Sid:   What happens when you’re a Baptist minister, you have a love for God, you have a love for people, you get involved in prison ministry, you’re doing it some twenty years.  You’ve had thousands of salvations. You’ve been in over 700 prisons and you see the same people getting out of prison and then coming back all the time.  There’s got to be something more, were you getting frustrated Don Dickerman and Don by the way I’m speaking to at his home in Bedford, Texas.  Don were you getting frustrated or did you just figure that’s the way it is?

Don:  I think a little bit of both Sid, frustrated more so as the years went by and as you said, “I would see the same people who I had seen in chapel services and felt like were genuinely born again, get out of prison and not be able to make it on the outside.  And you know I think that I was trying to apply the verse of scripture that “Any many be in Christ, he’s a new creature, a new creation and old things are passed away, all things are become new.”  And that’s not what I was seeing.

Sid:  And of course you were also taught, I mean on the plus side you were given a wonderful background in the word of God, but on the negative side you were taught that the gifts of the spirit are not for today.  And so you were also like in a fight with one arm tied behind your back.

Don:  That’s true, I don’t know my seminary and church training wasn’t so much that the gifts weren’t available, but they certainly didn’t talk about them.  It was a problem because I was seeing things that I knew had a spiritual meaning and had a spiritual answer, but I didn’t know how to apply it and I didn’t and that part was frustrating.

Sid:  There was a turning point in your life and it was in Galveston Texas you were taking kind of a break and you were sobbing in your bed.  Why were you sobbing?

Don:  Well, for the reason that we just talked about, I would see so many people return to prison and I felt like in some respect that that I wasn’t being effective and another respect that the gospel was not being effective and that troubled me.  And I remember crawling up in a motel bed and just weeping and my prayer was pretty much, “God, why can’t I be a deliverer?  Why can’t I get people out of bondage?  And I don’t think I knew exactly what I was praying and asking for, but it was that kind of prayer, what am I missing?  And it wasn’t long after that that I had an experience while preaching in a prison, in a federal prison in Three Rivers Texas.  And there was an officer, this is really unusual, you know I preached in 850 or more different prisons and experiences are pretty much the same, inmates come to church and they know that they have problems, but in this particular evangelistic service there was an officer seated in the chapel with the men and that’s very unusual, I had never seen that before and he was worshipping with them.  And when the service was over he motioned to the officer that was on duty and he said, “I’ll walk him to his car, I want to talk to him.”  So as we walked across the grounds of that prison on a beautiful night, he said, “I need to tell you something and I’m going to shorten this story a little bit, but he actually followed me as I was going back to Corpus Christy where I was staying on this particular trip and as I was about to get on the Interstate 37 I pulled up to a little grocery store or service station and he pulled up right behind me and he came up to the car window, he was just bouncing with excitement.  And he said, “Brother I need to tell you something, he said that while you were preaching tonight I had a vision and he said, “I saw you standing in a big black pot, and he was describing it with his hands.”  And he said, “In this pot there was oil bubbling all around you, not boiling it was just bubbling, and all around this pot he said as far as you could see there was just like a sea of people and the stench from their sickness was nauseating as it went up into the heavens.  He said, “That oil began to bubble up and as it ran off of your head down your arms and such,” he said “the people were healed.”  And he said, “Get ready brother, God’s fixen to pour it out on you.”  Well, that’s even hard for me to talk about now.

Sid:  Now, had you ever had anyone ever given you a vision before?  Had you ever had a vision?

Don:    No that was my first experience.

Sid:  That was off your grid through, so did you immediately reject it?

Don:  No, I knew I knew it was the Holy Spirit and I knew that it was something I had been longing for, I wanted to see people healed, I didn’t know how to make it happen.  But I remember driving back to Corpus, I couldn’t keep the tears out of my eyes and my prayer was “God, I don’t know how to do this.”  But there was an assurance that came, “You just keep on doing what you are doing, preach the gospel.  And what happened it started happening, people began to be healed in our services and I wouldn’t do anything but preach as I always had.  And I would start getting letters from inmates telling me, I know that you don’t know this, but while you were preaching heat came all over me and…

Sid:  Well what would you think when people are saying heat comes all over them and they are getting healed and all your doing is speaking, you’re not doing, you weren’t praying for the sick were you?

Don:  No, no.  I was just preaching, but it was with an anointing I had not really known before.  I knew something was happening and it was overwhelming to me, I knew that it was the Holy Spirit and I knew that I hadn’t done anything you know to make it happen.  But with it came a boldness that services would go by and I would get these kind of reports, I began to walk in that and speak toward that happening, I believed it was going to happen.  And you know I think since that night I could say that there’s not been a service anywhere that we’ve had in prison or out where someone hasn’t experienced healing.  And you know as it progressed, I knew it was the Holy Spirit and I was so hungry for putting this in context with what I had been taught and what I had actually never experienced, but I began to see inmates come at the altar call and as I would pray for them, they would fall and sometimes even when I got close to them.  And I, you know I didn’t that’s what I had a difficult time with; I didn’t know what that was.  I knew about the things that happened in God’s word and how the soldiers fell back and you know I understood those things, but I knew I wasn’t doing anything to make it happen.  And it was overwhelming sometimes I would leave the services and I would have to pull over the side of the road and weep with thanksgiving.  And then some of the frustrating part of that was coming back to the churches and knowing that it wasn’t going to happen, you know sitting in the congregation and you know saying you know that’s not going to happen here today.

Sid:  You know Don many people have a healing ministry and I understand exactly what you are saying and even the frustration of what you’re saying but there are few people that have such a practical balanced deliverance ministry.  How did you happen to get into deliverance?

Don:  You know sometimes I say, “God tricked me into that,”

Sid:  I would think He had to ha-ha.

Don:  You know I wasn’t looking for it but in the prison experience I did have many guys come to me and say “Look, I know I have demons, you know can you help me?”  And I didn’t, I didn’t really know what to do with that, but I knew that it was real, I knew what Jesus said.   And I was in a prison in Canada, a women’s prison in Kingston, Ontario Canada.  My wife was with me and a lady came up to me at the altar call she said, “I have demons and I know that you can help me, I know you understand.”  That was my first experience and I had met a man Bruce Jenkins, who still has a deliverance ministry in Michigan right outside of Lancing, I had met him and we had talked.  So I told this girl that you know I know someone who does deliverance and if you maintain contact with me, we’ll minister through the mail and so on.  I’ll get Reverend Jenkins to come up here; we’ll meet and take you through deliverance.   Well, that’s a hard process to even get that arranged in a prison, but we did and what happened is Reverend Jenkins wasn’t able to make it, he didn’t show up and I was there and she was ready for deliverance.  And so I kind of took a step of faith and I remember praying “God I know what the word says, I know what Jesus did and so we met in a private room in the prison.

Sid Roth:  I’ll tell you what, hold that thought right there and I see how God tricked you into deliverance ministry.  But the truth of the matter is there are so many people with problems, they’ve prayed and prayed, and prayed and never had any answers and that’s because there’s doors that give legal access to the demonic.

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