It's Supernatural!

Sid Roth: Hello, Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. My guest grew up with a notorious gangster for a father and a godly mother. From witnessing violence to leading thousands to Jesus, his story proves with God, never give up. Next.

Welcome, Holy Spirit. Go and flow. My guest, Marco Garcia, grew up with a violent gangster father and a devoted Christian mother. His dad was considered the Al Capone of the Virgin Islands. Tell me about that background.

Marco Garcia: My mother got saved when she was young, 22 years old, and she met my father as she was living out there in the Virgin Islands. He was a good-looking guy, came from a rich family. We lived right on the beach in the Virgin Islands. We had hotels on the beach and it looked like everything was really beautiful. Before she got married, her family told her, "You're a believer, he's not a believer, you should not marry him." But they went one step further and they told her, "If you marry him, we're going to disown you."

They really put pressure on her and she said, "Don't worry about it, I can change him. He's a good guy." She started dancing with him, going to parties. When she got married that first night of her honeymoon, the problems began. The Bible says you should not be unequally yoked. It's a command of God, and she broke that command and there are consequences.

I think even as we're talking about this, there's somebody right now that's listening that's in an unequally yoked relationship. You're a believer and you're ready to marry a non-believer and God's warning you, you've got to cancel that because there will be consequences. That night of her marriage, her honeymoon night, he took her, beat her up for the first time she's ever been beaten up, and threw her through a window.

Sid Roth: Through a window? That was the first night of her honeymoon?

Marco Garcia: The abuse continued because anything that he did on that island, there were times that he would take his car, drunk drive, crash it over and over, and the police would bring him home. "Here, Mrs. Garcia, here's your husband." It looked like nothing he ever did on that island, he'd ever have any consequences for. Now it was seven years of abuse, almost every single weekend.

Sid Roth: Why'd she stay with him?

Marco Garcia: This was the problem. He would threaten her and he told her, "If you leave me, you know I know everybody on this island. Before you get to the airport, I will kill you." She really believed he would because he would put guns to her head. When she was pregnant with me, he would punch her in the stomach trying to abort me. So it was seven years of the same thing happening. During the week, he would be okay as long as he wasn't drunk. As soon as he got drunk on the weekends, that's when the problems would happen.

He would come home every single weekend and it was scary. I was a little boy, five or six years old, and I would hear my dad coming home and I would be scared because it was the same thing. He'd come into the room and he'd look through all the closets, underneath the bed. He thought every woman was immoral because at the age of 12 years old in our family, what they would do is take you to a brothel and introduce you to manhood with a prostitute.

That's what they did with him and that's what they were planning to do with me. That was his introduction. He thought all women were immoral, so he would come home and accuse my mother of the very same things he was doing. When he couldn't find anyone, then he would start beating, trying to beat the truth out of her. It was seven years of that. It got to the point where my mother was trying to find a way out. She had fantasies of maybe killing him because of the violence and the pain and the suffering, but the only thing that stopped her, she was thinking about me.

Sid Roth: One night, your dad comes in, angry, and he asks for a gun.

Marco Garcia: That night was an interesting night because that morning before he left, they were running businesses. They had all kinds of businesses that him and his family were running on the island. They had car dealerships. He would be involved with that, but on weekends it changed. That morning he said something to me which was interesting, which he never did. I don't remember having a time with him, but he told me, "Marco, when I come home from work, I am going to take you to the movies."

Sid Roth: About how old were you?

Marco Garcia: I was six years old. I'm excited about going to the movies. I'm waiting for him. He was going to take me to the drive-in theater, that's all they had on that island. I'm waiting for him. It's 5:00, it's 6:00, it's 7:00, he doesn't show up. My mother already knows he's in his cycle. He's not coming. Right around 8:00 at night, I'm still waiting. I don't know any better. I'm still expecting for my dad to show up and she doesn't want to break my heart. She says, "Why don't you come to bed with me and we'll wait for Dad in bed?"

He came right around 12:00 midnight. I remember I was in the room and he came in drunk and he says, "Where's the gun?" My mother had the gun underneath her pillow. She goes, "It's here." He goes, "Let me have it." She says, "What are you going to do with the gun?" He goes, "I'm going to go kill somebody because no one disrespects me."

He went and we found out the story. What ended up happening, my dad was trying to pick up on a woman with her husband sitting there at the bar. The bartender says, "Mr. Garcia, we don't want any problems. Would you please just go home because we don't want a fight here? We don't want a problem." My father told him, "Are you kicking me out of this bar?" He goes, "No, Mr. Garcia, we don't want any problems. Just go home and relax." He goes, "No, it sounds like you're disrespecting me and no one disrespects me. I'm going to come back. I don't have my gun on me, but I'm going to come back and I'm going to kill you. You do not disrespect me."

My dad went home, got the gun, got in his car, came right back to that bar, and called the bartender out. He goes, "Come here." The bartender just came out of the military. He has his gun, my dad has his gun, and they have a shootout in front of the bar. My dad's shooting behind a pole and the other guy's shooting behind a pole. My dad puts his head out and got a bullet between his eyes. He died at 32 years old right there in front of a bar in a gutter.

Sid Roth: What effect did it have on you?

Marco Garcia: When I went to that funeral, I'm seeing my dad for the first time in a casket. One of the things I remember him telling me as a little boy, "Men don't cry." He told me that. So when I saw him in that casket, I wanted to cry because I knew it was the end of my father. You say, why did you feel love for your father? I didn't know better. He's my dad. Kids don't know better. They have a forgiving heart. I thought this was normal, everything we were going through.

I remember just holding it in. I'm not crying, and I didn't cry. I saw everyone crying. It was a huge funeral. But this was an opportunity for me and my mother to leave the Virgin Islands for the first time and have any type of freedom.

Sid Roth: How long did it take your mom and you to leave?

Marco Garcia: It was right away. My dad would say this, "No other man, if I die, will ever spend my money." He left everything to my grandfather. He didn't leave her with anything.

Sid Roth: So she was penniless. Goes to California. Your mother took you... first of all, she didn't go to church because that was the deal with your dad, no church.

Marco Garcia: My dad told her as soon as she got married, "You'll never enter a church again." She never did for seven years.

Sid Roth: So you get to California, you and your mother enter a church, she's already been there and she's the Sunday school teacher. What happened?

Marco Garcia: My mother finds a church. I've never heard about God. She was so involved with her pain, her suffering, her abuse, that she never talked to me about God. But finally, when we left the Virgin Islands and came to California, she told the pastor when she got there, "I'm a teacher and can I teach the little children Sunday school?" She wanted me in her class.

The first time I ever heard anything about Jesus was in that Sunday school class. After what she did, the first thing she did was present the Good News of Jesus Christ, that anyone that calls upon the name of the Lord can be saved. This was something interesting. At six years old, I already knew I was a sinner. The generational curse of my father was already on me.

I had a spirit of lust on me that was passed on from one generation to the next. I would look at little girls sexually already. There was something on me already. So when she said that I could be forgiven of my sins and I could be born again, this is what I said. I said this at six years old, "I don't want to be like my father." She said, "Anybody want to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior, be forgiven of your sins? Raise your hand." I remember raising my hand. I want to go to heaven, I want to be saved, I want to be forgiven. That day, at six years old, I was born again and I lived for God since that moment.

Sid Roth: You were the first Garcia in your family to be saved.

Marco Garcia: First Garcia in my family to get saved, yes, true.

Sid Roth: At 16, something happened.

Marco Garcia: My mother, from 6 all the way to 16, took her role real seriously. The Scripture says, train up a child in the way he should go. Training is practice, it's discipline, it's consistent. One of the things that I saw her always doing every single day was studying the Word of God. She would spend time with me studying the Word of God.

By the time I was 12 years old, I knew the Word of God. I could argue with anybody about what the truth was. When I heard something that was off, I knew it. I think it's really important for the audience to know that if you're going to raise godly children, it's not going to be an accident. It's going to be intentional and it has to be consistent. My mom wasn't perfect. One of the things she would tell me, "Marco, the reason I was abused and the reason I went through what I went through is because it was my fault. I chose to disobey the Word of God and these are the consequences." She would tell me, "Marco, don't do the same thing I did."

She trained me to know the Word of God. Now we used to have a Bible study in our home every single week. What she told me to do, she goes, "Marco, what I want you to do is go into the streets and I want you to invite your friends, the gangsters in the neighborhood, and bring them to the Bible study." She taught me how to do some street ministry. I would go while they were partying, while they were drinking, and I would stop the party and say, "Hey, guys." They would call me "preacher boy." They would laugh at me and I would tell them God has a plan for your life.

Sid Roth: Didn't it bother you that your peers were laughing at you?

Marco Garcia: It didn't, and I'll tell you why. My identity was that she spoke it into me. "You're a man of God, you're different, you're a leader. They don't know God." Because she spoke identity into me, I was very proud of being a young man that lived for God reaching the lost. That can be built in a young person. The confidence wasn't in me. My confidence was in the Lord and knowing who I was.

They would say that kind of stuff, but this is what would happen. After they'd call me "preacher boy" and start laughing, always one of them at least would come by and say, "Marco, come here. I'm going through this, I'm going through the other. Will you pray with me?" They would get breakthroughs. Some of them would come to our Bible study, get delivered, get set free, and become disciples of Jesus Christ. She introduced me to street ministry.

Sid Roth: You had a dream about starting a congregation.

Marco Garcia: She told me when I was a little boy... if someone asked me when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I said, "First, I want to be a baseball player. But if that doesn't work, then I know I'm called to be a preacher. I'm called to be a pastor." She drilled it into me. She told me over and over. That was part of the training.

We need to declare not our kids' weaknesses, we need to declare their destiny into their lives. Every kid has issues. Later on, I'm successful, I'm selling cars. At that point, over 21 years ago, I was making $30,000 a month. I was making $360,000 a year legally selling cars. I'm really good at it. My responsibility was to take stores... our company would buy stores that were failing, that were going bankrupt. They would buy them and my job was to go in and turn the stores around and make them profitable.

I was next in line to become an owner if I wanted to. Everything was lining up. But right around the peak of my career, I love what I'm doing, I got a dream. I'm not a dreamer. I'm not always dreaming. But God spoke to me in a dream, and this was the dream. It was just a voice. He goes, "Go. There're sheep and you're their shepherd. If you don't go, they won't have a shepherd." When I heard that, I woke up in the morning and I told my wife, "I think God's telling us to start a church." I'd never heard this type of thinking, that actually people were assigned to me and I was assigned to them. I always thought people go to church because they like the church or they like the preacher. God was telling me, "No, there's more than that. If you don't go, there's no one going to replace you."

Sid Roth: So the consequence was heavy on you.

Marco Garcia: Right. I don't know how to start a church. I've never seen a church start. I'm in the car business. I just bought myself a beautiful home, I'm driving the nicest cars. I just spent $600,000 fixing up my home. Now God's telling me to start a church. I don't know what I'm doing. I told Lisa, my wife, "God's telling us to start a church." She goes, "How?" I go, "I don't know." But the next night I had another dream, back-to-back. In this next dream, I see myself in a forest. I see a whole bunch of big huge trees around me. As I look at the trees, I'm looking around and every one of them begin to fall like dominoes. There's thunder as they're falling, they're so big. Now I'm standing in the middle of these big huge root systems.

I said, "Lord, what is this?" He goes, "Those are my ministers that have been hurt in ministry. If you don't start the ministry, they'll never be planted again and bear fruit." He goes, "Go." I remember waking up that morning, I told my wife, "Now God's going to send us people that have experience, they've been hurt, but this ministry is going to bring them back to health and they're going to finish their race strong."

Sid Roth: Marco starts knocking on doors, inviting people to go to church. He started with nothing. He started with not even credit. God turned a dream into a miracle. Today, he has nine congregations with 12,000 people weekly. It all started in the heart of one of America's most poverty-ridden cities. Be right back.

Your gift will help us continue pioneering Jewish and Muslim evangelism and support the broadcasting of impactful programs worldwide with the Gospel. To partner with me, go to sidroth.org/gift. Your first congregational meeting. Anyone show up?

Marco Garcia: God told us to go love the people. That was the instructions. I didn't know how to start a church. What we did, like you said, we knocked on doors. This is all we said: "We're thinking about starting a church in this area, but there's no need to start a church if we don't even know what your needs are." We started finding out just in one block alone, we started finding out desperate needs. One lady... there were five ladies that were living in one place. They had 15 kids. I looked through their door and I saw they didn't have a fridge, they didn't have a stove, they just had a little icebox.

I said, "Do you guys have a fridge or stove?" They go, "No, we don't." I go, "I'll be right back." I went to the store, bought them a fridge, bought them a stove, and then I just filled it with groceries.

Sid Roth: How'd you have the money?

Marco Garcia: I was still in the car business at that time when we first started the church. I was in the car business and going there every single week. We found on the second door I knocked on, there was a little girl that committed suicide. She hung herself from the rafters of the living room. How could we help that family? They were very poor. They could never move. What I did was I got some of my friends to come in and do an extreme makeover in their living room. They had open beam rafters because they had leaks in their roof and all the drywall fell down. I brought some friends, "Fix the roof, we'll put the drywall, we'll take out the carpet, put brand-new furniture." They can't move, but at least we could change their atmosphere.

We ran into story after story. Just one block, there was yellow tape in the front of that block. One of the kids, 17 years old, just got shot in a drive-by. That's why there was yellow tape. We hit one block and we started seeing the real need of an inner-city block, which we call "the hood." We started that.

Sid Roth: Tell me about that first meeting.

Marco Garcia: The block is telling us they'll come. What we did was we went to 12 blocks and I visited them every single week. They said, "Where's your church?" I said, "We don't have a church." I said, "But when we do, would you come?" I wasn't sure they'd come. They said they would come, but this is what happened. Our first service, 500 people came from the neighborhood. Prostitutes, drug dealers, the hurting, the broken, the homeless. I told some of the ladies, "Make some rice, make some beans, we'll buy some chicken at one of the local stores." I told all the homeless people to come and 400 people gave their lives to the Lord that service.

Sid Roth: Four hundred! That’s beyond your wildest faith, isn’t it?

Marco Garcia: I followed God's instructions and when we follow God's instructions, we get God's results.

Sid Roth: Now the first instruction from God is you have to know your sins are forgiven. You have to know that you're forgiven. You have to know that God loves you and you have to ask Him to be your Messiah and Lord. You use your own words or you could use mine. Just repeat after me out loud. Dear God, I've made many mistakes, for which I'm so sorry. I believe the blood of Jesus washes me clean. And now that I'm clean, Jesus, come and live inside of me. Thank you for saving me from my sins. I make you my Lord.

From the ashes of an abusive past to a life of freedom, Marco Garcia found true liberty. Learn how to overcome life’s darkness and step into your freedom. Get Marco’s free audio digital download, *Breaking Through Darkness*. Rise up and shine His light. Go to sidroth.org/4213d. Thank you, Holy Spirit. Go and flow.