SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome, welcome to my world, where it’s naturally supernatural. I love it! I wouldn’t want to change one iota of living in the supernatural. My guest went to a spirit-filled church, a young man, and he saw such excess, so he left and he said, “I’m going to an evangelical church where everything is biblical.” And he went to it and he saw such dryness. He saw no miracles, but even in the spirit-filled church he only saw a few miracles. So he got…have you ever heard of someone getting burned out? He got burned out. But then he prayed to God and he said, “God, there’s gotta be an answer! I need a breakthrough in my life!” And God spoke to him and he had a breakthrough. How many of you want to find the revelation for breakthrough? Someone was just healed of a neck problem. Test it; you’ll see. Larry Sparks, at age 16, became a believer in the Messiah, but something transformed his life. He went to a dynamic congregation that worshiped God, but he got something he really didn’t expect. What happened?
LARRY: I was 16 and I drove to this church, and I remember at the time, God was really inciting a hunger inside of me for Him, and I went, and at the time, you know, they were doing praise and worship music. They had drums and guitars, all this stuff going, and the music was a little bizarre. People were clapping their hands and raising their hands, and for me it was so strange, but the teaching so resonated with me. I wanted to know about God, who God was, and I would actually skip the music sometimes. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And then one Saturday night, July of 1999, I went to the church. The music was going on, and I was standing there and just without any warning God showed up. He touched me. I literally felt in my chest, like, a heat, like a burning, and then in my hands an electricity, like, a sud[den]…I didn’t need faith to feel it. It was real; it was a real experience, and I thought to myself, this God who I learned about going to school…I went to a Christian school, I had a Christian upbringing, and I learned information about God, but that day God made Himself real to me, and it was a subtle encounter but it was so supernatural and I’ve actually been living out of that encounter ever since then. He showed He was real.
SID: Okay, Larry, so, you go to a nice…now, you get kind of used to the raising of the hands…
LARRY: Yeah.
SID: …and the worship, and you go to this nice spirit-filled church and you loved it, but after a while there were things that began to bother you, because you’re kind of a theologian-type and things have to be in the Word. What was bothering you?
LARRY: Well, God was turned into a formula. God, the God who I experienced as a person, the God who touched me and I felt the heat, felt the electricity, this church culture kind of turned Him into a formula where they went to the Bible and it was all about finding things in the Bible, where you could pray something and pray a promise just to get whatever you want, need or desire from God. It was amazing how much emphasis was placed, not just on getting money, but how God almost became like a vending machine, like Santa Claus, like, you gave him your list in prayer and you basically said, ‘God, give me this stuff.’
SID: I heard one person say, “Well, God is like Aladdin’s Lamp. You just rub it and you get anything you want.” I mean, what is this?
LARRY: Yeah. Well, what happened is, I left, kind of, this hyper-faith type of church and I ran in the opposite direction. I said to my…I remember me and my wife saying we don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of stuff. In fact, when we’d go to other kind of charismatic, spirit-filled churches and hear that same language, we’d run away screaming just because, it’s like, we don’t want that. So we went to other churches where there was a strong theology of the cross, of forgiveness of sin, of knowing that we’re right with God, of righteousness, and those things are necessary and I celebrate them, but what was not there was faith to see God do anything for us today. So they believed that you’d get healed, maybe. They believed you’d get a breakthrough, maybe, but ultimately if you don’t get it now it’s okay because you’ll get it when you get to heaven. So they prayed prayers like, ‘If it be Thy will. God’s will is mysterious. You never know what God’s gonna do. All you need to do is just trust Him and whatever happens will happen.’ And I just knew in my heart that just didn’t settle it for me. I knew there were certain things that the Bible said God will do, and if we stand on what He said, if we believe what He says, we can actually see those things happen, with confidence!
SID: So, he sees this one extreme; no intimacy with God, just [formulas]. He goes to the other extreme; just the rules, and he doesn’t know what to do. So what do you do when you don’t know what to do? You pray to God. That’s what you did! What happened?
LARRY: Yes. I said, “God, what does faith look like?” And the Lord had me on a journey of actually going through the Bible, going through the Gospels and looking at healing. I think the Lord really wanted to reignite a fire in my heart that I encountered when I was 16; know that He is real, and that what He said, He will do. So I went to the Bible. That’s what I did. I said, “God, what do You define faith as?” And then He took me to a story in the Gospels that changed everything for me. There was supernatural revelation and He gave me actually a definition, a picture, an actual picture of what true Bible faith looked like.
SID: When we come back, we are going to explain what God showed him about true Bible faith that will cause you to have a breakthrough of epic proportions.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth