Sid Roth - Jesus Has Over 1,000 Names for YOU
Sid Roth: Welcome Holy Spirit. Go and flow. God led my guest Mike Shreve on a study of his God-given names. There's a big distinction in what I'm about ready to say. You're going to get it wrong unless you listen. Mike, why is this so important to know?
Mike Shreve: Well, at the time I was studying the names of God.
Sid Roth: Lots of people have done that.
Mike Shreve: Oh, yeah. Hundreds of books have been written on that. And it pulled back the veil on who God is. It revealed so many different attributes, and it built faith in me concerning my expectations of God in my relationship with Him. And so I was studying that and God spoke to me as you said, that it would be just as important for me to know my God-given names. And wow, the light bulb went off in my spirit. If you don't know who God says you are, you can't boldly walk in your calling and your purpose. But once you know God's declaration over you, you can lift your hand and say, "I am who God says I am, I have what God says I have, and I'm going to do what God says I can do". So it's a very powerful impartation.
Sid Roth: It was almost a shock when you found out how many different names God calls us. Explain that.
Mike Shreve: I thought I might find 30 or 40 or 50 at the most. But as I dug over a period of months and even a couple of years, I found over 1,000 names and titles that belong to the people of God that cover a whole range of callings and purposes, like we're referred to as the called of Jesus Christ, a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, more than conquerors, oracles of God. We're referred to as lovers of God and vessels of mercy and vessels unto honor his workmanship. And the list goes on and on and on. The bride, the church, and every one of those names is like a treasure chest that opens up to a revelation that is absolutely profound concerning who we are. And I've often told people, when you find Jesus, you find yourself. And when you discover His identity, you discover your own identity. And the big battle of this generation is identity and identity crisis. I don't just think, I know this solves that problem.
Sid Roth: How did it make a difference in your life? Let's take when you went to Asheville.
Mike Shreve: Oh, when I went to Asheville, North Carolina, I knew the kind of authority that I could walk in because I knew the scripture said, for instance in 1 Peter 4:11, "If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God". And the word oracle simply means a mouthpiece of God, that we should speak as if God is speaking himself. That's a level of authority that people deny themselves as having. But Jesus said, "It is not you but your Heavenly Father that speaks in you at certain times". So anyway, we went to Asheville and my normal mode, I had a whole team of soul winners with me at that time, is to go to a police officer and ask him where the worst place in town is.
Sid Roth: That's your normal?
Mike Shreve: And he said, "Oh, Lexington Street". But he said, "Don't go down there". I said, "Why not"? He said, "Because we'll probably find you beat up with your throat slit, robbed and killed, crammed in a dumpster somewhere". I said, "Thank you, officer". He said, "Where are you going, preacher"? I said, "Lexington Street. It sounds like they need our help down there". But I knew I was going down there as an ambassador for Christ. That's what Paul said. And that's a name given to us in God's word. And strangely, if an ambassador is even in a nation that is at odds with, say, the United States of America where we live, even if it's a nation that's hostile to our nation, within the confines of that embassy, that ambassador carries with him a weight of authority as if the authority of the president and the vice president and the cabinet and the Senate and the Congress and all of that is transferred down to him as the representative of the US government. Well, when I walked into Lexington Street, I walked in as a representative of El Elyon, the most high God, El Shaddai, the Almighty God. And if He's the Almighty, the Bible refers to us as sons of the mighty and Psalm 29 even calls us the mighty, "Give unto the Lord, oh you mighty, give unto the Lord glory and strength". And the reason we are the mighty is because the Bible said the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they are mighty through God. So I was going down there in the middle of a whole pool of sin. There were prostitutes walking up and down the street, drug addicts pushing their drugs. There was alcoholics walking all around, but I had weapons of warfare that could conquer every one of those strongholds like the blood of Jesus, like the name of Jesus, like the word of God and like the spirit of God, the anointing in my life. Because by the way, that's another one of my names and your names and your names, we are referred to as the anointed, the anointed. And the scripture says that the Lord is their strength. He is the saving strength of his anointed. And I love the Hebrew in that because the Hebrew word translated saving there is Yeshua. And so you could substitute the name of the Lord in there. The Lord is their strength. He is the Yeshua strength of His anointed.
Sid Roth: You researched, you found there were 1,000 names for God. You then boiled it down to how many in your book?
Mike Shreve: Well, in the book, Who Am I?, I highlight 52 of the most powerful names, one for every week.
Sid Roth: But what's even better is he does a teaching on what that name means to you. And he has lived what he's teaching. This is very important for you to understand. There's so few that under understand who you really are. It totally transforms...
Mike Shreve: And the transition takes place immediately as soon as the person's born again, like what happened that night on Lexington Street. And I was walking down the street with my family Bible under my arm and this guy... Some people spread word. There's a bunch of preachers outside and this guy... It was a crazy name for a bar, it was called the Rock and Robin Bar, and I didn't know that was some popular song back then. But anyway, this guy crawled out of the bar overdosing on drugs and he had mixed barbiturates and alcohol together or something like that, but he was frothing at the mouth. He was trembling and shaking. He was crawling on his hands and knees. He could hardly talk. And he crawled out because he heard preachers were out there and he said, "Pray for me". He pushed his words out. He could barely talk. He said, "Pray for me, I'm dying". And we all gathered around him and laid hands on him and commanded the demons to come out of him. And as we prayed over him, he got bright-eyed. He stood up, he said, "Man, I'm not od'ing anymore". And he said, "I feel this power in the air all around me". I said, "That's the sweet Holy Spirit, Jack". I said, "He feels even better when He comes on the inside". And he got baptized with the Holy Spirit. He got saved, filled with the Holy Spirit. And about that time this woman came running across the road. I found out later she was one of the street prostitutes. I also found out she was a backslidden church of God girl. And she came running over and threw her arms around this guy and she said, "Oh Jack, I'm so happy for you. I'm so happy for you". And I knew God was in it. I didn't know the details, but I said, "Why don't you get what Jack just got"? And I grabbed her hand and she fell on her knees in the middle of whiskey bottles and beer cans and she prayed through. She was a Cherokee Indian and I didn't know it, and she started praying in Cherokee. I thought, "Oh, praise God, already speaking in tongues". But then two winos walked up and they said, "We're the scum of the earth. Would God save us"? I said, "You're the very reason He came". And they fell on their knees and started praying through. And then the little Cherokee girl, and this was so, so beautiful, she started singing Amazing Grace. And all of a sudden it was like the volume level of all the bands and the jukeboxes and the revelry and the partying went down and all you could hear up and down Lexington Street was this little girl singing Amazing Grace. And then Jack started singing with her. And then the two winos started singing with her. And then a back-sitting Baptist preacher came up and fell on his knees and he said, "There's voices in my head that tell me I can't get right with God anymore, that I'm reprobating". He's crying. I said, "If you were reprobate, you'd be cursing God, not weeping". And I said, "Besides, the gifts and calling of God are without repentance". And I grabbed his hand and he got saved. Then all of them were singing Amazing Grace. I had the Lexington Street choir there. It was incredible. It was incredible.
Sid Roth: You could not have orchestrated that in a million years.
Mike Shreve: No way.
Sid Roth: What did you feel when you saw all this activity going around and God is doing this and disrupting an entire most evil block in the city?
Mike Shreve: I felt like an heir of the kingdom, and that's one of our titles in James 2:5, it says, "Has not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, because it was a supernatural kingdom that took over on that street". And incidentally, we are referred to as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. But then there's another scripture in 1 Peter that calls all believers heirs of the grace of life. So all those people getting saved became heirs of the grace of life as we, God's stewards of that grace, brought it to them. So we're all filling these roles that God has given us.
Sid Roth: I don't believe that you could have succeeded as much as you did without knowing who you really were in God.
Mike Shreve: No.
Sid Roth: Now, if you think that's something, wait until you find out when this guy here gets physically, literally, struck by lightning. Be right back.
Sid Roth: Sid Roth here with Mike Shreve and Mike, I've read about a lot of people struck with lightning that died. That's the normal thing or then died shortly thereafter. Tell me about this tent meeting where it rained and the lightning came down.
Mike Shreve: Well, I have people tell me I should have died that night. Actually, it was not far from here. It was in Monroe, North Carolina. And we were doing a tent meeting and that was about the time Hurricane Hugo came up the coast of North Carolina. And it spawned a lot of other storms. And many people told me I needed to drop the tent, which is normally what you do in a heavy storm time, but I just didn't feel led to. And I told the people, "We're not going to be intimidated. We're going to put up the tent and anybody that wants to come out and be with us, they can". So I had about 50 die-hard Pentecostals come out with me and they braved the weather and the tent would balloon up and sheets of rain would come through. We all got re-baptized that night. I was standing right near one of the center poles and I had a microphone in my hand. Back then we didn't have cordless mics. There was a long cord that went to the amplifier that was hooked up to the power and that was very attractive to that lightning. And it went down the pole, jumped off the pole, hit me in my hand, knocked the microphone about 30 feet and then went through my body.
Sid Roth: Now, I've never been hit with lightning. When you just nonchalantly say it hit me in my hand, did it hurt?
Mike Shreve: I don't know what I felt. To be honest, for a few seconds there I was completely numb, mentally and emotionally and physically. It just stunned me. That's the best word. I was totally stunned. Anyway, at first, I couldn't fathom what had just happened. And then I realized I was a preacher and the 50 people out in front of me that were wide-eyed were listening to my sermon. And then I remembered where I left off. So I kicked back in and started preaching at the same place. And they were all looking at me like this. And this little young woman, I'd say about 20 years old, she was the daughter of one of the supporting pastors. She ran and hobbled up. It was a hobble because she had a severe deformity. She had one leg that was an inch and a half shorter than the other, and scoliosis of the spine that was so severe it protruded from her blouse. And she ran up and she said, "Preacher, if you can endure a lightning blast, you can pray the prayer of faith for me". You know what I felt like saying? I felt like saying, "Honey, I am the one who stands in need of prayer right now". But here again, one of our names in the Bible, Galatians 6:10 10 says we are the household of faith. And Isaiah 8:18 says we are signs and wonders. And I became a sign to her that if I could endure lightning, I could pray the prayer of faith for her. And so I did. I reached out to pray for her. I don't think I ever touched her forehead. The spirit of God hit her and shook her. She quaked under the power of God from one end of the tent to the other. And when she came out from under the anointing, every vertebra in her back was straight. But more miraculous than that, her leg literally grew out an inch and a half. And so much so that to walk to the car that night, she had to take her shoes off because she had an elevator shoe.
Sid Roth: I get it.
Mike Shreve: She had an elevator shoe and it was tipping her over. And so it was absolute verification. She got a creative miracle.
Sid Roth: You think that's something, I want to find out what happened to your dad?
Mike Shreve: Yeah, dad was a hard one to win to the Lord. My mother was one of my first converts. We were all Catholic growing up and my dad had gotten disenchanted with religion altogether and he quit going to church. I don't know what happened, but he was a good man, a man of morality, integrity. But my mother and I prayed for him for 12 years. She even went on a 40-day fast for him. And he called me up one night and told me what happened, about 11:00 at night, he said, "Mike, I've got to tell you what God did for me". He had developed a neck condition where a vertebrae in his neck had slipped and for seven days his head was locked in a bad position and he checked into the hospital after about seven days and tried to worked the remote and the TV didn't work. So he figured, "I'm laying here in the bed with nothing to do. My head's already bowed. I might as well pray". I said, "Dad, that was a subtle hint from heaven, wasn't it"? And he said, "I decided to thank God for every good thing he'd ever in my life". And at the time he was a bookkeeper, so he was very detail-oriented. And so he went back to his earliest memories as a youngster and went through every good thing, every beneficial thing that had ever happened in his life and thanked God for it. And then he said, "Mike, I ran out of things to thank God for. So I decided I'm just going to praise God because he's God". I said, "Dad, that's a biblical principle. We enter God's gates with thanksgiving. We enter his course with praise". He said, "I don't know about that. All I know is what happened next". I said, "What happened next"? And it was the glory, the Shekinah. He said, "A golden light came in the hospital room". And he said, "All of a sudden the face of Jesus appeared in the light, beaten and bloodied and crowned with thorns". And then the light turned from gold to a crimson red and waves of red light started pouring over him. And he said, "I knew I was being bathed in the blood of Jesus and I knew I was being born again". Hallelujah.
Sid Roth: If this could happen to your dad, it could happen to you. I want to pray a quick prayer with you that'll have a lifetime, even when you leave your body forever result. Say this prayer out loud, believe it to the best of your ability. Repeat after me: "Dear Jesus. Forgive me for all my sins. I believe the blood of Jesus washes away my sins. And now that I'm clean, Jesus, come and live inside of me. I make you my Savior and Lord". Mike, briefly, what is going to happen to America?
Mike Shreve: I was in prayer for about two hours one day and momentarily fell asleep and I saw an outline of the map of the United States of America. And right about at the heart of the map just slightly to the right was a red dot. And that quick, in an instant, that red dot exploded into two blood-red words. One word was superimposed on the other and like liquid, it soaked into the entire map of America. There wasn't a place that wasn't covered. It was all soaked in red. And those two words were, Jesus saves. I believe a massive harvest. In fact, we are called the harvest of the earth. That's one of our names. And the harvest isn't big enough yet and He's given us the word of God. And He said He gives seed to the sower. That's what we are. You're sowing every time you do one of these broadcasts. I'm sowing right now while I'm sharing these words. And as we sow, the seed of the word of God in people's lives is going to bring them into this final harvest that I believe is going to be coast to coast and border to border. I don't care what the political agenda is. I don't care what the globalists claim they're going to do. I don't care what the atheists and the people that want to push perversity on our society do in order to transform us. I believe God's going to have the upper hand and he's going to return our culture to a biblical basis. And we're going to see the light of God shine again, unprecedented.
Sid Roth: Many prophets are saying any moment now this could happen. What are you saying?
Mike Shreve: Any moment, I agree, at any time. In fact, we're getting little foreshadowings of it all the time. An outbreak of revival here, an outbreak of revival there, all around the country, but I believe...
Sid Roth: But you saw the whole country ablaze...
Mike Shreve: The entire country. There wasn't a city...
Sid Roth: ...in red.
Mike Shreve: Yeah.
Sid Roth: Would you pray for the viewers right now that are so hungry for the new? Pray for them.
Mike Shreve: Yes, Lord, I just pray that you will move on every believer that wants to be an ambassador for Christ, wants to be a vessel of mercy and a vessel of honor and wants to be used of God to bring in to usher in this revival of the last days, this outpouring of the spirit. You're looking for new wineskins in order to put the new wine of that fresh anointing in. Well, we offer ourselves, Lord, all over this nation, all over this world, we offer ourselves to be containers of your glory. You declared in 1 Peter 5 that we are partakers of your glory. So we lay hold to what belongs to us. And we believe even as the priest carried the glory of God with them when they bore the Ark of the Covenant, we as priests of the new covenant, a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood, are going to bear the glory of God wherever we go. And we claim an outbreak in our communities, in our cities, in our states, and in our nation, in Jesus' name. And everybody said amen.