SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. I am mad with a godly anger over what the devil is doing to marriages, what the devil is doing to children. I am angry and my guest has come up with a supernatural way to devil-proof our families. Do you want to know this? Me, too. I don’t know how you two survived. What were you, 17, and how old?
KEN: Nineteen.
SID: Seventeen and 19, you get married. You don’t know God. You were sabotaged from the get-go. You should have never survived.
KEN: No.
TRUDI: No.
KEN: We heard that the word around town was those two will never make it.
TRUDI: Right.
SID: And then you became, how did you become an alcoholic.
KEN: Well I didn’t want to, but my dad was an alcoholic and I hated it when I watched him growing up. But then I fell into it, and by the time I’m 19, I’m drinking on a daily basis.
SID: So Trudi, you came to the end of yourself. Tell me about that.
TRUDI: Right. Well you know, like every girl, I’ve known him since I was 12 years old, so we grew up together. And I thought he would be the answer to all my prayers, you know, the knight in shining armor. And we hadn’t been married six months, and I could tell that things were not going well. It was in the middle of the Vietnam War. We were newly married. We were having a hard time making a living and that’s a lot of the reasons he began to drink, I think. It was just having a new bride and he’s fearful. But it just seemed like he came home every night and he would begin to drink and there was no communication because [he’d] forget everything you’d talk to [him] about. And I never had felt so alone in all my life. And so that night I cried out to God, and I just said, “If you don’t show me that you’re real I’ll never walk in the door of a church again and I’m not going to serve you anymore.” And the very next morning when I woke up, there were people at my door with beautiful feet that began to share the Gospel with me, and it was my sister and my brother-in-law.
KEN: And they told you about Jesus.
TRUDI: Yes. They began to talk to me about Jesus. And in fact, my eyes were swollen. My brother-in-law just said this, he said, “Do you believe God could heal your eyes?” And I don’t know why I said it, I just said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Can we talk to you about something that happened to us.” I said, “Yes, please.” They had gone to the dentist and this dentist was a man that was saved and filled with the Holy Spirit, and he began to witness to them and got them filled with the Spirit there at the dentist office, and it changed their life completely. And when I heard about it, I just said, “I want that. How do I get it?” And they said, “Well, we’re not really sure, but we’ll pray with you.” And so I remember I was in my living room and it’s still the sweetest thing to me to remember. You know, I’ll never get over being saved, ever. And I prayed and asked Jesus into my heart. And then, I said I want that other thing, which is not a thing. It’s a person, but I didn’t know that then. I want the Holy Spirit. And they said, “Well we’re not quite sure how to pray with you about that, but just ask him.” So I remember I reached my hands towards Heaven and I began to just beg, “God, please fill me with your Spirit.” And my sister tapped me on the shoulder and she said, “Well I know one thing. I don’t know a lot, but I know one thing. You don’t have to beg him for anything. He wants you to have this.” So I remember I lifted my hands towards the Lord and I was trying to speak in English, and the next thing I know this beautiful language began to roll out of me.
KEN: When I got home that night, you can imagine, she was so joyful, she had been crying, and I thought, what’s going on. And she told me, “I’ve been saved and filled with the Holy Spirit.” And she thought I would immediately want to jump in, but I said, “No, I don’t think I want that.”
SID: Why?
KEN: I thought God was mad at me, Sid. I thought, see, Trudi is sweet and wonderful, but I know what kind of guy I am.
SID: Okay. So God adds a little bit more. You have a marvelous healing.
KEN: You grew up with crossed eyes.
TRUDI: Right.
KEN: Took a fall when she was a little four-year-old girl that triggered a birth defect and caused her eyes to cross.
SID: Couldn’t surgery help?
TRUDI: I had three surgeries in my lifetime and they would try to cosmetically fix it. But because it was a birth defect, it would always go back.
SID: I see.
KEN: It was incurable.
TRUDI: Yes, it’s incurable.
KEN: But one night at a home prayer meeting somebody said, “Trudi, would you like us to pray for your eyes?” She said yes. So they prayed for her and within an hour, she looked in the mirror. She took her glasses off. Something was going on with her eyes. She looked in the mirror and her eyes were totally straight. And she threw her glasses away. Her vision was 20/20.
SID: Okay. That had to push you over, Ken.
KEN: You can imagine.
SID: So you became a believer immediately.
KEN: She came home. I wasn’t there. I walked in the door. She said, “Look at my eyes.” And I knew what she was going to tell me. Her eyes were straight. I knew the trouble she had with her eyes and I thought God is after me, but I still wasn’t ready.
SID: Now Trudi, I understand, is doing some secret work. She’s laying hands on the bed to get you to be, what were you doing?
TRUDI: Actually, he’s drinking. So he went to sleep real sound every night. So when he would fall asleep, about the only scripture I knew was that when you pray in the spirit you pray a perfect prayer. And I thought, I don’t know what he needs, but the Holy Spirit does. So I would wait until he fell asleep and I would just put my hands on his back, and just pray in the Spirit until I fell asleep.
SID: Secret. Sneaky.
TRUDI: Yes.
KEN: That’s a sneaky thing to do for somebody that’s running from God.
SID: Okay. So you’re still running. You’re on your way to run to a liquor store to get some more alcohol.
KEN: Which was [unintelligible].
SID: But something happened.
KEN: Well I’m driving down the road and I was thinking about conversation that her prayers were working. And Sid, the Lord, the only way I know how to say it is the Lord filled the car. I knew God was there. I heard God speak and I heard the Lord say to me, “I love you.” And then he said this: “I want to help you.” Then the third statement he said, “Why don’t you ask me to help you.” And there’s so much in those three things. God loves everybody. God wants to help everybody, but God can’t unless we invite him in. Now I didn’t immediately do that, but within a few days, I was in our living room and I got right with God.
[voice over] Please, God, forgive my sins. Please make me a new man.
SID: You know, the devil knew they were going to do something powerful. He gave him a black eye.
TRUDI: Yes.
SID: They were going to devil-proof the family. And so he threw everything he could think of at them, but they threw back. Do you remember, you might have seen the Gospel Bill television show? Well guess who was Nicodemus? You’re looking at him, Nicodemus. And thousands of children, a whole generation of children came to the Lord, were encouraged in the Lord because of what they did. They persevered. But I want them to teach you how to devil-proof your family, your marriage, your children. We’ll be right back.
