Sid Roth - Heaven Appointments
Sid Roth: Welcome to my world where it's naturally supernatural. I just so love breathing in the rarified air of Heaven. You should try it. You're going to like it. My guest is an award-winning medical doctor that was an atheist, went to Heaven and can't keep quiet about Jesus now. But that's not why I'm interviewing him. I'm interviewing him because he totally demystifies death. Now if you don't know the Messiah, there should be fear of the unknown, death. But many Christians have fear of death. Trust me. You will be in a whole new realm after you hear this medical doctor. Now Dr. Reggie Anderson is a medical doctor in church every time the doors were open. But as a teenager, your best friends you spent summers with were involved in one of the most horrible mass murders in the history of Georgia. What happened to you, Reggie?
Reggie Anderson: Like you said, I was raised in a church, went there every moment I got that the doors were open. Then when I was 15, Jimmy and Jerry, my best friends growing up were murdered, all six of their family members, and I ran as fast and as far as I could .... And I could not believe that a God that would allow something like this, so horrible, to even happen. And so I felt like at that time, that he must not exist because he didn't help my friends stay out of that tragedy.
Sid Roth: You did a little more than that, Reggie. Did you take your fist? Tell me.
Reggie Anderson: I really got angry. I ran as far as I could into the forest near my home, and I shouted angry thoughts at God. I mean, I hit my fist against the tree and I said, "God, you can't be allowing this and you must not even be here on this planet, I mean, or not even exist".
Sid Roth: So his new God became science and through science, he went to medical school and they just reaffirmed that he should be an atheist until he saw one of the most beautiful things on Earth. What was that?
Reggie Anderson: It was the human body. I was sitting in a Gross anatomy lab and I looked, and it was a piece of art. It was, I could not fathom that this order came out of chaos. Something so beautiful as the human body, I had no other explanation other than an artist, a creator. And so I started to think, there must be something else.
Sid Roth: How did this defy your scientific understanding?
Reggie Anderson: Well I had been trained classically as a scientist in physics to realize that unless there is an outside force order as to disorder, that's physical law, and of course, the biologists kind of disagreed with that. They said that evolution explained everything, that we came out of disorder. So I could not really resolve that conflict in my mind as a scientist. So then I see the creation in front of me, the human body, and I realize the only way this could happen was with a creator.
Sid Roth: But it still wasn't enough because all that hurt inside of him, all that anger, all that rage, God, why did you do this. And some of you can relate to this. So God knew exactly what to do with Dr. Anderson. He saw the most beautiful woman at college and decided, I want to meet her. But there's a problem. What was the problem, Reggie?
Reggie Anderson: Well I asked her out on a date and we went, and on the way home, I was asking her for a second date. But she asked me a very important question: are you a Christian? And I said the only thing I could think of, "My parents are".
Sid Roth: That must have helped a lot.
Reggie Anderson: So in response to that she said, "I don't think we should date because my life is dedicated to Jesus Christ and your life is going on a totally different path".
Sid Roth: But he keeps pestering her and he overhears her saying to one of her girlfriends, "This Reggie, he's an atheist and he's kind of a stalker". But that still didn't stop you seeing her. And so finally, he goes off on a camping trip. He promises her that he'll read a book. What happened?
Reggie Anderson: Well she had given me a book a few weeks earlier, called "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis, and my mother had mailed a Bible to me. And I took those two books, and I sat down by the fireside, and I read straight through "Mere Christianity" and I read the Gospel of John, and then I fell asleep, and I started dreaming the most miraculous dream for an atheist, especially.
Sid Roth: What was it?
Reggie Anderson: Well in that dream, Jesus came to me and he spoke these words, he said, "Reggie, why are you running from me? Your friends are here with me in paradise". And I turned and I could clearly see Jimmy and Jerry, and all their family, and they were well and healthy, and I wanted to be there with them. I did not want to leave that space with them. And then Jesus said, "If you'll stop running and listen to my words, I have a plan for the rest of your life".
Sid Roth: I mean, it was such a plan. He found out what he was supposed to do the rest of his life in Heaven, in this dream. When we come back, you're going to find out it was preposterous to him and surely preposterous to the woman he was kind of stalking.
Sid Roth: So Dr. Anderson, as a medical student, as a practicing atheist goes to Heaven. Tell me as a doctor, what you saw, what you experienced in Heaven.
Reggie Anderson: Well I turned and saw my friends who were healthy and well. I saw Jesus and I felt his presence, and he spoke to me into the deepest part of my soul, and he told me things that I would experience later in life. He promised that if I would stop running from him that all of these things would come.
Sid Roth: Tell me basically what he told you.
Reggie Anderson: He says, "You're going marry this young lady, Karen. You're going to have four children. You're going to practice medicine in Tennessee as a rural doctor". And all of these things have come true 33 years later.
Sid Roth: Thirty-three years later. Okay. What about your friends? What about that young man in the woods saying, "God, how could you do this"!
Reggie Anderson: Well that experience with Jesus radically changed entire spiritual DNA. I woke up not really understanding what was going on at that time. But I woke up a totally different man, totally converted into Christianity. And as soon as I got back to civilization I bought a postcard, and I wrote on that postcard to Karen, who would not even go out with me, "I became a Christian. I had a dream. Jesus came to me. We're going to get married".
Sid Roth: Okay. So you become a doctor. But you told me also you got the distinct impression the why's of your friends' death.
Reggie Anderson: Well I felt like God knew before their death why that was going to happen and that he had them in his arms even before they died, just like he has all of us in his plan even before we die.
Sid Roth: Are you afraid of death?
Reggie Anderson: Not at all.
Sid Roth: How many people have you been with just before they died, would you say?
Reggie Anderson: Hundreds.
Sid Roth: Hundreds. Because God gave him a gift when he came back from Heaven. All of his senses are so tuned into Heaven, he can smell Heaven, he can see Heaven, he can feel Heaven. He can tell the exact moment someone's spirit leaves their body. But the supernatural began to overtake him in his medical practice. For instance, explain to me what parting the veil means.
Reggie Anderson: Sure. The first time that it happened, I had just become a Christian and I was in medical school still. And the job of the medical student was to stand vigil at the bed of a dying patient and to retrieve the attending whenever it happened. So I was in this room in the VA hospital in Birmingham. And it was in the middle of the night, dark, sterile hospital room, and this man, I knew he was a Christian because his family had been in earlier and been praying with him. And soon as he took his last breath, it was as if this door had opened on a spring day and a kind of citrus and lilac smell entered the room, as if God had come into the room to take this man's soul. It lit up the hospital.
Sid Roth: What do you mean, it lit up? I don't understand.
Reggie Anderson: Well you could just feel a warmth. You could see the lights had, instead of being dark, it was lit up just like this studio.
Sid Roth: Now did you see a specific light?
Reggie Anderson: It was a glow and it was up into the right.
Sid Roth: Yeah, but how do you know it wasn't one of your medical machines?
Reggie Anderson: We had shut them off to make it quiet.
Sid Roth: Now what impact did that have on you?
Reggie Anderson: Well it made me think back to my dream and it made me realize that the reality of where we are going is more real than where we are. That what we are experiencing here on Earth is a dream compared to that reality of where we are going to be.
Sid Roth: I mean, he's been with hundreds, now, just before they die. He knows the exact second they leave. By the way, when a Christian dies, you were telling me about the expression on their face. What have you noticed?
Reggie Anderson: They always get the gaze of glory. They look up into the right and they start to get this glow, and they're smiling. They're, believers that leave this planet to go to Heaven, it's a joyous experience.
Sid Roth: Tell me about Irene.
Reggie Anderson: She was an elderly lady who had dementia, but she recognized me that night, and she was dying of a heart attack. But she had made it clear that she did not want to be resuscitated. And so, but she asked me one thing before we were going up to her room. She asked me to stay with her that night. She wanted to have an escort because she was going to meet Jesus that night.
Sid Roth: She actually used the word "escort".
Reggie Anderson: Yeah.
Sid Roth: Okay. Tell me about it.
Reggie Anderson: Well I was sitting there with her and her heart started to fade, and her breath started to be somewhat labored. I look at that, it's called change soaked breathing, but it's almost as if somebody is being born in birthed into another world. It's just like a woman going into labor and her breathing changes. And the veil parted. The room again opened up and the sense of..
Sid Roth: Now when you say, "the veil parted", I mean, be more graphic with me.
Reggie Anderson: Well it's a very thin space between where we are now and where we're going to be. And that thin space, I think of it as a veil. I mean, it's, I think of eternity really as not something we run toward as much as eternity walks right alongside us and it's just one breath away. And once we take our last breath here, it's our first breath in Heaven.
Sid Roth: I think Dr. Anderson is taking away the breath of some of you that are watching right now. We're going to be right back and find out how the supernatural started increasing more in Dr. Anderson's life.
Sid Roth: Okay. I'm here with Dr. Anderson. And he found out that his hands are naturally cold. But when he exams a patient, what normally happens, Dr. Anderson, with your hands?
Reggie Anderson: Well they are extremely cold. And when I shake a person's hands, they usually comment on it. Even you said something to me the other day. And they start to warm up whenever I'm examining a patient and I find an area that's not cold.
Sid Roth: Give me one example.
Reggie Anderson: Well I had one patient that I shook her hand and she was just a friend of my mother's, and I asked her if she had any thyroid issues and she did not know of any. And I told my mom that she probably ought to check with her doctor. Sure enough, two weeks later, she called her mom and said, "You do have some thyroid issues".
Sid Roth: You know, the thing that still amazes me about how he holds hands with hundreds of people. And you told me that there's almost like a breeze that you feel. Tell me. Describe graphically things you see and feel, and sense.
Reggie Anderson: Well there was another case of a young boy that was in the emergency room, that I had examined after he had injured his head. And I put my hand on his head where he had injured it, and there didn't seem to be anything outwardly wrong with him. As a matter of fact, I was going to send him home with just some instructions. But as I was speaking the words to the mother, I said, "I think we need to send your young son to Vanderbilt to have a CT scan".
Sid Roth: Why did you say that?
Reggie Anderson: I don't know to this day other than God spoke those words through me.
Sid Roth: What happened?
Reggie Anderson: Four hours after I sent him in, the neurosurgeon called me. And I was expecting him to kind of give me up the country for sending a normal child in, But he said, "If you had not sent this child in, he would have died. He had a bleed inside his head and we just finished surgery".
Sid Roth: Tell me someone that died, medically speaking, came back to life and told you what they saw.
Reggie Anderson: Sure. She was suffering from a heart attack and we sent her in to the cardiologist, and he discovered that she had a blockage. Took her to the cath lab, was doing a procedure to open the blockage and she died. And he did CPR on her. She was flat-lined for two hours.
Sid Roth: And you're sure she was dead. I guess flat-lined is short hand for dead.
Reggie Anderson: Right. The cardiologist called me as said, I mean, we went on and on with this procedure because I had a resident that I wanted to train on how to do CPR. Anyway, after two hours she woke, I mean her heart started. So we took her to the ICU.
Sid Roth: Why did her start after the flat-line for two hours?
Reggie Anderson: God only knows.
Sid Roth: Medically, is there an explanation.
Reggie Anderson: There was not any explanation and neither did the cardiologist have one. He just said her heart started, despite us.
Sid Roth: So if he hadn't been experimenting, she would have died.
Reggie Anderson: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: Okay. Let's go on.
Reggie Anderson: So three days later, she was in the ICU and woke up, and they estivated her. And the first thing she wanted to tell the nurses was to call me. And so Karen and I went to the ICU in Nashville to visit with this lady. And the first thing out of her mouth was that she had been with Jesus and her family, and that she had wanted to tell me that where she had been was better than where she is now, and she wanted to get back there as soon as she could.
Sid Roth: Was she upset that she came back?
Reggie Anderson: She was very upset and for seven years, she told me she was upset.
Sid Roth: Tell me about a patient you had that was not going to go to Heaven.
Reggie Anderson: Yes. I had this, a few patients. But fortunately, most of my patients have actually gone to Heaven. But I have had one that I tried to, I struggled with, constantly trying to bring him back to the Lord, because he was a man that was, had given up on God and many years of bitterness, and that sort of thing. At his bedside when he took his last breath, it was very, very different than the ones that go to Heaven.
Sid Roth: What was different?
Reggie Anderson: Instead of being smiling and happy, and you know, looking, he was very angry and taking, almost fighting his last breath. And there was a sense of darkness and coldness in the room. So it changed radically very different from one of my experiences where the patients go to Heaven.
Sid Roth: What would you say to someone that is facing death right now, that is a Christian?
Reggie Anderson: What I would say is that you have nothing to fear, that the veil is very, very thin. That we're not running toward eternity, but eternity walks right alongside us, and it is waiting for us. Jesus is waiting right pass this very thin veil and that he is loving that we are coming to meet with him.
Sid Roth: And what would you say to someone facing death that has not believed that Jesus died for their sins, has not repented and has not made Jesus their Lord? What would you say to them?
Reggie Anderson: I would say, give up on the old life. Except that you are about to meet eternity and that if you don't except Jesus, the eternity that you're going to be part of is not a heavenly one. It is a hellish one. So I would recommend very clearly that you look to Jesus as your savior.
Sid Roth: I don't recommend. You see, he's a doctor. I tell people. I'm telling you, you do not know, even though you might have gotten a death sentence. But maybe you haven't even gotten a death sentence. You flat, flat-line, you flat don't know when your end will come, do you? Of course, you don't know. But I know this. I'm a Jew and when I was 30 years of age, Jesus came into my bedroom and he's real. And I know my orthodox Jewish father, who was just like Dr. Anderson with his hand in a fist towards God, I know that on his death bed he had an encounter with Jesus and said this prayer that I want you to say with me out loud right now. Say, I believe Jesus died for my sins. And by his blood God remembers my sins no more. And I'm clean. And now that I'm clean I ask Jesus to be my Lord live inside of me. I'm going to Heaven!