Sid Roth - My Fear Melted When I Heard God Say These Words
Sid Roth: What is the deepest search in life?
Ed Piorek: Pascal, the philosopher, said that there's a God-shaped vacuum in all men that only Christ can fill, and now I can see that there's heart-shaped vacuum in all men and women that only the Father's love can fill. We were created out of love with a heart that seeks the love of a Father, and only the Father's love can fill that, and all men and women have that need, everyone who's listening to us. Even now, God, by His grace, is causing their heart to say, "I want this love. I want this love," that we're talking about, and so perhaps that's why we're talking about it, that they can realize that even in this moment, their heart wants to receive this love they were created for.
Sid Roth: And you know what? This is true for people that had dysfunctional fathers, and this is also true for people that had good fathers because what Eddie's talking about is something a human can't give. It's the pure, undefiled love of God coming into those that were created to receive this. You talk about hitting the glove.
Ed Piorek: Uh-huh.
Sid Roth: Explain what you mean by that.
Ed Piorek: I grew up as a baseball player, and my dad was my coach, and I was a pitcher, and so he was involved in my whole journey in playing baseball, and I just realized, in the way he groomed me for baseball, that he wanted me to win every game. And my father would take me out to practice in the side field, especially if we lost a game, and he was a little bit of unhappy, and he would put his glove out there, and he'd pound the glove, and he'd say, "Eddie, you need to hit the glove. You need to hit the glove," and I would have to throw strikes, but if I didn't hit that glove, that catcher's glove, and I missed it, I'd have to go chase the ball. And he was upset with me, and I'd come back and sometimes with tears in my eyes and do my best to hit that glove, and when I finally hit the glove, he would be happy, and he says, "That's what you have to do, son, to be successful". Well, that got tied into my relationship with my father. Because deep inside because of that pursuit, I was looking for my dad to give me this father's love, and so what I wanted was his embrace. I wanted him to tell me he loved me, but he came out of that generation where they really didn't do that, so I never heard my dad tell me he loved me. I never had him pick me up and hug me, and so I was trying to figure out how do I get that, and so I began to try to perform for his love. I wasn't even conscious of it. When I did something well, he was pleased, but when I failed at any point in my life, I would feel him pull away, and at times, he would get upset if I did something he really was disliked with, and I would feel this rejection from him, and out of that came, for me, a core fear of failure. And most people who have not received unconditional love feel they have to perform for it in order to get it. Without the Father's love being revealed, His manifest glory, so that people can experience it, we're vulnerable even as Christians because we don't know how to get this void filled, so what we're left with is what mankind does. We'll try to work for it, or the other thing is that you might try to fill it with false love, which could be - sex is one of the things or materialism or some kind of substance to fill the emptiness or have to work for it, and that's why the Father's love has to be revealed to the church.
Sid Roth: And you teach that Jesus shows us the way to know the love of Abba Father.
Ed Piorek: Yes.
Sid Roth: What is that?
Ed Piorek: Well, when Jesus came, he was sent by the Father to reveal the Father. John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by Me". Now, we're familiar with "I am the way, the truth and the life," to get saved.
Sid Roth: Yes.
Ed Piorek: But then we forget the second part, that He wants to bring us, and this is all so that He can show us the way to the Father. When He came, He started talking about the Father. He was always addressing God as Father, especially in the Gospel of John. Unprecedented. And then we learn from Mark in the Garden of Gethsemane that He routinely would call the Father, Abba.
Sid Roth: What does Abba mean?
Ed Piorek: Well, Abba is the, well, at that point, that was a term that children would use with their father in the Jewish culture, little children. They would call them, it's like our papa or daddy, but a sort of intimacy where you beheld and demonstrated love. That's, He said, "God wants us to experience that". But Jesus, who is the God Man, He also wanted to demonstrate, how does a human being experience that love? And we see that at His baptism, when Jesus goes to start His ministry, He goes into the Jordan River, and He's identifying with mankind in those redemptive waters. He doesn't need to be baptized, but that's the beginning of His ministry, so in His humanity, He knows that in order to fulfill His Kingdom ministry, He needs the anointing of the Messiah, promised, Isaiah 61, for power. But He also knows that He needs the affirmation of His Father because He knows what lies ahead, and that's where we see Jesus come out of the water, and the Spirit comes like a dove in this gentleness that is also a powerful anointment. The gentleness, I call it the love dove, that comes and settles on His heart, and while He's experiencing that in His human heart, simultaneously, the Father speaks these words, and these are His inaugural words over His Son, and says, "You are My Son. I love You. I am real pleased with You". You might say, "Well, He was the Son of God. It's only natural that the Father would love Him, but what about us"? Well, one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible that gives us the promise that we too can experience that is in John 16:27, and you know, Jesus has just told His disciples that He's leaving, and then He tells them that they're going to do greater works than He did, and so they all of a sudden, I think, have a holy huddle, and they say, "Did anyone take notes on how He did that"? And then they realize that He did so many of His miracles different every time, and then they came to the conclusion, "Well, He did it because His Father told Him". So they ask that question, very logical question, "Jesus, when you're gone, will the Father listen to us and answer us and show us what He's doing"? And so Jesus answers that very clearly. He says, "In that day, You will ask in My Name. I will not ask for you. You will be able to ask the Father yourself because the Father loves you because you have loved Me". But then He said, when He was leaving, He said, "Don't leave Jerusalem until you receive what the Father promised". And we are familiar with "Don't leave Jerusalem until you receive power," but they knew that they needed the power and the love, and that is what commissioned them: power and love. They moved in empowered love, and that's the key to Kingdom ministry. In the future, when we have the great revival, it's going to be a great outpouring of the power of the Holy Spirit, but a great and greater outpouring of the love of the Father.
Sid Roth: Tell me about the time that you experienced failure.
Ed Piorek: Well, I feel, experienced failure, it was in my core with my dad, but I started to feel the experience of failure in my Christian life when I would travel with a man called John Wimber, and the way he would disciple you, is he would get up on stage and proclaim the healing ministry of Jesus, and there'd be thousands of people there, and they're saying, "All right. Now if John prays for us, he's the man with the anointing, I'll get healed," but then John was trying to let people know that, no, he's not some healing guru, that anyone can bring healing by the power of the Holy Spirit, and he was into equipping the saints for healing. He says, "Oh, I want to show. I want to demonstrate this so, Eddie," I'm sitting down in the front row, thinking, "This is great". And then I'd have to get up on the stage, and he'd say, "Can I have this person come up that has this blindness"? Now, that's a tough one, blindness, so that person would come up, and John would say, "Eddie, would you go pray for them"? Now, when I would have to go pray for that person in front of all of those people, my fear of failure and my fear of not hitting the glove was palpable. And I would become so frozen in fear, but I knew that God was faithful, so I'd say, "Father, bring healing," and they would get healed, in, in spite of my inner fears. Those fears got so strong inside of me that in ministry, I was so afraid of failing, that it would freeze me. But I realized that Jesus, His fears, were disarmed because He knew His Father loved Him, and so I began to say, "Father, Father, I need that love," and then one evening at a pastors conference, I was in that same place, fearful, and there was something that was happening that made me afraid that there might be a, I might lose everything in the church if this important person we were sending away left. It was like that little fear of him leaving, tied to my bigger fear of failing as a pastor, but it was hardwired to my fear of failing my dad.
Sid Roth: Ah! And so all connected.
Ed Piorek: Hardwired. So I just went, "Father. Father," and on that evening, an all of a sudden when I prayed that prayer, frozen in fear, and all of a sudden, I felt the Spirit come, and my body began to tremble, and then I felt light. It was like a burst of light, and then I just remember, it was like, I felt like my heart, this frozen fear was like a, you know a, granite mountain, and all of a sudden, it was shattered. I mean literally shattered, and I felt the power jolt through me, and then I started to weep, and I started to get peaceful while this liquid waterfall was going through me. And I got quiet, and I hear this voice, "Eddie, you are My son. I love you. You can never fail in My sight".
Sid Roth: Birth defects recreated, blind eyes opened, severe cluster headaches disappear instantly when they receive the revelation and impartation of the Father's love. I can feel, many of you aren't feelers, that doesn't mean it's not going on. I can feel the water level, if you will, of the love of Father God increasing, increasing. It's a, Eddie's a surfer. But this is better than any ocean could ever bring a surfer. This is the real thing. We'll be right back.
Sid Roth: Tell me a few people that as you explained the revelation, got miracles.
Ed Piorek: One of the miracles that really demonstrated to me the connection between the Father's love and healing took place years ago in England. We were praying for healing. John Wimber was leading a conference. Said there's healing here for skeletal deformities, and as we were waiting for people to come forward, I saw this woman come forward, a middle-aged woman, and I noticed that when she's walking that one shoulder was about 2 or 3 inches lower than the other, sort of cockeyed. And she came up and wanted prayer, and she said that she was born with a birth defect in the pelvic area, and as a result of that defect, her body was all crooked. One leg was shorter than the other, and her shoulder dipped. So we began to pray for her, and I got the word rejection, and so I just spoke over her. "I break the power of rejection in your life," and when that happened, she was sort of hit by the power of the Spirit, and she falls back on the floor. And so then when I knelt down to pray for her, and I asked her this question, "Can you remember when you experienced rejection in your life"? When she was born, she had a twin sister stillborn, but she was born with these deformities, and so fast forwarding it, when she was 5 years old, and now she's had to go through all kinds of procedures, and it had cost the parents a lot of money, and she happened to overhear her father say to her mother in the kitchen. They were frustrated at that point a bit, and they said, "I just don't know why God let that happen, why he had to let the one daughter who had a perfect body die and had to let the one with the defective body live? I just don't know why. Why"? Well, she heard that, and so it felt like such rejection to her, and I just simply said, "Could you forgive your father for saying that now"? And so she prayed this prayer to forgive her father, and then I prayed for her. "Father, would you bring healing to that wound of rejection? Father, would you heal that emptiness and loneliness and bring healing to the pain in her body"? The power, her body was trembling. Her leg had come out, and all of a sudden, we could hear snapping. We could hear cracking. We could hear the bones moving, and as that was happening, we could hear her shoulders coming into alignment. We were blessing what the Father was doing, and then we had her stand up, and she was perfectly normal. Everything is straight, and I realized the power of love was released, the power to break the power of that rejection. It was - filled the body with love and began to just catalyze through the body a miraculous healing. Well, there was another woman in England, and I was teaching out of Luke where Jesus said, "Don't be afraid little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom". And this woman came up to me, and the Spirit was on her, and she was just feeling the love, and she said to me - and her head was down, and she said, "Oh, thank you. I feel the love. I feel the love. I need the Kingdom". And I said, "Well, what would you like from the Father and the Kingdom"? And she lifted up her head, and the one eye was completely whited out, closed, one right eye, and she said, "I want my eye to open. I want my eye to be healed". And I said, "Let me pray for you," and I put my hand on that eye, and I said, "The Father loves you. Receive healing". And the moment I did that, I removed my hand, and she opened her eye, and the eye was perfectly healed, and she could see out of it.
Ed Piorek: And in that case, I just saw that the Father's love gave her the faith to know she was loved, and she could receive a gift from the Father.
Sid Roth: I'd like to pray for you right now that you would know that you know that you know the love of God, that your sins are completely wiped away, that you will spend this life with the Messiah never leaving you or forsaking and direct communication through the Messiah to God the Father, that you will know this. Repeat after me out loud. "Dear God, I'm a sinner. I'm so sorry for my mistakes. I believe the love of God came in the form of a person, my Messiah Jesus. And He died for every mistake I made. And by His blood I am clean. And now that I am clean Jesus, come and live inside of me, become my Savior and my Lord. I want to experience you. Amen". I believe that you can pray for healing and impartation of the Father's love right now. Would you do that? And anything else God directs.
Ed Piorek: Yes. Father, I pray that Your Spirit would descend, that You'd open every heart and mind now to receive Your love. Father, I ask for healing power to be released now. Thank You for the anointing that's here. I release it and may Your kingdom come. Father, I pray for healing for broken hearts. I pray for healing for couples that are contemplating divorce. I pray for people that have just heard the devastating news about cancer that you know that your Father loves you and will carry you through this and will bring help and healing to you, that you will make it, and even that there will be signs of healing along the way. Father, I pray for all those people with skeletal issues that struggle, even the cripples, even in chairs. May the power of Your love, may the power of Your compassion come in the Name of Jesus now to bring healing, take pain, take fear, bring hope, bring healing. Father, I pray for a wave of healing love to be poured out as a result throughout everyone who hears this. Pour out Your love in signs and wonders. Pour out Your love in goodness. Hold Your children, Father, each one a son or daughter, hold them tight with your love. In Jesus Name, Amen.