“In a dream, I saw Jesus, and I had a moment with Him. And it changed my life. I woke up from it, and I was just emotional—for several days, I felt like I was under the weight of this visitation that I had.
“It changed the way I wrote music, changed the way I preached—it changed everything,” Pastor Jonathan Stockstill tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. After his powerful experience, Stockstill believes most people are missing out on the real Jesus, and he’s working to bring Him to as many as he can through his preaching ministry at Bethany Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, his music career and his new book, The Real Jesus.
An encounter Stockstill had during the relief efforts for Hurricane Ida, which hit his area hard, reinforced the importance of a personal knowledge of the real Jesus, he says.
“I was walking down the street of one of the [church] campuses where we were passing out food, and there was a man sitting on one of the steps, eating a meal that we had just provided for him,” Stockstill says. “And I didn’t mean for this question to be super engaging. I just said, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ … And he looked up at me, and he just started to cry, just out of the question, ‘How you doing?’
“So I realized this was a real hurting person,” Stockstill says. “He obviously didn’t have power in his house. And so I sat down; I just started to converse with him, and his wife had left him with their two kids, and he was a chef—lost his job during COVID, and we were talking about how life was hard.
“And I opened the Scriptures to where it says, Matthew Chapter 11, ‘Come unto Me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I’ll give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, for it’s light.’
“I read that Scripture and when I did, this guy just broke and began to cry,” Stockstill says. “And I was able to lead him into relationship with Christ.'”
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