Our Guest Graham Cooke

Sid: I believe my guest this week is going to cause your thermostat to just explode it’s going to go through the top of the glass.  He’s name is Graham Cooke and for those that aren’t familiar with Graham he is…now you don’t like titles Graham but you are a mentor of prophets, you’re a mentor for people to go all the way with God rather than settle for stinking thinking of a religious mindset filled with tradition learned by man.  So let’s find out a little bit about your background, one day you walk into a church, but there was something missing in this church; tell me about that.

Graham: Yeah, it’s actually my very first church experience I’d become a Christian and I had heard the audible voice of God coming from a totally unchurched nonreligious background.

Sid:  As you put it you were the first white sheep in your family.

Graham: Yeah, (laughing) yeah that’s right and so my salvation experience of God was so profound that I heard his audible voice and so of course I have no other, I have no capacity to measure any other way.

Sid: Now tell me your salvation experience; I don’t know about it.

Graham: Well, I got saved in a youth camp and…

Sid:  I mean I had a profound experience but I wasn’t going around hearing the audible voice of God.

Graham: Yes, so I’d come to this camp, I was staying with some people and just looking to really change my life and connect with something different. I had no idea what that was and I’d listen to the message and it had really touched me deeply about Christ as savior, but I just had no paradigm for it so I didn’t go forward because I was thinking, “I don’t know what this about.” And I don’t know what I’m committing myself to and I was a little bit wary so I escaped the meeting and I went for a walk and then came back to the camp and latter on when everyone was in bed sat in the original meeting tent and in the end I said out loud, “Well, Lord if Your real then make Yourself real to me because if that is true I want to get to know You.”  And then I heard this audible voice, I looked around in the tent there was nobody there and the voice just said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time.”  And it didn’t sound like anyone’s voice I knew and I looked around and I walked around the tent and I couldn’t hear anybody so I sat down and I thought “Well, maybe I’m catching a snatch of conversation from somewhere else.”  And so I come back just saying “Well, Lord you know I need to get back focusing on this thing so if Your there make Yourself real to be because I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true but I just know my heart was really touched.”  I can’t remember the exact words I used but that was the expression. Again I heard this voice saying “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time and you and I are going to go on a journey together.”  And it just suddenly struck me that “Oh, my goodness” I just foolishly said, “You’re going to think this is really dumb but I don’t know what to say, is this God?”  It’s almost like you know “Earth to Heaven I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to say and I heard this just quiet laughter.”  “Of course it is and you and I were going to go on a journey and it’s going to take your whole life and your life will be completely different.”  And just began speaking to me about who I was going to be, what I was going to do and that there would be painful times, difficult times but He would never leave me nor forsake me.  And Sid I didn’t know what to do with myself I have to say, but that really began my journey.

Sid:  So you must have been so excited going to your first church, what was it like?

Graham:  Yeah because I had had a few days in the camp and I’m trying to explain to people I heard God’s voice and just at the youth camp an everyone’s really skeptical thinking “Am I having some kind of meltdown or something.”  And so… but every time I walked away and I began just to have times with God I would hear His voice, I would hear His voice audibly or I would heard His voice like in my heart coming into my head; and so I would hear it on the inside and I would hear externally.  And so this was a normal thing for me so I remember I got back home; I was so excited I bought a Bible, a notebook, I went to my first church service, I just picked the church that was closest to my home.  And I’m walking down the street and I’m talking to the Lord so excited and I get into the building and I lose the presence of God.  So I’m in the foyer of this church and I can’t feel God’s presence.  So I look around and Sid this is where I’m as green as grass okay, I look into the sanctuary, He’s not there.

Sid:  You must have panicked.

Graham: Well, I got back into the foyer and I look and there’s the men’s rest room, so I’m just stupidly thinking “Ah, he’s in there.”

Sid: (Laughing)

Graham: So I’m 19 years old, an experience that’s radically changing my life and I just have no way of what is the normal way to deal with this.  And so I’m waiting outside, nobody talks to me at all so eventually it’s 5 or 6 minutes and I’m getting really concerned about God in the rest room so I remember sticking my head inside the restroom and I’m calling out, “Are you okay?”  But he’s not in there.

Sid:  Did you really do that Graham?

Graham: Honest I just have no, I mean I’m as green as anything, I don’t know what to do.

Sid:  Are you okay?

Graham:  Are you okay? And there’s nothing, He’s not there so I walk back on to the street and there He is.  So I’m saying “Are You not coming in?”  And He said to me, “Well, I’m not welcome in that place.”  And so I said, “If you’re not going I’m not going.”  And we walked home and that was it. (Laughing)

Sid:  So obviously you didn’t know where to go, but then you had another dream that told you where to go, tell me about that.

Graham: Yeah, it was a while later I had managed to kind of get myself thrown out of most churches in the city because people didn’t have a paradigm for what I was experiencing. So I’m starting to realize that what I’m reading in the Bible is actually not what I’m seeing in terms of church.  And so I’m talking to the Father about this, “So what do I do I feel like a fish out of water, I feel like I don’t connect anywhere.”  And then when I had a dream about walking down a certain road and there was a house and I looked at the number of the house, in the dream I went and rang the doorbell.  And I had an encounter with the person who was the house owner. The next night I had another dream that same road, but different house had an encounter with that person.  And so after two of those dreams I went and found a map of the city and this road isn’t on any map of the city so I said to the person who owns the store, “Is this an up to date map?”  And he said, “Well, it’s up to date but it doesn’t have anything that’s being built on the last twelve months.”  And so I went down to city hall found an up to date map and there’s this road. So I took a bus across town and there’s the road in my dream exactly as I saw it; all the houses exactly as I saw them.  So I started walking down this road and I came to this house, the number and I in the dream my encounter with the people there was there was a women whose husband had left her, she had a 6 year old son, who was incontinent, he was constantly bed wetting, she had a baby and her washing machine had broken down.  And in the dream I laid hands on her washing machine and it recovered.  (Laughing)

Sid: So did you become like an actor on the stage and just act out what you saw in your dream, or were you too nervous?

Graham: Well, I didn’t know what else to do and I’m learning that God does like something like when He’s teaching you something new He takes you a step at a time and so you have to take that step before He shows you the next one.  So I had nothing else to do so I went and rang the doorbell and my thing was…

Sid:  You know you got chutzpah, that’s a Hebrew word it’s called nerve!

Graham: (Laughing) Well my thought was if the woman doesn’t look like she did in the dream then I’m just going to make an excuse and leave, yeah.  And so that was my out and she opened the door and it’s exactly how I saw her in the dream.

Sid: I’ll tell you what why don’t you hold that thought we’ll pick up right here on tomorrow’s broadcast.  But I want you to tell me if you had had the book your latest book “Approaching the Heart of Prophecy” when you were first starting what difference would it have made if you could have read such a book as this.

Graham: Oh my gosh, I would have like, I would have grown a heck of lot faster than I did.  I mean I must have fallen down every hole that’s possible to fall down.

Sid:  Describe this book.

Graham: Well, Sid when we started there weren’t any books that described prophesy there was no kind of paradigm for it, most people it seem couldn’t even spell prophecy let alone know what it was.  So all my mistakes were public, you know because you just learn by doing, so for me…

Sid: I wish I had read this book 35 years ago.

Graham: You and me both.

Sid:  I have to tell you because I have a real prophetic bent in it but I was taking it more Old Testament than New Testament.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, that’s the normal way actually most people…

Sid: I mean I thought I was John the Baptist.

Graham:  (Laughter) So for me the benefit of the book is that people can benefit from all the mistakes I made.  You know when you do something for the first time you learn how not to do it.

Sid:   But listen, I after 35 years just reading a little of the book and then the notes I’ve benefited immensely.

Graham: But it tells you clearly it tells you what you’re going to learn in this chapter, it then lays out a pattern of teaching on a particular topic and then there are lots of exercises and assignments you can do.

Sid: its true mentoring and we don’t have mentoring by men and women that have walked the walk.

Graham: Yeah, so if you do the exercises it leads you into an actual experience.