Sid Roth - The Real Spirit of Revival
Sid Roth: Hello. Welcome to my world where it's naturally supernatural. Is there a diabolical plot to remove major sections from the Bible that we don't even talk about today, which will cost us the power of God and in some cases, even our very salvation? My guest says yes. Bert Farias, after graduating Bible College, you had an amazing dream with an amazing effect. Tell me about it.
Bert Farias: Yeah. It was actually the night at my ordination service. I had just been ordained for ministry and I was trying to get to bed, and I kept hearing words up on the inside of me, rolling around on the inside of me. I get up, turn on the light, write, go to bed. This happened several times just like that voice wouldn't shut off and it was this long prophecy about I call it the flame of fire prophecy. It was really part of my calling and part of the anointing that God has put on my life with that fire. Then I fell asleep and then I had a dream about the fire. I was in a large, a wide open grassy, dry grassy field and I remember I was on my knees in the middle of this field just praying and there were these young men all around me lighting these quick fires all over this grassy field. And I was down on my knees, and I could feel the heat of the fire coming up closer and closer to me until I couldn't take the heat any more, and I got up and just ran in the house. I knew that I was giving birth to some kind of ministry that I would be involved in at that time.
Sid Roth: But what you have found is that you are a fire starter. I believe that's what God was showing you.
Bert Farias: Yeah. No absolutely. When I was dreaming, and I don't know if I was half awake or dreaming, but I heard that roar of a blazing forest fire on the inside of me and it was... I mean, it was furious, so much that when people found out about it they, instead of calling me Bert Farias, they started calling me Bert Furious because that flame was a furious fire.
Sid Roth: You know, as far as I'm concerned, normal is not necessarily what you see with your eyes. Normal is normal according to the Bible. That is normal.
Bert Farias: Exactly.
Sid Roth: Tell me some normal things, because you're like a historian of revivals and moves of God's Spirit. Tell me, and you know that this has got me so excited, this Divine radiation zone.
Bert Farias: You know, I'm a glutton for his glory. I'll admit that.
Sid Roth: The Divine radiation zone, you find out and you'll be a glutton for it, too.
Bert Farias: Well in studying revivals of old, the power of God, I mean, we have so many church conferences today and so many conventions, but where is the power of God? I mean, when you read about history, the power of this Divine radiation zone, when ships would come into the New England harbor and crew members would be coming under conviction without anybody preaching to them, they came into this, they call it Divine radiation zone, where they came into this and crew members came into conviction, and they began to repent of their sins and call out on God because they had, they were hit with such a God consciousness of their sin and their conviction before God. I read stories about George Whitefield. When he came to Boston, you got to be tough to preach in Boston, I'm telling you. You got to be really saved to even live there. And he would draw a crowd of 10, 20,000 people that would come and these young boys would climb up on trees, you know, back before the day when they had amplification and sound systems. And he would tell these young men, "Boys, now you need to come down off of that tree because when I start preaching the power of God is going to come and it's going to hit, and you're going to fall off that tree, and you're going to injure yourself". So he would have all these young men get off, down off the trees. And sure enough, when he started preaching, in the middle of his preaching, people would just be slain in the Spirit, nobody touching them, all over the ground where he was preaching.
Sid Roth: Did anyone catch them so they wouldn't hurt themselves?
Bert Farias: No, there were no catchers. You would either fall in the flesh or fall in the Spirit.
Sid Roth: Now you are normal as far as I'm concerned, normal as defined by the Bible. You see the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, but this is kind of off the charts. Tell me about Thomas Amaro.
Bert Farias: Well that was amazing. That's the greatest miracle I think I've ever seen. Thomas taken over by demons when he was a little boy. He lived in Africa and, you know, in Africa these things are common. You know, there's witchcraft, there's voodoo. And he, in his own words because I interviewed him, he said evil spirits came and visited him when he was just a little boy and they enticed him and began to show him these wonderful things, and kept taking him deeper and deeper and into almost a relationship with these evil spirits where really he entered into a covenant with the devil. As he came into this covenant the devil kept demanding more and more things of his life, which is what the devil does. He gives you pleasure and then pain, a little more pleasure, a little more pain. But one night I was there it was in Gambia, West Africa, and I was preaching the Gospel. And this young man was now 19 at this time. He had been kicked out of his house because the people were afraid of him because wherever he stayed there would be this weird activity, so much so that there would blood, people would see blood on his back. He had scars on his back because he was beaten. He was being beaten by evil spirits for disobeying him. So he was out this night, very tormented trying to get out of this covenant that he had entered in with the devil. And he was outside of the venue where we were preaching, out on the streets and he froze to the ground. He couldn't move. As I was preaching, I remember in the meeting there was great joy and liberty. There was breaking out in the meeting during that time. And he said he came to a place where he felt this power he had never felt before and he didn't know if it was a stronger demonic, Satanic power that was going to take him over for good and he'd never be able to get back out of it or if it was a higher power than Satan, maybe God's power that had come to deliver him. And sure enough, it was God's power because the young men that were ushering in the meeting, they went out and noticed him. And he said, "Don't touch me. I can't move". And they tried to push them and he couldn't move. I mean, if you just stood as hard as you could and you asked somebody to push you, you could not help from pushing. They couldn't push him. Finally over a process of a few minutes, they finally got him loose. They brought him into the meeting. We ministered to him. They actually laid him down on the pulpit. We cast the devil out of him to minister the new birth to him and then the next day, the Holy Ghost, and he came out of that. We registered to him in our Bible school and Thomas Amaro, he's totally free today.
Sid Roth: Now that is normal, normal as defined by the Bible. But there are major themes missing in the presentation of the American Gospel. They're in the Bible, but they're missing intentionally, diabolically missing and it can cost you moving in that kind of normalcy, normal as defined by the Bible. We're going to talk about it when we come back. Don't go away.
Sid Roth: Remember the old story about the emperor's new clothes? Do you remember that? Well Bert, your wife had a dream which is kind of on that order. Tell me about it.
Bert Farias: Yeah, it was very significant at the time she had it and it still is today. In this dream, she was on this church property and the pastor was giving her a tour. They were having like a picnic-like fellowship on the grounds and the pastor was showing her around. And then they went into this large kitchen. He actually called it a cook house where they were preparing this food. And my wife knew what the food was because she had had some of this food, these rice dishes and these things that she had in Africa. And she told the pastor, she looked up at all this food that was being stored on all these shelves, and she said, "How come you're not serving this food to the people"? And he said, "It's strange food. They're not used to it". And so after that he took her back out on the church ground and there was all these weeds and tears that were growing up all over the property. They were crossing over on this little stick bridge, this little garden bridge and she noticed these weeds and tears were coming up under through the wood, and it was hard to even cross that bridge. And then all over the ground it was getting harder for people to walk. They were getting entangled in all these weeds and all these tears. And then my wife was very distressed after the dream and asked the Lord about it, and the Lord said, "These weeds and these tears represent festering sin, complacency and compromise that it's gotten into the body of Christ because of certain truths and themes that are not being preached".
Sid Roth: Well here's what I don't get. We have more bibles in the United States of America per square Christian than any country that ever lived. Now we have the Internet and where you can get free copies of almost every version of the Bible right on your own Internet. How can we be missing these major themes?
Bert Farias: In the West, we separate knowledge from application. The Bible is an eastern book and in the East, you know because you're a Jew, they did not separate application and knowledge. You did not know something until you applied it. But here we, our supreme authority has not been the Word of God. Jesus has not been the supreme authority in our lives and people are, you know, Paul prophesied. He spoke of it. In the last days, people are not going to endure sound doctrine. They're not going to have ears to hear the truth. They're going to keep to themselves teachers because they're going to have itching ears. Paul said, "Some will depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of the devil". We're living in that time. We're living in the last of the last days. And I've seen a major departure from biblical truths. I mean, I'm not talking about minor truths. I'm talking about major truths, major themes in the Bible.
Sid Roth: God told you, actually spoke to you that there is a diabolical plan so that major areas of the Bible are just not talked about today.
Bert Farias: Yeah. He said there's been a diabolical silence on holiness and because people just misunderstood.
Sid Roth: What is holiness?
Bert Farias: Holiness, to me, the essence of it, what happened with Adam and Eve? When they first fell, the first thing they tried to do was what? Hide. To me, holiness does not hide. The essence of holiness is transparency. It's an unveiled face. It's when you're open and honest before God. And then out of that will come a lifestyle of holy living. It's not what you wear, how you dress, the outward blessings that you have. Holiness is the nature, it's the character of God, it's the outshining of God in a person and it's beautiful.
Sid Roth: You've researched the nuggets that people of old that had normal, according to the Bible, ministries, like Smith Wigglesworth. Give me a nugget from Heaven.
Bert Farias: Well there's many of them. Wigglesworth said, "If anything in this world fascinates you more than God then you don't have what God wants you to have". He said, "Anything that cools your affection for God is worldliness".
Sid Roth: So how does someone that is a mixture, we're humans, there's degrees of mixture in every human that's going to a seeker sensitive, lukewarm church or one where there's no power, how do they have a fire on themselves and a fire in their home?
Bert Farias: Well we know today that God doesn't dwell in a temple made with human hands. He dwells in each one of us. If a person is born again, especially if they're also filled with the spirit, they are the Temple of God. God lives within them. And it's being aware, developing a consciousness, an awareness of God's presence 24/7 that you really learn to experience the presence of God. And there's an infilling that's not just a one-time infilling, we call the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues, but it is a stream that should never run dry. We should be being filled continually. The Bible says in Ephesians 5, "Do not be drunk with wine with excess, but be filled" or be drunk "with the spirit". Talk about Smith Wigglesworth, he came to place at the end of his life when he said he could get drunk any time he wanted to on the Spirit of God. And when he was around sinners and people that were not informed or were ignorant of these things, he could just sober up like that. I tell you, what a way to live that a man got to that point where he could tap into the spirit and get drunk any time he wanted to.
Sid Roth: Okay. How can we have it in our home, what he had?
Bert Farias: It comes through praying in the Holy Ghost. It comes through spending time in the Word of God. What was it, those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, remember after the resurrection in Luke 24, what caused their hearts to burn? It said, "Did not our hearts burn when he spoke the Word of God to us, the Scripture to us by the way"? In other words, it was a revelation of the Word that caused their hearts to burn. Well we know that the Word of God is an all, God is an all-consuming fire, but the Word is a fire. So you know, these spiritual exercises being filled with the Holy Ghost, praying in the Spirit, meditating on the Word of God, just spending time with Jesus, we need to give ourselves to inspired utterances, not just in tongues, but we need to be speaking and singing to ourselves. The Bible says psalms, hymns and spiritual song. That's almost a lost art in the church today. We don't do it.
Sid Roth: So many things are lost. You have to tell me about Father Nash. Most people never know that name, never know that name.
Bert Farias: Father Nash was the prayer partner of Charles Finney. He went, wherever Charles Finney was sent to preach, he would go like a week or two before him, sometimes gather one or two other praying, very skillful, prayerful people, and they would enter into deep intercession together. I'm talking about groanings, and travail, and giving birth to what God wanted to do in those meetings. And they knew it was time to bring Finney, to summon Finney, they would look out the window when, in the time when many people were outside on the sidewalks, on the street. And when men started bowing down and kneeling on the ground in conviction they knew it was time to bring Finney.
Sid Roth: You know, he had an easy job. As a matter of fact, you told me that when Father Nash died, what happened to Finney?
Bert Farias: Oh he stopped, he quit the ministry. He knew the power engine in his ministry, the power behind his ministry was Father Nash's prayers.
Sid Roth: Okay. I want to find out what he believes, being a student of revivals and awakenings that we've never even seen in our generation to this degree. Is there hope for America? We'll be right back.
Sid Roth: Okay. I set you up. Is there hope for America? Very important question.
Bert Farias: I believe there is. We're at a critical point right now in this nation. But there's been too many deep wells of revival planted in this nation throughout history. We've sent out too much, too many missionaries, too many gospels. There's righteous seed in this nation and God's purposes are never vindictive. He's not looking to punish America. His purposes are always redemptive. So there is hope for this nation because there is a godly remnant, a strong godly remnant that is still living in this nation.
Sid Roth: Now we have had revivals in several areas of our country. Nothing compared to those zones that where people would just bow down on the ground and on their knees, and repent over sin where no one was even preaching. But you saw the closest we've had. You were out at Brownsville. What did you see?
Bert Farias: The week that I went down there and the services that was in, that I was in were electric. I mean, people were lining up outside from early morning to early evening to get into the services. And when I walked in there, I could feel the electricity in there. And during the service, those particular services, I remember they miked little children in the back room, seven, eight, nine years old, moaning and groaning, and travailing. They had mikes on them in the Spirit, having this consciousness of God and eternity and the lostness of the world. And I remember one of those services they put in on the platform, they put these large trash bins. And the evangelist was talking about articles of affection that we all have in our lives, and he was calling for repentance. It was a strong call for repentance that night. And he had people come up, people that had addictions, people that were bound by these, what he called these different articles of affection. He had, you know, anything from drug paraphernalia to cigarettes, to pornographic magazines. I mean, people came up with all this trash and threw it in these trash bins and they had a rejoicing party, people repenting, people crying over their sins and then being set free from all these addictions. That's, that was the week I went. There was a tremendous altar calls, hundreds, there was crying, tears of great, great crying, weeping and then tears followed by tears of great joy and rejoicing.
Sid Roth: You told me during the break that you have an unction to pray for miracles and fire. Would you do that right now.
Bert Farias: Yes. Father, I thank you right now for the Spirit of God. There is no distance in the Spirit. And right now wherever people are watching in cities and nations here and across the world, I thank you now for your holy fire. I thank you Father for a revelation of Jesus Christ flooding across these nations right now, and dreams and visions being given to many that would reveal Christ to them and cause an explosion of holy fire that would ignite within them even now. And Father, those that are sick, those that are diseased, tormented, chronic sicknesses, terminal sicknesses, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Father, I release now that power and anointing of power to go into these people's bodies. I see people in hospital beds right now that are watching this. In the name of Jesus Christ, get up from your bed. Get up from your death bed. Be free from your cancer and your terminal diseases. In the name of Jesus Christ, receive that healing power and that healing anointing right there in your room where you are through a transfer, a transfer of God's Holy Spirit right now. In Jesus' name be healed now. Cripples be healed. Those that can't even hear maybe watching television, have problems with your ears, in the name of Jesus, ears be open, deaf and dumb spirits come out in the name of Jesus. Those that are having problems with their eyes even blindness, in Jesus name, eyes be open, blindness go, demons leave in Jesus' name. Be free right now of every damnable disease that is impoverishing your life right now by the power to the glory of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Sid Roth: I tell you, joints are being healed right now. I tell you that there is joy in Heaven over one sinner that repents.
Bert Farias: Yes.
Sid Roth: You say I'm that one. You repent of your sin. Do I have to tell you? No, you know what it is. You tell Jesus you're sorry. Believe the blood of Jesus gives you the power and washes away your sin so you can walk the way you've always wanted to. Make Jesus your Lord and watch the angels in Heaven start rejoicing just for you. You know I'm talking to you. Now do business with God.
Bert Farias: Yes, yes, yes.