Sid Roth - Your God Dream
Sid Roth: Hello. Welcome. Welcome to my world where it's naturally supernatural. The largest church in the world, 830,000 members, it's hard for me to comprehend, 830,000, South Korea. And the pastor of this church, when it was very small, had never seen a major miracle and frankly thought all the miracles that were spoken about were just hype. Well my guest spoke a word to him and catapulted him into walking in major miracles to such a point that my guest was offered to be the co-pastor of the largest church in the world, but he said no. The reason he said no is he had a dream inside of himself and this dream was not South Korea. Well today, he's fulfilled his dream. But because of his obedience, God has put an anointing and presence of God on this man that he will help you get in touch with your dream and have it become reality. Are you interested? I'm here with Pastor Tommy Reid and it's a real privilege for me because I knew a lot about him, but I found out a whole lot more. He was mentored by some of the real generals in the world, but one of the greatest generals that mentored him was his own mother. You see, his mother was Pentecostal. His father was alcoholic. His father got radically saved instantly, went into ministry. What is it, Tommy, with me? That's the way it happened to me. Instantly, the moment I knew who Jesus was I couldn't keep quiet about him. Others just go so gradual. What is it?
Tommy Reid: I don't know what makes the difference. All I know I was four years of age, lived with an alcoholic father. He walked into the Wesleyan Methodist, instantly he was delivered from alcoholism, instantly was saved, not only saved, but healed of bleeding ulcers created by his alcoholism.
Sid Roth: Now that was a life-threatening situation.
Tommy Reid: He was going to die. And I was four years of age. I would not have had a father. Walked into that church, heard a Native American evangelist, gave his heart to Christ. His life was totally changed and our home was totally changed.
Sid Roth: Eight years of age, you're afflicted, it's almost like the devil knows there's a call of God on someone's life and the devil tries to stop him before they even get started. Eight years of age, you get polio.
Tommy Reid: Polio.
Sid Roth: Tell me what was going on.
Tommy Reid: Well I was laying in my bed. I was unable to walk and I remember the Lord walked into that room and said to me as clearly as I hear your voice, "I'm Jesus and I'm here, and I'm going to heal you today". And there's a lot more to the story, but all I can tell you is I knew that was true. I looked at my, I looked at as if the devil was there. I pointed my finger and I said, I'm eight years of age, "Devil, you're not going to keep this young man in bed any longer. I'm going to walk". Pushed myself up to the side of the bed. As I pushed myself to the side of the bed, I took my first step and then I had to let go of the bed and take my second. That would be a miracle. I walked across the room. I looked to the stairs up to my bedroom and I said, "I never, ever have walked one stair at a time". Eighty-two years of age, I still don't take one stair. I still run upstairs. I ran up the stairs, put my clothes down, ran back down, walked into the kitchen and said to my mother, "I want a glass of milk".
Sid Roth: Your mother must have...
Tommy Reid: She said, "What are you doing? What are you doing walking"? I said, "I told you today Jesus is going to heal me". And as I did that, my mother dropped the milk all over the floor and she looked at me and said, "Well if you're going to drink milk you got to lap it up because that's the last bit that I got". She was holding some milk in her hand and I said, "Well I'll go down to the store". Ran down to the store, ran back home and I've been walking ever since.
Sid Roth: You know, I believe that his mother might have been the hero in this situation. Tell me what you learned from your mom.
Tommy Reid: What I learned from my mother was the Word. Every day I would say, "Mom, I'm going to walk again". And she said, "The Bible says and you say it, 'I am the Lord that healeth thee. By his stripes I am healed.'" Every day I was informed by my mother, she not only urged me, she insisted that I confess the Word. And I knew that. It was the Word that healed me. I learned from my mother. And she was a schoolteacher. She worked for Cornell University as an educator. She taught me what Jesus did on that cross and I saw the cross that day when I walked.
Sid Roth: Did she teach you to hear God's voice?
Tommy Reid: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: How?
Tommy Reid: My mother would take me out to Emery Park overlooking the community where I lived and she would lay on the, in the winter we would walk through it. In the summer, we would lay on our backs. And she would say, we would look at the sky and she would say, "What do you see"? I would say, "That cloud over there, that's a car, that's a boat, that's a ship and that's an airplane". She would look at me and say, "Tommy, if that's a ship, where do you want to go? Where do you dream about going"? I said, "Europe," wherever. And after she would finish wherever my hand would lead. And I'll never forget a word, she said, "Tommy, we never quit dreaming because your dreams were written by God before the foundation of the world".
Sid Roth: Then about the same time, he starts having visions. Tell me about these visions.
Tommy Reid: Well I would go to the altar because my mother was teaching me, my dad, too, but especially my mother was teaching me to be a man of prayer. And I would go to the altar every Sunday night at this little Assemblies of God Church and I'd kneel at the altar. And the little church around me had handmade seats and old worn out carpets. And all of a sudden, I would find myself, call it a trance, call it a vision, call it a dream, call it being lost in the spirit, every Sunday night I would get lost in the spirit. And I would be another church. It would be a large church, beautiful carpets, everything that I'd dream it being, and I looked at somebody, a young man standing in the pulpit, and I said, that's me. Now I was a stutterer. I could not speak and yet I was standing as a man in the pulpit, and I saw myself there, and I saw the church I would one day build. I lived with that dream all of my life wherever I went. I pastored, by 26, I was pastoring Bethel Temple in Manila with Pastor Sumrall. I worked with Cho in the beginning days. Every place I went, that was not what the church I saw in my dream. I had to go back to Buffalo. That's where the church would be.
Sid Roth: He's a dreamer.
Tommy Reid: I am a dreamer.
Sid Roth: God is a dreamer.
Tommy Reid: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: And God has a dream for you. And Tommy says that God has a dream for everyone. And the whole world would be changed if everyone would follow their God dreams. We'll learn more when we come back.
Sid Roth: Sid Roth here with Pastor Tommy Reid. And Tommy, you had the high privilege of being sent to South Korea and there was young pastor that had potential, and you were supposed to work with him.
Tommy Reid: Yeah.
Sid Roth: His name was Dr. Paul Yonggi Cho.
Tommy Reid: Right.
Sid Roth: That then had the largest church in the world. But Paul Yonggi Cho had never seen major miracles, and as a matter of fact, he thought it was all hype, but changed. Tell me about that.
Tommy Reid: Yeah. Well we went there in the first year of the ministry. In fact, I preached the first revival ever held in that church. And while I was there, we were in, I remember we were in this old Chevrolet panel truck and he was sitting in the back of the seat, and I was sitting in the front. And he looked at me and he said, "Tommy, I've never seen a real miracle. I was healed myself, but I have never seen God do a miracle. I've seen these healing evangelists come and they report that it's a miracle, but I've never seen a real miracle". I remember something rose up. You ever have something rise up inside of you, you're speaking for God. I looked at him and I said, "Brother Cho, you will, while I'm here in this country, you will see the miraculous and you will someday heal the sick". And he, you know, the miracle about it was we did see miracles and he saw, and the more and more I saw him soften. We went to a city called Cheongju, Korea. We went in a Presbyterian church, and it was jammed with people, thousands of people on the outside. And the revival was so great, the miracles so great, they wanted to go on another week. So I said to him, "You stay here. You preach the second week and you pray for the sick". This is the man that said he had never seen a miracle. He said, "I'll do that".
Sid Roth: I'm amazed he said he'll do that.
Tommy Reid: Right. So as he, as I went on to the next city, on the next Tuesday night, I think they had off Monday night, Tuesday night, they came up the hill and said, "There's a man dying in the hospital. If you don't come down and pray for him he will die". So Brother Cho left the service, went down the hill, walked into the hospital to a man he was going to pray for before he died, and found out he was dead. Man: I'm sorry, he's passed on. Dr. Cho: No, he's not.
Tommy Reid: He pulled the sheet back, this man that a few weeks before said he had never seen a miracle, pulled the sheet back and commanded that man to walk. That man got out of bed, began to walk and then Brother Cho said, "Come back with me to church". Now it was a huge, steep hill. He climbed all the way up this hill, walked into the church and said, "I was dead, but now I'm alive". Man: I was dead, now I'm alive.
Sid Roth: Okay. He then says to you, "I want you, Tommy, to be my co-," not assistant, "my co-pastor". How could you have said no?
Tommy Reid: Well I had to say no.
Sid Roth: Why?
Tommy Reid: Because as great as the revivals were tremendous, there were times in revivals where they would take, I remember one night, they took me on their backs and carried me through the city because of the miracles they were seeing. And yet, I knew that that wasn't my city. God had called me as a child at that altar, by a little Assemblies of God Church, where I saw the church I would build. This was not the church. That was his church, it was not mine. I had to go back to where I was called. That was my dream.
Sid Roth: And you know what I think is so amazing is when you went to the city that he was called to, you would think that because of his faithfulness that it would be a breeze. It would be easy. But when you went to Buffalo, New York, how bad was it?
Tommy Reid: It was really bad. I was ready, the ministry, you know, I could be pastor of the largest church in the world right now, but here I am pastoring 120 people, barely surviving. I don't think they even liked me. But you know, this wasn't the best place in the world to be. And one day, I'm coming up on the New York State Thruway onto a ramp and all of a sudden, I'm crying. This prayer is coming out from inside of me. I'm crying, "God, show me the world as you see it". And I kept arguing with my own prayer because that was the Holy Spirit praying. "God, I know how you see the world". And the Lord said, "No you don't. Keep praying the prayer". As I prayed that prayer, it came out of inside of me. And as I pulled the car up on the thruway, I don't know who drove it, I don't know how long it was, I had a vision. I believe in dreams and visions. I believe in the supernatural. And God took me and I saw the world, and God showed me the world as you see it. It was coming from deep within me. And I saw the nail scarred hands of Jesus coming toward the world, and here's what I thought. Every Sunday night I had preached on hell and I preached on judgment, you're trying to get people saved, and scared them to death to try to get the saved, you know, like we used to do in our churches. And I saw the hands of Jesus, and my first reaction, I know what you're going to do. You're going to bring judgment to this bad world. Instead, the hands of Jesus were gentle. They took and took the world and he opened it up. And, Sid, inside, I saw a broken heart. And my life has never been the same. It was within weeks the church grew from 120 to 800 in one single week all because of the revelation of God.
Sid Roth: The revelation of God's love for humanity.
Tommy Reid: God's love for humanity.
Sid Roth: Well you know, the Bible says God is love. And maybe, just maybe we're emphasizing the wrong things. God is love. When we come back, I want to find out how you can find out God's dream for yourself. I want to find out how you can move into God's dream for you.
Sid Roth: Can everyone have a dream or is it just special people like Tommy Reid?
Tommy Reid: Absolutely. Not only can everyone, everyone does have a dream. Some time when you were a child, seven or eight years of age, God began to speak into your spirit what the purpose of your life was. If he wrote it before the foundation world, that means that he's going to give it to you. You had some kind of a dream, but your mother said, "It's just your imagination". Everybody said, "That's crazy, you could never be president, you could never preach the Gospel, you could never do that, you're not smart enough to do that". And the dream was lost. And the problems with our world today, Sid, is because somebody didn't believe their dream. The world is unevangelized because God put in the heart of enough people, enough power to evangelize the world, but we never believed it. My passion, I have a passion today in these years of my life, I've got to get out and teach this nation that there's something that God gave them to do. There's a dream that God put in their heart, and if I can get people to believe that, if I can get people to know that inside of the depths of their spirit, look at Henry Ford. Henry Ford was an amazing man and he had this dream to put America on wheels, but there were no gas stations. There were no roads. He changed the world. In spite of the fact, the whole world out there was alien him to his dream. That's what's inside of us. There's an evangelist inside of us and there's a businessman, and there's millionaires, and there's billionaires. There are people out there that God has intended to change the world if they'll only believe it. I have a passion to teach that to America.
Sid Roth: How about that someone that says, I don't know my dream, how can I find it?
Tommy Reid: Well I think, first of all, there are several things. It's hard to say that in a few minutes. You want to go back, remember what happened to you. Remember what you thought about. My best friend growing up was Paul Crouch who built TBN. He had a movie camera, I wish I would have brought it on the set, a little movie camera. He would dream of making films. He would dream of radio. We fooled with, I can't tell you what it was like to live with a ten-year-old boy that had a dream. That kind of thing is inside of me. It's in every one of us. The last thing Paul Crouch did for me was look in a camera and say, "Tommy, let's you and I keep dreaming because dreams will change the world".
Sid Roth: Briefly, tell me your teaching on the cathedral and the altar.
Tommy Reid: Yeah. Well Abraham is my example of the dreamer because God told him he was going to have a family and it was going to be a great family. It would be a nation and it would be a nation that would bless the world. And God made a covenant. He had God the Father and God the Son walking between the sacrifices saying, "I'm going to swear by myself that this land is yours. I'm going to swear by myself that you, I will give you a family. This is my covenant and I'm swearing by myself to make that covenant". Well where did he take him? He took it out in the open air in what I call the cathedral of God. He's walking by the water, puts his fingers through the sand. "Those are my children". He looks at the stars and he said, "Those are my children". I'm not an astronomer to know I can't count them. "Those are my children". You take a dream, first of all, to the cathedral of God in the open air. Then you take it, Abraham built an altar. Because of the presence of God, there is the wonder with the dream. There is the wonder of God wants to do with you in His presence. Spend time under the open heavens dreaming and spend time with the presence of God letting God reveal His dream for you.
Sid Roth: Would you pray now.
Tommy Reid: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: That we find our dreams, that everyone that is viewing this will find their dream.
Tommy Reid: Yes. Can I just look in that camera right now and tell you that you have a dream. You may not know what it is. Maybe somebody has thwarted it, maybe somebody has tried to destroy it. You may be 80 years of age, but there's a dream in your heart that's never been fulfilled. I'm talking to everybody, every single person on the other side of that camera. I want to pray for you that you'll discover it and you'll live it. Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus, may the peace of God, the peace that passes all understanding come into that person's heart and take them back, and show them what you planned for their life. It's never too late. I know that, Lord. Give them the fulfillment of their dream.
Sid Roth: God is a dreamer. And before the foundation of this earth, he knew you and called you, and have a dream, has a dream for your life. Now this is what you have to do. He's done it all. All you have to do is accept it. He died for your sins. He died out of his personal love for you. He took every one of your sins, every one of your pains, every one of your heartaches on upon himself, and by his blood he says, "I remember your sins no more". If you will ask him to forgive you and tell him you're sorry for the mistakes, believe that his blood covered your sins and then ask him to come inside of you and be Lord of your life, because God has a dream and you, you, he's telling me people are being healed as I'm speaking, backs, pains are disappearing. You are his dream. You are special. You are wonderful and fearfully made, and never forget God is for you, so nothing can be against you. Nothing. As a young boy, Tommy Reid was supernaturally healed of polio and severe stuttering. As a young man, he was given the opportunity to pastor what is known today as the largest church in the world. But instead, he decided to pursue the dream had written on his heart before the foundation of the world. Tommy wants to help you find your God-given dream. We will be back with Tommy Reid in just one moment.