Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Pastor Greg Laurie

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Greg Laurie is an evangelist, author, and senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Southern California. He founded the church in Riverside in 1973 after becoming a Christian during the Jesus Movement in 1970. Through his Harvest Crusades and broadcast ministry, he shares the Christian gospel with audiences worldwide. His conversion and early relationship with his wife, Cathe, are depicted in the 2023 film Jesus Revolution, based on his 2018 book co-written with Ellen Vaughn. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AG1 ⁠⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠⁠ ------ Squarespace ⁠⁠https://Squarespace.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine ⁠⁠https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter Follow Tetragrammaton: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/tetranow⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/tetragrammaton.now⁠ Follow Rick: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/rickrubin⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin

tetragameter. You know, Jesus said, he used two pictures to describe how a Christian should function in the world. One was salt and one was light. So in the first century, salt was like they used to preserve meat. They didn't have refrigeration, obviously. When they'd get the fish, they'd either eat it fresh or they would put salt on it to eat it later. So salt was valuable in that culture. Roman soldiers would be paid in salt.

I think, number one, it says you're valuable. your life matters. Number two, salt stimulates thirst. And I think we do that too. Hopefully, I think if a person is walking with God as they ought to, they will create others a thirst for a relationship with God. The greatest compliment you can be paid as when someone says, you know what, how can you be joyful at a time like this? What makes you tick, your marriage or your family or whatever it is they notice? And then you can say, well, that's my relationship with God. And the other is preserving salt preserves. And as Christians, it's important for us to speak up for what is true,

sometimes speak out against what isn't true, and to tell the truth. And so a pastor, my job, pastor is to feed the flocks. I'm there to feed our church spiritually, guide them. But then I'm also called to be an evangelist. And the difference between a pastor and an evangelist are like different callings, like a pastor is tending a flock, teaching. people the Word of God. You're there to be involved in people's lives. But an evangelist is one who's proclaiming the message to the culture. Spreading the message. Yes, spreading the message. So that's,

so it's always been a little bit of a dichotomy inside of me because I'm half pastor, half evangelist, but we do outreach events that we call Harvest Crusades and stadiums. We're, we're on social media, we're on television radio. We've always, our kind of our goal is to reach unexpected people and unexpected places with an unexpected message. So it's like I want to kind of come into their culture and not blow them out of the water, not condemn them, but to hopefully stimulate a thirst in them and tell them there's a God in heaven who loves them and they can come into a relationship with him. So that means there's a lot of bridge building and attempts to reach people where they're at. I've been doing this for 52 years now. I'm 73. I don't feel

of 73. But I've been doing this a long time, but I love it more today than when I started. I started at 18. I didn't even know I was starting at church when I began. I was just teaching at a Bible study of young people, and I came to faith during the Jesus movement, which is the last great spiritual awakening in America. And so I just was hearing the Bible for the first time. I was a blank slate. I wasn't raised in church. The only thing I literally knew about Jesus was what I I saw in movies like Ben Hur, King of Kings, the greatest story ever told. And I always had this admiration for Jesus. My grandparents, there was a portrait of Jesus hanging on the wall,

and I would just look at it, and I just had admiration for Jesus. But I never knew that he could be known today. I just thought of him as a historical figure. So the reason I was living with my grandparents' request because my mom was married and divorced seven times. She's a beautiful woman. I'm not exaggerating when I say she was a dead ringer from Maryland Monroe. She was like a man-magnet.

And she was also a raging alcoholic, meaning she drank to excess and passed up pretty much every night. Sometimes she didn't come home. So I had to grow up really fast and kind of take care of her even as a kid. In some ways, I was like the adult and the relationship. And I was exposed to things the kids shouldn't be exposed to. But that was my life. That was normal to me.

So, you know, when I got a little bit older, my teen years, I started drinking and partying at high school. And I thought, I don't like this drinking partying scene, you know, and this is what my mother's done. And then the whole drug culture was coming in strong. And it made sense to me because sort of the mentality was the adult world, they don't know anything. It's a youth revolution. So I started smoking a lot of weed and ticking LSD. and after about two years of that, I knew this was a dead-end street.

My background is I like to do art. I'm a cartoonist. I created a little world of art that I would retreat to when I was a kid. So I saw all of my creativity being sapped, and I saw that this is bad. This can't be what I'm going to keep doing. So I already knew I wanted to stop doing that. So in my 17-year-old brain,

it was like process of elimination. I don't want the adult world of my mother. I don't want the drug culture of my peers. What is it? What am I supposed to do? And I came across a group of very outspoken Christians that we called Jesus freaks on the front line of our high school campus. And they were singing songs about Jesus.

And I thought they're crazy, these people. But the problem was I knew a few of them. And I used to be friends with them, and I used to party with some of them. And I saw their life change. So I couldn't dismiss them as completely. complete fanatics because I knew they were good people. So one day I was walking across my high school campus and I sat down on the grass,

close enough to kind of hear what they were saying, but far enough away where people wouldn't think I was becoming one. There's this guy named Lonnie Frisbee, and you saw the Jesus Revolution film. He's played by Jonathan Rumi. He also plays Jesus and The Chosen. And when I met Jonathan, I said to the director, this guy has to be Lonnie.

Lonnie, he was this very charismatic guy. long hair, beard. He kind of looked like Jesus. And so I'm just sitting there listening to this, and this guy, Lonnie stands up, and he begins to speak. And it's like Jesus is speaking, not literally, but it was like he looked so much like Jesus, and he was speaking the words of Jesus. And so there's power in that. And I'd never heard this before. And when he said, Jesus said, you're either for me or against me. I looked around with the Jesus freaks. I thought, well, I'm not one of them. Does that mean I'm against? Jesus because I don't want to be, but am I for him? I don't think so. And then he said,

if you want to pray and ask Jesus to come into your life, get up and walk up here. And I thought, there's no way I would ever do that. The next thing I knew I was up there. And I prayed this little prayer. I didn't even know what I was doing. And the school bell rang back to class. So that weekend, this was Friday, we had planned to go out into the Artega Mountains and drop acid, take LSD and smoke some weed. And I just was feeling so different. And I broke up from my friends and I went and sat in a rock and I'm filling up my little pipe and I'm thinking about what's happened to me trying to process it. And I, like, I wouldn't say I heard a voice, but that seemed strong impression on my heart that happened just hours earlier in my high school campus came back to me and it just

was like, you don't need this anymore. And I said, okay, God, I don't know anything about. you. I don't know how to do any of this, but if you're real, you're going to make yourself real to me. And they threw my baggie of weed out. And then I went back to school and I started going to the little Bible study. And then I ended up at a church called Calvary Chapel where the Jesus movement was in full swing. And that's when my life began to radically change. Tell me about Lonnie Frisbee, the person, who he was. Yeah. He was very charismatic. Like if he walked into a room, it just kind of changed the energy of the room. I mean, you don't think it was just based on how he looked.

It was something about his essence. Well, it was everything, but the look contributed to it. Because, you know, he'd wear like these shirts that are almost like robe-like shirts and beads. So it kind of, he almost looked like a Bible character a little bit and with a hair and the beard. But then he had this wacky and funny sense of humor. But then you'd just be talking to him. And all of a sudden he'd get really serious and says, the Lord's telling me this. And what freaked me out was I just saw the Lord did tell him things.

He said to me once, like I got to know him a little bit and hung out with him after that. And we were praying for somebody else. It wasn't about me. And all of a sudden he turns to me and says, Greg, the Lord just said to me, you're going to preach to thousands of people all around the world. I'm like, what? I wasn't a minister I hadn't spoken ever. It was so out of left field.

But it was like, but later, that happened, so I can't dismiss it. And I saw him do that with others. So he was very charismatic, but he was not illiterate, but like when he read, he would stumble over words. I remember once it was one of his Bible studies that would be packed

with lots of people, especially young people, seating in the aisle, sitting up in the stage, people everywhere. And he said, Greg, read the book of Jonah, which is only four chapters. So I'm sitting on the toilet because he's in the bathroom and he's brushing his hair, brushing it.

Then he goes down and brushes it down. I've never seen a guy do that before. I've seen girls. He really into his hair. And I'm just kind of watching him brush his hair, but I had so much admiration for him. And I read him, the book of Jonah. He goes, read that again.

Read it again. And this is in the movie, the Jesus Revolution movie. Then he got up that night, and he was speaking from the book of Jonah based on what I'd read him, which I was excited about. But then he started getting a few parts wrong. Like he missed parts in the story.

And I was just really young in the faith. So it's like you admire someone so much. But then, wow, he got the kind of, not in a really bad way, just details, parts of the story, not right. But he was just kind of a bundle of contradictions. Because later in life, he ended up falling away from the faith and started using drugs, which he had done earlier before his conversion. And he ended up getting AIDS from sexual.

contact. So very sad thing. And I actually met with him right before he died. He was in hospice care. He was emaciated. AIDS was taking its toll on him. And we're like sitting there in this dark room. It's like a scene from a movie. Fires really strong in the fireplace. So that's all the light in the room. And I'm looking at him kind of partially lit. And he says, God's going to heal me. And I'm going to preached to millions of people, and I was ever the friend, we're kind of like, and I'm thinking, I don't think God's going to heal you. We didn't say that. We're going, okay, great, great, I hope that happens. And he died not long after that. And then someone mentioned this to me. He said, do you think he was seen how the movie would touch people? Because that movie went all

around the world, and it has touched millions of people. So maybe the Lord gave him a little glimpse of his future. It was a sad ending, but he knew what he had done was wrong. He knew he'd paid a very heavy price for him. And he was sorry. So he messed up. But you know what? We have people like that in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation that are really used by God, like Samson. And then they mess up big time. And God forgives them. But sometimes they still reap the consequences of our actions. Yeah, so that's Lonnie. He was a lot of things at once. How do you think he became the person that you first met? Where did that wisdom come from? You know, there's a saying, if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know, he didn't get there by himself.

And God seems to go out of his way to choose the last person we might choose. And even in the Bible, like looking at King David, I mean like King David, but he was just a shepherd boy watching this flock of sheep. Or you look at Peter, the impetuous, impulsive outspoken fishermen. And you look at so many of the characters that the Lord selected. the Bible says, God chooses the foolish things of the world that confound the why. So I think sometimes God will choose the most unexpected person so he gets the glory. And I would just think Lonnie fits that criteria. He was abused as a child.

You know, he came from a broken home. But God put his hand on him. And, you know, like, Chuck Smith is the other main guy in the Jesus movie when he was older. And Lonnie and Chuck were like nitro meets glycerin. It's like Lenin meets McCart. right. They're both so talented, but together there was something special. Tell me about Chuck. Well, Chuck was the very opposite of Lonnie, like where Lonnie was, you know, energetic and you never knew what he was going to do next. Chuck was steady as she goes, kind of the father figure.

He was older? Yeah, older. But I mean, older 40s, you know, but that was older to us. Yeah, because you guys were 20s. Yeah. So he's like 45. He's old enough to be our dad. He was also bald. So that made him seem older than he was, but he was the perfect guy because he saw that the young kids were searching. And so it's sort of like we came for Lonnie and we stayed for Chuck. Lonnie was like the magnet that drew us in. If we only had Lonnie, I don't know what this thing would have turned into. When you had Chuck, who was a stabilizing pastor who knew the Bible, if me being a kid from a broken home, he was like a father figure and I was learning other things from him as well, not just the Bible, but he had a strong work ethic, and he was a really practical

guy, and I got to know him very well personally, so I picked up things from him that I, sort of like a son might pick up from a father. So he did that, not just for me, but for a lot of young people. So they were just this unusual combination that God brought together for a moment in time, and Lonnie left not long after this thing exploded. And so then Chuck started giving opportunities for other young ministers and one of those younger guys was me a little bit later. Do you still draw? I do. You do?

Yeah. That makes me happy. I love it. It's my happy place. If there's a piece of paper and a pen, I'm going to draw. I've always wanted to do animation. And these cartoon characters I've developed, and we animated about six cartoons. That was really fun.

That was kind of a dream country. Great. Yeah. As nutrition science advanced through the mid-20th century, researchers began to understand that Modern eating patterns, limited variety, processed foods, and time constraints could leave small but meaningful gaps in daily micronutrient intake. Today, large population studies confirm that approximately 90% of adults fall short on one or more essential vitamins or minerals.

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Daily nutritional support in a glass is now the result of applied science. Learn more at drinkag1.com slash tetra. Do it today. What were the conditions at the time that allowed the Jesus revolution to happen? It was just like you look back, you don't know what's happening when it's happening, but you can look back in retrospect with 2020 hindsight and start making a little bit of sense of it. I didn't know I'd walk smack dab into the middle of a spiritual awakening. I just thought, well, this is Christianity. It's really amazing. I like this.

In fact, it was like, I want to see Christianity on steroids, but in fact, it's not on steroids. It's normal Christianity. I think, unfortunately, a lot of times we settle for a watered down version. And so I think what I was seeing was vibrant, real Christian faith, not dramatically different than the faith of the first century of the early church. And that's what a revival, it's kind of a returning back to that original life. And so it was everything.

It was the culture. You know, we've got Kennedy assassinated, then Martin Luther King, then Robert Kennedy. We have our rock icons dying, Janice Joplin, Jim Morris, and Jimmy Hendricks. People I used to listen to, they're all gone. All of a sudden, kind of heroes of sorts. We have riots in the streets. We have racial tension. We have the Vietnam War raging with young men coming back in body bags.

We have the drugs. So you throw drugs into all of that. and that's going on. So all of these things were happening, and I think people are saying, we need a sexual revolution, we need a political revolution. So God sent a Jesus revolution.

What's interesting is Time Magazine coined that term. We called ourselves Jesus people, and we called it the Jesus movement. But Time Magazine did a cover with this kind of psychedelic image of Jesus, just said Jesus revolution. You'd never see a Time magazine like this again. I don't think, but the way it was written.

But they described it was happening, and I think they really got it right. It was a revolution. What year was this? Probably 1972 or so. It was all those things, and that's why I find it interesting today, because I know you've talked about a quiet revolution. Yeah. And I think there's real parallels between the late 60s, early 70s, and today.

We had a lot of young people really searching for God. Not that that wasn't happening in the 80s or the 90s. it's different right now. In Gen Z especially, they're like returning to church, or maybe many of them going for the first time. Yeah, and Bible sales have gone up for the first time in 60 years, 70 years. Right. And the other thing is it's young men. It's never, almost always in churches, women dominate. They're the ones that kind of lead the way and the guys come along later. For this to be led by young men is kind of a unique thing. And I think when you look at every spiritual awakening in American history. They're all similar and they're all different. You know, the first

awakening in America was George Whitfield, a preacher from England who came over. There's a movie out about him called A Great Awakening that's actually very well done. But he came over and preached and so many colonists came to Christ, 80% of them had heard him preach in person. That's pretty rare. And then when the American Revolution came along, it was kind of from the soil of that spiritual awakening. That's one version of it. And the Jesus movement was so different. Now we have AI. Now we have all of these technologies just blowing up so quickly. Even in the last seems like seven years, just like every time you turn around, there's a new innovation. I think you have a generation raised on this stuff. For a lot of the kids, it's kind of remapped their brains and they

live in a virtual world. And they'd ever been more connected? Digital. but more disconnected as human beings in spiritually. You know, instead of connecting, it's having the opposite effect. So many of them are looking elsewhere. Like they're looking for truth. They're looking for answers. Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life?

The age-old questions. Was the Jesus Revolution only happening in the L.A. area? Or was it in other places as well? Yeah, it was happening all around the world. And it was sort of like little wildfires. It started in Southern California and in Orange County. I still live there. That was sort of the epicenter.

Ground zero. Yeah, ground zero where we would do the giant baptisms at a place called Pirates Cove. Since the movie was made, you know, people now go down to Pirates Cove and they want to visit it. They want to be baptized there. We kind of felt we were making the movie that the fame of revival spreads the flame of revival. So the guy who directed it was in the late 30s. This name is John Irwin. And I said, John, I can talk all day about this to people, but if they can feel it, it'll be a

different thing. If they can feel like they're there. So I did the best of my ability to describe everything I remembered. And I remembered a lot of details. Like the carpet was this color. The upholstery in the pews was that color. The chandeliers look like this. And this is what people wore.

And then we were doing wardrobe and they were dressing kids up as hippies. I said, no one dressed like that. No, that's too much. And I described it. He's a really visual guy. And he got it. He shot one scene in the movie where Lonnie's preaching in the church. And I was there why he shot it.

And afterwards, I said, Johnny got lightning in a bottle. I felt it. I felt like I'd gone back in time. And then the other thing that really resonated were the baptism scenes. Because first I had to go out and teach the actors how to baptize people. I would an actor baptize anyone. So here's how we do it. There's what we say before we do.

Kelsey Grammer, Jonathan Rumi. But then what was so amazing is we had all these extras on the set. And after we were done baptizing them in wardrobe for the scene, they were coming back and saying, I want to be baptized for real. I want to be baptized. So there's this one guy who had a small role in the film, and he was baptized as that character in the film. Then he came up to me and said, I want to be baptized.

I go, well, you need to be a Christian. Tell me, how do I become a Christian? So I sat there in the beach, talked to him for a while, and he prayed with me. And I said, well, there's no reason you can't be baptized. So I took him out. He was still wearing his wardrobe from the film. He had a wig and all the stuff. And I baptized him.

And so they're doing this, still shooting the scene because we only had so much time. The sun was setting and our permit was over with. So they're baptized. And they're going to go, look, and they look. And I'm baptizing the guy for real. So I think you could feel it. So that was kind of the goal, you know. And then we'd hear stories.

people after seeing the movie would go down to Pirates Cove like at, you know, 12 o'clock at night and get baptized. People were getting baptized in fountains outside of theaters. You can only pray for something like that. That's a move of God. Tell me about the timeline for faith from that time to now. As in all things, as we get older, things change. What we were experiencing then, I don't think we're necessarily experiencing now.

in the same way, but I see hopeful signs. It's kind of like when it starts to rain. I'll be out walking with my wife, and I'll say, my wife has really thick, beautiful long hair, and I'll say, Kathy, it's starting to rain. So I'll say, it's not raining. I said, no, it's raining. And I'll say, bald men always know when it's raining first.

It's raining. And it's who it is raining? I told you, I can feel it in my head. So I see little drops of rain happening like, oh, there's like this series called The Chosen that's just blown up around the world. Oh, there's some song from some Christian artists that's like charting right now.

Oh, there's this, so these can be good things and hopeful things. So I'm hoping we'll see that again, but some of the people who came to faith then walked away from it, some deepened in it, and some continued in it. And I hope to be one of those people

that's continued in it. You know, Jesus says, remember from where you have fallen and repent and do the first works quickly. And before that, he said, I see how hard you work, but you've loved your first love. It's not unlike marriage. You know, you can fall in love with someone and you have the romance and then, you know, you have marriage and then as years go by, you can fail to appreciate that and fail to keep your marriage strong. The same can happen in your faith.

It has to be cultivated. It has to be watered, you know, that seed. You have to constantly be growing and learning and never resting on your laurels or living in the past. I see people my age retiring. I see people my age living in the past. And I'm always kind of want to be in the present and be thinking about the future. Like, what can we do next? And if I see like a new technology or a new this or new that, I'm always interested.

Like, can this be used for God's kingdom? I'm not afraid of those things. but sometimes people just, they get stuck in a rut. And so for us in our life, what happened was 16 years ago, we had a huge event happen. Our son was killed in an automobile accident. That's like the worst case scenario. You never plan on that. And as a pastor, I've done a lot of funeral services for people that have died in.

a lot of children, which are the hardest ones to do of all, who can explain that. And then one day, I'm not the guy in the pulpit explaining it. I'm the guy in the front row hearing the preacher. And when I heard the news, I just wondered, how do you survive this? Because I know I'm a pastor and all this, and a Christian, of course, but still, I was a father who lost my son. And you're human. And human beings feel things. We sure do. But I have to say, though, someone asked me, What moment of your life did you feel the presence of God more than any other? I have to say it was not long after my son died.

Our house filled with all these well-wishers that frankly weren't being helpful to me. I just have to get out of here. And I went, we had a little office over the garage, my garage. And I just fell on the floor and I just said, Lord, you gave them to me and I gave them back to you. And I felt the presence of God. You can have a national awakening and revival and you can have a person. one too. And that renewed me. I was in my late 50s at this point. And I thought, okay, I don't know how long I'm going to live, but I want to make every day of my life count. So what can we do now that we've

never done before? And I kind of felt kind of this iron inner my soul to try things we'd never tried before. And so we did some pretty big crusades. We went to Dodger Stadium two nights. We went to AT&T Stadium, which is huge in Texas, and did crazy stuff I would not have normally done in my late 50s. Started another church in Orange County. We have one in Riverside. They're about 45 minutes apart. So I was just doing a lot of things. And I felt a closeness to heaven because my son's there.

So that impacted Kathy and myself with my son, Jonathan. He had gone prodigal, which means he hadn't walked away from his faith completely, but he was doing drugs. he was going the wrong way in life. And his brother Christopher, who was like 11 years older than him, had done the same thing earlier and had made a recommitment to the Lord and was trying to help his younger brother. And then one night Christopher said, Jonathan, what's it going to take for you to get right with God?

And Jonathan, that night said, I'm going to talk to my brother about this tomorrow and get this sorted out. And then his brother was killed. I'm not suggesting this is what it took because, you know, tragedies happen that I can't explain. Rick, if you would have met me when I was 21, I could explain anything. And I'm seeing that facetiously.

I just thought I knew everything, but I didn't. And now I know I don't know a lot. But the Bible promises, and Romans 828 it says, for we know that all things work together for good to those that love God and are they called according to his purpose. So what that means is it doesn't mean that, oh, this bad thing happened so this good thing can happen. Though sometimes bad things happen that were always bad and will always be bad. But despite that bad thing, God can bring good things. And I would say yes,

that this happened. Many good things have happened, including Jonathan recommitting his life to the Lord. And then he came to me not long after and said, Dad, I want to help you in your ministry. And now he's a pastor at our church. Beautiful. That was the very thing he was running from. Because when you're a preachers kid, everyone thinks you're going to become a preacher. So people put pressure on you. And they said, are you going to be a preacher like your dad? So he was trying to escape that. And he ended up becoming a preacher like his dad. But I think it's a calling. So this happened in the aftermath of Christopher being called to heaven. So if I could turn back time, I'd bring Christopher back. I'd change everything. I'd gladly have gone in this place. But I wasn't given that choice.

But that did bring like a spiritual awakening in me. and my wife and in my son. Over the course of your life, had you had a series of new understandings and openings? No. You know, I read the Bible a lot, read a lot of books by a lot of people. I listen to a lot of sermons by people constantly.

I feel like there's always more to learn, and then there are things that you learn and kind of forget and need to relearn, or you learn them in a different stage of your life, and they're different now. And so I feel like I'm constantly needing to learn and constantly wanting to learn. In fact, it's sort of like,

if you're not feeling, well, you go to your doctor, he'll say, how's your appetite? It's a sign of good health. I think the same is true spiritually. If you don't have a hunger to learn more and to grow more and to get closer to God, something's not right spiritually.

So you need to constantly be feeding that and it's like never done. I'm done. I'm good. I'm good for a year. Now, to me, it's a daily thing of constant growth, constant learning, and I actually love it. My favorite thing to do, I love to do artwork. That's when I do that. I'm kind of playing. Anything creative is like play to me, but I do like to study a scripture, figure out what it means in its original languages and culture and context, and then build a message out of it, and then deliver. that message. I love to do that because I'm always kind of amazed at how it comes together. You know, there's a creative element to preaching too. So much of today's life happens on the web.

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Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit Squarespace.com slash tetra. and get started today. Can you think of an example of a piece of scripture that you understood one way when you were younger and have come to learn a different dimension of it over time? I don't think I would say I see it differently, but I see it more deeply.

Go back to Romans 828. I would just sort of quote that to people and not really think it through. But when you really break it down, and then there's a verse that follows that really explains everything. for we know that all things work together for God. No, we know this as Christians. And we have to start with, there's a God in heaven who loves us, who has our best interests in mind. One of my favorite

passages is Jeremiah 2911, where God says, I know the thoughts that I think towards you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. And interestingly, that verse, I had a watch that I gave to my son Christopher, and I inscribed it on the back of the watch. he was wearing it when he died. So when they brought this plastic bag to me with the watch, and I looked at it and flipped it over and saw that verse, I thought, how does this verse work now? It doesn't sound like these plans are very good.

But then I stopped and thought, well, he's in heaven, though. Because people would say, are you mad at God? I said, I'm not mad. I'm sad. I'm disappointed. Not in God, but just disappointed. But I know that he's safely in the arms of the Lord and that I'll see him again.

But anyway, we know that all things, not some things, all things, work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to its purpose. But then it goes on to the next verse and says, for whom God did foreknow, he also did predestined to be conformed into the image of his own dear son.

So what that means is God shows us. You know, there's a verse I love where David says, when I was in my mother's womb, God chose me. And like I was conceived out of wedlock, I found out later in life. I thought this guy was my dad because his name was on my birth certificate. But then they found out later, he wasn't my dad.

And the way I found out was when Christopher was born, I thought, well, I should introduce him to his biological father. So he went to my mom and he said, his name was Kim. I said, where's Kim? Is he around? Oh, yeah, he still has a dry cleaning business, which he had when I was a kid. Well, I want to go introduce him to his grandson.

Oh, okay. And when I got there, he's standing behind, the counter, I said, hi Kim, I'm Greg, your son. Yeah, hi, Greg. Okay. Well, this is your grandson, Christopher. He's looking, oh, nice. He didn't even come out from behind the counter. So we drove away, and I said to my wife, Kathy, that's not my father. I mean, that's your grandson. You would react differently. So I asked one of my favorite aunts, this really weird thought, I don't think he's my dad. She said, how did you know? I said, well, I didn't know it. You said, that. So I thought that he wasn't my dad. But I was conceived out of whether.

luck. So one might say, I wasn't planned, right? I was an accident, but I wasn't. God had a plan for my life in my mother's womb. He called me. So anyway, for whom he foreknew, he knew us before we knew him to conformance into the image of his own dear son. So the big picture is, we look at life and things happen, good things happen, we go, ah, that's good, all things were together for good. And bad things happen, and then later something good comes out of the bad thing even. And we go, oh, things work together, forget. Then this crazy, horrible things happen. It never makes sense. But we have to look at the big picture. Ultimately, God wants to change us and make us more like Jesus, because heaven is a prepared place for prepared people. Jesus said, I've gone to

prepare a place for you. So I just realized that God is a big plan. He loves me. He'll ultimately work it out together for good. And I've certainly seen that looking back in retrospect. So I trust that he'll continue that. So I'd say I've deepened in my understanding of that passage. I think I've deepened in my understanding of suffering. And when I minister to people who are suffering,

I realize sometimes saying less is more effective than saying more. Yeah. They don't have to explain things. people. And sometimes the best thing I can do is just say, I'm so sorry. And I'll just say, you're going to get through this. You're going to have joy again. You're going to have a lot of sorrow. This is going to be very hard. But life is going to get better again. And I think when you meet somebody who survived it, they'll listen to me. You know, it's been said, failure builds bridges, success builds walls. So if I seem to have it all together,

and I have all the answers, it's like, I can't relate to you. But if I say, hey, I've suffered, and they know I've suffered, they'll listen. If you preach to hurting people, you'll never lack for an audience. And there's just so many hurting people. So it's given me more compassion for people who are hurting, where before I might walk away from a situation, all these people just lost their child.

I'll be, oh, okay, maybe someone else will help them. Now I'll just walk into it, because I know what it's like to be there, and I want to help them. So I have a ministry I didn't have before, of ministering to people who lost children. I never wanted that ministry, but I accept it. And I did find even early on, when I took my focus off of my own pain and put it on others, it helped me. I'd feel better after I talked to somebody else. Yes. How did you learn about Christianity

after your experience with Lonnie? Tell me the process of learning. I would phrase it as just learning about Jesus. And the Bible is about Jesus. And the Bible is about Jesus. He's in the Old Testament concealed. He's in the New Testament revealed. So it's one continuous truth from Genesis to Revelation. But it all really comes down to him. He's the son of God who was sent to this world. He was fully God, but he was fully man. And we can't understand that completely. But he is the way that we come into a relationship of the Father. So, It's just learning about him. Paul said, my determined purpose in life is to know him and to become more like him. So that happens to Bible study. It happens to prayer. It happens to being involved in church.

Happens to having strong Christian friends that you encourage one another doing it. It even happens in sharing this message with others. You know, that's even life giving to tell others about it. The Bible says, He that waters others will be watered himself. And I found, you know, when I tell others about Jesus, it kind of like revitalizes me even. So, I mean, pretty much every day I started with the Bible. And throughout the day, I'm absorbing it. That's not all I do. We do other things. I go out and have fun.

I played tennis. I will now pick a ball, I guess, bracket ball. Occasionally I read my Harley, but the battery just died, so I haven't done that for a while. I like to listen to music. Occasionally, I surf off the water is really warm, and I'm in the, the right mood. I like to spend time with my grandkids. So yeah, I love to have meals with my friends and family. So I do all the normal things of life. But that's all kind of interwoven and all of that is my faith in growing spiritually. And people know who I am. And so I have opportunities to

minister to people a lot, you know, because I can get recognized a little bit here and there. So that's just my life. You know, it's just doing that every day. But I love that. what is harvest? Well, that's the name of our church. And it's from the Bible. Jesus said, the harvest is great, but the laborers are few. So it's sort of compared like a field ready to harvest to people that want to believe. These people want to believe.

But someone's got to go out there and reap where the seed has been sown. And so, considering that I've always done evangelism, I just thought that'd be a cool name for church. So that's how we ended up with it. Then our ministries just became harvest this, harvest that. And so it just kind of has carried on. Tell me about building a church. You know what? I was starting out.

I didn't know I was starting a church. Start of churches, you see a lot of them today. I'd never heard of anything like that back in 1972. There were just older established churches, and the pastor would eventually leave, and a new pastor would come. But it was only like, oh, we're starting a new church. or let's start a new church there. Well, so there was a group of young people meeting in Riverside,

and I was living in Orange County, they're about 45 minutes apart. And Lonnie had actually started at Lonnie Frisbee, and he left, and it sort of shrunk down, and they were looking for someone to take it over. So I was hanging around Calvary Chapel, and there was a bunch of pastors who were about nine, ten years older than me, who had been rotating and speaking. And one day, one of them said, hey, who's going to Riverside this week? One said, well, I went there last week. Another said, well, I'm going there next week. Well, I don't want to go. They looked at me and said, hey, Greg, you want to go? And I had my drafting board set up in the corner of the office, and I was doing freelance graphics to sort of support myself and pretty much doing what nobody else wanted to do.

I said, I'll go. Yeah, I'll go. So I went up to Riverside, and I showed up, and no one had told them I was coming and there was like some deacon guy in charge and I walked up high and Greg Lurie and from Coffey Chapel I'm here to speak you know someone told me you were speaking and said well I am yeah I'm here I'm here I'm here I just sit there and I'll let you know oh brother okay I'm just sitting there well no one else showed up because I was the guy he said go ahead so I spoke it went well I went back the next week it went well they said well you can keep coming then it started growing and then people are starting to call me pastor. And I went, wait, I'm like 19 years old.

I've been a Christian two years. I'm still learning these things myself. I'm not really qualified to be a pastor. I was looking for other people to take it over and no one would. So I thought, well, if I'm going to be their pastor, I better work at this harder. So I started building a library of books and started studying. And literally there would be things I believe,

but I would be studying them and teaching them that. night. And man, if you want to really learn something, if you teach it, you'll have to learn it, you know, so I'm getting it sorted out, and then I would teach it that night. And I had a great example of Chuck Smith, who I would still go and listen to. And so it grew, and then we eventually left that little church room meeting in, found our own facility. Then we became a church. Then it grew more. Now, fast forward to the 80s. One day I get a phone call from some Christian magazine. Well, as a mega church pastor, I go, what? Oh, you're a mega church. I I've never even heard that term before.

I never set out to be a mega-church pastor. I just set out to do the best job I could do. I just want them to be the best taught people around and do the best job I can for them. So then it just continued to grow, and we built a bigger building and added to our facilities, and we started doing outreach things, and then we got into other things as well, radio and TV

and now online stuff. So it's just been constantly growing, but the weird thing was I had this desire to go be an evangelist, to travel around more. So in 1990, Pastor Chuck came to me and said, why don't you come down to Calvary and do a Bible study for young people? Because I think they were losing young people at that point. And I was still pretty young, late 20s. And so I said, okay, and I started doing it.

And they started to grow. And Chuck said, why don't we go and do this in a larger venue? I said, well, like where? And he goes to the Pacific Amphitheater, which seats like 17,000 people. I'm going, whoa, that's pretty big. And he goes, well, we serve a pretty big God, Greg. Let's do it.

Okay. So we went there. And then the next year, we went to Angel Stadium. And we've been doing that now for like 34 years. Wow. Every year. And so we've gone around the world to do it as well and done it all across the United States.

So it's sort of like that desire I had to be an evangelist team later. One thing I left out was I got to be very good friends with Billy Graham. Tell me about him. So going back to my grandparents' house, portrait of Jesus on the wall, they would watch Billy Graham. So I always kind of liked Billy Graham. So then after I became a Christian, I thought, man, I'm going to go hear him. So I went to a Billy Graham crusade, and he does the thing where he calls people forward to accept Christ. You know, walk forward and ask Jesus into your life.

And I walked forward, even though I was a Christian and already a pastor, just to get a closer look at him. Like, oh, I want to look at this guy. And so I had a little envelope, a little envelope with an article that had been written about our new church, and I was going to give it to him that night. And so I wrote his name on the envelope, and there's a little line as he's leaving,

and I reached out the envelope, and someone grabs it to give to Billy, and I realized, yes, since it left my hand, I misspelled his last name. It was like, not GRA, H-A-M is just G-R-A-M. So, oh, no, I misspelled his name. Then I met him in 1985. and our church was growing at that point.

And then he was getting older. And so as he was ending his crusade ministry, I was starting mine. And he was aware of what I was doing. And I was friends with the son, Franklin. And then he asked me to come in as board of directors, which had been on for 25 years. And so then Billy said,

would you help me with my messages? And I said, yeah, he goes, I need help with my illustrations. They were kind of dated. I remember in Minneapolis, he was speaking. so Smashing Pumpkins had a song out called Rat in a Cage. And so I used the lyric from Rat in the Cage, put it in there. And then I explained in the notes,

Smashing Pumpkins is a band, because I didn't want to think I meant Smashing Pumpkins, you know. And so he was up there speaking, and Billy Graham Cade and Smashing Pumpkin said, and there's a song by Smashing Pumpkins, and I was, yes. And so I was just trying to help him with stuff that would connect to a younger audience. So I spent a lot of time hanging out with him. And now another thing, when I was always, I sought out older people. Instead of wanting to hang up people that were my age, I wanted to meet older people.

I think it's probably because I didn't have parents. So I would see everything I learned about pastoring, I learned from Chuck Smith. Everything I learned about evangelism, I learned from Billy Graham. And to me, he was the gold standard of evangelists. because Billy was a really humbled guy. And he was obviously a very famous person, but he was always approachable and very down to earth. I mean, just the way he dealt with Johnny Cash.

Because Johnny, you know, they were friends, but Johnny would, oh, this happened and that happened. And people would say, Billy, don't bring Johnny out to your crusades anymore. He goes, oh, he's my friend. He's coming. And I love that friendship that he maintained. and they really appreciated each other. And I thought that was, it said a lot, you know,

that he would build a bridge to someone who may be struggling, but not write them off, but encourage them and help them. And they're almost like opposites, but they actually have a lot in common. They're both Southern boys, both raised in the church, gospel roots. And Johnny really loved him. Talked about him a lot. Did he?

Really loved them. Yeah. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, There is something different, something clean, something precise. Athletic nicotine, not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters, not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery, but a careful calibration of clean energy and focused clarity. Athletic nicotine, the lowest dose tobacco-free nicotine available,

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it will be based on the teaching of Jesus. Now, sometimes people set up kind of a false dichotomy of, I believe in the red letters only. And, you know, there's certain translations of the Bible, they'll take the words of Christ and put them in red. So when you get to the sermon on the Mount, it's pages of red letters. But then, you know, then it'd be read here and there as Jesus spoke.

but I believe all of the Bible is red letters, if you will. In other words, the Bible says, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. Like I said earlier, Jesus is in the Old Testament concealed, meaning Jesus isn't walking around and the Old Testament is Jesus. But I think he makes some special appearances on what we call Christophonies,

like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedigo on the fiery furnace, and Nebuchadnezzar throws them in, and everyone thinks they're dead, and next thing he knows, are walking around, and he says, wait, there's a fourth guy in there, and he looks like the son of God. We would classify that as an appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament. So then in the New Testament, he's born in Bethlehem, he has this ministry, he's crucified, he rises again. Theology is just the study of God. We'd have to be afraid of the word theology, because it's just

learning more about God. And I'm a theologian in a technical sense, and maybe I'm not an academic, but I study God and the Bible all the time. So church theology, if it is being done as it ought to be done, will reflect the teachings of Jesus, but really the teachings of all of the Bible. Tell me about faith. The Bible technical definition of faith is the substance of things hopeful,

the evidence of things not seen. Faith is not just believing God can do it, it's believing God will do it. It's taking action. It's movement. You know, when you read about faith in the Bible, it's always doing things. Like in Hebrews 11, sometimes called the Hall of Faith, because it's like a gallery of all the great men and women of faith of the Old Testament.

It's about things they did. Like, by faith, Noah built the ark. By faith, this happened, by faith that happened. So it's actions of God's people. So, you know, we have the Bible and we have the promises of God. Faith is when I choose to believe them for myself. and I put it into practice. So I'll give you an example

where faith can overpower even emotions. Not long after my son died, something would trigger a memory of him, and I would just, oh, and I would like say or think, I'll never see him again, I'll never hear his voice again. Then I would quote scripture to myself. Sometimes I say, Greg, shut up. Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life.

He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, whosoever lives and believes in me, shall never die. Greg, you'll see your son again in heaven. And all of a sudden, they would just lift me out of this pit of despair and darkness, and I would just get a heavenly perspective again. Or faith might be, hey, that person over there, I think, you know, someone needs to talk to them. They look like they're hurting, like they're imping.

Maybe I can help them. I find that very few people will turn me down if I say, could I pray for you? Almost anyone will accept a prayer. But I might tell them about Jesus, or it might be, let's go try this thing, let's do this thing. That's an act of faith. Someone's sick. Let's pray that the Lord heals him. We don't know that God will heal everyone, but we know he heals many. And so by faith, we pray. You know, so it's just, it's action, and it's taking the promises of God and putting them into effect. And now sometimes it can be exaggerated, like it's some mystical force that we can harness and just speak things into existence. It's not that. Jesus summed it up in John 15 when he said,

if you maintain a living communion with me and my words are at home in you, you can ask it once for yourself whatever your heart desires, and it's yours. So we immediately gravitate toward the lot of part of their, oh, ask for whatever my heart desires or my heart desires and whatever. some crazy thing. Well, no, if you maintain a living communion with me, Jesus says, and my word is at home in you, when you are reading the Bible and you're walking with the Lord, I think your desires begin to change. But, you know, ultimately it has to be according to the will of God, but the Lord will, I think, put something in our heart that we will then pray for that he will answer. So ultimately, prayer is not getting God to do what I want him to do. It's getting myself in alignment with God.

And how do we know what his will is? Well, he speaks to us through his word. Tell me about the Holy Spirit. Well, he's the third member of the Trinity, probably the most misunderstood member, because we have the father. I think we can all have a basic concept of God as a father. God, the son, that's pretty easy to wrap our mind around.

The perfect example is the story of the prodigal son. We have a father. Was the son go astray? Now that's not speaking of Jesus. It's us wandering away from God, but we can see these pictures. But the Holy Spirit, he's compared to the wind. He's compared to fire. He comes on Jesus in the form of a dove.

So because these pictures are used, we can think of them almost like the Force, like Star Wars, trust the Force. But he isn't a force. He's a heat. He's more earthly than God, the Father? He's just a part of it. of the Trinity, and I think it's very hard to distinguish, like, because I think I could say to you, the Holy Spirit just spoke to my heart to tell you about Jesus so you can come into a closer relationship with the Father, so they work together. So it's not like, here's this, and then

he's over here somewhere, they're working in harmony. Like, here's an example of all of them in action at the same time. Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. As a As he's being baptized, the Holy Spirit comes upon him in the form of a dove, and then the Father says from heaven, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Or we read in Genesis at creation, the Spirit of God hovered over the waters, and God said, let there be light. And then God says, let us make man in our image. Oh, wait, who's he talking to? Angels? No, we're made in the image of God. So we see Father, Son, Holy Spirit, working in harmony together. It's actually not that easy to fully wrap your mind around. But the Holy Spirit is a person. He has a personality.

Jesus spoke of him and said, when he has come, not when it has come, he will convince the world of righteousness and the judgment to come. So the Holy Spirit has a work. And the primary work of the Holy Spirit is to bring us to Jesus. And so I think when someone feels like guilt or remorse for their sin or they sense, I need Jesus and they're drawn to Jesus, that's the Holy Spirit. That's the Holy Spirit doing his work, bringing you to Christ. And then how do we approach the Father? We go to the father to the Son. So, and it's interesting because if he's a force, because the Bible says we can insult the Holy Spirit, we can resist the Holy Spirit, and we can blaspheme the Holy Spirit. So you can't blaspheme the wind. I can't insult a force. There's a force. But because he's a he,

he can be resisted, insulted, lied to even, because on one occasion, two people named Anayas and Sapphire were lying to the people in the church, and Peter said, you lied to the Holy Spirit. So it's very interesting. You know, he is a personality with a distinct plan and purpose, working in harmony with the Father and with Jesus. Does the Holy Spirit exist in the Old Testament as well?

Oh, yeah. Like I said, in the beginning of creation, the spirit brooded. The Bible uses the word brooded, kind of like hovered, you know. Oh, yes, well, the Holy Spirit came upon the prophet, Elijah, the Holy Spirit would come upon Samson when he would do his supernatural miracles

and destroying Philistines and all the things that he did. So yes, the Holy Spirit is very much active in the Old Testament as well. When did burnt offerings stop happening? Well, all the burnt offerings were pointing to one thing, Jesus. Like the first verse in the Bible that points to Jesus is in Genesis 3. After Adam and Eve sinned, eat of the forbidden fruit. God says to Satan, there is coming one who crush your head and you will bruise his heel. So after Satan misleads Adam and Eve, God kind of puts Satan on notice.

It's like game on. There's coming one who's going to crush your head. So Satan knows Jesus is coming. And I think he was doing everything he could. to stop it, starting the book of Exodus. All the little Jewish baby boys, the Pharaoh commands they be put to death, the book of Esther, decree

given out, kill all the Jews. Because Jesus was going to come as a Jew through a messianic line that came through King David, on through the New Testament, all these passages that point to him. Isaiah 96, unto you a child is born, unto you a son is given. His name shall be called

Wonderful Counselor of the Mighty God. Then Micah 5-2, you Bethlehem though you be little among the thousands, of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth one whose origins have been from everlasting. So all these are like pointing to the New Testament. So Old Testament sacrifices. You take the lamb, you slame on the altar, you sprinkle the blood. That's a symbol of the Lamb of God. So when Jesus begins his public ministry, John the Baptist, his cousin says, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. In other words, it's done now.

And so when Jesus died on the cross, he gave seven statements. And one of those statements, And one of those statements was, it is done. It is done. That's what was done. All the Old Testament sacrifices were fulfilled. All of that was complete, so we no longer have to slay the animal at the altar. The Lamb of God has been slain. His blood has been shed.

And so now we can approach the Father through the Son. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning. over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition

has been used to stay close to wisdom. Not by studying words as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is not known as Lectio Divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements,

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buried in baptism with Christ. So it's sort of like the old life in the symbolic way is ending. It's not like when you're baptized, your sins are washed away. Your sins are forgiven when you put your faith in Christ and ask him to come into your life. But baptism is an outward showing of that. I've described it as an outward showing of an inward doing. Like, okay, now I'm going to publicly proclaim to everyone and anyone that I'm a follower of Jesus. And so the criteria for baptism is you have to repent and be baptized. Repent means to change your direction, turn from your sin. And there's a story in the book of acts of a guy from either. Ethiopia who came searching for God and Philip and evangelist led him to Christ.

And the man said, what hinders me from being baptized? And Philip said, if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, all of your heart, you may be. He says, I believe. So they baptized them. So you need to believe. You need to repent. And if you don't do those things, then it doesn't have any great significance. So it's a symbol, but a beautiful one.

There's been like this whole baptism movement, like thousands. and thousands of people being baptized. We alone have baptized like 5,000 people in the last three years. Wow. We called it the Jesus Revolution Baptism, kind of connected to the film, and people were lining up out on the beach, long lines coming down to be baptized. So that's another kind of recent phenomenon.

I've not seen that anywhere. This is kind of something that's happened in the last few years. What's the meaning of weighing a cross? It's a symbol. you know, it's interesting. The early church, they didn't wear crosses. They didn't have crosses on churches. Symbol of the early church was the fish. But the cross came later. Of course, Christ dying on the cross. You know, you can wear a cross and not believe in what it says. It can be a fashion accessory. You can tat it on your arm, whatever. People put them on jackets,

all kinds of things, you know. But if you were doing it with meaning, what would the meaning would mean? It would mean I'm a Christian. I identify as a follower of Jesus Christ. And I don't care who sees it and I'd be happy to maybe have a conversation with you about it. I don't wear a cross and it's not because I'm against it in any way. Maybe I'll wear one tomorrow. A lot of people do. My wife wears one. I know a lot of people who wear them.

I think it's a beautiful way to express your faith. Tell me about communion. Jesus had the last supper. It's kind of comes back to the Old Testament. Old sacrifices. So they had a lot of meals together and Jesus said they could tell something was

different. They didn't know what's a lot. Last supper. They weren't lined up behind the table like in the Da Vinci painting. They were just probably like sitting, probably like we're sitting with load of the ground and cushions with the table and you take the different foods and dip them and such. And so he says, take this and eat, this is my body which is broken for you. And when you drink this cup and they realize this is different. And he was instituting what we call communion. It's also called the Lord's Supper. So Paul talks about it, the apostle, and he says, when a man receives communion, a woman too, obviously, let him examine himself to see if he is in the faith.

So when we do communion, I always say to people, look at your life, and if there's anything that is not right with God or something you need to pray about or repent of, this is the time to do it. But I also say, maybe there's somebody here that needs a healing touch from the Lord. And it's funny because Kelsey Grammer has a communion scene in the Jesus Revolution film. So I had to explain, like, this is what community is. And this is what we say. And this is why we say it in this specific way. He did a great job of it, too.

Anyway, so the bread symbolizes his body. And before Jesus was crucified, they whipped him 39 times. And the Bible says, by his stripes were healed. So I believe that there's healing power. from Jesus that can happen through communion. I don't think it's like now in the Catholic Church, coming back to them in what they call the Eucharist. They believe that the bread literally becomes the flesh of Christ,

and the juice or wine literally becomes the blood of Christ. I don't believe that. Most Protestants don't believe that, but we believe they're very important symbols. And Paul kind of emphasizes it coming back to him, let a man examine himself. He says, don't take these elements in an unworthy, manner. So don't do it in a flippant way, or just it's a ritual. Now, this symbolizes the body of

Jesus. This symbolizes the blood of Jesus. So take this seriously. And this is for a believer in Jesus Christ. And then you receive these elements in the cup, you know, the juice of the wine, symbolizes his blood that was shed for us. And so when we receive communion, we'll pray and I'll say, Lord, thank you for shedding your blood for us because the Bible promises of we walk in the light as he is in the light. We have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sins. So Lord just cleanse us of our sin and we drink together. So it's a really beautiful thing that the church does. And Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me until he comes. So when we're in heaven, we don't need to do it anymore. But there's an interesting

little thing in the Greek where it can better be translated, do this in a affection remembrance of me. And so there's an affection, there's an intimacy and a closeness to Jesus. It's not a cold religious ritual. It's a warm connection of love that we're expressing to God and we're remembering the sacrifice that Jesus made. Because if it wasn't for that sacrifice, we would have no access to God. We'd still be back in the Old Testament with sacrifices with animals. Tell me about preparing a sermon. It's a lot of things at once. I heard about one preacher.

He said, I study myself full, I pray myself hot, and I let myself go. First you study. For me, a sermon is based on a text. So I'll read a text, and I'll try to figure out what is this text saying? What is Jesus saying? Always from the Bible.

Always. And only. I pull from all kinds of sources. I quote all kinds of people. and thinkers and different things that illustrate it. Starts with the Bible. Starts with the Bible. And I'd say ends of the Bible.

But like take John 15, what's an example. So John 15, Jesus speaks about a woman who lost a coin and searched for it until she found it, a shepherd who lost his sheep and searches for it until he finds it. And a father who had two sons and one went astray, and the father welcomed him home. So the theme is, lost things found, right? So you figure out the theme.

Then you figure out, okay, who was he speaking? to. He's speaking to the audience of his day, and he's kind of directing this toward the religious leaders, because in the story of the prodigal son, there's another son people forget about. The son goes astray and drags the family name to the mud and messes up and says, Father I've sent him, returns home. But there's this older brother, is ticked off at his younger brother because he's gone out there and disgraced their family. And he goes, man, you know, you never threw a party for me. You never slew the animal for me. me and in the dead's his son, you've always been with me. So Jesus was speaking to the religious

leaders. They're like the older brother. They're resentful because Jesus was hanging around sinners. That was the backdrop of this. Why are you hanging around these people? This tax collector and this prostitute and these other people. Yeah, outcast. You can't do that. And he goes, let me tell you a story. So in the story, he's really directing it toward them. You guys are like the older brother. You should be happy when this prodigal son comes home again. So, so, so you, so you're you figure out all those things, any interesting things in culture, and the language as an example, in that culture, it was considered undignified for an older man to run. Older men did not run in general. So I'll jokingly say, not to mention the fact that it's harder for an older man to run,

I can say from experience, but the father sort of like is willing to lose his dignity to get to a son as quickly as possible. In God, this is a picture Jesus gave us of God, how much he loves us and the links he's willing to go to to reach us. And so we get all those little cultural things, language things, now bring it into the present day. Now it depends who I'm sharing this with. If it's with an audience of nonbelievers, I might quote various people in the culture today talking about the emptiness of life.

There's a Jim Carrey quote I've used before. I wish everyone could get all the things they ever wanted to life and realize that's not what it's all about. that's a very list of our phrase. Sometimes I'll even begin my message with quotes from people they know, and I won't even quote the Bible at first. Or I might start with my own story, because I want people to understand, I'm just a person like you.

I'm not better than you, but here's what God says, and I want you to hear this. That's if it's an evangelistic message, and then I'll get to my text, then I'll explain it, and then I'll apply it and say something like, you can come into a relationship with God. Maybe you feel like, oh, God would never accept me. I've done too many horrible things

with the father accepted the son and noticed he didn't make the son clean himself up first the son came as he was. Accepted him as he was. As he was. And so I might say something like Jesus said he that would come to me, but in no way cast out.

So you just come as you are to God. You come with your sins, you come with your questions, you come with your addictions. You come to him, not unlike what I did. I mean, I came as a drug user effectively. Oh, I didn't have to clean my life up and come to God.

you come to God, he'll clean your life up. And so in the context of an evangelistic message, and I would say, and you can come to Christ right now. And I tell them how to do it, and I invite them to walk forward if it's in a stadium and I lead him in a prayer. Now, if I was teaching that at our church, I might do that as well, but I might say, and we need to remember that there's a lot of people like this prodigal son out there, and we need to reach them. Or maybe you have a prodigal son or a prodigal daughter. I had two prodigal sons. I like the man on the story. I'm a father of two sons. Let me tell you about my sons. And my son, Jonathan, preached on it a few weeks ago. And I said, you should teach on this because

you've lived it. Yeah. And he brought it home in a really personal way. So, you know, that's just an example of one text. Now, if I'm teaching an epistle, one of the letters of Paul, that's different because it's not a story like that. It's more like he's addressing certain topics. And then if it's an Old Testament narrative. That's another kind of sweeping story, you know, like David and Goliath. And so we'll tell the story. But then I would bring applications to dealing with challenges that we all face the giants in your life, so to speak. So it kind of just depends on what the text is. But I'm always, right now I'm teaching through the gospel of Luke. We call it the gospel for everyone. I'm just teaching through these things that Jesus said and did and show how they apply to our

life today. In the Old Testament, God seems judgmental, and in the New Testament, not so much. What changed? I don't think anything changed. I think he's the same God in the Old and New Testament as an example. God called Jonah to go preach to the Ninevites. The Ninevites, they're really wicked people. They were known for their atrocities. They wouldn't just kill their enemies. They would skin them alive. They would stack skulls as tributes to what they had done really evil people. So God comes to Jonah the prophet and says, go preach to Nineveh. Jonah's like, no way. And he gets in a boat going in the opposite direction. He disobeys God. Why? Because Jonah himself says, I know you're gracious and willing to forgive and I don't want to go to

them. Because his thinking was, if I go and preach to these people, God will forgive them. And I don't want him to forgive them. I want him to destroy them. A great storm comes. He's swallowed by a great fish. Everyone makes a big deal about Jonah and the whale. The Bible never says whale. It says a sea monster. We don't know what swallowed him. Some creature swallowed him. He repents and God brings them right back to Nineveh and he preaches to them and sure enough when he tells them 40 days in you'll be overthrown, they all repent and God doesn't judge them. So yes, God judges people in the Old Testament, but he forgives them as well. And God doesn't want to judge people. He says, I take no delight in the death of the wicked. I mean, take hell as an example. I did a teaching last

time I spoke on what Jesus taught about hell. I called it, what happens one minute after you die. And I tried to explain to people the fact that the last thing God wants is for anyone to go to hell. I do believe hell is real because Jesus talked about it more than all the other preachers in the Bible put together. But God doesn't want people to go. it wasn't prepared for people. Jesus said it was made for the devil and his angels. God wants us to join him in heaven. That is why he sent Jesus.

But as C.S. Lewis said, the gates of hell are locked from the inside. In other words, say there's a building on fire, and I'm standing in front of the building. And people are walking in. No, don't go in this building. Don't go in this building. You'll die.

Go over here. We have a banquet, a feast prepared for you. Come on over here. Now everybody's in line for the building. going there. We're going to party in hell with their friends. No, you weren't. It's judgment. You don't want to do that. If I'm stopping people even standing in their way and they push me aside, well, I did what I could. You have to climb over Jesus to get there. He doesn't want you to go there, but you have a choice in life. If you don't want God in this life, I don't want God. Well,

then you don't have to have him in the afterlife either, because hell is separation from God. So I think the nature of God is to forgive and to pardon and give second chances. I think you see that in the Old and New Testament. Tell me about the role of music in Christianity. Well, I believe, of course, God gave us music. Okay, so really the Psalms are prayers set to song. There were melodies, and David was a musician. David played a stringed instrument and sang to the Lord.

in fact, there was power in what he did because King Saul was being tormented by demons, because he had rebelled against God and kind of like going into the mental decline, and these demons would torment him, and they would bring David in, who would sing, and there would be temporary relief. So I think there's actually spiritual power in music, and I've seen it, and I love music. And before I became a Christian, I love the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Hendricks, Buffalo Springfield, etc. So I became a Christian.

I'm like, well, that's the end of that. Now I just listened to hymns and weird Christian songs. And so there's this guy named Larry Norman who had a record. And I came across it and just Capitol Records. I thought, well, it's a Beatles label, isn't it? And he was a really creative guy. And it was kind of like the first Christian's album. So, you know, he's really talented writer.

and I loved his music. I thought, well, there's actually some good Christian music here. I'm kind of surprised because a lot of the rest of it wasn't that great. So coming back to Calvary Chapel, when the spiritual awakening is happening, all these musicians are coming to faith, and they're writing music. And one of the groups, and this is in the Jesus Revolution film,

was called Love Song, Chuck Gerard, the lead singer. He was in a band called the Handel. It's not a big band, but he had a beach boy kind of sound and had an amazing voice. and then these other guys, it was kind of like the Beatles meet the Beach Boys with gospel in it. And so they came out one night and started singing. I was like, wow, this is amazing. So I kind of watched the birth of what we call contemporary Christian music.

It just started out as guys and girls coming to the Lord who wanted to express their faith. In fact, the big difference between the first wave of Christian music and the waves today would be the first wave was kind of more organic and it was more almost telling people about what we believed. Like there was one song by love song, the lyrics were. We're all gathered here because we all believe. If there's a doubter in the crowd,

we ask you not to leave. Give a listen to our story. Hear the message that we bring. Let the faith swell up inside you, lift your voice with us and sing. Accept them with your whole heart and use your own two hands, with one reach out to Jesus and with the other bring a friend.

So I love that it was directed toward the culture. And the original idea was let's go to the culture and talk about what's happened to us. But then in time, it became an industry. And now today, I work with a lot of these artists. I like them. I think they're great. A lot of them are friends of mine.

And it's fine. I don't have a problem with it being in industry. But I'm just saying in its original intent, It was organic and it was more oriented toward the culture. And I would like to see some more artists write songs of that nature. I've told a lot of them that. He wanted to write songs like kind of to the non-believer a little bit, not always just to the Christian.

Can we listen to that song? Yeah, it's called Two Hands. We all, there's a doubt. He asked you not. If we listen to the story, you're the message that he, the face will up around you. Lift your voice with us and sing.

Accept him with your own. With one reed and with the other. Accept him with... The Chuck had the really high voice. Kind of a little Brian Wilson. Of course, that brings back memories to me, so I can't remove myself from that. But that was typical of what it was.

And, I mean, what I love about what you do is you strip stuff away and get to the essence of it so the artist can come out. or the song can come out, punctuating elements of the song. And I feel like this industry is very slick and polished, and a lot of it's great. But I would like to see a return to that sort of thing. You could make the argument also that the church started as a grassroots thing and has also turned into a big industry. Yep, it can do that.

And it's kind of like, that's why we just start and we start over again and again and again. And even churches have like lifespans. The church doesn't have a lifespan, but churches do. Like there might be a church that was once impactful and packed out. And then one day it's a big empty auditorium. But then you hear of a new thing that just started up down the street and some abandoned supermarket that they've converted into a church or a movie theater. So there's always new expressions of it.

And it's just, it's life. Honestly, we mess things up. God doesn't. The human factor. Yeah, the human factor. But it keeps marching on, and Jesus said that gates of hell will not prevail against us. So I'm a big believer in the church and the local church and the importance of it because I've always remained as a pastor, so I'm involved in people's lives and what they're facing and dealing with.

And I think you can just get into an industry of it and be disconnected from people. and I feel the best thing is to be part of a church. And we even encourage what we call small groups or we get people into like eight or nine, maybe 10 people, and we'll study things together, but then friendships develop. And then, you know, they become a little world in a world. And then, you know, all of a sudden you have a network of people

to help you. Like as an example, we find people who are in small groups almost never come in for counseling. Because in the small group, they have that already. They have people to talk with, people to pray with. people to do life with, you know. We really encourage people to do that. And, you know, the church gets slammed a lot.

It gets criticized a lot. And sometimes people critique maybe exaggerated versions of it, which you might see on television or elsewhere. But there's so many churches faithfully making their impact. In this very community, you have them, I'm sure. And maybe a lot of people have never heard of these pastors or these churches, but they're doing their work and marrying and burying and counseling and putting families back together and doing the thing that the church does.

We get criticized a lot, but I feel like it's the only organization Jesus ever started. How has Christianity stayed the same and how has it changed since Jesus' time? I think it comes down to how close we want to stay to him and close we want to be to his message. I think if we adhere to Scripture, were good. And I don't believe that what I do today is remarkably different than what I did when I started. I'm older. I hopefully am a little wiser. But I've tried to adapt to changes in our culture

without changing my essential message. We didn't have social media 30 years ago. We didn't have a lot of things we have now. But the essential needs that people don't change and the essential answer doesn't changes. So I think for those that stay close to what the Bible says, and Jesus has gone to all the world and preach the gospel, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, low him with you even to the end of the age. That's called the Great Commission. I think as long as we are close to that, we're in good shape. Sometimes we deviate from that. Oh, it's political. It's all about politics or it's all about this agenda or it's all about that agenda that's when what we might call

Christianity or an expression of it or a lack of expression of it because it's really getting away from what it should be because to me ultimately Christianity is Christ. My message is not Christianity. My message is Jesus and how to come into a relationship with them. Now you can call what I do Christianity and it is and it is religion. Someone would describe me, oh, you're religion. You're religious. Yeah, you can say that, and it's not inaccurate. But I don't really consider myself religious. I think it's always been about a relationship with God for me, more than religion. The closer we stay to Christ, the better off we are. The more we deviate from that, the worst we are. Tell me about the role of social media in Christianity today.

There are a lot of people are being influenced by a lot of voices out there that maybe we'll talk about issues of faith don't necessarily know what they're talking about. It seems like if you want to get more reaction, you pick more controversial subjects. In some cases, you just spread false information to get clicks. I just like that a lot. I try to offer encouragement through my social media. I try to point people to Christ and they have a little fun with it here and there. So I think it's a tool.

It's a tool we can use like any tool. We live in a social media world now in the church. If we're not using it, we're missing a huge communication. opportunity. I remember when Twitter was first coming out, now X. And I remember we were doing a pastor's conference and a lot of pastors were saying, I'm not going to Twitter. Twitter's evil. I go, what do you mean Twitter's evil? Twitter's like a microphone hooked up to two speakers. I'm a speaker. Why wouldn't I speak in the microphone? I'm not afraid of that. I mean, sure, there's bad stuff out there, but there's bad stuff everywhere. What am I never going to talk to

anybody because somebody misuses it? So I'm going to go and use those mediums and try to to get the gospel to people, because there might be someone you could reach on social media or online or on TV or on radio that you would not reach otherwise. There's a guy like he was going to kill himself. He was a Vietnam vet. He had his gun loaded. He had it in his hand, and he was holding it up to his head to pull the trigger, and he was afraid, and he laid it down, and he turned on the TV, and he saw me speaking. And I was speaking from one of our crusades. I let a prayer, and he prayed the prayer, and his father and him needed to reconcile. He got in his motorcycle, rode halfway across the country, reconciled with his father,

and he wrote me a letter and told me the story and put the bullet in the envelope. Wow. Why do I use television for people like that? Yeah. Like, how would I reach that guy? Yeah, no way. He's not going to darken the doorway of our church, but he was flipping the channels with a gun at his hand. And I've heard a lot of crazy stories like that of all kinds of things.

Tell me about the Sabbath. really originally was given to the Jewish people as a day of rest. God rested after he created the world, and so he told his people to take a day of rest. I think his time passed, people perverted the meaning of it, like they got angry at Jesus for healing people on the Sabbath, doing a miracle on the Sabbath, and that was obviously a violation of what the Sabbath was ever meant to be. They were missing the point completely. I think for a New Testament person, for a Christian, idea of rest is a great idea. Taking time off is a great idea. I'll be honest.

If there's any area I fall short in, it's that. It's hard for me to unplug. It's hard for me to vacation and rest. I have to really almost force myself to do it. And I, like many people, am distracted by this and other things that I do. But I think it's a really good thing to take time off. Now, I don't think a Christian is. is required to strictly observe the Sabbath, like from sundown to sun up. But if someone wanted to do it,

I don't think there's anything wrong with it. The Bible says there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for he that is entered into this rest that ceased from his labors, as God did from his. So the idea is for us, New Testament people that believe in what Jesus did. It said, he paid the price so I can rest in that work, but I'm not bound by a single day. But it was Someone said, we take Saturdays off and put all of our devices away. Or Sunday, that's great. I respect that. I probably should do that word.

Were you around when Bob Dylan was born again? Yes. Tell me about that. Well, that was a big deal. We were all excited. And I actually think Slow Train Coming was a brilliant record. Mark Knopfler on guitar. Dylan, I thought he wrote some of an amazing song, Slow Train Coming.

Of course, you got to serve somebody. and they were very biblical. And I knew people who knew him, who went to the same Bible study he went to, Vineyard, it was called, which is an offshoot of Calvary Chapel. And Dylan was like not just going to church, he was like in a little Bible school thing. He was really studying scripture.

So I actually wrote a book called Lenin, Dylan, Alice, and Jesus. And it's about the spiritual search of different rock stars. So talk about John Lennon, who actually did make a profession of faith. for a short period of time, then Dylan, of course, who made the same, and Alice Cooper, who I know, who came to the Lord many years ago, and then how they encountered Jesus. But my understanding of Dylan, even at this moment, I don't think he's ever abandoned that faith. He's never said anything like that.

And I was looking at a set list from his recent concert. He's still doing songs off his slow train coming record, including one called Every Grain of Sand based on the Psalms, and he ends with that. I don't think Dylan, oh, Dylan walked away from it. Well, maybe he wasn't as vocal about it as he was in Slow Train Coming, and then there's other two so-called gospel records. But he's done some songs since then that I think still allude to it.

So it seemed to me like a real conversion, and the lyric content was brilliant. And I still think it's one of the best records he ever did. do you feel like you chose Jesus or Jesus chose you? Both. Jesus said, you did not choose me, but I chose you, and ordained you that you should go and bring forth much spiritual fruit. I did choose Jesus, and the Bible appeals to our choice.

Choose you this day whom you will serve. Elijah said in Mount Carmel. If the Lord does God follow him, then Joshua says, as for me and my house, we will follow the Lord. God says they sit before you with choice, life and death, blessings or curses, choose life that you may live. So there's many verses that appeal to my choice. Whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved, I have to call upon him. If I'm drowning and there's a lifeguard, they're not going to read my mind.

I've got to call out for help. Here's God who wants to save me, but I have to ask for his help. So I'm choosing him, but he chooses me. And I don't know the basis of that. And that's coming back to a subject called predestination. And that's a hard one to figure out. I heard it illustrated this way. You're walking down the road and you see a door,

and it's written on the door, whosoever will let him come. You go, hmm, you walk by it, walk by it again. Whosoever will let him come. Because that the Bible says, whosoever will let him come and drink of the water of life freely. I'd like to do that. I've heard other people have done that. Then one day, you open the door and you walk in,

and you shut the door, and on the other side of it, chosen in Christ from the foundation of the world. So who chose who? Well, God chose you, but you had to exercise your free will. So people have said, well, how do you reconcile that? You don't have to reconcile friends, the free will of man, and the choosing of God or predestination are both taught in Scripture. Maybe I can't completely explain it, but they're both there. But having said that, as far as it goes for me, I have to choose to follow Christ. And that's why as an evangelist, I challenge people to come to Christ. It's not like you're just born a Christian.

Jesus said, you have to be born again. He said that to Nicodemus, a very religious man, who others looked up to. And he said, you must be born again. Nicodemus, how can this be? He means, like, enter into my mother's womb again. Jesus says, no, that was just born of flesh, it's flesh, that was just born in spirit, his spirit. You must be born again.

It means a spiritual rebirth. And that happens when you choose Christ, when you believe in Christ and you're born spiritually. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammatin? Counterculture, tetragrammatin, sacred geometry,

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