Sid Roth

Sid:  I’ve known my guest many years and I knew his father before I met him his name is Craig Hill; he’s founder of Family Foundations International in Littleton, Colorado.  And Craig I met your dad, Gillman I bumped into him a number of times in Israel, but he did something that God called him to do that few people on planet earth would be obedient.  You told me he was a petroleum engineer and God spoke to him and said, “Find an oil well in Israel.”  And normally when God speaks to people like that they run around and they start public companies, and they raise money, but your dad didn’t do that, what did he do?

Craig:  Well Sid it was really an interesting story, back in 1981 my father just went on a tourist trip to Israel and while he was on Mt. Carmel near the Muhraka, he heard the audible voice of God speak to him, “Come here to work?”  And he didn’t know what that meant so as he continued to seek the Lord. The Lord began to show him what he was to do was to come and search for oil and water which was his professional background.  And so he felt like what God wanted him to do rather than raise a lot of money or go to the Israeli government for money. The Lord said to him “I will provide the money.”  And it’s a long story how that happened but God supernaturally provided him money to drill an oil well on Mt. Carmel.

Sid:  But the point I wanted to make for our listeners is that it was his own money it wasn’t investor money.  So he put his money where his mouth was when he said, “God’s telling me to do this,” go ahead.

Craig:  Yeah that was right, no he didn’t raise investor money because he felt like what the Lord had told him is “I want to direct this project, it’s not to be directed by investors.”  And of course when you go out and raise money for a project investors are pretty unhappy if you don’t make a return.  So he invested money that the Lord had made available to him and drilled down to about 9,000 feet and felt that the oil was located at 12,000 about 3,000 feet deeper and began to run out of money. He was very tempted to go raise money, find investors, and he heard the voice of the Lord say to him, “Stop, stop, I didn’t tell you that you would find oil I just told you that you were to drill for oil.”  And that was a difficult thing for him because his human nature really wanted to go raise money, to go find some way to really I would say “Birth an Ishmael” I guess to make this happen in a way that would not really be the direction of the Lord.

Sid:  Approximately how much did he invest in this oil well of his own money?

Craig:  It was many millions of dollars.

Sid:  I know it was and for him to be able to stop because God said, “Stop.”  Now does he believe that God’s going to tell him at a certain point to start drilling again?

Craig:  What he really felt like Sid was that it was just untimely; it wasn’t the right time and exactly as you said, that there will be a time when oil will be released in Israel, but nobody’s going to find it until the time that God says “Now is the time.”  And he’s 84 years old but he’s hoping that it will be within his lifetime and that he will get to be the one to go back and he believes that there’s oil right at that location another 3,000 feet deeper and that he may have the opportunity to go and deepen that well…

Sid:  Do you realize how the whole face of the Middle East, the world for that matter will change when Israel finds oil?

Craig:  Well, it will be an incredible change; it’ll change the political and economic situation in the entire region.

Sid:  Now, your background is kind of interesting to me you got a Bachelors degree in Russian studies and geology.  I guess you were planning on going into the family business, but why Russian?

Craig:  You know I really didn’t have a purpose or a reason for Russian I actually started studying Russian before I was a believer and I had no idea really that it would be useful, but after I met the Lord I really felt like what God was going to have us to do, my wife and me, was to minister in eastern Europe or Russia.  And I was hoping to use geology and business as a way to get there because back in the ‘70s you really couldn’t go to Russia as a missionary.

Sid:  But then you got a MBA in what?

Craig:  I got an MBA in finance and international economics, and again that was my thinking at the time was that I really wanted to serve the Lord fulltime in Russia and business would be an avenue to get there.

Sid:  Well Craig God has gifted you with such a wonderful teaching gift, and you teach in so many areas that my difficulty was finding which of the areas not which is the best but which of the areas that God wanted; because you have a gift in a number of areas.  But there is a critical problem coming.  For years prophecies have come forth get out of debt, then other prophecies of the scripture “The wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.”  So there’s going to be a wealth transfer. What is God showing you about these prophecies and the timing of them?

Craig:  Well, I think now is a critical time and to say something very short and brief initially I think that there is only a window of time for people to get out of debt or it’s going to be very difficult.  I think we’re headed for economic difficulty here in the United States.

Sid:  tell me either what God is showing you or your sanctified intellect because God has really given you the training. What do you believe will happen in America economically.

Craig:  Well, I think that there is a real simple thing Sid that we see, we have been spending more than we make.  The savings rate per capita in the United States has been negative for almost a year and a half now.  That has never happened since 1929, the last time we had a negative savings rate.  So I think the very simple long and short of it is if you spend more than you make there’s going to be a problem.  And we have been doing that on a personal level, a corporate level and a national governmental level in the United States for sometime.

Sid:  Will we see a hyper-inflation; a depression, what…?

Craig:  It really could go either way, I hyper-inflation or a depression.  What I tend to think is going to happen is that we’re going to see prices fall and we’re going to see a depression style rather than a hyper-inflation.  You know the interesting thing is when you look in scripture God had a natural mechanism that He put in scripture to correct that, it was called the Jubilee.  And Jubilee is really nothing more than a preplanned debt purge because human nature dictates that people will take on too much debt.  So people will always borrow more than they should and you end up with a problem in the economy.  So God instituted a Jubilee which was a preplanned debt purge.  The problem in our economy is that we have no preplanned debt purge, and as a result of that, when the economy does purge debt a lot of people get hurt.  And basically the people that get hurt are the people that carry a lot of debt; the people that are out of debt are the ones that are going to be in a position to help others.

Sid:  But Craig we have a generation of young kids that use the plastic and don’t pay any attention about what’s going to happen in the future. They borrow money, they have these, what you call, ARMS where there mortgage rate is tied in with the interest rate, and as interest rate goes up their payments per month go up. They won’t be able to afford it.  I mean I see chaos going on in the mortgage industry.

Craig:  Well, that’s absolutely true it’s coming unraveled and falling apart. I think that’s why the Spirit of God has been speaking to believers for some time, get out of debt.  You know what’s amazing thing Sid?  I just ran some numbers on an excel spread sheet and discovered that virtually anybody if they would take five percent of their gross income and apply it to their debt beyond their minimum payments it will never be more than a decade for somebody to be entirely out of debt including their house mortgage.

Sid:  No, no we have a better plan here in the United States it says, just go bankrupt and leave everyone else holding the bag.

Craig:  Yeah, I guess that’s a plan that some people follow, I question the ethics and the morality of that plan.

Sid:  Listen, I was out for one of your conferences I was one of your speakers. There was testimony, after testimony of people that have gotten a hold of your teaching and what’s happened to them.  Not only have they gotten out of debt, but they seem to be supernaturally blessed financially.  Give me one quick testimony.

Craig:  You know there’s an incredible man who lives in Mexico in the northern part of Mexico, his name is Carlos and he was a cattle rancher.  He went to one of our seminars on finances and began to get a revelation and an understanding that he could get out of debt.  When he looked at his situation it looked like it would be years and years and years for that to happen, but he said “Lord, I determine in my heart I want to be obedient to you; I want to do what you told me to do which is to get out of debt.”  And he began to make plans to pay down his debt, to take a little bit of his income every month to begin to reduce his debt.  He heard the Holy Spirit say at a particular point and time “To sell your cattle.”  Now that was difficult for him because that was his channel of income, he was a cattle rancher.  But he was obedient to the Lord, sold his cattle and an amazing thing is he hit the peak of the market, the cattle market in his area crashed the following week.  He then heard the Holy Spirit say “I want you to invest in sheep.”  He began investing in certain type of sheep, and God showed him how to breed trophy sheep that were worth about ten or twenty times what the normal sheep were worth.  And to make a long story short through that mechanism he paid of his entire debt in about 18 – 19 months I think it was, was completely out of debt and continued seeking the Lord. “What do You want me to do now?”  And as you said Sid this man has experienced unusual favor, he was just telling us recently that the government of his region had given him a grant, not a loan but a grant to put up a green house and grow a particular type of grass that was good for feeding sheep that the government wanted to experiment with.  And he said, “That it was incredible, many people wanted to receive that grant but he just had supernatural favor from God and God gave that to him,” and has again opened up a whole new…

Sid:  Craig it’s so amazing the number of people that start moving in the supernatural there is a counterfeit teaching on money and prosperity and there’s an authentic.