Bill Johnson

Bill Johnson's story doesn't have a far country. He gave his life to Jesus at six years old, raised inside the faith — and in this episode of Who Is Jesus To You?, he tells David Harris Jr. why that isn't the whole story. Because at nineteen, freshly graduated and mapping out ambitions in sports and business, something happened one Saturday night alone in his house that changed everything: under the no-compromise preaching of Mario Murillo, faith stopped being the environment he grew up in and became intensely personal. “I said, yes — I give you everything.” His musical tastes, his friendships, his time, his ambitions — all of it went on the altar in a single evening.

What God did next reads like a private miracle: the young man who hated reading became a student overnight. The one who took an F on an oral exam rather than speak in front of his class became — well, Bill Johnson. “All the things that I do now are things I once despised,” he says. “As you walk with Him, He changes your appetites.”

From there, this conversation becomes a masterclass from one of the most influential pastors of his generation. He walks David through the hunger that has driven his whole ministry — the accounts of the Welsh revival of 1904 and the Hebrides, when the presence of God so saturated a region that crime simply stopped — and the moment that hunger got answered: a 1987 John Wimber conference where no one prayed for him, no one taught him anything, and yet the week after he went home, miracles started. He also recounts the night in February 1996, shortly after arriving at Bethel in Redding, when he invited the Holy Spirit to come and the power of God fell on exactly one person. “It's the cloud the size of a man's hand — and we'll take it. If you don't celebrate the small, you can't be trusted with the big.”

The miracle story he chooses is one you won't forget: a dying eleven-year-old boy from Norway whose body could no longer absorb food, brought by his family on what doctors intended as a final memory-making trip. What happened after one simple prayer from an unnamed student — and what his mother discovered at an Olive Garden bread basket — became a life-saving healing so remarkable they made a movie about it in Norway.

Some of the richest material is the quietest: his definitions of thanksgiving, praise, and worship (“worship is worth-ship — and there is no worship without surrender”), why the kindness of God has preoccupied him for years and he refuses to move on from it, his practice of reading Psalms 127 and 128 over his household every single night, and the confession that in roughly forty years he has missed reading Scripture exactly one day — while unconscious with kidney stones. He also speaks with unusual candor about accountability, humility, and leading through the hardest seasons of leadership — taking responsibility rather than deflecting it.

Ask him who Jesus is, and the answer pours out before the conversation is a minute old: “The kindest person to ever live. Ultimate beauty, ultimate grace, ultimate wisdom, ultimate joy. Absolute Lord and Savior.”

Watch the full conversation above, and find more from Bill Johnson at Bethel Church in Redding, California.