Sid: Many people are crying out to God “I want to be free. I’ve prayed but I’m not free.” My guest this week is Bishop George Bloomer he’s Senior Pastor at Bethel Family Worship Center in Durham, North Carolina. Yesterday we found out he was a drug addict, he was involved in a cult, he was involved in gangs, he ended up in prison, and in prison he found the Lord. But he really abstained from drugs he was set free and shortly thereafter he continued in his life of drugs while preaching. But one day God had mercy and he was sovereignly set free of his cocaine addiction and he hasn’t had it since. There’s a big difference between deliverance and abstinence. Most Christians are moving in their own will power rather than being supernaturally sovereignly set free. Now another problem George that you had was as a child you were molested. What happened?
George: I call that experience 3D because it was in 453 Columbia Street Brooklyn, New York apartment 3D. There was a young lady who had a live in lover a common law husband and they broke up. They would come to our house on the weekends and gamble and play cards and party in the projects, that was the norm for the weekend. I would do errands for her run to the store, go to the laundry mat do things where she’d give me a $1 or so in those days. When he left her she would hug me and pay me and the hugs would get closer and more intense and the kisses would be closer to my mouth. One afternoon she took me into the adult world of sexuality. The thing that is indelibly impressed in mind and feared in mind about the deliverance is that it robbed me from my innocence at age, the latter part of my 11 year to age 12. This went on for about a year or so. She robbed me of my innocence; we used to play a little game in the streets in Brooklyn called Skelzies. Take bottle tops and fill them with asphalt and use them to knock other kid’s tops out of the box. Sort of like a homemade projects ghetto version of marbles. My pockets were filled with the bottle tops that I had won from the other kids. But when that sexual urge kicked in I would stand up and go upstairs for 10-20 minutes be a man and then return right back downstairs sweating and playing Skelzies again. It bothered me as I grew up it made it impossible for me to date and look at younger ladies who were my age. There was a young girl in the projects whose name was Tanya I was really really excited about her and I liked her. I started talking to her and her mother came and put her fist in my chest and pushed me against the wall and told me “No Bloomer was ever going to be involved with her daughters for me to stay away from her daughter!” That stayed with me years and years and years and I remembered at age 32 I was called back to Red Hook to the school that I grew up in, Public School 27. About a thousand people showed up and I’m back on my own soil in my own area to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Up comes to me this woman who’s asking me if I remember who she is, and I didn’t. When she told me her name she said “I’m Tanya’s mother” immediately I remembered and she told me Tanya’s fate and plight in life and how she was strung out on drugs, and she had crack babies, 3 babies who were born crack addicts. She turned to walk away from me and looked back at me said to “I sure wished you and Tanya would have stayed together.” Immediately I was overwhelmed by the presence of God. The little boy whose head was stuck in my chest, and whose feet was stuck in my ankles, and fingers and hands that was stuck at my wrists began to grow into my physical hands, my physical feet and come up through my neck and choke me as that little boy began to grow in me. I believe that was the day the Lord delivered me. The rejection that I had received from this woman held me hostage, held this little 12 year old boy hostage entrapped inside a 32 year old man with all the sexual problems and addictions that I had dealt with in coming up. It seemed to me like I needed to be released, or affirmed, or accepted by this woman who had rejected me so many years prior to that.
Sid: How did this change your life?
George: Oh completely, completely. I’m married and I have 2 children…
Sid: Were you married at the time?
George: Absolutely. I was married but quiet in my marriage. Not as attentive, not as loving as I should have been. My marriage changed totally. I was able to fully embrace my wife and trust her as a woman and protect and cover my children. Not become overbearing but to protect and to cover them and they’ve grown up to become very very beautiful young ladies ages of 16 and 17. It brought a great deliverance in my life and I speak to those in your listening audience may have been abused and are dealing with secrets and addictions, and rejections as it goes. To find someone that you can confide in and tell them your story, get free from you so that you can live the rest of your life.
Sid: How does someone handle… God developed the human mind in such a way that sometimes when trauma happens to us when we’re young we block it and bury it so deeply we don’t even know what it is. We just know the symptoms of it, we don’t even remember what happened like you remembered what happened to you. What should someone do about that?
George: What you said is absolutely true because for a number of years I didn’t remember, I knew something was wrong.
Sid: Hmm.
George: But subconsciously I didn’t remember but God knew that He was moving me into this vein of ministry. So in order to deal with it He had to bring me back to it. I’ll tell you a quick story, before I went preach for Bishop T.D. Jakes at Manpower he called me and asked me would I be one of the speakers. I said “Yes.” A friend of mine’s son plays opposite to Denzel Washington in a movie entitled “The Hurricane.” I bought the video and began to watch the video because I wanted, you know support his son’s role and I wanted to know about his nephew. I was watching the video at a party that I had given, and when I got to the part in the movie where Denzel Washington was locked in solitary confinement cell. He came apart from himself physically and emotionally I couldn’t handle it. I started crying and sobbing in the middle of the movie was and I got up walked into the hallway. A friend of mine came out and he said “What’s wrong?” I told him “I can’t handle all this I don’t know what’s happening but I can’t handle it.” What God was doing at that moment was reminding me of all of the issues that I hadn’t dealt with and that I needed to get free from it because I was put into a solitary confinement cell and there I would talk to myself constantly and contemplate killing myself and taking myself out laughing and joking with myself over these 4 weeks that I was in the dark in a confinement cell with defecation coming down the walls when they’d flush the commodes from upstairs. God had to help me to deal with that before I could go into that arena and minister to those 36,000 men who had come from all different walks of life to Manpower to be set free.
Sid: Your book, your new book “Weapons for Warriors.” If you don’t mind I’ve subtitled it “Armed and Dangerous.” What will happen when someone reads your book?
George: A number of things when they begin to read the 18 lessons on spiritual warfare and realize that you can be set free and delivered from anything that has happened to you in your past. When they begin to realize that there’s lessons in the book that deals with the sovereignty of God and confrontational lessons. The first lesson is “Satan You’re not a Solvent.” To put Satan in his place and let him know that God is solvent over our lives. The next lesson is “The Plot to Destroy our Destiny” and that’s going to set a lot of people free. There’s a lesson in there that deals with Satan’s fall…
Sid: Most people are missing their destiny because of the snares that the devil has set. Like for instance, if you weren’t set free the last thing in the world you’d be dead right now, I’m sure.
George: I’d be dead. I’d be dead. The heroin would’ve taken me out. A few weeks before I walked down the DeKalb Avenue to go into the church to get set free, I had started contemplating shooting up heroin. I had been talking to people finding getting me information on it because the high of snorting cocaine and smoking it I was looking for a greater high going to another level. It was there that God delivered and set me free before I was going to… my destiny would have been destroyed I would have been dead. But Satan is a defeated foe and the people of God need to know that. When we get know our adversary and know the demonology and government and the devices of Satan and how he uses depression, oppression in order to possess us. Then God will teach us how to cast the devil out. When we understand that we understand the very phases of demonology and what is witchcraft, and religious demons and how to identify and break generational curses. How to reject rejection, and then those…
Sid: I love that title: “Reject rejection.”
George: (Laughing) Those addictions won’t be able to hold us then God will help us to be… to confront the spirit of pride, and embrace the power of worship and realize that He has encamped angels round and about us. That He has truly taken us from the old existence of Adam and placed us in His loving tender care. The new Adam which is Christ Jesus and you will be armed and dangerous with this book.
Sid: But let me ask you this, usually people have to come in person to be ministered. Can someone really be set free just through following what this book says?
George: Absolutely, totally.
Sid: Are you seeing many people set free?
George: Well first I was set free. I was putting together the final edits on my book “Witchcraft in the Pews,” and my family had gone out to the state fair and I was in the house alone by myself. I was doing some writing but I was listening to a tape because…
Sid: Ohh! We’re out of time we’ll tell this story on tomorrow’s broadcast.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth