The Prophetic History of the Road - The Road Less Traveled

Hey, I'm Pastor Steve Hole.

I want to empower you today to walk in your true identity as a worshiper and warrior.

Today, embrace the power of God's Word and the Holy Spirit.

Welcome to the Born for War podcast.

All right, we're going to do something a little different.

You can be seated.

Liz is up here with me, and we are going to tell you guys a story.

And this is the story of us coming to Colorado Springs and also the story of the road.

And we've never told it before.

We've told it in bits and pieces at different maybe events that have been smaller and stuff, but we've never actually done a sermon on this.

And Liz and I felt like we wanted to do it because this month in 2014, we started the church, The Road.

And so it's as we're coming up on our 10-year anniversary.

Isn't that exciting?

Feels like forever.

That, you know, it just seems like it's happened so fast.

But it's that journey that we wanted to then present.

I think what Liz and I felt like was hopefully will minister to the deepest needs of your heart because we're going to talk about some strange occurrences of how God spoke to us to come to Colorado Springs.

And by the way, when we came to Colorado Springs, except for one other time, we had never been here before.

So we had, I'm a Georgia guy.

We went to the University of Georgia.

Liz wasn't born in California, but grew up in California, went to UCLA, and how God put us together and then brought us here was kind of crazy.

And we didn't expect it and we didn't uh anticipate it at all.

But what we're gonna talk about is visions and dreams.

How many of you would say you've had a vision or a dream that you believe was from God?

Raise your hand.

Awesome, good.

Talking to the right crowd.

But we haven't really taught on it much in the past.

I've alluded to it, but this is gonna be our first time in front of all of you to share a little bit of our story that takes us way back actually into the 1980s.

And why don't you turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 2 to set the scene because there's some there's some prophetic people out there that base everything on visions and dreams.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

That is not Liz and I, and that's not the road.

We believe that visions and dreams augment, listen, augment God's word.

So you get some crazy vision or dream and it doesn't line up with scripture or there's no other confirmations, I would say probably it's the pizza that you had the night before.

Okay?

So this has to be confirmed by God.

It's through the witness of others, and I think you'll pick that up as you hear our story.

But look at Acts chapter 2, starting at verse 17.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

At Pentecost, isn't it interesting?

I find it very fascinating that Peter inaugurates the local church.

He basically is planting the first church with the first sermon after the resurrection of Christ.

And he starts with how God's going to speak in the latter days.

And Liz and I like to say that the language of the Holy Spirit is visions and dreams.

The language of the Holy Spirit is visions and dreams.

Listen to what he says.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

Now that's huge because in the Old Testament, primarily God spoke through his prophets, but now he's going to speak through an entire group of people that he now defines for us.

Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

Your young men shall see visions, circle visions.

Your old men shall dream dreams, circle dreams.

And on my men servants, that means slaves, male slaves, and on my maidservants, female slaves, I will pour out my spirit in those days, and they shall prophesy.

And so, right here in the first sermon in the New Testament, by the church, by Peter, he's prophesying that in the latter days, God's going to speak in new and varied and powerful ways, ways that we just couldn't expect.

And it's going to be amazing.

Well, Liz and I, because of our different backgrounds, were not expecting what began to happen to our life when we were in Japan.

Well, probably me a little more than you, because I did not grow up in the church.

I had some relatives that said if you get too nutty into religion, that's really bad.

And you will be kind of the scum of the earth.

So don't do that.

And I did not know a Christian at all.

No one said they were a Christian where I grew up.

I did not know one.

And my first Christian that I met was at UCLA when I was 18.

And I met a group of Christians, and they were so different than anyone I had ever met, those people.

And I was alarmed and alerted, like, oh my word, what is happening here?

I became a Christian when I was 18, but started opening my Bible when I was 19.

It took me a year.

And um, when I started reading the Bible the year before, it was Matthew, all the genealogies.

I'm like, I don't, I don't know these people, I don't, I don't understand.

I gave it up real quick.

And then I realized from some older Christians that this Bible was my love letter.

This Bible was a guide for my life.

And I once I got that, I would not put it down.

And I started seeing God do so many miracles.

And the first thing I did was surrender my life when I was 19.

You know, I only know one king that doesn't demand that we think he's great, and that's our God.

But he hopes we will think he's great because he wants to lead us into victory, into conquering.

And he started leading me as a young Christian, and I didn't know any other church template.

So when he said, Go share with this person, there's gonna be great fruit, I did it because I thought he spoke.

I thought that this was about visitation, heaven to me, little earthling.

I thought it was normal.

And so that's me.

I was the hidden people group that came in.

So, how many of you came to know the Lord later in life?

Let's say in your 20s or 30s or something like that.

Okay, you have quite an advantage in some ways over people like me who grew up in the church.

So I grew up in the church, my dad was a Lutheran pastor, and I never wanted to be a pastor.

I thought that would be the most boring job ever.

And um, and I think uh my vision of the church was quite negative at that time.

So when I was a freshman at the University of Georgia and I got injured as a gymnast, and some guys shared with me the pure gospel from the Bible.

Man, I was ready and I received it.

But soon I was under teaching that spoke kind of against things like visions or dreams or supernatural healing and things like that.

So Liz comes into it with a fresh mindset that just is open to God to do stuff.

And I actually came at the Bible and Christianity as kind of, I would call it like Bible only, Bible-only Christianity, which is great.

I mean, hey, that's better than no Bible, which is the way I was raised.

So I just was fascinated and love the word of God.

But then I remember us sitting at the kitchen table, yeah, and you said, I would never lead a church that's evangelical with the word and Holy Spirit over there.

I would never do that.

And I remember thinking, yes, you will.

There you go.

You always want to, by the way, you always want to marry up.

Don't marry down.

So we felt called to go to Japan.

I felt called to go to Japan before, I mean, Liz was feeling called, but hadn't met her yet.

So we smuggled, we were smuggling Bibles into China.

You many of you know this story, but in the smuggling of Bibles into China, um, I saw Liz.

I fell madly in love immediately.

Well, sort of, anyway.

We we met in China, we had our first date in Hong Kong, we fell in love in LA, and we got married in Tokyo.

And um, and two of our kids were born in Japan, and they actually have made in Japan stamped on their bottom.

Now, if you believe that, I've got some other land in Georgia that we can sell you.

But so we we go to Japan, we're working with university students in Tokyo, and it's just a fantastic ministry.

We get married there, um, we saw lots of stuff happen, and then we encountered the demonic.

And when we encountered the demonic and we had to cast out demons, that was like a paradigm shift.

If you were to put a term over this message today, it would be the paradigm shifts of Stephen Liz.

Because that was eye-opening.

When we had a demon with a different voice speaking to us and challenging us, and then in the name of Jesus casting it out and seeing that person get set free, it's like, oh my, we're living the Bible.

I mean, the stories here are real.

And so it was just it was eye-opening, it was heart-opening to us at that time.

And so um, God directed us to go to Okinawa.

So we go to Okinawa, Japan, which is a southern island on the island chain of Japan.

It's uh in the South China Sea, and the ministry exploded there.

We were seeing all kinds of people get healed, all kinds of people getting saved.

We have Bible studies going, everything's going great.

And I start hanging out with pastors in Okinawa.

Now, this is true even in Colorado Springs, that if you're more of a Pentecostal stripe, you're not gonna hang out with Presbyterians.

And if you're a conservative Presbyterian, you're not gonna hang out with liberal Methodists.

And if you are evangelical and you speak in tongues or believe in all that kind of stuff, you would never hang out with evangelicals that don't believe in that stuff, right?

Am I correct?

If you don't know that, that is the world we live in.

But in Okinawa, it's really different.

And I think it's an it's the fact that it's an island, it's the fact that only 2% of the population is Christian, they're actually unified.

So they don't really care if you are more into healing than they are.

They believe that if you kind of believe this book a lot, then you're kind of a good guy.

And so the I just was around these pastors that were unified and they worked together.

Then, as the director of Crew or Campus Crusade in Okinawa, I began to help minister different discipleship classes and stuff like that with the pastors, and you guys, all I can say is I fell in love with the local church.

I just began to see my desire shift from just being with college students to working with the local church.

And I remember one day, kind of I was walking on the campus and realizing, you know, if you're a church pastor, if you have a local church, you keep ministering to the same people every year.

You can grow those people, you can have a lifetime of friendship and relationship with them, versus college ministry, which was every three or four years, you know, they graduate and you start over.

And I remember thinking, I remember that the word in my mind was the genius of God to develop the local church.

And I started just hanging out more and more with pastors and falling in love with them.

And so the idea of being a pastor after my background was a massive paradigm shift.

I I and my dad's a great pastor, don't get me wrong.

You guys, you heard me um uh sing his praises, you know, all the time.

But I'm talking about the the institution, more of the institution of what I would call denominational pastoring.

Okay, that did not appeal to me.

And so as the shift was happening, then God was gonna speak some fresh revelation to us.

Um for me, that was a little freaky to think I was a missionary, this is what I signed up for.

Now my husband's talking about being a pastor.

I was like, what is that?

And what is a pastor's wife?

I didn't know any, except for I guess me.

And so I always like to say, forgive me if I don't meet your expectations as a pastor's wife, because I didn't know any any of them before I became one.

So you just have me.

Um but we started talking about what what this would look like, and it was kind of scary for me because we thought we were gonna live in Japan maybe till we died, but that was we were there.

I don't know that that had changed yet.

I don't know the idea of leaving Japan because that was gonna come with your dream.

Right.

So I had a dream one night, and it was that I was in a house, and there were lots of different women in there, and the women had different clothing, seasonal clothing on.

They had some had summer clothes lighter, and there was fall clothes, I had fall on, and there was a younger generation of women that had heavy clothes on, and the Lord said, These women are clothed in Christ in different ways, and I feel like the younger women, ladies, you will be even more clothed than my generation, and we will help you get there if you want help, but you will need that, and I'm excited about that part of my dream.

And then I also saw one of my kids that I hadn't even conceived yet in this dream.

And the Lord said, You need to name this one uh this name.

And I saw her face and I knew, yes, okay, we're gonna do that one.

So this dream was about me looking out a window in this house along with all the ladies in there, and I could see out the window snow-capped mountains, and I could see a rodeo in the backyard.

And I was thinking, what is happening here?

I felt like God was saying, I'm taking you here.

So I told Steve that dream.

At 3 a.m.

3 a.m.

Yeah, he woke me up.

Gotta, you gotta wake up for Jesus.

But not at 3 a.m.

So Liz has this dream.

She says, Steve, I think this has something to do with our future.

And um didn't mean anything to me, didn't mean anything to her.

Six months later, I get a call from the coach of the women's gymnastics program, Athletes in Action with crew, to ask if he could bring his team to Okinawa.

They were already going to Taiwan and they were going to South Korea, and then he wanted to come through Okinawa.

We had competed together.

He was at Long Beach State when I was at the University of Georgia.

He's now the coach.

I said, Yeah, come on.

So the girls come, they do their outreach using gymnastics to gather these huge crowds.

And then we were up at a Baptist retreat center in the northern part of Okinawa, and we're sitting out on a veranda, and I, again, I'm not even thinking about the dream or anything.

I just said, So, Dale, um, tell me about Colorado Springs, because that's where he lived.

He said, Well, if you imagine you're in a room, maybe with some people in a room and there's a window.

And if you were looking out that window over almost any part of Colorado Springs, if you're looking west, you see snow capped mountains, like most of the time.

And I went, okay.

And then he said, and uh, Rodeo Hall of Fame is also in Colorado Springs.

And I go, okay.

And then I get this sharp elbow in my side.

And he said, Remember the dream, remember the dream.

And I went, what dream?

You remember the dream I had six months ago, or I guess it was nine months ago at that point.

And I went, oh yeah.

So that got us sort of thinking, you guys, about the fact that God might be calling us out of Japan and that he might be calling us specifically to Colorado Springs.

And I think at that point we'd never been here.

We'd never been to Colorado.

All I knew was the Olympic Training Center was here.

I didn't know anything else about Colorado Springs.

No desire to be here, no desire to be in um in Colorado at all.

But God began to work and work some stuff in our hearts.

Now, being missionaries, we also had to do furlough.

And those of you who have done missionary work know that you got to take a furlough.

So we went to Georgia and we had somebody ask us to come to a special meeting.

I like to call this week that we had in Georgia our holy week, because so many great things happened.

So many amazing things happened.

I had a dream where there was going to be, well, there was a scroll that came down from heaven, and the Lord said, I want to write something special about one of your kids.

And I knew which kid it was.

And I and so just remember that because it was so amazing to see a scroll coming down.

It had nothing written on it, and God said, I'm gonna write that on this scroll.

So then that same week, I have a dream.

How many of you are old enough to remember Prairie Home Companion on the radio with Garrison Keeler?

Okay, so in the dream, there's a guy up on a stage who looks like Garrison Keeler, and he's saying to the crowd in the dream, I'm in the back, he's saying, Come forward for prayer.

So the next thing I know in the dream, I'm right in front of the stage.

He lays his hand on my head, and wham, the power of God hits me.

This is in the dream, and then I wake up.

Okay?

So then we are on furlough, we're speaking at churches.

And before we go to this meeting, I have this dream that God said, Your husband is being attacked by a spirit of tradition.

And I didn't tell him, I'm like, he doesn't want to hear that.

So I So you guys remember I grew up Lutheran, and before Dietrich, how many of you know who Dietrich Bonhoeffer is?

Okay, we've we've had Eric Metaxis here twice, and so his seminal work on Bonhoeffer is one of the best.

There's several really good ones out there.

But I grew up, I grew up hearing about Bonhoeffer.

I grew up hearing about Tillich, and I heard grew up here, Bart and the great theologians of the Lutheran Church and stuff.

So tradition definitely defined who I was.

So we get invited to this meeting.

So we had spoken on one side of Atlanta.

We drive as fast as we can over to this other meeting, um, and we walk in and check this out.

This is a church at that time that was meeting in a Jewish synagogue.

It's Presbyterian, but it's Pentecostal.

So this is this is a bunch of weirdos, okay?

And we're starting to get kind of weird.

So we come in and it's packed out because this prophetic guy is there to speak, and I look through the crowd, and I go, Liz, that's the dude in the dream.

That's the Garrison Keeler guy.

So we're looking at him, and he sits there, I mean, he's standing there, and he says, Everybody who needs prayer, please come forward.

Verbatim, same thing in the dream.

So, you know, I get up there, and he comes up to me and he begins to prophesy.

And he prophesies about one of our kids and what the future held for that child, which has all come true in his life.

Remember the scroll that Liz had the dream about.

And then he spoke about something holding me back, arrows being shot at my feet.

Remember her dream.

And I said, I know what that is.

And then I said it.

Yeah.

It's a spirit of tradition.

Yep.

And then as he's speaking, men and women, I hear in my spirit resign, resign, resign.

Three times I hear resign.

And then over the next six months, I had to resign three different leadership roles that I had in Japan.

And God then, which we're not going to go into the details here because of time, but God led us to go to Fuller Theological Seminary in Southern California.

By this time, we feel like we are supposed to church plant.

We are supposed to plant a church in Colorado Springs.

We don't know the timing of it all.

We were familiar with the vineyard movement.

The vineyard movement was a probably the state-of-the-art church planting movement in the 80s and 90s.

And we were, I had read two books by a man named John Wimber at that time.

So I was familiar with the vineyard, but we came back to go to Fuller.

And we thought we were just gonna find a church near the seminary and dig in.

But I had a dream the very first night, and it was this phrase, This is your homestead.

So again, I woke him up at this time I think it was four and said, And we had we were already on jet lag too.

So we had come from we had gone from Okinawa to Taiwan to Hawaii to LA, and she wakes me up again.

Yeah, and we had been invited.

This is kind of a part of our MO.

I just want you to know.

We had been invited to the vineyard that next day, this first Sunday.

So but we thought we're just a visit once.

And so we go there, and this lady stands up and says, This is your homestead.

I was like, again, like, oh, what?

What what happened was there was a leader in this church that somehow talked to you, had your phone number and name, and gave this piece of paper with all this info to the second in in charge at the vineyard and said, call this guy.

And he was like, Okay, and didn't know why he was calling you.

And we didn't have cell phones, we had like a landline on the wall.

So it was hard for him to get a hold of you.

Yeah.

And he did.

And I remember it was the phone, I think the phone was green.

I remember the phone being green on a really, really long cord.

Oh, yeah.

So this guy's name was Bob Fulton.

He was the brother-in-law of John Wimber, called me.

He didn't even know why he was calling me.

We started a relationship that then led to me becoming the director of the Vineyard Bible Institute.

This is while I'm at Fuller, and then became the assistant to John Wimber, the head of the Association of Vineyard Churches and the Anaheim Vineyard, very large church at that time.

And um, so one day, we've been working there about a year.

John and Bob already know that we feel like we're being led to eventually go to Colorado Springs and plant a church.

He calls me, we go to lunch, and he says, I want to make you an offer.

I want to make you an offer you cannot refuse.

And what he did is he said, um, he gave me a salary and said, Go through Yor Belinda.

If I don't know if you've ever been to your Belinda, but it's a very nice part of Orange County, and just pick the house you want, and we'll get you house just like that.

And yet in my spirit, I felt like we're supposed to not be there.

But here was this offer uh to stay there and to be the evangelist for the Association of Vineyard Churches and for Anaheim Vineyard.

So I come back and tell Liz she's not happy about the offer at all because we're supposed to go to Colorado Springs, right?

And I'm just thinking security, man.

And she's thinking savior.

All right.

So we go into three days of fasting and prayer.

So we walk all through the different neighborhoods of Yorba Linda, we're fasting, we're praying, and we come into staff meeting.

So we come into staff meeting, there's worship, there's a teaching by John.

No, no, John wasn't there because he's in London.

There's a teaching, and we're all done.

I'm getting ready to leave, and this lady walks up to me and she says, You've never met me, I've never met you.

Your name is Steve.

God told me during worship your name is Steve.

And that's the same name as my husband.

Am I right?

I go, Yeah.

The Lord told me to tell you this that during worship I had a vision of seeing the snow-capped mountains, and that you were standing there, and God is saying, You're being called to the Rocky Mountains.

God has given you the Rocky Mountains, and He's already told you that, but you're not listening.

And then I remember she looked at her watch, she said, and it's March the 1st, and it's time for you to march.

And I just began to weep and weep, and that day I went into Bob's office and resigned from my position there with the Association of Vineyard Churches.

And we had just talked about it.

John's, I mean, Bob's kind of excited, kind of sad.

He was just a great mentor to me.

And then there's a phone call, and one of the secretaries tells me there's a phone, there's a call in your office.

I go in, it's John Wember calling me from uh the London airport, and he said, I was standing here with some of the pastors, and God told me you have something to tell me.

And I said, Yeah, John, I just had this encounter uh with this woman, and she prophesied to me, and I and I think I need to resign and not take your offer.

And he goes, Who was that?

And so I'm not gonna say her name, but I gave the name and he goes, Man, you can take that to the bank.

If she said that, I know that's the Holy Spirit speaking to you.

And so at that point, we began the process of moving to Colorado Springs.

So we came to Colorado Springs and um started pastoring here, you guys.

So in 1994, we moved here and we started Mountain Springs Church uh in our living room because our basement was too big.

Um we didn't know, we didn't know anybody, and God just blessed it.

He just blessed it in a mighty and powerful way.

Um for 20 years we did that, and then some things began to happen.

Well, in October of 2013, I went on a getaway.

My husband was so nice, he let me go have quiet at times, and I would go for two nights, just 10 minutes away at a hotel, and I took tons of books.

I had probably 10 books, and I'd come in and they'd be piled on the little luggage cart, and people are like, Whoa, this what is happening here?

And what I would do is I would just be like, What which one do I want to read?

I don't know, but I'm so excited to get some quiet and read.

So I grab a couple books, and those books both have an entry that talks about a road less traveled.

And then I never turn on the TV because I want quiet, right?

But I kind of feel like watching TV, which is really weird for me.

And I have this little angel over here saying, Don't turn on the TV.

And I have this little other voice going, turn on the TV.

So I turn it on, and actually Robert Redford was in an interview and he was talking about the road less traveled.

And I was like, What is happening here?

So I go, I get back from my retreat, it was great.

I said I had a weird thing though about God speaking that we're maybe going on a road less traveled.

That doesn't make sense, so we're not.

Yeah, so I didn't I didn't really think much of it, but a month later in November, I just finished a seminar uh that I'd done on spiritual warfare, and I came into the lobby of our church, and there was a grim-faced elder who escorted me to my office and told me that I was being forced to be on a six-month sabbatical.

And I was like, why?

And so the elders tried to explain it to me.

I didn't I didn't fully understand it.

I was blown away.

And let me just tell you, if you don't have a good explanation and you come back to this woman, um, she was incensed.

And so then we're talking over the next week or two and remembering the road less traveled word.

Then over the next four months, you guys, we hear the road less traveled four more times.

So seven times.

I mean, I remember one of them was I was driving out to go pheasant hunting out in uh out on the the uh east side uh toward Peyton, and I can still remember I'm going through Peyton, I'm on sweet road, I'm driving along, and it was a it was a Christian broadcast on the radio, and he's talking about the road less traveled.

And it's like, whoa.

And then HB London, yeah, the HB London thing's crazy.

So HB London is a cousin of Dr.

James Dobson.

He was vice president at one time of Focus in the Family, and he was a mentor of mine.

He and Beverly invited us out to Southern California to spend time with them because I was just so broken.

I was so confused about what was going on.

And we're sitting there talking on the last day that we're with uh HP and Beverly, and I just mentioned to him, did he mention the poem first?

I think we said, you know what, we have a lot of like yucky things that are happening in our lives, but we want to tell you about this road less traveled message we're giving.

And he gets these deer in the head light eyes.

Yeah.

Um So then he says, I can't believe you said that.

And I said, What?

He said, You know the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.

He said, Yeah, he says, I'm preaching on that poem uh tomorrow at church.

Here it is.

And then here it is.

And so he pulls it out and hands it to us.

That was the seventh time that we had heard the roadless travel.

So then we went out to Joshua Tree.

Many of you maybe know where Joshua Tree is, and we started hiking, and that's when we knew, I think, that God was speaking to us about starting the road.

That's why the we that's why you're called the road here, is because it's based on the roadless travel spoken to us seven times.

So a group of us, Jay and Jan, and many of you in this room, joined us for 40 nights of prayer in the chapel over here in Every Home for Christ.

And we just prayed and sought the Lord.

It was this month, 10 years ago, that we did that because Chapel Hills Church was willing to let us have the facility, part using the facility and stuff.

And um, so on May 24th, um, we launched the road.

And that was 10 years ago.

And here's what's cool about it, too, is it was about, was it four, I think it was four or five years later when we merged.

So we merged, and that's the reason we have the road at Chapel Hills, because of the Chapel Hills connection with them, and and that was the beginnings of the church.

So that's a little bit of our story.

We left out a lot because of time, but isn't that exciting what God can do?

And you know, I want to just say to each of you that God may be doing something in your life that's uniquely different than anything you've done before.

Even you coming to this church might be uniquely different because of the work he's doing in your heart.

Be open to spiritual paradigm shifts.

That God might speak to you, that God might be orchestrating, and don't let your chronological age get in the way of new things that God can do in you.

Even as you grow older, God's not done with you.

And he may open doors and close doors that will shock you.

But you've been, listen, you've been uniquely prepared by your past for something God's doing in your future.

You know, the Lord has designed this world so that we don't fully understand our significance until we die.

Because we're supposed to walk by faith and not by sight.

And there is no king that ever would not demand greatness that you would say he's great, but our king does.

He lets you say he's great.

He's a gentleman, he won't force his way with you, and he is a king, and I one of my greatest desires is to encourage people to make him great in their lives.

Let's make the the Lord great.

And I want to just say that there is a verse um right here on the screen.

This is um at the end of Moses' journey, and he said to the people of Israel right before he died, he said, For I proclaim the name of the Lord, ascribe greatness to our God.

He is the rock, his work is perfect, even in our messy journeys, even in our messes, for all his ways are justice.

A God of truth and without injustice, righteous and upright is he.

Thank you for listening to the Forn for War podcast.

We hope today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.

To connect with Pastor Steve's sermons, books, and blog, visit Steve Holtonline.org.

God bless.