Sid Roth

Sid: My guest Ruth Fazal has had an encounter with the Messiah that is going to dramatically touch your life.  Ruth so we can get together a little bit, you’re a violinist.  You started playing the violin at age nine, why did you pick it up.

Ruth: I’m not sure, I was offered it at school and I actually didn’t like it that much, I wanted to play something else but it kind of took over as time went on.  But not until thirteen or fourteen I completely feel in love with the instrument and then realized it.  It was a like a voice.

Sid: Now your father is an Anglican Vicar.  Now what is a vicar?

Ruth: A vicar? Well it’s a pastor within the Church of England, in England so that’s what they call them.

Sid: Okay, you kind of distinguished you went to Music College in London and Paris and at twenty-two you were in the Toronto Symphony.   But something happened to you when you went to Toronto.  You went to an Anglican Church which makes sense which you bumped into a legitimate revival.

Ruth: I did, not actually in the church its self but there was a real sort of renewal going on in the Anglican Church in those days and it was just really exciting to see the Holy Spirit moving in people’s lives, hearing prophetic words coming from people and just getting the sense that God is so alive.  It wasn’t about going through motions; it was a about encountering a living God and that He is wanting to do things, he’s wanting to say things; He’s wanting to draw us into His Kingdom.  Yeah, it was fairly life changing because in all of that realizing that if God had that kind of call on my life this was surely going to actually effect how I lived my life as a musician as a violinist and all of those things.

Sid: And I have always loved the violin, especially in worship music.  But what you’ve done is well; I’m getting ahead of my story.  Let’s kind of take this in a logical fashion.  Then you found yourself, you were in Toronto at the Toronto Airport Church which was really having a revival, what happened to you?

Ruth: Oh wow, that was pretty amazing; I was actually just in the process of recording a new sort of a new worship album.  And my friend Jeremy is the worship leader at the TCIF as it was called at the time.  He called me up and he said, “Ruth you might want to come play, there is something going on at the church, this guy Randy Clark has been here for like four nights now and it looks like he’s staying.  And so I went out with my friend and just kind of going, “OK, its this —-and undeniably the presence of the Lord was so strong.  I had never experienced anything like that.  And it was funny because I would go back night after night and sometimes I would say to myself, okay I’m just feeling this, I’m like I’m almost syking myself up for it, I’m just going to go in and just decide I’m not going to feel anything.  And then I would go in and I would sit there and then the Holy Spirit would just land on me.  Yeah really something started to happen very deep.  I realizing and recognizing the real presence of God, you know.  I’ve always known the Lord in an intimate way.  I’ve always known the Father in an intimate way, but there was a whole other level of this and it felt like it was the beginning of something very new for me.

Sid: Now, God gives you visions, did it pretty much start there or had that been most of your life?

Ruth: Good question, I think, let’s say it increased, it increased at that time.  I think that it’s that kind of senses that when you start to realize that God is speaking and wanting to make Himself known all the time then your expectation of actually hearing from Him or seeing what He’s saying I think increases.

Sid: Well, the next year 1995 you had been soaking in the presence of God, I understand that you would stay till 2:30 in the morning.

Ruth: Oh yeah, sometimes I would have had a concert in Toronto city, you know concerts finish around 10:30 at night, I’d get in my car and I’d head out to the church because I knew that probably even the main part of the meeting hadn’t finished.  But the ministry time would go one for so long.  And so yeah, I had many many encounters with the Lord in that context and it seemed like everything would start to happen after midnight.

Sid: You know, I noticed that too.  I think that it has to do with the fact that the only ones that will be there after midnight are the ones hungry for God.  Otherwise, people are sleeping at midnight.  Ha-ha.

Ruth: Ha-ha.

Sid: So the next year in 1995 you had a visitation which you really didn’t understand, where Jesus gave you a violin bow.

Ruth: Yeah, oh that was amazing, it was kind of these, it was the end of a meeting and I was laying on the floor at the back of the church and just waiting, just waiting for him you know.  And I felt like I saw Him coming towards me and He was holding, like He was holding out in His hand a bow, He was carrying it towards me and I sort of saw myself stand, I was laying there but I saw myself stand up and He put the bow in my hand and He said, “Here Ruth, this one’s for you, I think you might want to have this one.”  And I didn’t, really I didn’t understand it at that the time except that I knew that it was kind of commissioning; it was kind of, He was giving me something new.  And actually even now as we’re talking I realize what happened next because it was sort of within a year or so that I did the first recording with the violin where I was feeling that I was to just just to play and to let the Holy Spirit come.  And it was all spontaneous and just trust that somehow the Holy Spirit would invade the space wherever it was being played, wherever people would hear it, whoever would hear it so.

Sid: But then a couple years later you had a visitation which Jesus totally clarified what He was doing.

Ruth: Yes, yes then it became even more specific, that’s right.  I remember I had just dropped my daughter off at school and I came back home.  I just felt like the Lord said like, “Just come and sit down a minute,” and so I did and I just waiting and I heard Him say, “Ruth it’s time for a new bow.”  And after thinking, what’s this you know, and then He said, “Reach up and take it.”  So I stood up and I put my hands up to take the bow and it was so heavy like, now heavy in a bad way, heavy in a weighty kind of way and a glory kind of way.  And it was so heavy I just fell to the ground because I realized I could not carry this bow, this bow was something very different.  And then He said, “This bow is a bow of healing, righteousness and forgiveness.”

Sid: What does that mean?  What did it mean to you?

Ruth: Well, not a lot at the time. Ha-ha.  At the time I didn’t understand it, I knew that it was real, I think I knew a little bit about the healing aspect because I’d already seen how God would touch people’s hearts in the context of playing the violin.  And so I’d seen that the way the people would encounter the Lord.  The forgiveness part, I didn’t, you know I didn’t really actually if I think about it now I’m not quite sure how much I understand that part.  The righteousness part though, that sense of His Holiness, that sense of then what He called me to do just a few years later when He asked me to write this piece based on poetry of the children from the Holocaust.  And so it really, as soon as you enter into that whole realm of you know, where is God in those kinds of times.  You never typically encounter His righteousness because you have to acknowledge in all things His righteous and that you know even when we don’t understand that He is good, that He is righteous.

Sid: Now did you see, now by that time you were playing the violin at the Toronto Church but did you see a difference in the anointing after that visitation?

Ruth: I felt it, certainly people said they did.  I’m always, I always seem to be the last one.

Sid: I understand exactly.

Ruth: It’s like everybody else see’s it and they go, “wow,” and I’m going oh, well I was just playing you know.  But, yeah I think more of a sense when I was playing very specific things I think there was an increase in authority.  Like before I would play my violin and it was really lovely to play before the Lord and sometimes I would feel what I was playing was maybe a Word from Him, but He was somehow speaking.  But I think when I started to see was an increase in the sense of the authority that God had stood me in, that now…

Sid: Well, I think that it so phenomenal when you play over people.  Tomorrow I want you, well we’ll play a selection.