JAMES: Wow. No one in my family has ever been saved. I was never raised in church. And my mom was in… Still nobody. I mean, it’s unbelievable. I got invited to a service. I was actually on drugs one night with my friend, and I was passing out on his couch. And his mom looked over to me and said, “Do you know who Jesus is?” And I had no clue. I needed a ride to Six Flags. She invited me to church if I wanted a ride. I went to church that night. I heard a testimony of a gang member that got completely set free. And she kept telling me that Jesus did this. I came home that night, the woman hands me a Bible. I never opened it up. I walked in my mom’s house. She was drunk, passed out in front of me. I turned to the left in the kitchen. I had the Bible in front of me, and I just started thinking, is he real?
Did he really set that gang member free? And if he’s real, I want to know. And so without any understanding of the gospel, never reading the Bible in my life, I put my hand on the Bible. I looked up to heaven and I said, “Jesus, if you’re real, reveal yourself to me.” And right at that moment, I saw a lightning bolt come out of heaven, and it just hit me right here. And I fell on the floor, and I was screaming in the power. And I just felt so empty. I felt like—
SID: Why were you screaming?
JAMES: Because I could feel the surge in my body. It was like a feeling I’ve never felt. I was powerless. I was on the floor yelling as I felt this fire inside of my heart. And I started crying. I started saying, “Jesus, you’re real. Jesus, you’re real.” And I just knew that he was real. And he was telling me, because my whole thing I said to him was, “If you’re real, then I’m going to give the rest of my life to tell people who you are. Show me if you’re real. I don’t want to live on this Earth if you’re not.”
SID: You teach and demonstrate the fire of God. You’ve been baptized in water and fire, in the spirit in fire. What is the fire of God? And what are the benefits of it?
JAMES: Absolutely. So when I got saved, I started reading that Bible I had. And I immediately saw in Matthew 3, there was a spirit, water, and fire. And I began to cry out for what the fire was. I was baptized in water. I was saved, but I wanted that fire in my life. And so as I began to read, I realized that we weren’t meant to live without it as Christians. Every day of our life, the Holy Spirit needs to be with us and empower us to be parents, to be children, to work at our jobs everywhere we go, that that fire would burn in us. And an appetite got created in my life. And I was convinced I wasn’t going to live anymore without the fire of God in my life. I wanted it all. You mentioned Kathryn Kuhlman. She said, “Why settle for a cup full, if the whole ocean is ours?” Man, I want the whole ocean. I want it all.
SID: What do people miss if they don’t operate in the fire of God? What are they missing?
JAMES: Yeah. I think we’re living underneath the privileges. I think a lot of the attacks that we go through, it’s interesting. We just had a famous basketball player, unfortunately, die in a helicopter crash. They said the pilot had something called spatial disorientation. That means you actually can get to a point, the fluid’s out of your ear, you don’t know which way is up, right, left, down. In faith, if we’re not plugged into the source with the presence, with faith, then we’re going to go through things in life and be confused. We’re going to be spiritually disoriented, and we’re not then able to know which way is up. Discernment, I believe, is the greatest thing we need.
