Episode 83

When God reached down from heaven to remove barriers and save Edward Thal’s soul, no one realized the extent to which that God was setting in motion a series of dominoes that would greatly benefit so many people around the world, both saved and unsaved. Edward Thal was a very successful business man in South Africa where he was born and raised, but he walked away from it all and moved to the west as he began an earnest search for God. When God was pleased to reveal Himself, the barriers came tumbling down and his new life in Christ took off. Join us on this episode of the Removing Barriers Podcast as we discover how Edward Thal’s barriers were removed.

So he led her to Christ. She got saved. And then she came home and asked me if she could invite him to our home. And I said, sure, on one condition. I don’t want to hear any of his religious nonsense anyway. So he came to us and of course, he immediately started to witness to me and he shared the gospel with me. And I kept telling him, I don’t want to hear this nonsense, it’s just religious propaganda and it’s not part of my consciousness. And he wouldn’t stop. I finally had to grab him and physically throw him out of my house and Slam the door. And I stood there after I had been so rude to him and thought to myself, You’ve got a problem.

Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers Podcast. I’m Jay and I’m MCG and we’re attempting to remove barriers so we can all have a clear view of the cross. This is episode 83 of the Removing Barriers podcast, and this is the 23rd in the series of How Were Your Barriers Removed? And in this episode we’ll find out how Edward Thal’s barriers were removed when he came to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Hi, this is Jay MCG and I would like for you to help us remove barriers by going to Removingbarriers.Net and subscribing to receive all things removing barriers. If you’d like to take your efforts a bit further and help us keep the mics on, consider donating at removingbarriers.net/Donate. Removing a Clear View of the Cross.

Brother Thal, it’s a pleasure and welcome to the Removing Barriers podcast. Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you, and I look forward to spending the next hour or so with you. Great. Well, let’s jump into it.

What state or country were you born in? I was born in South Africa a long time ago. I was a victory baby from the Second World War on May 23, 1946. Where in South Africa were you born? A city called East London, named for London in England because that’s where a group of early settlers arrived from London to establish a British colony in that part of South Africa.

Interesting. Tell us more about East London. What was it there? Well, I only spent the first few years of my life there. It’s a seaside city, a small Port. The time going up was spent mainly on the beach. Frankly, in my first six years of life, all I remember is spending all day on the beach or in rock pools looking for fish and crabs and things like that. Of course, it was a long time ago, so it was a very secure, idyllic sort of existence. In fact, I was very fortunate. I was born at a time when South Africa was a very tranquil, beautiful country. The different races got on very well together. The apartheid policies had just begun and so the effects weren’t really felt. And there was a great sense of peace and harmony. So, for instance, my parents, at the age where I was barely able to walk, I just pedal off to the beach on my own. And people would always look, oh, look, there’s a little kid and kind of let me come and sit with them or watch out for me. And my mom and dad never worried because I knew I was safe. Of course, things changed gradually over time from then, which eventually led to me leaving South Africa in 1987 when I left the country for good.

What type of family were you born into? They were pagans. My dad was a descendant of a German Jew who arrived in southwest Africa, which was then a German colony back in the late 18 hundreds was a German colony. And so his father, my grandfather, came from Germany, a little town called Burn Castle. Our family is still there, and he was a horse rancher. He raised horses for the various armies. Of course, horses were the main form of transportation in armies in those days, and that was his job. So he came to southwest Africa to start a horse Ranch, horse breeding operation. That’s where my dad was born and that’s where he grew up. My mother, on the other hand, her ancestors came from France and Holland. So my roots in Africa go back to 1672, when my first ancestors arrived on the Southern tip of Africa. French wine farmers, French Eugenie escaping the persecution in France. And this extraordinary thing is when I came to America many years later and lived for a time in South Carolina, I discovered that Chuginos had also established a colony in South Carolina. And they still have a Church there that is a mirror image of a Church in French Hook, which means French Corner on the Southern tip of Africa where other Cubanos landed and established wine farms there. So there’s that connection. The world is a small place. In fact, another fascinating story. When I arrived in America for good in 1990 with the plan to settle here permanently, which, of course, I did, I met a man in Minneapolis who turned out to have the same name as mine, and we discovered that we were cousins. Three brothers left Bonecastle in Germany in 1892. Brothers went to America because back then the whole of the west was opening up. South Dakota was a new territory. And if you claimed land and if you fought the Indians off and held a piece of land, it was yours, you didn’t have to pay for it. You just have to maybe give your life for it. So the two brothers came all the way from Germany to America, and they traveled by train from Boston to Minneapolis, which was then the frontier, and then by Volkswagen from Minneapolis into coaches and established a farm there and prospered. Well, the third brother was the one who came to southwest Africa. My grandfather, they lost track of him over time. So exactly 100 years later, I arrived in Minneapolis and met a man called Stephen Thal. I didn’t recognize the name at first because, of course, that’s an Americanized version of Thal, which is the way Germans say it, and that’s the way I pronounce it. And he handed me his business card, and I looked at it and I said, oh, your name is the same as mine. And he said, yes. So it turned out he was an immigration attorney and also was studying a family tree and said he liked meeting people with the same name because he was trying to find out what happened to the missing brother. And he asked me what my grandfather’s name was. And I said, Jacob. And he asked if I know anything about him. I said, he arrived in southwest African 1819, and he said, you’re my cousin. Jacob is the missing brother. And he left with the other two brothers in 1892. Seafood fortune overseas. So, again, a picture of how small this world is. So those are my ancestors in Africa, but my roots go back a long way. I am, in every respect, a true African American.

Don’t tell anybody that. I actually tell people that all the time, because I think it’s important to know. Yeah, that’s right. If you’re born in America, you’re an American. If you’re born somewhere else and you come to America, well, then you add the hyphen. So I’m an African American, and I have 300 years in Africa to prove it. Yeah. Now, you said that you came to America in the I think you said the. Is that right? Yes, I came to America. So is your family still in South Africa? No. I’ve been planning for a long time to get out of South Africa. I left South Africa in 1987. Right. Got you because I was offered a job in London, England, to run a business there. And I was looking for something like that as my escape from South Africa, because to leave South Africa, it wasn’t against the law. Anybody could leave. But if you were white and you had financial resources, the government discouraged you from leaving for obvious reasons. And so the only way you could get out was if you had money overseas. Well, I had no money overseas, so I realized the only way I’d ever get out was to get a very good job overseas, because when I left, I left everything behind. All my assets, my savings, my pension, my insurance policies, anything I had on the stock exchange, my home, my car, literally walked out the house, left everything there, got on the plane, flew to London and started a new life with nothing, except I did have a very good job that paid me a lot of money. So that enabled me to establish myself there and then gradually got my family out of South Africa and three years later, was offered a job in America. In Minneapolis, by the way, I had no idea that Minneapolis was one of the coldest spots on planet Earth. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have gone there because born and raised in Africa. To me, if the weather gets below 70 degrees, it’s cold. I’m with your brother. And in Minneapolis, it regularly gets down to 40 below zero, which is just I can’t even conceptualize that. But I did live three years there.

Now, by the time that you leave South America, you’re a grown man. At that point, you’re 40, 41 around that age. Yeah, that’s right. But your upbringing is what I’d like to know more about. Was your family a religious one? No, not at all. You did mention they were pagan, but I didn’t know if it was like my father was a very rough man, very hard working, but a German Jew who turned his back on Judaism and everything else, just was a hard drinking, hard working, hard fighting. He was kind to his children. He was kind of not that kind to his wife, my mother. My mother, on the other hand, came from a rather genteel family. Her parents were minor pillars of Cape Town society, and they met at the start of the Second World War. My dad then was a Lashing tank commander. My mother was a socialite who organized fundraising balls and parties for the troops. And they met at some function in Cape Town and fell in love and got married. And then he was off to war and came back home. He left in 1939. Wait a minute. Is that right? Yes. The end of early 1940 to go and fight the Germans. It was in German East Africa. Today it’s known as Tanzania, and then fought all the way up the African continent up to the Sahara Desert, where he joined the British Army. The South African Army joined the British Army, and they fought Rommel in the desert. He then joined the American Army and fought against the Germans in Italy and was there toward the end of the Second World War and came back home at the end of nine months before May 1946. So what is that? That’s when he arrived back home. So he had been gone for about five, six years after being married for just a few months and came back, settled down. And as I said previously, I was born shortly after his return. And my mother was a very gentle woman. She loved reading. She loved poetry. She actually was a qualified architect for draftsman. She loved art. She won competitions for flower arrangements. And so she and I spent a lot of time together because I enjoyed reading and she read me lots of books. And it was like I lived in two worlds. When I was with my dad, he was this hunting, shooting, fishing, drinking fellow. And when I was with my mom, she was a gentle lady who appreciated the finest things of life. And so I grew up confused. The other thing that was very confusing. As a child, my parents were typical products of their culture. They were racist. They did not associate with black people at all. But my dad was a businessman, and so I would travel with him up into the mountains of what was then known as the Suture, a little Kingdom in the heart of South Africa where he had his business. He was a trader. I’ve got to say that carefully because I told someone once that my dad was a trader, and he said he was. Did he go to jail for that? And I said, no. He traded goods with the tribespeople. And the man said, oh, I thought he said he was a traitor. So that’s what he did for a living. He had a warehouse in a little town on the border of his Kingdom, and then he traveled up into the mountains. Those days, it was very primitive. No bridges on the road. There were no tar roads. There was one tar road in this little Kingdom that ran for 2 miles from the local little airport to the King’s Palace. And everything else was dirt roads and mud huts. And as a little boy going up into mountains, I met little black children who had never seen a white child before. So I was a great celebrity because they’d want to touch me to see if I was real, and we would spend a lot of time with black people. And I thought they were my friends. We’d eat together, we’d stay in their houses. But when we were back in South Africa, they weren’t allowed. The only black people allowed into our home were servants.

And so as a child growing up, it was very confusing because children don’t know how to make that distinction. To me, black people were my friends, but to my parents, they were only friendly in one context. And so that was something to get used to. Of course, the other problem was going to boarding school, and they sent me off. Now, they hated the British, my parents, because the way the British treated South Africa during the civil war that South Africa fought against the British government at the time that Britain ruled South Africa, and Britain had learnt its lesson after losing the American colonies. So they were much more brutal in South Africa. The way they defeated the South Africans was to round up all the women and children, put them in concentration camps where they died like flies because they various diseases. And then they burned the farm scorched Earth policy. And finally, after three years of fighting, the men gave up, and Britain established its control of that area. So my parents hated the British, but my father, the businessman, said, you have to learn to live with the master race, the British. So we’re going to send you to an English boarding school where you’ll learn to be an English gentleman. From the age of eight, I was sent away to go and grow up in a place where they tried to make an English gentleman out to me. They failed miserably. But yeah, we’re going to ask about that. I had another layer of confusion, the culture. While I was at school for nine months of the year, I was a little Englishman. When I went home, I was a little Englishman hater. And when I was with my dad doing business, I was someone who loved and associated with black people. And when I went home to be with my parents, I was someone who didn’t like black people. So, yes, that might tell you a lot about me. Yeah, definitely. I just grew up confused. And then the last part of the puzzle, because you’re going to ask me what about my spiritual background? I had to go to Church. At boarding school. We were required to go every Sunday morning and every Sunday night. And so we’d March off to Church twice a day. And so whether I liked it or not, regardless of the fact that back home my parents were totally uninterested in religion, I had to be in Church. And of course, if you sit in Church for that many years, eventually you start paying attention. And the older I got, the more confused I became about religion, because occasionally I would listen to what the man behind the pulpit said and realize that we’re talking out of the strange book, the Bible, and realize that what he was talking about, the supposed God of this book, was a fantasy, because he was talking to a group of people who supposedly believed in the God of this book. And when I looked at the people around me, there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever of that God in their lives. And that convinced me that the whole thing was a hoax, because if that God was true, then surely I would see some sort of evidence in the people who pulled the Church each weekend, and there was no evidence of that. So by the time I left school, by the time I was 18 years old, I was a confirmed atheist. I decided the whole thing was just a hoax and a confirmed atheist. I decided I was never going to pray, never going to go to Church, never going to acknowledge God, because I was not stupid like everybody else. I would just live my own life.

Do you remember the first time you heard the gospel? Yes, actually, I was 16 years old at boarding school, and we heard about something called a camp, a Christian camp. And the reason the boys at my boarding school, the hospital I lived in, by the way, to a very brutal life there to survival of the fittest. But the boys were all excited about going because we go camping and we get out of the hostel for the weekend and we might even miss a bit of school. So we all went off to this camp, and there was a very dynamic man. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember anything about him. I don’t even remember what he told us. But I do remember one amazing night when we were in a stable, a big barn, and I was upstairs in the haloft looking down on all the assembled crowd below, and this man speaking, and he was talking about Jesus and Salvation and what God had done for us. And he must have been a really Godly man and a powerful speaker because an overwhelming sense of the presence of God, and it really shocked me and troubled me. And then he gave an altar call. I didn’t know it was an altar call, but looking back now, I do know and invited us to receive Jesus Christ as our Savior. And I felt a tremendous impulse to do that. But at the same time remembered the words of my schoolboy friends, some of whom had been to one of these camps before, and all laughed about the fact that they came back, all good little Christians. And that lasted about three days until it was beaten out of them. And then they reverted to type. So I decided I wasn’t going to get caught up in the emotion of this invitation to receive Christ because I didn’t want to be mocked by my friends back at the hospital. But that feeling stayed with me for some time because as a 16 year old, I was old enough to realize something strange had happened that was very real and touching, but it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t going to go down that road. And that was the only time until years later that I really considered Christ.

Was that also the time that you came to a full realization of your sin, or was it merely an emotional response to whatever he was preaching at that time? Yes. I have no idea about sin. I mean, that is theoretical concept. No, I got saved at the age of 23. Now by that time I was married. And my wife at the time, she wasn’t saved. We got married in Episcopalian Church. And I was very successful. I was also very cynical. I left school and went out into the world and became a journalist. And it was a very successful journalist at a young age. And then I became a partner in a public relations company and also became involved in South African politics. This is in partnering a business. I had my name in the newspaper every weekend. And I was being groomed by the opposition party in South Africa, that’s opposition to the ruling nationalist government, the apartheid government. I was being groomed by them to become the youngest member of Parliament in the history of our country. And also the woman I married was from a very wealthy family, very prominent family. So I had everything. I had a nice house, new car, nice wife, antique furniture, great career ahead of me. I could choose politics or business or public relations or journalism. And at that point, I decided I was there to commit suit. And the reason I thought that was I felt somewhat cheated. I was 23 years old, and I had achieved by then, by the way, at the age of 18, I came to America on a scholarship for one year. So I’d been to America. I’d spent a year in school here, an exchange program. So I’d seen something of the world. I’d also been to Egypt and Greece. So I’d seen something of the world. I knew what was out there. And I felt at the age of 23, I’ve achieved something that most people take a lifetime to achieve. And I’ve got everything that everybody strives for. And I’m 23 years old. And I thought, what is there left to live for? Because if I live any longer, I’m in control now. But if I live any longer, the chances are something might happen to me and I’ll lose control. But if I lose control, I’ll be a lot worse then than I am now. This would be a very good time while I’m in control, and I’ve got everything I want, everything I need, I’ve sampled all the pleasures of life. This is a really good time to take control of my own life and end it. And so I started researching, rather diligently, the most effective way to die without suffering any pain and without ensuring that I’d end up as a vegetable and then really lose control. So I told my wife what I was thinking and she was shocked and horrified wants something she had done wrong, which of course, it wasn’t. And I tried to logically explain to her, it’s got nothing to do with you. It’s got to do with the reality of life. We are incredibly fortunate. We’ve got everything we need. What’s the point of living any longer when if we die, it’s just going to be oblivion. There’s no point in doing anything. At the end of it all, we’ll be dead. And she said, well, if you die, what’s going to happen to me? And my answer was, Your dad’s rich. He’ll take care of you. And she said, well, what about you? Don’t you worry about the children? I said, I’ll be dead. I won’t know about the children. I’ll be dead. And she’s couldn’t. Being a woman, being wiser than I was, she just couldn’t compute that.

So she went and opened her heart to her Jewish art teacher, a man called Peter Lyesan, who is still alive, who I dedicated one of my books to. Peter was a wonderful man who taught art and was a Hebrew Christian, a Jewish convert to Christianity. And she used to come home and tell me how interesting he was. He always wove stories of the Bible into the arc lessons that he taught. I was quite indulgent. I said, that’s very nice, and I’m sure he’s a very nice person. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, glad he’s not my art teacher. He’s always talking about religion. And she went and spoke to him and told him what I was planning to do. So he led her to Christ. She got saved. And then she came home and asked me if she could invite him to our home. And I said, sure, on one condition. I don’t want to hear any of his religious nonsense anyway. So he came to us. And of course, he immediately started to witness to me. And he shared the Gospel with me. And I kept telling him, I don’t want to hear this nonsense. It’s just religious propaganda and it’s not part of my consciousness. And he wouldn’t stop. I finally had to grab him and physically throw him out of my house and Slam the door. And I stood there after I had been so rude to him and thought to myself, You’ve got a problem? Because I realized for the first time in my life I had met someone apart from that man who I didn’t know who preached that sermon when I was 16. Jerrod, meet someone face to face to whom Jesus Christ was a living reality. When he spoke of Jesus, he wasn’t talking about some musty figure in an old book. He was talking about his actual best friend. And it wasn’t an affectation with him. It wasn’t an act, you could see it. His eyes sparkled, his face lit up. His friend. Jesus was real to him as I was more Realty than I was. And so after he left, I thought to myself, You’ve got a problem, because that guy is either insane, which is probably what’s going on here. He’s lost his mind. But he’s so convinced about the reality of Jesus, I’ve got to accept the possibility that maybe what he said is true, in which case I’m the one with the problem, because I’m going to face God. If I was to kill myself and wake up on the other side and find out I’d drawn the short straw in this big lottery of life and in fact, had done the one thing that my creator didn’t want me to do. Do I get a do over or do I just find that I am in a whole load of trouble? And so that bothered me so much that thought that I thought I must find out if this is true before I go ahead and commit suicide, which is still my intent. I’ve got to satisfy myself that there is no God, or, on the contrary, satisfy myself that in fact, God is real. So that’s how my journey began in trying to seek God. And I met Jesus a week later.

Continue. Tell us, how exactly did that happen and what barriers do you think were preventing you from receiving the gospel? Well, I think I’ve laid it out pretty well. I grew up in a Godless home, went off to boarding school at a young age, and then heard this religious propaganda all my young life. What I thought was religious propaganda, the disconnect between the God of the Bible and the people of the Bible listen to for years. I mean, from the age of eight to the age of 18, twice a week I was listening to sermons about the God of the Bible. And so I had a pretty good idea of what the Bible taught. And the people who said they believed the Bible showed no evidence whatsoever of its reality. As I said, the first person I ever met face to face who acted behaved as if the God of the Bible was real was this man who came to my home. So the barrier for me was just the dichotomy between what the Bible teaches and what was expressed in the lives of people who said they believed the Bible. And that, of course, raises the point that as Christians, we have a duty to reflect Christ. We are the only Bible people ever read. If they haven’t met Christ and they’ve never been to Church, their only assessment of Jesus Christ and the God who created us is us. If I say I’m a Christian, I better reflect the reality of Christianity. Otherwise, I’m a liar, I’m a cheat. I’m going to keep someone from heaven because they’re going to read me and say, well, clearly there is no God. If that guy says he believes in God, then that’s proof there is no God. Right? That was the barrier I had to overcome in my life to try and figure out, having met this man with the God I had rejected all my life was, in fact, real. And so after a week of thinking about it and wondering what to do about it, and recognizing that if I went to talk to a priest or a Minister or some authority figure in Christianity to ask for more clarity on the subject, all I was going to get from them was their propaganda. So that wasn’t useful. I just get somebody telling me all the Hocus Pocus stuff that I’ve heard for years out of the Bible that I rejected is true. Anyway. So it became clear to me, after a week of debating the issue with myself, that the only sensible thing to do would be to approach God himself. If God is there and if he’s real, and if this book is true and he really was so adamant that I should be part of his family that he actually came to this Earth to live amongst us and then to die for me, then surely I could just approach it and say, okay, here I am, prove to me that you’re real. So that’s what I did and nothing happened. And in many other details we don’t have time to get into. The key point is, the day came when I locked myself in my study and I locked the door because I thought, if anybody over here has this conversation, they’re going to think I’m a candidate for an insane asylum just talking to an empty room. And I basically sat at my work desk at home and said, Well, God, if you’re real, let’s have a conversation. I need you to prove to me that you are real and that the Bible is true. And then I sat back and waited for Thunder, lightning, Angels appearing, and nothing happened. And so I thought to myself, well, that was pretty definitive. Leonard thought came to me, well, wait a minute. If there really is a God, the creator of heaven and Earth, I mean, that would be a pretty big God. Why should he respond to some young punk challenging him to do a magic trick for him? In fact, if he’s a real God, he’s not in the business of doing magic tricks for young punks.

So I thought, well, how could I get a response from God? And it seemed to me the only basis on which I could approach him. Now, by the way, I had an advantage, because when I thought of God, I thought of Jesus Christ, because that’s the name I’ve heard all my life, one who came to die for us. So I thought, if he really loves me that much and is really that interested in me, what is the one thing that I could give him in advance or offer as a bargaining tool? A bargaining trip to get a response from him? And as I thought about it, it became clear to me the only thing I had to offer was myself. So that’s the deal I made with God. I said, okay, so listen, I really want to know if you are, too, because I’m planning on committing suicide and I don’t want to make a mistake. So if you really are the God of the Bible, if that book that I’ve heard preached all my life and the God that I was told about by this crazy artist, if that is true, I really do want to meet you. And to show that I’m sincere in this matter, I’ll make a deal with you. If you convince me that you are real, I will give you my unqualified surrender. I’m surrendering in advance. And if I meet you, I’m yours. So while I was saying that, I was thinking to myself, Well, let’s say God does show up and ask me to jump off the tallest building in Johannesburg, which is where I lived at the time. Would you do it? And I thought, yeah, I think I would. If he’s God and created the universe and he asked me to jump off a building, why not? If he wants to catch me, well, and if he doesn’t, well, I’m going to meet him then anyway. So that seemed reasonable to me. I thought, well, what if he asked me to pack up everything and go to China? I don’t know why I thought of China, but that’s what popped into my mind. I thought, Well, I’ll do it. I mean, if he’s God, if he created the universe and he asked me to do anything, it would be reasonable because he’s God, and I’d really like to meet Him. And so that’s the proposition I put to God. And I was alone at home. My wife actually was at an art lesson that night. The house was very quiet. I was locked in my study. And even as I was processing these thoughts and came to the place where I thought it would be reasonable for me to make a total surrender to the God I didn’t even believe was there. If he would reveal himself to me, I became aware of a presence. I can’t explain it any better than that. I can’t describe it any better than that. There was a real presence with me and an awareness. And again, it sounds vague, but it was very real to me. There was a presence and an awareness of somebody in the room with me. And the sense that my search had ended, it was overwhelming. It was very real. And to talk about it now, it doesn’t carry the same weight. You had to be there to experience it. I was convinced. I was convinced beyond any doubt that God was responding to me and that he is real, and that what the Bible says about Jesus is true. I just knew it. It was an absolute conviction. And I sat there for a while just thinking about that. And then, because I’d made this deal, this agreement in advance, I finally said, okay, you’ve convinced me. Now you’re going to have to tell me what to do next. And through a series of extraordinary events that unfolded in the days that followed cut a long story short. Within a year, I had sold my share in the business. I resigned from journalism. I’d been to tell the political party I was affiliated with that I wouldn’t be there. Great young hope they were interested in me because I was a young guy and they needed a young face to go and represent the new image to the electorate. I was also fairly articulate. So I was apparently a good candidate. And I had to go and tell them I’m quitting politics. And I told them why? Because I’ve met Jesus Christ and he’s real, and I want to follow him.

And everybody thought I was nuts. But a year later, I was in Bible College with a wife and two little babies. No money. My wife’s father, my father in law, called me into his study one day. We announced that I was giving up everything and going to Bible comments. So I went in to see him and he said, you know, when you marry my daughter, I didn’t approve of that marriage, as you know, because I was a different class. I was one of the elites. And he said, I didn’t approve of the marriage. But you promised me you would take care of my daughter and you would always provide for her. And I said, that’s true. He said, well, now you’ve just walked away from everything. You had a brilliant career ahead of you. You were established as a young man on a good path towards success. And now you’re walking away from all that and I’m going to have to support you. And I said, no, you’re not. He said, yes, I am. You don’t have a job and you’re going to be in Bible College studying, and you’re going to have to support my daughter and my two grandchildren. And I said, Well, God will take care of us. And he stopped and he looked at me and he said, well, that’s the first time anyone has called me God. And I said to him, no, the God I’ve met will take care of us. And I’ll never ask you for a Penny. Well, there were days in the years ahead when I wished I’d never said that because it was very hard. I’ll tell you, one episode that kind of epitomizes that experience. Once we were at Bible College and the day came when we literally the coverage was there. We used to go to the supermarket and rummage through the trash cans to find discarded cans of food that might be labeled off or the can was buckled or something. Or we go to the supermarket and ask if we could have their castles and we would gather those and bring them home. And that was our food supply. And it always made meals very interesting because you never knew what you were getting when you opened the can because you might have baked beans with peaches and cream for lunch. But anyway, the day came when we had nothing. I mean, the babies were hungry, two little girls. I was hungry. My wife was hungry. I think we’d run out of soap. My wife was pretty distressed because she didn’t have formula for our smallest baby. That was the thing. She couldn’t even feed our youngest child. And I just lost it. In that moment I started telling God that I thought he had let us down and I did it in no uncertain terms. I raised my voice, told him that I didn’t appreciate the fact that I’d given up if I had sacrificed everything for Him. And what have you done for me? Why wasn’t he looking up to me and carried on in that vein at the top of my voice? By the way, we lived in the Bible College. We got free accommodation because we were the caretakers of the Bible College, which is in a grand old house. And we lived in one section of the house for free, which helps a lot with the budget. And so people would come and go at odd times. And sure enough, while I was in full voice telling God, I thought he’d made a terrible mistake and he wasn’t to God, I thought he was. And he wasn’t doing a very good job of looking after us. Became a loud knock on the door. And I thought, oh, no, somebody must have heard me. And so I waited for about ten minutes, I stopped yelling, waited for about ten minutes in the hopes that that person would go away, walked to the front door, opened the door. The house was double storey and we were on the upper floor. So you had to actually come up a flight to stairs. And there was this large, beautiful home, large patio on the second floor. And I mean, it was extensive. An entire patio was full of grocery bags. Wow. There was probably a few months food and supplies there. I mean, everything you could think of, baby formula, bread, eggs, toast, meat, you name it. Not toast, bread, toasting stuff, flapjacks and things, I think they called them, I mean, just this vast supply of food. And so I went back inside to my wife and said, you’ve got to come see this. She was in the bedroom cowering with the children because Daddy was losing his mind yelling at God. And so we took the kids and my wife and walked out on the front porch and just looked there, speechless. Oh, wow, we have places to store all the stuff. I mean, it was absolutely incredible. So I learned to lesson that day. One of many that I learned since. Yes. So what’s your next question? Well, let’s go into a break.

You’re listening to the Removing Barriers Podcast. We are sitting down with brother Edward Tall and we are finding out how where his barriers removed. We’ll be right back.

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Two Corinthians 517 says, Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, all things are passed away. Behold, all things become new. Brother, you explain how you got saved, how God provided for you in time of need, how he proved himself real to you. That a little bit deeper into some more of the changes that were evident in your life, evident especially to others in your life. After Salvation. In my case, it was a slow and lengthy process based on my personality, the kind of person I am. By the time I graduated Bible College, I had already planted my first Church. I was a pastor before I actually was ordained. I just went out and started a Church. I was pretty gung Ho for Jesus. In fact, my attitude was that now that I was saved and had learnt a bit of the Bible, God could take his long awaited vacation because I was here and he could leave the rest up to me. I had a plan to evangelize the whole world and couldn’t wait to get started. And so just plunged right into being a street preacher, a gospel preacher, a witness for Christ, a pastor. And people started attending my Church and I had converts and still made crazy mistakes because I was so full of bluster. One notable occasion led a couple to Christ who now live in Australia, by the way. And at the very first time they invited me to dinner to talk about their Salvation. And I was talking about how you can trust God for anything. I think I might have shared with them the story of how he looked after us at Bible College. The wife turned to me and said, what would you do if crime was a problem in Johannesburg in those days? What would you do if someone broke into your house? Now they look at me like, I’m Mr Super Christian. What would you do if someone broke into your house? Because I was talking about trusting God. And I said, well, if someone broke into my house, it would mean that they really needed stuff. Otherwise, why would they be breaking into my house? So I would let them have it. Take whatever you want. They said, really? I said, yes. I mean, that’s what being a Christian is. Just be open hearted and don’t condemn people. Just share the gospel with them. And they looked at me in awe like, wow, this guy is like Jesus. He’s just amazing. He’s so deep and spiritual. And I really believed what I was saying. But three nights later, this is how God works. Three nights later, someone broke into the Bible College where we lived. No. Was that. Yes, that’s right. We were still in the Bible College, had already started a Church and we were on the upper floor and my wife woke me up at 02:00 in the morning and said, Someone is in the house. And sure enough, someone was in the house. I could hear him walking around and I was enraged. I thought someone’s in my house at 2:00 in the morning, jumped out of bed, went to my cupboard and pulled out a pistol that my father in law had given me to defend his daughter and grandchildren if someone ever threatened us. And that was my first response. Get the gun. I got the gun. Put a magazine in it crept out into the corridor, and I could hear someone walking around in the next room. And so I tiptoed up the door of the room, kicked the door in, jumped into the room. There was a man taking something out of the cupboard, and he looked at me in horror, and I aimed at his head and pulled the trigger, and he turned and he ran from me as fast as he possibly could. And I took another shot at the back of his head, and it just missed him by inches. And he ran right through a plate plus window and dived off the balcony. Oh, wow.

Well, I have to call my friends, my Converse the next day and say, I’d like to come and see you urgently. Which I did. I said, at dinner the other night you asked me what my reaction would be if someone broke into my house. And I told you as a Christian what my reaction would be, and you were very impressed. Now I need to tell you what would really happen if someone broke into my house and they didn’t think I was quite as Godlike as I appeared before. That’s how God teaches us. But I made a lot of bad mistakes just by being too aggressive in my Christianity, I think too confident. I often represented God in the wrong way. I had a lot of zeal and utterly lacking in wisdom, and that’s no way to preach the gospel. And so, sadly, after ten years of struggling, working mightily start at a second Church in a different city. And each year it just got harder and harder and harder. I had to work more and more, I believe, less and less. I was doing it all in my own strength. And I come up with a plan and then ask God to bless it. And God never blessed my brilliant plan. And finally, the turning point for me was looking at myself in the mirror one day and realizing I become the kind of Christian that I had despised all my life. I bought this mask on Sundays and the rest of the week I was a mess. I hardly knew what I was doing. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I believed anymore, because God just did not seem very impressed by my efforts. And I couldn’t understand why I knew what I believe was true. I mean, the Bible is true, Jesus is real. God is true. But somehow there’s been a disconnect between God and me. And I believe it’s my fault, but I don’t know how it happened, and I don’t know how to fix it. So I’m going to quit the Ministry and go and do what I can do and what I know I can do. I’m going to go and make a lot of money. When I told my wife that was my plan, she refused to follow me. She said, no, I’m going to stay in Church. So we divorced and I left her and my two children and went out into the world and spent the next twelve years or so working, making a lot of money, traveling the whole world until God finally got a hold of me again. Lived on borrowed time for twelve years. If you had met me in those twelve years and I told you that I was a Christian, you would have said, that is impossible. Nobody who knows Jesus Christ, they said you could behave the way you behaved could live the way you live. I ended up in London running a business. I was making $20,000 a month and I was broke. Oh, wow. Because of lifestyle I was living. And then I nearly died in a plane accident. I was flying from London to Northern Ireland to go and interview a new client. Then the plane nearly crashed. Very scary experience. And I realized that the day that I’d been fearing trading had finally caught up with me. I thought I was going to die. And I knew I was saved. I knew I’d end up in heaven. And I felt crushing embarrassment. I wasn’t afraid. I just felt terribly, terribly embarrassed because I thought, what am I going to say to Jesus? I’ve lived like a pig all these years. I’ve spurned him. I never mocked him. And by the way, I never told anyone I was a Christian because I didn’t want to bring shame on his name. But I didn’t deserve heaven. I just resolved when we didn’t crash and I survived that experience, I resolved I somehow gained to get out of it, out of my lifestyle. And it was at that moment that I was offered a job in America in Minneapolis. And I thought, well, if I can get out of London and start in a new environment and I know the Americans are quite devoted to Christianity. There are lots of Christians in America. Maybe I can start my life afresh there.

And so that’s why I came to America in 1990. My job in London resigned my position there. And three years later, when I got my green card, I resigned my job in America with the intention of just throwing myself on God’s mercy and leaving it to him to lead me to a place where I could begin to serve him again and made for a year. I left the job eyes in at the end of 93. And from January 94 to about November 94, just drove around America trying to find answers, trying to find ended up finally in Charleston, South Carolina, dead broke, didn’t have a friend in the world. Nobody knew where I was. None of my family friends. I totally cut myself off from everybody. And I was absolutely alone in the world and thought I was going to die and said to God, Here I am. This is a pathetic end of the road. My life started out so promising when I first met you. And now here I am. I’ll probably die here, and people won’t know who I am or why I’m here or won’t know anything about them. My kids will never know what happened to me. My former wife will never know what happened to me. And that’s a pretty pathetic way to leave this world. But I guess that’s my fate. And I stayed in a dingy little poverty furnished apartment in North Charleston, which is a part of Charleston the tourists don’t go to. And there was a knock on my door, literally, while I was thinking these thoughts, there was a knock on my door and two young ladies. Good evening, sir. We just aren’t visiting and we want to know if you die tonight. Are you sure you go to heaven? And I nearly laughed. I thought, this is just too amazing. So I said to them, well, actually, I’m not sure of anything, but I am sure I’m on my way to heaven. They said, well, then we want to invite you to come to our Church. It’s just across the road. Please come and join us on Sunday morning. And I knew that was an invitation from God. A little blue collar Baptist Church, poor people in a part of Charleston nobody ever went to. And so I walked in there on a Sunday morning, November 1994, and I knew I’d come home. From that point on, my rehabilitation started.

Tell me something, brother. You said that you did a lot of these things in your own strength. And just speaking for myself personally, I find it to be easy at times to do things in my own strength. Yes. How do we as Christian break that habit and truly trust the Lord? Well, it doesn’t happen in five minutes. It’s a lifetime training program that God puts us into. You can read about it in the Bible. Without me, you can do nothing. John, chapter 15 and verse five, Jesus said to his disciples very clearly, abide in me, and I in you. For without me, you can do nothing. When he said nothing, he meant nothing. We don’t believe that, especially those of us who feel strong in ourselves. Hey, there’s a lot of stuff I can do. I don’t need God’s help for it. I can do it, especially when we have the financial means to do things. Yes. So it’s something you can’t be told. It’s something you have to be taught, and you are taught it by the circumstances of life. And the incredible thing I’ve learned is that God doesn’t hold it against you, that you make these dumb mistakes, that you overextend yourself, or you’re an arrogant fool who thinks he can do it all on his own. God doesn’t hold that against you. What he wants is for us to come to a place that I came to where I finally realized it’s true. I can do nothing by myself. And I don’t need anyone to tell me that life has taught me that. I have taught myself that circumstances, and I’ve made that mistake often enough. It’s one thing to learn it once and twice and three times. When you’ve learnt it a dozen times. Eventually even someone like myself gets the message, hey, without Jesus help, you can do nothing. And then it’s real. You can’t go to Bible College to learn that. Amen.

Thank you, brother. Do you think the way your barriers were removed would be effective to reach someone similar to you in the culture today? Yes and no. I suppose because of our personalities, our nature, we are more suited to meeting certain types of people. It’s a lot easier for me to someone who speaks my language than it is to witness to someone in France, because my French isn’t that good. So it makes sense. You have more access to people who are of the same culture, the same social level, that you are of the same background, perhaps even the same skin color. There is that advantage in the initial stages, but the real answer comes back again to the fact that without him you can do nothing. It doesn’t matter what the gap is. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. It doesn’t matter who it is you’re trying to reach. You need the help of Jesus, because without Him you can do nothing. So tell me, what are some things you’re doing in the area of evangelism now that you’re saved? Well, I’ve always since coming back to the Lord and that little Church that I joined in Charleston, the pastor was like a Sergeant major, by the way, is exactly what I needed. Single shaking, pulpit pounding, snot slinging, Baptist preacher. Amen. And I mean, he was like a drill Sergeant. And so he taught me to be a personal evangelist. We had to go out every week, and if we came back to the Church at night, it was dark, it was cold, and we couldn’t tell him that we had led at least one person to Christ. He just sent us back out again. So why did you come back? Get back out there. Somebody is dying. It’s on his way to hell. Oh, wow. Don’t come back until you pray with somebody and get them saved. Well, that wasn’t the right approach either, because eventually if someone opened the door, I would put my foot in the door and they couldn’t get the door closed until they prayed. The sinners prayer with me, but they just wanted to get rid of me. So that didn’t work. But at least I could go back and tell the pastor, hey, someone prayed with me, but it did teach me to be fearless and persistent. What I needed to add to that then was some wisdom and some of the Grace of God and some compassion and some feeling for people who just weren’t ready to get saved. In that moment. And I don’t treat them like you dirty, filthy rockle. Sooner you’re going to burn in hell forever because you didn’t listen to me. That’s hardly the way that you want to represent Christ, but that’s the way some Christians do it. And that’s the way I did it for a while. And so, again, it’s just experience. Eventually, if you stick with the Bible long enough and you talk to God enough and you are honest enough with yourself, eventually you get the message, well, there’s a better way of doing it. And the better way of doing it is, I can do nothing without Jesus help.

There’s a man I admire greatly in a country I can’t name, but I won’t even mention the name of this missionary. It’s somebody you know, in a former Communist country who has an amazing Ministry. He is a modern Apostle Paul. He has achieved in this very difficult environment is incredible. And of course, he’s achieved it because he’s very attentive to Jesus leading. But his formula is very, very simple. When you ask him, how do you do all this? He said, well, it’s easy. You just pray. You meet people and you tell them about Jesus. And yes, that’s what you do. You pray, you meet people and you tell them about Jesus. And it’s not more complicated than that. It’s not more fancy than that. You do not have to have a three year Bible College degree or a four year Bible College degree or a postgraduate degree in theology to pray, meet people and tell them about Jesus. The most effective story in the New Testament about soul winning is in John chapter nine. Jesus meets a beggar who was born blind. That man knew absolutely nothing. He’d spent his life sitting on a street corner with a begging bowl, asking for arms, and he knew absolutely nothing else. That was his entire life. One day, Jesus comes to town and heals him. And immediately everybody starts attacking this man because he’s running around saying, I can see, I can see. And people are saying, what do you mean, you can see? How can you see? He says, well, a man came and he made some mud, and he put it on my eyes and he told me to go and wash and I can see. And they said, well, who is he? And he said, I don’t know. How could he heal you? I don’t know. How did he heal you? I don’t know. Is he a good man? I don’t know. And the religious leaders start beating up on him, saying, you’re just causing a lot of disturbance here. Your theology is all wrong. And this poor blind man finally says the one thing that matters. He says, you know, you’re probably all right. I don’t have answers to your questions. I can’t explain what happened. I’m not even sure why it happened. But one thing I do know, once I was blind now I can see that’s it. What other testimony do you need? What other convictions you need? What else do you need to say? What theology do you need to bring to this? Just don’t tell people. Once I was blind, now I can see. And by the way, I’d like to share that with you. Pray, meet people, tell them about Jesus. Yeah, definitely.

Alright. But let’s go into a little bit of fun section. We can use it as a rapid fire, but it’s up to you. So tell me, what is your favorite scripture verse? Psalm 36, verses seven to eight. Can I read it to you? Sure. Best section in the whole Bible. Psalm 36, seven to eight. How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God. Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house. And thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. That is the God we serve, brother. Amen.

What about your favorite Bible history? Some people call it Bible story. We kind of shy away from that term because we feel like this term story has. I have a lot of favorite parts of the Bible, but I think my absolute favorite is the story of kingsall, one Samuel, chapter 15. And you’ve got to contrast that with Psalm 51. Samuel 15 is an incredible study in how not to serve God, how not to be a Christian, how not to earn God’s favor. Do you have a King who God anoints and appoints and who does 99% of what God asked him to do? But when he’s challenged on the 1%, he did wrong. He doesn’t acknowledge it. He tries to hide the fact. He tries to blame others. He downplays the fact that he messed up. His attitude is basically what’s the big fuss about? Just bless me anyway. And finally God says to him, I’m taking your Kingdom from you. It’s an amazing story. It should be studied in detail by every Christian. And then if you go from there to Psalm 51, you encounter a man King. Saul sin was minor compared to David. David committed adultery and murder, the two worst sins imaginable. And God calls him a man after my own heart. Why? What’s the difference between Saul and David? The difference is Psalm 51. You read one Samuel 15 and you read Psalm 51 side by side, and you’ll learn everything you need to know about the Christian life right there and about how to walk with God. It’s all there in those two chapters. Amen.

What about the most convicting script of passage to you? Luke 1027. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself and possible price. Yeah. I have not yet met a man alive. Certainly I’m not the man. It’s just till we get to heaven, we’re not going to be able to say, yeah, I do that every day, every minute of the day. I love God for my heart. It’s not true. And I don’t love my neighbors myself. It’s not true. Now, hopefully, I love God a lot more than I did when I first met him 50 years ago. And I love my neighbor a lot more than I did when I first met God 50 years ago, but still a work in progress. So that’s a very convicting verse.

What about the most comforting script of passage? You sent forth the spirit to be son into your heart’s. Crime. Abba Father. Amen. Christianity is the only religion. It’s not a religion, it’s a life. But compared to other religions, there is no other God, none like the Christian God, who doesn’t just want to be your creator, God Father in heaven, but also your Daddy. It only occurs twice in scripture where he says, Abba, Father, but it has immense implications. I often think of God, my father, my dad, as the one that I can go and sit on his lap and talk to him, cuddle him my Daddy, but I never am familiar with him because he’s also my father. Amen.

What is your favorite hymn of the Fate Be Thou Exalted? Oh, what a glorious hymn that is. Be Thou exalted by Seraphs and Angels be Thou exalted with harp and with song. Saints in their anthems of worship. Adapte thine be the glory. Yeah. Great old hymn.

Who’s your favorite giant of the fate? Paul FF Bruce wrote a wonderful book. Paul, the Apostle of the heart, set free. Paul was extraordinary because he was just totally sold out to God. A man of great talent, a man of great ability, who learned to be nothing, who suffered more than jobs, suffered, and yet could say, God’s Grace is sufficient for me.

All right, brother will be coming down to the end. Let’s wrap it up and tell us in a way of sharing the gospel. How can barriers in general or specific, how can those barriers be removed in the life of others? In my experience, after 50 years of walking with God or learning about God, I didn’t walk with him for all of those years. You do learn a little bit of wisdom, and in my experience, it’s pointless to talk to people who don’t want to be talked to. It’s pointless to try and share Christ with someone who doesn’t want to care about Christ. Now, you don’t know who that person is, not until you try and talk to everybody, but you very quickly pick up that somebody is just not interested. By the way, that’s why it’s so good to fly a lot, because if you fly on your own, you can always pray that the person sitting next to you is someone that God wants you to witness to and he can’t escape. As long as that plane is in the air, you’ve got a captive audience and whether he wants to hear you or not, you can share the gospel with him. But mostly if you’re just out in society, people just don’t want to hear. But you don’t know that until some soul winner said to me one day the way you do soul winning is you kiss a lot of frogs until one turns into a Prince. That’s pretty much what it’s like. So when you do meet someone who’s responsive and hungry, then you just present the gospel to them. The Romans road is always good. I find that got to have a clear, logical explanation for why we need Salvation. And the Romans road provides that all sin and come short of the glory of God. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. That one verse Romans 623 contains the entire gospel. The wages of sin is death, but the hinge the gift of God it’s a gift you can’t earn. It is eternal life through Jesus Christ. Everything you want to know about Christianity is in that one little sentence. Amen.

Brother Edward Thal thank you for joining us on the Removing Barriers podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Thank you for listening. To get a hold of us to support this podcast or to learn more about removing barriers, go to removingbarriers. Net. This has been the Removing barriers podcast. We attempted to remove barriers so that we all can have a clay view of the cross.