Hearing Is Not the Same as Listening

Hearing Is Not the Same as Listening

by Dr. Bill Reed and Lee Kizer

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I don’t even know where to begin. It is such a delight to be back. I mean, it seems like it’s been forever, and yet it seems like only yesterday, I guess, that we saw many of you. As I look out and just see all the familiar faces and some new faces, it’s just a tremendous blessing to be back here. My spiritual journey really began in the early 70s down in Miami. I guess Robbie and Marion are probably two of our oldest friends. We knew them way back in Miami. And John Kilpatrick… did John leave? Well, there he is. Okay. And good to see him. And then we got involved in Faith Alive and ended up in Palm Beach Gardens, of all places, with some folks from St. Mark’s. I see the Wilcoxes, and then it spread out into the Belle Glade area. Ed Lively and some of the folks out there. I met Pastor Barber. I don’t know whether any of you all remember Bob Barber from Good Shepherd Church down in Miami. And he cornered me one day. I think it was in a mall. We had lunch together when we were in Miami. And he said, “There’s three things that you need to do for your spiritual journey.” He said, “One of them is to get involved in Faith Alive, because that will just cement your personal relationship with the Lord.”

And another thing that you need to do is you need to get involved in Cursillo, that short course in Christianity, that little weekend affair that will get you pumped up and send you back into the local church and really have you work well among the parishioners there. And then the third thing you need to do is you need to go to CFO. And I said, “What is CFO?” And he said, “Camp Farthest Out.” And I said, “Well, I’m not overweight. I don’t know why I would need to go to a camp for the stout.” But… He said, “No, no, no. Camp Farthest Out.” And Chris, of course, explained very beautifully what it’s all about. But in about the mid-70s, I guess, Janet and I began to come to CFO camp. And I must say that Pastor Barber was right. Those three events have really shaped my life. But I think especially CFO. And mainly for this reason. Where can you go for one solid week and just be alone with God? Just be alone with God’s people. I mean, He only gave us two commandments, didn’t He? Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. That’s the first and great commandment. The second is likened to it. Love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Well, we’re here for a week. And we get to love God and we get to love one another. We need to get to fulfill that great commandment. The exciting thing about that is that when you are with God for as long as we will be this week, you have a special opportunity. And I look back on my experiences at CFO and I see just about every time I attended camp, something happened. Something monumental happened in my life that in many cases changed the direction of where I was going at that particular time in life.

I can remember one of the very first camps that we came to, we had a brand new baby. And you can imagine what job they appointed for us. We were in charge of the nursery. Chris, your daughter was probably in the nursery at that particular time. It gave us our first chance to be servants. And it wasn’t too much longer after that that we came to a CFO. And I remember specifically telling God at that particular time, it was about Wednesday or Thursday, I think, around healing and blessing. And I’d really felt a touch from the Lord. And I said, “Janet, we need to commit our lives, ourselves, our souls, our bodies. We need to be a living sacrifice unto God. And we need to say to Him, we will do anything that You want us to do.” And so we committed to God. Don’t ever do that, by the way.

It gets you into deep trouble. But you know, I don’t think that was so much the problem. The problem was the footnote that I put on it. I said, “Lord, I’ll do anything You want me to do except youth.” Just, you know… you know, we’d been at Church of the Resurrection for a while, Episcopal Church down in Miami. And we’d had sort of a… Well, it wasn’t the best experience in the world with a youth group. And I felt like that just wasn’t my calling. And if God didn’t want me to do that, I didn’t need to do that. So I would just put that aside and say, “Lord, I’ll do everything but the youth.” And it was at that particular camp around Friday or Saturday. I think it was on Saturday morning. Everybody was getting ready to go home. And somebody from Miami, Joey. I can’t remember Joey’s last name. He was part of Lighthouse Ministries down there. Steve Alger and Carol were part of that ministry. And he came up to me and to Janet and he said, “You know, the Lord seems to be speaking to me. And He’s telling me something.” And I said, “What is it? I’ve been waiting to hear all week what it is, you know, that God wants to say to us.”

And he said, “I really sense that the Lord is calling you into full-time ministry.” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “You know, there are a lot of youth that are here at this camp that will be going back, you know, to their local churches. And, you know, they really need a place to go hang their hat.” And I said, “Wait a minute, Joey. You probably have gotten me mixed up with Ed Lively or, you know, somebody like that. You can’t mean me, you know.” He said, “No, no, no. I’m sure it was you. I’m sure it was Janet. And it’s just got to be.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think so. But I appreciate the word anyway.” He said, “By the way, there’s a few of us will be up at your house next Friday.” And I said, “What for?” And he said, “Well, we’ve called together a little meeting, you know.” That Friday, 25 kids from Miami and about 10 from North Palm Beach showed up at our house. 35 kids in our dining room.

They went to the beach before they came to our house. I mean, it’s sand, just wet bathing suits, you name it. I mean, it was the worst nightmare come true, you know. And so anyway, I said, “I’ll be glad, Janet, when this is over with.” They went home that night and Joey again said on the way home, he said, “We’ll see you next week.” I said, “What do you mean next week?” He said, “Well, we’re coming back up. We, you know, we just need to get this off the ground.” Anyway, to make a long story short, four straight weekends, you know, these kids remind me, well, the thing began to grow. You know, more kids began to show up. And so by the time the end of the month rolled around, we had about 40 kids packed into us. Same wet bathing suit, same sand, you know. Cars on the lawn, you name it. You know, the neighbors are complaining because of all the noise and that kind of thing. I said, “I just don’t know about this.” And so after four weeks of this, Joey said, “Well, we won’t be back.” I said, “Well, good.” He said, “But the rest of them will, these kids from North Palm.”

Something happened to me that particular night. For one thing, they took up an offering. And I think it was something like $78. All in $1 bills, all wet, full of sand. Stuffed into one of Janet’s plants, you know, that we would discover later on. But God began to speak to me and He said, “You know, when you commit to Me, you commit 100%.” It was that particular event in my life that literally propelled me into full-time ministry. Edwin, that prophecy in 1982 was about six months before I went into full-time ministry. March the 13th, 1982. Also my brother’s birthday. So God really knew what He was doing. It all started at CFO camp. And all I’m saying is that you and I have an opportunity this week, you know, to hear some things from God. You may hear something you don’t want to hear. But it will be good for you. Sort of like Listerine, you know. It’s good. It will do a world of good.

Janet, come on up here for just a second. For two reasons. Number one, I just want you to see how pretty she is, you know. She’s only 39 years old and she’s just really… But the other reason is that she knows the names of all our children. And she also knows where they are and, you know, who they’re married to and those kinds of things. Can you bring them up to date on where our family is?

Yes, I’ll be glad to. How many of you have ever had the great opportunity of resting in the Spirit? Have you ever had someone pray for you and you just couldn’t stand on your two feet? And you just felt sort of woozy and like the power of God came over you and you just were all of a sudden on the floor? How… Yeah. Well, our four children grew up either on the floor because someone had prayed for them at CFO in the children’s ministry, in the youth ministry. Or they were either on the floor themselves or standing over the two of us while we were on the floor pointing us out to all their friends. I can remember being prayed for and so often Lee and I would fall under the power of God together.

And our children would be standing there looking at us when we opened our eyes. And they’re grown now. They’re big. And they… each one had a touch at CFO camp. I hope I can get through this without crying, but we have a son, Lee, who is 34 and three daughters. Catherine, Dottie and Julie, they’re 31, 27 and 26. Yeah. Not even close. Okay. Close enough. And our son, Lee, at a… I can remember at a CFO camp, he was so touched by the power of God in the youth ministry that he came back to the room and he was… you know, if you ever saw a child drink and get drunk, this is what they would look like. And I was astounded. He was literally drunk in the Spirit of God. And he said, “I’m gonna be a minister. And I’m gonna have a ministry when I grow up.” Someone had given him a word of the Lord in the youth. One of the youth had prophesied over him. Well, he went to Wheaton College. I taught… we taught all four of them to pray for a mate. He prayed for a mate and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed. And when he was about 32, I said, “Stop praying. Just date somebody.”

He was in New York City. He worked in the World Trade Center. And he had gone off for a year. He had taken a year off and moved to Boston to try to make his Christian band take off. And the Lord just didn’t seem to want to bless it at that time. So he came back to the World Trade Center the Thursday before it fell on Tuesday. He had an appointment that morning to go back and get his old job back on the 105th floor. He did not go to the appointment. God warned him. He’s alive today because he didn’t go in. He had 24 friends from Wheaton that were on the 105th floor. They were told if the tower, you know, if there gets hit or there’s a problem, go up to the roof. You’ll be air-vacked off. That day, a woman came up from the 103rd, came running up the stairs, told everybody on the 105th floor, all those Christian kids that work there at Aon, “Don’t go down… don’t go up to the top, go down the back stairway. It’s open. You’ll get out. Run.” And they all got out but one. So, thank You, Lord. He just felt led to call and cancel the appointment. They put him on hold and then the phone went dead.

So he wasn’t there. Anyway, there was a group of about 400 young people in New York City that met in a church. And he became their worship leader. And he was asked to film all the ministries of the church. And he went out to video this one girl who was ministering to kids in Harlem. And she was an entertainment writer for TV Guide. And she said, “My date has stood me up for the Grammys. Lee, do you have a tux?” And he said, “Yeah.” And they went to the Grammys. And he found out she was a Christian. And she had been praying for 10 years to meet a Christian guy. And had given up. And they lived three blocks from each other in New York City. So, for 10 years. And then they finally met. And they just knew immediately. So, they got married and had a grandbaby on their anniversary.

Our grandbaby. Our daughter, Catherine, served the Lord in the Pacific, in Samoa. And in missions with YWAM. And is now working for Microsoft. Our daughter, Dottie, learned at a CFO through prophecy that she was gonna marry a minister. So, she went off to college. She didn’t want to go to college. She just wanted to get married. Went off to college. And every time she’d hear of a seminary student, or somebody going to go to seminary, she would say to them… or she would get a date with them somehow. And then she’d say, “I’m gonna be a minister’s wife.” And they’d drop her flat.

And they’d drop her flat. So, she went through all of college. Didn’t marry. Went through graduate school. Didn’t marry. Went to teach in Messiah College up in Pennsylvania. And met a really nice seminary student. And never told him she was gonna marry a seminary student. And they’re married today. They’ve been married about two or three years. About three years. About three years. Our youngest daughter, Julia, was really involved in the renewal that came through the churches a few years ago and may still be going on. She would fall under the power of God and get so deep in the power of the Spirit that she would wield a sword and cut through things. And people prophesied over her the same thing everywhere she was. She would be in Charlotte. Or she would be in… another place. She would be in Atlanta at a Christian conference like this. And somebody would come up and say, “You’re gonna take teams of people into Europe. Lots of Bibles. You’re gonna carry people and Bibles into Europe. And you’re gonna have to have a lot of resources to do this.” So she grew up, became a policewoman. She’s a canine officer. And she’s getting ready to go with the diplomatic corps and learn… She majored in French, so she’s French-speaking.

And we think God’s leading her into full-time Christian ministry. She’s not married. Two are married, two are not. Did I take too much time? No, you didn’t. So, as you can see, our family has really been impacted by CFO. And, you know, God’s no respecter of persons. He will impact your life. All you need to be is willing and be open, you know, to what God says. I wish I had time, you know, to tell you story after story of what God has done, you know, through CFO. All the way from returning our third-year-old, our third-grade students’ glasses to, well, to literally changing our direction as far as ministry goes. But just know that God brought you here for a purpose this week. That you’re not here by accident. That you’re here by God’s design. It’s part of His perfect plan for you.

When the Lord speaks, all we have to do is listen. There’s a difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is simply knowing that the vibrations have reached your ears. A lot of people hear, but they don’t listen. Listening is hearing that small voice. That still small voice of God. The one that speaks to your heart. The one that you say, “Yes, Lord. I’ll ride wherever You want me to go. I’ll go where You want me to go. I’ll do what You want me to do.” I believe He wants to speak to everyone here, including me. So I’m really excited.

I feel like I’m going to come away with new revelation from God. New understanding of who He is and what He wants of me. He’s not ready to put me out to pasture, nor is He ready to put you out to pasture. He’s ready to begin something. To begin something new. His mercies are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. I want to speak to you this week about change. I think there’s any message that’s been put on my heart over 18 years of ministry. 18 years of pastoral ministry and about 4 years now of ministry in a Christian university. I’m a professor of business at Southern Wesleyan University in South Carolina. And I get a chance to minister to my graduate students in their jobs. In their families. In the workplace. And they all come wanting to know, “How can I fit into God’s plan?”

God desires for you to move from where you are to where He wants you to be. And it’s a process that will go on throughout your entire life. He’s not finished with you yet. He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. It’s going to take that long. And so, I want to speak to you about change. Monday, we’re going to talk about the importance of change. The reality of change. God’s purpose for change. Wednesday, we’re going to look at the changes that take place in us. Body, soul, and spirit. And in the healing and blessing service Wednesday night, we’re going to experience God’s changing power in our lives. So, whatever your need is. Whatever your point of interest. Whatever area of your life needs a touch from Him. He’ll do that. His promise is to do that. So, body, soul, and spirit on Wednesday. And then on Friday, the change is there not only for you, but for the rest of the world. Jesus said, “As long as I’m in the world, I’m the light of the world.” But now you are the light of the world. So, a changed life will have an impact. And so, Friday, we’re going to talk about that. So, get ready for change.

Buckle up. Get ready because God wants to speak to you. And I really believe He will. Let me pray that our hearts will be open. That our ears will be open. That we will be listeners of the word. Father, I thank You for the opportunity that we have this week. This week of coming away. Of getting out of the hustle and bustle. And Lord, it may take us a day or two. Or maybe even three days to where we can stop long enough. To have the cell phones off. And the computers shut down. To have the car radios on. And our TiVo units idle. So that we can hear from You. And listen to the voice. That will literally change our lives. We want to be changed, Lord. But more importantly, we want to be change agents of Yours. So, speak to us, Lord. As Samuel said, “Speak, Lord, Your servants. Listen.” We ask that You would do that. In the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Let me just say one more thing. How delighted I am to be able to partner with Dr. Bill Reed. And minister alongside him. It’s a great honor, Dr. Reed, to be with you. And we love you. God bless you. Chris.

Our second speaker this week is going to be Dr. Bill Reed. He likes to be called Dr. Bill. Sorry, Dr. Bill. Not Mr. Bill. Dr. Bill. Dr. Reed is a general surgeon and president of the Christian Medical Foundation. He has been a CFO leader for many years and is active in healing ministry. He is an ardent believer in Jesus Christ and His word and a practitioner of spiritual healing, as well as medical healing through his surgical practice. Dr. Reed is also active in missionary surgery in Central America. He’s a singer, a violinist, a writer, a poet, a lecturer, and he looks to Jesus. Dr. Bill.

Dr. Bill. This goes in the pod. Yes, it goes. That’s fine. Okay. What’s that for? It’s me and his name. This is just in case I feel like falling over. Lord, I just pray that tonight I can magnify Your holy name. I thank You, Jesus, for the fact that I’m even privileged to be here.

I’m an American. And Jesus died for me. And He gave me a life that, to me, it’s just been wonderful. And though I’m lonesome tonight, for my darling wife, who went to heaven a month ago, my heart is still fractured in many pieces. But You poured the balm of Gilead on Jesus. And I thank You for that. I thank You, Jesus, that You’re infinitely more able to do for us, far beyond all that we think or ask or even dream of.

I’m thankful that the song we sang tonight said You’re all that it is. Because You really are. And You make us out of nothing. You give us success, happiness, joy, abilities far beyond our canon. And I thank You, Jesus. I thank You for blessing. Thank You for blessing me, my family, my loved ones, La Familia de Dios, the people of Christ, the body of Christ. Will they be Catholic or Pentecostal or Lutherans or Episcopalians or whatever they are. Thank You that You’ve given me love for them all.

Thank You, Lord, that You’re making a way where there is no way. That You’re the God of the impossible. And I thank You, Jesus, that I’m here. Thank You that I’m feeling better tonight. Thank You for the prayers of the Council Ring for other people. Thank You for the L-O-H, laying on of hands. Thank You for songs. We can enter Your gates with thanksgiving and Your courts with praise. That we can sing. Sing unto the Lord a new song. We can sing and enjoy and praise and worship You, Lord.

Thank You for teaching me way back at Ardmore Camp, 1959. With Marge Lawrence and Mary Whitney and Tommy Tyson and Genevieve Parkhurst. My first camp. For some strange reason I went there. My first camp as a leader. I didn’t know how it went. It just happened.

Thank You for that song that I learned that time in September of ’59, my first camp as an angel.

Jason Vihal. This is the sweetest name I know. And He is just the same as His lovely name and that’s the reason why I love Him so, Oh, Lord Jesus is the sweetest name I know. Yes, He’s all I need. He’s all I need. Jesus is all I need. He’s all I need. He’s all I need. Jesus is all I need. Cause I love Him. I love Him. Because He first loved me. And He purchased my salvation.

On Calvary Street. Where I first saw the light. And the burden of my heart washed away. It was there by faith. I received in my sight. And now I am happy. Oh, the day. I was born in a snowstorm on May the 25th in Port Huron, Michigan. They don’t know how to even discover summer up there some of the time. It’s almost as bad as Minnesota. And Wisconsin. And my family came over in 1862 from May Dock and Sterling in Belleville, Ontario.

They had originally been in the Mohawk Valley of New York. And they were Empire Loyalists. And when the Revolutionary War occurred, my family thought it was curtains for them. So they moved up to Ontario. And there wasn’t even a Holiday Inn up there. They were just a whole bunch of Mohawk Indians.

And Dad told me that great-grandfather P.W. Reed had lost his eyesight. But somehow he and his brother were in town, I think in Belleville. And some old doctor had died and they were selling his books. And they bought a book on the care of the eyes. And my grandfather and his brother treated his eyes problem. And he regained his eyesight. And he decided to become a doctor.

And he came to Port Huron in 1862. And he trained in Cincinnati to become an eclectic physician. Sort of like a naturopath today. And Dad… That was his grandfather. My dad, when World War I came along, he joined a Masonic ambulance company and went to France. They didn’t know anything about the separation of church and state back there at that time. In fact, the matter is, the songbooks they handed out were printed by the United States government. And they were all about Jesus and His love and how He protects and how He takes care of us. Imagine printed by a government that supposedly has a separation of church and state. I was going to bring that little book along. I would have brought it along. But part of my luggage is somehow… I don’t know where it is. But Jesus knows where it is.

I went to Springfield, Missouri one time to speak at Evangel College. And I took a plane from Chicago to Springfield. And somehow my luggage remained on the airplane and went down to Phoenix, Arizona or somewhere. And so I spoke to the student body at Evangel about… I was naked and you clothed me.

You know, when you start to follow Jesus, not that you desire necessarily to do that. It’s just that all of a sudden, bang, there you are. I had, in the Department of Pathology at the University of Michigan, when I was studying to be a surgeon years later. That was all a miracle. There was no way I could have gone to college. No way I could have gone to medical school. No way I could have become a doctor because this was a time called the Depression. Depression in those days had nothing to do with mental, your mental state. It had to do with not having any money in your pocket. But of course, a hamburger only cost 10 cents in those days. So a guy like me could get along. But anyhow, somehow I got a scholarship at the University of Michigan.

A lawyer, a Jewish lawyer interviewed me. He said, “Mr. Reed, what do you want to become?” I said, “I’d like to become a newspaper man.” He said, “What do you know about the newspaper business?” I said, “Nothing.” I said, “My Sunday school teacher is the sports editor of the Port Huron Times-Herald.” Well, he sort of took, looked kind of green, you know, and I could see that I had struck out at the plate. And the boy that got the scholarship said he was going to become a doctor. But I was first alternate. And the boy that got the scholarship decided that he wasn’t going to take it, so I got it. And I was first, took my violin under my arm and headed for Ann Arbor in September of 1939.

I wondered why I took that fiddle with me. You know, I thought, well, I don’t want to leave it at home and just be up in the attic and heaven knows what will happen to it. And when I got to the university, I said I was going to have to work my way through college. So they asked me to put down what my talents were. And one of the things I put down was that I could play the violin.

And lo and behold, if I didn’t get a call from the music school, they wanted me to try out for the symphony orchestra. I thought I’ve got about as much chance of getting a seat in the symphony, the University of Michigan Symphony, as Man on the Moon. But you know, I went over there and I got a seat in the second violin section. And the next year I played viola.

And I got $12 a month. And my room cost me $10 a month. And so I had $2 to buy hamburgers with. Besides that, I was waiting on table at the University of Michigan Union. And I got pretty well fed.

And one day, just walking across the campus, I ran into a friend of mine and asked him where he was going. He said I was going to take the examination for medical school. I said, “Well, I haven’t anything else to do. I think I’ll go take it with you.”

He’d been studying for about three months for it. You know, I hadn’t studied for five minutes for it. But we both got accepted. And beyond that, we even got accepted at the University of Michigan. And then I wondered how in the world I was ever going to pay the tuition. It wasn’t anything like today. You know, tuition skyrocketed. You’re out of medical school today. When you graduate, you’ve got about a $100,000 debt. That makes the Scotchman’s blood run cold, you know. But just the thought of it. But anyhow, Dad and Mother had, in the interim, moved to Florida. They were Yankees. And Dad was in the grocery business. By the way, your name is Kaiser. Kaiser. My dad was in France in World War I. And Kaiser Wilhelm was the… He was the head of Deutschland über alles. And my dad was in the grocery business. And he used to tell me, when I was helping him in the grocery store, he’d say, “Well, your dad is a famous person.” I said, “How’s that, Dad?” He says, “I’m the Wilhelm de Großer.”

Wilhelm de Großer was Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. But my dad might as well have been Kaiser Wilhelm of Deutschland. Because he was a Christian. And my mother was a Christian. They were people of prayer. And we felt always that there was nothing beyond God.

And that He is our Savior. He’s our Lord. He’s everything. Like we sang about. It’s not something nice to sing. It’s the truth. You shall know the truth. And the truth will make you free. We need to be thankful for our freedom. Well, people fought for our freedom. But Jesus gave us our freedom. The Holy Ghost came down. And we were talking about people falling on the floor. I was out at Ardmore one time. And some girl was there from Texas, you know. And I had a little prayer group. And we were meeting out on the lawn. And she came up to me. And she said, “Is it alright if I come to your prayer group?” I said, “Well, yeah, that’d be fine.”

And I said, “Well, that’d be wonderful.” Everybody she prayed for fell down in a heap. And she’d say, “There just ain’t anybody like Him, are they?” She didn’t even know how to speak English. Who cares whether they know how to speak English? I’d rather have them split a few infinitives than to be a Satan follower or an atheist or an agnostic or something like that. And I thought, good night. Here I am, diplomate of the American Board of Surgery and chief of surgery at a big hospital up in Michigan and everything by that time. What about if they hear me? I’ve been out at Ardmore praying for people and they’ve been falling down in a heap. You know, so I decided that I was not going to follow that particular ministry.

But it didn’t matter, you know. So they’d line up. Tommy and I would be praying for people. They’d be lined up, you know, in that big place at Lake Murray Lodge. And I would very gently lay my hands on people. I didn’t want to have them feel it very, very much for fear they’d feel my hand on there and over they’d go. And Tommy, he would be over there at this side and he’d say, “And Lord, just fill them now.” And bang, down they’d go.

Tommy’s up in heaven. And Marge is up in heaven. And Mary Whitney’s up in heaven. And Genevieve Parkhurst is up in heaven. Boy, quite a group up there. And it’ll be a… going to be a meeting in the air. One of our dentists, one of our doctors, I should say, a pulmonologist from the University of Texas in Tyler, came up to one of our meetings. And we started having meetings of doctors to talk to doctors about Jesus, you know. And we let it be known that we believed in the fullness of the Holy Spirit and we believed in divine healing in addition to the things that we’re doing medically and surgically and so forth. And doctors and nurses began coming from all over the country. And there’s this pulmonologist who was a Canadian, by the way, originally. He came to our meeting.

And somebody said, “Jerry Landry’s got a nice testimony. Why don’t you have him say a few words?” Well, I was very cautious about such things because you never knew what somebody, especially from Texas, was going to say. Because everything is large in Texas, you know. But anyhow, Jerry got up there and he said, “You know,” he said, “my wife and I came back from a little vacation.” They were over in Israel, I think, for a couple of months. And he had been playing catch with his son and he made a mistake and the ball hit him on the little finger and it fractured the thing and it just wouldn’t heal. He was going to have to go in and get the thing fixed. And that was just one thing. I thought, well, that’s interesting. I’m sitting there listening to that. And then he said, “You know, when we got home, it was kind of chilly. It was autumn. And Denise said, ‘Why don’t you go get some wood and we’ll have a little fire in the fireplace.’” He said, “Well, I went out and got some wood. And on the way back in the house, I started having chest pain.” And she looked, she was a nurse. She looked at him. She said, “Jerry, you don’t look very good to me.”

And he said, “Well, I don’t feel good. I’ve suddenly developed a pain in my chest.” She said, “Well, let’s go over to the hospital.” So she piled him in the car and took him into the hospital. Imagine this is a guy who was a professor at the University of Texas. This was not just, you know, an orderly or something like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with an orderly. But this is one of the top dogs over there at the University of Texas in Tyler. They took him into the emergency room and they did a tracing on him. That’s the bad thing about being a doctor. You know, I say, well, here’s the tracing.

Boy, there’s something wrong with that. Looks like something has hit that left side of my heart. And so they got the cardiologist to come in. And by the time the cardiologist got there, he was having more pain. I don’t know what all they did, but the next thing you know, he’s gone. He went into cardiac arrest. And he, imagine, this is a guy from the university, from the medical school. He says, all of a sudden, he said, “I was no longer there, but I was in heaven. I went up there so fast, you can’t imagine how fast I went.” And here are all these guys, you know, doctors from all over, you know, professors and so on and so forth. All of them are listening. This wasn’t just some Pentecostal preacher talking, or even an Episcopalian preacher.

I mean, we might be able to take it if it was an Episcopalian. But, you know, the Pentecostal is pretty hard to take at that point. But anyhow, we loved them. But anyhow, he says, you know, he said, “The next thing you know, I’m up there in heaven. And I saw these people. They all looked like human beings, but they were all full of light.”

And he said, “They were there to meet me. That was sort of the welcoming committee.” He said, “A lot of people there. People I’d led to Christ, people that I’d worked with and so forth. Everybody looked the best way they ever lived in their lives, about age 24, and full of light, and looking wonderful, you know.” And he recognized them. And they were all happy to think that he’d gotten there, you know. And the next thing you know, he sees Jesus. And Jesus is up there on the cross.

Alive. And He began to speak to Jerry. And He said, “I’m going to send you back into the world. And I want…” This is 25 years ago, folks. He said, “I want you to go back into the world. And I want you to go all over the world and tell your colleagues that I’m coming soon.”

And He said, “That’s going to be your ministry. And I want you to go back. And your heart is… Within a week, your heart will be okay. There won’t be anything wrong with it.” I’m sure the Lord was using better English than I am. But anyhow…

That was about… He had his arrest about maybe 7 o’clock in the evening. They put an endotracheal tube down him. And he was up in the cardiac… or coronary care unit. And totally under inhalation therapy. And so forth. And hadn’t come to… But along about noon, he starts making sounds. And the nurse looked over there. And he’s got his hand up in the air like this. And he had looked up. And he saw that God had healed that little broken finger.

You know, the funny thing about Jesus is that when He heals you, He doesn’t just take care of your tonsils or your adenoids or your gizzard or something like that. I mean, He takes care of you. Every cell, every tissue, every fiber of your being.

And of course, he had the endotracheal tube down, because he couldn’t do anything or anything. He starts wiggling around. The nurse called the doctor and said, “He thinks he’s been up there with Jesus.” The cardiologist comes tearing up there. I don’t know where he was, but came up there. And he told the cardiologist he’d been up there with Jesus.

Is my five minutes up? But the wonderful thing was that not only had Jesus taken care of his finger, within five days he was totally healed of that major myocardial infarct. And he went all over the world. He went to Switzerland. He went to South Africa. He went to Taiwan. He went to Korea. Went all over Canada. All over the United States. He was on Pat Robertson’s program. I’ve been on there too.

But I didn’t have any story like that. And just recently… Now that’s say 25 years ago. Within the last year, he suffered a major stroke. And this time, when he knew that he’d had this, he said to Denise, “I don’t want to come back. I want to stay up there.” Most of the people that have been resuscitated and gone up there and seen heaven, they don’t want to come back here to this world. Bill, I’ve been crying and crying and crying since my wife died a month ago. My brother says, “Bill, why are you crying? She’s up there in a better place than this.” I said, “Well, I’m crying for myself. You know, I just feel very sorry for myself. I don’t like living in my… I’ve got a beautiful house. Three dogs.”

Nobody but me and the three dogs. She had just a lot of memories. Things on the wall. Notes that she’s written. Peggy, you know. Just… Boy, when Jesus gives you a wife… or when He gives you a husband…

And you have this thing called holy matrimony. I wish they’d discover holy matrimony out there in Hollywood. I wish we’d find it in the good old USA. But the thing about it is we’re never going to do anything until we begin to realize that this Jesus we’re talking about, and we come by, by hook or by crook, or somebody has invited us there. We get there wondering what in the world it kept for the stout folks or whatever. I mean, you’re a little overweight and glad to come. Or whatever it is that brings you here. I was invited by the head of the Order of St. Luke out in San Diego. I had sent her an article about my belief in Jesus’ healing power. And she got in touch with CFO and said, “You better get this guy to one of your camps.” They invited me in 1954 to go to Ardmore. And I took the invitation to our Episcopal priest. And he says, “Camp Farthest Out.” And he said, “That sounds pretty far out to me.” He said, “Better stay away from that bunch.” But I tell you, I got another invitation in 1959. And I said, by that time I realized, you get to a point in life where you realize that you cannot do it alone.

You’ve got to have that power of resurrection, of power of Jesus. You’ve got to have the love. It’s love, folks. Okay, what’s this guy going to talk about this week? First of all, he’s going to tell how Jesus just healed his back. Yeah. Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where it went. That’s what people say. The pain’s gone. Where did it go? I said, “Who cares where it went as long as it’s gone?” You know. It’s almost as if they try to bring it back. You know. I’ve seen him wiggle around and everything else and try to get the pain back again.

I prayed for one woman up in Philadelphia one time. Stella Shepard. She was a Jewish woman who had married a black man up in New York City. And they had a good marriage. Of course, they were both members of the Communist Party up there. And she had done something to her back and came up, of all people, to me. Alfred Price was the priest up there, and he said, “I want you to pray for the sick.” I said, “That’s a job for the ministers.” He asked me the Bible. He says, “Show me where that is in the scripture.”

I said, “I have no vestments.” He said, “You can wear mine.” He was six foot seven. And I put that black thing on, you know. This was on a Tuesday morning. I put that black outfit on and the skirt was hanging away. I was like the bride going down the aisle.

And here I am up there. I’ve got Williston Merrick Ford on one side. And some great preacher from Cleveland on the right. And I thought, what kind of a prayer am I going to pray? So I listened. I listened to what these guys were praying next to me.

And this woman from New York City, she and her husband, remember the Communist Party and so forth. And she’s got this back pain. I laid hands on her and Jesus just plain healed her. And she told me afterwards, she said, “I did everything I could do. I went down that aisle this way. I went out the front door, jumped on the steps and everything else.” She could not get that pain back.

You know, that’s the way our mentality, our minds, our mental mind, where do you think the devil works? Somebody came to me and they said, “I want to know what you mean about getting saved.” I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what it means to me. I got saved for myself.”

If I ever sinned, it was me that went ahead and did it. I like to blame it, like what that fellow used to be on television said, “The devil made me do it.” But that was just an excuse. Flip Wilson. But no, I had to get saved from me. I think every doctor in the country needs to get saved from themselves. Amen.

You know, I… He… Jesus healed him. He healed his patient, rather. That’s when we met. He told me about it tonight. He had a patient that had cerebral anoxia and a lot of… Neoplat… a lot of neurological problems and so forth. And he thought, he was scared stiff, that when he went back home to Fort Pierce or wherever it was, that she was going to be in bad shape. And I told him, we prayed every day. We get together and prayed every day. And he said, “You know, you told me that the Lord had told you that Mrs. So-and-so was healed. Or was feeling better.” And you know, Vicki… I didn’t know you were here. Good night. She was in Bermuda. Fell off a motorcycle in Bermuda when we were there. Bless your sweetheart. Well, anyhow, I didn’t know you were here. Well, where was I?

Where was I, Bucky? I didn’t get better. Oh, yeah. When he got home, he went into the patient’s room, the person with all those neurological problems. He looks in there and the bed’s empty. He thought, good night. She’s in the morgue.

And he’s going over to the nursing station. That’s what a doctor does, you know, after he has to go and get a little consolation there. And so going out there, he looks over there at the woman on the telephone. And here it is. It’s his patient. She’s calling somebody up on the telephone.

And she got well, didn’t she? And you lost every hair you had in your head. And you lost your cane tonight, too. But these are the kinds of things, I mean to tell you, if you want to lead an interesting…

Wonderful life, it’s because my dad was the most wonderful guy in the whole wide world. But I mean, I got another Father up there. His name is God. He’s a triune God. He’s God the Father. He’s God the Son. And He’s God the Holy Ghost. And He has taken care of me. He took me through the whole works. Took me through the Navy. Took me through all out there in the Pacific and everything else. Naval Air Station Santa Ana. I’m going out with my big old blimp bunch in September. Imagine. Portland, Maine.

You can’t imagine. I’ve gone down the Danube River twice. Gone down the Rhine once. I’ve been in Rotterdam. Amsterdam. A lot of strange places in Holland. Been all over England. Scotland and Wales. I’ve been… We were in Bermuda, as I mentioned. Are you still riding motorcycles? No. No.

Anyhow, what am I going to talk about this week? I’m going to talk about life. I haven’t divided it up. That’s how it’s going to be. But life is a wonderful thing. When I sat there after my wife had this major…

Gastrointestinal hemorrhage. And she was unconscious. And she was asleep. For maybe 48 hours. I said, “Jesus, please, just wake her up for a minute so I can talk to her. Maybe 15 minutes.” I said, “I’ll settle for five.” I didn’t even get that. And sitting there and praying for her. And laying hands on her. And anointing her. And hour after hour after hour, with my two daughters there. And other family members too. And the doctors and the nurses. And so forth. And just praying. Praying.

And she’s breathing. I’m watching her. The nurse comes in. And I took her stethoscope and listened to my wife’s heartbeat. It was beating just the way it always did, perfectly okay. But I didn’t like the sound of her respiration, then all of a sudden, bingo. There was no more respiration.

I want to tell you that that is a terrible feeling. I never knew anything about grief. I’ve had lots of experiences with death. Family members and everything else. But when it’s your wife, folks, or something, especially when you’re married to somebody who loves Jesus with all of her heart.

And it was as I just had to say, “Jesus, she’s Yours.” And I just felt amputated. You become one flesh. That means something. I think it was C.S. Lewis. I didn’t get that from him, but somebody told me that I probably stole it from him. I’ll get arrested for plagiarism any moment. But it was like something had been amputated. It was like my heart. When my wife got sick, I started having dyspnea, difficulty in breathing.

And I thought, well, it’s just emotional. My wife said, “You go and see the cardiologist.” I went to see the cardiologist. They did an EKG and they did an angio on me. And they found an obstruction of the left anterior descending coronary artery and the right coronary artery too. Four obstructions on this one and two on this one. So I’ve got six stents in me. I decided to look up in Webster’s old dictionary about what the word stent meant.

You know that Webster’s 1828 dictionary, which is the last Christian dictionary that we published in the U.S. that I know of. In that particular dictionary, you look up stent. S-T-E-N-T. And it says, “See stent.” So I look up stent. And it says several things about stent. But one of the things about a stent is it’s a small bird that lives in England. And I… It even gives the Latin name of this little bird.

And I said to the cardiac surgeon, I said, “What’s the idea of planting all those darn birds in my house?” I said, “Every time Jesus come and place the heart strings in my heart, those birds start to sing again.”

Thank You, Jesus. I’ll tell you, that’s the answer. Well, wouldn’t it be wonderful no matter what happens when you have pain in your gallbladder or pain in your colon or pain in your esophagus? Whatever that is. Or some kind of a renal problem.

And all of a sudden, the birds start to sing. You know, and the problem leaves. It’s like we’re sitting over here tonight and that sweet little Robertson Scottish girl that was leading the singing. She’s good in a bug’s ear. Is that your daughter? No, she looks like you. I’m your daughter.

Good night, I was also by midnacht Zeit von Zubestork. We’re getting on on die. That is not tongues. That’s German prepositions. Well, I’ll tell you what. She’s wonderful in that little baby. But anyhow, to think that the Lord, when we sing and we say, it’s all Him. Folks, it isn’t anything else. I’ve got my… I’m a diplomate in the American Board of Surgery. I’ve got my master’s degree in surgery. I should be, by this time, the richest man in the cemetery.

Now I’m just a poor old CFO lecturer. I took over a church. When I retired, I’m going by this church all this time, going to my office. And it’s been there for 12 years. Been sitting there idle. Kay said to me, “Bill, what are you going to do now that you’re retiring?” I said, “Well, I’m still going to see patients. Going to hang on to my license.” “Where are you going to see them?” I said, “Well, we’re going to sell the place on the river. That’s where the office was. And I’m going to try to buy that church.” I went over and I talked to the people about that church. They’ve been using it as a storage place. And we bought it and fixed it all up and made it Anglican. A narthex. A communion rail. An altar.

Not that that’s important. But, you know, I felt happy there. And on the walls, we’ve got pictures of the doctors that we’ve given honors to over the years that have worshipped Jesus in their practices. And a whole bunch of medical students who are freshmen trying to get into medical school and they get accepted. They don’t have any money. And we pay… We give them a scholarship. The Marion Griffin Scholarship. Marion Griffin of Asheboro, North Carolina. We do that. And there’s the picture of all of them there. You know, if you ever come to Tampa, come on. Tuesdays. Not this summer, but beginning in September. On Tuesday morning, Peggy’s there. Bucky’s there.

Bucky and Peggy are on our board. You know, these are the things that make a thing work. That’s counseling that you have. That’s a world beater. Why should we want to beat the world? Because Genesis, in the fourth chapter, says the God of this world is blinded on believers. Minds. It’s not an ocular blindness. It’s a mental blindness that the devil causes. And it says he’s the God of this world. God is the God of the kingdom of God. Thy kingdom come on earth. And He’s about to come, folks. Don’t allow your cerebral cortex to negate your Christianity. Amen.

My five minutes up. We need to sing something before we go to bed. Till we meet… Till we meet… At Jesus’ feet… That’s a QX. Till we meet… At Jesus’ feet… Till we meet… till we meet… God be with you till we meet again.