Pete Greig: 2024 DLW Podcast Awards Rd. 1

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I'm so grateful to

be doing some self-brain surgery with you here on Wild Card Wednesday.

I told you a few weeks ago that we wanted to do something for the guests that

spend so much time giving us these incredible interviews and conversations and

free books and all the things that happen as a result of having these special

guests on the show from time to time.

And I've just been so honored and grateful to have these incredible conversations

that have made a difference in my life and Lisa's life and for you, too.

The guests that we have help us see things in a new way, help us find our way

to understanding truths from science or scripture, understanding who God is

in a different way, and ultimately help us to change our minds and change our lives.

So we want to do something to give back to our guests, and we're going to do

that by starting to have an annual podcast award.

We're going to have the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast Award, and we're going to do

something nice to recognize the guests that seem to have had the most impact

on the listeners of the show, including me and Lisa and Tata, for the year.

So 2024 is going to be the inaugural podcast award, and we already voted with

you for the first quarter winner. We had Maddie Jackson Smith versus Jenny Allen,

and it was a neck-and-neck race.

But Maddie Jackson Smith has been chosen as our favorite interview from quarter one.

Congratulations to Maddie. And now it's time to pick the winner from quarter

two. We had some doozies.

I mean, we had some incredible interviews in the second quarter of this year.

We had J. Warner Wallace and David Carrion to talk about depression.

And we had Michael Behe to talk about biochemistry and the problems of Darwinian evolution.

And we had Terrilee Cobble from the Bible Recap, and we had Pete Gregg,

who's one of my favorite authors. And we had multiple other interviews.

Including Josh Axe and just incredible Ben Carson in second quarter.

How could you pick a winner among all of those?

So basically, we just had to go back to total number of downloads.

So the people who had the most downloads, the interviews from the second quarter

are Tara Lee Cobble and Pete Gregg.

So today I'm going to bring you back the interview conversation I had with one

of my very favorite authors, Pete Gregg.

He's taught me so much about prayer and three of his books that I've read.

I've read all five of his books now, but three of them that I started with when

I was really struggling.

Every once in a while when you're a bereaved parent, you go through a season

where you feel kind of dry, and you can't hear God very well, and you feel stuck.

Pete's helped me learn how to pray in a different way, how to hear God,

how to pray, and God on mute were the first three Pete Gregg books.

He really helped me, and I think this interview will help you.

If you didn't hear it the first time, take a listen. And then next week,

I'll bring you back the amazing conversation I had with Tara Lee Cobble.

And then after that, we'll have a chance to vote and see which one of these

guests should be the second quarter nominee to go up against Maddie Smith,

Maddie Jackson Smith, for the title of semifinalist for the 2024 award.

So that's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to do something special for

the winner ultimately for this year.

And you can help me choose it. Today, we're going to go talk to Pete Gregg.

Remember, when we're playing an episode that's been played in the past, it's an old episode.

If we talk about free books, we've already given those away.

So please don't write in for a free book because the publisher's already sent

out the winners for this episode.

So I'm just going to bring you back Pete Gregg's episode to get it fresh in your mind.

Next week, we'll hear Tara Lee Cobble again, and then you'll have a chance to vote.

So grateful for the time I had to spend with Pete. Congratulations again to

Maddie Jackson Smith. My friend, I hope you enjoy this conversation,

this potentially soul-changing, life-changing, eternity-changing conversation.

Conversation with my favorite prayer resource, Pete Gregg. Let's get after it.

Hey, my friend. I'm so excited to be with you today. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and we're about to do some self-brain surgery.

I've got a guest that's coming on the show today that I really think is probably

the most anticipated episode I've ever recorded.

And I know I've said things like that frequently when I have somebody I'm really

excited about, But I remember this episode, I started planning in my mind when

I read a book called God on Mute.

It had a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury back in 2022.

And the author was Pete Gregg. I didn't know Pete at the time,

but I discovered the book through one of those Amazon accidents where I was

buying a book and it said, hey, you might also like this.

And I saw the title God on Mute and I read the synopsis. synopsis.

And basically the book was about these times when we can't feel or hear or even

know for sure that God is there.

What do we do when we're really hurting? We don't have the words to communicate

or the ears to hear that God's really there.

And that really resonated with me because I found this book that just spoke

into my heart of some things that I really had walked through.

Lisa and I had walked through and our family had done after we lost our son, Mitch.

And I remember how excited I was when I read Mark Vrogep's book,

Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, and subsequently read Tish Harrison Warren's book, Prayer in the Night.

And I finally had some language around lament, these ideas of how to pray to

God and ways to pray to God when you're really upset and hurting.

Sometimes you don't even know what to say or not even sure you believe in him,

but you find yourself unable to avoid prayer anyway.

And the Bible, it turns out, is full of these episodes of people praying in

that mode. and I didn't have the language for it based on the way I was raised

and the tradition that I was raised in in Christianity.

I didn't have the language to understand what lament was, and I had grown so

much and learned so much from Vrogep and Tish Harrison Warren,

and I remember being excited to have both of them on my podcast.

But after I read Pete's book, God on Mute, I subsequently read How to Pray,

A Simple Guide for Normal People, and How to Hear God, A Simple Guide for Normal

People, and then Lisa read them, and we basically just began to just anticipate

an opportunity to speak with him.

We found out that Pete Gregg and his wife Sammy had started the worldwide 24-7 prayer movement.

And now for more than 20 years, people have been praying every second of every

day all over the world for the world, for God's work in the world and his healing for the world.

We found out that he's been involved in the development of the Lectio 365 app,

which now we're using twice a day, every day.

We start in the morning with a few minutes of this This contemplative prayer

in a few minutes in the evening of this sort of evening examine type prayer.

So we do the Lectio, this eating the word, chewing on the word,

meditating on the word, drawing everything out of the word that can be drawn out of it.

Coming to it with open eyes, not to exegete the scripture, but to exegete the

scripture, not have a filter in place of what God's trying to say,

but just ears open, heart open, mind open, brain open to hear what he really has to say.

And I've learned all of that from Pete

Gregg and I sent an email back in November of

2022 to talk asking Pete's assistant

Rachel Hall shout out to Rachel for her incredible work

in getting this done and I sent an email way back in November of 22 and it took

a long time to get us together our schedules are so hard to match up and finally

we had it scheduled and on the day it was supposed to happen something happened

and I had to do emergency surgery now there's a funny moment in our conversation.

I'm going to play it for you as we start out.

I told Pete that I had emergency surgery and his response was classic.

And you'll enjoy hearing that before we get into the interview.

So I'm going to leave that in there, even though it was really part of our little preamble.

And so you'll hear that and then we'll get into the conversation.

I asked Pete to pray for us before we started.

But I just I wanted to give you this little intro to say that this conversation

was almost two years in the making.

And it's worth every second of that waiting. You're going to learn so much from Pete.

You'll find in him a trusted friend and guide as we try to get to know our Savior and our creator more.

And especially if you're an agnostic or an atheist or you doubt her or you have

been hurt so badly by life that you feel like God's given up or maybe he doesn't even exist.

Pete Gregg is a guy you should read because his story is one of real pain and

real heartache and real doubting in a time when he rejected God and said,

I don't even believe you anymore.

And he tells us what to do and that it's okay to have those moments.

And his work is so important and so personal to me.

When I met him on this conversation, I felt like I was seeing an old friend

for the first time in a long time. And we just had an incredible conversation.

And I'm confident that the Lord is going to arrange another opportunity or maybe

more than one an additional opportunity in the future for Pete to come back

on the show and us to have more to do to talk about for you and with you.

But for today, I want to give you a conversation about a lot of different things,

mostly about our Savior and prayer and what to do when things are hurting and

you can't quite hear with Pete Gregg.

And before we do any of that, the only thing you have to do,

my friend, is change your mind and change your life. So let's get after it.

Hey are you ready to change your life if the

answer is yes there's only one rule you have

to change your mind first and my friend there's a place where

the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together

with faith and everything starts to make sense are you ready to change your

life well this is the place self-brain surgery school i'm dr lee warren and

this is where we go deep into how we're wired take control of our thinking and

find real hope this is where we We learn to become healthier,

feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

I first reached out to Rachel in November of 2022 to try to get this done.

And then you were on my schedule and I had emergency surgery one day.

And I'm so glad that we finally got this together. Oh, are you OK?

Yeah, I'm good. No, I had to perform surgery that day.

This is like, Lee, this is like in my line of work. Sometimes I say I had to

marry someone and it means a different thing. me.

I guess I should be more, a little bit more specific when I say that.

Well, friend, we're back and I can't remember a podcast that I've ever been

more excited about this one.

I've got Pete Gregg on the show today, all the way from the Isle of Wight in

the UK. Welcome to the show, Pete.

It's so good to be with you. I feel the same way. I am so excited to be on your podcast.

Your latest book is helpful and moving. And I'm going to try and ask you some

questions too, if that's all right.

We'll reverse the microphone in a minute. That's beautiful. Hey,

before we get started today, would you mind saying a prayer for us? I'd love to do that.

Lord Jesus, thank you that by your spirit, you are in the room right now with

every person listening to this.

And thank you that you know us better than we know ourselves.

And we pray that something out of this conversation would be hope bringing and transformative.

And that you would speak as Lee and I have a conversation in Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. Thank you so much, Pete.

I'm excited to have a chance to talk to you because I've been reading you for

years, and now for the last six months or so, thanks to my wife,

Lisa, I've been listening to you with the Lectio app twice a day every day.

I've been sending you to sleep is what you're telling me. That's right.

So Lisa and I, we started using the app at night to help us get ready to sleep,

and then now I've been doing it both twice a day. And so I feel like I kind

of hear your voice all the time.

And I've been reading your books for years. So great to have you with us today.

And maybe my listeners have heard about you many times.

And your book was we called God on Mute, our book of the year for 2022 on the show.

So they know who you are. But let's hear a high level, maybe 30,000 foot view

of Pete and your life and what you're all about.

OK, sure. Well, as you can hear from my accent, I'm English.

And I live in the UK, although I did have a wonderful year living in the Midwest

of America. Very happy time.

I am a pastor of a church just outside London.

I'm the bewildered founder of the 24-7 prayer movement.

We've been praying nonstop for 25 years now, and we're in over 100 nations.

And we're working with everyone from the Catholics at the highest level to the

Salvation Army at street level.

And one of our ministries that Lee, you're kindly referring to there is Lectio

365, which is just an approach that's helping people each day to pray the Bible.

And we're using ancient models.

The morning is Lectio Divina, holy reading, just prayerful reading the scriptures.

And the evening is the Examen, which again is an old Ignatian approach to prayer.

That's taken off. That's just gone crazy.

We're translating into new languages as fast as we can. And then I'm also,

you know, I've written a few books and most importantly, I'm a husband to Sammy

and I'm a dad to two adult sons who continue to surprise and make us laugh.

So that's a little bit about me. Amazing.

Now, you the first time I heard about you was actually just just kind of one

of those fortuitous moments.

Once I was buying a book on Amazon, and it was one of those people also bought

this book, and it was your book, God on Mute. It was the first time I'd ever heard your name.

And it was right in a season when I was starting to write Hope is the First

Dose, my most recent book.

And it just struck me as something I needed to read. And I started reading you

and then delayed my writing by a month.

I read three of your books in quick succession. And I've learned so much from

you. But I think you started God on Mute with sort of a personal story of your

wife having encountered somebody like me, like a neurosurgeon.

So give us a little bit of that history and how that led you to this understanding

of there's times when or experience rather of times when we can't seem to hear

what God's doing or hear his voice and how medicine and health care kind of put you into that place.

Yeah, sure. We were about a year into the 24-7 prayer movement,

which, you know, we we realized prayer is the key to everything and we were bad at it.

And so we we'd started praying night and day in a warehouse in the south of

England and it began to spread.

It went back then. We used to say it went viral. We probably can't say that anymore.

And and, you know, we were suddenly all over the world and it was very exciting.

We had Rolling Stone magazine and mainstream TV companies checking out what we were doing.

It was a wild, really a wild time.

And I think, Lee, if I'm honest, we became a little insufferable.

Like, you know, that first year we thought if we if everyone prays the way we're

praying, Jesus will be back before breakfast time on Thursday.

Day you know and then what happened about a

year in is uh we just had our second son

he was seven weeks old my wife woke

me in the middle of the night um and uh

i watched her slip into an epileptic fit and i'd i'd never seen anyone have

a seizure before let alone that you know the face i left more than any other

and she bit her tongue there was blood coming out it was it was terrifying and

And I called the ambulance.

And it was so strange because in a movie, the baby would have woken up and started crying.

But Danny, our seven-week-old, was just fast asleep through the whole thing,

waiting for his next feed.

And I think at that moment, my worst fear was that for some strange reason,

my wife was developing epilepsy.

But then, of course...

What they discovered after a brain scan is she had a very large brain tumor.

And they said it's the size of an orange. And for a while, they didn't know

if they'd be able to operate. So it was a very, very dark time.

And so we were kind of plunged into this.

And then, you know, we're incredibly lucky, Lee. And I use that word advisedly.

You know, I don't think God micromanages everything. I remember I remember reading

somewhere Jimmy Carter, when he was president, used to still run the White House tennis roster.

I don't think God's like that. I think that's a little, you know.

And so we're lucky in that they were able to operate and they got the tumor out.

And many people have a much darker story than ours.

But our battle has been with epilepsy ever since.

So that's been 23 years now of

my wife sammy who's still alive living with

a chronic illness and i've watched her

slip into fits more often than i can

say and prayed and prayed for it to stop and most of the time it doesn't work

you know she has a very bad kind of seizure it's a status epilepticus it's a

cycle of seizures you can't get out of without sedation so it's the flashing

lights in the hospital and all that.

And I think, Lee, I went pretty quickly from thinking my prayers could save

the world to questioning whether my prayers could save my wife.

And I found my faith suddenly had to enter paradox, which we all,

by the way, we all have to enter paradox at some stage.

And I guess many of the listeners to this, you know, know all about that.

And I started to realize that the Bible was more honest about suffering than

the church was or is yeah I started to.

Relate to that aspect of God's nature that is with us in the suffering.

So the book you kindly mentioned, God on Mute, traces Jesus's story from Good

Friday, you know, the God who suffers with us.

Martin Luther says, became the atheist on the cross. My God,

why have you forsaken me?

Through to Easter Sunday, okay, but very importantly,

tarrying at Holy Saturday, day that space

most of us live our lives in somewhere between dear god

and amen between the cross and the resurrection we know god's

done something for us but he ain't done everything yeah

so that's right that that my theology was was

morphed and as for neuroscience i i

am so grateful for a neurosurgeon called

uh liam gray an irish atheist brain

surgeon who whilst operating

on my wife experienced what he

called lucky intuition which meant that

he didn't cut her sinus vein which would have resulted in

paralysis or death and i think

was a miracle i think i think the god he doesn't believe in spoke to him and

and then subsequently of course we we we spent a lot of time with epileptologists

and and even now maybe i just land it here lee you know what why Why does a

prayer movement that begins out, you know, shouting,

you know, in tongues and ends up creating Lectio 365, which is very contemplative.

I think probably I've been on a bit of a journey from my frontal cortex to my

limbic region in terms of the ways I relate to God.

Wow. You said something in that book that was just dumbfounding to me because

I'd never thought about it.

Pete, you said basically that God's will, the reason he put that line in the

Lord's prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,

is because God's will is not always done on earth.

And when you said that, I was like, holy cow. You know, I spend so much time

thinking that the suffering I'm experiencing is somehow God's will. And it's not.

It's not God's will. And his will is not always done on earth.

And that's why we long for heaven. and unpack that for me for a minute.

But that was a powerful shift in my own personal theology when I read that.

I'm so glad you said that because I wrestled over that line.

It's something like God doesn't always get his will, his way, even though he's God.

That's right. I wrestled with it because it sounded like heresy.

But the more I looked into it, the more I realized it's not.

It's actually theologically and just philosophically true.

So let me put it like this.

Forgive me for being, I'm not trying to be too stark or provocative here.

When I say this, I'm a pastor. I deal with every kind of tragedy.

But when a child is killed in a car crash, that is not the will of God.

That's right. When someone is trafficked, that's not the will of God.

When a five-year-old gets leukemia, that cannot be the will of God.

And, you know, whatever, whether you're a Calvinist or an Armenian,

everyone goes, yeah, no, of course that's not the heart of God.

And I think one of the problems is that we don't understand there is a real

spiritual battle in our world.

If you step outside the Western world,

world everyone understands that there is there

the god's will is contested that there

is evil in our world and and even people are very

progressive and think it's very primitive to believe in satan and demons and

evil the moment there's a mass shooting the word evil appears in the headlines

and so uh but i'm also i don't want to be too binary lee i don't think it's

just about everything bad is Satan, everything good is God.

I also think our lives are infinitely complex.

And as C.S. Lewis says, miracles by very definition have to be rare.

And preachers like me are often not honest about that.

That's right. So I guess give us a short,

because I want to pivot and talk about prayer and about how to hear God's voice,

but give us a short little pastoral moment maybe for somebody that's listening,

that's in that middle of that time when God seems to have muted himself.

You can't hear, you can't feel him. You're in that dark place where you just

don't know if God's even there.

How do we move through that season with faith but also with hope? Yeah.

Well, the first thing I want to say is be real with God about your questions,

your struggle, your suffering.

It's really OK not to be OK.

And God doesn't need you to do his PR for him.

You know, God is not insecure if you ask him a few questions.

And to be real with God.

I, in the very darkest days of...

What I went through with Sammy, I prayed prayers that felt so irreverent,

I didn't even know if it was okay to pray them.

Wow. I mean, I remember the time when I thought she was, one of the several

times I thought she was definitely going to die, and our kids were so little.

And I was having to put them to bed every night, and it was a horrible,

it was a wonderful and a horrible time.

I remember always thinking, well, I wonder if they have to show them photos

and try and describe who their mum was to them, you know. Wow.

And I know you, Lee, have been through your own absolute shattering heartbreak, you understand.

And so I ended up praying one night. My friend Dan had come round.

Somehow our conversation became prayer. I don't even know. There wasn't a let us pray moment.

We just, it became prayer. And I said to God, I don't care what you want.

I know I'm supposed to pray, not my will, but yours. But for a change,

let me just tell you what I want.

I want my wife to live. I want my kids to know their mom.

And if you have some plan on a heavenly wall planet to take my wife from me, I'll fight you for her.

Wow. Oh, and I felt I think Dan, my friend, didn't even know if he was allowed

to say amen to that prayer.

You know, and I was weeping as I said it. And I felt ashamed.

I felt ashamed for a while because in my Gethsemane, I couldn't do the Jesus thing.

I couldn't pray that, you know, not my will, but yours be done.

And Jesus is so kind. And he eventually spoke to me.

Maybe a bit like peter on the beach you know do you love me do you love me do

you love me and he just said i love that you prayed that way i love that you're

willing to fight for your wife and that is love yeah so um be real you know

remember jesus told an explicit parable,

about the pharisee and the tax collector the pharisee's praying all the right

things i thank Thank you, I'm not like that other man.

And the tax collector is praying this snotty prayer, hunched in the corner,

you know, I'm not worthy.

And Jesus with a twinkle in his eye, he looks at the crowd. He probably eyes

a couple of the Pharisees in the crowd and says, who do you think went home hurt by God?

So so so so be real with God. There's many other things I could say,

but that's that's one on one for me.

I love that. And, you know, that's a completely biblical kind of prayer to the

prophet shook his fist at God and said, I would question your justice.

And the guy in the New Testament, Jesus walked right up to him and said,

what do you want me to do for you?

Like, remember, he said, what do you want me to do for you? So it's OK. Tell God what you want.

I love that. And I love the way you kind of gave us the tools to process and navigate through.

So, listener, check out that book, God on Mute. It changed my theology,

changed my own look at my own suffering.

It'll help you, too. So Pete's done a tremendous gift for the kingdom with that book.

So, Pete, with your permission, I want to switch to how to pray.

And first of all, I want to ask, what does it feel like to title a book How to Pray?

Like that that had to be a little bit nerve-wracking for you

to say hey i'm going to teach people how to pray yeah it's terrifying

and and especially because remember

lee i said i only got into this because i one day held up my hands acknowledged

i was bad at prayer as a pastor i was bad at prayer and so this is god's joke

now i'm going to be the prayer guy and i spent years going around the world

saying hey i struggle with this too but let's try and work it out and eventually sammy my wife

took me aside and and it wouldn't

be the first time she's dressed me down you know she

said to me hey by now if you

haven't learned how to do this thing what are you even talking about and

maybe it's

a little bit of a british psychosis this as well

that that we like to be you know very self-effacing but the truth is that in

25 years i have learned some things about how to pray and I've made a lot of

mistakes I'm very honest about that I still struggle in many areas but I have

learned I've learned about the breadth of prayer.

You know, I refuse to be handed a limited menu.

You know, so many of the listeners, you'll be in a particular Christian tradition

that has said, this is the real kind of prayer and that kind isn't.

But Ephesians 6 has all kinds of prayers on all occasions.

And I feel like, you know, I want to grow in contemplative prayer.

You know, and I have certain places trying to ban my books because I encourage

some breathing techniques and prayer.

And I just think, well, if you need a Bible verse for breathing,

well, you're in deep trouble, you know.

But I also still believe in miracles.

You know, I've seen them. And, you know, Einstein said there's only two ways

to live your life is everything's a miracle or nothing's a miracle.

I mean, what could be more miraculous than getting out of bed this morning as

a sentient being on this rock spinning in the eclipse the other day?

You know, we could predict the minute when when the sun would fall behind the moon.

I mean, this world is a miracle.

So so all kinds of prayers.

And but the subtitle is important to the book. The title is How to Pray,

but the subtitle is A Simple Guide for Normal People.

And what I really wanted to do was write something that was accessible because

all the research shows that most people pray way more than go to church.

Many atheists admit they backslide and pray regularly.

And and very few people you know i

think i say in the book no one ever holds a newborn baby

aloft and says behold a biological fluke born into

a meaningless universe we all know that's that's

a miracle and then we also you know no one walks away from a terminal diagnosis

and says i really should pray about this but i struggle with prayer we cry out

to god and the root of the word prayer in latin is precarious so we pray because

life is too precarious and too wonderful for us to

cope on our own. So the question is not.

Why do we pray? But how do we pray? And then, of course, ultimately,

the this was the question the disciples asked Jesus and my authority comes from him.

He replied with giving the Lord's prayer. This then is how you should pray in

the book. The book traces the Lord's prayer.

Yeah, and it's well done. I found so many little things that I learned,

even just a little acronym that you use, the P-R-A-Y.

Why i can maybe you can unpack that for us in a second give people a

little tool to help us pray we all have these little formulas

and little ideas that we use the axe model and all that but you gave us a new

one talk about the prey model for a second well you know part of it lee was

acts is terrible everyone grew up with you know adoration confession uh what

is it Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving.

Supplication. Supplication. Like even Harry Potter doesn't talk about supplication.

No one has used the word supplication outside church for like 300 years.

And yet we teach children this is how to talk to God.

And I sat around one day and thought we've got to come up with something that

we can teach our kids better than Acts.

And I just thought I wonder if we can do something with P-R-A-Y.

And we can. and it goes like this and this really works okay i know i don't

i'm not really into acronyms i know they can be reductionist no it's simple

but this this is helpful okay it goes like this,

pause or as you'd say pause rejoice ask

ask and yield or

if you're teaching this to children don't swap that tricky word yield

for the word yes it works just as well yeah and so

it goes it goes like this it's super simple just before

you start before you stop before you

start stop you know before you you know fill your amazon cart with all your

prayer requests and ram it into the shins of the almighty just just stop be

still you know center your scattered senses become aware of god It's not him

that's absent, it's you. It's me.

You know, God is always with you.

My wife experienced God's presence with her in the MRI tube,

which for her was the most frightening place of all, and learnt...

Learned to experience his presence with her in that place

no one else goes become aware of the presence of god that's the first thing

i give some simple tools because we don't find it easy actually to stop and

to be centered and to be still then rejoice is it's so simple isn't it you know

read a psalm give thanks to god and this is not hyping up or positive thinking this is.

Relaxing into reality the reality is god

is good he wins and as

julian norwich says all should be well and all manner of things should

be well it's going to be okay so by worshiping god

we actually we we our lives

are primed by fight and flight you know and

freeze and it's a moment of saying no life is

good and god god is with me

so take a bit of time rejoicing then the bit

we find easy ask uh and then yield

is that moment where we you know

we relinquish ourselves we sacrifice we say

well you're god and i'm not so if i can

give you one example of how i'm having to yield every day right

now lee this isn't in any of my books because

it's more recent but my my mom had a massive stroke

i'm sorry um whatever it

was just over a year ago and she is a woman who prayed for me every day of my

life she taught me to speak obviously she taught me to feed myself and now she

has to be fed through a tube um she

can't talk she says the word yes very occasionally no that's about it um.

And my prayer life went like this for her. The start, I was in warrior mode. God, heal her.

She's in the hospital. God, pray for a miracle. That's where we always start, right?

Then it moved into more of a kind of state which flipped the request for a miracle

from healer to take her home.

Like, this is no life. She knows you.

So my advice to you, God, is this is a really good time,

to take a home and i had to process all the

guilt around how do you even pray that prayer

about your mom who i love dearly and then

when god didn't do that uh i've

had to come to a place of yielding of just saying i trust

you i don't understand you because if i

was you i would either heal her or take a home i

wouldn't leave her in this this state but

i guess you're cleverer than me i

don't begin to understand you but i'm going to choose to trust

you so one of my areas of yielding every day is i've moved

from healer or take a home to god you drive me crazy but i trust you that's

my yielding but and pray will work with a six-year-old you know you can you

just get in get in bed with them as you put them to bed and say hey let's take

some deep breaths and just be still for 15 seconds.

And then it's, hey, what was good today that we can say thank you to Jesus?

And then it's, what do we want Jesus to do tomorrow?

And then it's, what do we need to say yes to Jesus about? What might he be asking us to do tomorrow?

And you can do that in 10 minutes, or you could spend a whole weekend retreat

working through P-R-A-Y. So I hope that's useful to people.

It's extremely useful. And I think one of the other things I love,

So if you're listening to this and you're wondering, like, how do I get deeper

into prayer and what can I get out of this book?

I'll tell you something I got out of it. As a neuroscientist,

as a brain surgeon, you tied in the brain science to what we're doing in prayer.

And I love it. It's one of the few places I've seen that outside of sort of scientific stuff.

And the idea that BDNF is increased when you're walking around.

We see Jesus walking and climbing and drawing and walking around the Galilee and all that.

And you tied that in beautifully. And I don't know if you've read Ian McGilchrist or not.

He's a neuroscientist from Scotland, and he writes a lot about the difference

between the left and the right halves of our brain and the way that they interact.

And you talked about how sometimes using instrumental music that doesn't have

lyrics is a helpful way to get into a kind of a contemplative prayer space.

And that's perfect on the neuroscience side because left side is all about this sort of.

Language and and making something into an

object like this is how god is this is who god is this is

what god is and the right side is more of the

whole experience that the calm down relax get

your brain calmed down and being able to listen and hear and you did that beautifully

so i can't encourage you highly enough to read how to pray a simple guide for

normal people and it's really helped me i can tell you um on a personal side

pete lisa came into the my office the other morning I mean, her eyes are swollen. She's been crying.

I can tell she's really torn up about something.

And I said, what's wrong, honey? And she said, I've been reading Pete again.

So every time she reads your book, she finds something that connects her.

Oh, please say hi to her. I hope to meet her one day.

I hope so, too. So you've helped us a lot with that.

And the final book that I know you've written more than three books,

but the final one that I've read that has helped me so much is How to Hear God.

And again, subtitled Simple Guide for Normal People.

And just a little bit of background here that will help you understand why it's

impacted me so much is I was raised in kind of a legalistic,

kind of fundamentalist version of Christianity where you're sort of discouraged

from talking about things that might sound sort of charismatic or, you know,

talking about hearing God because you hear God in the Scripture, right? Right.

And so for me, as I've matured and grown and learned that I really do want something,

I want to hear him. If he wants to talk to me, I want to hear him.

So that the book was really personal for me as I learned to listen to God more,

listen for God more effectively. So talk about how we can hear God and especially

those of us who aren't sure that we can. Like, how do we get there?

Lee, you're so kind. Thank you for all these thoughtful questions.

And I mean, I'd love to ask you more from your angle on the neuroscience of this.

But I mean, simply the first thing is, you know, let me reassure everyone.

First and last is scripture.

I mean, we hear God in the Bible. And, you know, Lee, that has turned out to

be one of the more controversial bits of how to hear God. But I didn't expect

it to be. I thought I was kind of doing due diligence.

But it's amazing how many people, especially younger people out there,

they are very comfortable having experiences. And they actually measure God in experiences.

And the idea of absolute truths and of God's unchanging word,

it turns out, is quite controversial for some people.

So, you know, I can talk at length about that,

but you probably don't need me to um but so so the

the bible is is that it's the heart language

of god and ultimately i talk about reading the bible

through jesus through jesus lenses you know earlier when we were talking about

you know god doesn't always get his way even though he's god yeah you know i

talk about jesus had at least three unanswered prayers one of which is still

unanswered so i'm gonna have to read the bible through that that of jesus and and um.

And then to electio divina you know how do

we pray the bible how do how do we

read the bible with our limbic region you know that part

of us that's that's emotion and and

and um less less logical less less mechanistic that part of our brains that

we all know how to use like you go to the movie theater you know if you try

and watch that movie through your frontal cortex You're not going to enjoy it.

You're going to spend the whole time going.

It's only a movie. They're just actors.

So you know how to switch into that limbic system.

So you suspend this belief and you become emotionally connected to the movie. That's right.

And and I think that many of us, especially if your background is fundamentalist,

were taught to read the scriptures through the frontal cortex.

But to switch off that part of your brain that God created and that Jesus specifically

speaks to by telling stories, you know, which is a limited reason.

So there's a lot about the Bible. But then I also talk about hearing God in

dreams, which is fascinating to me because.

When you do a Bible study on it, and when you talk to people outside the Western

world, it's still one of the main ways God speaks.

And yet, probably since the rise of psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud and all

of that, in the West, we've slightly sort of relegated dreams as an untrustworthy thing.

So I talk a bit about that. I talk about prophecy. For me, this is not a tribal issue.

You that's for Pentecostal charismatics I just

think you know 1 Corinthians chapter 14 the apostle Paul says

I want all you to prophesy in fact you should eagerly desire

he says to prophesy and he says prophecy is

just speaking God's word to people in a way that encourages them strengthens

them and builds them up and so again I talk about how we can all grow in hearing

God that way and sharing his word in that way and you know I don't mind what

tag you put on it but it It seems to me that all Christians believe in hearing God.

Jesus said, my sheep listen to my voice.

Yeah. And I know them. They follow me. And the word, the Greek word,

therefore, listen is akoua, which is where we get the word acoustics from.

So it doesn't he's not saying my sheep know a few Bible verses.

He's saying my sheep know the acoustics, the nuance, the tone.

They're in a conversational relationship with me.

Yeah. And so, you know, the book just tries to help us grow in the greatest

thing any of us can ever learn to do, which is hear the voice of God.

It's the great superpower we all have.

And some people live almost their whole lives without ever learning how to activate

it, which seems tragic to me.

It is tragic. That's exactly right. I love your line. You said.

That hearing God is not a skill to master, but a master we must meet.

Like Jesus is what God sounds like. That's exactly, I was like, yeah, that's it.

I've been trying to figure that out for 55 years and you gave it to me on one page. I love it.

Yeah, yeah. Tell me, can I ask you a question? Of course. Absolutely.

So talk to me more about, from a neurological angle, how do we grow in hearing God?

How do we know when it's God or just our brains?

Just speak to me a bit about that. I think that's a really good question.

And it's actually kind of the subject of the new book I'm working on, Self-Brain Surgery.

The idea is this. I think our brains present to us many thoughts,

thousands of thoughts every day. And most of them sound kind of like us.

They sound kind of like our own idea, right?

You're such a loser. We'll never be able to get this done.

And a high percentage of the thoughts that we have are negative and challenging

to our sense of worth and all that.

And I would say God never speaks to us in that voice.

He never speaks to us in a shaming sort of accusatorial voice.

When the Holy Spirit, at least in my experience, When the Holy Spirit speaks,

it's always from a place of compassion and love.

And when it needs to be corrective, it's in a sense of, I need you to correct

this because it's good for you to correct this. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And so I think from a neuroscience standpoint, the first thing we need

to learn is that not all of our thoughts are true and not all of our feelings are facts.

We have a lot of feelings that are designed to make us aware of something that's

happening on a subconscious level.

And then our job is to test that out against what we're needing to learn from

that feeling so that we can then apply truth and reason to it with our frontal lobes, like you said.

But I think when we hear the voice of God, it's always designed to help us navigate

the world in a way that will honor him, improve us, and help other people.

And if the voice you're hearing is not doing that, I don't think it's from God.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So I love that line. Our thoughts are not always

true. Our feelings are not always facts.

And you said that many of us, the majority of our thoughts are negative.

Why is that? Why are we so prone towards negative thinking?

Well, I think the evolutionary biologists would say it's a survival thing.

You know, our brain's primary job is to help us not get eaten by the bear,

you know, and help us not get killed by the caveman.

And so I think part of it is God wired us with protective instincts and that

our neurochemistry is designed to sort of serve as an alarm system or a warning system.

But I think life comes along and we learn over time that things are going to

hurt us and people are going to disappoint us and things are going to let us

down and we're going to fail at things.

And I think so we start making synapses in our brains between chemical signals

that are designed to alert us to possibilities.

And we attach those to memories of previous experiences and encounters with

other people. And we decide what they mean.

So you have a feeling. And for a good example, you have a very limited set of

neurochemicals that your brain makes, right?

Very small number, dopamine, serotonin, GABA, norepinephrine, a small set of things.

And therefore they can only combine to produce a

limited palette of things that you can feel and

that's why fear feels the same when

there's a bear in your house trying to kill you as it does when you have a random

thought in the middle of the night that you're gonna something bad's gonna happen

to you the next day that the feeling of fear is the same whether it's based

on something that might happen or something that is happening does that make

sense that's fascinating yes it It does.

And I mean, it makes sense intellectually, but also experientially.

And those when you wake afraid in the night, it does feel as overwhelming as

if a bear has been let loose. That's fascinating.

That's what that's what C.S. Lewis was getting at, really, in his book,

A Grief Observed, when he said nobody ever told me that grief feels just like fear.

What he's getting at is we have a limited palette of things that we can feel

and we attach what they mean. We decide what they mean based on our experience.

And Lee, forgive me, I'm probably disabusing your podcast platform.

No, I love that. But listen, one of the beautiful things that's come out of

our story is that my wife, Sammy, is now a professional therapist, counselor.

Wow. Because of what she's been through. And she's busy. I mean,

she helps a lot of people.

And, you know, she's at the front end of what we all know, which is that anxiety

seems endemic in Western culture right now.

How do we help people to receive the peace of God when they are overwhelmed with,

you're talking about this blunt instrument of cortisol,

these overwhelming feelings of anxiety and fear.

How do we put into practice, Philippians, for the peace of God,

guarding your heart and mind?

Well i think that the first the first step

is to this is going to be a little bit

of a tangent here but there's something we learn in quantum physics about

something called the quantum zeno effect and it is basically the

more you observe something that the more you look at it

from a particular point of view the more it stays stuck in

that reality and it turns out that that

thing in quantum physics is true of all of

us like the more you think about how you feel for

example the more you feel the way that you feel

the more that you the more attention you pay to

something the more it stays stuck in that state and so you

get stuck in it yeah you get stuck in it and so the same thing is

true with grief and depression and anxiety so the first thing is i think a lot

of our therapy colleagues have have focused us in the wrong direction when we

talk about how we feel in that we spend a lot of time talking about and thinking

about what we feel instead Instead of saying, okay,

here's how we feel. What can we do to not feel that way?

And so part of the behavioral therapy, shifting your attention from the feeling,

the problem, the event, the trauma that got you to that place to what can we do about it now?

And I think from a Christian perspective, that's the whole mission.

I mean, Jesus came up out of the tomb, but he still had his wounds.

He still had his scars and his holes and the nail holes. And that was to teach

us that you're going to move through life with some wounds.

But if you focus on the wounds, you can't ever heal. If you keep picking the

scab off, you can't heal, right?

So I think part of it is to say, hey, anxiety is a complex set of things that

you feel, but it's not something that you are.

And so we have this tendency in our culture right now, Pete,

to make everything a diagnosis and to constantly sort of pathologize everything.

And I think rather it would be a better strategy to say, let's let's understand

what we feel and then let's make a path forward.

Let's make a treatment plan to try to step through it and move towards the healing

that God wants us to have.

So helpful. I mean, this is this is self brain surgery. Yes.

Well, yeah. Self brain surgery.

I had another. This is a really strange thought. But so if Jesus never sinned

with his thinking, right, if Jesus never sinned and we know he didn't from Scripture,

that means he never acted on a thought that led him into sin in his mind, right?

And since we know that we can direct through the process that they called applied

neuroplasticity, we can direct how our minds influence the structural things

that happen in our brains, right?

That means that Jesus never harmed his brain structurally with his thinking.

And so since Paul tells us that we can have the mind of Christ,

that means that one of our goals ought to be to have a brain that's more like Christ.

Oh, that's so interesting. Isn't that interesting?

Yes. And we do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. That's right.

So if we don't just walk in the paths of righteousness,

but learn to think in the paths of righteousness,

righteousness that's right we we see everything differently

oh that is so interesting that's what

romans 12 2 is about so don't don't be conformed to

the world the way the world wants you to think or the way the world wants you to feel

or the way the world wants you to process your trauma be transformed by the

renewing of your mind right and the back half of that verse is i think super

important it says then you will be able to test and approve what is good and

pleasing to god right so if you want to say how can i know what god wants for

my life god says think differently Change the way you think.

That's what I want for you.

Wow, that is, I mean, you've just thrown out something. I need to think about this for about a week.

It's got such big implications. We'll have another podcast.

And it raises all these other questions about what's the difference between

thinking sinfully and then presumably Jesus did experience hurt and rejection.

So how did he handle those feelings appropriately? Yeah, that's fascinating. That's right.

That's what we call self-malpractice, right? So Jesus never,

I mean, he had, because he was human, he had automatic negative thoughts.

What he didn't have was taking the first thought and turning it into a second

thought that led him down a rabbit trail of harming himself with his thinking.

So that's self-malpractice when you take it and you run with it and you let

your limbic system get overactive.

And I think it's interesting from a brain imaging standpoint. point

they know now that that the path from amygdala the

path from hippocampus to amygdala so because it

goes from a thought to a feeling to a fight

flight freeze reaction is the same circuit

that goes from hippocampus to frontal lobe

when you get gratitude so you basically can't

go towards anxiety and towards gratitude at the

same time because it's a one-way street that circuit it only goes

one direction that is oh

this is so interesting it's good

stuff pete this is and it's so the thing is it's so empowering because we talk

in so many metaphors and so many shoulds right in the church and these are just

simple tools take your brain to the gym you know train I mean,

it develops a new mental muscle memory.

That's great, yeah, I love that. I had a thing recently, I was getting some

counseling and my counselor, who's great, but she, someone had hurt me a lot.

And she was pushing into asking how I felt.

And I realized I felt a little bit angry about it. And she said,

I want you to unpack that more.

The more I talked to them, the more angry I was feeling about this person.

And I eventually stopped. I said, can I just ask? I said, at the start,

I didn't feel that angry.

This isn't helping. This is making it worse. I'm going to leave this counseling

session furious with this person.

It doesn't feel healthy. healthy and i processed it

with sammy my wife later she said yeah that wasn't the best bit

of counseling because um a numbers of

studies now have shown that for example if you

do scream therapy you punch your pillow you become more angry not less right

uh she said that's talking therapy is not going to help with feelings of anger

um she said now that there are other things anxiety talking therapies can be

helpful with and mindfulness can be very helpful with and so on Um,

and yes, I'm, I'm, I'm learning about all this.

I'm just an amateur pastor, but I find it fascinating. So thank you.

Yeah, I love this. I love this conversation and this dialogue and I love how

much I've learned from you, Pete.

And I've, I've changed the way that I pray, the way that I've listened for God's voice.

And I've changed, frankly, the way that I've grieved and processed some of the

trauma that we've been through. And you've been incredibly helpful to you.

So I'm very grateful for the work that you're doing. And I hope we get to meet

in person someday and maybe have another time on the podcast if you have time in the future.

Yeah, I'd love that. Thank you for having me. It's been fascinating.

Absolutely. Hey, as we come into a time of closing here, can you switch into your pastor chair?

And let's just acknowledge that there's some listeners today,

Pete, who, I mean, they just buried their kid or they just got the diagnosis

that their wife has a brain tumor.

Something is in the middle of happening to them.

That's the biggest thing they've ever been through. and they're turning to this

podcast right now hoping to find some hope or some ways to move forward.

Just as a pastor, what would you have to say to that person who's right in the thick of it right now?

Well, I mean, Lee, there's no words at one level for those sort of situations

that many people do go through.

But we're in a podcast, so just going silent and crying isn't going to help much.

So let me just try and say a couple of things. and I'd love to pray if that's the right afterwards.

But I think the thing I've learned is firstly, you know, Psalm 23,

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I'll fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

That psalm is saying that God is with us in the shadows and the death and the valley. Yeah.

And that is, of course, the message of the cross amongst all the religions on Earth.

It is only Christians that believe that God suffers with us and understands in the way as a human.

And so I think it is possible to grieve with God, not just as it were before God in front of God.

That's lament actually with God to realize that he is feeling the agony, too.

Who um and you know we always i would say we always ask understandably our prayer

is always to god would you airlift me out of this problem would you make would

you do a miracle would you make the problem go away and sometimes he does yeah

but mostly can we be honest he doesn't,

that's right more often than god airlifts us out he parachutes in and joins

us in the midst of the the brokenness, the MRI tube at the funeral.

And, you know, we recently, we had a new couple, lovely couple who had become

Christians, not married yet, living together, had a little baby.

The baby, in fact, we baptized her, the mom, as she was carrying this baby in

her stomach, and she didn't want to go over backwards into the water because

she had lost a number of children, miscarried before.

And so she she knelt in the water and we poured water over her head.

She was so careful about this baby.

And we prayed and prayed. And she's now she's a Christian. She's trusting God.

Right. It's a new thing for her.

And the baby was born. We all celebrated. And then the baby died a few weeks later.

And I was so furious with God, you know. and I didn't know how this very new

Christian couple were going to cope.

And the funeral, the coffin was the size of a shoebox.

I mean, it was one of the worst I've ever done.

And it was agony and there were no answers.

Except this, what became so clear is they were now grieving with hope instead of complete despair.

Despair yeah before they knew god it was just

despair because well your

sufferings have no consequence the world is meaningless um

if you're genetically weak you should

die out of the pool bad stuff happens so what but if there is god no matter

how hard you find it to hold on to him at these times there is still hope for

this life and the next and um i always say to people it is It's possible to

trust that which you do not understand. You all did it as a child.

As we get older, we think it's not possible to trust unless we understand it's a lie.

And so relearn how to lean into God. I don't understand you, but I trust you.

And I believe you are with me in this.

And the final pastoral note is don't leapfrog Holy Saturday.

Some people will try and rush you real quick to Easter Sunday.

They'll quote Bible verses at you. They'll say, you know, I don't know,

there's resurrection, there's heaven to come or whatever it is.

And just God allowed the whole world to live without easy answers for 24 hours.

God himself was dead in the grave. It seems to me that we're not very good at

waiting with the chaos and the unanswered questions in the pain, in the unknowing.

There is a time to move on. You cannot allow your grief to define and destroy your future.

There does come a time where it is appropriate to say, I will always have wounds.

I will never fully recover, but I am going to move on with my life.

But don't do it too quickly. Allow yourself to live on Holy Saturday,

and you will know when it's time to transition into Easter Sunday.

So those are just a few thoughts. If any of that's helpful, then I'm grateful to God.

That's perfect. Let's finish with prayer. Let's just pray for those folks. Okay.

If you're able to do so as you listen to this, if you're not driving or whatever,

you may want to just open your hands or put your hand on your heart.

The Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ is with you. He is deeply present to you in this moment.

He has brought you to this podcast now because he loves you. He's with you.

And he wants to minister to you deep to deep, beyond words, actually.

But I want to pray of you an old apostolic blessing.

Romans 15, verse 13. May the God of hope fill you with peace and joy as you trust in him.

So that you may overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Amen. Thank you, my brother. It is such an honor to get a chance to talk to you.

I feel like I've known you for years, but it's such a good time to talk to you today.

Lee, thanks for having me. I found it fascinating, and I'm so grateful for your work. Thank you.

What's the best way for people to connect with you, Pete?

Well, social media is, you know, Instagram or Facebook or whatever,

Pete Gregg, G-R-E-I-G, weird Scottish spelling.

And then 247prayer.com.

Love it. And then the app you mentioned. Yeah, the Lectio app, absolutely.

Hey, God bless you and your work. Keep praying, and hopefully see you soon face-to-face sometime.

Thanks, Lee. God bless you. See you soon. God bless you. That was fantastic. Thank you, Pete.

Oh, thanks for having me. And please say hi to your wife.

I will, and you as well. I feel like I know Sammy, too. All y'all have been

through and so vulnerably put your work out there and your life out there.

It's very helpful. Thank you. Sammy is great.

People come through the door to meet me and they stay because they meet Sammy.

That's what I say about Lisa. That's awesome. Hey, enjoy your day.

Thank you so much, brother. See you. Bye.

I told you so. Right? I don't mean to say I told you so, but that was one of

the most profound conversations I've ever had on the podcast or any other time in my life.

Pete Gregg is the man. He's getting it done.

Helping us see God in a new way. helping us hear God in a new way,

helping us find God in those moments when we can't feel or hear Him or see Him.

And I'm telling you, his books, God on Mute, How to Hear God,

How to Pray, three of the best books I've ever read.

And they will have, when I get my signed copies, Lord willing,

get a signed copy from Pete, it's going to be up on the shelf next to Yancey

and Foster and Keller and all the great books on prayer that I've read and love so much. P.

Greg is my new sort of favorite current spiritual guide and mentor.

And I know he's going to be important to you, too. What a great conversation.

I hope it was a blessing to you. Remember, friend, you can't change your life

until you change your mind.

And the good news about all of that is that you can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.