me weeping saying they had never felt God like that before. That’s when I knew that God had a call on my life to preach the gospel.
SID: This is happening to her, and she’s really pursuing God, and she finds out … actually, it was a miracle of God you found out you had a rare type of cancer.
AMY: Yes. Absolutely. Within a year after I was filled with the Spirit, I got diagnosed with cancer. The doctors actually said it was a one in a million chance that they would even find the cancer the way that they did. Although I didn’t know anything about divine healing, thank God for medical doctors because I believe God heals both ways. I actually became a cancer survivor, but I really felt that the enemy was attacking me in the very area that he had called me to, which was miracles.
SID: Not only did the devil try to take her out with cancer, she finds out her mother has terminal cancer, but she is a great woman of God, and her husband is a great man of God. It didn’t turn out the way they expected. But because of what the devil tried to do to her, because of what the devil did to her mother, they have a passion to get you free of any terminal disease, but especially the one that begins with a C. Be right back.
Our Guest Kim Meeder
SID: Let me take you back. Your first face to face encounter with our Messiah, Jesus.
KIM: I encountered Jesus Christ for the first time when I was nine years of age. And on that day, I went to my grandparent’s house and the house was full of all these grieving people and everyone was weeping, and I was pushed into the arms of someone I didn’t know and they were crying so hard and they just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to tell you this. Your father has just murdered your mother and taken his own life. I’m sorry.” And I remember thinking, “You’re a liar!” And I popped out of this woman’s arms and ran out the door in this child’s effort to outrun the unthinkable, and ran and ran until there was nothing left and just fell down in the dirt, and I was gasping and crying and inhaling dirt and retching, and I could hear my voice start to cry out, “Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me. I need you now. Jesus, will you help me?” I didn’t even know who Jesus was. I wasn’t raised in the church. I’d only been to church twice that I can remember and–
SID: But why did you call out to him then?
KIM: Because Romans 1 is true, and within the heart of every man, there lies that place that we were intended to know him. It doesn’t matter who you are, how you were raised, or what culture you’re from. When our heart is being crushed, we know intuitively to turn to the one who made that heart because we know he’s the only one who can heal and restore it.
SID: And what happened to that broken heart, and you cried out to Jesus. What happened?
KIM: Romans 10:13 is true, and that simply says that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. The salvation is as near as your lips and your heart, a few verses above that, and that if you speak with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that he is the son of God and came to this earth, you will be saved. And I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was that in that moment I was no longer alone. The Lord of all creation had just knelt in the dirt beside a breaking child and took the hand that was reaching out to him. And my Jesus has never let go. Not then, not now, not ever.
SID: You use terminology that I don’t hear frequently used about God. You call him your wild God. What do you mean by wild God?
KIM: I love what he has made and I’m a wilderness girl, and I’ve spent a lot of time in his creation and who God is and what he does cannot be contained or confined. God is unfathomable. He’s uncontainable, he’s untamable. He’s wild and he never asks us to fully understand him because we can’t. But what he does ask us to do is to fully trust him, to move beyond what we understand, beyond our humanity, beyond our logic, beyond our education and all of our experiences, and as women certainly beyond our emotions, and step through that veil of humanity into the deep water that is the very presence of the living God and in this place is where we encounter the wildness that is his presence and it’s where he wants us to live.
SID: You also talk about wild simplicity. Explain that.
KIM: I heard a beloved African pastor once say so beautifully that the spirit of the living God, the Holy Spirit is like a great mighty river. You do not tell the river where to flow, don’t, don’t. Instead you jump in and you go where he takes you. And for us to follow the Lord, we can’t understand God, and what he is is so much bigger than what we can fathom. But what he’s calling us to do is so simple. Follow the one who knows the way. Pray, listen and do what he says. And this is the wild simplicity of our God. Anyone, anyone who calls Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and their Messiah can pray and listen and follow his voice.
KIM: Let me tell you what I mean. I’m learning how to just follow him where he wants to go. And recently I was teaching a large women’s conference and in between somebody ran up to me, reached over all these women and said, “My friend doesn’t think she can come. Can you sign her book?” And I started to sign it and was just stopped by the Holy Spirit. And my favorite prayer is, Holy Spirit lead me. And what I started to write was the dumbest poem you have ever heard in your life.
SID: Is that what you were thinking when you wrote it?
KIM: I’m writing to a woman I’ve never met, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky. I love you more than all the sand in the sea.”
SID: Did you want to find a rock and crawl under it?
KIM: Oh, my goodness. I’m like, “Lord, you got to be kidding me. This is awful. I don’t even know this woman. She’s going to think I’m an idiot.” I love you more than all the sand in the sea, and all this love together, it’s the love we share, you and me.
SID: This is a total stranger.
KIM: Yes. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most gag-atrocious poem in the world and it makes me want to barf in my mouth a little bit.” God bless you. Love, Kim. Here’s some verses to encourage you. And I hand it to this lady and she grabs it and I hold on like, “I can still rip out that page,” and I let the book go and I think, “Oh, Lord, I just made a fool out of you and me.” And God, he’s so funny and he’s such a good dad. And he said, “I’m God. You can’t make a fool out of me. How about if you just own your pride?” Dang it. It’s still in there. And so I confessed my pride, taught the conference. At the end of the conference, there’s a long line of women and it’s bending to the left and there’s a woman at the very end, and she’s destroyed.
KIM: So she comes up to me and she’s holding her fist under her chin and she’s just full body tremors, and I can see at that point she’s holding a book to her chest, and she grabs the cover and opens it and it’s the horrible poem book. And my first thought was, “Yeah, it really is that bad. It kind of made me cry a little too.” And she starts to point at it. She can barely speak. And then she says, “How did you know? How did you know, Kim? You could not know this. This is what my mom used to pray over me every night when I was a child, and my mom just died and I’m so lost without her, and I’ve been begging Jesus, if you’re real or you see my pain, will you let me know in a way that I know that it’s you and that I can trust you with my life? And now I know. Now I know.”
KIM: People, if you want to experience the wild simplicity of serving and following our Lord, ask him. Ask him, follow him where he wants to go. Pray, listen, and just do what he says.
SID: This is how kind of perspective works. Sometimes we only see part of the picture. Give me a real life example of that.
KIM: As I said before, I love the wilderness and I spend a lot of time in the high country, and I think it would be like viewing an avalanche from a distance. And when you’re a safe distance away, there’s nothing more beautiful and powerful, but to be caught in an avalanche, you would have a completely different perspective. Senseless pain only exists on this side of heaven. God’s plan always makes sense to him.
KIM: Case in point, we rescue horses and a while back we had rescued two young horses, and on their reentry into a herd, this horse had a catastrophic injury. She fell and I heard bones break. And we rushed in, four women and … four women, myself included, picked her up and her leg was completely backward. Her front right leg. We hustled her out, got her to a safe environment and I ran to my home to call the vet to come and stop a life. And while I was waiting for her to return my call, I was just weeping and saying, “God, I just don’t understand. This is senseless. This is a baby horse. This is senseless. Lord, help me understand.” In minutes was down, the vet was there and we walked into the corral and this horse was, not only was her leg in a normal position, she’s standing on it. We had prayed over the horse before the vet got there. She did an examination and the horse started walking.
KIM: And all she could surmise was that maybe the blade was dislocated, the shoulder, and when you moved her it was jostled back into place. No, but–
SID: That sounds like what a vet or a doctor would say.
KIM: So anyhow, I released my staff and–
SID: You knew better.
KIM: I did know better. And as I was following the vet back to her car and putting her things away, the Holy Spirit said, “Pursue her. This is about her. There’s much more.” And I looked at my friend’s beautiful face in the twilight, and I asked her, “Honey, are you okay?”
KIM: And she just started to mourn and grieve, and her head fell into her hands and she was just groaning and sobbing over just wave after wave of this just gut wrenching grief. And after probably 30 minutes, she finally said, she still had her hands in her face and she said, “I have made such a disaster out of my life. I didn’t know what to do. And so I made up my mind and when you called me tonight, I was sitting on the bed and I was holding a gun to my head, and I was trying to pull the trigger and I never needed someone to call me more. And then you did.”
KIM: And there in the twilight, the Lord allowed me to see that my call to end a life became his call to save a life. And this is the wild perspective of our God, and if we will trust him to keep moving forward, step for step, the wreckage around me does not change his perfect plan, and I can trust him for every single step. This is his wild perspective and he’s calling those who are his to trust him every step of the way.
SID: When I get to heaven, I’ll understand it all. In the meantime, God, I know you’re a loving God and I know everything that’s messed up in my life you’re turning around for good, so I’m through with my pity party.
KIM: Yeah.
SID: Kim’s grandfather taught her wisdom that few people on Earth, I mean have ever heard of. I’ll tell you this, it’s saved her life and it also is going to save your life. We’ll be right back.
Our Guest Steven Bancarz
SID: Steven, on the outside, you had it made. On the inside? You’re coming apart at the seams. So, how in the world that you get free?
STEVEN: The Bible says, “Be sure your sins will find you out,” and my secret sins started catching up to me. It reached a point where I really had to start confessing the sin I was suppressing and hiding from people in my life. So, I confessed sin to people. It was the first time I was really looking in a mirror and coming to terms with my own brokenness, “Wow. I really am a slave to sin. I really am deprived. I really am twisted on the inside,” and I was broken. I was really broken. My mother, my Christian mother who was praying for me vigilantly the entire time I’m in this movement. She says, “Are you ready to give your life to the Lord yet?”
STEVEN: I was like, “Okay.” I mean, I had intuitions about Jesus that I was suppressing when I was in the New Age Movement. Every New Age teacher goes out of their way to try and account for Jesus. Never Buddha or Muhammad, but for Jesus, they always have the new explanation about what His ministry really was. That was always a red flag to me. I had a soft spot for him, so I was like, “Okay, Jesus, if you’re real, I want more of you. I want you as you actually are. I’m not going to fit you into this New Age paradigm anymore.”
STEVEN: A few weeks went by and nothing really changed in my life until I confessed another round of sin that was worse than the first one, and that’s really when I bottomed out. I had nothing left. I had no strength left. I had nothing good in me. I was a wreck. I realized I’m not fit to be lord of my own life anymore. I went outside on the back balcony of my house, my stupid 4,000 square foot house I was living in, and I just fell at the feet of the Lord and I was weeping.
STEVEN: It was the first time I was actually repenting. I had this conviction, I hadn’t just wronged people. I’d sinned against the Holy God and I was weeping before Him, apologizing to Him, reaching out to Him. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was just giving Him everything that I had. When I did this, I felt His presence enter in on the horizon in front of me. I felt Him enter in and this presence engulfed me.
SID: As you’re saying this, I can feel the presence of God. Can you? Some of you in the audience and you at home? Go ahead.
STEVEN: Right. Yeah. So, His presence comes in and it starts engulfing me and it starts filling me at the same time. It’s a personal presence that is self-authenticating. I knew when I was in this presence that this was the Jesus of the New Testament. This is the Jesus I was suppressing in unrighteousness. All I could stay in my head during the [ ], during this time, was “Jesus is Lord.”
STEVEN: It’s so simple. He’s the Son of God. I was making it so complex. It’s the simple thing. Jesus is Lord. What really stuck out to me, Sid, which wrecked me, it really broke me. The Lord showed me how creation was responding to Him. When He was there, I could hear and detect in the Spirit that the sounds of nature, the crickets, the leaves on the trees, the sound of the wind was glorifying Him. All of nature was crying out and I was detecting that. I picked that up in the Spirit.
SID: I believe God knew you needed to have that. Am I right?
STEVEN: I needed to have that because I believed that nature was God and that I was God; and He was showing me, “No, even nature itself knows who I am.” I thought to myself, “If nature itself recognizes Jesus is Lord, who am I to deny Him?” I went back into my house after and I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I had all these light bulbs going off in my head showing me the New Age Movement is a demonic deception set up strategically to lead people away from the experience, the born again experience I just had.
STEVEN: From that day forward, I never wrote another New Age article. I quit my job overnight, sold my house, sold my car, made an apology video online, apologizing saying, “I’m really sorry, guys. I’m no longer writing New Age articles, and I’m actually a born again Christian now. So, I just want to share with you my story and my testimony.”
SID: So, you were able to tell hundreds of thousands of New Agers that Jesus is Lord. But then these demons, they didn’t want you doing this, and they came back and hit you again. What happened?
STEVEN: Yeah, there was demonic attack going on in my life. I was having night terrors. I was having nightmares. I was having things fall in my house randomly. It like there was a demonic fester in the atmosphere in my house. What the Holy Spirit started to show me and reveal to me was, “The reason why you’re being attacked, the reason why you’re being oppressed, even though you’re walking with Me, is because you are giving legal ground and legal right to these demons by having occult and New Age paraphernalia in your house.”
SID: So, what did you do with all this paraphernalia?
STEVEN: Well, I had a bonfire. I put them all together, I burnt them all. I threw all my objects, my trinkets, my jewelry, even my clothing, my idols, I threw it all in the garbage. As soon as I did this, there is instant spiritual breakthrough in clarity in my head. Praise God.
SID: The sad thing is, this New Age movement is invading the church. You mentioned that the Pew survey showed 61% of professional Christians are involved in one or more New Age practices or beliefs. I want to know what these practices are. We’ll be right back