SID: God is real. But you know, with everything Derek said, it’s absolutely almost impossible for me to believe that a few years ago he had a dry spell. Miracles and salvations kind of squeaked to a close. You lost your spiritual hunger. You became desperate and cried out to God, “Reignite my hunger.” Tell me about that experience.
DERRICK: Yeah, Sid, so after a period of time, I just became dry and stale in my walk with the Lord. I felt like I was going through the motions and I got to a place in my walk with God, to where it was a breaking point. And I said, “Lord, it has to be more than this.”
DERRICK: And I had reasoned within myself that if God didn’t touch me and if I didn’t see an outpouring of God’s presence in my life, I was going to probably stop pastoring or probably stop doing ministry and just work a secular job and be happy.
SID: That would’ve been a tragedy.
DERRICK: It would’ve been a tragedy. So literally I began to pray and that same teaching my mom instill in us as young children, it’s on another level now. So I’m fasting now for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, crying out to God, desperate for God, “Lord, please touch me. Please ignite my soul.”
DERRICK: And one night I was literally seeking the Lord and I just began to read the scriptures and the scriptures went, Sid, from black and white, in the best way I can describe it, to full four color HD. It literally, it was like the scriptures became alive. They became real. And I began to see scriptures that I preached before in a completely different light.
DERRICK: And all of these scriptures very much so pointed to the same thing, that God wasn’t some out in the clouds ambiguous God. But he was a personal God, who was very near to me and who wanted to encounter me. And so I began to weep. I began to cry and I began to shake and I began to tremble. I closed my eyes and I just began to immediately repent, which was off cuff because I didn’t practice that. I didn’t rehearse it.
