This is because Biblical illiteracy was created by these guru type celebrity pastors that
are running around now and they love to sound like Anthony Robbins and wear the the muskull
shirts and stand there and enthrall the crowd.
But they're not teaching truth verse by verse biblical doctrine on truth.
Believe it or not, youth are fascinated by truth.
They want it.
Mario Murillo, it's great to have you back here on Charisma News.
It seems like every time that we talk, you're in another part of the world or you're going
to another part of the country to do another tent crusade.
And judging by the background that you have behind you now, you're not in San Francisco
anymore.
You're somewhere in Denver, right?
Or Colorado.
Colorado Springs.
That's where the tents going up.
And it's a new tent, by the way, John.
It's a new tent.
We've outgrown our tent every 18 months.
We've had to double the size of our tent.
Mathematically, that means by the end of five years from now, we should be able to seat
a million people.
We'll be able to see that tent from the moon pretty soon, right?
Yeah.
And in any event, we just took delivery on a 40,000 square foot tent.
It would cover a football field.
And we're going to need it because of all the people that are getting saved.
It'll be able to seat 5,211 people inside of it with a massive stage.
It's going to be 40 feet high.
You're going to see it from all over then Colorado Springs.
And we're excited.
We've got already 500 people two months in advance.
500 people have volunteered to come to Colorado Springs to help us bring healing and salvation
to thousands and thousands of people.
Amen.
And so I want to hear what has been happening recently.
I mean, you always have some sort of a report or a testimony of a miracle healing or a miracle
of salvation.
I remember when you were in Bakersfield, you were talking about these gang members that
were coming to Christ and just seeing amazing things happening there.
Tell me about something that's been happening recently.
And I know later, a little bit later in this interview, we're going to talk about some
prophetic things that are stirring in your heart and regarding our culture and the culture
war that we're in right now with free speech and everything.
So before we get into that, let's talk about these amazing testimonies that God is bringing
right in front of you.
Let's encourage the body of Christ.
Yes.
And especially, I love to do this on Charisma News because this is the platform that I enjoy
the most.
And I want to tell you, whenever I'm with you or with Brother Steve Strang, I love it.
I enjoy it because I know it's going to go out to thousands of people.
Will everybody listen up?
Listen up very carefully.
We are flooded with testimonies.
We're flooded with reports.
And unfortunately, it starts to become background noise.
We tend to lose our sense of the credibility of what people say because, you know, we hear
all of these fantastic, continual reports of things that are going on.
So I'm going to keep this as direct and definable as possible.
His name was Steve.
He lived in his house with darkness alone for seven years.
He wouldn't venture out hardly anywhere from his house because he lived on a level of pain
that few human beings can understand.
He was on every medication.
You took the capsules that he took every day, 15 separate kinds of things that he was prescribed,
which I don't understand, in order to deal with the pain in five ruptured discs that
were in his spine.
And so there he was, not a Christian, lost, no hope, in darkness.
And some friends brought him to the Tent Crusade in Colorado Springs last July, sat in the
back.
He was annoyed, not only because it was painful to sit, but because he thought it was a concert.
He didn't realize it was a Christian event.
So he's a little bit perturbed, a lot of anxiety about it.
Well, and we give God the glory for everything because I'm unworthy to be associated with
this in any way, but I'm in the pulpit.
I point to the back and I sit right there is a man whose spine is being healed.
And at that moment, Steve felt his finger, like these fingers, these vertebrae go back
into place and seven years of indescribable pain was gone in an instant.
And it scared him and he stood up and he ran to the front to be saved.
And he was dramatically converted.
He went from being a housebound pain victim to every single time the doors of the church
at Radiant Church in Colorado Springs are open, he's there.
He's always there.
He's the first one to arrive, the last one to leave.
Second miracle, I'll make this one quicker because I get too excited for my own good.
This is great.
I love it.
Her name is Bree, B-R-I, how you spell her name.
She had parasites in her stomach and the medication they gave her to deal with these parasites
started a autoimmune war in her body where it began to cannibalize itself.
And it affected her motor skills.
It wiped out her energy and she became helplessly degenerating and shrinking to 94 pounds.
She's five foot nine.
And she went down to 94 pounds.
And when they brought her to the meeting, they brought her to the front, they carried
her and she's on her knees.
But again, her motor skills, inability to really coordinate and she looks like a skeleton.
And she's in front of the Tower of Speakers on my left when all of a sudden, man, the
power of God came on me and said, go over there and I'll be glorified.
And I prayed for her.
And she knew the moment that God had touched her, she understood it.
Well, she within the next few weeks could eat whatever she wanted, had no pain, no weakness.
Her motor skills are restored.
She gained 30 pounds and she's absolutely a walking, talking miracle a year later.
We just had her testify a few weeks ago.
And those are two of many that happened in Colorado Springs and why we're going back.
Yeah.
When are you going back?
When is this crusade?
Okay, the crusade is at Church for All Nations in their Northeast campus.
It's a Church for All Nations, July 16th through the 19th.
We're going four nights.
Catherine Mullins is going to lead worship at that event.
And it's going to be a remark.
We are already flooding the city with workers and we're going to see miracles.
Wow.
And so I find it very interesting that you heard the voice of the Lord say, go over to
there, go over to that girl and I'm going to be glorified.
And you needed to be able to speak.
You needed to be able to get the words out.
Yes.
And to be able to be obedient to do that.
And in our world today, we're dealing a lot with cancel culture and there's a fight against
free speech.
We just saw from the time that we're recording this a couple of weeks ago that Tucker Carlson
was fired from Fox News and there seems to be this fight or this battle for our words,
this battle to keep people quiet.
If we can keep people quiet in the natural, then we can keep people quiet from declaring
the word of God.
You have a powerful message that God has put on your heart about this and I just kind of
want to turn you loose and I'll ask questions along the way like I normally do, but I'm
just going to let you go brother.
Because before we hit record here, you were on a roll and yeah, so just go ahead and share
what the Lord has been sharing with you.
Well John, I want everyone who's watching to take a moment and listen to me on one point.
There are only two passions in my life that I'm in the ministry that I'm fighting for.
One is to preach the gospel with signs, wonders, and miracles.
And when all the drug addicts I can, every lost soul I can find, I'm trying to win them.
But my secondary passion in the ministry is to fight to preserve that right to do the
first thing.
The second thing is to fight to preserve that.
And I have some good news and some horrible news actually, but I think it's important
to understand what the meaning of Tucker Carlson's firing, what it means to us.
You know, it's a charade in Washington.
There's a ruling elite party and some of them are in the Republican Party and a lot of them
are in the Democratic Party.
And the idea that a minister shouldn't be referencing politics, that might have held
some kind of validity a few years ago, but now it is an inexcusable betrayal of your
calling in God to remain silent right now.
You have to speak out.
And what we found out with Tucker is this.
He said some things that went against that elite group of corporate heads that want to
control our world.
They are neither Republican nor Democrat.
They live in a loftier perch than that in the global scheme.
And so they silenced him, but they thought they did, only it backfired.
You know, Elon Musk was not something that any of them expected to happen.
And if you'd have told me five years ago that Twitter would actually be a platform for free
speech, I wouldn't have believed you.
But there's been such a shift and a moment that I believe is from God that the church
needs to seize.
And amen.
I agree with that completely.
The church needs to seize every opportunity to preach the gospel.
And St. Francis of Assisi is quoted by saying this, that we preach the gospel at all times
and when necessary, use words.
Well, to be honest, it's necessary to use words at all times.
And so if we're not doing our best to share the gospel through our actions as well as
our words, then we're missing a key component of that.
And so I know that I believe that he was actually misquoted quite a bit about that and it was
taken to just be a nice person and people will come to Christ.
He did a lot of preaching the gospel with words too.
But no, what I'm going to say is that you said when necessary, use words.
And the words we need to use are the necessary words.
Not our opinion, but what words are necessary.
And here's what I'm going to tell you.
I'm in a strange place in my life where I know that God wants me to address abortion,
the transgender agenda, and God wants me to speak out against evil as I see it.
But it becomes difficult for me to say, oh, the Republicans are right and the Democrats
are wrong.
And I'm going to tell you what I'm going to say.
Democratic Party has an evil agenda.
The Republican Party has a compromised agenda and we can't trust either one fully.
Now obviously, I know God can work a lot easier right now in the conservative movement because
they still at least outwardly claim to value family and truth and freedom of speech.
But the real battle, the real war that's going on right now is the silence in the American
pulpit.
That's the real, that's where you know, the devil is in the details.
That's where the problem is.
And there's a verse in the Bible that I wanted to reference.
And I will after you ask your question, you were going to ask me.
But I wanted to say that about necessary words.
That is really important with these whole necessary words.
I mean, that is those necessary words are the ones that are being, they're triggered.
You know, on Facebook, I know people that have because they posted about Jesus dying
for your sins to save you.
They have been, they've gotten a strike.
They've gotten put in Facebook jail.
You know, people are getting removed from different platforms because they're speaking
the truth.
They're not even speaking against certain groups or things like that.
They're just speaking the truth.
And then people come after them.
And so, I mean, we've had some interesting, interesting altercations with that as well.
Because, yeah, I mean, it's, we're just trying to report what's going on.
And we have to be careful.
I mean, we're going to speak the truth no matter what.
But sometimes we have to beat around the bush a little bit to so, so that things are, you
know, we're not going to get shut down on these different platforms.
We're going to continue to be on available at charisma news.com forever.
And all these other platforms, our podcast network, and those things.
So we're not going to shy away from that.
But we're going to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves to be able to be to be able
to get the word out there and be careful with those necessary words, I guess.
You know, Twitter was recently purchased by Elon Musk a few months ago.
And honestly, a few years ago, I thought Elon Musk was probably one of the best Bond villain
names that I could have ever come up with.
And now he seems more like a Tony Stark, you know, helping the people of Ukraine get the
internet through satellites and, you know, the shooting off rockets and, and all this
interesting stuff and buying the biggest buying the biggest social media platform and turning
it into something that's just totally free speech.
It seemed like we were heading towards a place before where free speech is totally cut off
and there's nothing that we can say and we just have to bite our tongues and hope something
changes.
With this change that's happening, what are you seeing spiritually?
All right, I want to I want to address it this way.
Number one, how many times have you and I heard ministers who were mediocre say, well,
we shouldn't get involved in that, because they're really not criticizing the church.
In 2008, I told leaders and my blog, I said, they're going after Christianity.
That's all they really want.
They don't want to just silence the right wing QAnon, whatever they're after Christianity,
you just don't want to face it.
They don't say it today because they don't have enough momentum.
They don't have enough support to do it.
They won't get away with it.
Well, so the pendulum swung.
And like I said, you can't even say that Christ can save you or wash away your sins by his
blood.
That is now a hate crime that is unsafe.
People feel threatened by it.
And therefore, you're going to see social media block that out.
Well, we disobeyed God when this problem began.
God had sent voices like David Wilkerson and others and said to the body of Christ in the
United States, we need to stand up against the flood of evil and against the flood of
immorality.
They didn't do it.
And they kept telling themselves what it doesn't affect me.
Well, here we are.
And we're at another moment where now we better speak up or it's going to be impossible to
speak up.
And so that's where we're at.
Secondly, Elon Musk was a phenomenon like something you would see in the Old Testament.
The Bible says he sets up one king and takes down another.
You see, I have a theological theory that I call the Dagon factor.
And it is this, the God Dagon was half man, half fish worshiped by the Philistines.
And one day they went to war against Israel and stole the Ark.
But they made the mistake of putting the Ark in the same room as their God, Dagon.
And his hands fell off and his head and he fell forward in a pile in front of the Ark.
Now imagine trying to believe that your God is still a God when you're repairing him,
you're putting his limbs back together and you still believe he's deity.
Obviously, what you're watching here that the anointed of God in every situation will
rise to the top and God will change world events to facilitate their destiny.
All right.
He sent a storm to keep Jonah from getting to Tarshish because he belonged in Nineveh.
You know, you look at Caesar Augustus, he's a mighty, powerful potentate, the head of
the world's biggest empire.
And so he issues a decree that every person had to go to their original hometown and register
for the registry and taxation.
That brought Joseph and Mary all the way from Nazareth down to Bethlehem so that Micah prophecy
would be fulfilled.
That though you are the least of all the tribes, out of you will come a ruler whose origins
are from before time and Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
So God facilitates, he moved the heart of Cyrus the king to fulfill the 70 year prophetic
word of Jeremiah.
So every single moment in time, every epoch in time carries two initiatives, the prophetic
and policy.
So there's prophecy and there's policy.
And whatever the prophecies are that apply to that time, they're going to overrule man's
policy.
So here's what Elon Musk represents.
It's a kink in the armor.
It's a moment in time that God is allowed for the church once again to be protected
from having his voice completely silenced.
But we also ought to bear in mind that there have been nations that have been totally silenced.
And it was this, when Jesus approached Jerusalem, he wept and he said, you did not know the
hour of your visitation and now your peace is hidden from you.
That's the alarm that I'm pulling.
That's the alarm button that I'm referencing that we're in an hour where we need to hear
God.
You know, we have just under half a million Protestant ministers in the United States.
Now you tell me, John, if Kid Rock shooting up a pack of Bud Light ended up affecting
their sales, what would a hundred thousand pastors, men and women, standing in their
pulpit as one voice saying, we do not want children to get replacement surgery for their
gender.
We don't want old men in sundresses reading stories to our children.
We don't want this immorality.
It would make the Bud Light boycott look like nothing.
And it is essential for us to understand that this silence is being fomented by what I'd
consider a faulty theology, which I will explain from Isaiah 59.
All right.
Is it okay?
So I'm going to read it if you don't mind.
All right.
It says Isaiah 59 in the AMPC, an amplified classic version, starting in verse 14, justice
is turned away backwards and righteousness and uprightness are standing afar off for
truth has fallen in the streets and uprightness cannot enter the courts of law.
So it's saying the truth has failed, saying that the courts don't bring justice anymore.
It's saying the time we're living in.
And then in verse 15, it goes on.
Yes, truth is lacking.
Boy, I'll tell you that.
And he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.
By being righteous, you're suddenly being canceled.
And the Lord saw it and it displeased him that there was no justice.
And he saw this is what he found remarkable.
There was no man and wondered that there was no intercessor.
Here's where it gets.
It gets real touchy.
John is the assumption here is prayer.
And this is out of context.
It's not about prayer.
Is prayer important?
Yes.
The Bible says that we got to pray.
Second Chronicles 714 interceding for revival.
It's just that in this moment, it is speaking of something else.
What God was shocked at was not that people weren't praying, but that they were silent
in the face of the evil.
That's a big deal, John.
That's what it's talking about.
There was no intercessor.
And in brackets, it says no one to intervene on behalf of truth and right.
Therefore, and this is where the news gets good.
Therefore, his own arm brought him victory and his own righteousness, having the spirit
without measure sustained him.
And that's where we are.
That's our moment right now in American history.
God is going to send revival even though we don't deserve it.
God is going to send revival even though men and women have been silent.
Even though there's been this massive dereliction of duty where the priority is membership in
church, money, offerings, everything else.
God is still going to intervene in America.
How do I know it?
Because I saw it in the Jesus movement.
I saw the church in this same exact condition when all of a sudden, Southern California
became ground zero for a youth movement that would go around the world.
Amen.
You know, what you saw during the Jesus movement, and I love the whole Jesus Revolution movie.
I mean, I cried at the end of that.
And I just basically, I cried and spontaneously prayed, God use me that way.
And I just was overwhelmed.
I mean, you lived through that.
You were a part of that.
You were preaching that and seeing people come to Christ.
We look at California now where this really started from.
And San Francisco, people are leaving San Francisco.
People are leaving a lot of these areas because it's gotten so bad.
There's the homelessness is rampant.
The drugs are everywhere.
Violence is happening in so many different places.
I know that Whole Foods had to close their store in San Francisco because of so much
theft.
And so you're telling me that stuff was like this back in the 70s when the Jesus revival
was happening.
Tell me about this more right now because we need some more hope.
And what you're saying is you're comparing it to that.
So I'm just kind of painting the picture.
Like, if God can do it, then he can do it again.
Well, and here's what he did.
The cover of Time magazine said that God was dead.
It just said in three words, God is dead.
We had the assassination of Kennedy.
We had the Vietnam War.
We had the Beatles came in 1964 in their first tour of the United States and overnight changed
the culture.
All right.
In 1963, 10,000 kids ran away from home.
In 1965, just barely two years later, 1 million kids ran away from home.
And the movement, I would get on a bus after high school.
I got radically saved in high school and would jump on a bus to go down to the Haight Ashbury
where there were 50,000 young people and I'd witness on the streets.
In fact, I got a little amp and I would street preach, as I recall, with Janis Joplin and
all of them in a concert about a quarter of a mile away from me.
And I was just standing there against the tide.
And if there had been an AIDS virus in 1966 in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the
death rate would have shocked the world.
But the fact is they were on drugs, they were dying.
The whole 10 years I was at Berkeley, we had overdoses all the time, deaths all the time.
And the worldwide student revolution against the...and we had Watergate.
There was the fear of nuclear war.
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was a time where New York City had discovered psychotherapy.
Everybody had a shrink.
They were depending more on Freud than the Bible.
It was a time of tremendous...and feature this, Timothy Leary would do events with 10,000
young people that were the purpose of it was to get them to triacid.
It was literally a drug recruitment rally and they were happening all over the country.
So it was evil and churches were abandoned.
They figure that about 5% of American teenagers were in church in the mid-60s.
And all of a sudden, the power of God fell.
And you know, the Jesus Revolution movement, it couldn't...it'd be impossible for any one
film to do justice to that moment in the late 60s to the mid-70s of what hit the United
States because it happened simultaneously.
There was a Chuck Smith and Costa Mesa, but there was something going on in Seattle, in
Portland, in San Francisco, in Berkeley, and San Diego.
And the drop-in centers and the number of outreach places that were going on had us
so busy that I was in my car driving across California from one end of it to the other.
There wasn't a city where we couldn't stop and preach.
There was a Christian pizza parlor in Santa Cruz.
There was a drop-in center in San Francisco.
In Portland, when we went up there, there were people ministering on the streets.
You know, the West Coast was hit so hard by the Jesus movement that literally there was
not a man, woman, boy or girl who was not personally witnessed to receive Christ.
That's how pervasive it was.
So why do you think that we went from a culture or a time where, as you just said, literally
everybody had an opportunity to hear the gospel, everybody was preached to, to now it's people
are afraid to share the gospel and it's shut out.
Like, obviously that's a slippery slope, but where did that slippery slope start?
Well, you know, the John Kennedy said in one of his speeches, he said, a rising tide raises
all boats.
And at that time, the Jesus movement affected Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Catherine Kuhlman
and church growth.
And we had two Christian schools a day opening at one point in the United States, Christian
private schools.
Now where did it go?
Well, I believe one of the things that cost us our steam was an overemphasis on the rapture.
Well, do I believe in the rapture?
Well here's what I believe.
I believe that we are to function as if we're here another thousand years.
We have to function as if we are here for the long run.
So in the Jesus movement, the books, the movies, everything was so apocalyptic that no one
bothered to finish college, no one bothered to have a long range plan.
Nobody had any serious body of work that was being done in order to speak to the culture
on a long range basis.
Because of that, it tended to take a lot of the momentum out of it.
I believe that in this second one, you know, this is really important to say, Jesus is
a lion, he's a lamb.
And the Jesus movement was acoustic, it was flowers, it was, you know, that little chubby
dove design.
And it was tender and it was that way.
That was a lamb temperament.
The matrix of that movement was a lamb temperament.
And it was like Jesus loves you.
And you know, the songs of the day, the Christian music was amazing.
But here's what we're in now.
Joel says, I'll pour out my spirit on your sons and daughters and they will prophesy.
I personally don't believe we've seen that yet.
I believe that Peter was right saying this is that.
But in America, we've had the lamb revival, I think we're on the verge of a youthful revival
that's going to be very frightening.
I believe the devil has counterfeited the prophetic gift, counterfeited it so that when
the real arrives, he's trying to make us immune to it, inoculated against it.
But youth are going to be the prophets.
And the prophets that come out from the youth movement in America aren't going to say, you
know, everything you've been through is preparation and your end is going to be greater than your
beginning.
All of this flattery.
No, prophets speak to cultural evil.
Prophets go to the seat of power and challenge it.
They speak truth to power.
That hasn't happened yet.
But when young people do it, it's irresistible.
But I'll give you a clue.
What was happened in Asbury right before the Jesus Revolution movie came out, that momentary
flash was an omen and a precursor to something on campus that's going to be widespread.
That's why we are rebranding, recalibrating our ministry, because we are going to be on
campus where the student awakening of America is going to strike.
And it's going to have an intensity because of the passion, the natural passion of youth
is going to be amazing.
And John, you always ask me these questions and I, you know, you get me going.
So there it is.
That's great.
You know, I've got another question for you.
Because you were talking about the youth and how they're, we had the lamb revolution.
So we're kind of expecting the lion revolution.
But when you were talking about this, the counterfeit prophetic, their counterfeit things,
you know, several years ago, maybe the previous generation, the big thing was to question
authority.
And now people are questioning truth and they don't know what truth is.
And so let's just talk about the whole thing of questioning authority and where that has
led to.
Because I think there is a good questioning of authority and there's an inappropriate,
there's a rebellious questioning of authority.
And the same way connecting to truth, there is a good questioning of truth.
And then there's a rebellious questioning of truth as well.
Can we discuss some of those correlations there?
Well, to get to right to the heart of what you just asked me, what makes it right or
wrong to question authority is basically has to do with the question.
What is the question?
Because questions that are hit pieces or rhetorical questions or questions that are meant to just
kind of get you aren't purveyors of truth.
Where we are frustrated is on two levels.
One is we took scripture out so that we don't teach the Bible.
The average young believer today doesn't understand doctrine, the essential truths of the gospel,
the Trinity, the second coming of Christ, the blood, the process of sanctification and
redemption, inerrancy of scripture.
They haven't got it, even though the Bible says be ready to give an answer for the hope
that lies within you.
This is because biblical illiteracy was created by these guru type celebrity pastors that
are running around now and they love to sound like Anthony Robbins and wear the muscled
shirts and stand there and enthrall the crowd.
If they're not teaching truth verse by verse, biblical doctrinal truth, believe it or not,
youth are fascinated by truth.
They want it.
So this is a canard.
It's not something we need to be doing at all, is to seduce or leave the Bible verses
out.
Secondly, we haven't pursued with integrity the supernatural.
So we have a bumper sticker that was famous all over the South and conservative areas
has said when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
Well, for every false prophet that we see running around seeing cows driving tractors
in heaven, there is another preacher who said prophecy isn't for today.
The most powerful and devastating movement that I ever had to be a part of was a luncheon
I did in San Francisco to several hundred pastors who wanted to understand how did so
many young people were fooled by Jim Jones.
These were mainstream churches.
They were liberal churches and they wanted me as a youth leader because they heard what
God was doing in Berkeley.
They said, why did they end up with Jim Jones?
And I couldn't believe John what God had me to say.
I looked at him and I said, you know, before they tried Jim Jones, his church, they tried
yours.
Ouch.
And I said, here's what's wrong.
We needed to discover the true gift of prophecy, discerning, casting out of devils.
How does healing and the word of faith that is true, the true legitimate word of
knowledge, prophetic word of wisdom, healing faith, all of how does that work?
Here's what Paul said.
He said, concerning spiritual gifts, I don't want you to be ignorant.
We didn't have that passion.
There are certain spirit filled denominations that a huge number of their pastors don't
even pray in tongues, have never been baptized in the Holy Spirit.
So here's the problem.
We ignored tongues.
We ignored the gifts of the spirit.
We didn't understand that Oral and Catherine Kuhlman specifically were going after these
things to generate a faith in people.
They worked with the medical community, not against it.
There was no anti-intellectualism at Oral Roberts University.
Catherine Kuhlman, in most of her meetings, the first couple of rows were saturated with
heart doctors, surgeons, nurses, and people in the medical community.
There wasn't this us and them thing.
It was this, this is real.
It's real.
Let's validate it.
Let's open it up in our churches.
The Bible says, forbid not to speak in tongues.
And so we got 1 Corinthians 12, 13, 14 telling us to open the gates so that the true moving
of the Holy Spirit could occur.
We didn't do it.
So that opened the door for all of these people that are flaky, that are extreme, and the
onslaught of social media.
You can get on there and find people that are self-proclaimed everything.
And they're not under any kind of integrity or authority.
And they're accountable to no one.
And they're fleecing the flock.
That's what they're doing.
Wow.
So, you know, Mario, there's, I've got two questions that I've got just from the things
that you were just sharing.
And I'm going to ask both of them and let you kind of work them in together just so
that I don't forget them because they're so deep.
And it's making me ponder and really just maul some of these things over.
But the first one is you talked about the rapture and how teaching about the rapture
is what you believe is one of those things that really led to passivity in the overall
body of Christ, especially in the American church.
I know with that type of teaching, I've basically kind of, I'm 38 years old right now.
And I just got married five months ago.
And my whole life, I have been wanted to be a husband and a father.
And I've known that that's part of the calling that God has on my life.
But people that are older than me, people that have already gone through being a husband
and a father and having their family and they're towards retirement, now they've just been
talking about Jesus coming again, Jesus coming again.
And it's actually, it went from something that's encouraging to something that's depressing
the following generation.
And I've definitely felt victim of that, not wanting Jesus to come back before I've done
what I felt God was calling me to do.
And so I totally agree with what you were talking about.
So I'd like you to kind of dig into that a little bit more.
But also speaking about that younger generation, you said that the youth want truth.
And like, so discernment seems to be something that's really key right now.
And I want to hear what you're seeing as evidence for that.
And so I know kind of those things are basically speaking to the younger generation.
So if you can kind of just opine about that a little bit, I would appreciate that.
Okay, to your first question, I don't want to take anyone's rapture doctrine away.
I'm gonna tell you something, I know theologians, I've got friends that are the most gifted
Bible scholars in our world today.
And they're friends of mine, because I made it a point to seek them out.
And when they didn't want to know me, I made them know me, because I just love what they
do.
And I could take a person who believes in the rapture, pre-tribulation rapture, mid-tribulation
rapture, and the ones that believe the church is going to go through the great tribulation.
I could moderate a discussion.
And I promise you, it's just like it says in Proverbs, when a man speaks, he said it
is absolute truth until his neighbor comes and cross examines him.
So I could take this guy, and you'd be convinced.
And then this guy, and you would also be convinced.
And this guy, and you would be convinced.
And I believe that I look at the end times like the blind men that saw an elephant.
And all right, so one grabbed the ear and said, this is flat like a moray eel.
This is like a flat fish.
One grabbed the trunk and said, no, it's like a tree.
And the other grabbed the belly and said, no, it's like a whale.
And then one grabbed the tail and said, it's like a snake.
And they were all wrong, and they were all right.
And if you take prophetic teachers on the eschatology and lay them end to end, they'll
point in all directions.
But here's what I believe is essential.
So I don't want to get any emails or say, you shouldn't have said anything against this
or against that or the other.
I'm not.
I'm going to tell you that what I believe is that there is a mystery associated with
the end times in order to produce a dynamic tension.
And that tension is perseverance and urgency.
The Bible says, be urgent in season and out of season.
What God is trying to do to the church is make them aware that only a few things are
important right now, because don't hold tightly on your possessions.
Don't hold tightly on to your carnal dreams.
Be ready at any moment to go, but be ready just as ready to dig in.
D.L.
Booty, they said, if you knew Christ was coming tomorrow, what would you do today?
He said, I plant a tree.
So I'm going to tell you that this is what God is trying to do.
Keep us off balance, so to speak, so that we have this dynamic tension between urgency
and perseverance.
Dig in like you're going to be here for 100 years, but be ready at any moment.
But here's what we can't do.
We can't have eschatology that has us off balance.
It's hard to defeat the enemy when you've got a sword in one hand and luggage in the
other.
So if your mind is to leaving and so until you know the if God were to take me, that's
autonomous.
That's I don't have any part of that.
He's just going to do it.
So in the meantime, I'm going to go up in the rapture.
If I'm going up in the rapture, I'm going up feet first, dragged by an angel, biting
demons all the way up.
Because as long as I'm here, I'm going to fight with fierceness.
I'm going to plan.
I'm going to dig in and invest.
We just bought a 5000 seat tent.
We're buying a 55 foot trailer.
We bought a stadium size sound system.
We bought 2000 more chairs, John.
We bought a truck for our television live streaming.
What are you doing, Mario?
It's the end of the world, right?
Listen, I'm going out with a bang is what I'm doing.
Every day that I'm here, I'm going to make the loudest noise that I can for God's glory.
Wow.
That's that's so good.
I appreciate you talking about that.
So I want to go into the second part of that word, discernment and the younger generation.
You're talking about how youth want truth.
What is the evidence that you're seeing of that?
And what makes you really believe that?
It's Gen Z, that is the first evidence are there are vast large gatherings of young people
going on right now that a lot of people don't hear.
Four and five thousand of them are getting together to understand Bible teaching, Bible
intercessory prayer.
There's a vast hunger for it.
Barna, you know, George Barna's group, they did a poll and they asked young people, what
is it about church that you don't like or that you wish was in church?
Number one was the presence of God.
They missed that.
Number two is Bible teaching.
Now how do we know that's true?
Go to the Jesus Revolution film.
Look at Chuck Smith.
What did he do?
He began to teach expository preaching.
Instead of being a topical preacher, he was expository.
So he was going through one book after another in the Bible verse by verse.
And when he started to do that, the young people came in record numbers.
We saw the same thing in Berkeley.
It is Bible doctrine that youth are interested in.
And if pastors would only wake up and realize that who they think are young are not young
anymore.
You know, and I was in Long Island with five mega church pastors and they asked me a question.
We had lunch together and they said, they were in the Jesus movement and they said to
me, they asked me, why are our youth groups so small?
All of us came out of youth revival.
Why are youth groups so small?
And I looked at him and I said, are you sure you want to hear the answer to that question?
Because the answer is y'all still think you're the youth group.
You haven't become fathers.
Wow.
You still think it's about you and your music and your day and your time and it's not.
Wow.
You are not mentoring.
And that's what and at the minute that young people feel I'm going to get training, if
you offer training, they're coming.
If you offer Bible teaching, they're coming.
If you operate in the gifts of the spirit, they're coming.
But if you're doing this Anthony Robbins imitation, if you're strutting across the stage, telling
little stories, monologues and narratives and tropes, the kids, they're not, they don't
want it.
They can see right through it.
They can get that everywhere else, but that's what they want.
Yeah.
You can get a motivational speech anywhere.
I mean, TikTok is full of them.
So is Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube.
I mean, there's so many places that you can get some sort of motivation to do better,
be better, do more, get up earlier, stay up later, work out harder, but they can't touch
the word of God.
That's it.
No, they can't.
I mean, it's good to do all those things, but the word of God is key and central to
what we're doing.
And if we remove that, we're not actually going to be a successful person and a successful
Christian for sure.
What you were talking about reminds me of 2 Timothy 2, 2, how Paul told Timothy that
what I have taught you in trust of faithful men who will be able to teach others.
So you have discipleship in action right there.
Paul to Timothy, Timothy to faithful men and faithful men to others.
And what you were saying to those five mega church pastors and telling them you still
think that you're the youth group.
I mean, you're not factually fathering, you're not discipling, you're not making those disciples.
Wow.
I mean, there's a breakdown of that 2 Timothy 2, 2 layout or outline that God's given us
through the apostle Paul.
How do we fix that?
What is something that the person that's listening to this now or watching this right now that
they can do to take that step to fix that problem?
To fix that problem is to get alone with God and turn off all the noise and wait on God
and you'll hear and anyone here that and let's face it, you know, I have a way of thinning
the herd of people that don't want God and whenever I speak, it's funny because they
leave and the drug addicts come in and the gangsters come in.
And so if you empty out those seats, so those lost souls can come in, I'm good with that.
And I'll keep preaching that way.
But I think that cutting through the noise of all of the bad influences that preachers
and young leaders get today to stop it and in the silence to wait on God because here's
your secret weapon.
And I want to say this to those who are watching, here is your secret weapon is your desire
to be used of God.
If you have a sincere and honest desire to be used of God, then you are in the best possible
condition you can be in because there's no way that you're going to escape being told
by God what to do with your life.
It's impossible.
And you know, I never thought of that that way until I reread the Beatitudes where it
said blessed are those who hunger.
And I thought when is it a blessing to be hungry?
See, when is that a blessing?
And why is it a blessing?
Well, it's a blessing because you're willing to pay the price.
The hungry are willing to pay the price.
That's what's left out of the equation.
You know, opportunities are available everywhere, but they're purchased.
They're not in an endowment.
They're bought and paid for by the passion of the person.
So here's how it works.
Blessed are those who hunger.
Why?
Because that hunger will give you the energy to pay the price.
Blessed are those who hunger.
Why?
Because of where that hunger came from.
God gave it to you.
All right.
Why?
Blessed are those who are hungry.
Why?
Because of what you're hungry for.
God does not awaken a desire for you to have something deeply unless he means to give it
to you.
When Oral wanted miracles, Catherine wanted miracles, Billy Graham wanted souls, and Chuck
Smith wanted to obey God.
That was it.
And so it overtakes you.
You know, I had dinner with David Wilkerson one night, and I was trying to decide, Brother
Dave, where am I supposed to go?
I don't know the will of God for my life.
And he looked at me and he said, son, let me tell you something, the will of God will
grow on you.
It'll grow on you.
It starts as a spark and a hunger, a fascination.
You find yourself praying and seeking, and you're setting yourself apart until one day,
instantly you are faced with the fact of what you're to do and how you're to do it.
And what it is becomes inescapable, irresistible, and unavoidable.
That's why those who hunger are blessed.
Wow.
That's why those who hunger are blessed.
That is a breakdown of that passage that I have not heard like that.
And I really appreciate that.
That makes so much sense that what we are hungry for, that that is where there's a blessing.
And that's where, wow.
You know, Mario, every time that we talk, I start writing down notes on my notepad and
we've filled up a whole page.
And sometimes that's how I indicate we need to kind of wrap things up this time and schedule
another opportunity to talk because we've gone almost an hour, my friend.
And I just feel closer with Jesus because we've been talking.
And I hope that everybody that has been watching and listening to this Charisma News podcast
is blessed by the conversation that Mario and I have been having.
Because what he's talking about is he's really a prophetic voice and bringing truth and clarity
to what's happening in our society right now.
So stay tuned for more Charisma News.
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