Sid Roth

Sid:  We want everyone everywhere to be red hot for the Messiah. By the time you’ve finish this weeks’ interview I’m going to tell you something they’ll be a paradigm change in your life.  It’s what you’ve always been after I can’t wait to get into it but my guest is Dennis Clark. Dennis and I were talking a little bit before we started this show and I want you to know a little bit about his background.  He’s watching TV one day a Christian TV show and he’s not born again, the last thing on his mind and  a preacher points his hand it’s as if it came right out of the screen it was just as if he was talking just to Dennis, and Dennis gets born again.  And he reads the Bible and he knows that this is God’s Word. He has no unusual supernatural things happen although it was very supernatural that just as TV evangelist just arrested his attention. Four months later he’s minding his own business and all of a sudden he has a vision.  No paradigm for supernatural, no one’s every told him anything about this, what did you see Dennis?

Dennis: In my minds’ eye I saw the Godhead, an understanding that was an impression on the inside.  Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I was indwelt and infused with a tremendous sense of power, then with my eyes wide open in the air in front of me were letters of living light.  Letters that I could read but when I read them I did not just read them with my mind.  My entire being was absorbing, and reading, and understanding the living words that I was seeing in front of my eyes.

Sid:  What did it say?

Dennis: It said, “Grand Book and Bible” a Christian Book Store within a mile of my house.

Sid: You don’t have to be a mental giant you get this amazing vision, you got to the book store and what happened?

Dennis: I was grabbed by the arm by one of the clerks she said “There is a man in this store that you must meet,” and took me over and the man was the author of the book that I had read, the only Christian book that I had read that four month period outside of the Bible.  And he said, “You need to go to a Christian businessman’s lunch.”

Sid:  This was what “Full Gospel Businessman.”

Dennis: Yes.

Sid: So you go to the meeting and all of a sudden you find out about being baptized in the Holy Spirit.  You receive the baptism you speak in a supernatural language; how did your life change?

Dennis: From that moment on there was always, and I mean always, a constant awareness of God’s presence.  There never was a moment that I wasn’t aware of precious cargo carrying precious cargo.  I even equated it kind of like a pregnant woman 7, 8, 9 months she has to be about her business but she will always be aware that she’s carrying precious cargo.  And the feelings never left, it was what I later come to understand of course the fruit of the Spirit the sense of His presence.

Sid:  You actually had a Spirit that had been harassing you your whole life broken off in 1976. You were afraid to even share your testimony in front of people.

Dennis: Yes.

Sid: Tell me what happened briefly.

Dennis: Well, I went and was invited because of the richness of even passing on the testimony of the open vision etcetera, they put me in front of a crowd of perhaps 40 people to share my testimony.  And for whatever reason out of the blue I’m standing on this platform and I freeze,  I mean just totally freeze. I could feel shame and it was strong and powerful and I didn’t understand it and walked right off the stage.

Sid:  You must have been even more humiliated by having to walk off the stage, you must have been a horrific experience for you.  Then what happened?

Dennis:  Absolutely, went home and then I went home and I said, “God, I’ve been called to preach, I’ve been having all these wonderful experiences what is wrong with me?”  And I knelt down by the side of a couch and I closed my eyes and it happened again. All of a sudden in my mines eyes with total clarity I saw myself at the age of perhaps nine and I was a bed wetter. I saw in my mind’s eye a young nine year old boy, me, making fists hating himself.  Hating himself that he couldn’t even control his own body. The shame was so powerful that it was my little secret nobody knew this.  And I said, “God, I knew that it was wrong to hold unforgiveness toward anybody but even myself.”  And down in my Spirit I received, this was even without words, I receive, this is even without words, “I receive forgiveness for having held such hatred for myself.”  And when I did I was flooded with the peace and all of sudden there was this thing that was on me like a slimy stocking mask, simultaneously while I felt, because I felt everything in the spirit realm as a constant, I felt it lift in my mind’s eye it was lifting off me, it was like a burglars stocking mask only it was slimy and ugly and as it came off…

Sid: You know what this reminds me it’s almost like you made an oath no one is going to ever know that I had this horrible habit and you even blocked it from yourself but you didn’t block it from your real self because it limited you from fulfilling your destiny.

Dennis:  Absolutely.

Sid:  And once it was lifted was it almost immediate that you had freedom?

Dennis: It was immediate as a matter of fact I went to a local church the next day and the first thing they said is “Dennis we want you to share your testimony.”  And the first thing I did was walked up to that pulpit and I said, “I don’t know if everyone is going to understand this but I like me,” and they all laughed about wow this guys may have some issues. I was so full of the joy of the Lord that I felt that for the first time I received myself the way God received me.

Sid: You were free.

Dennis: I was free, it was total freedom and shame and it was just like amazing that had been blocking the way.

Sid:  And the gifts of the Spirit ever since you were baptized in the Holy Spirit started flowing. Although you had a good prayer life at least you thought you had a good prayer life.  One day you are praying and you heard from God, what did He say to you?

Dennis: He said, “Ask me to teach you to pray.”  And at first I was a little stunned because I thought it was quite sufficient.  I mean I had learned everything I learned I learned in prayer and He said, “Ask me to teach you to pray.”  And so then I just humbled myself and said, “Sure, teach me how to pray.”  And then to my surprise it started immediately that day, one thought coming from the heart of God bombarding me continuously, and it must have lasted for a month.  That thought was “Dennis, I’m giving you My undivided attention.”  And every single day He never changed the subject but I like soaked in it, I absorbed it and I wanted to be a partaker of that.  And little did I know only in hindsight that rejection was being washed out of me over a period of five weeks, but in the mean time it did something else that I thought was quite amazing.  While I had never known such acceptance I had never known such affection, I had never and I’m feeling these things, they were not thoughts or concepts they were impressions that I owned and I absorbed and then as I…

Sid: These were knew feelings.

Dennis: These were totally – I never had anything like this I mean I was Dennis the Menace, there was nobody saying “Dennis you know your might constant delight and I’m giving you my undivided attention.”  But what happened was that all of a sudden by the end of the four weeks, being bombarded with so much affection, acceptance, attention I wanted to burst inside and say “God I want to reciprocate, I’ve got to, I can’t do like you God I can’t think of you every minute every hour.  I’ll try but I can’t do it like you, but oh God that I could reciprocate.” That’s when the voice came and He said, “You can, I’ve given you the equipment.”

Sid: What you know, and then for the next month God’s spoke to Dennis and taught him step by step… You know what it reminds me, when I was a young believer Dennis I got a hold of a book by Brother Lawrence and it was called “The Practice of the Presence of God.” This was written in the 1617 hundreds. It was a monk that his job in the monastery was washing dishes, but he had such communion with God that he was happier than if he had been President of the United States, well, that’s not a good analogy.  Well, leave that one alone, but people would seek him out because they knew when they would meet him they’d come and they’d come into the presence of God.  Well, I read that book and I tried to do what that book said, but it didn’t work for me, and that’s why I’m so excited about interviewing you because Dennis for the next 30 days God said to you “I’m giving you my undivided attention and I’m going to teach you how to commune with me.”