He was the product of a rape and later nearly shot his father.and then took his surname
Now James Robison is delivering the gospel to the world - and because of his traumatic early life, has a deep compassion for the downtrodden of the world

By Dan and Peter Wooding
Special to ASSIST News Service

Dan Wooding with James Robison and Peter Wooding at NRB 2008

NASHVILLE, TN (ANS) -- James Robison's background is hardly typical of a nationally known inspirational leader. For on October 9, 1943, James was born in the charity ward of St. Joseph's Hospital in Houston, Texas-the result of a rape by a drunken man.

James told us during an interview at NRB 2008 in Nashville, Tennessee,  that when the man who made his mother, Myra Wattinger, pregnant, came back into their lives, he took out a high-powered rifle and was about to shoot him.

But we are jumping ahead with the story.

James Robison began his extraordinary story by saying, "My mother was a practical nurse caring for an elderly man in his home. At forty years of age, she'd never had a child, but had been married and divorced. She found herself being approached by an alcoholic son in the family and he forced his affection on her.

"I would assume from what she has shared in the past that it wasn't violent, but it was a forced moment of his uncontrolled passion and in a sexual relationship and she conceived a child that she was not supposed to be able to have at the age of forty. The year was 1943 and she went to a doctor and asked for an abortion and, of deep conviction, he refused.

Unexpected and unwanted

"Later, she said that she prayed about it and thought that she should have the child and, at age forty-one, she gave birth to me. So, I'm unexpected and unwanted, and she went on to put an ad in a newspaper in Houston and asked for someone to get a baby boy; someone who cared, and would be compassionate. The Rev. and Mrs. H.D. Hale of Pasadena, Texas, answered that ad and came and got me, tried to adopt me, and kept me until I was five.

Lived in absolute poverty

"Then my mother took me back from them and, for the next ten years, we moved fifteen or sixteen times and we lived in absolute poverty. To say that we lived in a most dysfunctional situation would not be an exaggeration.

"When I was fourteen, this alcoholic that raped my mother, came back into our lives. He choked my mother and she passed out and I thought he had killed her. He then came into my room and threatened to kill me and I almost killed him. I pointed a high-powered rifle at him in self defense and I would have shot him if he' d have moved his hand rather than just curse me for a while.

"When I look back on it, and many have asked me, 'Why do you think your father didn't move toward you when you had the rifle pointed at him?' I reply, 'I don't think that pastor and his wife and their little congregation of believers ever stopped praying for a little boy that they in many ways lost track of.' I believe somehow prayer was powerful enough that it held my alcoholic father in place until the police arrived and arrested him. After that experience, I left that home and went back to live with the pastor and his wife."

Billy Graham encouraged him

Robison went on to say, "God called me to preach at eighteen, and by the time I was nineteen, Billy Graham had found out about our ministry and took an interest in it. By the time I was twenty the crusades were citywide. They were held in stadiums and coliseums and twenty-million people attended the crusades and millions of people came to Christ. I ended up on television at Billy Graham's suggestion and the television ministry is carried around the world; it's called LIFE Today and God has greatly blessed it."

James Robison's LIFE Today features mission outreaches around the world and encourages viewers to get involved in the fight against hunger, disease, homelessness and poverty. LIFE Outreach has helped feed up to 300,000 children in crisis areas throughout Africa. According to reports from African governments, Mission Feeding has saved more than 5 million lives. The Mission: Water for LIFE program drills fresh water wells in areas where contaminated water takes millions of lives each year. LIFE Centers in countries like China, Mozambique, Ukraine, India and Bolivia offer a home to orphans and outcasts. The Homes for LIFE program has built entire neighborhoods in areas where simple housing is scarce.

Dealing with bitterness and hurt

When asked he had dealt with the whole issue of bitterness and hurt through all he had gone through, he replied, "When I left home again, I became a Christian -- the pastor and his wife led me to Christ -- so this was not a religious experience, it was a relationship experience because I'd already tried religion. I'd already been Christened and been to different churches, but I never really had met the living God as the father. He changed my life and filled me with love and interestingly, he gave me love for the alcoholic man who raped my mother and who threatened to kill me.

"I can remember holding him in a drunken stupor and pulling him up to my chest after he had thrown up on his shirt, and I saying to him, 'I don't know you, but I love you,' and I meant it. So God gave me a supernatural capacity to forgive. As the Bible says, 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.' That's really a key to the healing that is necessary in the world -- in the Middle East or any other place on earth."

When asked how he got the name Robison when that was not his mother's name, he explained, "I was born Wattinger . She was divorced from a Wattinger and my birth certificate is Wattinger. My mother got the name Robison because she wanted me to have the name of the man who was my father. It is strange, very strange, but she actually went and had my name changed to Robison, but that was the name of the man who impregnated her."

Today much of James Robison's ministry is related to helping the downtrodden of the world, and we wondered if this was because of what he had been through in his early days.

"I think that the pain that I experienced; the dysfunctional life I went through; is sadly typical of what many people face today," he said. "I think the extreme poverty in the Third World countries has really attracted our attention and the attention of our viewers.

"Here's what I have noticed -- and I don't believe socialism works -- I don't think you can throw money at a need without compassion connection, otherwise it is doomed to failure. Compassion and giving charitably brings about a connection of the heart. In the Thir d World countries we find people not expecting help but amazed that it comes and are deeply grateful, open and curious about why you noticed them why you loved them.

"So yes, my experiences perhaps helped me identify with people in pain; the experience with God and with relationship, with this great God of love, pours through us like a river if we will just release it. And, yes, amazingly our viewers, whether it's in the UK or Australia or North America, have learned to move outside their world into another person's world; to be a light of hope and help.

"I tell our viewers, 'If you want your prayers answered, become an answer to someone's prayer; become an answer to someone's need and they identify with that."

His new book on prayer

Cover of James Robison's new book

James Robinson then spoke about his latest book, Soul of a Nation: 30  Days, 30 Issues, 30 Prayers (Thomas Nelson Publishers), in which he says that prayer is the best way to build a bright future for our nation and our world.

"In the book, I deal with thirty issues that are really of vital interest to the secular non-church community as well as the faith community," he said. "The center of the book contains a message, which is separate from the thirty separate topics. The center message is that we have a choice of humility or humiliation in which I point out something that God put on my heart. It really is a message that God definitely put on my heart to share and, at the suggestion of Jack Hayford, Ravi Zacharias, Ruth Graham, and other leaders, I went ahead and shared it.

"So the book is centered around that, and here's what I believe. I believe we will sacrifice the comforts we've enjoyed if we don't understand what is necessary to preserve the liberty and freedom we've enjoyed and the sacrifices that purchased that may be necessary to preserve it. We may lose our comfort because we love it too much.

Betty and James Robison

"We've got to know how to fight the right fight in the right place at the right time in the right way. And it's not always with arms -- sometimes it is, but then with arms of love. Sometimes it will be with a military defense and I do talk about that which some would call, 'A just war?' Is it ever right to protect the innocent for the sake of justice, liberty and so forth?"

"That's why I am asking people to pray for us to not only give mercy, but to be forgiving and also to receive the mercy and forgiveness and direction that we need. I want us to have shepherds after the heart of God. I don't want us to walk in a way that looks good, following our own thoughts, I would like for us to know that the foundational principles that Jesus called 'the unshakeable rock' and these principles are to love God and to love others."

Something that James Robison has certainly shown in his own life and ministry, which he shares today with his wife Betty, who make their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area..

For more informat ion on the ministry of James Robison, go to www.jamesrobison.com.

Note: We would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview.

Peter Wooding is senior news editor for the UK-based Christian radio network UCB UK. The son of ASSIST founders, Dan and Norma Wooding, he has traveled extensively reporting from places such as Croatia, Dubai, St Petersburg, Russia, South Korea, Zambia and Israel. He is also the director of ASSIST Europe, and last fall led his first mission trip with the ministry to Beslan in Russia. Previously Peter served as a missionary for five years with Youth With A Mission, where he met his wife who's from North Wales where they now live with their three daughters. Dan Wooding is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS). He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. Wooding is the author of some 42 books, the latest of which is his autobiography, "From Tabloid to Truth", which is published by Theatro n Books. To order a copy, go to www.fromtabloidtotruth.com. danjuma1@aol.com. (Pictured: Dan and Peter Wooding)