Two Trees in the Garden: Rick Joyner - Part 1

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Thank you. Welcome back to another episode of It's Time to Man Up. Nikita Kolov and no longer the Russian nightmare. Now, the devil's nightmare, and it is a privilege to have this man in the studio with me today. My goodness, we're going to talk about his, some of his life story and what all God is doing in and through this man's life.

Rick Joyner, Morningstar Ministries. Rick, welcome to It's Time to Man Up. Well, good to be here with you, and let's man up. Let's talk about man's stuff.

Let's talk about man's stuff, and all you lady listeners out there will appreciate this, I'm sure. I was trying to figure out how many years we've known each other now, and I'm thinking about a decade, plus or minus. Yeah, I would think at least. Yeah. It's been a long.

But at least a decade, and for me, it's just been a privilege of getting to know you and an honor for real, and I mean that in all sincerity, and have so much respect for you and all that you not only have done, but all that you're doing when it comes to building the Kingdom. But before we get to that, Richmond, Virginia is, you're born and raised, right? Yeah, I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. Okay.

Rex Hospital. Moved to Richmond when I was six years old, so it wasn't my decision. Well, it wasn't your decision.

Go ahead. But yeah, I was raised in Richmond till I was 18, then went in the Navy. Of course, I had to go in something back then. I got my draft notice, so the Navy took me in.

I had a good time. I was in aviation, and learned a lot after that. It was really after I got out of the Navy.

It was only about a year later that I met the Lord, became a Christian, was born again. After the military. After the military.

Okay. And how many years were you in the military then? Almost four.

Four years. Yeah, I got out early because Vietnam started winding down. They gave us early outs. Okay, early release. Yeah, I got in on that. And some other circumstances made them want to get rid of me.

We may or may not want to go into... No, let's don't go into BC. All right, I understand. Well, because you have shared with me, off the record, a few of your military... Shall I call it antics? Would that be a proper word or... Well, I think there's gotta be something beyond antics. Okay.

But some of the stories, like for real though, I mean, you have me laughing, man. I mean, just because you were a pilot, right? No, no. I was in aviation. I was a crewman for a while.

Okay. But I didn't get my pilots. They offered to send me to flight school, to engineering school, get my engineering degree, and then flight school. But they wanted me to basically make a career out of the Navy to do that, and they wouldn't guarantee me what I fly. If they would have guaranteed me fighters, I would have done that.

Right. But anyway, I just got out, used the GI Bill to get all my ratings, and did become a professional pilot, and did that for a number of years, built an aviation business. And I used to... You did well with that. I did pretty well.

In some ways, maybe real well. We turned a little single pilot, me, in one airplane operation into one of the biggest in the country, or busiest, the FAA said, within three years. We had a pretty busy operation, mostly flying freight, flew passengers in the day, freight at night. General Motors became my best customers.

Right. But we flew for everybody, Corps of Engineers, rock and roll bands. I flew all the presidential candidates in 1980, but won. We flew all kinds of politicians and candidates. Wow. Of course. But we were on demand air charter service.

Okay. But we also had the busiest airport in the state I was in at the time. We had flight school. We had aircraft maintenance. I even sold aircraft insurance.

Wow. We sold airplanes, insurance... Anything I could make a dollar on with an airplane, I did it. You were involved in it.

You were involved in it. And where were you... Where was that based, or where do you live? That was just north of Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi. The Madison, Mississippi airport. Wow. If you read John Grisham books, most of those are based in Madison, Mississippi.

Okay. And of course, I knew all the buildings, streets, and all he writes about there. But it's a great place, right on a big reservoir. And yeah, business really took off.

Business was good. Yeah. From Mississippi then, where would the path take you from Mississippi? Well, it was in 1987 when I received a call to go back into full-time ministry.

Okay. I had been in ministry for a few years, but I started too young. I had a church ask me to be their pastor, and I don't even think I'd known the Lord for two years. But during that two years, I'd accumulate a lot of knowledge.

Right. I'd read and study 40 hours a week just because I was so hungry. And it's like, I wasn't an atheist. I was never an atheist, but I didn't know about God. I didn't know anything.

I hadn't grown up in Sunday school or anything, and I just had no clue. When I found out God is real, Jesus is real, He's everything, the Bible says He is, when I learned all that, I said, this is like the mother of load. This is the greatest thing you could ever learn.

So, I'm going to spend my life learning about Him. And I accumulate a lot of knowledge, but not much wisdom. Okay. And there is a difference, right? Yeah. There's a difference between wisdom and knowledge.

Right. And when this church asked me to, not enough wisdom or experience at the time, when they asked me to be their pastor, they were impressed with my knowledge. And I tell people, I was the worst pastor I've ever heard of. People would come to me for counseling, I'd tell them, well, get over it. Why are you dumping your problems on me? I got my own problems. But playing it simple.

Playing it simple. Yeah, that was my... No, I didn't do too good. And I realized it. I said, I'm going to wreck these people's lives if I don't go take a real job.

And I wanted to take a flying job where I can fly corporately or commercially, because you do, in most of those, you'll fly a few hours a day and then you're sitting in airports or hotels or whatever, and it would give me all this time to study. That was my real passion. Right. Well, and I've learned that about you, that, I mean, you're one of the greatest historians that I know, personally.

I mean, as far as some of our conversations we've had, some of the stories you've told, and I'm just amazed by... And I know you said, you said you just love history and you love to study and all of that. Yeah. I mean, it's like, we'll have forever to do this. Right. But it's just, to me, it's almost an addiction to knowledge, to truth, to new knowledge.

I love the name of this station, The Truth Network. But what greater treasure could we have than that? And it's available. If we seek Him, we'll find Him. It's right there at our fingertips, isn't it?

Just open up a Bible, turn on a podcast, listen to a sermon on YouTube. I mean, it's available now at the flick of a switch on our phone, right? So, but let's back up for a moment. So, you said about a year after your departure from the military, that's when you surrendered your life to the Lord? Well...

Roughly, plus or minus? Yeah, surrender would be a good word. Okay. Well, because I had no choice. I had no choice, right? I probably chose a good word. Yeah, it was Balvani.

He's the king. And I had a very supernatural conversion experience, and to me, there was zero doubt that this is real, he's real, and he's calling me, and you don't have a choice in that. What was the pivotal point in that? What led you to... Was there something dramatic that happened or just something... What happened there?

Well, I was basically, at the time, in the counterculture scene, hippies, I was going around to all the rock festivals and just living that life. I was invited by some girls to go to a seance in which they said they could make demons appear. I just thought they were taking too many drugs, but they were good-looking girls, and I said, I'll go. I'm in.

I'm in. So, when I got there, I just... I didn't believe anything they were talking about. I didn't believe in anything supernatural. I didn't disbelieve it, but to me, it's just, how do we know? Well, anyway, we're in this little room, dark room, and stuff happened, and these things did appear, and I knew, somehow I knew, this is really evil. These things are not good.

These girls think they're controlling them, but they're controlling these girls. Wow. It just shocked me. I mean, the whole supernatural, all of a sudden, is totally real.

There's something beyond what we see, feel, touch, smell. So, I went back and, you know, told a girl that I was with at the time what had happened, and I didn't know that she was a backslidden Christian, and she got un-backslidden real quick, and she knew this is real, and she started telling me about Jesus, and I went down and bought a Bible. I said, I'm going to find out everything I can about Jesus, because this stuff is evil, and it's obviously powerful.

There's got to be a counterbalance in good, or this would be taking us over. And when she told me about Jesus, I just totally believed her. I believed her, and she told me her story, how she had met the Lord, and only walked with him for about 30 days in college, and then she basically said, Lord, I'm going to come back to you before a while. I'm going to do my own thing. Yeah.

She's a real honest girl. Yeah. I'm sold my oats and live my life.

Yeah. So anyway, I've got a Bible, read as much as I could, believed it. You know, when you first read, you have no knowledge of Christianity or anything. When I read this about whatever you ask, believing it will be done for you, I started believing God to make these drug deals work out, because I hadn't gotten to that part. I didn't know that was wrong. I said, Lord, I really need these to work.

Okay. And I mean, it was a wild thing. I had no one to go to, but this girl who'd only known the Lord for 30 days, and she didn't know anything. I started finding Christians, I started going to churches and meeting people, and you can always find the ones who are on fire in any church or whatever. And I did get up with some real good people that helped disciple me. One was a guy from North Carolina, retired Air Force Colonel, and he kind of discipled me for a while. And then I moved back to Richmond to lead some friends of mine to the Lord that I'd grown up with, which the Lord blessed. And you met one of them, Bart. We grew up on the same block together, and I went back and he met the Lord. And so I moved back to Richmond to help them get established in the faith like we're growing together.

And then we got really connected with this group in Northern Virginia. And everybody, all the leaders of that church, it was a whole network of house churches. But all of the leaders of it were like deputy secretaries of this or that. And my name- High level profile people.

Top level. And CIA and everything. And my mentor was the assistant secretary of the Air Force who was in charge of all weapons development for the Air Force, all airplanes, bombers, missiles, everything that was developed.

He was ahead over every program developing new weapons. But they had jobs like that, really serious jobs. But they were so caught up in the Lord, their main identity was not, I'm the assistant secretary of the Air Force, but it was, I'm a Christian and this is my ministry.

Right. When you ask them, you meet them, what they do, they're going to name their ministry before they're... I think all of them were like that. It was an on fire, blazingly hot movement back then. But this was right in when the charismatic movement is peaking, the Jesus people movement. There was so much happening spiritually at that time that, I mean, you could go up and ask somebody about the weather and they would ask you, how do I get saved?

I mean, it was just people were... It's like the fruit is falling. Right, right. Low hanging fruit, right?

Just right there for the picking, right? So I got involved with some of the guys from Teen Challenge, Wilkinson, Don Wilkinson, and his brother Dave kind of built that ministry. But Nicky Cruz, some of those guys, we worked with them, worked with street people, and that was what pretty much I'd come out of after the service.

So yeah, it was a great, great time then. Nikita Koloff here. If you're needing to buy a car and have marginal credit and considering using buy here, pay here, that's worse than taking the Russian sickle. Winston-Salem Motor Cars will put you behind the wheel of a car you can rely on while helping rebuild, repair, or establish your credit score. Conveniently located on Silas Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem, be sure to check them out today at wsmc1.com because you are number one. We so appreciate our listeners. If you will support this program with a financial gift of any amount, I will send you a personalized copy of my latest book, Nikita, A Tale of the Ring in Redemption.

Go to koloff.net, that's koloff.net, koloff.net, and make your contribution today. So, and that's interesting, you know, you mentioned the supernatural, and of course I've, you know, traveled overseas and like yourself and, you know, I've had a number of different encounters and not just overseas but even here in America that, you know, real encounters with the demonic forces and the supernatural and understanding that it is real, you know. In Ephesians 6, chapter 6 says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and these wicked, you know, forces. It's real for those who don't realize it.

It is real. You witnessed it firsthand, and that led to really your conversion. And so the timeline here is so you, you're getting grounded, you're getting discipled, you're getting mentored, growing in your faith now, and as you mentioned just shortly ago, you jumped really into ministry probably too soon, because then you transitioned into business, but then you came back into ministry. So what was that transition like? So you're like, okay, because you knew there was a call in your life.

You sent, you knew that, right? You sensed that. And so when you made that decision to step out of the, if you will, the business world and back into ministry now, about how old were you when, how far along were you in your journey with the Lord at that point, would you say? Well, you know, I was pretty young in business, that level of business.

Yeah, in your 20s and 30s, but I was getting right around 40 when I had two people come from different parts of the country, one of them from Miami and one of them from Texas, who I knew had, didn't know each other. They both came to me in the same week with the same word. You're called to ministry. You've got to return to ministry now or the Lord is going to give your commission to somebody else.

Pass it on, yeah. I didn't know what my commission was, but it sounded bad. So I immediately set about to wrap up my business, made a deal with Beechcraft to take over and manage my whole business. They were major aircraft manufacturer at the time.

The president of that company had become a good friend. But anyway, I just immediately started wrapping up. I'm going into ministry. I didn't even know what it was, but I'd written up my first book. There were two trees in the garden and it exploded.

I mean, it just took out one thing that made it explode. Back then, James Robison was probably had one of the most highly visible ministries at the time, the evangelists from Fort Worth, Texas. And James and I met and connected. And anyway, James spent a whole hour long program of his back then just reading from that book and kept holding it up. And then he read another thing, had it outlined in the next Monday, we had 30,000 orders waiting in one day. And it didn't let up for a long time. And it was like, all of a sudden, now my aviation business had grown really fast. Double, triple in a year was usual for us back then. And that normally you can't grow that fast without it killing you.

Normally about 30 to 35% growth rate a year is the drop dead zone. It's too fast. But we had handled it. We'd done it, made it work.

And then all of a sudden the ministry did the same thing. But I knew how to do this now. And you'd already had that experience. I'd had the experience of how to organize and handle this. But we just had piles of book orders. I had more invitations to speak than I could answer.

I was getting an average of three invitations a day to speak all over the world. And I couldn't even, I finally just turned them all over to somebody to answer. We're praying about it. That was all we did. And we did. We said, Lord, you got to show me where to go. I can't go to all these places. Right.

You're only one man. So yeah, you can't duplicate yourself all over the place. And I can relate, Rick, I can relate to... It's interesting because as I'm listening to that part of your story, how the business grew so fast, but you were able to keep up and learn how to handle... It's almost like training ground for... Because the Lord's knowing when you step into ministry, it's gonna explode. And the relatable part for me there is my wrestling career, which the wrestling career was meteoric by many people's accounts. And when I look at my wrestling career and I'm like, what did I do in wrestling? I flew on airplanes, rented cars, stayed in hotels, talked on microphones in front of cameras, entertaining crowds. And then I surrendered my life to the Lord and He opens up all these doors of opportunity for ministry. And what am I doing in ministry the last 28 plus years?

Oh, I know, flying on airplanes, renting cars, staying in hotels, talking to microphones in front of cameras, not to entertain a crowd. So it's like the wrestling really was just a training ground for me. And it sounds like your aviation business, in a sense, was that very same thing. It was like a training ground, God preparing you for the ultimate call on your life so that when the book sales and invitations to speak explode, you're ready to handle it, even though it was more than you could handle, you at least had experience at how to handle it. So, right? Yeah.

I don't think we would have survived it without it. So you mentioned your first book, but it was funny. I was up in Moravian Falls at your property up there one time, a few years ago now. And because if I were to ask you how many books you've written, I know you're going to tell me you don't know the answer to that most likely, because I think I've heard you say that before. But I remember this, Rick, I remember being up at Moravian and a bunch of your books are on the bookshelf.

And I'm pretty sure, pretty certain I counted 45 at that time and even handed me a new one today. We'll talk about this on the second show, The Second War. So that was one of many, many books that you would go on to write. But and I read that one, by the way.

Two Trees in the Garden. I have. And yeah. Well, all Christians should.

Well, hello. I mean, all Christians should read every book you've written. I agree.

I totally agree with that. There's so much, here again, not only wealth of knowledge, but so much wisdom that you've put into these books. And I know that's a passion of yours though, right? Writing. Well, yeah, because I've always been a reader.

Okay. Study, read, research. I love the written word. And so becoming a writer, I knew when I was 12 years old, I'm going to be a writer. I didn't know how or why I wasn't a Christian. I didn't know it would be in that, but I knew this is what I'm going to do.

And I loved it. Would you say you enjoy writing more than speaking? Much more.

Much more so. I love meeting people, being in groups and all, but just speaking to a large crowd, I can do that on television. I can do that a lot of ways. I've spoken by phone to a million people at one time, and been invited to speak to large groups in Africa and all, but that doesn't do much for me. I don't consider myself that great of a speaker. I think my content is good and that gets me by. I'm not polished.

I'm not... I should have invested more in learning the skills of being a public speaker, but I think my content has gotten me by. But, and again, I've sat in on times, whether it's a Sunday service when you have spoke, or certainly many of the conferences, and we'll talk more about this in the next show as well, like Morningstar Ministries and what all...

I mean, because there's a plethora of ministries that you guys... And the impact you guys are making for the Kingdom around the world through Morningstar Ministries. And I've sat in a number of conferences that you've hosted where you've spoken. And I would say this, I would say, yeah, the content of what you share is valuable. I'm a note taker. I like to take copious notes and have taken plenty of notes from when you've been speaking. So I would say to that point, but I was just... Yeah, I was curious as to whether or not writing or speaking was more enjoyable for you. Well, I feel more anointed when I'm writing.

Okay. I feel the Lord's presence. I feel revelation coming while I'm doing that. And I do sometimes speak into... And I could speak to all the Muslim leaders on the planet one time, all the tough imans and whatever. And I preach the gospel as hard as I could. I thought I'd get killed before I got out of there, but it worked.

It worked. And after that, I was at this World Public Forum on civilizations and religions. I felt a greater anointing in that setting than I'd ever felt in church. And the Lord touched many of them. After that, the next few days we were there, I couldn't sit down for a meal with a bunch of them wanting to sit with me and talk. And well, the main thing I told them was about God loves you.

They didn't have that in their book. This concept, He really loves you, wants a personal relationship with you. And they just responded like you wouldn't... Couldn't imagine. Well, you just touched on something in our last couple of minutes together here on this show, and then we're gonna come back and have you... We're gonna talk more about, like I said, more about Morningstar and what all it's involved in, and more about your books and all of that. But you just touched on something, God loves you, and it's about a personal relationship. And that's one thing this show is centered on as well, is... And hopefully, and I've already gotten emails and messaging on social media and others that, as they've listened to the radio show, listened to the podcast, in fact, a wrestler you're probably familiar with, Sting, did a two-part show, and a guy just... What we said, what he said, totally transformed this guy's life. Rick Joyner, my guest from Morningstar Ministries, in studio with me today. I wanna encourage you, I wanna challenge you, if you're listening today and you don't have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, then today would be a great day to make that decision. And whether you're driving in a car, pull off to the side, or listening on your phone in a hotel room or wherever you're at, make that decision today. Don't wait any longer.

There is no promise of tomorrow. And so I encourage you, just surrender your heart, repent, ask for forgiveness, give your heart and life to Jesus, and join us again on another episode of It's Time to Man Up. Men, I would like to challenge each of you to consider spending five days with Lex Luger and I at Man Camp, pursuing the heart of God. Ladies, if you're listening, we'll send your men home fed or equipped to be men of God, godly husbands and godly fathers. That appeals to you. Give them your blessing and encourage them to sign up today at mancamp.info. Pastors, if you would like to bring Koloff for Christ Ministries and Man Up Conference to your community, go to koloff.org and email me.

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