Sid: My guests Nic and Rachael Billman, they understand worship and both of them have pastor fathers, United Methodist Pastors and they’ve known each other their whole life and they began leading worship at thirteen, really Nic?
Nic: Yep, yeah at thirteen years old.
Sid: Were you singing together at that time?
Nic: Yea we were, I was playing guitar and I think that my voice was probably still maturing at that time but Rachael’s was pretty strong so.
Sid: Yours was cracking every once in awhile, okay. Ha-ha. That’s interesting, we Jews have bar…at thirteen we’re bar mitzvah so at thirteen you two they recognized your psalmist ministry. And today the two of you lead worship all over the world and in particular with Randy Clark who’s got a tremendous miracle ministry. He goes to places like Brazil and sees just the most wonderful miracles, but it’s my contention that it is the worship that brings the atmosphere of heaven that releases the miracles. What have you seen when you worship with every fiber of your being in a place like Brazil what do you see happen?
Nic: Well, we just see people their lives being restored, it is awesome to watch people come into an atmosphere of worship and maybe with their head down, you know they’re tired from the week or whatever, whatever it is that their dealing with, whether it’s a physical sickness or disease or emotional or whatever it is and watch in worship where nobody touches them but we like to refer to it like Acts Chapter Four where God extends His hand and in the shadow of His hand there are signs, wonders and miracles. And it’s just amazing to watch that and we even seen people that we’ve prayed for that are healed one night but they still kind of leave almost the same. It is like oh wow I was healed of the pain in my arm or my back or whatever but then the next night they come and they get the revelation of the Father’s love in worship and their whole continence changes.
Sid: And that is key, that is really what you’re accomplishing in your brand new CD “The Least of These.” In fact tell me what you believe your goal for this CD is.
Nic: Well, our goal for the CD is that people would receive the Father’s heart, the Father’s love; more than just the music CD that they would listen to, but that they would really have there, whether it was in their car or living room, their headphones be filled with an atmosphere of heaven that would bring the Father’s heart to them. And it combines the elements of worship and ministry to the poor because we see that a lot of times in the church we separate singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and then ministry to the poor intercession but really the heart of God is for both. And so one to the ways that we get closer to God is by having a heart for the things that He does; that our hearts would break for the things that break His. And so that’s really our heart with this CD that it would accomplish both, draw them into intimacy but then also transform our hearts to be like His.
Sid: Now the two to you were married at a young age, and in fact you were seventeen when your first child was born and he was a miracle boy, tell me about him.
Rachael: He really was a miracle boy. It was an unexpected pregnancy for us but we had just a really loving family that was very supportive and that really drew us through the whole pregnancy, but when Nic and I were on our honey moon we woke up one morning and my water had broken and I was only six months pregnant. And so we rushed off to the hospital with them trying to hold back the delivery it was not successful and so we deliver our son he was a little over two pounds and very, very sick and they were telling us very much from the beginning that he was not going to make it and if he made it he was going to have brain damage, his lungs were going to be damaged. He may be mentally impaired in some ways, he could be blind; they told us all these things and here Nic and I are seventeen years old and we’re newly married and we are…we don’t know what to expect. But he stayed in the neo intensive care unit for three and a half months.
Sid: Did they really show you pictures of babies coffins?
Rachael: Yes. That was one of the first things they showed us.
Nic: Yeah, they gave us a booklet a pamphlet to order one if we needed to because not all funeral homes carry them.
Sid: Now, now he was on 100% life support for how long?
Nic: Well, what happened yeah, he was off and on with the respirator and all the stuff and then he was doing good actually and then one day the doctor called Rachael and said we had to put him back on 100% you need to get down here or he’s not going to make it. And so we came down and they gave us the choice, we could either keep doing what we are doing or to pull the plug and make the decision and stop.
Sid: Well, was that a tough decision for you?
Nic: Oh, man it was really hard, it was really hard because you know we are young and he had been doing well for a couple of weeks.
Sid: Well, you’re both seventeen.
Nic: Yeah and so what happed was, a miracle because the doctor told us, he was in a hospital in Camden, New Jersey called Cooper and Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia had an experiential treatment but they couldn’t get it to Cooper because they weren’t approved for it. The doctor said well you could transfer him to this other hospital but it could kill him from the trauma of being transferred over there and being shaken around and so we said we need to go home and pray about this. So we went home and prayed and the next morning we got awoken up from a call and the doctor there had actually illegally gotten the procedure from one hospital to the other in the middle of the night and hooked him up to it because she really believed that it would work. And in three weeks he was doing better and he came home simply with a heart monitor and a feeding tube and within a month those two things were gone too.
Sid: You know as you’re sharing about your miracle child, there are so many wonderful songs on your two new cds “The Least of These,” which song comes to mind that would minister to people right now that need a miracle?
Nic: There’s a song called “Vessel” on the album and it’s a song that one of our spiritual sons, our guitarist actually wrote and wrote it at a time of just crying out to God, I want to be so full of you that You’re flowing through me and you know like the prayer of John the Baptist. I want to decrease that you would increase that You would fill me up and then I would minister out of the overflow.
Sid: Let’s hear a selection from the “Least of These”… “Vessel”
Worship excerpt:
