Brandon Lake is an American Christian, worship singer, songwriter, guitarist, big star, and five-time Grammy Award winner. In this episode, Brandon Lake and I talk about what it means to be a Christian and why we need to break bread together.
00:01:20.000I've been praying for this day, looking forward to this day for a long time.
00:01:24.000Everyone in my friend group knows that you are in my top five of like, if I could hang out with anybody for the day, you have been that for many, many years.
00:01:33.000I'm so happy, Brandon, because now we're going to pilot that idea of a hangout for one hour, and we're going to see how it would go and how it will go, because I'm fully down to come.
00:01:56.000You know, sometimes people read something from the back end of one of the Gospels, but I've had friends read stuff from Corinthians as a supplement and a support before we read.
00:02:10.000And then I want to talk about even breaking bread and some of the challenges around that.
00:02:16.000Yeah, I'm already open to 1 Corinthians 11, 23, if we want to do that.
00:03:27.000Now, I know that a lot of people, even the process of communion, I've got a lot of friends who are hardcore Catholic.
00:03:37.000A lot of friends who are hardcore Catholic.
00:03:39.000And I've got friends who are, like, Eastern Orthodox, and, like, some of them are like, we're, like, I'm not the, like, when they've come on the show, a couple of them have come on, and, like, well, I'm not doing that there.
00:04:26.000I just want to, while we do this together, like, I don't think there's nothing wrong with being humorous and light, and I think we are as the Lord made us.
00:04:36.000But I just want to say, Heavenly Father, Lord God, that as we do this, I believe that we are partaking in transubstantiation, that the literal body of Christ moves through all reality.
00:04:52.000You, Lord Jesus, are atemporal and aspacial by your nature, that you were there in the beginning at the creation with the Father and the Holy Spirit as one component of the triune God that you came to earth.
00:05:05.000And died for me and for Brandon and everyone participating in this, that we may be redeemed of our sins.
00:05:12.000And I thank you, Lord, that your body was broken like this bread.
00:05:17.000Your body is broken and is this bread.
00:06:45.000Lord, we thank you for Russell as well.
00:06:48.000We thank you for his family, and as we take this communion, Lord, I'm just reminded I have a friend that takes communion every single day, and as he does, he prays for those that he loves, and he prays great health.
00:07:05.000And Lord, we just release a blessing over Russell and his family, grand family.
00:07:09.000And God, I pray that you would take what he's doing now.
00:07:12.000And Lord, I pray that you just multiply it.
00:07:13.000Lord, that millions and millions would come to know who you are and how much you...
00:07:18.000Just desperately love them and that you have a plan for their life, Lord.
00:07:22.000I pray that you would just pour out such a fresh anointing on him and his family, Lord.
00:07:27.000And Lord, that this is just the beginning, Lord, that they would be able to, even in just a year from now, stand back and just be utterly astounded at what you've done through their ministry.
00:07:37.000Lord, thank you for this first love fire.
00:07:47.000And Lord, thank you that he is teaching the world right now what it looks like to genuinely love you, follow after you, but also how to carry peace, your peace.
00:07:57.000And through a crazy, chaotic world, Lord, we thank you that you do.
00:08:02.000You give us peace and you give us joy.
00:08:06.000And Lord, you give us life that's more abundant.
00:08:08.000And so, Lord, we thank you for him and his family and bless him in Jesus' name.
00:08:41.000So before we get into this, but when you moved into that very gracious, humble, simple and open prayer, I thought, ah, this is who I'm dealing with.
00:09:18.000I just heard on the way in that a friend of mine...
00:09:23.000I'm going to say his name because I want to...
00:09:31.000Honour it as we commend him into the arms of God.
00:09:34.000A friend of mine, Ross, is dead now, and I don't know the details because I've just been given the information, but I'm going to guess that he participated in his own death is my guess.
00:09:51.000I've just heard from his family, you know?
00:09:55.000And I feel like, yeah, we commend Ross into your arms, Father.
00:10:03.000I also know that you've been depressed yourself, because it's public, and the way it's reported, at least, is that fame somehow was a component in that.
00:10:20.000And I suppose the bottom line of male depression, it's female depression, I guess, as well, but when you look at statistics...
00:10:30.000Men, and I don't know this for sure about my friends yet, so let me make that clear.
00:10:35.000You know, you might have got hit by a bus, I don't know.
00:10:37.000But, like, I've only just, literally just got the information.
00:11:28.000I've been a Christian for a long time.
00:11:30.000You know, I asked Jesus to come to my heart at like age five, but I'm still learning the same lessons that I was learning very early on.
00:11:37.000And I'll get to kind of the whole point of what kind of has cured me and healed me.
00:11:43.000But, um, mine didn't come about because I had a really dark moment.
00:11:48.000Um, mine actually came about because I went from, I've just always been a And then I signed to a record label as I was writing songs and people found out, you know, thought these songs were great.
00:12:02.000They're like, hey, we want you to be our next artist.
00:12:04.000They threw me on tour within a few weeks of signing to a record label.
00:12:08.000I wrote with all of my heroes within a span of a few months.
00:12:12.000And I went on this tour and when I came home, I think God uses multiple things.
00:12:36.000I came home from this tour and I went straight to Disney World on a vacation, which people think is heaven.
00:12:51.000All of my adrenaline had been completely just expended.
00:12:56.000And so I'm depleted of all my adrenaline, which there's a real, I think, chemical thing that happens that you're more prone to getting sick, having a mental attack, an emotional attack.
00:13:11.000So I come home and I just all of a sudden had the darkest thoughts.
00:13:51.000So I'm sitting in bed, and I just start praying.
00:13:54.000I just start press play on the prayer.
00:13:57.000And all of a sudden, kind of like how David played for Saul in the Bible, where he's being attacked by this, being tormented by this evil spirit.
00:14:05.000And it was like in that moment as his prayer was just released over me, it was like, boom, it broke.
00:14:35.000But here's the lesson that I had to learn.
00:14:39.000Even being a professional Christian, surrounded in nights of worship, and people are getting healed and set free and saved.
00:14:45.000And I love the Lord, but I was still trying to, when I came home, chase that adrenaline and chase that feeling of significance.
00:14:57.000And I was craving this intimate mountaintop experience moment.
00:15:04.000And I was trying to fill it with even intimacy with my wife.
00:15:07.000So we can even take good things and make them bad.
00:15:10.000It's not bad that I wanted intimacy with my wife, but I was going to Brittany first.
00:15:16.000And through this whole season, I just had to relearn the reason why, one, I let the enemy attack me by not being honest and not reaching out to my community and keeping it to myself.
00:15:58.000I'll go on a tour and I'll come home, but now I have tools and I have things to kind of get me back to reality and kind of curve the bend of this mountaintop Like, tour is not reality.
00:16:13.000I'm sure you've experienced this doing all, like, film and all that.
00:16:17.000There's these crazy moments, but then you come home and then you're like...
00:16:20.000So, I've had to realize, like, it's super elementary, but the only thing that'll keep me right and keep me who I'm supposed to be is by going to God first and most.
00:16:30.000This is my favorite quote I heard from my dad.
00:16:42.000Ministry flows out of a place of intimacy.
00:16:46.000And I've had to realize, still after all these years, I have to recognize I'm not putting God first and I'm not going to Him most.
00:16:55.000Instead of a last resort, I want Him to be my first response.
00:16:59.000This is nothing but word and wisdom, Brandon Lake, that you're conveying.
00:17:05.000I got so much from that just then, and this is how I want to relay what I've just been taught and what I'm understanding.
00:17:18.000When you said, like, you sort of describe elevated states, like, going on tour, it's stimulating and overwhelming.
00:17:29.000Like, I feel like I've done what you described, I've done the other way around.
00:17:33.000Like, because I feel, and I don't mean this in any way as an assault on my parents, right, because I love Barbara Brand and I love Ron Brand very, very much.
00:17:47.000But the cultural message that I received had, I would say, no God in it.
00:17:56.000I'm reading at the suggestion of Jordan Peterson at the moment a book called The Sacred and the Profane.
00:18:05.000And in The Sacred and the Profane, this sort of anthropological, psychological text describes how there was a time where everyone would have lived in sacredness, like early mankind.
00:18:21.000If you want to take a biblical perspective, Adam and Eve walk in the garden with God, the triune God right there.
00:18:29.000If you want to take a historical, anthropological perspective...
00:18:35.000You know, like early tribes, like indigenous tribes that you can still look at now that have not been intersected by a civilization.
00:19:57.000Like, and I see, like, addiction, Brandon, as an attempt, and this is the best word I've come up with, is an attempt to defibrillate continually, a stimulating state that we might call divine down here on this plane.
00:20:15.000Now, you said, you said, first, what did you say?
00:20:26.000I was in this last week, someone told me, Jeff Cavins, who's a Catholic scholar, former pastor, who returned to his native Catholicism, said, obviously spotting that I'm a person with an inclination towards and a tendency towards intellectualism and endless neurological Pirouettes.
00:20:55.000He said, like, the main things are the plain things.
00:21:00.000Like, when looking at the Word and looking at Scripture, the main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things.
00:21:07.000Like, you know, so I don't, you know, and like, so for me, I'm hit hard with something like, like, love one another as I've loved you and love God with all your heart.
00:21:19.000Like, I'll get it, go and be loving, go and be loving.
00:21:22.000So every time I get caught up in, now what do we do about homosexuals?
00:22:09.000What I want to say, now what I want to get to is what seems to be your main point, or your father's point that you've conveyed kindly to me, is this intimacy with God.
00:22:19.000Because as a person that's spent their whole life trying to find God through self, trying to find reverence, divinity, connection through self, as I begin to know intimacy with Jesus Christ, I recognise...
00:22:33.000It was there all along in him that it's the only solution available.
00:22:38.000The thing I resisted, and with me, luckily it's obvious, luckily it's obvious, I believed in Jesus always.
00:22:48.000That's been there ages, that tattoo of Jesus on my forearm.