Sid: My guest Corey Russell is talking about a subject that it’s almost evaporated from the church today; now I know that it hasn’t, but the overall church it’s almost evaporated. And as I understand it from the best source book that I know the Bible everyone spoke in supernatural languages in the first church. Since God doesn’t change I’ll give ya one guest who’s done the changing. Now Corey for people to get to know you just a little bit you’re quite a prayer warrior, and my notes say you spend what about fifteen, eighteen hours a week in prayer?
Corey: Well, at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City; I mean more like just by right of my schedule I probably spend around thirty to forty hours a week in prayer.
Sid: My goodness eighteen would have been enough, but thirty that’s a lot of prayer. Just because you know you’re kind of whetting my curiosity, it takes a unique person to put that amount of time in prayer or do you think anyone could and do you think everyone should?
Corey: Oh, I totally do. Isaiah 56 you know the Lord, Isaiah prophesied “That I’m going to make them joyful in my house of prayer.” And you know in Kansas City the Lord’s doing it all over the earth; so what we’re finding joy in is the mixture of music, singing musicians, prophetic singing mixing it with praying. There’s such a joy and an ease, and hours just past and you don’t even realize that times flown by while you’re connecting with the Lord the whole time. So it sounds really heroic and real awesome, but when you’ve got anointed music in the background and singers singing songs right from the Word of God you’re heart just soars. It’s a wonderful occupation that I’ve been blessed to be a part of.
Sid: Now you told me something else before we went on the air, and that is that the level of prayer when you’re praying for Israel has been in recent weeks and months dramatically increasing. Do you believe that God’s up to something significant in Israel, is that why that’s going on?
Corey: Oh, very significant. I mean we’ve been praying from everything you know from what’s going on with Israel and the Middle East as well as you know President Obama’s meetings with Netanyahu, the recent meetings. And the Lord whenever we focus in on these prayer topics for Israel and God’s heart for Israel I don’t know how to explain it I’ve been a part of the house of prayer for the past eleven and a half years and it’s like the Lord’s heart is just coming down on the room and catching up 500 intercessors into His heart. And I feel such faith for salvation to break in like no other time, and the salvation of you know Jews all over the land both in Israel and all through the nations.
Sid: I have been having this feeling Corey that Israel, despite all rational and logic, is as ripe as they’ve ever been in history for a revival and I can literally picture the young people in Israel getting on fire for the Lord.
Corey: Yeah, and I’ll tell you as an intercessor whose in the prayer room and seeing from that vintage point that I know when the Lord moves on us in this, way and I feel like He’s praying through us I know it’s the time. It’s just one of those seasons and we need to be expecting and believing for mass revival and salvation to breakout.
Sid: I have to tell you, as I look at things with the U.S., and the decline of morality, the economic problems, the potential war problems in militant Islamists, and all the things that are going on that are almost happening so fast and so unbelievable, I don’t even focus on that anymore. I focus on Jesus is coming back soon and He is extending mercy to people like never before and we’re about ready to see the greatest revival the world has ever seen. I can picture miracles like we’ve only dreamt about like people with missing limbs; the whole limbs coming out. You have any sense along those lines?
Corey: I’ve never been as stirred for that reality like I am right now, I mean even just reviewing our own prophetic history here in Kansas City as well as looking at what the Lord’s doing we are in a season of great expectation. I feel one of those contractions of the Holy Spirit pushing through with fresh wave, you know. All I can say is this is what we’re made for, I believe we’re moving into the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit that the world ever seen and at the same time as we’ve seen through history outpourings are accompanied by shakings and by disruption in all kinds of different levels in society. And I think that its creation groan of the Spirit within us and heaven and it’s one of those conversion seasons that’s going to result with Jesus returning to the planet, I’m so excited!
Sid: How old are you?
Corey: I’m thirty-five.
Sid: Okay, you’re a young man everything’s relative but you are a young man, but I believe Jesus; I’m seventy-one and I believe Jesus is returning in my life time and I never believed that before. Oh I might have said it, but I didn’t really believe it in my heart of hearts; but I believe that in my heart of hearts that this is the generation He’s returning in.
Corey: I believe it too, that’s what I’m living my life for and putting all my eggs into that basket of preparing my own life and preparing my family and my children and the ones that are coming to get into this kind of mindset and heart.
Sid: Okay, let’s learn a little bit about you. You came from a loving Godly family; and how in the world when you got on your own in college did you get into drugs and alcohol, and sexual sin and I mean coming from that type of family how did that happen?
Corey: Well, it’s I never met Jesus, you know I had a great family you know you go to church but you never truly encountered the man and spent the teenage years just a normal boy in high school and normal jock in high school, athlete, did well in grades, but I never had a personal relationship; I go off to college, my first year in college…
Sid: By the way, I feel so sorry, sad is the word, for kids in college today, I mean I graduated college but what is going on in the colleges today from the professors to the sexual promiscuity, to homosexuality being normal I don’t know how a kid can make it if they don’t really know Jesus.
Corey: Well, I think that’s really the issue right there Sid, I think the religious games and just attending once a week to a service and hearing nice things and being associated with people that know Him. We got to understand that there’s an all out war not when they’re eighteen, nineteen or twenty, but there’s an all out war at five, six and seven that the parents have to win in the place of prayer; in the place of modeling it; in the place of living it. And I feel like what we’re seeing happen is that kids that are be-bopping or just heading off to college with no real depth in Jesus and their getting slaughtered by the spirit of the age by so many areas. There’s humanism, there’s so many things that are vying and it’s because they never truly encountered the Man. And that’s what it comes down to and I feel like we’ve got to win them in those early years.
Sid: Well, I have a great sadness in my heart with what these kids have to be going through right now. But let’s get back to you. In college you have a best friend and your best friend happens to be your supplier of drugs. By this time you’re a hard core drug addict and he gets saved and you get offended, why?
Corey: Well, because well to preface that he had an intercessor praying mom who prayed all the time, my parents prayed, but the reason I got offended was because I had hung out with him, put up with all of his mess for all these years and in my opinion the last thing you want to do is get saved at twenty; that’s something you do at twenty-eight, twenty-nine when you are ready to settle down, have a family. I felt like Christians, my view of Christians were they were the most boring people on the planet; it wasn’t that I had anything against Christians it was that they seemed boring to me and I felt betrayed by him when he gave his life to Jesus, and I wanted nothing to do with him. So two weeks later he shows up at college where I was at, and he takes me to lunch and he begins to share with me that he went through a season where the Spirit realm was opened up to him where he was seeing angels and demons; seeing what was controlling people. And he told me that for that season that he was seeing that I was being controlled by real demons, by real spirits that I didn’t know about. And he said that it culminated on that very last night we’d been partying and the voice of the Lord broke into the middle of our party and the Lord said, “That satan is raising up an army, but I’m raising up an army too and I’m calling you out tonight and I want you to go call your friends out.” And so He’s telling me this over lunch, telling me, he’s saying “Corey, give your life to Jesus,” by this time I had two DWI’s, my license was gone and I said, “No, just take me back to school.” He drives back to the college and I’m about to get out of the van in the parking lot and right before I do the Holy Spirit fills the van, and I begin to shake violently like I’m having a seizure. And I begin to be aware about, one I began to see flashes of light between light and darkness. And what I felt in that moment Sid is that I felt the value and the power and the real battle over every soul, if there was a real battle in the spirit realm over every soul and I could see a tug of war between light and darkness over me.
Sid: I’ll tell you what, hold that thought, we’re out of time, but Corey has a brand new book called “The Glory Within,” the interior life and the power of speaking in tongues. And if you want to be motivated to understand the benefits and just be pushed to either start speaking in tongues for the first time in your life; or you just don’t emphasize it anymore it will change your life. And then we went and we interviewed some of the best guests we ever had that have had supernatural experiences in speaking in unknown tongues and we call it “PTT,” Personal Trainer for Tongues.
