SID: Hello, I’m here with, Joe Oden. And Joe, you’re channel-surfing one day, you’re a drug addict, you’re overdosed on LSD. Why in the world would you be watching an evangelist on television?
JOE: That’s a great question. It wasn’t set up that way, I was experiencing an OD as you said, and I stopped. And when I did there was a gentleman preaching and he said these words, “There’s some young people that are watching this program and you’re hooked on drugs. Not only are you hooked on drugs you’re in a deep, dark cave of drug addiction, but I have good news for you. Jesus Christ is in the cave with you. He’s going to bring you out, He’s going to set you free and you’re going to preach the gospel around America.” When he said that, Sid, the power of God hit me in a La-Z-Boy chair. I was instantaneously sobered off the drug and I was called to preach the gospel. I would love to say at that moment I gave my life to Christ and I began to fulfill that call but I began to do more drugs than I’d ever done before.
SID: Did you believe that was God?
JOE: I knew unequivocally it was God, because after that moment I would be at a party strung out on drugs, doing cocaine, I’d get everybody’s attention and I’d prophesy. I didn’t know what I was doing. I would say this, “One day real soon I’m going to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ around the United States of America.”
SID: I mean, while you’re high on this LSD?
JOE: While I was high, while I was drinking, the call of God from that prophetic word got on the inside of me and I knew it was my destiny.
SID: So two years later you do you’re up to your old ways, you’re still a drug addict, and you get in trouble with the law and the judge gives you an unusual sentence.
JOE: Yes.
SID: He sentenced you to church?
JOE: Right. I prayed along with the prophecy every night before I’d go to bed that God will get me in church. For two years I prayed that prayer, court-ordered by the law to go to church, I picked a little Assembly of God church in Southern Alabama. Six months into my church sentence I’ll walk in, I don’t know Christian-ese, I don’t know how to say, “I feel the Holy Spirit,” but something in the room. I began to have open-eyed visions of the things of God. The preacher preaches, I run to the altar, I give my life to Christ. I stand up for the first time in my life washed in the blood of Jesus.
He said, “What do you need from God?” I said, “I want to be filled with the Holy Spirit.” He lays hands on me, I hit the ground under the power of God. That had never happened to me before, it didn’t happen in my church, and before I left that day, “I said, God, if my friends that are hooked on drugs could feel this power that’s running through my body right now they get born again.” I walked in bound by hell down to the grave, I walked out telling everybody I could about Jesus.
SID: So you’re born again, you’re baptized in the Holy Spirit?
JOE: Yes.
SID: You’re delivered from drugs?
JOE: Yes.
SID: You are on fire for Jesus?
JOE: Yes.
SID: All in one day?
JOE: Instantaneous deliverance.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth