Sid Roth welcomes Peter Jackson

SID: Hello, Sid Roth here with Peter Jackson, and what do you think of when you think of God? A lot of people visualize God as they did their earthly father, but the problem is, no matter how good that father was, he still is very imperfect compared to God. If you’re Muslim or if you’re Jewish, you have a feeling that God is up there and He’s a judge. You don’t have the concept of He’s a loving God. But Peter, you had read this in the Bible, but still there was a misconnect. You were at this cabin, and what happened?

PETER: As I said, I was dealing with all the bitterness towards my earthly father, and that really began to soften my heart, where I came to a place of compassion for my father. He had a father who treated him in a certain way, and it was generationally being passed down. As I was working through that forgiveness, one morning I had this dream. And one of the greatest disappointments in my life with my earthly father was on my twelfth birthday, where he promised to take me up to this cabin in the Rocky Mountains, and then at the last minute, as usual, cancelled. And so, God had come to restore my faith in Him through taking me back to the most painful disappointment. That’s where I really closed the door on relationship with my earthly father. In this vision, I see myself waking up as a twelve year old boy, and it’s just like I’m watching it as a TV program. But I see in this dream that I’m twelve years old, and I smell bacon being prepared for me, breakfast was being prepared.

SID: It’s very realistic.

PETER: Oh, it was amazing. It was like being there. In a God dream, you’re there. And I look into the kitchen, wondering who’s there, and I see this person with His back to me, cooking breakfast. And I just thought “I wonder who that is?” And when He turned around, I just saw these eyes of my Abba Father, God the Father.  And He didn’t say any words, He just communicated with this look of total love and acceptance. It was just like I received an impartation of His love, and it just broke through that wall that I’d had towards my earthly father, and I was able to accept him as my father.

SID: Tell me again about the love that you saw in His eyes.

PETER: His eyes were blue, but they were crystal clear, and they just communicated. You know, they say communication is only 7 percent words. It’s 53 percent body language, and His body language said “I love you with My whole heart.” And that just completely broke me on the inside, because my dad always had a look of disapproval.

SID: Who is God the Father to you know?

PETER: He’s my Dad. He’s my Dad, and I have a relationship with Him where, I used to just see Him as an angry judge up in heaven, but now He, as Jesus said, “The Father and I have come to dwell in you, make Our home in you.” John 14:23 says “I have come.” The Father and Jesus have come to make their home in us. And I’ve made Him feel at home. I’ve welcomed Him home, and I have a home in His heart.

SID: Now you became a pastor with your wife, and I’ll tell you something. It is tough for someone to be a pastor. It’d be easy if they didn’t have to deal with people, but guess what, that was the way it was all orchestrated. And Peter, you became a burned out pastor, and you went to a renewal meeting, and what happened?

PETER: I was very disappointed with the church that we had, and we were seeking revival. We were asking God to bring His manifest presence and affect our city, affect people around us, our families. We’d been praying that way for a year, but revival always brings change, and there’s such a resistance in change for people. The get in a comfort zone, they get in a rut, and they don’t want to change. So then in January of 1994 when revival broke out in Toronto at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, John Arnott, the senior pastor, called me up the night after it started and said “You’ve got to come to this pastors’ meeting”, because he knew I was pretty disappointed and disillusioned being a pastor. Our church was growing and all the stuff was happening, but I was just getting further and further detached from it. So I went to the meeting, and I listened to the testimony of Randy Clark as he shared similar experience, being in the ministry for years, but getting more and more dry. And so I stood there for prayer at the end, and Randy Clark comes by and prays for me, and nothing happened, and I’m just all “Oh boy, I must…”

SID: Talk about a disappointment.

PETER: I’m just like…  Everybody else around me is really getting impacted with the presence of God, and I’m just standing there like a oak of righteousness, stiff as a board. Well John Arnott was right behind Randy praying for me, and he knew my situation.  He just asked the Holy Spirit to lift this discouragement off. And I began again just to weep and weep, for about half an hour I was weeping and weeping with all this discouragement that I had stuffed down, because big boys don’t cry, you know.

SID: I know all about it.

PETER: Yeah. But right behind that discouragement was the joy of the Lord. And literally, I was lying on the floor, rolling around, laughing for three and a half hours. You cannot humanly do that.

SID: I would imagine you must’ve ached all over from all that laughing when it was over. Did your body ache?

PETER: I was thinking “Now I know what they mean when they say I split a gut.” I was coming unglued.

SID: But you know what, the Bible says a merry heart is good medicine. Wait till you find out what this medicine did for Peter. Don’t go away, we’ll be right back.