SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. My guests, best-selling authors John and Lisa Bevere, unmasked. What do I mean by that? They were sabotaged when they got married. There is no way in the world their marriage should have survived and they have decided if they will tell people what happened to them it will give hope. But what happened to them wasn’t natural. What happened to them that gave them a marriage from Heaven was supernatural. Hello. Look, I cannot believe what I read in the newspaper. The institution of marriage is under assault. John Bevere, what’s going on and what’s behind what’s going on? What is the reason that the institution of marriage is under such assault?
JOHN: Marriage was authored, created, designed up by God himself. Satan hates anything that’s of God. The spirit of this world wants to destroy marriage and is on an active path to do it. And this is why Lisa and I decided to start speaking on marriage because we know now not only are marriages under attack, and they are under attack, but the very institution as you just said is being assaulted. And so we need to voice out what God says about marriage because it is so valuable.
SID: You know, John looks like he’s kind of meek. But would you believe on his first date with Lisa he gets her saved, he gets her speaking in tongues filled with the Spirit, and he gets her healed of a life-threatening disease, on the first date. I guess I’d better find out what happened on the second. No, I’m just teasing. Well I’ll tell you what happened. He marries Lisa. Now you’ve heard the saying, opposites attract, but this is ridiculous. Lisa, what was your background?
LISA: Okay. So I’m half Sicilian, Apache Indian, French and English. My grandmother had been married four times.
JOHN: And I’m fortunate to be alive.
LISA: Yes. My grandmother had been married four times. My parents were married, divorced, remarried, divorced. My dad was an alcoholic. I came from dysfunction way before it was popular. We were doing it way before the Kardashians. And basically, you know, John and I, we just came together. I had no good thing. I brought adultery, I brought alcoholism, I brought dysfunction and he brought all the good, and I brought all of the bad. I remember when he introduced me to his mom, his mom was like, “Wait a minute, we have never had divorce in our family before.” And I was like, that’s not my name. But it was really a scary thing when I came in. But you know, we decided, Sid, God wasn’t interested.
SID: You got me laughing so much, I don’t know what to say.
LISA: Well we decided it wasn’t about John’s good and my bad. It was about holy. And the truth is God wants to do a new thing with couples. And I brought nothing to the table, and we wanted to do our marriage different, but we didn’t know how to do it different. And I personally had a vision about three months into my marriage, and it was the vision of a perfect man, and this man looked like my husband, but he did not act like my husband. And so I decided my job was to change my husband from the man he was to the man he could be if he would work with me, but John had a vision of his own.
SID: But Lisa, not one woman listening to you understands.
LISA: No.
SID: No woman wants to change her husband.
LISA: None of us do.
SID: Okay, that’s what she brought in.
LISA: Yeah.
SID: Now what did you bring in?
JOHN: Well I brought in, I mean, my family, my mom and dad are amazing. They married 66 years. My dad just went home to be with the Lord this year. But what I brought in was a lot of insecurity. I was the only boy of six children. So I was the chosen one, my son, my son, according to my mother. So a lot of—
SID: I thought that was just Jewish men.
LISA: No, it’s Italians, too.
JOHN: So a lot of selfishness and a lot of temper, a lot of arguing, a lot of this is my way or the highway. And we clashed like the Titans. I mean, it was like WWF wrestling the first couple of years of our marriage. It was horrific. And we really realized all of a sudden, hey wait a minute, this happily ever after just doesn’t happen. And so, you know, we started, Lisa and I started realizing in order to have a good marriage you have to work to have a good marriage.
SID: But I have to ask you this question, Lisa. Why the dirty laundry? Why are you doing this?
LISA: Well you know, I think too many people feel isolated. They feel hopeless. So John and I said, you know what, we’re going to open up our lives. Because we sit in conferences and we would hear the pastors say, “my wife and I have never had a fight” and I’d be like, for the love of Jesus, we’ve never not fought. I mean, we decided, what in the world? So we just did not know how to do it correctly. And so we were like, all right, people are going to have different differences and we need to be constructive with this. Plus John and I have a unique dynamic that other people didn’t have. We both are strong personalities. We both have voices. It isn’t I’m just supportive of him and he’s not there or he’s just supportive of me. But couples coming up, they want to do it together, Sid. I think that we are created to do it together. And it would have been easier if we did it separately. So we said, let’s just put it all out there. Let’s talk about our struggles in the past with abuse, let’s talk about our struggles with control, let’s talk about our struggles with fear, let’s talk about what we’ve regretted and what we’ve learned. We’ve been married for 33 years. That’s a long time. And so we’ve learned a lot of lessons that we don’t think other people need to learn the hard way.
SID: John, you were addicted to pornography before you got married.
JOHN: Yep.
SID: And before it was almost commonplace. Right now, the statistics are overwhelming. Tell me a few of them.
JOHN: Well it started at age 11. And then when I married Lisa, I thought, gosh, when I get married to this beautiful woman it will all go away. Well it certainly didn’t. And so it was a big battle.
SID: I’ll tell you what, hold that thought. I want to find out how you got supernaturally, I mean, he thought if he just would get married to a beautiful woman, he wouldn’t be interested in pornography. He didn’t know that that’s one of the strongest addictions on the planet. When we come back I want to find out how they supernaturally went from physical abuse with each other, verbal abuse, her taking off her engagement ring. I mean, and to have the marriage they have today, and I say there is tikvah, that’s a Hebrew word, there is hope. We’ll be right back.
