499. The Jesus Revolution: The Real Thing | Greg Laurie
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Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down with Greg Laurie, and many of you will be familiar with Mr. Laurie as a consequence of the movie Jesus Revolution, which is really the place where he came to

where I came to know about him. And so I reached out to Mr. Lorry to find out more about the underlying story. So he started a ministry as a reluctant convert, let's say, in the hangover decade of the 1970s, ministering to disaffected young people

and himself in a manner that had quite a revolutionary impact. He started with a very small church of about 30 people and grew that into a massive organization in a short time, which meant that he hit the target squarely in some relatively mysterious manner. And so I wanted to find out how he did that. I wanted to hear the background story. And so we talked about the development of his interest in

the religious, which had made itself manifest in a variety of ways, including some experimentation with hallucinogens. We talked about his fragmented family background that probably partly gave him the craving for something authoritative and genuine. We talked about the state of the world of youth in the 1970s after the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s had collapsed. We talked about the

meaning of the story of Abraham, which is an archetypal story of individual development, and the emergence of the spirit of the benevolent Father in that story, and the parallels between that and his own life, and his own quest, and his own ministry.

And then we talked about the broader significance of the longing for a grounding meaning that characterized the 1970s and that also characterizes young people, especially young men, but not only young men now. And so we weaved that all together quite successfully. And that's what you're in store for if you participate in this podcast.

So I think, Mr. Lorry, I think we'll talk today. Yes, call me Greg, it's good. Greg is good. I think we'll start today with this description, a discussion of a recent New York Times article. And you know something's going on in the religious side of the world, if the New York Times deigns to report on it. Mm-hmm.

They're reporting something that I've been tracking for a couple of years, which is the return of young men to churches, particularly more traditional, not only, but particularly more traditional churches. But I'm wondering, well, first of all, I guess I'm wondering what you think about that. Is this something that you've seen, again, accelerating more recently? And what you think might be accounting for it? Hmm.

You know, it seems to me that this young generation, so many of them raised in broken homes and often fatherless homes, which really is at the root of so many social ills. I'm sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but I've done a little research on it, and you can almost trace everything in culture from...

people getting into crime, drug use, girls getting pregnant outside of wedlock, to broken homes, specifically the lack of a father. So I think that, I think one of the reasons that you have connected with younger people and especially younger men is you're a father figure. And they're looking for an authoritative voice. And I think sometimes parents are trying to be a friend to their children when they need to be parents to their children.

And so I think that there's something about coming to a church and hearing someone say, without apology, here's the Bible, here's truth, here's what God says, and here's the way that you should live.

And I think that there's an appeal to that that is just lacking in our culture. You know, we've pushed so hard against these values and against these absolutes that there is, you know, a reaction. There's always an action and a reaction. So my generation, you know, the baby boomers, we're the children of the people that came out of World War II, you know, building families, rebuilding America.

And so many of us maybe didn't get the affirmation or attention we thought we should get. So maybe we overindulged our children. Then there's a reaction to that. And it just goes on from generation to generation. But I think this is a generation that to me, having lived through a few decades, is in many ways parallel to my youth generation.

I see more of a connection between the late 60s and the early 70s and today than they do in any other decade. I don't see that with the 80s necessarily or the 90s, but today I see young people, they're looking for a cause. They're looking for meaning. I was talking to some Gen Z kids recently. I said, why do you think so many kids of your generation are out there protesting against

Israel was slogans like, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. I don't even think they know what the river or the sea are, but they're involved in it. And they said, they're looking for a cause. They're looking for something to speak up for, something to believe in. So I think that when you come to the church and you come to the Bible and

If we offer theology without apology and make it understandable to people, I think there's a great appeal in that. And that's probably part of the reason that young men in particular, but I think people of all young women, too, are looking for that. So searching for a cause. Right.

I don't think there's any difference between searching for a cause, let's say, and searching for an identity. And of course, you see a lot of clamor in the modern world about identity, a tremendous amount of misconception about what constitutes identity, a tremendous insistence that identity is to be defined only subjectively.

which is really, I think, technically equivalent to the claim of a spoiled two-year-old who wants exactly what he or she wants right now, regardless of the consequences. And I really do mean that technically, because as you mature...

the focus of your attention moves beyond your immediate self-gratification. And it doesn't only do that because you're more controlled than in a sort of patriarchal manner. It does that because as you become more sophisticated, you can play larger and larger scale games that last longer and longer with more and more people. And that's a form of maturation. It's, it's completely appropriate anthropologically and psychologically to

young people to be searching for a cause or for identity because well neurologically what happens for example There are two periods of mass neuronal die-off that characterize human development so when you're first born you have more neural connections that at any point in your life and then a lot of what happens in early infancy is that many of those neural connections die the ones that aren't performing a

rewarded and socialized function all disappear. That pruning takes place again in late adolescence. And so there's a call for the catalyzation of identity in late adolescence. It's probably something like the transformation from that group-centered identity of early adolescence that substitutes for the parent. It's probably something like the transformation of that into independent adulthood. Yeah. Right. And so...

Of course, young people are going to be searching for an identity because that's exactly what they should be doing at that time. The question is, you know, what should the identity be? So let's talk about some of the markers of success. Money, fame, power. Fame in and of itself is not a bad marker for success. Not everyone who's famous is useful and not everyone who isn't famous is useless.

Why is there a small percentage of hyper-successful men who are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that success? It's like if you intervene at the right time, you don't need to use power. Success is not a place you get to and stay. It also integrates the idea of the journey and the idea of the destination.

And so there now you have a definition of success. Here's a thought. Tell me what you think about this. So I have this new book coming out called We Who Wrestle With God. And one of the stories that I deal with in that book is the story of Abraham. So I want to just delve into that a bit in relationship to identity. And I want you to tell me what you think about this. Okay. So what happens in the Old Testament and the New Testament

this book concentrates mostly on the Old Testament, is that you see dramatic characterizations of God. And the characterizations are, there's a multiplicity of characterizations, and each of them highlight a different aspect or trait. There's an underlying presumption that all of these

this multiplicity of characterization has a fundamental unity. So it's all the same thing, but you're seeing it from different angles. So whatever the ultimate is, is very complex. It can't be reduced to a simple unidimensional characterization. So you have to see pictures of it, dramatic pictures. So in Abraham, there's a very specific kind of picture. So first of all, these are all definitions of the highest, let's say.

So God comes to Abraham in the guise of the spirit of adventure. Okay, now there's something paternal about that, right? You could think about the role of a father in a family as if the role of a mother is totalizing acceptance, the role of a father is something like acceptance.

discriminating encouragement and one encloses and the other thrusts out into the world. Now, both parents can play that role, but one is more typically masculine and one is more typically feminine. So God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure. And he says to Abraham, you have to leave your comfort. Now, Abraham is wealthy. He has wealthy parents. And so all of his needs are already

met insofar as needs can be met materially. Abraham's got that covered. It's a very interesting starting place because it implies that whatever the highest has in mind for human beings, it transcends mere satiation. You could also think of that as a maternal role to satiate, right? To take care of needs. Okay, but Abraham, he's got all that covered. But God shows up nonetheless and he says,

you have to take yourself out of your zone of comfort, and you have to leave everything you love, and you have to go into the terrible world. And then he makes him a deal, and this is the covenant. And this is very interesting because the relationship with God is portrayed, particularly in this story, as a contractual arrangement with something like the spirit of the potential future. So God says, if you hearken to the voice of adventure—

you'll become a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal because people often aren't blessings to themselves. They have miserable, self-conscious, neurotic, painful lives. So God says, this is the way out of that. Take the path of adventure. If you do that, your name will become known among the people, among your people, and it will be, and your reputation will be valid. So that's a good deal because people want to be, they want to, that's what the search for fame is.

It can corrupt into just the search for fame, but it can be genuinely predicated on the desire to do something that's worthy of recognition. Okay, so that's deal number two. Deal number three is you'll simultaneously establish something of permanent value. So that's the dynasty of Abraham. He'll be the father of nations. Now he's the spirit of the father as well, right? He's the veritable spirit of the father. And then the final deal is you'll do that in a way that will be beneficial to everyone.

So that's a pretty good deal. And so you think about what that story is doing. It's remarkable. It's remarkably sophisticated. It says that the same impetus or spirit that thrusts you out beyond your zone of comfort is the call to a pattern of behavior that would make you a blessing to yourself, capable of establishing something permanent, capable of generating a name for yourself.

And capable of doing all that in a way that's maximally beneficial for the community. Okay, so that's a good deal. That's the covenant. Now, I've been thinking about this biologically. So you imagine that psychologists have been wrestling with this idea for quite a while that there's a

very sophisticated motivational system that's operating in human beings that has that's something like a unifying force so it's not sex and it's not thirst and it's not hunger and it's not power it's none of these particular drives you might say it's a force that integrates all of them and

integrates that integration with social integration. And it's an instinct as well. It's the instinct to develop. Now that's what seems to be highlighted in the Abrahamic story, is to follow that. And so the biblical insistence is that the call of the spirit of adventure, which is a divinely unifying voice,

is aligned with the pattern of being that would make you a blessing to yourself, good for everyone else, establish something. Yeah, so, but it makes sense to me because the alternative hypothesis is that the voice that calls you forward is

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or to living in a manner that would be a benefit to you and others. And that would mean that our deepest instinct to develop would be set at odds with the sociological surround, and that doesn't make any sense at all, right? They have to be integrated. Okay, so one more thing. We're talking about why this might be particularly attractive to young men at the moment. So one more thing, which is that the ascent of Abraham, once he starts this adventure...

So he decides he's going to go along with this. He's going to throw himself into it wholeheartedly and pursue it wherever he goes. So that's his adventure. And then what happens is that he undergoes a series of transformations that are upward. And with each transformation, there's a sacrifice. That's the rekindling of the covenant. So he has to remember what he's up to. But the sacrifice seems to me to be something like the necessity of

of Abraham abandoning everything that's no longer appropriate as he climbs up Jacob's ladder, right? And he does that so thoroughly and in such a devoted manner that the adventures expand as he moves and become greater, and the demand for sacrifice also becomes greater, right? And it culminates, of course, with the potential sacrifice of Isaac. Yes. And so this is the pattern. And I think it's the

patriarchal pattern. So as the biblical stories progress, the prophets that are after Abraham describe God, the Father, as the God of Abraham and Isaac, right? So we know that we're talking about the same spirit, and it seems to me that it is the spirit of the encouraging Father, and that could be made manifest in any particular father, but it's that spirit as such, and it

beckons forward, calls out of security, establishes the social contract, establishes the pattern of psychological transformation, and indicates that there are sacrifices at each, what would you say, point of crisis that have to be rectified for the personality transformation to occur. Right.

Yes? That seems reasonable to you? Well, yes. You know, I think the thing to start with is just that God spoke to Abraham. He's coming from a completely pagan background.

And God establishes a relationship with him. And then he has a tension with his nephew Lot. Yeah. And you can compare the two of them because it's like Lot was drawn to the bright lights of the big city, if you will, to Sodom. Yeah, he pitches his tent towards Sodom. And progressively goes downhill from there.

And Abraham is looking elsewhere. In the New Testament, it says he was looking for a city and had foundations whose builder and maker is God. So I think there's this longing in Abraham for God. But, you know, him and his wife never have a child. And they finally have Isaac in their old age. And Isaac means laughter. He's the joy of their life. And then the Lord asked for the ultimate sacrifice from Abraham. Take your son, your only son, Christ.

whom you love and offer him as a sacrifice to me. And kind of a common misconception I think about Isaac in some religious art is you see him portrayed as a young child when in reality he was probably a young man.

And therefore, it wasn't just a father sacrificing a son, but it was a son fully cognizant of what he was being asked to do, willing to sacrifice himself. But the Lord intervenes, said the angel, and it was never God's intention for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but it became a perfect picture of what would happen later at the cross. You know, and I think one of the best summations of it all is the story that Jesus told. We call it the parable of the prodigal son.

But, you know, we wonder, what is God like? You know, is God austere? Is God harsh? Is God distant? Does God have an interest in us? And if Jesus had not suggested this, it might even seem somewhat irreverent.

Jesus portrays God as a father who loves his son, who misses his son, and when his son is gone, he longs for his return. And not only that, but when the son is a long ways off and comes to his senses and returns, the father runs to him and kisses him. And a better translation would be he smothers him with kisses. So this is an affectionate father. And you think this is a boy who came from an affluent home, he came from a loving home,

But yet he went away. But that's God. Like, what is God like? God is like a father that misses us and longs for fellowship with us. And then, of course, the son is restored to sonship. So I think we're all longing for that. Just to go to my own personal story, Jordan, you know, my mother died.

was married and divorced seven times. And she was a beautiful woman, literally a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe. And she had a bunch of boyfriends in between. She was a raging alcoholic. So I never had a father growing up. And I was searching for a father myself.

And so I saw my mother's lifestyle that was sometimes affluent, primarily alcoholic. She would drink to excess and pass out in a stupor every night. And suddenly I became the parent in the relationship. Even though I was a little boy, I did make sure my mom didn't die, right? So get her in bed, make sure she eats something and care for her. But

So I can understand young people searching, young men searching. I was searching too, but I didn't know what I was searching for. I just knew out there there was something better than the life I was living. And so it's almost like my mother engaged in a form of pre-evangelism.

She sort of, in her way, showed me the adult world had nothing that I really wanted. And so the answer must be somewhere else. But unfortunately, the whole drug culture was happening. And I bought into the lie of turn on, tune in, drop out, you know, along with a lot of other young people. Timothy Leary. Yeah, Timothy Leary, exactly. And I quickly found that wasn't true. And I tried it.

I smoked a lot of weed. I did those things every day. I saved that for weekends. And I had a couple bad trips, and I thought, this is not the direction I want my life to go.

And, you know, and I lived for a time with my grandparents and they had a portrait of Jesus on their wall. And I would often look at it as a young boy and think, I wish I could have known Jesus. It's too bad he was merely a historical figure. And somehow I made a connection on my high school campus when there were these kids that were very outspoken for their faith.

that were talking about Jesus. We called them Jesus freaks. Not meant as a compliment. And I thought they were all crazy. - How old are you?

Now? Yeah. I'm 72. So you were born in? 1952. 52, right. So you were 18 in 1970. Yes. Right, okay, okay. I'm just trying to place you with regard to the hippie movement. So you were 16 and 16. 17 in 1970. Yeah. And that was the year that I, while I saw these Christians on my high school campus, they

that would sit around at lunchtime and sing songs about God. And I just looked at them and thought, they're all crazy. And then I tried a thought on for size. What if it's true? And I quickly dismissed it as impossible. It couldn't be true because I'd become very cynical because of my upbringing. I've been so disillusioned by the adult world. But then I tried that thought on again. What if it's true?

And there was a guy speaking that it's in the movie, the Jesus Revolution movie that it's shown in the film. Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, plays the role of Lonnie Frisbee, this evangelist who had long hair and a beard, who was speaking that day. And he made one statement that got my attention. He said, Jesus said, you're for me or against me. So I looked at all these questions.

Jesus freaks, and I thought, well, I'm not one of them. Does that mean I'm against Jesus? I thought, well, I don't wanna be against Jesus. I believe he's out there. I've seen all of his movies. What I know of him, I have a respect.

But then I realized, but I'm not a believer in this sense. Could this happen for me? And I ended up praying. And that was the day that my life changed. And so coming back to fathers again, my mom had been married and divorced so many times. I had a full-time ministry trying to evangelize my former father, so-called.

But, you know, here's what happened. So let me tangle some of the things we talked about together then and correct me if I'm wrong. Right. Okay, so we started out talking about why there might be a movement more towards traditional faith among young men, right? And then I told the story of Abraham. Yes. And you started to talk about your...

your childhood. So I want to elaborate on that a little bit because there's a theme emerging here that's particularly relevant and you compared her to Marilyn Monroe. Now Marilyn Monroe of course died an unpleasant death and in many ways had an unpleasant life but she was definitely an archetypal figure. Yes. Right? And so I want to delve into that a little bit. Now

If your mother was comparable to Marilyn Monroe, then she had a tremendous sensual cachet. Yeah. Right? And that is an immense power. And Marilyn Monroe could wield that better than anyone in the last century, let's say, that we know of. She said she could turn that on and off. I heard an interview with her, and she said she could walk down the street as was necessary.

Was Norma Rae? Was that her? Norma Jean. Norma Jean. And no one would pay any attention to her. She could walk down the street as Marilyn Monroe and then she was just magnetic. And so she had learned how to turn that on and off. So there's a tremendous sexual power there. But Marilyn Monroe and your mother both got caught up in the shadow side of that. And I think the shadow side of that is the fact that

sexuality, like any primordial motivational state,

is very short-term and hedonistic in its orientation. And that means that if it's the ruler, then things are going to devolve very badly. It doesn't have a long-term vision. And so it's pursuing its short-term ends. And that's anything that only pursues short-term ends isn't going to survive in the medium to the long run. It has to be integrated in something that's broader. Now, you as a child, again, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm going on very slim evidence here. You as a child saw...

the power of that and also the dark side of it. So the power of it was the fact that your mother was capable of attracting men and pursuing sequential relationships. Like she had that ability, but the downside was, well, the alcoholism that's often and drug use that's often associated with hedonism and the fact that she was abandoned and alone. Right. So those are terrible dark sides. Now you could imagine that in you,

because this has to happen, there's going to be the emergence of a deep longing for the corrective to that. So then you might ask, well, what's the corrective to hedonistic sensuality? And it is something like ordered patriarchy. So let me give you an example of that, a reverse example. So I wrote this paper with Jonathan Pagel on the imagery of the Scarlet Beast and the

Babylon. So the scarlet beast is a multi-headed monster that's blood-colored, and it represents the degenerate patriarchal state. So when God dies, so to speak, and that unity disappears, the state turns into a multiplicity, and the heads war with one another, and that's like bloodshed. And so there's the scarlet beast, the degenerate masculinity.

On the back of that is degenerate femininity. And the message seems to be that when the masculine state deteriorates, the feminine state deteriorates. Exactly what you'd expect unless you propose that one sex could go astray without the other going astray. That's not going to happen. Yeah.

When the state degenerates, feminine sexuality commoditizes. That's a good way of thinking about it. And then you get the tension between the two. And in that story, the Scarlet Beast ends up killing the whore. So the degenerate state will offer hedonistic gratification as an attractant, but in the final analysis will demolish all of that. Which is, you know, married religious couples have the most sex. Mm-hmm.

Which is like one of the funniest statistics ever, as far as I'm concerned. It's like unbridled hedonism destroys sex itself. That's another way of thinking about it. Right. So that's... Okay, so in you, obviously, and to some degree you were a child of your times. Yeah. In you is going to emerge a longing for whatever would rectify whatever you saw your mother go through right now. So you could imagine that that would manifest itself as a desire for the presence of something paternal. Yeah. But also...

But underneath that, there would be a religious longing as well, which would be something like a longing for the spirit of the benevolent patriarchal. Okay, so now you're watching these kids, the Jesus freaks, and you're having ambivalence about that. Okay, what's the basis of the ambivalence? What is it about what they're doing? Because this kind of strikes to the heart of the atheistic conundrum too. You know, I mean, there can be something, the...

The enemies of Christ in the Gospels, the primary enemies, are the Pharisees, right? They're religious pretenders. Yes. Right. So that's a very interesting thing. Right. So you're watching the Jesus freaks, and you said that that wasn't a laudatory term, and you're wrestling with their attractiveness, you know, on the one hand.

You think there's something to it. On the other hand, you find, what is it that you weren't happy about that you were seeing? Do you think? What was it that was pushing you away? Well, I think it's just that they seem fanatical. They seem extreme, and it seemed too obvious. Like, are you kidding me? Are you telling me that...

After my search into all these things, thinking maybe it's in astrology, maybe it's in Eastern religion, maybe it's in drugs, maybe it's in this or it's in that, that it's literally Jesus Christ, that portrait hanging on my grandmother's wall. Like I never even considered that is what I was looking for, or I should rephrase it, that's who I was looking for.

But there it was in plain sight. And so it was, it can't be this simple. So that seemed too absurd in a way. Well, yes. But then there was something, some of these kids, I knew them. I grew up with them. I partied with them. And I saw they were changed. So I couldn't dismiss them as all being crazy people because I knew them before. And I saw transformation had happened in their lifetime.

But so I prayed a prayer and I said, "God, if you're real, you need to make yourself real to me 'cause I'm full of cynicism, I'm full of doubt." - How old were you at this time? - I was 17. - Okay. - Yeah, but I felt like I was older because I had to grow up faster. And so I think my life experiences were not the typical 17 year old.

But, but. Especially for that time, because at that time, where'd you grow up? I grew up in California, Newport Beach. Okay, so things would have been a little more fragmented there than in many places. But most people at that time would have come from intact families. Did you have any male figures in your life that were, that helped you orient yourself along that axis? No, no, not really. Not until later, where there was one person.

Oscar, Lori. So my mom almost looks like she kept marrying the same guy. They were kind of, you might call them bar flies. You know, the guys that have just a few too many of their buttons on their shirt undone. And they're hanging out in the bar. And so she kept marrying like the same guy in a sense. And then she met this guy from New Jersey. He was an attorney. He was intelligent. He was educated. He was smart.

He was very conservative. And I don't know what my mother saw in him. He was so different, but he literally took an interest in me. He adopted me. He gave me his last name and treated me as a father should treat his son. So one day— So you had a taste of that. Yeah, so he was that one bright spot. And then there's a neat connecting story where I was able to reconnect later with him and, in a sense, return the favor a little bit.

But so he, when I came out of school one day in New Jersey, where we were living at the time, the car was packed up with all of our luggage. And I said, where are we going? My mom said, we're going to Hawaii. I said, well, where's dad? She said, he's not coming. And I didn't see him for the rest of my childhood. So we flew to Honolulu. She had already met another guy who was the most abusive of all of her husbands. In fact, this guy knocked her unconscious once.

with a wooden statue when they were having a drunken fight. And I climbed out of the window of my bedroom and ran to the neighbors and we moved back to California. But, you know, so this was, I remembered him.

And he was someone that was stable. He disciplined me. He gave me an allowance. One time I stole something from a store and he took me down to the jail and introduced me to the prisoners trying to keep me away from a life of crime. Problem was, I thought it was kind of cool. I kind of missed the memo. But he was a father figure. So even though I never, because I was not

planned. You know, my mom had a one night stand in Long Beach and I was conceived and I found that out like 30 years later. But because he treated me as a father should treat his son, I've always thought of him and spoken of him as my dad. So here's the cool thing. Even if you're broken, if you're raised in a broken home and you don't have a biological father, I think a

A man can step in and be a father figure. It could be a pastor. It could be a coach. It could be an uncle. It could be a friend. But a man can step in and show a young man or a young woman, because young women obviously need dads too. He can step in and be that father figure for them. And Oscar did that. And then later after I became a Christian, there was a pastor named Chuck Smith.

who was kind of that father figure for a lot of us. So it kind of helped me and a lot of other young men find our way. And I think that needs to, and like I was saying to you earlier, I watched a film about you in The Rise of Jordan Peterson. And I saw these young men coming up to you. And it was so interesting to me because they're very young and they're reading what you've written and they've found you on YouTube. One young man said,

I was extremely depressed and even suicidal, and you helped me. And I just thought you're doing that in your way, being a father figure to a generation that is seeking. And I think that's fantastic. Yeah, well, there's a longing. There's an innate longing for the realization of certain patterns. The longing is vague.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's deeply instantiated. The longing is vague, and there's various ways that it could be catalyzed. But my sense as a developmental psychologist is that a neurologically intact child needs one good example.

Right. Zero is too few. Yeah. That's fatal, so to speak. But if you're neurologically intact, one example will do the trick. Yeah. And so you had the gentleman that you described. And, you know, it's also for people who are more aesthetically oriented or intellectually oriented, they can often derive some of that from books and from abstracted representations. You can pull it in that way, too, but you definitely need it.

So now these Jesus freaks. So when I was a kid, you see, I was struck by a moral conundrum. And I think it has something to do with religious pretension. And so I'd be interested in your opinion on this is that the more religious people that I grew up with.

So I grew up in what was essentially a frontier town. Fairview had only been settled about 50 years before, scraped out of the prairie 50 years before. We were in the northernmost reaches of the North American prairie. And it was a relatively rough working class town.

And most of my friends were relatively rough working class kids. And I hung around with, I wouldn't exactly call them delinquents because there were some seriously bad kids. And my friends weren't in that group, but they were, most of them dropped out of high school, you know, in grade 10 or so, worked on the rigs. They were tough kids. And there was the odd thing.

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I was leery of them because I, and I think there was a Nietzschean reason for that, is that Nietzsche said that most morality is cowardice. Now, he didn't mean that morality was cowardice because he wasn't a simple-minded character, but what he meant often was that people who were afraid justified their fear by giving it a facade of the moral. And what I noticed about the moral Christian perspective

teenagers that I knew is that they were timid and afraid and obedient and they justified that by reference to their religious morality and I didn't like that I like the more I like what one of my best friends for example he got kicked out of school when he was in grade 10 for picking a fight with the With the said instructor and you think well, that's pretty bad. It's like well He was only 15 and this phys ed instructor could do an iron cross He was tough muscular

tough guy. And the fact that my friend picked a fight with him, you know, I'm not trying to whitewash that, but it was also extremely brave. He was not a coward. It was a foolish thing to do because he hadn't progressed to any great distance. He would have been pounded flat, but he was a tough kid. And I admired that. And when I watched the more religious types, so to speak,

They were too afraid to engage in life. And then I learned later, you know, as a psychologist, there's a literature on misbehavior in adolescence. Okay, so you imagine a normal distribution of misbehavior. Over here are the kids who, like, they steal and they drink and they take too many drugs and they engage in early sexual promiscuity. And they don't do well. That's like pathway to life course criminality. Then there's the kids over here who never break any rules.

They don't do well either. They end up dependent and depressed and anxious. And then there's the kids in the middle who break enough rules when they're teenagers to explore, but basically take a straight path. They're the ones that do well. And so I saw the religious type, so to speak, fall into that timid camp that was dependent. And

That turned me away from that. So I don't know if that experience rings any bells for you. Well, I'm over in this category here. You know, I was the one, like my cousin older than me named Wayne. He is a psychologist. He was preparing to become a psychologist. And so he did a study on me as a young man. And he said, clearly, you're headed in the wrong direction. And I was always getting in trouble at school, always creating chaos,

And I think I was just looking for attention. I was looking for purpose. And so for me, I didn't have any religious hypocrisy to rebel against because I didn't know any religious people. All I knew were basically hedonists, adult hedonists. Right, right. Who didn't give me...

anything even remotely close to an example worth emulating or following. So all I knew in life at that stage at 17 was like a process of elimination. I hadn't found what I was looking for, but I knew it wasn't here and it wasn't there. Right. So where was it? If anywhere. Yeah, if anywhere. But there was something in me that said, it's going to get better. What do you think that was?

I think that, I think God, you know, the Bible says that God has put eternity in our heart. Yeah, right, right. And I think that deep inside of us, we're pre-wired to know God. I think that there's a longing, you know, it was C.S. Lewis that called it the inconsolable longing.

something that won't be satisfied by anything. But the right thing. But the right thing. And so that was in me. And I became an artist, a little cartoonist, and I drew these little cartoon adventures. And I created my own characters because it was a private world I could retreat to. And it was also where I developed a slightly warped sense of humor. It's very sarcastic. Like I was more drawn to reading, I don't know if you've ever seen these Mad Magazine. Oh, yes, definitely. Instead of normal comic books because...

I liked things that were subversive and sarcastic and somewhat irreverent. And I still have that sense of humor today. It's changed somewhat as a Christian, but it's still there. You know, I see the absurdity in situations. I think I see facades maybe a little more quickly. But at the same time, there was a longing for something good and pure. So when I met my wife-to-be—

Kathy. How old were you when you met her? I was, let's see, I would have been probably 18 years old. And we got married, and we just celebrated 50 years of marriage. We're still together. We're still celebrating, but she's here in the room with us. Yeah.

So, you know, to be able to come from a home where my mom was married and divorced seven times with a bunch of boyfriends in between, with a life that was on the wrong trajectory, going the wrong way,

And then to have everything changed, that can't be explained to me. Okay, now you said, okay, so two things I want to delve into. So I was curious, you were watching the Jesus Freaks. You know, I've never been to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I feel this is my first time. You're helping me.

Well, it's very interesting to see how themes develop and to see what they imply, right? And it is, I mean, you also revealed something that's quite remarkable just in the last thing that you said, because, you know,

You came from a broken home, but you had a marriage that lasted 50 years. Right? So, you know, one of the things that foolishly psychological people, psychologically minded people assume is that the past determines the future. Yes. And the thing is, is that like...

Many people who don't drink had alcoholic fathers. Now, many people who drink also had alcoholic fathers. But the reality of the matter is that there's a variety of lessons that you can learn from any teaching trial. And if you're bullied, you can learn to bully, but you can also learn to never bully. And one of the things that you apparently learned

both to desire and to enact from the example of your mother was a counterexample because you've had a 50-year relationship. It was also something that you wanted. And so there was part of you that was searching for stability and purpose and part of you that actually believed that that was possible as well, which is also interesting because it begs the question why you would even think that was possible.

Okay, so now back to the Jesus freaks. Now, you were watching them as a relatively young teenager, and you thought there was maybe something there. And so you got curious about that, but you were also skeptical, and you said something about praying, and that that was something that changed your life. So can you relate that? Okay, here's what it came down to. This guy who was preaching, his name was Lonnie Frisbee, he said, come up here and pray.

And I'll lead you in a prayer. And I walked up there and I thought, this isn't going to work. Where were you? I'm high school. It's high school at lunchtime. And Newport Harbor High School in Southern California. And Newport Beach, California. So it's lunchtime. I've walked forward in this public meeting that I was kind of attending. I was...

far enough away where I wouldn't be looked like I was a part of it, but close enough where I could kind of eavesdrop. No one invited me. Normally people become Christians because someone invites them to church or they share the gospel with them. No one did that for me. But I walked over to this evangelist and other kids were praying. He said, pray this prayer with me. And you know, Jordan, this is a prayer that

that I've led people in for over 50 years. And I've seen their lives changed. And there's nothing magical in this prayer. It's just a prayer based on biblical principles. But all prayer is, is it's communicating with God. And I don't think it has to be sophisticated. I think it needs to be genuine and from the heart. And the prayer went something along the lines of, God, I know I'm a sinner, but I know Jesus Christ is a savior who died on the cross for my sin and rose again from the dead.

And I asked Jesus to come into my life. I didn't know what I was doing, but I believed it. And I didn't have an emotional experience, though people next to me did. One was laughing, one with joy. One was crying, maybe over their sins. I felt nothing. And I thought, that figures. God rejected me. But I marked that day in 1970 as the day that Christ literally came into my life and

And it changed everything for me. In fact, that weekend, we had planned to go out into the mountains and take out and smoke. And I went out with my friends and I broke away. I felt like being alone. I had this little baggie full of and a pipe and it just dawned on me, I don't want to do this anymore. And I don't know why I felt that way, but I thought, I don't want this anymore.

And so I said, God, if you're real, make yourself real to me. And I threw my pipe away and my away. So that's a sacrificial gesture. Yeah. And it was and there was no one talking to me. No one explained like what we do when someone prays at one of our events. We're there to explain it. We give them a Bible. We're there to follow up on them. No one did any of this for me.

But, you know, God says, those that seek me will find me. And I think if we genuinely reach out to God, God will respond. You don't have to do anything perfectly. It just needs to be a movement of your heart toward God. And as much as I knew as a 17-year-old kid, I took that step of faith. And that is when my life began to change. And I've led people in this

So your thoughts do make themselves manifest to you in keeping with the spirit of your aim. So you can think about this. So there's a long history since the early 1960s of study into a phenomenon known as the orienting response. And the orienting response is a collection of psychophysiological responses that orient you towards a goal. Yeah.

You see a landscape appear in front of you in relationship to that goal. And it's quite straightforward to understand. I mean, if I want to walk across the room through an open door, the first thing I do is look at the door, right? So now I've oriented my aim towards the door. Now I can see a pathway to the door and I can see obstacles and pathways. I can see things that will move me forward and things that will get in my way. And that is the...

landscape of perception. There's an aim and a pathway, and there's obstacles and facilitators, and you're always in that. Okay, your thoughts work that way too. So once you orient yourself towards an aim, the thoughts that come to you will have the voice of the spirit of that aim. This is technically how thought works. If I'm angry with you,

and I want to have a fight, the thoughts that will come to me will be in keeping with that motivation and the perceptions as well. Like I'm going to transform your face even into a target, right? I'm going to allow the voice of anger to make itself manifest within me. So now imagine that I reconfigure my aim

so that I'm aiming, however imperfectly, for the highest thing I can conceive of, however imperfectly. Well, that's the voice that's going to respond to the inquiries. Like, that's technically true. Now, I'm not sure exactly what that means metaphysically, but it does imply that this is a terrifying thing to realize, is that every aim is a prayer.

And every spirit that responds to your aim responds in the voice of the spirit of that aim. And this is a terrible thing because it means, for example, if you're possessed by resentment, it's the eternal spirit of vengefulness that will make itself manifest in your heart. That's exactly what happens. Yeah. And so...

Well, there's no reason to assume at all that that wouldn't happen on the positive side. Okay, so now you made a gesture. Yeah. You know, you had decided somehow that...

The hedonistic pathway that you were pursuing, even if there was some search for enlightenment in it, say with the, you weren't going to go down that route. And you can imagine that, you know, you'd learned your lesson to some degree by watching your mother and her and her boyfriends, that there was some real danger in that. Timothy Leary danger, right? Enlightenment without wisdom, let's say. So you made a gesture, you cast that aside, and then you opened yourself up and the opening would be, well, I'm,

Operating under the presumption that something better could appear, whatever that might be. Right. Okay, so now you said the first time you did that in the schoolyard, there was no real response. But you believe, in retrospect, that something nonetheless changed. And then the next part of the story was this. Yeah.

So you're out with your friends, and you decide to do something different. Okay, so now that's a prayer. That's a humble prayer. You're on your knees saying there's got to be more. Okay, so then what happens? Well, you know, so I go back to school, and the Christians there saw me and said, hey, Greg, come to our Bible study.

And, okay. And I went, and I felt kind of uncomfortable there. Did you have friends outside that circle? I had a bunch of low-life friends. I was going to one school called Coronadomar High School that was kind of a...

a school attended by a fluent kid. So I was not an affluent kid. We lived in a little apartment in that area. And so it was very different. I literally transferred to this other school, Coronado Mar High School to Harbor High, to change my identity. I said, I want to become a different person. I don't want to be the preppy guy that everybody knows and, you know, I

trying out for the football team, I was ultimately rejected. But I hung out with those kids because my grades were too low. But anyway, so I wanted to be a different person. And I thought the drug culture had the answers. So what happened ultimately was I transferred to another school where I had relative anonymity because people didn't know me like they knew me at the school I transferred from. Right, right.

But in reality, I ended up becoming a different person, just not in the way I expected. So I look back in retrospect and I think. So you transferred to this new school so that you could get away from the preppy image and hang around with the more drug oriented. And that isn't what happened. You ended up in the clutches of the Christians instead. I did. But there was a time I was in the drug culture there, very much so, every day as a matter of fact.

But then when this transformation happened, so here's an illustration. So I'm walking across the campus and one of these Christians says, hey, Greg, here's a Bible. And they gave me a Bible. And I'm like, wow, I'm not going to carry this Bible around. So I shoved it in the pocket of my coat and I went over to my friend's house, which was a stone's throw from our high school because we would literally get high there every day at lunchtime.

So I walked over there. I hadn't seen them since I'd prayed this prayer with these Christians. So I looked around. I'm not going to walk in with a Bible. So I took the Bible and put it in the hedge in front of my friend's house. And I walked in. They said, hey, Laurie, where have you been? I said, nowhere. Hey, we're going to get high. You want to get high? He said, no, I don't want to. Really? They kind of looked at me. What's wrong with you?

Like, what have you been doing? I said, nothing. I wasn't going to talk about this. Suddenly my friend walks, mom walks in holding my Bible. I'm thinking, what is this woman? Check her bushes when she comes in her house. And then the thing that struck me, he says, who does this belong to? I thought, lady, kids are doing drugs in your house and you're concerned about a Bible in the bushes. She holds it up. Who does this belong to? It's so funny. Every eye in the room went to the Bible and they look

They looked at me, they knew there was a connection. And I said, "That's mine." And one of my friends said, "You're reading the Bible?" I said, "Yeah." And they said, "Oh, are we gonna be nice little Christians now and follow Jesus?" I said, "No, maybe I'll hit you in the mouth." I don't know. I hadn't read- - That's a good response. - I hadn't read 1 Corinthians 13 or anything at that point.

So, and so they all started mocking me. So it kind of helped me 'cause I thought these are not good people and I don't need to hang around these people anymore. They made it easy to make a break with that crowd. So I thought I'm gonna give the Christians another try. And I went back to their meetings and ended up at this church that was in the middle of a spiritual awakening called Calvary Chapel, filled, packed up with people of all ages.

And then Chuck Smith, who I mentioned earlier, this older man who is the pastor, opened up the Bible and suddenly this book came alive to me. And suddenly I found truth. I never had any absolute truth in my life. I was just looking for something. I remember we're in school and

Ray Bradbury, the well-known author, came and spoke. And we thought, he's going to give us truth. We were just looking for someone to give us some truth. And he didn't have anything for us. And all of a sudden, I find that truth I've been looking for in the Bible. And so...

then you can't keep me away from the play. So I was like a sponge wanting to make up for lost time and just absorbing these things. And then my life was changing. And it wasn't long after that that I started talking to people about this because I wanted to talk to people that were like I used to be, cynical, closed off.

And I wanted to say, if God could change someone like me, he can change you too. And fast forward 50 years, I'm effectively still doing the same thing. Right, the scales change. Yes. Well, so let's walk through that story. And maybe you can tie it in for people who are listening to the movie, The Jesus Revolution. Okay, so this church that you attended and this pastor, flesh that out a bit, if you would.

Well, it's funny because this young hippie evangelist, he was kind of cool. We all looked up to him. And so... That was Frisbee. That was Lonnie Frisbee. That's hilarious that his name was Frisbee. I don't know when you were a kid, but all the stoners when I was a kid, they all played Frisbee. Frisbee. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Right. I think that was one of those games that you could still understand when you were stoned. Exactly. Yeah.

So we kind of came for Lonnie, but this older man walks out. I had a problem with older figures, authority figures, because all of the adults in my life I didn't respect. And then I was always being sent to the principal's office for misbehaving in class. So I just had a chip on my shoulder for all adults. Like, there's nothing you can tell me. There was a— Oh, you know what?

a lot of these, a lot of the claim that's popped up among young women and young men, I think I'll concentrate on young women for a moment is that, you know, the patriarchy is nothing but authoritarian power. That is what you think if you've never had a good relationship with anybody in a position of authority, you know? And so if you're, you know, a lot of young women who are trapped in the progress in progressive hell are trapped there, not least because they're,

They've never had a good relationship with anyone male. Not a brother, not a father, not a friend. Yeah, so all they see is... And then it's a worse conundrum, too, because imagine that you regard the opposite sex as...

a power-mad enemy, well, then the ones that are better at that are going to be more frightening. So what you want is, if someone's your enemy, you want them to be weak. Right. Right, okay. So now, so these young women who are confused like this are in a terrible conundrum because if they ever meet a competent man, but their history is,

you know, tilts them towards interpreting any manifestation of competence as power, they're going to be anti-competence because they're going to assume that that's nothing but a manifestation of power. So then they're in an absolutely brutal position because nobody who's competent, they're going to be maximally distrustful of anyone who's competent. Yeah. Okay, so you're kind of in the same situation because all the people of authority, so to speak, in your life had, well...

You just saw the hedonistic and exploitative side of that. Right. Right. Well, you could also imagine that even your misbehavior, such as it was, would be, that's a limit-testing approach. Because what you're kind of hoping for is that... As a homeowner, some of the most tedious and easily forgotten maintenance tasks are often the most important. Take gutter cleaning. It's one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind chores that can lead to serious issues if neglected. Right.

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- Right, you're gonna, and the way people search for that isn't merely by asking, they search for that by misbehaving and watching what happens. That's limit testing. It has to happen that way. - Well, actually to illustrate that, during my mother's wild adventures, I lived with my grandparents for a time, she sent me to military school on two separate occasions.

Where like I lived on campus, we were cadets, we wore our little uniforms, we had barracks, we had a house mother. And it's funny, I hated it, but I flourished there. Because there were like, if you mess up, you get disciplined. And we're talking corporal discipline. They had something notoriously known as the cheese paddle, which was a large paddle with holes drilled in it. And they'd swat you with that thing. And suddenly I went from delinquent kid to honor roll and good grades.

And so when I was pulled out of military school and went back to public school and realized how much I could get away with, I returned to my old ways again. So it shows when absolutes were in my life, I would respond. I needed that. But this is different, though, because that was a very strong authoritarian movement.

But I think in many ways, it was actually kind of good for me at the time. Well, the thing, you know, the more disagreeable a child is, you know, so now would that be associated with that tendency limit test? Yeah. The more, the higher the walls have to be to hem them in. You know, and there's advantages and disadvantages to that. I mean, the disadvantage is if you're a disagreeable kid and you're let run away.

while you're kind of like an attack dog that isn't trained. And well, that's just not good. But an attack dog that is trained, that's a really useful dog, right? But it takes some real work to socialize. The more aggressive a child is, the harder it is to socialize them. But if you can socialize them, they're hyper-useful. Right, right. So it's a high-risk, high-return strategy.

Okay, so you went to this church and you were first attracted and the other kids around you by Frisbee. Yes. Who was kind of charismatic and young. And there was an older gentleman. Yeah. This is also all laid out in the movie, right? In Jesus' privilege. It is, yeah. Kelsey Grammer plays Chuck Smith. Right. In the film. And I think Chuck came out on one service.

And I looked at him and, an adult, I don't want to listen to an adult, you know, it's going to be boring. And he opened the Bible up and he began to speak in such an understandable way. So he's like a father, but a benevolent father, but strong. And so he was someone, I'd never met anyone like this before, apart from Oscar Laurie, who adopted me. And so this was...

what I needed, a father figure to help me and to be a model for me. And sometimes it's not just in theology. It's just in the practical things of life. You know, he was kind of a salt of the earth guy, hardworking guy. Like for him, a day off was actually building things. So he was like a classic dad

I think they call them trad dads now, you know, but kind of like, wow, this is what I've never seen this before. How interesting, you know? And so. Wow, that's a terrible conundrum to be in too, because you'd be longing for that. And also the distrust would build in proportion to the longing. Yeah. You know, you see people who are really hurt sometimes. It's a terrible thing to watch because what they'll do when they meet someone, they're hoping they can trust them. Yeah. Yeah.

They're so afraid of opening themselves up to betrayal one more time that they'll ramp up the misbehavior. And some of them, these are the borderline types, some of them will ramp up the misbehavior past the point where anyone can tolerate it. And then they get rejected. And then they think, oh, well, that's what I expected. But they get in this terrible loop so that they misbehave so badly that it's beyond the ken of anyone human to tolerate it. Yeah, then they're in a permanent betrayal trap. Right.

It's really bad. But you still had enough residual trust, apparently, so that you could allow this connection to occur. You had that guy that was your father. Yeah, maybe because there was one bright spot there. So looping back to him again. So I got married, and I'm a young pastor. I've started my own church now that grew out of a little Bible study of young people. I never intended on becoming a pastor.

I kind of thought I might be called to be an evangelist and travel around and speak to people, but a little Bible study was developing. So— This was in that church to begin with? No, this is another church about 45 minutes away in a community called Riverside that I went and established this little Bible study. Oh, yes. I'm remembering pieces of the movie now as you tell the story. Right. Right. So you established your own—how old were you when that happened? Uh.

- I was 21. - Right, so well, young by today's standards. - Yeah. - There were battle commanders who were 21 not so long ago. - That's true. - Yeah, okay, so you established your own church and what sort of people came to begin with? - Young, very young. So we were all young kids and I had no intention of starting a church

You know, today we have what we call startup churches. They pop up all over the place. Not unusual to see. Back in 1973 or 4, you didn't really see startup churches. They were traditional churches that had been there for a long time. And then the pastor would die or retire and someone new would come. But you didn't see, oh, we're starting a brand new church. And especially a church...

of young people and especially a bunch of hippie kids. You could quickly dismiss it as almost cultic, but one of the good things that Chuck Smith did for us is he got us studying. He got us into great books and we built our library and we built our messages on the Bible. It's called expository Bible teaching.

where you go through chapters of the Bible and let the Bible speak for itself as opposed to imposing your view on the text. Let the Bible be the Bible. It's alive, it's powerful, and it impacts people. So coming back to Oscar, so I thought,

I would like to see him again. So I was speaking in New York City and I reached out to him. I found him through the Bar Association, a lady that went to our church, worked for the Bar Association. I didn't even know if he was alive. This is before Google, right? And so we found his office and I called it and I said, hello, is Oscar Laurie there? And the secretary said, no, he's at lunch.

who is calling. I said, "Greg Laurie." She said, "How do you spell your last name?" I said, "Well, the same way he spells his. This is his son calling. He calls me a half hour later. He says, 'Greg, it's so good to hear from you.'" And I said, "Dad, I'm going to be in New Year's." I don't know if I called him dad at that point because that maybe was a bridge too far at that moment.

I just said, I'm going to be in New York City. I'm going to be speaking. Maybe we could have lunch because he'd remarried, had a new family, and I didn't want to interrupt his life. And he said, no, Greg, come and spend the weekend with us. We want to see you. So I went there with my wife. That's a good thing to have happen. Right. So I went with my wife and our oldest son, Christopher. So the first night we caught up.

And I told him what happened to me in my life. And he said, I tried to get custody of you. But even though your mother was living this crazy life, she fought me and would not let me get custody because I would have lived a very different life if I lived with him.

So we had dinner the next night, and his wife, Barbara, made a great Italian meal. She said, Greg, tell us how you became a Christian and a minister. So I started telling my story. And my dad, he's an attorney, and he's sitting at the other end of the table. He says his hands up to his face the whole time like this. I felt like I was in a courtroom. I was giving my testimony, and I wasn't doing a very good job.

because he was not reacting in any way, just staring at me. This isn't going well. Barbara's very emotional, reacting. This is wonderful. And so after the meal was over, he said, Greg, um,

I'd like to, would you walk with me in the morning? He had to walk every morning. One thing I left out, he was older. He blacked out behind the wheel of his car and almost died. He was having heart issues. So he said, Greg, I'd like you to walk with me. So the next morning he knocked on the door of my bedroom. It's three o'clock.

California time, six o'clock, East Coast time, and we start walking. And he said, "I listened very carefully to what you said last night." I said, "Right." And I'm calling him dad at this point. "Yes." And he said, "I would like to accept Jesus Christ into my life right now." And I said, "Well, Dad, let me go over that one more time." And I explained it again. He goes, "I want to do that right now." I said, "Well," he says, "What do I need to do?" I said, "Well, we need to pray." And he drops to his knees.

We're in a park at this point. I wasn't going to get on my knees, but he's down there on his knees, so I get down on my knees with him. And I put my hand on his shoulder, and I lead him in that prayer I was talking about, similar to the prayer that I prayed. And he said, Greg, pray for my heart. Pray God heals my heart. Okay, let's pray. So we prayed for his heart. And he gets up, and he was so excited.

And he said, Greg, I want to go to my doctor's office and I want to have him do a check on my heart. I believe God has healed me. I said, well, you know, I don't know if God's healed you. You know, and so we go to his doctor's office later and

And he's a nice Jewish gentleman. And my dad introduces me. He says, this is my son from California. He's a preacher. And I just accepted Jesus into my life. And I'm thinking, oy vey, this is like, this doctor's going to think this is crazy. And so they ran tests on my dad. And his heart condition was gone. And he lived 15 more years. So I lived in California. I left and I got him a Bible. And I came back.

Oh, maybe three weeks later, and I started saying something from the scripture. He'd read the entire Bible already.

Because he was always reading, reading, reading. Read the whole Bible. He's quoting it back to me. His life was radically changed. And so, you know, it was really a great thing for me to be able to... Right, right. That's a nice completion for that story. Yeah, it was. To go back and, you know, the Bible says that God can bring beauty out of ashes, right? So, and we, you know, we've had to deal with this because our...

Another story about our oldest son, Christopher, died in an automobile accident 16 years ago. So we've dealt with severe pain and suffering.

But we've seen how even in tragedy, God can still do amazing things. And, you know, we're all dealt a hand in life, so to speak. We don't determine what that hand will be, but we have everything to say about how we will react to it, what we'll do with it. You know, we can harbor bitterness and anger. We can also choose to forgive. And, you know, so...

I was able to do this for him, and when I said, "Return the favor," I felt like I was able to say, "Thank you for being a dad for me when I didn't have one, and now let me introduce you to your heavenly Father." Coming back to your original theme of fathers and the importance of fathers. And so that was a beautiful thing. That's what happens in the Pinocchio story.

Why would Geppetto, I mean, the puppet turns into a boy and the next thing you know, he sends him off to school. Yeah. It's like, maybe you want to nurture him a little, teach him. Well, he'd give him a foundation, right? Because he was a maker and he was a builder of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like,

like the gentleman who started the church, you said when he was on break, he'd just like to build things. And so that kind of takes up the Christ as carpenter motif. And so Geppetto is a craftsman, but he's also a craftsman who serves the adventurous spirit in children because he makes children's toys and he makes this boy as well as he can. And the next thing to do that, that,

That sacrifices him to the world. It's an echo of... Never thought of it that way. It's exactly it. And, you know, we can return to that. Now I understand. Well, the thing is, is that...

God is the voice that calls Abraham to sacrifice himself to the world. He says, leave your comfort and have the terrible adventure of your life, right? But then that's echoed with the son. And you might say, well, why would God call upon you to do that? And it's really amplified in the Abrahamic story because Isaac is not only Abraham's son, but in a sense, his only son and his only unlikely son, right? Promised after decades. So not only son, but like special son. But

If you're a good father, you do sacrifice your child to the highest possible goal. And in doing that, you get him back, right? That's the moral of the story. And of course, it's the case because

If you're a father and you encourage your son to go out in the world, to leave you, let's say, to go out into the world, even the prodigal, to go out in the world and to suffer the consequences, which is also what a mother has to do when she encourages her child, then the child will be grateful for the support and the faith and maintain a real relationship, say, between adults in adulthood. And so I really figured this out by...

by concentrating on Michelangelo's Pieta, which is also in St. Peter's. And I've always thought about it as the female equivalent of the crucifix, because it's a portrayal of Mary, and she's holding the broken body of her son, right? And she's offered him to the world, right? Which is what a mother has to do if she's actually...

performing the role of being a mother. She can't protect. And women have to struggle with this. This is part of the reason that we're having an antenatal crisis. Women think, well, could I bring a child into a world such as this? And the question is, could I bring a child into the world given all the pain and suffering that that child will have to undergo? And it's the mark of the faith of Mary

the archetypal faith of Mary, because she's rewarded, so to speak, with the knowledge of her son's destiny and says yes to God. Anyways, that is the spirit of the courageous mother. And that's a sacrificial spirit. And you think, well, why would God call upon a mother to make that kind of sacrifice or a father or yourself for that matter? And the answer is, well, you have to, Christ says this, you have to deliver everything up to God. Family, friends, community, wealth,

Everything has to be subordinate to the highest unity, and that's a sacrifice. It's like, well, of course that's the case, because the lesser has to serve the greater, or the lesser becomes, well, a satanic usurper, essentially, something like that. And so, well, in the Pinocchio story, of course,

Pinocchio disappears and is lost. But then Geppetto's lost because he no longer has his son. And so Geppetto goes on a search to reestablish a relationship with his son. And in doing that, plumbs the depths, that's down into the abyss, and reestablishes the relationship with his son. And then they're both united with the absolute in consequence of that. That's exactly what happens in your story. It's so interesting because he tried to get custody of you and that failed.

And you went and had your catastrophic adventure in the world. It would have been a different life with him. Right. And in a way, even though I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone, all of those things through process of elimination brought me to that crisis point where I made that step of faith. And if I'd been raised by Oscar Laurie, it would have been a better life. It would have been a safer life. An easier life. An easier life. Yeah. But I don't know that that is what would have happened to me. So you can look back into the Bible says...

"God cannot cause all things to work together for good to those that love God." And that doesn't mean that everything that happens will always lead to something better. There are things that happen in life that are just awful things. Like coming back to my son, you know, that was, I never have thought, wow, that happened so this good thing will happen. I see that more as this horrible thing happened to me.

I wish it had not happened. If I could bring him back, I'd do it in a heartbeat. However, despite this, now my life has changed. And now I want to help other people who are maybe suffering something similar. You know, the Bible talks about comforting with the comfort that we've been comforted with. It's been said, you know, if you preach to hurting people, you'll never lack for an audience. And I think it kind of broke me in a new way.

And it made me want to help other people who've lost loved ones, especially children. Because when it happens to you, you wonder if you can survive it. I mean, even though I'm a pastor and I have been for 50 years and I've done the services of many children, which are the hardest to do, by the way.

And I believed everything I said to those parents. I would say as I would leave that service, I hope that never happens to me because I don't think I could handle it. And it did happen to me. And instead of being behind the pulpit, I'm sitting in the front row as the grieving father and my wife,

as a grieving mother, but I found, interestingly, that when I helped other people, it helped me. And even when I was closer to the event, when our grief was still very fresh, when I would meet someone that maybe had just happened to them, they lost a child, because people that lose children somehow find each other very quickly.

And I would find when I would tell them, you're going to survive this. You're not going to get over it, but you will get through it.

And life will be better. And it'll take a lot of time. And it's okay to cry. And you should cry. Because the depth of your sorrow is an indication of the depth of your love. But I would find as I would say those things, I'd kind of be speaking to myself a little bit. Because you can be okay, relatively speaking. You get your head above water. You get a gulp of air. I'm going to survive this.

And then you go into a deep time of grief and you're turned upside down. And you just need to be reminded over and over again that as a Christian, I believe I'll see my son again because he believed in Jesus. So he won't be in heaven because I'm his dad.

He'll be in heaven because he put his faith in Christ and he had that relationship with God. So I know he's not just a part of my past. He's a part of my future as well. So that gives me hope. But also I realize that God can allow these things in our life. I don't know why. I can't explain it. I don't even try to explain it. But I do know... I think it's partly because we're made in the image of God. Yes. And we have a...

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the right and the responsibility to subdue and to name and to put everything in its proper place. Right? And Eve to bring to Adam's attention the things that

remain outside his purview. And those are real things. So human beings have something real to do. And so then you might say, real and important. And you might say, well, what makes something real? Now, this is a hard question. And the materialist answer is, well, let's say sensory evidence. But I don't think that's right. I think what makes things real is death.

And limitation. Like, if you're playing a game, if you're playing a video game, a first-person shooter game, it's a game because when you get killed, you're not dead. Yeah. It's not a game when death is in the...

when death is in the offings. And so, and what we're doing as human beings is real. And the price we pay for reality, it looks to me like the price we pay for reality is death. And it's real. And so that's going to have these consequences. And I think, you know, you highlighted the most

at least arguably the most painful of those consequences. You know, people think there's nothing worse than death. I think, well, you have a limited imagination, first of all, because there are many things worse than death. And one of the things that might well be worse than death is the death of a child. Yes. No, I think it's a very rare parent who wouldn't happily substitute themselves in a contest of death with their child.

you know, in a heartbeat even. And so, now why does God demand that price of reality? I think it has something to do with the fact that we do actually have something important to do. You know, we're supposed to be establishing the kingdom of heaven of God on earth. And that's hard, like actually hard. And the eternal enemies of that are sin and death. And those are real. And

Fighting them is real, and when you're in a real battle, there's real death and there's real evil, and that's brutal, but that's the price of reality. Now, then the question is, well, under what conditions is that price worth paying? And I think that's what the biblical stories actually attempt to explicate. You know, the offering to Abraham,

It isn't a life of ease. It's not a life of comfort. And it's not a life of hedonistic gratification. It's something like a life of adventure. And I would also say there's probably no adventure without death. Yes. You know, if you think about the movies that people watch, people will go watch super ages, secret agent movies and superhero movies. The secret agent movies in some ways work better because the person is mortal and intelligent.

the depth of their commitment is measured by their willingness to put their life on the line. So I don't know, it looks to me like without, this is a very weird thing, but it looks to me like without death, there's no reality. And then you might say, well, that's a price not worth paying. It's like,

That's an understandable argument, especially that's the sort of thing you ask yourself when a child dies. But then you think you said something also that bears on that. Well, you said the depth of your grief is proportionate to the magnitude of your love. And so you might say, well, how could God constitute a world made such that a child could die? And then you think, well, if you have a child and the child dies and you grieve, the grief is an indication of

of the magnitude of the loss. And so the fact that you grieve, that's a testament to the value of the life, even though it was truncated. So your grief is the proof of the value of the life. And so what that means, as far as I can tell, is that grief itself is the justification of life in the face of death. But then there's the afterlife. And I believe in the afterlife. And I believe in heaven.

And I believe in it more than I've ever believed. I've always been a student of heaven as a Christian, and the Bible speaks so much of heaven.

But when my son went to be there, I wanted to know more about it. And as you read the Bible, you realize that heaven is a real place for real people to do real things. You know, Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you. And heaven in the Bible is pictured as a city. It's pictured as a country. It's pictured as a paradise.

The Bible tells us we'll eat in heaven, we'll be reunited with loved ones in heaven, we'll be active, and then one day heaven comes to earth in what we call the millennium. Heaven and earth become one. So I believe very strongly in that. Now, can I prove it? What do you think that means? So let's delve into that. That's such a hard topic. Let's delve into that a little bit. So Christ tells his followers to be perfect like...

His Father in Heaven is perfect. And there's continuous injunctions in the Gospels to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. That's central to the Lord's Prayer. And the idea, there's an idea that lurks in the opening chapters of Genesis about the reestablishment of the eternal Eden. So it looks like, to me, it looks like there's an insistence that the goal of the true religious striver is to

paradise on earth, something like that. And I mean, that can take some vicious utopian spins that are very counterproductive, but that's the underlying idea. Now, I don't know how to reconcile that with the idea of, so that's heaven. That's the heaven that people are striving to bring about when they aim upward properly and walk up Jacob's ladder. And I don't know how to reconcile that with notions of the afterlife with regard to death. We have the strange insistence on death

the part of Christianity too, that Christ defeated death and evil in spite of the evidence that death and evil continue in this world unabated. And so there's a paradox there. Like, how do you reconcile in your own mind the insistence that part of the Christian moral pattern is to perfect the world and to raise the material up to the heavenly with the notion of the

the afterlife and immortality? I know that's a terrible question, but I'd like to know your thoughts on it. Well, I think coming back to the statement of Jesus, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Bottom line, nobody can be perfect. We fall short. So the point of that to me is,

is we sin against God. Now, some of us sin more than others, but we all sin. We had a little Halloween event at our church and we had one of those, you know, the bell where you hit the thing with the hammer? And so I've hit that and hit the bell in the past. So I got it out and I hit it and I got so close, but I never got it. I think I spent a half hour trying to ring that bell and I fell short. So God has said perfection, that's the standard for humanity.

Well, who can be perfect? Answer, no one. That's where Jesus comes in because the Bible says, "Why were we yet sinners? Christ died for us." So going back to the Garden of Eden, our first parents sinned.

And because they ate of the forbidden fruit, which by the way, the Bible never says was an apple. I don't know where the apple came from. But, you know, it was something that was very attractive. If you ate of it, it would give you this supernatural wisdom, knowing good and evil. Supposedly, that's what the lie was. They ate of the fruit and sin came into the world.

So if Adam and Eve had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't die. If they had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't age and get sick. If they hadn't eaten of the forbidden fruit, I'd probably have hair right now, right? So these are the effects of aging. But here's the thing. Is death...

The earth, life on earth is not everything. This is the before life. Then there's the afterlife. C.S. Lewis, you know, what did he call it? He had a phrase for it that he used often in his writings about life.

Shadowlands, that's right, Shadowlands. So the idea of Lewis was that what we're seeing now at its very best, take the greatest moment of your life with your friends, having a meal, enjoying life together, maybe a beautiful sunset, it's a shadow of greater things to come. It's not like Earth is the real thing and heaven is the imitation. It's actually, according to the Bible, the other way around.

Heaven is the real thing. See, going back to Abraham, he was looking for a city that had foundations, whose builder and maker was God. He was looking for something he never found in all of his journeys.

And I think it was a longing for the afterlife. And we all have that longing. And one day when we get to heaven, I think we'll see that the greatest experiences of earth were only a shadow of greater things to come. So I believe very firmly in a real heaven where I'll do real things and I'll be reunited with my son. Well, it's clear that when you have those great experiences that they're...

First of all, the fact that we can have a category that's great experiences indicates that there's some commonality between those experiences, right? The peak moments of your life when you're at the apex, right? It's all the same symbolic language. And that obviously is emblematic of something that unites all of those episodes, right? And you could call that heavenly and you could think about it as an echo of a place. Right.

I mean, I still don't understand the relationship between that. And I think that's all true, by the way. And I mean, I've seen, too, that Jacob's Ladder, God is the ineffable pinnacle of this endlessly spiral, endless upward spiral that's Jacob's Ladder. And it's he's ineffable in part because maybe you have an ideal and you take 10 steps toward it and now you're

near it, but then you see that the true ideal is yet farther than that. And so you reconstruct your vision of the ideal and you progress towards that. And then when you get there, you see that that's only a shadow of the true ideal. I don't think, like I don't think there's any bottom to the abyss, so to speak, on the malevolent side. I don't think there's any pinnacle to upward.

And there is a vision of heaven in that. But I still struggle to understand the relationship between that and the moral requirement of people to aim towards. You know, one of the things my wife and I have been practicing, we got much better at this. She just about died three years ago, and so did I. And like close enough so that as far as we were both concerned, we were either dead or wanted to be. Like it was...

and for a very long time. And anyways, that didn't happen. And so we were pretty happy about the fact that each other were around.

before that but much happier afterwards and that's we've really never forgotten that you know even moment to moment and one of the things that we've decided to practice is to notice when we're interacting with one another in a manner that's optimal and It's interesting because it's also I've known her since she was eight so we were childhood friends and we were good friends and

I can remember what she was like when she was a little kid and she was an excellent little kid and she was very popular and very much fun to be around. And I can see in her that spirit coming back to life, like very frequently. And so one of the things we've learned to do is to notice when that's happening, right? And first of all, to notice, second, to appreciate it, but then to see if we could practice that.

extending the amount of time that we're in that state. And you can get much better at that if you practice, just like you get better at everything that you practice. And that is something like, I used to counsel my clients as well to do this, if they were depressed, is to monitor their mood.

and then to see times when they were less depressed, because even someone who's even quite depressed still varies. So you say, well, sometimes you're going to be like on the brink of suicide, but other times you're going to forget that you're depressed. You got to see what you're doing when things are better, and then you have to start doing those things more. Right. Right. So you can practice that. And so you can take these little visions of paradise that you get in life and you can expand them with practice.

And then I think as you do that inside that window, then another window opens up or another door. That's the door you knock on, right? Another door opens and then you can expand that. And I don't think that is a paradisal vision. I don't think there is any end to that. But I still don't understand the relationship between that, even theologically, and the idea of life after death. I can see...

That it means life eternal, because what happens in those moments of transcendence is that you do get a sense of the value of life that's eternal, right? So you're living in eternity. But as I said, I still don't understand the relationship between that and post-death existence. And I haven't found anything biblically that's helped me understand.

Help me clarify that. It's still a mystery to me. It has something to do with heaven descending and the material world ascending, and some vision of the ultimate unity of those things, but I can't make any more heads or tails of it than that. How did that become clearer to you, say, in the aftermath of your son's death? Well, that's one of the biggest questions of all. You know, what happens after we die? You hear of these near-death experiences.

And they're hard to quantify because how can we know, you know, really what happens? But we hear certain similarities that people say, I went up and I looked down and I saw my family grieving over me. So I prefer to go to a reliable source, which is the Bible. And there actually is a story in the Bible of a man who died and came back to life again. I'm not talking about Christ, that's obvious. But it was the Apostle Paul.

And, you know, he was beaten many times and on one occasion he was stoned and left for dead. They thought he had died. And so Paul in the book of Corinthians writes about being caught up into the third heaven.

He says, I knew a man in Christ, whether he was in the body or out of the body, I'm not sure. But such a one was caught into the third heaven, and he heard things he can't describe. You know, it's interesting because people write entire books about their experiences in heaven. But the apostle Paul, who actually had this happen, didn't write a book, but he did write a little bit of a chapter on it.

But he says it was paradise. So the word paradise is translated like the royal garden of a king. So I don't know if we would have even a parallel to this today. But if you go to some of these incredible British estates where these gardens go on endlessly, maybe that gives us a sense of what he was talking about. But he just used the word paradise. And that's the same word that Jesus used when he hung on the cross and the thief said, or the

Probably guilty of a worse crime than stealing. But the criminal next to him said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said, truly, truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. Same word. So Paul went there and he came back.

And then after that, he said, I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. So I think ever since that moment in his life, he had a homesickness for heaven. So coming back to my son, I can't explain it, but I would say this. When he went there, I feel like a part of me went there too. And your first inclination is communication. And I understand why people...

are so desperate to communicate with their loved ones. But according to Scripture, we can't communicate with them and they can't communicate with us. David lost his son. He said, I will go to him, but he won't come to me. So I think that that is something that's futile. But after my son died, I had his phone number with a recording still attached to it that he had made. And I would call it over and over and over.

Just to hear his voice. I've been doing that with my mother because she died in May and my father like two weeks ago. Wow, I'm sorry. So I can still phone home and have her voice. Yeah. So there's a longing for communication. And so it really just kind of opened up something in my heart.

where I thought, wow, you know, okay, I'm 72 now. You know, how much longer am I going to live? I don't know. But I'm not afraid to die because I know that I too will go into God's presence. You know, in the book of Luke, there's a story of

of a man who died. He's called a beggar. And he went into Abraham's bosom, coming back to Abraham. And he was carried by the angels. So I believe when my son left this world for the next world, and that tragic automobile accident,

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that he was taken by angels into God's presence, and I believe that I will go there too. And I- Why do you believe that? Well, it's just faith. You know, it's faith. I mean, how can I explain it? It's faith that's in my heart, but the Bible says faith is the substance of things hoped for. It's the evidence of things not seen. I believe this firmly. Now,

I have indications of why my faith is worth having because I've seen the change that's happened in my life over the years. I've seen the change that's happened in other lives. So that's sort of like a down payment on greater things to come. God said, listen, you follow me and here's what I'll do for you. I'll forgive you of your sin. I'll give you a peace that passes human understanding. I'll give you meaning and purpose in your life. I will guide your steps. Okay, God made a lot of promises.

I've put those promises to the test, including the worst thing of all, to lose a child. And I've seen how God came through for me. And, you know, and so, because if he didn't come through for me after my son died, I would have given up preaching for sure. Why carry on? But

But he did come through for me. How? He came through for me because I've seen what's happened to other people. I've seen how their marriages have unraveled. I've seen how they've turned to drugs and alcohol. I've seen how they become bitter, angry people.

And that didn't happen to me. And that's not because I'm some virtuous person. That's because I believe the promises of God and I leaned into them and I found them to be true. And I continue to find them to be true. And there's no human explanation for getting through something as awful as that apart from faith.

Faith is, you know, you say these things, but when you have to walk across the bridge for real, it's different. It's not theory now. This is like in Job after all of his suffering. Yeah, I was thinking of Job when you said that. Yeah, he said, I heard this with my ears.

But now I've seen it for myself, you know? So it's one thing when you believe something, but then you put it to the test and you find it's absolutely true. Therefore, if all of these things that have been done in my life up to this point have been true, which they have been, therefore, I accept God's promise of the afterlife.

And I accept what God says about heaven. And there'll be no more pain and no more suffering and questions will be answered. And so I think, so I get little glimpses of heaven and the great moments of life, which I appreciate. And I think you tend to treasure those things more because it seems like the great moments of life are the in-between moments that we take for granted. You know, we're always waiting for the big event, Christmas or whatever.

this or that or this trip, but a lot of times it's the little things in between. You treasure those.

And but then I know I'm going to have new memories to create with him in the future and I'll be in God's presence. And and so that and I want to tell other people that because ultimately, when everything's said and done, what's more important than the afterlife and what's more important than where we spend it? And according to the Bible, I believe there's a literal heaven, a literal hell.

And I believe we choose in this life where we will spend the afterlife. And the reason I'm going to go to heaven is not because I've lived a good life, because I've failed in many ways, but because Christ laid his life down for me on the cross coming back to Abraham. I mean, what a picture. The son was willing to go and be sacrificed by the father.

He knew what was going on. Hey, Dad, where's the sacrifice? My son, God will provide for himself a sacrifice. But Isaac made that sacrifice too. The son, Jesus, made that sacrifice for us because he knew there was no other way that we could reach God, no other way we could satisfy the righteous demands of God. So heaven isn't for good people, as it's often said. Heaven is for forgiven people. That's how I see it.

That's a good place to stop. I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, as all of you watching, many of you watching and listening know, I follow up these conversations with an additional half an hour for Daily Wire subscribers. I think what we'll do is I'd like to walk through the growth of your movement. Okay. I'm interested in it. Maybe we can draw us. So one of the things I've written about in this new book is,

is that Abraham is the archetypal individual. And so the Abrahamic pattern is the pattern of the adventure of the individual. Moses is the pattern of the leader. Abraham is the individual. And it's an expansive pattern of adventure, right? That really never ends. Well, it ends with death in Abraham's case. But, you know, your life expanded as you followed the golden thread. And I'd like to lay out some of the practicalities of that. So I think that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. And so...

join us there and to the film crew here in Nashville thank you guys all for helping us out with this it's much appreciated and

Great. Very much. Thank you very much for coming. And it's so nice to be able to do this in person. Great to be with you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for asking me. You bet. Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure. And to everybody watching. Thank you for explaining the Pinocchio story to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That bears endless explanation. I write about why he's in a whale, too, in We Who Wrestle With God. Well, because that's a mystery, right? It's like...

The movie's going on, and all of a sudden, Geppetto is in a whale, and everybody goes, well, that's no problem. It makes perfect sense. It makes no sense, right? He's looking for a puppet, and he ends up in a whale, right? Why does that make sense? Well, I described that in We Who Wrestle With God, and it's ridiculously fascinating. So anyways, yes, thank you very much for coming, sir. For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. It's much appreciated.

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