Sid: We want everyone everywhere to sense the urgency to share the good news with the people that God has supernaturally cross your path. I have on the telephone a new friend. When I say a new friend it’s because I met him in person really for the first time and we had lunch a few weeks ago. His name is Gordon Robertson, and you’re probably familiar with him because you see him every day on the 700 Club. His father is Pat Robertson and Gordon and I had lunch in Virginia Beach a few weeks ago. I got a chance to meet him and guess what I found out Mishpochah, he’s the same off the air as on the air, I like that it’s called being real. Gordon I want to take you back way back when just a child, but I read your dad’s life story “Shout it From the Rooftops.” And there was one thing that stuck like oatmeal on my ribs, and that was one weekend your dad was reading the Bible and the Lord told him to sell everything he had. So he just gave away everything in the apartment without consulting your mother who was away for the weekend. I’m just curious that is such an amazing thing what your dad did and of course history testifies God honored that. But tell me what you think your mother really and truly did when she came home and found the apartment empty.
Gordon: Well she wanted to kill him.
Sid: (Laughing)
Gordon: I don’t have to tell you what I think, I know. She was with her parents in Columbus, Ohio with the children. There was just 3 of us that that point in time. Dad called her up and said “I’ve been reading the Bible and I feel God’s telling me to do something, and he didn’t tell her what. And she just sort of responded, “Well that’s nice dear it’s always good to do God wants you to do.” And came home and everything had been sold and all of the money had been given to the poor. And literally there was nothing left, there was no furniture left in the apartment.
Sid: Hmm, in retrospect how important do you think that was as history recorded things for your father’s life?
Gordon: I think it was a test, you know you look back in time and I don’t think that it was much more than a couple hundred dollars you know at this point. Dad had stopped all of his efforts to try to be a worldly success; he was working for WR Gracing and Company in New York City and had quit that job and enrolled in seminary to study for the ministry.
Sid: Your grandfather though was a prominent senator.
Gordon: He was, my grandfather was Senator Willis Robertson and at this point of time he was chairman of the US Senate Banking Committee. So he was a pretty big wheel.
Sid: Do you think he had a problem when your dad stepped down from this fine career at this grace company?
Gordon: I think granddaddy was always sort of disappointed, I shouldn’t say always, for a good period of time was disappointed that dad either didn’t follow in his footsteps into ta political career. Although later he did go into a political career.
Sid: He sure did running for President of the United States.
Gordon: Yeah, I think granddaddy was also that dad sort of turned his back on law and business. But at the same time within our family history my grandfather’s father was a Baptist Missionary, part of the Baptist Home Mission Board. I think because of that granddaddy grew up as a son of a minister. And knew some of the hardship and that’s why he was saying to my father “Are you sure?” My grandmother was a great support, she was a real woman of prayer. Her father was a lawyer who at the ripe age of 56 quit the practice of law to go into full time ministry. So it’s so it sort off was in the family tree, you study for law you get involved a little in politics but you always return to the ministry. So it seems strange that God’s is working through the generations this way but you go back deep into the Robertson family and for generations you find ministers.
Sid: Now you were as a family, your parents and the children, really as I understand it was struggling financially to the point where some evenings all you had was soy beans.
Gordon: We are so many soy beans that I don’t eat soy beans anymore.
Sid: (Laughing)
Gordon: It was a regular part of our diet for several years.
Sid: Did it bother you that you knew your grandparents had money, here your father’s in the ministry and why do you have to live like this?
Gordon: Well I’d go see granddaddy and here’s granddaddy the US Senator, a nice home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I’d spend 6 weeks in the summer with grandmommy and it would be breakfast of cornflakes and strawberries with half and half. And every night was either roast beef or turkey.
Sid: Did you think sometimes maybe I don’t want to go home.
Gordon: Yeah, yeah I mean it was you know some people you grow up without and you don’t know you have it. And it’s sort of the worst to grow up without and know that. I would go to either grandparents my mother’s father was the president of a paint company that had an oversea office in Beirut and so they lived in Beirut for a good decade and they were well to do an Ohio family. So I would visit them and we’d see the difference, and we’d visit my US Senator grandfather and we’d see a very definite difference and we’d go home to soybeans. And it left a mark, it left a mark on I think all of the children as to the sacrifice involved in following the Lord and being obedient to the vision.
Sid: So did you have any inkling that you would end up in ministries as a young person?
Gordon: There were words spoken over me when I was 5 and 6 and 7 years old that I was called to ministry, that one day I would be a host of the 700 Club.
Sid: Did you want to stone them and say “You’re a false prophet?” Or did you just listen?
Gordon: I rebuked them soundly in Jesus’ Name and I said “No way.” And because you know you see this and you see what the sacrifice is involved. And if you don’t understand the other side of it that the word of the Lord can literally burn in your bones. You know it becomes your highest and your greatest, it becomes that treasure that you want to sell everything to get. Until you understand that it doesn’t make any sense to you, why would you… you know dad was a Yale Law School Graduate working for W.R. Grayson and then for an investment Banking Firm in New York City and he left all of that. And you know the political position of his father literally could have named his ticket. He left all of that to pursue a vision for Christian television at a point and time where no one had a vision for Christian television.
Sid: Were you angry with God that your family wasn’t a normal prosperous family?
Gordon: I don’t know if it ever got to a point that I was angry with God growing up. I think later on in sort of the college timeframe it turned into that. As a child I don’t remember that. I remember being frustrated with sort of our circumstance and saying “Well if this is cost of it, then why do it?”
Sid: Out of curiosity have you learned a lesson that perhaps you play out with your own family having gone through a father in ministry, you’re now in ministry, how do you handle it?
Gordon: I actually feel a real tender heart for all pastors children anywhere. Most pastors families and there are exceptions but most of them, the majority of them don’t live with them. And so I tend to go out of my way to make sure that I try some anonymous ways to send money and make sure that the recipients know that this is not for anything other than your wife and your children. In terms of my own children they’re not growing up with lack, those early days of living on soybeans for the Robertson family are over so I don’t have that. What I do try to make sure with my family is that… and my father did this with me as well that they know the presence of God. That this is not something that they haven’t tasted and handled it and that they know it and that they know it deep in their spirits. That they know that God wants to directly speak with everybody.
Sid: Gordon, unfortunately we’re out of time right now. I want to find out about that supernatural visitation you had. You’re a lawyer and you get a phone call this minister had a dream that you’re supposed to go on the mission-field. You didn’t want to do it but we’ll talk about that on tomorrow’s broadcast.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth