How to Pray, Hear, and Find God, with Pete Greig (Mind Change Monday)

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 On Mute, that 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. 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 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 contemplative prayer and

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're a doubter 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 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 the Lord is going to arrange another opportunity or maybe

more than one 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 faith.

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 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 okay?

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

Oh, 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 for 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, Lee. 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 it 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.

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

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

And so we had started praying night

and day in a warehouse in the south of England, and it began to spread.

Back then, we used to say it went viral. We probably can't say that anymore.

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. That 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 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 God'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 yeah 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 um 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 that that that is with us in

the suffering so the book you kindly mentioned god on

mute traces jesus's story from morn

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 the easter sunday okay but very importantly tarrying at

holy saturday that 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 yet.

So that my theology was morphed.

And as for neuroscience, I am so grateful for a neurosurgeon called Liam Gray.

An Irish atheist brain surgeon, 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 spend a

lot of time with epileptologists and and even now maybe Maybe I just land it here, Lee.

You know, 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. 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. 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 i 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 the i don't think.

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,

that 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. 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 so 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 horrible time.

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

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

And I know you Lee have

been through your own absolute shattering heartbreak

you understand and and and so I

ended up praying one night my friend Dan had come around

somehow our conversation became prayer

I don't even know there was there wasn't a let us pray moment we

just I became prayer and 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 you know

i want my wife to live i i want my

kids to know their mom and if if

you have some plan on a heavenly wall planner

to take my wife from me i'll

fight you for her wow and 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 uh 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 yeah 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.

So 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 you that I'm not like that other man.

And the tax collector is praying this snotty prayer, 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 Pharisees in the crowd and says, who do you think went home heard by God?

So be real with God. There's many other things I could say, but that's 101 for me.

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

too. 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? Remember?

He said, what do you want me to do for you? So it's okay. 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. and 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?

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 especially because, remember, Lee, I said I only got into this because I

one day held up my hands and acknowledged I was bad at prayer. prayer.

I was a pastor and 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 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

Lee 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 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 is 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.

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 The P-R-A-Y.

Maybe you can unpack that for us in a second and give people a little tool to help us pray.

We all have these little formulas and little ideas that we use,

the ACTS model and all that.

But you gave us a new one. Talk about the PRAY model for a second.

Well, you know, part of it, Lee, was ACTS. It's terrible.

Everyone grew up with, you know, adoration, confession.

What is it? Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Supplication.

Supplication. like even harry potter doesn't talk about supplication

like 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

thought we got like we got to come up with something that we can teach our kids

here better than acts yeah and i just thought i wonder if we can do something

with pray why um and we can and it goes like this and this really works okay

i know i don't i'm not really brilliant 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.

And so it goes, it goes super simple. just before you start before you stop before you start,

stop before you fill your Amazon cart with all your prayer requests and ram

it into the shins of the almighty just stop,

be still centre your scattered senses become aware of God it's not him that's

absent, it's you it's me 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 it god

is with me so take a bit of time rejoicing then the

bit we find easy ask 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 yeah 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. You know, she's in the hospital. God, you know,

pray for a miracle. That's where we always start, right?

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

miracle from healer to take her home. Like, this is no life.

She knows you. you so i my advice

to you god is this 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 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 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 making something into an object.

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, 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 on a personal side, Pete, Lisa came into my office the other

morning. 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.

Please say hi to her. I hope to meet her one day.

I hope so, too. So you've just 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'll 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 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?

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 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 hadn't expected

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 of them.

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 is 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 Lectio Divina, you know, how do we pray the Bible?

How do we read the Bible with our limbic region?

You know, that part of us that's emotion and less logical, 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.

That's right. But you know how to switch into that limbic system.

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

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 limit region.

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 there for

listen is akouo, 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 I've been trying to figure that out for 55

years and that and you gave it to me on one page I love it yeah yeah tell me

can I ask you a question well that's course absolutely so so 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. You'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 our majority of our thoughts are negative.

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

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

Our brain's primary job is to help us not get eaten by the bear and help us

not get killed by the caveman.

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 something bad is going to happen to you the next day.

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 does. And it makes sense intellectually,

but also experientially.

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 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,

a counselor, 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 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, 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 attention you pay to something, the more it stays stuck in that state.

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 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 of saying,

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

And so part of the right… Causes of behavioral therapy, yeah.

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.

I mean, 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.

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 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.

Have so helpful i mean this is you this is self-brain surgery that's what you're

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 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 like Christ.

Oh, that's so interesting.

Isn't that interesting? Yes, and.

Was it we do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.

That's right. You know, so if we don't just walk in the paths of righteousness, but learn to think,

in the paths of righteousness, that's right, we see everything differently.

Oh, that is so interesting.

That's what what Romans 12, 2 is about. So 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.

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,

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,

they know now that the path from hippocampus to amygdala, 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 only goes one direction.

That is, oh, this is so interesting.

It's good stuff, Pete. 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 it, develop some new mental muscle memory.

That's great. Yeah, I love that. I had a thing recently.

I was getting some counseling. And my counsellor, who's great,

she, someone had hurt me a lot.

And she was pushing into asking how I felt

and and I realized I felt a

little bit angry about it and she she said I want you to you know

unpack that more the more I talked to them what angry I was

feeling about this person and I eventually stopped I said can I just ask you

said at the start I didn't feel that angry I'm feeling this isn't helping this

is making it worse yeah I'm gonna leave this counseling session furious with

this person it doesn't feel healthy and I posted with with Sammy, my wife later,

she said, Yeah, that wasn't the best bit of counseling,

because 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.

She said, that's talking therapies are not going to help with feelings of anger.

She said, now that there are other things, anxiety, talking therapies can be

helpful with mindfulness can can be very helpful with and so on.

And yes, 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 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 grieve and process 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.

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 that 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 like 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 there's no words at one level for those sort

of situations that many people do go through but yeah we're in a podcast so

just going Going silent and crying isn't going to help much.

So let me just try and say a couple of things. I'd love to pray,

if that's all 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. Why?

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.

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 yeah 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 rest

of the brokenness the MRI tube at

the funeral and you know

we we recently we had a new a couple lovely

couple who'd become Christians not married yet living together had a little

baby um the baby in fact she was we baptized her the mom as she's carrying this

baby in her stomach and she didn't want to go over backwards into the water

because she she had lost a number of children miscarried before for.

And so she we 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 gonna cope and the funeral the

coffin was the size of a shoebox I know

it was one of the worst I've ever done and it was agony there were no answers

except this what became so clear is they were now grieving with hope instead

of complete despair yeah before they knew God it was was just despair.

Because your sufferings have no consequence. The world is meaningless.

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 onto him at these

times, there is still hope for this life and the next.

And I always say to people, it is 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 pray for those folks. Okay.

If you're able to do so, if 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. Yes.

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. 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 we mentioned 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 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's 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.

Pete Gregg 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.

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

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