Sid Roth welcomes Joel Richardson

Sid:  I have to chuckle a little bit about my guest Joel Richardson, because I can just picture this happening.  He’s a nice Catholic from Boston and it’s a hot hot day and there’s a tent meeting, a revival that is going on.  Now, Joel is not interested in spiritual things, he just thinks maybe he can go in that water and cool off.  Is that really the way it was Joel Richardson?

Joel:  Everything except for the good before catholic, I was raised Catholic fairly nominally; by the time I was nineteen which is when I did come to the Lord, I was very very far even from my nominal Catholic roots.  So, when I was nineteen, yeah a friend of mine and I had driven from South Boston down to the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee.  Just one street over from Elvis Presley Boulevard and we pulled up to a grocery store and in the back of this field, next to the grocery store was a big old southern holiness tent rival was going on.  And it was a hot day at the end of August, we had a little truck with no air conditioning and so when we pulled in I had the bright idea, as I suggested to my buddy, I said, hey you know why don’t we just go ahead and get baptized and get cool off and freshen up.  We’ve been on the road for twenty hours and he thought that that was a good idea.  So the end result was that we found the preacher, it was in between services and this was sort of revival that was going on for a few days and we got baptized and then of course we stayed for the meetings and you know there were various individuals that knew that we didn’t belong there, I had long hair at the time.  I was kind of just a little south Boston hippie, drug addict I guess you could say.  And they began trying to witness to us and minister to us and so forth and as the meeting went on numerous people were being touched by the Holy Spirit.  And different people were being healed and of course I’ve always very skeptical individual and so I was watching this and there was one gentleman that really caught my attention.  He was an older gentleman that went up and he said that he had been blind most of his life and even from a distant you could tell that his eyes were sort of, I guess I’ll say white blue grey you know, He didn’t actually have pigment in his pupils in his eyes.  And as the preacher prayed for him he asked him he said, “Can you see?  Are you beginning to see anything?”  And very hesitantly the man said, “You know I think I can a little bit and he himself seemed pretty mystified and rather than giving testimony and jumping up and down and you know shouting hallelujahs as a lot of the previous folks had, he sort of walked off stage and of course by this time it was night and he wandered out into the cars that were all parked in the field and I went ahead and I followed him.

Sid:  Why?

Joel:  Well, I was curious I wanted to see, it was my opportunity in essence to interview someone who said that they were being healed but, he caught my attention.  It was sort of this, you could tell that he was looking around and that he himself was pretty mystified.  You know, you could see the look of shock on his face; something had happened.  And as I walked up to him he was, you know,  fifteen yards off kneeling down in the grass and I could hear him sobbing and weeping like a little baby, and again this gentleman was probably in his sixties.  And I walked up and I began to ask him what was taking place?  And he said and as we began to talk for awhile, he sort of interviewed me a little bit.  He said, “You know I’ve been blind my whole life, if I can remember correctly, it was from childhood.  He had the ability to see for a couple of years when he was a child and he had his hands reached up to the sky, he was just praising God and he was just weeping and he said, “Right now I can see the stars, I can see the stars.”

Sid:  That had to have such an impact on you and then that same evening were you saved?

Joel:  Yeah, I was saved you know I knew at that moment that I had to take all that was taking place seriously.  I knew that no matter how much I would like to write it all off as fanaticism I knew that something had taken place and this man was being genuine.  And as I went back into the meeting, I remember the preacher was reading from the gospels, he was reading from the sermon of John the Baptist.  And he said the ax at the root of the tree has already been laid therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance unless you be cast into the fire.  And at that moment the Holy Spirit confronted me and He essentially told me that if you don’t repent of your entire life, your entire life is a lie.  And if you don’t repent tonight right now if you don’t completely give me your life you will spend eternity in hell, you will go to hell.  And my response which shocked me was absolutely, your right.  My entire life is a lie and if I don’t repent I will end up going to hell and deserving it.

Sid:  You know what’s so obvious to me, you were set up.  You were set up by God Joel.  Then after you became a believer you’re minding your own business in a large meeting of about 7,000 people and the prophet who was speaking calls you out and what does he say?

Joel:  Yeah, fast forward now several years and my wife and I are sitting in the back of a very very large auditorium filled with people.  And he calls me out, he calls both of us out, but he calls me out and he said because of my faithfulness in my season on waiting on Him and in intercession; and this was something that I understood I had just been in a very long extended season of waiting on the Lord and spending time with Him and seeking His face and He said because of this waiting on Him in intercession the Lord is going to release you into revelation and he’s going to essentially down load revelation from His heart and from His mind to yours and begin to opening up the scriptures.  And again for me this tied into another prophecy that my wife had receive that she would marry someone who would have significant new insight, new insights into the end times and that I would actually release revelation concerning the end times.

Sid:  Now, you are actually doing this right now.  Are you as amazed as the people that you talk to of the revelation that you’ve been getting, because it’s different than most people that are teaching end times? 

Joel:  To a degree it is and one of the things that I continually hear as people read or listen to my material is that they say that I had a dozen ah ha moments, well I always respond by saying me too.  As I’m writing, you know there’s this famous quote from Winston Churchill, he said, if you want to learn about a subject then either write a book or teach about it.  Which means when you take the time to prepare and pray and study and seek the Lord in order to teach others you yourself are taught in the process.  And so in the process of putting so much of my material together I have also have had numerous ah ha moments and you know it’s more than just…

Sid:  I mean it must just pop out like a revelation, I know when this happens to me, I’m as mystified as excited as the people that hear it.

Joe:  You know I’ll tell you something personal Sid, when I was a child I had a repeated dream.  I use to have this throughout my childhood and it was that I would discover, sort of a secret panel in the house that I grew up in and I would discover a secret room.  And I would always wake up from this dream with just this intense of sense of excitement that I had lived in this house my whole life, but I never knew that there was this secret room in my house.  And as I’ve become an adult I still have the dream, but it’s changed since becoming a believer a have a dream as I’m reading the Bible I open up the Bible and I find a new book.  And I say, wait a minute where’s this book been, I’ve never seen this book and as I begin reading it it’s exciting and there’s this energy on me.  And every time I have that dream, it usually follows that as I begin opening up the Bible I’m not literally finding a new book, this is not heresy but it’s as if the Lord’s opening up His books that are already there and He’s releasing understanding and revelation.  And that’s the sense…

Sid:  I can tell you Joe that as I watch your DVD series and it’s two DVD’s and four sessions I am so excited the way you unfold and tie in end time Bible prophecy with current events.  You have facts about who is the great harlot?  You have facts about who is Babylon?  You kind a connect the dots of things that we know the ingredients, but you put it together.  And as a matter of fact even before we share anything I’ve gotta ask you this question.  I know no one knows the day or hour that the Messiah is going to return so I’m not stupid enough to ask you that question, but based on the information that you have in these DVD’s could everything occur in your life time?

Joel:  Personally I absolutely believe that if, I should live long enough, that absolutely that the Lord will return in my life time.  I do believe that He’s at the door and I believe that we need to be about the work of the Lord as a result.

Sid:  Now, you have spent over a year in the Middle East in Egypt and Jordan and Israel and some of the information that you’ve obtained about Islam; you must have had a fit when President Bush kept referring to Islam as a peace loving religion.

Joel:  Yeah, as a great religion and a religion of peace and a religion of peace, you know I have and I have and I carry a very hard message.

Sid:  Opps our time is up.