Roberts Liardon - Visions of Heaven: 4 Stories of People Who Have Seen the After-Life

DESTINY IMAGE BOOKS BY ROBERTS LIARDON

The Azusa Street Revival

Frank Bartlemans Azusa Street

Smith Wigglesworth on Prayer, Power and Miracles

Copyright 2012Roberts Liardon

All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request. Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked TLB are taken from The Living Bible; Tyndale House, 1997, 1971 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from The Message. Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. Take note that the name satan and related names are not capitalized. We choose not to acknowledge him, even to the point of violating grammatical rules.

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Promoting Inspired Lives.

Previously published as We Saw Heaven by Destiny Image

Previous ISBN: 978-0-7684-2381-5

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ISBN 13 TP: 978-0-7684-0297-1

ISBN 13 Ebook: 978-0-7684-8792-3

For Worldwide Distribution, Printed in the U.S.A.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 / 16 15 14 13 12

ROBERTS LIARDONS LIFE AND MINISTRY are having a powerful impact on the Body of Christ and appear to be poised to reach a new level in their influence for the Lords last-day ministry.

As Ive preached for his growing church, with the students of his Bible school attending, I sense something special is moving upon them. It could partially be from the influence of the dreams that he describes in this book, virtually enmeshing his life from a child. He is a strong Bible preacher and teacher, also a gatherer of materials of noted men and women of God of the past 100 years in an effort to reveal how God does His mighty deeds.

It is my feeling as Roberts continues to obey God, grow in the Word, build his strong teaching, and persevere, totally committed to the Lord Jesus, his impact will be immeasurable on thousands worldwide.

Sincerely,

Oral Roberts

(Written in 2000)

WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS old, my life was, I think, fairly ordinary in most respects. Eight-year-old boys are not consumed with jobs or making a car payment or planning their retirement fund. Instead, their days revolve around school, their friends and pets, their favorite sports, and their families.

My own life was much the same, living in Americans heartland. I enjoyed meeting up with my friends to play sports. The summer I was eight, I remember rushing indoors from a baseball game and hurrying through my chores so that I could get back outside to more baseball! And yet, there are some aspects of my existence that were definitely far from average and certainly out of the ordinary.

When I was eight years old, I visited Heaven.

Train Up a Child

I was born February 14, 1966, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My parents had moved there so that my mother could attend the charter class of 1965 at Oral Roberts University (ORU). I was born while she was attending ORU, and because I was the first baby boy born to a student, I was named Kenneth Roberts Liardon.

ORU Founder and then-President Oral Roberts and his wife, Evelyn, wanted the privilege of helping name the first boy and the first girl who were born to students of what was at that time a new university. I have always been proud of my name because of its origin.

When I was between five and six years old, my father left us and divorced my mother, and I did not see him again for many years. My grandmother, an Assembly of God pastor, then came to live with us. She had pastored for many years alongside my grandfather. Together, they had started more than 20 churches, mainly country Pentecostal congregations, during their ministry together.

My grandfather had died when I was about one year old. After that, Grandmother came to Tulsa to help raise my sister, Priscilla, and me in order that my mother could finish school and still work to support us.

What I remember most about those childhood years was all the prayer and study of the Bible that occurred in our home. These things were a central part of our lives. We had more prayer at home than we did at church! I have often said that there was more spiritual activitymore healings, and more power and evidence of Godin our front room than at some churches.

I dont say these things to be critical or derogatory. These are simply the facts. I believe we saw healings and answers to prayer because there was so much awareness of God in our home.

Both my mother and my grandmother spent time with my sister and me, training us in the way we should go (see Prov. 22:6). Grandmother, however, was able to spend more time with Priscilla and me than our mother, who was working and finishing school. Even as a child, I knew that I was called to preach; and because Grandmother was a preacher, she naturally spent additional time with me.

Her training mainly involved prayer and reading Gods Word, the Bible. When we had family prayer, my sister and I were not allowed to just sit and listen; and we were certainly not allowed to watch television or color in coloring books when the adults prayed, either!

When it was time to pray, we had to kneel down just as they did. We came from a background where many people felt they werent really praying if they were not on their knees. Priscilla and I werent expected to pray the entire time our mother and grandmother prayed, because their prayer times were, on occasion, hours long.

We were, however, instructed to pray as much as we could. Our mother and grandmother understood the limits of our attention spans and physical stamina, and they encouraged us to pray to that point and then just beyond it to build our endurance in prayer. In that way, they trained us to be able to enter into a long period of prayer when we sensed God calling us to do that.

Naturally, we prayed in English, but we also prayed in tongues. The Bible mentions this as a heavenly prayer language, given by God to Christian believers. Most of the time, we do not know exactly what we are praying when we pray in tongues, but the Holy Spirit of God prays through us just what is needed. The apostle Paul mentions the importance of praying in both our human language and in the unknown language of tongues in First Corinthians 14:15:

what shall I do? I will do both. I will pray in unknown tongues and also in ordinary language that everyone understands (TLB).

We also read our Bibles daily at home. It was simply a part of our lifestyle. In some families, the children might be expected to make their beds, fold their own laundry, or care for the pets; in our family, Priscilla and I were expected to read four chapters of the Bible a day, so that we could read it through in a year. This was an assigned chore, in a sense, but it certainly was not a grinding, unpleasant burden to my sister and me. It was just what we did as a familyhow we lived.