The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:30.000 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.

00:00:48.500 And so I reached out to Mr. Laurie to find out more about the underlying story.

00:00:56.800 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.

00:01:15.320 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.

00:01:27.680 And so I wanted to find out how he did that. I wanted to hear the background story.

00:01:31.480 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.

00:01:42.240 We talked about his fragmented family background that probably partly gave him the craving for something authoritative and genuine.

00:01:50.740 We talked about the state of the world of youth in the 1970s after the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s had collapsed.

00:02:00.660 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.

00:02:19.420 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.

00:02:35.760 And so we weaved that all together quite successfully.

00:02:39.360 And that's what you're in store for if you participate in this podcast.

00:02:45.720 So I think, Mr. Lorry, I think we'll talk today.

00:02:50.780 Yes, call me Greg is good.

00:02:52.260 Greg is good.

00:02:53.220 I think we'll start today with this description, a discussion of a recent New York Times article.

00:03:00.760 And you know something's going on in the religious side of the world if the New York Times deigns to report on it.

00:03:06.260 And 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.

00:03:19.360 But I'm wondering, well, first of all, I guess I'm wondering, I'm wondering what you think about that.

00:03:25.380 Is this something that you've seen, again, accelerating more recently and what you think might be accounting for it?

00:03:36.360 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.

00:03:47.860 You can, 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.

00:04:05.540 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.

00:04:13.320 And they're looking for an authoritative voice.

00:04:17.300 And I think sometimes parents are trying to be a friend to their children when they need to be parents to their children.

00:04:23.620 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.

00:04:35.620 And I think that there's an appeal to that that is just lacking in our culture.

00:04:40.160 You know, we've pushed so hard against these values and against these absolutes that there is, you know, a reaction.

00:04:46.080 There's always an action and a reaction.

00:04:48.340 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.

00:04:58.320 And so many of us maybe didn't get the affirmation or attention we thought we should get.

00:05:03.400 So maybe we overindulged our children.

00:05:05.740 And then there's a reaction to that, and it just goes on from generation to generation.

00:05:10.320 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.

00:05:19.820 I see more of a connection between the late 60s and the early 70s and today than they do in any other decade.

00:05:26.620 I don't see that with the 80s necessarily or the 90s.

00:05:29.780 But today, I see young people, they're looking for a cause.

00:05:33.600 They're looking for meaning.

00:05:34.960 I was talking to some Gen Z kids recently.

00:05:37.540 I said, why do you think so many kids of your generation are out there protesting against Israel?

00:05:44.740 With slogans like, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

00:05:48.660 I don't even think they know what the river or the sea are.

00:05:51.560 But they're involved in it, and they said they're looking for a cause.

00:05:56.100 They're looking for something to speak up for, something to believe in.

00:06:00.280 So I think that when you come to the church and you come to the Bible, if we offer theology without apology and make it understandable to people,

00:06:10.920 I think there's a great appeal in that.

00:06:13.400 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.

00:06:22.100 So, searching for a cause.

00:06:26.680 I don't think there's any difference between searching for a cause, let's say, and searching for an identity.

00:06:32.040 And, of course, you see a lot of clamor in the modern world about identity, a tremendous amount of misconception about what constitutes identity,

00:06:42.040 a tremendous insistence that identity is to be defined only subjectively,

00:06:47.560 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.

00:06:58.040 And I really do mean that technically, because as you mature, the focus of your attention moves beyond your immediate self-gratification.

00:07:07.880 And it doesn't only do that because you're more controlled then in a sort of patriarchal manner.

00:07:13.420 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.

00:07:22.220 And that's a form of maturation.

00:07:24.660 It's completely appropriate anthropologically and psychologically for young people to be searching for a cause or for identity.

00:07:35.360 Because, well, neurologically, what happens, for example, there are two periods of mass neuronal die-off that characterize human development.

00:07:45.800 So when you're first born, you have more neural connections than at any point in your life.

00:07:50.040 And then a lot of what happens in early infancy is that many of those neural connections die.

00:07:55.940 The ones that aren't performing a rewarded and socialized function all disappear.

00:08:03.060 That pruning takes place again in late adolescence.

00:08:06.080 And so there's a call for the catalyzation of identity in late adolescence.

00:08:11.580 It's probably something like the transformation from that group-centered identity of early adolescence that substitutes for the parent.

00:08:24.080 It's probably something like the transformation of that into independent adulthood, right?

00:08:29.020 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.

00:08:36.600 The question is, you know, what should the identity be?

00:08:40.980 So let's talk about some of the markers of success.

00:08:45.100 Money, fame, power.

00:08:46.860 Fame, in and of itself, is not a bad marker for success.

00:08:55.080 Not everyone who's famous is useful, and not everyone who isn't famous is useless.

00:09:02.580 Why is there a small percentage of hyper-successful men who are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that success?

00:09:10.760 Because, like, if you intervene at the right time, you don't need to use power.

00:09:19.040 Success is not a place you get to and stay.

00:09:22.880 It also integrates the idea of the journey and the idea of the destination.

00:09:32.400 And so there, now, you have a definition of success.

00:09:35.720 Here's a thought.

00:09:49.160 Tell me what you think about this.

00:09:50.700 So I have this new book coming out called We Who Wrestle With God.

00:09:53.840 And one of the stories that I deal with in that book is the story of Abraham.

00:09:58.520 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.

00:10:04.240 Okay, so what happens in the Old Testament and the New, this book concentrates mostly on the Old Testament, is that you see dramatic characterizations of God.

00:10:19.080 And the characterizations are, there's a multiplicity of characterizations, and each of them highlight a different aspect or trait.

00:10:27.220 There's an underlying presumption that all of these, this multiplicity of characterization has a fundamental unity.

00:10:37.580 So it's all the same thing, but you're seeing it from different angles.

00:10:41.400 So whatever the ultimate is, is very complex.

00:10:44.480 It can't be reduced to a simple unidimensional characterization.

00:10:48.180 So you have to see pictures of it, dramatic pictures.

00:10:51.940 So in Abraham, there's a very specific kind of picture.

00:10:56.160 So first of all, these are all definitions of the highest, let's say.

00:11:01.740 So God comes to Abraham in the guise of the spirit of adventure.

00:11:09.320 Okay, now there's something paternal about that, right?

00:11:12.800 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 discriminating encouragement.

00:11:27.060 And one encloses and the other thrusts out into the world.

00:11:30.940 Now, both parents can play that role, but one is more typically masculine and one is more typically feminine.

00:11:36.820 So God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure, and he says to Abraham, you have to leave your comfort.

00:11:47.960 Now, Abraham is wealthy.

00:11:49.840 He has wealthy parents.

00:11:51.380 And so all of his needs are already met.

00:11:55.920 Insofar as needs can be met materially, Abraham's got that covered.

00:12:00.220 It's a very interesting starting place because it implies that whatever the highest has in mind for human beings, it transcends mere satiation.

00:12:11.160 You could also think of that as a maternal role to satiate, right?

00:12:14.920 To take care of needs.

00:12:16.840 Okay, but Abraham, he's got all that covered.

00:12:18.980 But God shows up nonetheless, and he says, you have to take yourself out of your zone of comfort.

00:12:24.740 Yeah.

00:12:24.940 And you have to leave everything you love, and you have to go into the terrible world.

00:12:30.460 And then he makes him a deal, and this is the covenant.

00:12:33.900 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.

00:12:45.920 So God says, if you hearken to the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself.

00:12:51.280 Yeah.

00:12:51.460 So that's a good deal because people often aren't blessings to themselves.

00:12:55.280 They have miserable, self-conscious, neurotic, painful lives.

00:12:59.400 So God says, this is the way out of that.

00:13:01.820 Take the path of adventure.

00:13:03.600 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.

00:13:12.060 So that's a good deal because people want to be, they want to, that's what the search for fame is.

00:13:19.480 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.

00:13:27.780 Okay.

00:13:27.960 So that's deal number two.

00:13:30.360 Deal number three is you'll simultaneously establish something of permanent value.

00:13:34.780 So that's the dynasty of Abraham.

00:13:37.960 He'll be the father of nations.

00:13:39.440 Now he's the spirit of the father as well, right?

00:13:41.820 He's the veritable spirit of the father.

00:13:43.900 And then the final deal is you'll do that in a way that will be beneficial to everyone.

00:13:49.540 So that's a pretty good deal.

00:13:50.680 And so you think about what that story is doing.

00:13:52.820 It's remarkable.

00:13:54.060 It's remarkably sophisticated.

00:13:55.680 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.

00:14:19.160 And capable of doing all that in a way that's maximally beneficial for the community.

00:14:25.140 Okay.

00:14:25.340 So that's a good deal.

00:14:26.160 That's the covenant.

00:14:27.540 Now, I've been thinking about this biologically.

00:14:32.240 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's something like a unifying force.

00:14:46.040 So it's not sex, and it's not thirst, and it's not hunger, and it's not power.

00:14:50.460 It's none of these particular drives, you might say.

00:14:55.300 It's a force that integrates all of them and integrates that integration with social integration.

00:15:02.640 And it's an instinct as well.

00:15:04.060 It's the instinct to develop.

00:15:05.820 Now, that's what seems to be highlighted in the Abrahamic story is to follow that.

00:15:10.060 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.

00:15:28.160 Yeah.

00:15:28.320 But it makes sense to me because the alternative hypothesis is that the voice that calls you forward.

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00:16:06.820 Would be antithetical to developing relationships or antithetical to developing anything permanent or to living in a manner that would be a benefit to you and others.

00:16:18.160 And that would mean that our deepest instinct to develop would be set at odds with the sociological surround.

00:16:23.240 And that doesn't make any sense at all, right?

00:16:24.960 They have to be integrated.

00:16:26.820 Okay, so one more thing.

00:16:28.920 And we're talking about why this might be particularly attractive to young men at the moment.

00:16:35.000 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.

00:16:44.040 He's going to throw himself into it wholeheartedly and pursue it wherever he goes.

00:16:48.340 So that's his adventure.

00:16:49.940 And then what happens is that he undergoes a series of transformations that are upward.

00:16:56.260 And with each transformation, there's a sacrifice.

00:16:59.440 That's the rekindling of the covenant.

00:17:01.200 So he has to remember what he's up to.

00:17:02.600 But the sacrifice seems to me to be something like the necessity of Abraham abandoning everything that's no longer appropriate as he climbs up Jacob's ladder.

00:17:16.560 And he does that so thoroughly and in such a devoted manner that the adventures expand as he moves and become greater.

00:17:27.620 And the demand for sacrifice also becomes greater, right?

00:17:31.420 And it culminates, of course, with the potential sacrifice of Isaac.

00:17:35.060 And so this is the pattern, and I think it's the patriarchal pattern.

00:17:40.960 So as the biblical stories progress, the prophets that are after Abraham describe God, the father, as the God of Abraham and Isaac, right?

00:17:52.260 So we know that we're talking about the same spirit.

00:17:55.660 And it seems to me that it is the spirit of the encouraging father.

00:18:00.380 And that can be made manifest in any particular father, but it's that that spirit as such.

00:18:05.760 And it beckons forward, right?

00:18:09.020 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.

00:18:26.900 Yes?

00:18:27.980 That seems reasonable to you?

00:18:29.200 Well, yes.

00:18:30.680 You know, I think the thing to start with is just that God spoke to Abraham.

00:18:34.640 He's coming from a completely pagan background.

00:18:37.520 And God establishes a relationship with him.

00:18:40.960 And then he has attention with his nephew, Lot.

00:18:43.360 Yeah.

00:18:43.760 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.

00:18:51.440 Yeah, he pitches his tent towards Sodom.

00:18:53.580 And progressively goes downhill from there.

00:18:56.560 And Abraham is looking elsewhere.

00:18:58.900 In the New Testament, it says he was looking for a city that had foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

00:19:04.500 So I think there's this longing in Abraham for God.

00:19:07.860 But, you know, him and his wife never have a child.

00:19:10.660 And they finally have Isaac in their old age.

00:19:12.820 And Isaac means laughter.

00:19:14.580 He's the joy of their life.

00:19:16.040 And then the Lord asks for the ultimate sacrifice from Abraham.

00:19:20.140 Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and offer him as a sacrifice to me.

00:19:25.600 And kind of a common misconception, I think, about Isaac in some religious art is you see him portrayed as a young child.

00:19:33.880 When in reality, he was probably a young man.

00:19:37.360 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.

00:19:47.440 But the Lord intervenes to the angel.

00:19:49.400 And, you know, 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.

00:19:58.900 You know, and I think one of the best summations of it all is the story that Jesus told.

00:20:03.920 We call it the parable of the prodigal son.

00:20:06.420 But, you know, we wonder, what is God like?

00:20:08.660 You know, is God austere?

00:20:09.940 Is God harsh?

00:20:10.940 Is God distant?

00:20:13.540 Does God have an interest in us?

00:20:15.260 And if Jesus had not suggested this, it might even seem somewhat irreverent.

00:20:21.000 Jesus portrays God as a father who loves his son, who misses his son.

00:20:26.380 And when his son is gone, he longs for his return.

00:20:29.960 And so, 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.

00:20:38.840 And a better translation would be he smothers him with kisses.

00:20:41.820 So, this is an affectionate father.

00:20:43.820 Father, and, you know, you think this is a boy who came from an affluent home, he came from a loving home, but yet he went away.

00:20:53.120 But that's God.

00:20:54.120 Like, what is God like?

00:20:55.180 God is like a father that misses us and longs for fellowship with us.

00:20:59.600 And then, of course, the son is restored to sonship.

00:21:02.720 So, I think we're all longing for that.

00:21:04.700 Just to go to my own personal story, Jordan, you know, my mother was married and divorced seven times.

00:21:11.760 And she was a beautiful woman, literally a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe.

00:21:16.720 And she had a bunch of boyfriends in between.

00:21:18.780 She was a raging alcoholic.

00:21:20.600 So, I never had a father growing up.

00:21:22.840 And I was searching for a father myself.

00:21:27.040 And so, I saw my mother's lifestyle that was sometimes affluent, primarily alcoholic.

00:21:32.980 She would drink to excess and pass out in a stupor every night.

00:21:36.900 And suddenly, I became the parent and the relationship.

00:21:39.940 Even though I was a little boy, I didn't make sure my mom didn't die, right?

00:21:43.780 So, get her in bed, make sure she eats something, and care for her.

00:21:49.240 But so, I can understand young people searching, young men searching.

00:21:53.560 I was searching, too.

00:21:54.780 But I didn't know what I was searching for.

00:21:57.000 I just knew out there there was something better than the life I was living.

00:22:01.660 And so, it's almost like my mother engaged in a form of pre-evangelism.

00:22:07.400 She sort of, in her way, showed me the adult world had nothing that I really wanted.

00:22:12.600 And so, the answer must be somewhere else.

00:22:14.880 But unfortunately, the whole drug culture was happening.

00:22:18.300 And I bought into the lie of turn on, tune in, drop out, you know, along with a lot of other young people.

00:22:25.260 And I quickly—

00:22:25.920 Timothy Leary.

00:22:26.480 Yeah, Timothy Leary, exactly.

00:22:28.200 And I quickly found that wasn't true.

00:22:31.060 And I tried—I smoked a lot of weed.

00:22:35.460 I did those things every day with the—and I saved that for weekends.

00:22:40.400 And I had a couple bad trips, and I thought, this is not the direction I want my life to go.

00:22:48.260 And, you know, and I lived for a time with my grandparents, and they had a portrait of Jesus on their wall.

00:22:55.420 And I would often look at it as a young boy and think, I wish I could have known Jesus.

00:23:00.920 It's too bad he was merely a historical figure.

00:23:03.740 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.

00:23:13.840 We called them Jesus freaks, not meant as a compliment.

00:23:17.200 And I thought they were all crazy.

00:23:18.820 How old are you?

00:23:19.820 Now?

00:23:20.360 Yeah.

00:23:20.740 I'm 70—I'm 72.

00:23:23.140 So, you were born in—

00:23:24.660 1952.

00:23:26.140 52, right.

00:23:27.420 So, you were 18 in 1970.

00:23:30.880 Yes.

00:23:31.420 Right.

00:23:31.760 Okay, okay.

00:23:32.360 I'm just trying to place you with regard to the hippie movement.

00:23:36.000 Right.

00:23:36.140 So, you were 16 in—

00:23:37.260 17 in 1970.

00:23:39.840 Yeah.

00:23:40.120 And that was the year that I—well, I saw these Christians on my high school campus that would sit around at lunchtime and sing songs about God.

00:23:49.520 And I just looked at them and thought, they're all crazy.

00:23:51.900 And then I tried to thaw them for size.

00:23:53.920 What if it's true?

00:23:54.960 And I quickly dismissed it as impossible.

00:23:57.580 It couldn't be true.

00:23:58.400 Because I'd become very cynical because of my upbringing.

00:24:01.480 I'd been so disillusioned by the adult world.

00:24:05.280 But then I tried that thought on again.

00:24:07.500 What if it's true?

00:24:10.040 And there was a guy speaking.

00:24:12.100 It's in the movie, the Jesus Revolution movie that it's shown in the film.

00:24:16.080 Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, plays the role of Lonnie Frisbee, this evangelist who had long hair and a beard,

00:24:23.240 who was speaking that day, and he made one statement that got my attention.

00:24:28.300 He said, Jesus said, you're for me or against me.

00:24:31.160 So, I looked at all these Jesus freaks, and I thought, well, I'm not one of them.

00:24:35.840 Does that mean I'm against Jesus?

00:24:37.380 And I thought, well, I don't want to be against Jesus.

00:24:39.980 I believe he's out there.

00:24:41.740 I've seen all of his movies.

00:24:43.440 What I know of him, I have a respect.

00:24:46.200 But then I realized, but I'm not a believer in this sense.

00:24:50.500 Could this happen for me?

00:24:51.900 And I ended up praying, and that was the day that my life changed.

00:24:56.140 And so, coming back to fathers again, my mom had been married and divorced so many times.

00:25:01.620 I had a full-time ministry trying to evangelize my former father, so-called.

00:25:07.480 But, you know, here's what happened.

00:25:09.600 Okay, so let me tangle some of the things we talked about together then, and correct me if I'm wrong.

00:25:15.960 Okay, so we started out talking about why there might be a movement more towards traditional faith among young men, right?

00:25:24.120 And then I told the story of Abraham, and you started to talk about your childhood.

00:25:29.920 So, I want to elaborate on that a little bit, because there's a theme emerging here that's particularly relevant.

00:25:36.340 And you compared her to Marilyn Monroe.

00:25:38.400 Now, Marilyn Monroe, of course, died an unpleasant death, and in many ways had an unpleasant life.

00:25:44.380 But she was definitely an archetypal figure, right?

00:25:50.960 And so, I want to delve into that a little bit.

00:25:54.640 Now, if your mother was comparable to Marilyn Monroe, then she had a tremendous sensual cachet, right?

00:26:04.220 And that is an immense power.

00:26:06.900 And Marilyn Monroe could wield that better than anyone in the last century, let's say, that we know of.

00:26:12.760 And she said she could turn that on and off.

00:26:15.140 A guy heard an interview with her, and she said she could walk down the street as, was Norma Ray, was that her?

00:26:20.780 Norma Jean.

00:26:21.520 Norma Jean.

00:26:22.440 And no one would pay any attention to her.

00:26:24.180 She could walk down the street as Marilyn Monroe, and then she was just magnetic.

00:26:27.460 And so, she had learned how to turn that on and off.

00:26:29.800 So, there's a tremendous sexual power there.

00:26:33.200 And, but Marilyn Monroe and your mother both got caught up in the shadow side of that.

00:26:39.620 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.

00:26:52.280 And that means that if it's the ruler, then things are going to devolve very badly.

00:26:58.340 It doesn't have a long-term vision.

00:27:00.580 And so, it's pursuing its short-term ends.

00:27:02.880 And that's anything that only pursues short-term ends isn't going to survive in the medium to the long run.

00:27:08.260 It has to be integrated in something that's broader.

00:27:10.320 Now, you as a child, again, correct me if I'm wrong because I'm going on very slim evidence here.

00:27:16.400 You as a child saw the power of that and also the dark side of it.

00:27:21.220 So, the power of it was the fact that your mother was capable of attracting men and pursuing sequential relationships.

00:27:29.960 Like, she had that ability.

00:27:31.440 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.

00:27:39.640 So, those are terrible dark sides.

00:27:41.900 Now, you can 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.

00:27:51.820 So, then you might ask, well, what's the corrective to hedonistic sensuality?

00:27:58.880 And it is something like ordered patriarchy.

00:28:01.980 So, let me give you an example of that, a reverse example.

00:28:04.760 So, I wrote this paper with Jonathan Pazio on the imagery of the Scarlet Beast and the Babylon.

00:28:10.820 Wow.

00:28:11.260 So, the Scarlet Beast is a multi-headed monster that's blood-colored, and it represents the degenerate patriarchal state.

00:28:18.120 So, when God dies, so to speak, and that unity disappears, the state turns into a multiplicity, and the heads war with one another.

00:28:27.040 And that's like bloodshed.

00:28:28.420 And so, there's the Scarlet Beast, the degenerate masculinity.

00:28:32.380 Okay, on the back of that is degenerate femininity.

00:28:36.420 And the message seems to be that when the masculine state deteriorates, the feminine state deteriorates, which is exactly what you'd expect, unless you propose that one sex could go astray without the other going astray.

00:28:48.880 That's not going to happen.

00:28:50.960 When the state degenerates, feminine sexuality commoditizes.

00:28:56.940 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:28:58.560 Right.

00:28:58.680 And then you get the tension between the two.

00:29:00.660 And in that story, the Scarlet Beast ends up killing the whore.

00:29:04.220 So, the state, the degenerate state, will offer hedonistic gratification as an attractant, but in the final analysis, will devour, demolish all of that.

00:29:14.260 Right.

00:29:14.560 Which is, you know, married religious couples have the most sex, which is like one of the funniest statistics ever, as far as I'm concerned.

00:29:22.480 It's like unbridled hedonism destroys sex itself.

00:29:26.400 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:29:27.820 Right.

00:29:27.940 So, that's, okay.

00:29:28.940 So, in you, obviously, and to some degree, you were a child of your times.

00:29:33.520 Yeah.

00:29:33.800 In you, it's going to emerge a longing for whatever would rectify whatever you saw your mother go through, right?

00:29:40.700 Now, so you could imagine that that would manifest itself as a desire for the presence of something paternal.

00:29:47.220 Yeah.

00:29:47.520 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.

00:29:56.300 Okay, so now you're watching these kids, the Jesus freaks, and you're having ambivalence about that.

00:30:02.380 Yeah.

00:30:02.580 Okay, what's the basis of the ambivalence?

00:30:04.820 What is it about what they're doing?

00:30:06.720 Because this kind of strikes to the heart of the atheistic conundrum, too.

00:30:10.480 You know, I mean, there can be something.

00:30:12.420 I mean, the enemies of Christ in the Gospels, the primary enemies are the Pharisees, right?

00:30:20.240 Yeah.

00:30:20.300 They're religious pretenders.

00:30:22.160 Yes.

00:30:22.440 Right, so that's a very interesting thing.

00:30:24.840 Right.

00:30:25.440 So you're watching the Jesus freaks, and you said that that wasn't a laudatory term, and you're wrestling with their attractiveness.

00:30:33.080 You know, on the one hand, you think there's something to it.

00:30:36.580 On the other hand, you find, what is it that you weren't happy about that you were seeing, do you think?

00:30:41.720 What was it that was pushing you away?

00:30:43.660 Well, I think it's just that they seem fanatical.

00:30:46.420 They seem extreme, and it seemed too obvious.

00:30:48.900 Like, are you kidding me?

00:30:50.500 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?

00:31:06.840 Like, I never even considered that is what I was looking for, or I should rephrase it.

00:31:11.880 That's who I was looking for.

00:31:14.180 But there it was in plain sight.

00:31:17.200 And so it was, and it can't be this simple.

00:31:19.840 So that seemed too absurd in a way.

00:31:22.020 Well, yes.

00:31:22.980 But then there was something, some of these kids, I knew them.

00:31:26.500 I grew up with them.

00:31:27.540 I partied with them.

00:31:28.960 And I saw they were changed.

00:31:30.320 So I couldn't dismiss them as all being crazy people because I knew them before, and I saw transformation had happened in their life.

00:31:37.220 So I prayed a prayer, and I said, God, if you're real, you need to make yourself real to me because I'm full of cynicism.

00:31:44.160 I'm full of doubt.

00:31:45.120 How old were you at this time?

00:31:46.240 I was 17.

00:31:47.120 Okay.

00:31:47.560 Yeah.

00:31:47.740 But I felt like I was older because I had to grow up faster.

00:31:51.520 And so I think my life experiences were not the typical 17-year-old.

00:31:56.560 But, but, yeah.

00:31:57.400 Well, especially for that time, because at that time, where'd you grow up?

00:32:01.400 I grew up in California, Newport Beach.

00:32:03.480 Okay, so things would have been a little more fragmented there than in many places.

00:32:08.120 But most people at that time would have come from intact families.

00:32:12.740 Did you have any male figures in your life that were, that helped you orient yourself along that axis?

00:32:19.840 No, no, not really.

00:32:21.440 Not until later.

00:32:22.940 Well, there was one person, Oscar, Lori.

00:32:25.540 So my mom almost looks like she kept marrying the same guy.

00:32:29.120 They were kind of, you might call them bar flies.

00:32:31.700 You know, the guys have just a few, too many of their buttons on their shirt undone.

00:32:36.220 And they're hanging out in the bar.

00:32:38.240 And so she kept marrying like the same guy in a sense.

00:32:42.380 And then she met this guy from New Jersey.

00:32:44.620 He was an attorney.

00:32:46.000 He was intelligent.

00:32:47.760 He was educated.

00:32:50.120 He was, he was very conservative.

00:32:52.580 And I don't know what my mother saw in him.

00:32:55.000 He was so different, but he literally took an interest in me.

00:32:58.540 He adopted me.

00:32:59.560 He gave me his last name and treated me as a father should treat a son.

00:33:04.140 So one day.

00:33:04.540 So you had a taste of that.

00:33:05.900 Yeah, so he was at one bright spot.

00:33:08.680 And then there's a neat connecting story where I was able to reconnect later with him.

00:33:13.960 And in a sense, return the favor a little bit.

00:33:17.300 But so he, when I came out of school one day in New Jersey, where we were living at the time,

00:33:22.960 the car was packed up with all of our luggage.

00:33:25.340 And I said, where are we going?

00:33:27.280 My mom said, we're going to Hawaii.

00:33:28.640 I said, well, where's dad?

00:33:30.140 She said, he's not coming.

00:33:31.700 And I didn't see him for the rest of my childhood.

00:33:34.040 So we flew to Honolulu.

00:33:35.980 She had already met another guy who was the most abusive of all of her husbands.

00:33:40.400 In fact, this guy knocked her unconscious with a wooden statue when they were having a drunken fight.

00:33:46.140 And I climbed out of the window of my bedroom and ran to the neighbors.

00:33:49.860 And we moved back to California.

00:33:52.120 But, you know, so this was, I remembered him.

00:33:56.020 And he was someone that was stable.

00:33:59.140 He disciplined me.

00:34:01.060 He gave me an allowance.

00:34:02.680 One time I stole something from a store.

00:34:04.820 And he took me down to the jail and introduced me to the prisoners trying to keep me away from a life of crime.

00:34:11.020 Problem was, I thought it was kind of cool.

00:34:12.560 I kind of missed the memo.

00:34:13.520 But he was a father figure.

00:34:17.340 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.

00:34:23.960 And I found that out like 30 years later.

00:34:26.680 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.

00:34:33.840 So here's the cool thing.

00:34:34.980 Even if you're broken, if you're raised in a broken home and you don't have a biological father, I think a man can step in and be a father figure.

00:34:45.320 It could be a pastor.

00:34:46.800 It could be a coach.

00:34:48.160 It could be an uncle.

00:34:50.520 It could be a friend.

00:34:52.340 But a man can step in and show a young man or a young woman, because young women obviously need dads too.

00:34:59.400 He can step in and be that father figure for them.

00:35:02.480 And Oscar did that.

00:35:04.000 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.

00:35:11.520 So it kind of helped me and a lot of other young men find our way.

00:35:15.840 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.

00:35:25.420 And I saw these young men coming up to you.

00:35:27.620 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.

00:35:34.160 One young man said, I was extremely depressed and even suicidal, and you helped me.

00:35:39.320 And I just thought, you're doing that in your way, being a father figure to a generation that is seeking.

00:35:46.420 And I think that's fantastic.

00:35:47.620 Yeah, well, there's a longing, there's an innate longing for the realization of certain patterns, right?

00:35:54.940 And the longing is vague.

00:35:56.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:57.880 It's deeply instantiated.

00:35:59.720 The longing is vague, and there's various ways that it could be catalyzed.

00:36:05.560 But my sense as a developmental psychologist is that a neurologically intact child needs one good example, right?

00:36:13.660 Zero is too few.

00:36:15.360 Yeah.

00:36:16.640 That's fatal, so to speak.

00:36:19.200 But if you're neurologically intact, one example will do the trick.

00:36:22.620 Yeah.

00:36:22.940 And so you had the gentleman that you described.

00:36:26.060 And, you know, it's also for people who are more aesthetically oriented or intellectually oriented,

00:36:31.640 they can often derive some of that from books and from abstracted representations.

00:36:36.760 You can pull it in that way, too, but you definitely need it.

00:36:39.180 And so now these Jesus freaks, so when I was a kid, you see, I was struck by a moral conundrum.

00:36:47.800 And I think it has something to do with religious pretension.

00:36:51.960 And so I'd be interested in your opinion on this, is that the more religious people that I grew up with,

00:36:58.580 so I grew up in what was essentially a frontier town.

00:37:02.820 Fairview had only been settled about 50 years before, scraped out of the prairie 50 years before.

00:37:08.760 We were in the northernmost reaches of the North American prairie.

00:37:12.460 And it was a relatively rough working class town.

00:37:16.260 And most of my friends were relatively rough working class kids.

00:37:20.440 And I hung around with, I wouldn't exactly call them delinquents,

00:37:23.880 because there were some seriously bad kids.

00:37:25.840 And my friends weren't in that group, but they were, most of them dropped out of high school,

00:37:31.580 you know, in grade 10 or so, worked on the rigs.

00:37:33.640 They were tough kids.

00:37:34.380 And there is the odd.

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00:38:27.760 Evangelical?

00:38:29.000 Yeah.

00:38:29.280 They weren't exactly Jesus freaks because we weren't a hippie community, really,

00:38:35.120 but I was leery of them because I, and I think there was a Nietzschean reason for that,

00:38:41.060 is that, you know, Nietzsche said that most morality is cowardice.

00:38:44.900 Now, he didn't mean that morality was cowardice because he wasn't a simple-minded character,

00:38:49.260 but what he meant often was that people who were afraid justified their fear

00:38:54.920 by giving it a facade of the moral.

00:38:58.100 Yeah.

00:38:58.680 And what I noticed about the moral Christian teenagers that I knew is that they were timid

00:39:06.300 and afraid and obedient, and they justified that by reference to their religious morality.

00:39:12.340 Yeah.

00:39:12.480 And I didn't like that.

00:39:13.500 I like the more, I like one of my best friends, for example.

00:39:17.840 He got kicked out of school when he was in grade 10 for picking a fight with the phys ed instructor.

00:39:23.780 And you think, well, that's pretty bad.

00:39:25.480 It's like, well, he was only 15, and this phys ed instructor could do an iron cross.

00:39:30.480 He was tough, muscular, tough guy.

00:39:33.460 And the fact that my friend picked a fight with him, you know, I'm not trying to whitewash that,

00:39:39.820 but it was also extremely brave.

00:39:41.680 He was not a coward.

00:39:43.020 Yeah.

00:39:43.420 It was a foolish thing to do because he hadn't progressed to any great distance.

00:39:47.840 He would have been pounded flat.

00:39:49.220 But he was a tough kid.

00:39:50.480 Yeah.

00:39:50.880 And I admired that.

00:39:51.900 And when I watched the more religious types, so to speak, they were too afraid to engage in life.

00:39:57.720 And then I learned later, you know, as a psychologist, there's a literature on misbehavior in adolescence.

00:40:03.160 Okay, so you imagine a normal distribution of misbehavior.

00:40:06.840 Yeah.

00:40:07.040 Over here are the kids who, like, they steal and they drink and they take too many drugs

00:40:11.900 and they engage in early sexual promiscuity, and they don't do well.

00:40:16.820 That's like pathway to life course criminality.

00:40:19.540 Then there's the kids over here who never break any rules.

00:40:23.240 They don't do well either.

00:40:24.580 They end up dependent and depressed and anxious.

00:40:27.260 And then there's the kids in the middle who break enough rules when they're teenagers to explore,

00:40:33.660 but basically take a straight path.

00:40:35.680 They're the ones that do well.

00:40:37.100 And so I saw the religious types, so to speak, fall into that timid camp that was dependent.

00:40:43.520 And that turned me away from that.

00:40:45.900 So I don't know if that experience rings any bells for you.

00:40:49.180 Well, I'm over in this category here.

00:40:51.640 You know, I was the one, like, my cousin, older than me, named Wayne.

00:40:56.480 He is a psychologist, preparing to become a psychologist.

00:41:00.180 And so he did a study on me as a young man.

00:41:02.980 And he said, clearly, you're headed in the wrong direction.

00:41:06.980 And I was always getting in trouble at school, always creating chaos.

00:41:11.920 And I think I was just looking for attention.

00:41:15.520 I was looking for purpose.

00:41:17.340 And so for me, I didn't have any religious hypocrisy to rebel against because I didn't know any religious people.

00:41:24.220 All I knew were basically hedonists, adult hedonists.

00:41:27.800 Right, right.

00:41:28.420 Who didn't give me anything even remotely close to an example worth emulating or following.

00:41:34.940 So all I knew in life at that stage, at 17, was like a process of elimination.

00:41:40.280 I hadn't found what I was looking for, but I knew it wasn't here and it wasn't there.

00:41:44.880 Right.

00:41:45.280 So where was it?

00:41:46.960 If anywhere.

00:41:47.800 Yeah, if anywhere.

00:41:48.600 But there was something in me that said, it's going to get better.

00:41:54.020 What do you think that was?

00:41:56.020 I think that, I think God, you know, the Bible says that God has put eternity in our heart.

00:42:00.440 Yeah, right, right.

00:42:01.080 And I think that deep inside of us, we're pre-wired to know God.

00:42:05.320 I think that there's a longing, you know.

00:42:07.960 It was C.S. Lewis that called it the inconsolable longing.

00:42:11.720 Right, right.

00:42:11.980 Something that won't be satisfied by anything.

00:42:14.640 But the right thing.

00:42:15.700 But the right thing.

00:42:16.500 And so that was in me and I became an artist, a little cartoonist, and I drew these little

00:42:22.420 cartoon adventures and I created my own characters because it was a private world I could retreat

00:42:27.880 to.

00:42:28.400 And it was also where I developed a slightly warped sense of humor.

00:42:32.280 It's very sarcastic.

00:42:33.580 Like I was more drawn to reading, I don't know if you've ever seen these, Mad Magazine.

00:42:37.320 Oh, yes, definitely.

00:42:37.860 Instead of normal comic books because I liked things that were subversive and sarcastic and

00:42:43.960 somewhat irreverent.

00:42:45.240 And so that's, and I still have that sense of humor today.

00:42:48.180 It's changed somewhat as a Christian, but it's still there.

00:42:50.880 You know, I see the absurdity in situations.

00:42:53.860 I think I see facades maybe a little more quickly.

00:42:57.120 But at the same time, there was a longing for something good and pure.

00:43:01.640 So when I met my wife-to-be, Kathy.

00:43:04.480 How old were you when you met her?

00:43:05.940 I was, let's see, I would have been probably 18 years old and we got married and we just

00:43:14.440 celebrated 50 years of marriage.

00:43:16.500 We're still together.

00:43:17.700 We're still celebrating, but she's here in the room with us.

00:43:20.860 But so, you know, to be able to come from, to come from a home where my mom was married

00:43:26.240 and divorced seven times with a bunch of boyfriends in between, with a life that was on the wrong

00:43:32.900 trajectory, going the wrong way.

00:43:35.060 And then to have everything changed, that can't be explained to me.

00:43:39.960 Okay, now you said, okay, so, so two things I want to delve into.

00:43:43.300 So I was curious, you were, you were watching the Jesus.

00:43:46.420 You know, I've never been to, to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I feel this is my first

00:43:52.640 time and you're, you're, you're helping.

00:43:56.120 Well, it's, it's very interesting to see how themes develop and to, and to see what they

00:44:01.140 imply.

00:44:01.560 Right.

00:44:02.100 And it, and it is, I mean, you also revealed something that's quite remarkable just in

00:44:05.880 the last thing that you said, because, you know, you came from a broken home, but you

00:44:10.720 had a marriage that lasted 50 years.

00:44:12.700 Right.

00:44:13.220 So, you know, one of the things that, that foolish, foolishly psychological people, psychologically

00:44:18.920 minded people assume is that the past determines the future.

00:44:23.660 Yes.

00:44:23.960 And the thing is, is that like many people who don't drink had alcoholic fathers.

00:44:28.340 Now, many people who drink also had alcoholic fathers.

00:44:31.560 But the reality of the matter is that there's a variety of lessons that you can learn from

00:44:36.260 any teaching trial.

00:44:38.200 Yeah.

00:44:38.360 And if you're bullied, you can learn to bully, but you can also learn to never bully.

00:44:42.260 True.

00:44:42.440 And one of the things that you apparently learned both to desire and to enact from the

00:44:47.760 example of your mother was a counter example because you've had a 50 year relationship was

00:44:52.200 also something that you wanted.

00:44:53.700 Right.

00:44:53.900 And so you were, there was part of you that was searching for stability and purpose and

00:44:59.760 part of you that actually believed that that was possible as well, which is also interesting

00:45:03.340 because it begs the question why you would even think that was possible.

00:45:06.660 Okay, so now back to the Jesus freaks.

00:45:10.120 Now, you were watching them as a relatively young teenager.

00:45:12.860 Yeah.

00:45:13.140 And you thought there was maybe something there.

00:45:15.180 Yeah.

00:45:15.420 And so you got curious about that.

00:45:17.480 And, and, but you were also skeptical and you said something about praying and that that

00:45:24.300 was something that changed your life.

00:45:25.900 So can you, can you relate that?

00:45:27.800 Okay.

00:45:28.120 Here's what it came down to.

00:45:30.700 This guy who was preaching, his name was Lonnie Frisbee.

00:45:33.820 He said, come up here and, and I'll lead you in a prayer.

00:45:38.060 And I walked up there and I thought this isn't going to.

00:45:40.820 Where, where were you?

00:45:41.860 I'm high school, high school.

00:45:43.200 It's high school at lunchtime and Newport Harbor high school in Southern California

00:45:47.720 and Newport beach, California.

00:45:50.580 So I'm at, it's lunchtime.

00:45:52.460 And I've walked forward in this public meeting that I was kind of attending.

00:45:57.620 I was far enough away where I wouldn't be looked like I was a part of it, but close enough

00:46:02.160 where I could kind of eavesdrop.

00:46:03.500 No one invited me.

00:46:04.880 Normally people become Christians because someone invites them to church or they share the gospel

00:46:10.020 with them.

00:46:10.420 No one did that for me.

00:46:12.000 But, but I walked over to this evangelist and other kids were praying.

00:46:17.500 He said, pray this prayer with me.

00:46:18.880 And you know, Jordan, this is a prayer that, that I've led people in for over 50 years

00:46:23.840 and I've seen their lives changed and there's nothing magical in this prayer.

00:46:27.980 It's just a prayer based on biblical principles, but all prayer is, is it's communicating with

00:46:33.120 God.

00:46:33.860 And I don't think it has to be sophisticated.

00:46:35.860 I think it needs to be genuine and from the heart.

00:46:39.320 And the prayer went something along the lines of, God, I know I'm a sinner, but I know Jesus

00:46:44.640 Christ is a savior who died on the cross for my sin and rose again from the dead.

00:46:50.040 And, and, and I asked Jesus to come into my life.

00:46:52.960 I didn't know what I was doing, but I believed it.

00:46:56.480 And, and I didn't have an emotional experience.

00:46:59.140 So people next to me did, one was laughing, one with joy, one was crying, maybe over their

00:47:05.080 sins, I felt nothing.

00:47:06.880 And I thought it, that figures God rejected me, but that I marked that day in 1970 is the

00:47:13.200 day that Christ literally came into my life and it changed everything for me.

00:47:18.260 In fact, that weekend we had planned to go out into the mountains and, and take and smoke.

00:47:24.580 And I went out with my friends and, and I broke away.

00:47:28.580 I felt like being alone.

00:47:29.820 I had this little baggie full of and a pipe and, and it just thought to me, I don't want

00:47:35.060 to do this anymore.

00:47:36.400 And I don't know why I felt that way, but I thought, I don't want this anymore.

00:47:40.140 And so I said, God, if you're real, make yourself real to me.

00:47:45.820 And I threw my pipe away and my, the way.

00:47:49.680 So that's a sacrificial gesture.

00:47:51.860 Yeah.

00:47:52.140 And it was, and there was no one talking to me.

00:47:54.620 No one explained like what we do when someone prays at one of our events, we're there to

00:47:59.180 explain it.

00:47:59.820 We give them a Bible.

00:48:00.980 We're there to follow up on them.

00:48:02.420 No one did any of this for me, but you know, God says, those that seek me will find me.

00:48:08.340 And I think if we genuinely reach out to God, God will respond.

00:48:12.720 You don't have to do anything perfectly.

00:48:14.940 It just needs to be a movement of your heart toward God.

00:48:18.080 And as much as I knew as a 17 year old kid, I took that step of faith.

00:48:23.500 And, and that is when my life began to change.

00:48:25.900 And I've led people in this.

00:48:27.980 So your thought, your thoughts do make themselves manifest to you in keeping with the spirit

00:48:33.440 of your aim.

00:48:34.520 So you, you can think about this.

00:48:37.060 So there's, there's a long history since the early 1960s of study into a phenomenon known

00:48:43.440 as the orienting response.

00:48:45.040 And the orienting response is a collection of psychophysiological responses that orient

00:48:50.320 you towards a goal.

00:48:51.740 Yeah.

00:48:52.060 Well, so imagine that when you envision a goal, you see a landscape appear in front of you

00:49:01.500 in relationship to that goal.

00:49:03.520 And it's quite straightforward to understand.

00:49:06.240 I mean, if I want to walk across the room through an open door, the first thing I do is

00:49:10.600 look at the door, right?

00:49:11.820 So now I've oriented my aim towards the door.

00:49:14.020 Now I can see a pathway to the door and I can see obstacles and pathways.

00:49:19.060 I can see things that'll move me forward and things that'll get in my way.

00:49:22.380 And that is the, that is the landscape of perception.

00:49:26.540 There's an aim and a pathway.

00:49:28.600 Yeah.

00:49:28.940 And there's obstacles and facilitators that, and you're always in that.

00:49:32.300 Yeah.

00:49:32.740 Okay.

00:49:32.940 Your thoughts work that way too.

00:49:34.760 So once you orient yourself towards an aim, the thoughts that come to you will be, will

00:49:41.460 have the voice of the spirit of that aim.

00:49:44.020 Like this is technically how thought works.

00:49:46.280 So if I'm angry with you and I want to have a fight, the thoughts that will come to me will

00:49:53.120 be in keeping with that motivation and the perceptions as well.

00:49:56.900 Like I'm going to transform you or face even into a target, right?

00:50:00.200 I'm going to allow the voice of anger to make itself manifest within me.

00:50:04.820 So now imagine that I reconfigure my aim so that I'm aiming however imperfectly for the

00:50:10.620 highest thing I can conceive of, however imperfectly.

00:50:14.220 Well, that's the voice that's going to respond to the inquiries.

00:50:17.200 Like that's technically true.

00:50:19.000 Now, I'm not sure exactly what that means metaphysically, but it does imply that this is a terrifying thing

00:50:26.820 to realize is that every aim is a prayer.

00:50:30.140 And every spirit that responds to your aim responds in the voice of the spirit of that aim.

00:50:39.660 And this is a terrible thing because it means, for example, if you're possessed by resentment,

00:50:44.180 it's the eternal spirit of vengefulness that will make itself manifest in your heart.

00:50:50.180 That's like, that's exactly what happens.

00:50:52.780 Yeah.

00:50:53.200 And so, well, there's no reason to assume at all that that wouldn't happen on the positive

00:50:58.720 side.

00:50:59.180 Okay, so now you made a gesture.

00:51:01.040 Yeah.

00:51:01.400 You know, you had decided somehow that the hedonistic pathway that you were pursuing, even

00:51:07.700 if there was some search for enlightenment in it, say with the, you know, you weren't going

00:51:12.520 to go down that route.

00:51:14.080 And you can imagine that, you know, you'd learned your lesson to some degree by watching

00:51:17.980 your mother and her and her boyfriends, that there was some real danger in that.

00:51:21.880 Timothy Leary danger, right?

00:51:24.260 Enlightenment without wisdom, let's say.

00:51:26.200 So you made a gesture, you cast that aside, and then you opened yourself up and the opening

00:51:30.880 would be, well, I'm operating under the presumption that something better could appear, whatever

00:51:36.500 that might be.

00:51:37.360 Right.

00:51:37.420 Okay, so now you said the first time you did that in the schoolyard, there was no real

00:51:42.300 response, but you believe in retrospect that something nonetheless changed, and then the

00:51:46.900 next part of the story was this, right?

00:51:49.220 So you're out with your friends, and you decide to do something different.

00:51:52.400 Okay, so then, so now you were, that's a prayer, that's a humble prayer, you're on your knees

00:51:57.060 saying there's got to be more.

00:51:58.460 Okay, so then what happens?

00:51:59.920 Well, I, you know, so I go back to school, and the Christians there saw me and said, hey,

00:52:05.860 Greg, come to our Bible study, and okay, and I went, and I felt kind of uncomfortable there.

00:52:12.820 So did you have friends outside that circle?

00:52:15.560 I had a bunch of, I had a bunch of low-life friends.

00:52:18.820 I literally, I was going to one school called Coronetomar High School that was kind of a

00:52:22.580 school attended by affluent kids, so I was not an affluent kid.

00:52:27.560 And we lived in a little apartment in that area, and so it was very different.

00:52:33.560 I literally transferred to this other school, Coronetomar High School, to Harbor High, to

00:52:38.120 change my identity.

00:52:39.460 I said, I want to become a different person.

00:52:41.960 I don't want to be the preppy guy that everybody knows, and, you know, trying out for the football

00:52:48.740 team, I was ultimately rejected, but I hung out with those kids because my grades were too

00:52:53.460 low.

00:52:53.600 But anyway, so I wanted to be a different person, and I thought the drug culture had

00:52:58.500 the answers.

00:52:59.480 So what happened ultimately was I transferred to another school where I had relative anonymity

00:53:05.120 because people didn't know me like they knew me at the school I transferred from.

00:53:08.880 Right, right.

00:53:09.660 But in reality, I ended up becoming a different person, just not in the way I expected.

00:53:14.120 So I look back in retrospect, and I think—

00:53:16.400 So you transferred to this new school so that you could get away from the preppy image and

00:53:21.040 hang around with the more drug-oriented?

00:53:23.880 And that isn't what happened.

00:53:25.280 You ended up in the clutches of the Christians instead.

00:53:29.440 Yeah, I did.

00:53:30.160 But there was a time I was in the drug culture there, very much so, every day as a matter

00:53:35.700 of fact.

00:53:36.800 But then when this transformation happened—so here's an illustration.

00:53:41.000 So I'm walking across the campus, and one of these Christians says, hey, Greg, here's

00:53:45.540 a Bible.

00:53:46.020 And they gave me a Bible.

00:53:47.040 And I'm like, wow, I'm not going to carry this Bible around.

00:53:50.260 So I shoved it in the pocket of my coat, and I went over to my friend's house, which

00:53:54.880 was a stone's throw from our high school, because we would literally get high there

00:53:58.660 every day at lunchtime.

00:54:00.540 So I walked over there.

00:54:01.680 I hadn't seen them since I'd prayed this prayer with these Christians.

00:54:04.880 So I looked around.

00:54:06.300 I'm not going to walk in with a Bible.

00:54:07.580 So I took the Bible and put it in the hedge in front of my friend's house.

00:54:11.240 And I walked in.

00:54:12.340 And they said, hey, Lori, where have you been?

00:54:14.180 I said, nowhere.

00:54:15.380 Hey, we're going to get high.

00:54:16.340 You want to get high?

00:54:17.060 I said, no, I don't want to.

00:54:18.640 Really?

00:54:19.100 They kind of looked at me, what's wrong with you?

00:54:21.180 Like, what have you been doing?

00:54:22.160 I said, nothing.

00:54:23.220 I wasn't going to talk about this.

00:54:25.020 Suddenly, my friend walks—mom walks in, holding my Bible.

00:54:29.520 I'm thinking, what does this woman?

00:54:30.640 Check her bushes when she comes in her house?

00:54:32.780 And then the thing that struck me, she says, who does this belong to?

00:54:36.160 I thought, lady.

00:54:37.140 Kids are doing drugs in your house, and you're concerned about a Bible in the bushes?

00:54:41.440 She holds it up.

00:54:42.560 Who does this belong to?

00:54:43.780 It's so funny.

00:54:44.700 Every eye in the room went to the Bible, and they looked at me.

00:54:47.520 They knew there was a connection.

00:54:49.320 And I said, that's mine.

00:54:51.920 And one of my friends said, you're reading the Bible?

00:54:55.460 I said, yeah.

00:54:56.600 And they said, oh, are we going to be nice little Christians now and follow Jesus?

00:55:00.240 I said, no, maybe I'll hit you in the mouth.

00:55:02.800 I don't know.

00:55:03.560 I hadn't read—

00:55:04.160 That's a good—

00:55:04.800 That's a good response.

00:55:05.620 I hadn't read 1 Corinthians 13 or anything at that point.

00:55:09.920 And so they all started mocking me.

00:55:12.000 So it kind of helped me because I thought, these are not good people, and I don't need

00:55:15.820 to hang around these people anymore.

00:55:17.300 They made it easy to make a break with that crowd.

00:55:20.120 So I thought, I'm going to give the Christians another try.

00:55:23.100 And I went back to their meetings and ended up at this church that was in the middle of

00:55:27.140 a spiritual awakening called Calvary Chapel, filled, packed up with people of all

00:55:31.860 ages.

00:55:33.120 And then Chuck Smith, who I mentioned earlier, this older man who is the pastor, opened up

00:55:38.620 the Bible, and suddenly this book came alive to me.

00:55:41.560 And suddenly I found truth.

00:55:43.420 I never had any absolute truth in my life.

00:55:46.260 I was just looking for something.

00:55:48.120 I remember we were in school, and Ray Bradbury, the well-known author, came and spoke, and

00:55:54.100 we thought, he's going to give us truth.

00:55:56.180 We were just looking for someone to give us some truth.

00:55:59.680 You know, and he didn't have anything for us.

00:56:02.280 And all of a sudden, I find that truth I've been looking for in the Bible.

00:56:06.820 And so then you can't keep me away from the place.

00:56:10.240 So I was like a sponge wanting to make up for lost time and just absorbing these things.

00:56:16.200 And then my life was changing.

00:56:18.980 And it wasn't long after that that I started talking to people about this, because I wanted

00:56:24.040 to talk to people that were like I used to be, cynical, closed off.

00:56:29.720 And I wanted to say, if God could change someone like me, he can change you, too.

00:56:36.340 And fast forward 50 years, I'm effectively still doing the same thing.

00:56:41.080 Right, the scales change.

00:56:42.980 Yes.

00:56:43.480 Well, so let's walk through that story.

00:56:45.920 And maybe you can tie it in for people who are listening to the movie, The Jesus Revolution.

00:56:51.540 Okay, so this church that you attended and this pastor, flesh that out a bit, if you would.

00:56:55.980 Well, it's funny, because this young hippie evangelist, he was kind of

00:56:59.680 cool, we all looked up to him.

00:57:02.000 And so...

00:57:02.880 That was Frisbee.

00:57:03.740 That was Lonnie Frisbee.

00:57:05.020 That's hilarious that his name was Frisbee.

00:57:06.820 I don't know when you were a kid, but all the stoners when I was a kid, they all played

00:57:11.320 Frisbee.

00:57:11.880 Frisbee.

00:57:12.420 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:57:13.580 Right.

00:57:14.540 So...

00:57:15.220 I think that was one of those games that you could still understand when you were stoned.

00:57:20.660 Exactly.

00:57:22.360 So we kind of came for Lonnie, but this older man walks out.

00:57:26.080 I had a problem with older figures, authority figures, because all of the

00:57:29.660 adults in my life I didn't respect, and then I was always being sent to the principal's

00:57:34.320 office for misbehaving in class.

00:57:36.160 So I just had a chip on my shoulder for all adults.

00:57:39.400 Like, there's nothing you can tell me.

00:57:41.200 There was a...

00:57:41.620 Oh, you know, a lot of these...

00:57:42.860 A lot of the claim that's popped up among young women and young men, I think I'll concentrate

00:57:47.960 on young women for a moment, is that, you know, the patriarchy is nothing but authoritarian

00:57:52.760 power.

00:57:53.800 That is what you think if you've never had a good relationship with anybody in a position

00:57:57.620 of authority, you know?

00:57:58.620 And so if you're...

00:57:59.520 You know, a lot of young women who are trapped in progressive hell are trapped there, not

00:58:06.020 least, because they've never had a good relationship with anyone male.

00:58:10.040 Not a brother, not a father, not a friend.

00:58:12.660 Yeah.

00:58:12.920 So all they see is...

00:58:14.480 And then it's a worse conundrum, too, because imagine that you regard the opposite sex as

00:58:19.820 a power-mad enemy.

00:58:22.100 Well, then the ones that are better at that are going to be more frightening.

00:58:24.920 Yeah.

00:58:25.480 So what you want is...

00:58:26.720 You want...

00:58:27.120 If someone's your enemy, you want them to be weak.

00:58:29.640 Right.

00:58:30.040 Right.

00:58:30.380 Okay.

00:58:30.760 So now...

00:58:31.580 So these young women who are confused like this are in a terrible conundrum, because if

00:58:35.400 they ever meet a competent man, but their history, you know, tilts them towards interpreting

00:58:42.200 any manifestation of competence as power, they're going to be anti-competence, because they're

00:58:47.100 going to assume that that's nothing but a manifestation of power.

00:58:50.740 Yeah.

00:58:50.900 So then they're in an absolutely brutal position, because nobody who's competent, they're going

00:58:55.940 to be maximally distrustful of anyone who's competent.

00:58:59.480 Yeah.

00:59:00.740 Okay.

00:59:01.160 So you're kind of in the same situation.

00:59:02.900 Yeah.

00:59:03.040 Because all the people of authority, so to speak, in your life had...

00:59:08.240 Well, you just saw the hedonistic and exploitative side of that.

00:59:12.640 Right.

00:59:13.140 Right.

00:59:13.460 Well, you could also imagine that even your misbehavior, such as it was, would be...

00:59:18.120 That's a limit...

00:59:19.120 Right.

00:59:19.480 That's a limit-testing approach, because what you're kind of hoping for is that...

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01:00:30.400 You know, you'll push and you'll hit a wall that actually is there.

01:00:38.140 Right.

01:00:38.400 Right.

01:00:38.620 And not one that's arbitrary, not one that's just based on power, but one that comes along

01:00:42.600 and says, you know, no, that's actually enough.

01:00:45.640 Enough of that.

01:00:46.520 Not least because it's not good for you.

01:00:48.860 Right.

01:00:49.320 You're going to...

01:00:49.740 And the way people search for that isn't merely by asking.

01:00:53.400 They search for that by misbehaving and watching what happens.

01:00:56.140 That's limit testing.

01:00:57.400 Yeah.

01:00:57.600 It has to happen that way.

01:00:58.720 Well, actually, to illustrate that, during my mother's wild adventures, I lived with my

01:01:03.480 grandparents for a time.

01:01:04.440 She sent me to military school on two separate occasions where, like, I lived on campus.

01:01:10.120 We were cadets.

01:01:11.140 We wore our little uniforms.

01:01:12.520 We had barracks.

01:01:13.520 We had a house mother.

01:01:14.980 And it's funny.

01:01:15.820 I hated it, but I flourished there because there were, like, if you mess up, you get discipline.

01:01:21.800 And we're talking corporal discipline.

01:01:24.040 They had something notoriously known as the cheese paddle, which was a large paddle with holes

01:01:28.700 drilled in it.

01:01:29.340 And it'd swat you with that thing.

01:01:31.040 And suddenly, I went from delinquent kid to honor roll and good grades.

01:01:37.100 And so, when I was pulled out of military school and went back to public school and realized how

01:01:41.480 much I could get away with, I returned to my old ways again.

01:01:44.580 So, it shows when absolutes were in my life, I would respond.

01:01:48.280 I needed that.

01:01:49.560 But this is different, though, because that was a very strong authoritarian thing.

01:01:54.300 But I think, in many ways, it was actually kind of good for me at the time.

01:01:57.400 Well, the thing, you know, the more disagreeable a child is, you know, and that would be associated

01:02:04.600 with that tendency to limit test, the higher the walls have to be to hem them in.

01:02:10.080 You know, and there's advantages and disadvantages to that.

01:02:12.860 I mean, the disadvantage is if you're a disagreeable kid and you're let run wild, you're kind of

01:02:18.640 like an attack dog that isn't trained in the world, that's just not good.

01:02:22.340 But an attack dog that is trained, that's a really useful dog, right?

01:02:26.240 But it takes some, you know, some real work to socialize.

01:02:30.320 The more aggressive a child is, the harder it is to socialize them.

01:02:33.580 But if you can socialize them, they're hyper-useful.

01:02:37.600 Yes.

01:02:37.980 Right, right.

01:02:38.580 So, it's a high-risk, high-return strategy.

01:02:40.460 Okay, so you went to this church and you were first attracted and the other kids around

01:02:46.840 you by Frisbee, who was kind of charismatic and young, and there was an older gentleman.

01:02:51.680 This is also all laid out in the movie, right, in Jesus' privilege.

01:02:54.300 It is, yeah.

01:02:54.860 Kelsey Grammer plays Chuck Smith in the film.

01:02:58.160 And I think Chuck came out on one service and I looked at him and, oh, an adult.

01:03:04.420 I don't want to listen to an adult, you know, it's going to be boring.

01:03:07.140 And he opened the Bible up and he began to speak in such an understandable way.

01:03:11.500 So, he's like a father, but a benevolent father, but strong.

01:03:16.220 And so, he was someone, I'd never met anyone like this before, apart from Oscar Lurie, who

01:03:22.980 adopted me.

01:03:24.400 And so, this was what I needed, a father figure to help me and to be a model for me.

01:03:32.380 And sometimes, it's not just in theology, it's just in the practical things of life.

01:03:37.660 You know, he was kind of a salt of the earth guy, hardworking guy, like for him, a day off

01:03:42.620 was actually building things.

01:03:44.120 So, he was like a classic dad.

01:03:46.440 I think they call them trad dads now, you know, but kind of like, wow, this is what I've

01:03:50.820 never seen this before.

01:03:51.920 How interesting, you know?

01:03:53.200 Wow, that's a terrible conundrum to be in too, because you'd be longing for that and

01:03:58.520 also, the distrust would build in proportion to the longing.

01:04:03.440 You know, you see people who are really hurt sometimes.

01:04:06.320 It's a terrible thing to watch because what they'll do, when they meet someone, they're

01:04:11.400 hoping they can trust them.

01:04:12.600 Yeah.

01:04:13.560 They're so afraid of opening themselves up to betrayal one more time, that they'll ramp

01:04:18.560 up the misbehavior.

01:04:20.300 And some of them, these are the borderline types, some of them will ramp up the misbehavior

01:04:24.120 past the point where anyone can tolerate it.

01:04:26.320 And then they get rejected.

01:04:27.700 Yeah.

01:04:27.960 And then they think, oh, well, that's what I expected.

01:04:29.940 Right.

01:04:30.300 But they get in this terrible loop so that they misbehave so badly that it's beyond the

01:04:34.960 ken of anyone human to tolerate it.

01:04:37.420 Yeah.

01:04:37.580 Yeah, then they're in a permanent betrayal trap.

01:04:39.800 Right.

01:04:40.100 Oh, it's really bad.

01:04:41.500 But you still had enough residual trust, apparently, so that you could allow this connection to

01:04:47.260 occur.

01:04:47.800 Well, you had that guy that was your father.

01:04:50.840 Yeah, maybe because there was one bright spot there.

01:04:53.240 So, looping back to him again.

01:04:55.340 So, I got married, and I'm a young pastor.

01:04:58.520 I've started my own church now that grew out of a little Bible study of young people.

01:05:03.420 I never intended on becoming a pastor.

01:05:06.260 I kind of thought I might be called to be an evangelist and travel around and speak to

01:05:10.700 people, but a little Bible study was developing.

01:05:13.620 So, this was in that church to begin with?

01:05:15.240 No, this is another church about 45 minutes away in a community called Riverside that I

01:05:20.080 went and established this little Bible study.

01:05:22.820 I'm remembering pieces of the movie now as you tell the story.

01:05:26.240 Right.

01:05:26.520 Right.

01:05:26.760 So, you established your own.

01:05:28.520 How old were you when that happened?

01:05:30.320 I was 21.

01:05:32.380 Right.

01:05:32.780 So, well, young by today's standards.

01:05:35.740 Yeah.

01:05:36.560 There were battle commanders who were 21, not so long ago.

01:05:39.240 That's true.

01:05:39.780 Yeah.

01:05:40.160 Okay.

01:05:40.400 So, you established your own church, and what sort of people came to begin with?

01:05:44.840 Young.

01:05:45.360 Very young.

01:05:46.400 So, we were all young kids, and I had no intention of starting a church.

01:05:51.720 You know, today we have what we call startup churches.

01:05:54.020 They pop up all over the place.

01:05:55.460 Not unusual to see.

01:05:57.000 Back in 1973 or 4, you didn't really see startup churches.

01:06:01.800 They were traditional churches that had been there for a long time, and then the pastor would

01:06:06.180 die or retire, and someone new would come, but you didn't see, oh, we're starting a brand

01:06:09.900 new church, and especially a church of young people, and especially a bunch of hippie kids.

01:06:15.600 You know, you could quickly dismiss it as almost cultic, but one of the good things that Chuck

01:06:20.660 Smith did for us is he got us studying.

01:06:22.700 He got us into great books, and we built our library, and we built our messages on the Bible.

01:06:29.420 It's called expository Bible teaching, where you go through chapters of the Bible and let

01:06:34.920 the Bible speak for itself as opposed to imposing your view on the text.

01:06:39.460 Let the Bible be the Bible.

01:06:41.040 It's alive, it's powerful, and it impacts people.

01:06:45.000 So, coming back to Oscar, so I thought, I would like to see him again.

01:06:49.920 So, I was speaking in New York City, and I reached out to him.

01:06:53.700 I found him through the Bar Association, a lady that went to our church, worked for the

01:06:59.360 Bar Association.

01:07:00.480 I didn't even know if he was alive.

01:07:02.100 This is before Google, right?

01:07:03.480 And so, we found his office, and I called it, and I said, hello, is Oscar Lurie there?

01:07:09.100 And the secretary said, no, he's at lunch.

01:07:11.700 Who is calling?

01:07:12.960 I said, Greg Lurie.

01:07:14.680 She said, how do you spell your last name?

01:07:16.540 I said, well, the same way he spells his.

01:07:18.640 This is his son calling.

01:07:20.240 He calls me a half hour later.

01:07:22.340 He says, Greg, it's so good to hear from you.

01:07:24.920 And I said, Dad, I'm going to be in New York.

01:07:26.640 I don't know if I called him Dad at that point, because that maybe was a bridge too far at that

01:07:31.020 moment.

01:07:31.620 I just said, I'm going to be in New York City.

01:07:34.020 I'm going to be speaking.

01:07:35.460 Maybe we could have lunch, because he'd remarried, had a new family, and I didn't want to interrupt

01:07:40.520 his life.

01:07:42.120 And he said, no, Greg, come and spend the weekend with us.

01:07:44.920 We want to see you.

01:07:46.120 So, I went there with my wife.

01:07:47.380 Well, that's a good thing to have happen.

01:07:49.140 Right.

01:07:49.400 So, I went with my wife and our oldest son, Christopher.

01:07:52.460 So, the first night, we caught up, and I told him what happened to me in my life.

01:07:57.720 And he said, I tried to get custody of you, but even though your mother was living this

01:08:02.380 crazy life, she fought me and would not let me get custody, because I would have lived a

01:08:07.000 very different life if I lived with him.

01:08:09.480 So, we had dinner the next night, and his wife, Barbara, made a great Italian meal.

01:08:15.180 She said, Greg, tell us how you became a Christian and a minister.

01:08:19.480 So, I started telling my story, and my dad, you know, he's an attorney, and he's sitting

01:08:25.200 at the other end of the table.

01:08:26.280 He says his hands up to his face the whole time like this.

01:08:29.200 I felt like I was in a courtroom.

01:08:30.960 I was giving my testimony, and I wasn't doing a very good job, because he was not reacting

01:08:35.580 in any way, just staring at me.

01:08:38.080 This isn't going well.

01:08:39.260 Barbara's very emotional, reacting.

01:08:42.260 This is wonderful.

01:08:43.220 And so, after the meal was over, he said, Greg, I'd like to, would you walk with me in

01:08:50.300 the morning?

01:08:51.000 He had to walk every morning.

01:08:52.480 One thing I left out, he was older.

01:08:55.400 He blacked up behind the wheel of his car and almost died.

01:08:59.760 He was having heart issues.

01:09:01.340 So, he said, Greg, I'd like you to walk with me.

01:09:04.760 So, the next morning, he knocked on the door of my bedroom.

01:09:07.520 It's three o'clock California time, six o'clock East Coast time.

01:09:11.540 And we start walking, and he said, I listened very carefully to what you said last night.

01:09:16.720 I said, right.

01:09:17.600 And I'm calling him Dad at this point.

01:09:19.760 Yes.

01:09:20.140 And he said, I would like to accept Jesus Christ into my life right now.

01:09:24.520 And I said, well, Dad, let me go over that one more time.

01:09:28.180 And I explained it again.

01:09:29.260 He goes, I want to do that right now.

01:09:31.080 I said, well, he says, what do I need to do?

01:09:33.400 I said, well, we need to pray.

01:09:34.600 And he drops to his knees.

01:09:36.440 We're in a park at this point.

01:09:38.040 I wasn't going to get on my knees, but he's down there in his knees.

01:09:40.700 So, I get down on my knees with him.

01:09:42.340 And I put my hand on his shoulder, and I lead him in that prayer I was talking about, similar

01:09:46.540 to the prayer that I prayed.

01:09:48.620 And he said, Greg, pray for my heart.

01:09:51.220 Pray God heals my heart.

01:09:53.300 Okay, let's pray.

01:09:54.320 So, we prayed for his heart.

01:09:55.480 And he gets up, and he was so excited.

01:09:59.260 And he said, Greg, I want to go to my doctor's office, and I want to have him do a check on

01:10:05.880 my heart.

01:10:06.580 I believe God has healed me.

01:10:08.120 I said, well, you know, I don't know if God's healed you.

01:10:11.080 You know, and so we go to his doctor's office later, and he's a nice Jewish gentleman.

01:10:16.580 And my dad introduces me.

01:10:18.380 He says, this is my son from California.

01:10:20.320 He's a preacher, and I just accepted Jesus into my life.

01:10:23.980 And I'm thinking, oy vey, this is like, this doctor's going to think this is crazy.

01:10:29.060 And so, they ran tests on my dad, and his heart condition was gone, and he lived 15 more

01:10:36.840 years.

01:10:37.520 So, I lived in California.

01:10:39.260 I left, and I got him a Bible, and I came back, oh, maybe three weeks later, and I started

01:10:45.420 saying something from the Scripture.

01:10:46.980 He'd read the entire Bible already, because he was always reading, reading, reading.

01:10:52.380 Read the whole Bible.

01:10:53.220 He's quoting it back to me.

01:10:54.720 His life was radically changed.

01:10:56.800 And so, you know, it was really a great thing for me to be able to—

01:11:00.620 Right, right.

01:11:00.820 That's a nice completion for that story.

01:11:02.800 Yeah, it was.

01:11:03.340 To go back, and, you know, the Bible says that God can bring beauty out of ashes, right?

01:11:08.680 So, and we, you know, we've had to deal with this because our—another story about our

01:11:14.520 oldest son, Christopher, died in an automobile accident 16 years ago.

01:11:19.320 So, we've dealt with severe pain and suffering.

01:11:22.860 But we've seen how, even in tragedy, God can still do amazing things.

01:11:30.360 And, you know, we're all dealt a hand in life, so to speak.

01:11:34.680 We don't determine what that hand will be, but we have everything to say about how we

01:11:38.660 will react to it, what we'll do with it.

01:11:41.160 You know, we can harbor bitterness and anger.

01:11:43.500 We can also choose to forgive.

01:11:45.000 And, you know, so I was able to do this for him.

01:11:50.860 And I felt—when I said, return the favor, I felt like I was able to say, thank you for

01:11:55.560 being a dad for me when I didn't have one.

01:11:58.260 And now let me introduce you to your Heavenly Father, coming back to your original theme of

01:12:03.680 fathers and the importance of fathers.

01:12:06.400 And so, that was a beautiful—

01:12:08.380 That's what happens in the Pinocchio story.

01:12:10.200 Why would Geppetto—I mean, the puppet turns into a boy.

01:12:15.840 And the next thing you know, he sends him up to school.

01:12:18.620 Yeah.

01:12:18.840 And it's like, maybe you want to nurture him a little, teach him.

01:12:21.540 Well, he'd give him a foundation, right?

01:12:23.340 Because he was a maker and he was a builder of things.

01:12:25.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:26.500 Right?

01:12:26.860 Like the gentleman who started the church.

01:12:28.980 Yes.

01:12:29.320 You said when he was on break, he'd just like to build things.

01:12:32.280 Yeah.

01:12:32.740 And so, that kind of takes up the Christ as carpenter motif.

01:12:35.960 Yes.

01:12:36.220 And so, Geppetto is a craftsman, but he's also a craftsman who serves the adventurous

01:12:41.720 spirit in children because he makes children's toys.

01:12:45.220 Right.

01:12:45.400 And he makes this boy as well as he can.

01:12:48.300 Right.

01:12:48.540 And the next thing to do, that sacrifices him to the world.

01:12:53.380 It's an echo of it.

01:12:53.660 Never thought of it that way.

01:12:54.700 It's exactly it.

01:12:55.660 And, you know, we can return to that.

01:12:57.020 Now I understand.

01:12:57.820 Well, the thing is, is that God is the voice that calls Abraham to sacrifice himself to

01:13:05.520 the world.

01:13:06.040 He says, leave your comfort and have the terrible adventure of your life, right?

01:13:09.560 But then that's echoed with the son.

01:13:11.600 And you might say, well, why would God call upon you to do that?

01:13:14.760 And it's really amplified in the Abrahamic story because Isaac is not only Abraham's son,

01:13:19.040 but in a sense, his only son and his only unlikely son, right?

01:13:24.260 Promised after decades.

01:13:25.640 So not only son, but like special son.

01:13:28.540 But if you're a good father, you do sacrifice your child to the highest possible goal.

01:13:35.800 And in doing that, you get him back, right?

01:13:39.500 That's the moral of the story.

01:13:41.220 And of course, it's the case because if you're a father and you encourage your son to go out

01:13:47.740 in the world, to leave you, let's say, to go out into the world, even the prodigal to

01:13:51.640 go out in the world and to suffer the consequences, which is also what a mother has to do when she

01:13:56.920 encourages her child, then the child will be grateful for the support and the faith and

01:14:03.760 maintain a real relationship, say, between adults in adulthood.

01:14:08.120 And so I really figured this out by concentrating on Michelangelo's Pieta, you know, which is

01:14:17.000 also in St. Peter's.

01:14:18.160 And I've always thought about it as the female equivalent of the crucifix because it's a portrayal

01:14:24.120 of Mary and she's holding the broken body of her son, right?

01:14:27.780 And she's offered him to the world, right?

01:14:30.880 Which is what a mother has to do if she's actually performing the role of being a mother.

01:14:35.400 She can't protect, you know?

01:14:37.300 Well, and women have to struggle with this.

01:14:39.760 This is part of the reason that we're having an antenatal crisis is women think, well, could

01:14:44.220 I bring a child into a world such as this?

01:14:47.400 And the question is, could I bring a child into the world, given all the pain and suffering

01:14:52.400 that that child will have to undergo?

01:14:54.080 And it's the mark of the faith of Mary, the archetypal faith of Mary, because she's rewarded,

01:15:01.200 so to speak, with the knowledge of her son's destiny and says yes to God anyways.

01:15:04.960 That is the spirit of the courageous mother.

01:15:07.380 And that's a sacrificial spirit.

01:15:09.280 And you think, well, why would God call upon a mother to make that kind of sacrifice or

01:15:13.980 a father or yourself for that matter?

01:15:16.600 And the answer is, well, you have to, Christ says this, you have to deliver everything up

01:15:21.440 to God.

01:15:21.920 Family, friends, community, wealth, everything has to be subordinate to the highest unity.

01:15:29.900 And that's a sacrifice.

01:15:31.200 It's like, well, of course that's the case, because the lesser has to serve the greater,

01:15:35.980 or the lesser becomes, well, a satanic usurper, essentially, something like that.

01:15:41.580 And so, well, in the Pinocchio story, of course, Pinocchio disappears and is lost, but then

01:15:48.780 Geppetto's lost because he no longer has his son.

01:15:51.740 And so, Geppetto goes on a search to reestablish a relationship with his son.

01:15:55.460 And in doing that, plums the depths, that's down into the abyss, and reestablishes the relationship

01:16:02.060 with his son.

01:16:03.180 And then they're both united with the absolute in consequence of that.

01:16:07.220 Right.

01:16:07.360 That's exactly what happens in your story.

01:16:09.320 Yeah.

01:16:09.680 It's so interesting, because he tried to get custody of you, and that failed.

01:16:14.580 And you went and had your catastrophic adventure in the world.

01:16:17.580 It would have been a different life with him.

01:16:19.000 Right.

01:16:19.280 And in a way, even though I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone, all of those things

01:16:23.940 through process of elimination brought me to that crisis point where I made that step

01:16:29.000 of faith.

01:16:29.480 And if I'd been raised by Oscar Lurie, it would have been a better life.

01:16:33.560 It would have been a safer life.

01:16:35.460 An easier life.

01:16:36.300 Yeah.

01:16:36.460 But I don't know that that is what would have happened to me.

01:16:39.720 So you can look back.

01:16:40.700 You know, the Bible says, God cannot cause all things to work together for good to those

01:16:44.960 that love God.

01:16:45.960 And that doesn't mean that everything that happens will always lead to something better.

01:16:52.040 There are things that happen in life that are just awful things.

01:16:54.740 And coming back to my son, you know, that was, I never have thought, wow, that happened,

01:17:00.360 so this good thing will happen.

01:17:01.660 Yeah, right.

01:17:02.140 Steve, that more is, this horrible thing happened to me.

01:17:05.440 I wish it had not happened.

01:17:07.400 If I could bring him back, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

01:17:10.200 However, despite this, now my life has changed.

01:17:14.100 And now I want to help other people who are maybe suffering something similar.

01:17:20.780 You know, the Bible talks about comforting with the comfort that we've been comforted

01:17:24.320 with.

01:17:24.860 It's been said, you know, if you preach to hurting people, you'll never lack for an audience.

01:17:30.320 And I think it kind of broke me in a new way.

01:17:34.520 And it made me want to help other people who've lost loved ones, especially children, because

01:17:40.720 when it happens to you, you wonder if you can survive it.

01:17:44.480 I mean, even though I'm a pastor, and I have been for 50 years, and I've done the services

01:17:48.740 of many children, which are the hardest to do, by the way, and I believed everything I

01:17:54.480 said to those parents.

01:17:55.660 I would say as I would leave that service, I hope that never happens to me, because I

01:18:01.040 don't think I could handle it.

01:18:02.840 And it did happen to me.

01:18:04.640 And instead of being behind the pulpit, I'm sitting in the front row as the grieving father

01:18:09.440 and my wife as the grieving mother.

01:18:12.200 But I found, interestingly, that when I helped other people, it helped me.

01:18:18.560 And even when I was closer to the event, when our grief was still very fresh, when I would

01:18:25.040 meet someone that maybe had just happened to them, they lost a child, because people that

01:18:29.240 lose children somehow find each other very quickly.

01:18:33.040 And I would find when I would tell them, you're going to survive this.

01:18:37.820 You're not going to get over it, but you will get through it.

01:18:40.620 And life will be better.

01:18:42.020 And it'll take a lot of time.

01:18:43.560 And it's OK to cry.

01:18:45.040 And you should cry, because the depth of your sorrow is an indication of the depth of

01:18:49.900 your love.

01:18:50.380 But I would find, as I would say those things, I'd kind of be speaking to myself a little

01:18:54.980 bit, because you can be OK, relatively speaking.

01:18:58.220 You get your head above water.

01:18:59.980 You get a gulp of air.

01:19:01.320 I'm going to survive this.

01:19:03.180 And then you go into a deep time of grief, and you're turned upside down.

01:19:08.500 And you just need to be reminded over and over again that, as a Christian, I believe I'll

01:19:13.820 see my son again, because he believed in Jesus.

01:19:16.720 So he won't be in heaven because I'm his dad.

01:19:21.100 He'll be in heaven because he put his faith in Christ, and he had that relationship with

01:19:25.940 God.

01:19:26.200 So I know he's not just a part of my past.

01:19:28.920 He's a part of my future as well.

01:19:31.200 So that gives me hope.

01:19:32.900 But also, I realize that God can allow these things in our life.

01:19:36.860 I don't know why.

01:19:37.660 I can't explain it.

01:19:39.140 I don't even try to explain it.

01:19:41.520 But I do know.

01:19:42.280 I think it's partly because we're made in the image of God.

01:19:45.800 So, and we have, Adam is...

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01:20:46.680 Granted the right and the responsibility to subdue and to name and to put everything in its

01:20:55.360 proper place, right?

01:20:57.240 And Eve to bring to Adam's attention the things that remain outside his purview.

01:21:04.120 And those are real things.

01:21:06.020 Yeah.

01:21:06.480 So human beings have something real to do.

01:21:08.580 Yeah.

01:21:08.780 And so then you might say, real and important.

01:21:11.040 And you might say, well, what makes something real?

01:21:13.280 Now, this is a hard question.

01:21:14.620 You know, and the materialist answer is, well, let's say sensory evidence.

01:21:21.580 But I don't think that's right.

01:21:23.080 I think what makes things real is death and limitation.

01:21:27.180 Like if you're playing a game, if you're playing a video game, a first person shooter game, it's

01:21:31.740 a game because when you get killed, you're not dead.

01:21:34.480 Yeah.

01:21:35.020 It's not a game when death is in the offings.

01:21:40.520 And so, and what we're doing as human beings is real.

01:21:44.980 And the price we pay for reality, it looks to me like the price we pay for reality is

01:21:49.860 death.

01:21:50.360 Yeah.

01:21:50.700 And it's real.

01:21:51.780 And so that's going to have these consequences.

01:21:53.640 And I think, you know, you highlighted the most, at least arguably the most painful of

01:21:57.920 those consequences.

01:21:58.900 You know, people think there's nothing worse than death.

01:22:00.840 I think, well, you have a limited imagination, first of all, because there are many things

01:22:05.740 worse than death.

01:22:06.620 And one of the things that might well be worse than death is the death of a child.

01:22:10.980 Yes.

01:22:11.460 No, I think it's a very rare parent who wouldn't happily substitute themselves in a contest of

01:22:18.220 death with their child, you know, in a heartbeat even.

01:22:21.840 And, and, and so now why does God demand that price of reality?

01:22:28.460 I think it has something to do with the fact that we do actually have something important

01:22:32.500 to do.

01:22:32.920 You know, we're supposed to be establishing the kingdom of heaven, of God on earth.

01:22:38.260 And that's hard, like actually hard.

01:22:40.980 And the eternal enemies, enemies of that are sin and death.

01:22:48.720 And those are real and fighting them is real.

01:22:52.820 And when you're in a real battle, there's real death and there's real evil.

01:22:57.120 And that's brutal, but that's the price of reality.

01:23:02.240 Now, then the question is, well, under what conditions is that price worth paying?

01:23:05.640 And I think that's what the biblical stories actually attempt to explicate.

01:23:09.200 You know, the offering to Abraham, it isn't a life of ease.

01:23:13.280 It's not a life of comfort and it's not a life of hedonistic gratification.

01:23:17.360 It's something like a life of adventure.

01:23:19.980 Yeah.

01:23:20.220 And I would also say there's probably no adventure without death.

01:23:23.920 Yes.

01:23:24.540 You know, if you think about the movies that people watch, people will go watch super

01:23:29.280 ages, secret agent movies and superhero movies.

01:23:31.840 Yeah.

01:23:32.200 The secret agent movies in some ways work better because the person is mortal and the depth

01:23:39.520 of their commitment is measured by their willingness to put their life on the line.

01:23:43.900 Yeah.

01:23:44.100 So, I don't know, it looks to me like without, this is a very weird thing, but it looks to

01:23:48.900 me like without death, there's no reality.

01:23:51.100 Yeah.

01:23:51.520 And then you might say, well, that's a price not worth paying.

01:23:53.860 It's like, that's an understandable argument, especially that's the sort of thing you ask

01:23:59.560 yourself when a child dies.

01:24:01.860 But then you think you said something also that bears on that.

01:24:04.600 Well, you said the depth of your grief is proportionate to the magnitude of your love.

01:24:08.840 Yes.

01:24:09.440 And so, you might say, well, how could God constitute a world made such that a child

01:24:14.520 could die?

01:24:15.300 And then you think, well, if you have a child and the child dies and you grieve, the grief

01:24:19.360 is an indication of the magnitude of the loss.

01:24:22.540 And so, the fact that you grieve, that's a testament to the value of the life, even though

01:24:27.100 it was truncated.

01:24:28.920 Yes.

01:24:29.260 So, your grief is the proof of the value of the life.

01:24:33.500 Right.

01:24:34.000 And so, what that means, as far as I can tell, is that grief itself is the justification of

01:24:40.860 life in the face of death.

01:24:42.600 But then there's the afterlife.

01:24:44.220 And I believe in the afterlife.

01:24:46.400 And I believe in heaven.

01:24:49.040 And I believe in it more than I've ever believed.

01:24:51.320 I've always been a student of heaven as a Christian.

01:24:54.940 And the Bible speaks so much of heaven.

01:24:57.560 But when my son went to be there, I wanted to know more about it.

01:25:02.200 And as you read the Bible, you realize that heaven is a real place for real people to do

01:25:07.240 real things.

01:25:08.380 You know, Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you.

01:25:12.600 And heaven in the Bible is pictured as a city.

01:25:16.000 It's pictured as a country.

01:25:17.980 It's pictured as a paradise.

01:25:20.360 The Bible tells us we'll eat in heaven.

01:25:22.660 We'll be reunited with loved ones in heaven.

01:25:25.020 We'll be active.

01:25:26.100 And then one day, heaven comes to earth in what we call the millennium.

01:25:30.860 Heaven and earth become one.

01:25:32.560 So, I believe very strongly in that.

01:25:34.840 Now, can I prove it?

01:25:36.260 Well, I can.

01:25:37.000 What do you think that means?

01:25:39.060 So, let's delve in.

01:25:40.360 That's such a hard topic.

01:25:42.240 Let's delve into that a little bit.

01:25:43.540 So, Christ tells his followers to be perfect like his Father in heaven is perfect.

01:25:50.020 And there's continuous injunctions in the Gospels to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth.

01:25:56.580 That's central to the Lord's Prayer.

01:25:59.380 And the idea, there's an idea that lurks in the opening chapters of Genesis about the reestablishment of the eternal Eden.

01:26:07.600 So, it looks like, to me, it looks like there's an insistence that the goal of the true religious striver is to establish paradise on earth.

01:26:18.440 Something like that.

01:26:19.360 And, I mean, that can take some vicious utopian spins that are very counterproductive.

01:26:23.760 But that's the underlying idea.

01:26:26.620 Now, I don't know how to reconcile that with the idea of, so that's heaven.

01:26:31.020 That's the heaven that people are striving to bring about when they aim upward properly and walk up Jacob's ladder.

01:26:36.760 And I don't know how to reconcile that with notions of the afterlife with regard to death.

01:26:42.160 We have the strange insistence on the part of Christianity, too, that Christ defeated death and evil.

01:26:50.140 In spite of the evidence that death and evil continue in this world unabated.

01:26:55.640 And so, there's a paradox there.

01:26:57.920 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 afterlife and immortality?

01:27:14.300 I know that's a terrible question, but I'd like to know your thoughts on it.

01:27:18.600 Well, I think coming back to the statement of Jesus, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.

01:27:23.740 Bottom line, nobody can be perfect.

01:27:26.080 We fall short.

01:27:27.300 So, the point of that to me is we sin against God.

01:27:31.820 Now, some of us sin more than others, but we all sin.

01:27:35.080 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.

01:27:41.220 And so, I've hit that and hit the bell in the past.

01:27:45.780 So, I got it out, and I hit it, and I got so close, but I never got it.

01:27:50.020 I think I spent a half hour trying to ring that bell, and I fell short.

01:27:53.820 So, God has said perfection.

01:27:55.840 That's the standard for humanity.

01:27:58.100 Well, who can be perfect?

01:27:59.600 Answer no one.

01:28:00.280 And that's where Jesus comes in, because the Bible says, why were we yet sinners?

01:28:04.540 Christ died for us.

01:28:05.520 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.

01:28:14.560 I don't know where the apple came from, but, you know, it was something that was very attractive.

01:28:19.180 If you ate of it, it would give you this supernatural wisdom, knowing good and evil.

01:28:24.940 Supposedly, that's what the lie was.

01:28:27.000 They ate of the fruit, and sin came into the world.

01:28:30.280 So, if Adam and Eve had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't die.

01:28:35.180 If they had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't age and get sick.

01:28:39.500 If they hadn't eaten of the forbidden fruit, I'd probably have hair right now, right?

01:28:43.100 So, these are the effects of aging.

01:28:45.100 But here's the thing, is that the earth, life on earth, is not everything.

01:28:52.420 This is the before life, then there's the afterlife.

01:28:55.920 C.S. Lewis, you know, what did he call it?

01:28:59.480 He had a phrase for it that he used often in his writings about shadowlands.

01:29:06.000 That's right, shadowlands.

01:29:07.220 So, the idea of Lewis was that what we're seeing now, at its very best,

01:29:12.260 take the greatest moment of your life with your friends, having a meal, enjoying life together,

01:29:18.420 maybe a beautiful sunset.

01:29:20.300 It's a shadow of greater things to come.

01:29:23.080 It's not like earth is the real thing and heaven is the imitation.

01:29:26.620 It's actually, according to the Bible, the other way around.

01:29:29.820 Heaven is the real thing.

01:29:31.200 See, going back to Abraham, he was looking for a city that had foundations,

01:29:36.780 whose builder and maker was God.

01:29:38.280 He was looking for something he never found in all of his journeys.

01:29:41.820 And I think it was a longing for the afterlife.

01:29:45.300 And we all have that longing.

01:29:47.340 And one day, when we get to heaven, I think we'll see that the greatest experiences of earth

01:29:53.260 were only a shadow of greater things to come.

01:29:57.440 So, I believe very firmly in a real heaven, where I'll do real things,

01:30:02.820 and I'll be reunited with my son.

01:30:05.480 Well, it's clear that when you have those great experiences, that they're,

01:30:10.300 first of all, the fact that we can have a category that's great experiences

01:30:15.700 indicates that there's some commonality between those experiences, right?

01:30:20.040 The peak moments of your life when you're at the apex, right?

01:30:23.360 It's all the same symbolic language.

01:30:25.080 And that obviously is emblematic of something that unites all of those episodes, right?

01:30:31.100 And you could call that heavenly, and you could think about it as an echo of a place.

01:30:35.260 I mean, I still don't understand the relationship between that.

01:30:38.800 And I think that's all true, by the way.

01:30:40.700 And I mean, I've seen, too, that Jacob's ladder,

01:30:44.040 God is the ineffable pinnacle of this endless upward spiral that's Jacob's ladder.

01:30:51.480 And he's ineffable, in part, because maybe you have an ideal,

01:30:56.600 and you take ten steps toward it, and now you're near it.

01:31:00.520 But then you see that the true ideal is yet farther than that.

01:31:03.980 And so, you reconstruct your vision of the ideal, and you progress towards that.

01:31:08.700 And then when you get there, you see that that's only a shadow of the true ideal.

01:31:12.380 I don't think, like, I don't think there's any bottom to the abyss, so to speak, on the malevolent side.

01:31:17.940 I don't think there's any pinnacle to upward.

01:31:19.900 And there is a vision of heaven in that.

01:31:22.380 But I still struggle to understand the relationship between that

01:31:26.420 and the moral requirement of people to aim towards.

01:31:30.840 You know, one of the things my wife and I have been practicing, we got much better at this.

01:31:35.480 She just about died three years ago, and so did I.

01:31:38.000 And, like, close enough so that as far as we were both concerned,

01:31:41.400 we were either dead or wanted to be.

01:31:43.160 Like, it was, and for a very long time.

01:31:46.420 And anyways, that didn't happen.

01:31:48.480 And so, we were pretty happy about the fact that each other were around before that,

01:31:53.120 but much happier afterwards.

01:31:54.500 And that's, we've really never forgotten that.

01:31:57.040 You know, even moment to moment.

01:31:58.320 And one of the things that we've decided to practice is to notice when we're interacting with one another

01:32:05.060 in a manner that's optimal.

01:32:06.980 Well, and it's interesting because it's also, I've known her since she was eight.

01:32:11.200 Wow.

01:32:11.500 So, we were childhood friends, and we were good friends.

01:32:14.640 And I can remember what she was like when she was a little kid,

01:32:18.400 and she was an excellent little kid, and she was very popular and very much fun to be around.

01:32:22.880 And I can see in her that spirit coming back to life, like, very frequently.

01:32:28.580 And so, one of the things we've learned to do is to notice when that's happening, right?

01:32:33.140 And first of all, to notice, second, to appreciate it.

01:32:35.520 But then to see if we could practice extending the amount of time that we're in that state.

01:32:42.020 And you can get much better at that if you practice,

01:32:45.120 just like you get better at everything that you practice.

01:32:47.220 And that is something like, I used to counsel my clients as well to do this,

01:32:51.000 if they were depressed, is, you know, to monitor their mood,

01:32:54.620 and then to see times when they were less depressed.

01:32:57.220 Because even someone who's even quite depressed still varies.

01:33:00.940 So, you say, well, sometimes you're going to be, like, on the brink of suicide.

01:33:05.120 But other times, you're going to forget that you're depressed.

01:33:07.840 You've got to see what you're doing when things are better.

01:33:11.580 And then you have to start doing those things more, right?

01:33:14.320 So, you can practice that.

01:33:15.500 And so, you can take these little visions of paradise that you get in life,

01:33:19.040 and you can expand them with practice.

01:33:21.080 And then I think as you do that, inside that window,

01:33:25.260 then another window opens up, or another door.

01:33:28.440 That's the door you knock on, right?

01:33:30.200 Another door opens, and then you can expand that.

01:33:32.680 And I don't think that is a paradisal vision.

01:33:34.720 I don't think there is any end to that.

01:33:36.360 But I still don't understand the relationship between that,

01:33:40.040 even theologically and the idea of life after death.

01:33:43.760 I can see that it means life eternal.

01:33:47.060 Because what happens in those moments of transcendence is that you do get a sense of

01:33:51.980 the value of life that's eternal, right?

01:33:55.120 So, you're living in eternity.

01:33:57.040 But as I said, I still don't understand the relationship between that and post-death existence.

01:34:02.860 And I haven't found anything biblically that's helped me clarify that.

01:34:08.600 It's still a mystery to me.

01:34:09.720 It has something to do with heaven descending and the material world ascending,

01:34:13.860 and some vision of the ultimate unity of those things.

01:34:16.840 But I can't make any more heads or tails of it than that.

01:34:20.880 How did that become clearer to you, say, in the aftermath of your son's death?

01:34:25.780 Well, that's one of the biggest questions of all.

01:34:28.640 You know, what happens after we die?

01:34:30.840 You hear these near-death experiences.

01:34:32.880 And they're hard to quantify because how can we know, you know, really what happens?

01:34:38.820 But we hear certain similarities that people say,

01:34:41.640 I went up and I looked down and I saw my family grieving over me.

01:34:47.160 So, I prefer to go to a reliable source, which is the Bible.

01:34:51.780 And there actually is a story in the Bible of a man who died and came back to life again.

01:34:56.140 I'm not talking about Christ.

01:34:57.440 That's obvious.

01:34:58.140 But it was the Apostle Paul.

01:35:00.700 And, you know, he was beaten many times.

01:35:03.120 And on one occasion, he was stoned and left for dead.

01:35:07.460 They thought he had died.

01:35:09.420 And so, Paul, in the book of Corinthians, writes about being caught up into the third heaven.

01:35:14.720 He says,

01:35:15.260 I knew a man in Christ, whether he was in the body or out of the body, I'm not sure.

01:35:19.420 But such a one was caught into the third heaven.

01:35:22.100 And he heard things he can't describe.

01:35:24.460 You know, it's interesting because people write entire books about their experiences in heaven.

01:35:29.140 But the Apostle Paul, who actually had this happen, didn't write a book.

01:35:32.840 But he did write a little bit of a chapter on it.

01:35:35.980 But he says it was paradise.

01:35:38.820 So, the word paradise is translated like the royal garden of a king.

01:35:43.620 So, I don't know if we would have even a parallel to this today.

01:35:47.020 But if you go to some of these incredible British estates where these gardens go on endlessly,

01:35:52.180 maybe that gives us a sense of what he was talking about.

01:35:54.920 But he just used the word paradise.

01:35:56.780 And that's the same word that Jesus used when he hung on the cross.

01:36:00.680 And the thief said, or probably guilty of a worse crime than stealing.

01:36:05.340 But the criminal next to him said,

01:36:07.020 Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

01:36:09.000 And Jesus said, truly, truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.

01:36:14.220 Same word.

01:36:15.400 So, Paul went there and he came back.

01:36:18.600 And then after that, he said,

01:36:20.680 I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.

01:36:24.880 So, I think ever since that moment in his life, he had a homesickness for heaven.

01:36:29.480 So, coming back to my son, I can't explain it.

01:36:32.940 But I would say this.

01:36:34.540 When he went there, I feel like a part of me went there too.

01:36:37.640 And your first inclination is communication.

01:36:40.860 And I understand why people are so desperate to communicate with their loved ones.

01:36:46.120 But according to Scripture, we can't communicate with them and they can't communicate with us.

01:36:51.300 David lost his son.

01:36:53.160 He said, I will go to him, but he won't come to me.

01:36:56.400 So, I think that that is something that's futile.

01:36:59.080 But after my son died, I had his phone number with a recording still attached to it.

01:37:04.480 And I would call it over and over and over just to hear his voice.

01:37:09.000 I've been doing that with my mother because she died in May and my father like two weeks ago.

01:37:13.720 Wow, I'm sorry.

01:37:14.160 So, I can still phone home and have her voice.

01:37:16.820 Yeah.

01:37:17.380 So, there's a longing for communication.

01:37:20.480 And so, it really just kind of opened up something in my heart where I thought, wow, you know, okay, I'm 72 now.

01:37:29.240 You know, how much longer am I going to live?

01:37:30.700 I don't know.

01:37:31.660 But I'm not afraid to die because I know that I too will go into God's presence.

01:37:37.220 You know, in the book of Luke, there's a story of a man who died.

01:37:42.200 He's called a beggar.

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01:39:11.160 That he was taken by angels into God's presence, and I believe that I will go there too.

01:39:18.400 Why do you believe that?

01:39:20.100 Well, it's just faith.

01:39:21.780 You know, it's faith.

01:39:22.620 I mean, how can I explain it?

01:39:24.300 It's faith that's in my heart, but the Bible says faith is the substance of things hoped for.

01:39:29.320 It's the evidence of things not seen.

01:39:31.840 I believe this firmly.

01:39:33.480 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.

01:39:41.440 I've seen the change that's happened in other lives.

01:39:44.800 So that's sort of like a down payment on greater things to come.

01:39:48.020 God said, listen, you follow me, and here's what I'll do for you.

01:39:51.660 I'll forgive you of your sin.

01:39:53.240 I'll give you a peace that passes human understanding.

01:39:56.240 I'll give you meaning and purpose in your life.

01:39:59.840 I will guide your steps.

01:40:01.020 Okay, God made a lot of promises.

01:40:03.300 I've put those promises to the test, including the worst thing of all, to lose a child.

01:40:09.560 And I've seen how God came through for me.

01:40:12.840 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.

01:40:19.400 Why carry on?

01:40:20.520 But he did come through for me.

01:40:22.020 He came through for me because I've seen what's happened to other people.

01:40:27.820 I've seen how their marriages have unraveled.

01:40:30.520 I've seen how they've turned to drugs and alcohol.

01:40:33.360 I've seen how they've become bitter, angry people.

01:40:37.040 And that didn't happen to me.

01:40:38.360 And that's not because I'm some virtuous person.

01:40:40.640 That's because I believe the promises of God, and I lean into them, and I found them to be true.

01:40:47.120 And I continue to find them to be true.

01:40:49.620 And there's no human explanation for getting through something as awful as that apart from faith.

01:40:55.840 Faith is, you know, you say these things, but when you have to walk across the bridge for real, it's different.

01:41:02.240 It's not theory now.

01:41:03.440 This is like in Job after all of his suffering.

01:41:06.200 Yeah, I was thinking of Job when you said that.

01:41:08.120 Yeah, he said, I heard this with my ears, but now I've seen it for myself.

01:41:12.900 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.

01:41:20.540 Therefore, if all of these things that have been done in my life up to this point have been true, which they have been,

01:41:26.480 therefore, I accept God's promise of the afterlife.

01:41:29.360 And I accept what God says about heaven, and there'll be no more pain, and no more suffering, and questions will be answered.

01:41:37.820 And so I think, so I get little glimpses of heaven and the great moments of life, which I appreciate.

01:41:44.200 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.

01:41:52.020 You know, we're always waiting for the big event, Christmas, or this, or that, or this trip.

01:41:57.240 But a lot of times, it's the little things in between.

01:41:59.880 You treasure those.

01:42:01.180 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.

01:42:09.460 And so that, and I want to tell other people that, because ultimately, when everything's said and done,

01:42:14.740 what's more important than the afterlife, and what's more important than where we spend it?

01:42:20.260 And according to the Bible, I believe there's a literal heaven, a literal hell.

01:42:25.180 And I believe we choose in this life where we will spend the afterlife.

01:42:28.980 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,

01:42:35.780 but because Christ laid His life down for me on the cross, coming back to Abraham.

01:42:40.980 I mean, what a picture.

01:42:42.000 The son was willing to go and be sacrificed by the Father.

01:42:47.180 He knew what was going on.

01:42:48.760 Hey, Dad, where's the sacrifice?

01:42:51.460 My son, God will provide for Himself a sacrifice.

01:42:54.940 But Isaac made that sacrifice, too.

01:42:57.640 The son, Jesus, made that sacrifice for us because He knew there was no other way that we could reach God,

01:43:04.360 no other way we could satisfy the righteous demands of God.

01:43:08.360 So heaven isn't for good people, as it's often said.

01:43:12.720 Heaven is for forgiven people.

01:43:15.500 That's how I see it.

01:43:16.280 That's a good place to stop.

01:43:19.540 I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, as all of you watching, many of you watching and listening know,

01:43:26.180 I follow up these conversations with an additional half an hour for Daily Wire subscribers.

01:43:31.240 I think what we'll do is I'd like to walk through the growth of your movement.

01:43:35.420 Okay.

01:43:35.600 I'm interested in it.

01:43:37.920 Maybe we can draw some.

01:43:39.980 So one of the things I've written about in this new book is that Abraham is the archetypal individual.

01:43:46.700 And so the Abrahamic pattern is the pattern of the adventure of the individual.

01:43:51.120 Moses is the pattern of the leader.

01:43:53.320 Abraham is the individual.

01:43:54.460 And it's an expansive pattern of adventure, right, that really never ends.

01:43:59.680 Well, it ends with death in Abraham's case.

01:44:01.840 But, you know, your life expanded as you followed the golden thread.

01:44:06.780 And I'd like to lay out some of the practicalities of that.

01:44:09.080 So I think that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side.

01:44:11.480 And so join us there.

01:44:13.500 And to the film crew here in Nashville, thank you guys all for helping us out with this.

01:44:19.300 It's much appreciated.

01:44:20.420 And Greg, very much.

01:44:21.960 Thank you very much for coming.

01:44:23.000 And it's so nice to be able to do this in person.

01:44:25.140 Great to be with you.

01:44:26.020 Yeah, yeah.

01:44:26.600 It's great.

01:44:27.040 Thank you for asking me.

01:44:28.080 You bet.

01:44:28.560 Yeah, my pleasure.

01:44:29.380 My pleasure.

01:44:29.940 And to everybody watching.

01:44:30.900 Thank you for explaining the Pinocchio story to me.

01:44:33.500 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:44:34.720 That bears endless explanation.

01:44:37.720 I write about why he's in a whale, too, in We Who Wrestle With God.

01:44:41.120 Well, because that's a mystery, right?

01:44:42.320 It's like the movie's going on.

01:44:44.120 All of a sudden, Geppetto is in a whale.

01:44:45.720 And everybody goes, well, that's no problem.

01:44:47.320 It makes perfect sense.

01:44:48.180 It makes no sense, right?

01:44:50.000 He's looking for a puppet.

01:44:51.140 And he ends up in a whale.

01:44:52.280 Well, right.

01:44:53.500 Why does that make sense?

01:44:54.760 Well, I described that in We Who Wrestle With God.

01:44:57.200 And it's ridiculously fascinating.

01:44:59.800 Wow.

01:45:00.180 So anyways, yes.

01:45:01.200 Thank you very much for coming, sir.

01:45:02.440 For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:45:06.760 It's much appreciated.

01:45:07.740 It's much appreciated.

499. The Jesus Revolution： The Real Thing ｜ Greg Laurie

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