Finding God in the Unexpected: Joseph Garlington & Randy Clark

[Music] hi i'm randy clark and i have the privilege today to be able to interview uh a man of god uh a hero of mine years ago um probably i was up in the balcony of a huge stadium at a promise keeper and uh heard this man that i'm presenting to you this great man of god is bishop joseph garlington and i heard him preach and i was just amazed at the gift of god that was on him and not as not only as an orator and but also as one who carried authority and and power and uh over time well we've got to know each other and i preached in his church some and he's done many things for us in our conferences but this is going to be a time kind of behind the scenes to get to know the man a little bit more about him and his pilgrimage and his background and just some of the things that he has i think i don't know he's a well-educated man with i believe a doctorate from fuller and i think but anyway i want to find some of the things he's seen and get his perspective from how the church interacts with culture and how the church can interact with uh cultural and political issues because sometimes the political issues are following cultural issues and and uh i was a little bit younger than you when when uh martin luther king was having his ministry and i'm old enough to remember the the i had a dream sermon in washington dc and i've always felt like that martin luther king jr was not only a baptist preacher but he was a he really was a prophet to our culture uh doesn't mean that he was a perfect man doesn't mean that you know because none of us are perfect we have this uh treasure and vessels of clay but i'm i'm just curious this is some of the things as uh after we can tell me a little bit about yourself but some of the things that you've lived to see at different historical points in our country and in our culture uh that the challenges that we as a country face and uh how the church did in in addressing that and sometimes i think we did okay and some things i think we might have failed a little but i'd just like i'd like to kind of go on that thing okay and then let you just kind of interpret that any way you want or whatever you feel like god's showing you that's what you'd like to talk about so bishop tell us a little bit just about yourself your background um curious to know i i i didn't know until uh thomas reminded me i guess i've forgotten that you and my best friend tom were originally of the same uh denomination so just tell me about it a little bit about yourself well well first of all it's a it's a it's a real honor to be with you always a joy and i i can't think of a single time when in listening to you being around you that i haven't learned something that stimulated me to learn even more and um and it's like what i what i see with you is this this strong strong passion for having a clear understanding of what the word says and then a strong understanding of how to take what the word says and meld that with the holy spirit and you walk and you walk it's just an amazing clarity as far as the word is concerned and so i'm trying to remember if there's anything i disagree with you about when you've been preaching but nah it's all good it's just great um i come from a pentecostal background my my dad was a bishop in a pentecostal church in fact he really really began that church and there were a number of churches um in that time that carried the the name church of god and so there would be offshoots from that church of god in christ church of god in faith church of god in faith in christ and in ours of spiritual god in true holiness and so walking with that church growing up in in a strictness that that some people would not even believe today we um we we came into that place and and understanding how how holiness worked um was not it wasn't what we're understanding right now it's really built around how you looked and what things you did what things you didn't do and and so our challenge in those days was we are in a world and god wants us to occupy a place in that world but the emphasis wasn't so much on impacting the world as much as getting out of the world so one of my one of my messages in my early early days was stop the world i want to get off and and it was a message on the rapture and and i preached for years jesus is soon to come any minute now and so i've been doing this for about 60 some years and waiting on jesus to come and he's just saying he's still got work to do son and so the messages of global that you hear and the people who are engaged in that it's like jesus is going to come but while we are waiting on him i that phrase that the lord says occupy till i come and so you're you're teaching on how to occupy and continuing to occupy has been such an encouragement to us and so we have young people in our church a number of years ago we planted a church in pittsburgh barbara and i in 1971 and that was the result of seeking more of god um and asking god to do something in my world and in our world and barbara and i we were reading a book by one of my early mentors a guy by the name of bob mumford who was such an incredible bible teacher and and he had a similar background so i could ask him questions to relate to where he was one of his books he had a prayer in it lord if you're doing anything in the earth i want to be a part of that and it was right around that time that barbara and i had been moving gently into the charismatic renewal but still hanging on to our pentecostal stuff and and i told her we're on a honeymoon in san diego and i said let's pray that prayer so she said yep and so we pray god if you're doing anything on earth we want to be a part of that and 30 days later i was excommunicated from the denomination i was a part of because i was casting out demons and lengthening legs and all of that stuff and it was it was something that these guys just thought was crazy and so our journey began there and in pittsburgh pennsylvania 71 we began working with two other pastors one was a methodist pastor and one was a lutheran pastor the methodist pastor had been baptized in the holy spirit and his church was growing but his district elders said you're going to have to stop this and so we were praying together about it and he had this amazing amazing dream uh in which he was lying on the bed and a a vulture came down toward him screaming reaching toward his chest and he awakens startled and he said i don't know what to do with that and he happened to be in a friend's home looking through a jerusalem bible just paging through it and he found this phrase give not the life of your dove to the vultures and so in that moment he and i decided we're going to do something together and at the same time this lutheran pastor who felt like he needed to do more so the three of us joined and we started a fellowship called um three rivers fellowship and and of course there were three rivers there the lutheran river the methodist river and the pentecostal river and we began to build this multi-racial multicultural church in pittsburgh back in the early 70s that with a real emphasis on preaching and a real emphasis on worship and small groups and it was an amazing time and then in 1977 i was invited to come to mobile alabama with my family and we we began to work with the church there with with a view towards bringing in some of what we had learned in pittsburgh and and we lived there for seven years and then and then god led us back to pittsburgh and we've been in his work since 1985 and it's just been one of those amazing times back in pittsburgh in in 85 and then somewhere around um 90 94 a friend of mine i said where have you been he says he said i just came back from toronto and i've heard a whole lot about toronto and some of it was good some of it was not so good and uh at the time we were in a in a major deal to uh to build a new church mark sharon and one of your friends they've given us a prophetic word that god was going to give us some property and overlooking the city and so forth and so this guy i said well where have you been he says in toronto what happened and he and he began to tell me what took place and how often he was touched by the lord and he said unlike everybody else i didn't fall on my on my back i fell on my face and his big tall guy and i said and i said and then what happened he says i came back home i didn't know what had happened to me but i just told our congregation i've been to toronto and really touched by god and i'm i'm i can pray for anybody one's prayer and his service he said it wasn't over until about one or two two o'clock that afternoon it started in the morning and i said wow he says no even better than that he said we raised the biggest offering that day that we'd ever raised in our in our history and i said really and i said how do you get to toronto did you tell vinnie about it and he said vinnie's already gone and it was and that was the beginning of the journey for us in 1994 the the last part of 94 i came up and we brought some of our leaders up and and it was life-changing for me i it was a what i what i experienced in toronto was was a major major inner healing that i didn't know i had i've been preaching i was leading a network of churches i was speaking with promise keepers and so i had notoriety outside of toronto and no one in toronto knew me and so i told some people i was there in cognigro you know just nobody knew me and so i saw carol and carol had this she had this sweet ministry she'd pray for people and her deliverance ministry was one of the easiest i'd ever seen in my life and she just said drive it out holy spirit drive it out and and i said man that's so much easier than the way i've been doing it and and the holy spirit just spoke to me said i have another way of showing you what to do because my yoke is easy and my burden is light so i asked carol to pray for me she did and i went down on the floor and i was i was i was broken i knew and i was crying and and i kept hearing her say holy spirit just heal this man of rejection heal this and and i became i became offended by that because i just couldn't imagine myself having rejection i had i just had too many other things that that didn't communicate rejection and so and so i was offended and i started talking to her even though she couldn't hear me i was in tears and and i'm saying myself i don't have no rejection you don't know me you don't know anything about me and uh and then the holy spirit spoke to me the father said that's not her that's me and if you want to you can leave here the same way you came or if you want to you can receive healing and that sense that there was an opening like this and lying on my side and i and this is the picture i had i could see this opening and it was moving from my right to my left but as it moved it kept getting smaller and smaller and i realized i got to make a decision and so i said to god i'll take your point of view and when i told him i would take his point of view it was that passage in genesis 7 where it says and the fountains of the great deep were broken open and i thought i was crying before but what i did after that was it was what we call uh uh ugly crying and it was that way and i was so embarrassed but i couldn't stop and i could imagine all these people standing around me thinking how impoverished i was and how and i'm and it was so bad when i came to myself i was on the floor by myself carol everybody else had left and i think the janitor was there running the vacuum cleaner and just saying like hey as soon as you move we can both leave i got back to my hotel room and i sat there and i said god what in the fatal fire happened to me over there and no answer came back the next day and the service was entirely different the music that i didn't like the first night was absolutely different the songs the lyrics it was like everything was speaking to me and then ian you remember ian there ian was one of the elders and he said i feel like we're going to pray for senior leaders well i was already up front worshiping because i'm into it now and he said hold out your palms and i held out my hands and he put his two index fingers on each palm pray for me and bam i'm at the floor again this time i'm at carol's feet and she's putting her finger on my forehead which is a very lethal finger as i tell people and she said again oh father he killed this man of all of his rejection and for years i mean i i've battled add and all of the things that are accompanied to that and it was in that season that that perspective came to me even even about add as much as it was not a limitation but it was an expression of creativity that i've had for years and so god began to say so many things to me my life changed our church change my ministry chains and everything about my approach to what i've been doing for years i started preaching when i was 14 and so i'm looking at what i'm doing i'm thinking was i wasting time or was i leading up to this but it was that ministry that god used you to initiate in that season there was one other thing um uh he he was the theologian there um and he did a teaching for pastors and he talked about how god will take a place that you don't think has any value at all and he used the term the scandal of particularity um and i listen to that and i begin to think how many times god has placed his his spirit like at with naaman at the jordan naaman wanted to get healed but he didn't like the issue and and uh and then the thing for me as a as a continued because i every time i had every opportunity i had i would just go to toronto and just i'd say to my wife i said i gotta get out of here i go i gotta go so i go to toronto and and spend some time in god's presence and come back home re renew to refresh the ironic thing for me was that i met people and i knew people who i thought would have been incredible candidates for the outpouring of what was taking place in toronto but on the other hand it was almost like they were scandalized by it they were they were the name and man if this is revival i want nothing to do with it naaman says if this is the only way to get healed then i want nothing to do with it but it's realizing that god set his spirit on something and i'm just wondering is is that part of what god does when uh in the the tabernacle is covered with badger skin there's nothing on the outside of the tabernacle that makes it look like all of the beauty and the color that's on the inside and do you think maybe god uses something that has the power to change your life to offend you before you can receive what it has and growing up in the pentecostal church where i saw all kinds of antics and now i'm walking in this and i'm realizing this is god all over again and that was god too but nobody understood it so my journey then has come a long way with that promise keepers getting to know you and mike and and the team that's here uh hanging out with you and hanging out with the guys at bethel it's like i'm finding how big and how amazing the church is and realizing that scholarship and spirit commitment can produce some amazing insights and and some amazing things in the kingdom what is now in 2020 2020. i just thought you know we talked about 2020 is that perfect vision thing here we are in 2020 i'm not so sure how perfect vision anyone really has i think but what do you feel that uh god is you know at this stage in your life and in your ministry and 60 some odd years of being a minister and i thought you know this is my 50th year but if you you started four years before me i was 18 when i started preaching what do you think are some of the biggest challenges that uh the church is uh facing and as we look to go forward i think one of the one of the really big challenges that the church is facing is the the uh i want to call it the mysterious or the mistaken image of what success looks like for a church because so many times um a move the holy spirit doesn't wait on a clock it doesn't wait on a particular time and and the real question is if you invite god to come do you want him to come on your terms or do you want god to come on his terms and and in so many cases when i seen people receive something from god it wasn't what they expected and then churches that weren't succeeding because i grew up in a time when storefront churches were really storefront churches and so the kind of building that we're in right now no one would have ever thought of that concerning a pentecostal or charismatic church our churches were what they were and we were doing what we believe god wanted us to do but i look at today and i see quote church growth the quote church growth movement and that when i look at the church growth movement and i can't find the authenticators that i see in the new testament then i'm wondering can we really call that a church growth movement and i don't want to i don't put down anything that's taking place and yet at the same time it seems to me that you can't call people to discipleship with lights and smoke and incense and where you are where you're manufacturing something uh one of the one of my friends was teaching once and he says he says you can't fool god with smoking lights but i think we can fool people and so we we bring in a lot of people a lot of things that are they think are accoutrements to worship when in reality the their obstructions and so you can come in and we were just talking about it at lunch church service your worship is 22 minutes your message is another that and then you've got this announcement you got this video and you're out of there and so they'll promise you we can get you in and out in an hour even on easter and and i'm thinking about what if god comes what what if god actually shows up what would you do in relationship to that and so the struggle that i have now is that many people are looking at size and they're looking at growth in terms of numbers and they're not thinking in terms of how many lives are actually being changed by that and so i'm i'm feeling like there is there there is a season of pruning and and i feel like we've seen it primarily during this covert thing where um people can't come to church and people who have been coming to church are now saying i don't think i need all of that anymore others who were walking in it uh serving in the church one pastor told me he says i've got more people who are saying i'm not coming back than other and i just i just feel like god is helping us to see that we need him a whole lot more than we think we need him and so i i see the challenges that the church is facing in the sense of holy spirit you do what you want to do and then there's this other part of the church that says holy spirit you do what you want to do as long as it doesn't inconvenience us and so to become prophetic means that you're going to speak out to the church and to the world about what's taking place without worrying about as my brother said today whether or not it's the donkey or the elephant but more it's like it's the lamb that we are to represent and so churches today i think are going to discover that a lot of what they've been doing has very very little relevance to eternal life john 15 jesus says apart from me you can do nothing and and i feel like what he's saying that anything that will have eternal value to it and maybe i can paraphrase it apart from me you can do nothing that will have eternal value we can preach great messages and we can write great songs and we can we can call people to to discipleship but when it gets really challenging and the kinds of things that jesus said were going to take place in the lives of believers he says there is no man who has left father mother sisters brothers who but for my sake they've done this will receive a hundredfold and persecution and i think we've enjoyed the 100 fold but we didn't realize that that the persecution is also a part of the promise i have i've seen something in in in our nation that maybe i could see in other places like england or canada or sweden where you can no longer preach the bible and if you do if you say certain things then it can be categorically called hate speech some of the pastors in our network one guy said i was preaching on and he says and youtube just you know or facebook cut him off and they wanted to know why and he said they're going to do an investigation but it's because of something that he said that to them sounded like it was anti another religion and i know i don't think we're going to have favor in another season apart from that prophetic word that rodriguez spoke to us about we're looking for a season but that season has been accompanied by hostility to the church in ways that i'm sure you and i would never have thought could happen in america where the church could be shut down and that the church said nothing about it so that in itself contributes to part of the problem we position ourselves in such a place um why you um what do you see is the bright spots or in the church or if i if i was to say what you see is like the hope for our country well we both agree well that's god but do you see any bright spots any not necessarily a church or a denomination or just something that's happening in the church with the big c that is encouraging to you about what god is i i think i'm going to say it like this um johan moody was giving us another definition for the word aftermath and um which is it's great to have that definition as well as the other one but um i felt and i have felt for some time that when you begin to move in to what god has for you with excitement within in anticipation with faith with a grip on on what god is doing in your life through the holy spirit um it seems to me that the church is almost always surprised when the apostle peter says don't be surprised at the fiery trials that come and so i think there's a principle in revelation 12 where the voice shouts out of heaven woe to the inhabitants of the earth for satan has come down and he has great wrath knowing that he has but a short time and i think the principle is essentially this as the purpose of god increases in terms of what he wants to accomplish the persecution increases and the measure the persecution tells tells us how much god is up to paul says in first corinthians 69 a wide door for effective services open and there are many who oppose me and so i can take the posture this opposition must mean jesus is soon to come or this opposition must mean that we are about to have a breakthrough like we've been praying for we've been asking god lord one of my sons in the gospel has written a song and and in the song he says we've been praying we've been sowing now we're crying heaven send the rain well when rain comes according to the right of of hebrews it doesn't just it doesn't just produce vegetation but it produces thorns and thistles and so our need is to understand that the thorns and thistles are not inconsistent with revival and without pouring and we were talking about it earlier that the moment you start moving in the power of the spirit the accusation for years has been that's the devil and uh and i'm and i see that in my own journey where god begins to move and people say i don't believe in that that's god doesn't do that anymore and so i look at this and i say hot spots or or high points for me is that as i am pressing in to the lord i feel like god is saying to me keep going in this direction and and i will confirm to you periodically that you're still on the right path um had an experience we we had a a group of people come to our our church uh about a month and a half ago and they did a major meeting there and some of the most incredible things took place that i i had no idea were going to happen got a prophetic word from a man who said he said bishop i believe that god is calling you to gather the apostolic leaders in the city and and he used the term gather and so he said and maybe you've already got that plan well we had we we planned for a meeting of our team in october uh and the expectation is that god wants to do something that following saturday um a young man broke into our building and um they couldn't find him and they walked around but he had hidden himself behind the curtains in the choir stand where we have a huge image of a harp a bowl and a sword and it's it's one of the things that we we have to express our commitment to intercession and worship and uh prayer at the bowl but that's where he went to sleep that building is dark at night and we don't even know how he found it the big part of the story is that he came out later on after the police had gone and identified himself to one of our guys and told me he said i'm sorry i had to break your window but it was the only way that i could get into the church to get some rest and so uh we laughed about because of the reaction that my friend had when when the guy just suddenly later on they asked himself what's your name he said my name is shiloh and when he said my name is shiloh it's kind of like the hair on your head and and i heard the passage of scripture the scepter shall not depart from judah nor a lawgiver from between his feet until shiloh comes and there will the gathering of the people be and i'm just sensing because we said to our guys our our team meeting is no longer a team meeting and i could just sense the same kind of thing here in this atmosphere that the holy spirit is beginning to produce an energy of i am doing something and i don't want you guys to lose focus on it and i think that what the enemy is doing he's trying to get the church to focus on the presidency the election and all the other things and they really are distractions to keep us from seeing what god has for us and we have the peters and we have the james and john's who are saying to jesus um those samaritans are saying some really ugly things about about you can we just go and call fire down on them and jesus says that's not what i'm about and the bible says he stayed focused on his journey to jerusalem and i feel like the enemies do whatever he can to take our focus off of the mission because we have been praying for revival we've been hearing it and the prophetic word that that david wilkerson had about what was going to take place in new york and it would precede the uh the third breakthrough the third wave and and so we're looking at one another and just saying everybody needs to say focus on what is it that we've been asking god to do and what is it he's going to do and coming here in these meetings this week just sensing it's a precursor to something that is so energy focused on what god wants to do sean floyd and when he was talking about him sean's coming to pittsburgh the day before our meeting starts in october and i'm saying it's like one of my guys says you can't make this stuff up and somewhere the conviction that i have is that the generation that we thought didn't care it's the generation that's going to energize us and motivate us and say hey guys we were missing it and it's going to take a generation like sean's um and we've been quoting this this passage for years in our church one generation shall declare to the next the glory of god and i believe it's not our generation declaring to them but it's their generation declaring to us don't forget where you are don't forget who you are don't forget what god's got for you so i'm excited about i'm excited about all of that well thank you for giving me time i know you're really really really busy guys thank you for giving me time thank you for thinking with me and yeah because i i'm not saying we have the answers but i just think there's there's answers that's needed and i think god has the answers i do too i do too thank you so much you're welcome i am so excited about what i know deep deep in my heart the holy spirit's doing and i believe that those of you are watching you are hearing something in your heart like esther would have heard from mordecai when he said to her you've come to the kingdom for just such a time as this and so for those of you who are watching those of you who've been watching and looking at the news and other things i'm saying to you you have purpose in your life this is not the time to say ah maybe it's maybe it's not our time i believe that you have come to the to this season in god when he is getting ready to unleash heaven on earth we have been praying your kingdom come your will be done on earth open heavens are all around us and all god needs from each one of us is just a yes because we live under a yes and not a no get excited about what's ahead don't be discouraged get encouraged and encourage one another and god bless you i'm hoping to hear great testimonies from what you are seeing and hearing in god amen amen thank you hey thanks for 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Channel: Global Awakening

Views: 18,613

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Id: o_u5XG58JVE

Length: 37min 56sec (2276 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020