Sid Roth

SID: I love medically documented miracles. Skeptics, where are you? Tell me about the Garza twins.

DON: The Garza twins attend our church. Their parents, Isaiah and Evangelina have gone to our church for several years. And when they discovered they were expecting twins, they started going through the normal process of going to the doctor’s appointments and that kind of thing. And pretty early on, they discovered that the twins had what is called twin-to-twin transfusion, where blood is passing back and forth between the twins.

SID: Is that dangerous?

DON: That’s very dangerous. It’s almost always fatal to at least one of the children and usually to both of the children. And as they walked through that process, they were advised by almost everybody that they saw to abort the pregnancy, and they chose not to do that.

SID: Even with that kind of a prognosis.

DON: Even with that kind of a prognosis. In fact, one day

SID: They have to be, you must be doing a good job if they’re in your church. You taught them right.

DON: Well I don’t know if I did a good job or they’re just smart people.

SID: Okay. So they went against the doctor’s advice.

DON: They did go against the advice of the medical community in not aborting the twins. They just chose to let God decide what would happen with their children. And so they continued with this pregnancy. And the longer it went, the more opinionated the advice became from the medical community that they should abort. And on a Sunday night in our church, we had a miracle healing service, and they came to that miracle healing service, and came up for prayer. And a lady in our church, one of my board member’s wives, Kim Hawthorne, prayed with them. And at the end of that prayer, she said to them, she said, “Go document this night because God has performed a miracle for you, and write down the date and the time, and what occurred because something has changed here.” And so when they went back to the doctor, the doctor as he’s doing the sonogram, he said, “Amazing, amazing. There’s baby one, there’s baby two and it appears that something has changed here. But yet, the diagnosis was that you still should expect that there is going to be some really severe consequences when these children are born.” But they knew at that time that the miracle had taken place, and we were believing that these twins would be born normal, and that they would live normal and healthy lives. And of course, the medical community believed that even if they were born, that they probably would not be able to live normal lives just because of all the things that go with the twin-twin transfusion.

SID: Now how old are they today and what do they look like?

DON: These children are ten years old today and they’re the picture of health.

SID: I want to go to Dr. Alexander Reiter. He’s a heart specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston Medical Center. Let’s go to that clip now.

[begin video]

Dr. Reiter: Follow this blood vessel. You see, it goes like this. And here connects with this one. So this was the main connection between the two. So blood from this one will go into this one and end up in the other baby or vice versa. What happened here at a certain point, this here clotted, formed a little clot and it stopped it. And when it stopped it, allowed them to recover. That’s what saved them. That’s what saved them. Because otherwise, it would have continued, would have died, both of them. Both of them would have died. This is a miracle.

Male: Yeah, grace of God.

Dr. Reiter: Yeah.

[end video]

SID: Did you get that? A medical doctor said, “This is a miracle.” And God is not a respecter of persons. As a matter of fact, God spoke to you audibly, and what did he tell you?

DON: The Lord spoke to me and said, “If you can convince the people I will do my work.” And so I took that to mean that if, in my preparation and in my preaching, I needed to take the Scriptures that the Lord had laid on my heart and figure out what can I do in my delivery, in my presentation to convince these people that God is actually going to do and wants to do this. And I think that when my preaching changed that the number of miracles began to increase that we were seeing in our church and our ministry. You know, Ephesians 3:20 says that, “God is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above that which we are able to ask or think of him according to the power of works in us.” Now the problem is, not that we think God is not able. Our problem is believing he’s willing. And the Bible says he’s able to do these things, and that exceedingly and abundantly means that God will go past or way past, do more than what the Bible says that we can ask or think of him.

SID: You’re convinced of that, aren’t you?

DON: I’m convinced of that, yes.

SID: Okay. There are crosses that people bear. All of a sudden, a doctor says you have cancer. All of a sudden, there’s an accident. Tell me about the Mr. Funderburg.

DON: John Funderburg is a pastor friend of mine. He pastors a church in Murfreesboro, Arkansas. And at 32 years old, John is a great big guy, he’s a healthy, strong guy, and at 32 years old, suddenly, he was overcome with a heart problem. In a 24-hour period of time, John went from working in a sawmill to being in an intensive care unit, in a hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And that night, the doctors came and told him wife Crystal that there’s very little chance of his survival. His heart was pumping 10 to 15 percent of what it should be pumping. The only chance would be for a heart transplant.

SID: Simultaneously, what were you and your church doing while this is going?

DON: We’re praying. Everyone that knew John was praying. There were people all over the nation, maybe around the world that were praying for John.

SID: Did the doctor expect him to recover?

DON: The doctor did not expect him to recover.

SID: Well let me read you a report from the doctor that was involved in that. And the doctor’s name is Dr. Steven Hutchins, Medical Director, Baptist Heart Transplant Institute. “Mr. Funderburg came to Baptist Medical Center with severe heart failure and in shock. He was gravely ill and being evaluated for heart transplantation at the time of his admission. I saw him in my office one month later and his repeat echo showed absolutely normal. Mr. Funderburg has a miraculous, you don’t see that from doctors, “a miraculous recovery.” Well when we come back, what happens when a world-renowned surgeon is operating on a patient and the Holy Spirit says, “Do something that has never been done before.” You realize the patient will die if this isn’t God and you also realize you’ll lose your practice. What would you do? We’re going to find out when we come back.