SID: Hello, I’m Sid Roth. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. My guest needs no introduction to the supernatural, because when he was 4 years of age, he started knowing things that no one had ever told him. For instance, tell me what happened at 5.
JOHN: Sid, when I was 5 years of age, I had a dream about a next door neighbor. When I woke up from this dream, as a child, I was crying and very distraught over what I dreamed. My mother and father came in to see what was wrong with me; they began to comfort me. And as they were comforting me, they looked outside and there was my friend that I’d seen in the dream, playing. And I remember to this day how confused I was over seeing my friend playing in the front yard, and yet I had just seen something terrible happen to him and his mother in this dream that I’d had. I had seen them involved in an automobile accident where my friend and his mother actually lost their lives.
SID: So you’ve just figured it was nothing, your dream.
JOHN: Yeah, right. That’s what my mom and dad did, they convinced me that it was just a dream. “See, your friend’s out in the front yard playing.” But just a few days later, that happened.
SID: Really? So what’d your parents think?
JOHN: They, at first, didn’t make the association of it, because they had kind of forgotten about it. They treated dreams as if it was kind of an imagination, something that everybody has. But after they realized that it had come true, and they said “Didn’t John Paul have a dream about this?”, or something along those lines, then they began to query me. And as I grew up, they always thought that I had a vivid imagination, that’s what they called it. “You have such a vivid imagination.”
SID: But when they saw something like that, that would cause the hair to stand up on end, for everyone.
JOHN: It did, it did. But at that particular moment, they thought it was just one of those unusual occurrences.
SID: But let me just take you back. Even your birth was very unusual. Tell me about it.
JOHN: Well, my birth. My mother had lost a baby in a miscarriage, and she was grieving over the loss of that child. She had an encounter with an angel who said “Do not grieve over this child any longer.”
SID: Well wait now! She had an encounter with an angel?
JOHN: Yes she did.
SID: My goodness. And so, what did the angel say?
JOHN: He said “Do not grieve over the loss of this child. You are going to become pregnant again. You will have another child, and it will be a son, and you are to call his name John Paul.”
SID: But the pregnancy was a long one.
JOHN: Well, it was a long one. The angel went on to say that this child will have an 11th hour ministry, and even your pregnancy will be a sign of that 11th hour ministry. So she became pregnant with me, and the day that I was due, 9 months later, 40 weeks, the gestation period, she went to the hospital in labor. And when she got to the hospital, everything was going along fine,
and then the labor process stopped. Well when the labor process stopped, they sent her home, thinking “Well it’s just false labor pains. We’ll see her within 24 to 48 hours.” Instead, two months went by. And two months to the day that I was to be born, eleven months total, she went back into the hospital and gave birth to me.
SID: Have you ever talked to a doctor to find out how unusual it is for it to last eleven months before you’re born?
JOHN: Yeah, it’s very, very, very rare. It’s like less than 2/10 of 1 percent of the children that would even survive that type of birthing process. And in that particular day, they didn’t have a means of artificially inducing labor, so my mother would drink bottles of castor oil. We had a two story house and she would sit on the top of the stairs and bounce down the stairs after drinking bottles of castor oil, trying to induce labor, because she had heard that it would throw the uterus into contractions.
SID: It’s a wonder she survived or you survived. But anyway, over the years you began to see that these were messages from God that were coming to pass. But you decided you didn’t like the life, the “religious” life, you wanted to be a millionaire. You had been discipled by television, like I was, like most people were, and you can only be happy if you’re a millionaire. But at age 30, your world turns upside down. You had a visitor.
JOHN: I did, I had a visitor. My marriage had a lot of difficulty in it. We had a small business, a daycare center, that we owned. I was involved in a Fortune 500 company, and was going up in that Fortune 500 company. But everything seemed to be falling apart. My golden boy… You know, that “golden boy” status seemed to be disappearing. And I thought “Ok, if everything is going to disappear, then I am going to get close to the Living God. I’m going to find Him, I’m going to find out what He’s all about, and I’m going to see if what happened to me as a child is real.” And so, I began seeking Him. And He, in November 1980, when I just had turned 30 years of age, a few months before, I had an encounter where I was laying in bed. It was dark. My wife had gone off to open up the daycare center. I had laryngitis. I couldn’t speak, so I was staying home from work to try to recover. In the dark of the morning, a light came into my room. And when this light came into my room, it started out small, it woke me up, and then it grew very quickly. It encompassed the entire room. Everything in the room disappeared, Sid. The dresser drawers disappeared, the chest of drawers disappeared, the furniture disappeared, in the brightness of this light. Everything disappeared. I felt a holy presence, something holy, like I’d never felt. Holiness. The reality of what sinlessness must be like. And I knew it was the presence of God. I rolled out of bed onto the floor, because the bed was too high in His holy presence. If I could’ve gotten under the carpet, I would’ve. If I could’ve gotten under the foundation of the house, I would have. Because whatever it was, I was too high in the presence of this holiness.
And so, then this light identified Himself as the Lord. He identified Himself as my Creator. He identified Himself as The One who had caused my birth to take place, caused my mother to conceive, told her about what was going to happen. He identified Himself in all this, showed me my entire life, showed me why I had lived and not died – or actually why I died twice and He brought me back from these two death encounters – why things that had happened to me had happened, and what it was meant to do. The enemy meant to destroy me, but He meant it to create a sensitivity in me, an awareness of spiritual issues that He wanted me to tell the church about.
SID: Now did He show you what would happen, some things in the future?
JOHN: Yes He did. He showed me some things that were going to take place, and those things that were supposed to take place, took place.
SID: Wait a second, what does this “eleventh hour ministry” mean?
JOHN: To me, it’s very akin to what Joel said in the Bible. Joel said that in the last days, and I think that’s like the eleventh hour. Midnight is typically thought of as being the conclusion of things. And so the eleventh hour would be in the wind down of things, as things are winding down.
SID: Listen, he knows what’s going to happen in the future, in America, in the world.
