Near-Death Experiences Can Teach Us About God: John Burke

Hey Lisa. Hey Lee. It's good to see you today. It's good to see you too. Will you help me

with something? Of course. I can't remember what day it is. It's frontal lobe Friday.

It's frontal lobe Friday. Good morning my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee

Warren here, your favorite neurosurgeon of the internet. I'm here for another episode

of Self Brain Surgery and I'm so grateful that you've joined me to talk about some incredible

ways in which your mind and your body and your spirit work together with your Creator

and the neuroscience that He invented to help you become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

And today I'm geeking out.

It's frontal lobe Friday. Okay, on Fridays, if you've been around for a while, we usually cover some topic related

to the interworkings of your incredible frontal lobes and how they set you apart from everything else.

Every other living thing that God created, your frontal lobes set you apart because they

that give you this incredible ability to choose what you think about.

To decide to think about one thing and not another, and apply this incredible ability that you have

to direct how your brain functions and forms synapses and makes connections and really can help you

to overcome stuckness, depression, anxiety, anything else you're dealing with.

Your frontal lobes are the thing God gave you that really sets you apart.

And so today, instead of talking about some nerdy application of neuroscience and smashing it together with faith like we do.

Today I have a guest.

I recorded this episode with the intention of taking a lot of time and getting the video

perfect and all that and releasing it all at the same time.

But as I slept last night, God kind of nudged me and said, this video, this audio needs

to come out today. You can take your time on the video and release it later.

Audio needs to come out today because there's somebody.

On Frontal Lobe Friday that needs to know that your mind is eternal, it's connected to your creator,

and God wants to use your mind to change your life, friend.

And you can't change your life, as we always say, until you change your mind.

Today, maybe I'll change your mind about one thing.

There's an author, I got an email from Pamela McClure. She owns a PR agency that represents

some of the biggest authors out there, some of the ones that have been on the show,

Max Lucado and Addison Bevere and others represented by Pam.

And she reached out to me and said, hey, I've got an author that,

let me just read you what she said. Dear Lee, I know you don't usually focus

on near-death experiences on your show.

I can tell you, friend, I've never received an email with that first line.

That's what she said.

Dear Lee, I know you don't usually focus on near-death experiences on your show,

but this guest may be of interest to you for a specific reason, apologetics.

John Burke is a veteran pastor who has studied near-death experiences for three decades.

He posits that near-death experiences, near-death accounts of a God of love and light

are vivid illustrations of the God of Scripture.

His own journey from skeptical agnostic to Christian pastor was predicated by his discovery

of compelling near-death experience accounts.

The foreword is written by Lee Strobel, who's also coming up on the show,

And John's new book is called Imagine the God of Heaven. Listen, millions of people around the world

report personal, unforgettable, near-death experiences.

And the question for you and I today here on Frontal Lobe Friday is, is this just some weird

electrical phenomenon that happens in the brain, or is it God reaching out and trying to personally

connect with people and change the arc of their eternal destiny? For the first time in history,

Pamela wrote, we're able to access personal reports directly from those who have been

brought back from clinical death all around the world. Author and pastor John Burke has

studied the commonalities of more than 1,500 near-death experiences over the course of 30 years.

Today, he's one of the world's foremost near-death experience experts.

And he, my friend, is with us here on the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast today to talk about

Imagine the God of Heaven, Near-Death Experiences, God's Revelation, and the Love You've Always Wanted.

I'm telling you, the book is incredible.

We're going to give away two copies. Pamela and Diana, the two publicists from McClure's agency, have given us two copies

to give away.

Today, if you send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com, lee at drleewarren.com with your name and your mailing address,

after I receive all those emails, we're going to just randomly choose.

Lisa and Tata and I will randomly choose two people to receive this book so that we have an opportunity for people on the West Coast.

And further west in the world to receive one of these two free copies.

Imagine the God of Heaven is a game changing book. I'm going to come back after the interview and wrap it up

and tell you why I thought it was appropriate for Frontal Lobe Friday and why I thought it was a great opportunity

for you to find hope, because remember my friend.

Hope is the first dose of any sort of treatment plan that can help you find your way back after life hurts.

And this episode is really gonna, it just moved my heart. I shed some tears, it really moved me.

John's a passionate and dynamic guy. He's not crazy.

The things that he shares with us are incredible.

And what you'll notice if you pay attention is that these experiences happen to people

from all cultures, all backgrounds. A lot of them are people who have a lot to lose

by speaking up about meeting the God of heaven.

And they have so many commonalities and similarities. And some of the witnesses to these are people I know,

famous neurosurgeons and neuroscientists have seen this happen and they came away going,

I'm not sure what I believe, but I believe that really happened to that person.

And this is an amazing encounter, I think, with the God of heaven.

And John Burke's gonna help us get it done. I'm gonna play the book trailer real quick.

I didn't really believe in God or the afterlife or any of it.

I kept thinking, how do I explain so many people clinically dead, resuscitated by modern medicine,

then saying very similar things.

I was considered clinically dead for an hour and 45 minutes.

I hit my head on the steering wheel, and I died in my truck.

And I'm looking at my body.

I was just like, am I dead?

Well, I found myself leaving my body and going toward this light.

At this point, you don't know you're dead?

Here's the good part. After 30 years of researching

In over a thousand of these accounts, many encounter a God of light who is personal.

It was a divine light.

I fell in love with that light. And I knew that's where Jesus and the Father is. I knew I was home.

That is home. Your book's number seven on the New York Times bestseller list.

Thirteen million Americans had near-death experiences.

Many people talk about being in the presence of this man of light, and in his presence

they never want to leave. What's really cool is that people actually met God.

I actually saw someone they believed to be Jesus, people who have never even read the,

scripture. I had been raised to not believe in God.

I couldn't find proof of his existence.

I had never prayed. I had never read the Bible. It was said frequently, Jesus Christ is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind.

He's real. He's more than real. It was the most real experience I'd ever had in my life.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Someone that I thought was just a Jewish legend.

And here I am, looking at this magnificent being.

Everything about him was ugly to me. Everything was coming out of him for me,

like I was the only one he loved.

Like I was the only one that he had ever created. That's how he treated me, like I was the only one.

Incredible. Listen, friend, buckle up for this one. Take some notes.

Be careful if you're driving your car, because there's going to be some moments when you

say, holy cow, and just be careful, because this episode shows us that God is out there

seeking to encounter you with love.

He's seeking to encounter you with light, and He wants you to know that if you want

to become healthier and feel better and be happier, you need to know who He is, and this

This is a tender and beautiful example of how God never stops searching for us,

never stops making himself available to us.

And John Burke is gonna blow your mind with Imagine the God of Heaven.

But before we get started, I just have one question for you.

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 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.

Well, friend, we're back and I'm so excited to have a new friend with us.

I've got John Burke here, probably the current leading expert on near-death experiences,

New York Times bestselling author and pastor from Austin, Texas.

John, welcome to the show.

I'm excited. Anytime we can talk about the God of heaven, it's a good day and you've got just some great

insight and experiences for us. Before we get started, Pastor John, would you pray for us?

Yeah, I'd love to.

God, thank you for just this time when we can consider how wonderful you are, and the

evidence that you've given, maybe for those who are still skeptical, that you are real.

And not only that, you love each one of us more than we can possibly imagine.

And so just guide our conversation, lead us, and I pray it helps people see you accurately,

more accurately. In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. Well, Pastor, before we get to a little bit of your background,

the listeners of this show, a lot of them are people who have gone through great loss.

My wife and I lost a son 10 years ago. Mitch was stabbed to death.

And so my writing all sort of, I know, it all sort of kind of coalesces around hope.

And how do we find hope in hard times? And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you

is because your work has helped people find hope, really, by getting to know who God is.

And so I wanted to give you that background, because there's going to be some people listening today

who are hurting and are looking, kind of desperately looking for, they may not even think that God cares about them or loves them.

And I think you're going to have some words to speak into those folks today.

So I just wanted to give you that little bit of info before we get started.

Can you tell us just a general background of how you got into this work of looking

at near-death experiences?

Through suffering.

So, I was an agnostic, I studied engineering, I worked as an engineer,

I've always been very analytical, like, prove it, you know, how do you know?

And that's still, I still ask those questions. I don't believe everything I hear or everything that they say.

I'm looking for the evidence. But, yeah, my dad was dying of cancer.

And someone gave him the very first research that coined the term near-death experience,

which for those who aren't familiar,

I'm talking about when people clinically die, their heart stops beating, their brain waves cease,

and yet modern medicine or miracle resuscitates them,

some after minutes, some after hours, and they consistently come back describing the reality

of a world to come and a life to come that they say makes this life like the shadow

and that's like the real thing.

And I read this in one night and I said, wow, I mean, could this actually be medical scientific evidence,

that this stuff is true?

And that opened my mind and I later came to faith.

But I was curious, I was just curious, like, what are these near-death experiences,

and how do they relate to what I had been learning and studying about this God of the Bible?

And so, for 35 years now, I've been researching these.

I've researched well over 1,000 of them, probably closer to 1,500 of them now.

And I wrote Imagine Heaven, which was really taking a look at,

really what the Bible says about the expectation of the life to come.

And I was showing how the commonalities.

That I had studied across these thousand people really lines up with with what the Bible has said all along,

This new book imagine the God of heaven. I'm doing the same thing, but I'm focusing in on who is God and,

and it's amazing because.

He is the God of all nations and I have stories from

70 people in this new book from every continent on planet Earth, and yet when they clinically

die and they find themselves in the presence of this God of light, they say, like brighter

than the sun, like thousands of times brighter than the sun, yet easy to look at and mesmerizing,

they say.

You don't want to do anything but just be in his presence because God is a love that

our word love doesn't even come close to, they say.

Wow. And so I'm showing this as well, that this is not always the God that people anticipated,

but he's the same.

Wow. And your experience with your dad and reading that book that led you to faith, basically,

like unpack that just a little bit, because a lot of people would say,

well, it was just an emotional time in your life and all this stuff.

Like unpack that for us, Cause you're not a, you're a skeptic and you're an analytical kind of guy.

So this isn't some emotional decision that you made. What happened to you?

Well, at first, you know, I read these and there were about, you know,

in this very first research on it.

And again, this is back in the early eighties.

And, you know, there are about 70 or 80 stories in there.

And, you know, I was like, huh, I was curious.

But then I started studying them more and more and as more and more were coming out,

and what began to convince me, that has convinced many skeptical medical doctors.

You know, a lot of people don't realize this, but these have been studied scientifically

and written up in the Journal of the American Medical Association,

in the Lancet, in psychiatry, 900 scholarly articles written.

So a lot of skeptical doctors, medical doctors have also been convinced by the same evidence.

What really convinced me, when people die, they say that they leave their body,

but they still have a body.

They're still themselves. In fact, they say things like, not with five senses, more like 50 senses.

And they talk about how they felt, not like they went from life to death,

but life to more alive.

But they say, you know, I had a spiritual body, and I was still me, but I could see

what was going on in the room.

And so this is very important because, you know, how do we know these are?

There's something fact-based about these. Well, when they come back,

they're able to describe what was happening during their resuscitation, when they had no brainwaves.

They shouldn't have been able to say that, describe it.

I was asking you about Pam Reynolds case because it was actually overseen by Dr. Spetzer.

Who's a neurosurgeon. Yeah. Neurosurgeon like yourself and she was a singer songwriter had a deep brain aneurysm.

And you'll without reading what I wrote, I won't remember because it's a long thing,

but when they have to shut the body down, drain, you know, bring the circulatory arrest. Yeah.

Yeah. So 50 degrees. It's called bring them to a standstill, right? Yeah. Body temperature

down to 50 degrees, drain all the blood completely.

They put 100 decibel clickers in her ears so that she wasn't picking up any hearing.

Monitor on the brain waves to make sure there are no brain waves.

Taped her eyes shut so she couldn't see anything to get any kind of stimulus.

And yet, hours into the surgery in the deepest anesthesia, she claims she leaves her body

and watches as a surgeon takes out the saw, which she said, didn't look like a saw at all.

It looks like my father's electric toothbrush. Yeah.

And then she describes a socket set, like her dad's socket set with all these bits.

And she heard a female doctor down by her legs say, I can't find the artery.

And a male doctor up near her head said, try the other leg, which was confusing.

Cause she's like, I thought they were doing brain surgery. Why are they down on my legs?

But they were trying to find the femoral artery, right?

And then she leaves and she goes to this to this presence of this God who's light and love and sees

her grandmother who had died and he sends her back as she's coming back to her body.

They're playing Hotel California in the operating room and they had to shock her twice to get her

back resuscitated all those details she was able to share. Wow.

And studies have been done of these kinds of veridical observations.

Dr. Janice Holden did a study with 93 patients who claimed to make these out-of-body observations.

Each one may make multiple observations.

She found that 92% of near-death experiencers' observations were 100% accurate.

Wow.

Another 6% had some variation, but were mostly accurate. Only 2%, which turned out to be one person, was completely inaccurate.

So that was one of the things that convinced me. The others were blind people.

When they have a near-death experience, they see and they report seeing the same things,

that sighted people do all over the world.

And they're reporting things that they should not have been able to, just by hearing, they

wouldn't say. I'll give you an example.

So Debbie, for instance, who I report on in Imagine the God of Heaven, was blind. She dies.

Her mom, she is above her body and sees her mom come into the room and later was able

to tell her mom, you were wearing a robe and it was a dark color, right?

And her mom said, yeah, I was wearing my black robe. Wow.

Then she leaves and she goes into the presence again of this God of incredible love and light

who tells her she's going to have to go back because she's going to have a child and she,

needs to go back.

And she was told she couldn't have children, but she does come back and she does have children.

But while on the other side, she also meets her grandmother who she had never met before

because her grandmother died when she was an infant.

Yeah. And she, when she comes back, can describe what her grandmother looked like.

But her mother said, you're describing her perfectly, but as a 30 year old. Wow.

Which is a commonality as well that the people of heaven are typically,

you know, people many times say they seemed like they were all in their prime.

Wow. And so, you know, so you have you have multiple cases like this, veridical evidence, blind

people seeing the same thing, people meeting people on the other side that they didn't

know or didn't know had died, like children meeting their siblings on the other side,

and then coming back and telling their parents, I met my brother.

Yeah. And they say, you don't. What brother are you talking about?

Your brother's alive right here. He said, no, I have another brother.

And then they like, aha, oh, we had a miscarriage. We never told him about that.

And so point after point after point, I give 10 points of evidence in chapter two

of Imagine the God of Heaven that if an alternate theory doesn't take those into account,

they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall,

hoping that there's not a life after death.

Wow, now it's not all heaven either. Like not everybody that has these experiences

sees this great light and this beautiful place and feels peace like that.

Like some people have a different experience. Talk about that.

Yeah, so 23% of those who have come forward, that's an important point.

We don't know what percent because people who have good experiences don't often come forward

because they're afraid people think they're crazy. And it's a sacred experience.

But those coming forward who have hellish experiences, they say some of the same things.

They say, it was more real than anything on this planet.

And nobody wants to come forward and say, hey, by the way, I had a hellish experience.

But 23% have in studies done. And interestingly, I have three friends today

who, one was an atheist college professor, tenured.

I like to point this out too. Why would, you know, these people are doctors,

anesthesiologists, surgeons, college professors, lawyers, CEOs.

There is nothing they have to gain by making up these wild stories of heaven and seeing God.

They have stuff to lose, yeah. They lose a lot.

They lose a lot.

But it changes them.

And so these three, this one guy who was a atheist tenured professor,

another guy who died of a cocaine overdose,

another guy who died of alcoholism, and they were all in hellish experiences

but cried out to God for forgiveness.

Wow. And he rescues them.

And then they have the exact same experience. So, you know, like this tenured, you know,

professor who was an atheist is in this hellish experience.

And in desperation, he, you know, he cries out, Jesus save me.

Yeah. Because he remembers, he keeps remembering a song when he was taken to church as a child.

And the song was Jesus loves me.

And he kept hearing it in his heart. And so just in desperation, he's like,

I don't, if he even exists, why would he love me? Because he realized this is what I deserve.

And yet into this darkness comes this pinpoint of light, brighter and brighter until he says,

brighter than the sun, arms reach out, grab him, pick him up and take him out of there.

And then this tenured atheist professor says, in the presence of Jesus and the angels,

he gets a life review. Wow.

And then Jesus sends him back and two years later, he leaves his tenured professorship to become a pastor.

Wow. All three of the guys that I'm talking about who had hellish experiences are pastors today. Wow.

But it changes them. It's so real. And the reality of heaven and hell,

but also the reality of God's goodness and his mercy.

I'll tell you, one of the things that's just so encouraging is that in this new book, Imagine the God of Heaven,

I have people from all over the world and they experience this God of mercy and compassion

even though they didn't know it.

Like Santosh, he's a manufacturing engineer. Are you familiar with Santosh?

Yeah, I love his story.

Yeah, and you know, he grew up in India, Hindu. His father was a Sanskrit scholar.

The Hindu gods were all he knew.

And yet when his pancreas erupts into his, or his gallbladder erupts into his pancreas,

and they can't get his blood pressure down and he hears code blue, code blue, heart stops.

And he came back three days later, they had to induce a medical coma.

And he, again, out of his body, sees his body laying there. He says, this divine light comes, brighter than the sun.

He said, and I instantly fell in love with this light because I knew this light was safe

and was taking me someplace safe.

And he follows and this light, and this is crazy, but this light parts and goes over what he then is outside,

describing this city.

This gigantic city. And when he described it to me, he said, it was like this giant compound.

And he said, on the other side, you can see for thousands of miles, your eyesight is like

telescopic. Which I point out is actually in the Bible, because John in the book of Revelation,

Revelation 21 is taken to a very high mountain. He's looking at the same city Santosh is going

going to describe, but he can read names on the foundation stones.

Wow.

How can he do that from a very high mountain?

Well, telescopic eyesight, just like Santosh and other Indie ears are saying.

So Santosh describes this giant compound, he says, with very high, beautiful walls,

and inside he calls them mansions or big buildings of otherworldly building material.

And there were 12 gates, he said, I counted them, 12.

And outside the gates were angels. And he said, that's when I realized I'm looking at the kingdom of heaven.

And he said, my longing was to go in there. He said, I realized that is the longing of every human heart.

And then he has a vision of and describes hell. And he definitely doesn't want to go there, and he turns looking for some way in, and,

he sees this giant, almighty God on a throne.

And he knows. He said, I knew this was God. No one had to tell me. I knew it.

And he looks into his eyes, and instantly he has a life review, sees all of his good,

but all of his bad, all of his sins.

And he falls on his knees, and he says, Lord, forgive me, Lord, forgive me, forgive me.

And then the Lord speaks to him, and he said, I was shocked because he had such tenderness

and mercy and compassion in his voice, and he said, I'm sending you back, Santosh, and,

I want you to love your family and especially your daughter.

She needs you right now. Yeah. And it's such a great picture that.

Even if you don't yet know God, God knows you and He cares. He cares for every one of us because

He created us. And He created us for love. And that's what they consistently say. They come back

saying God is love and how we love one another is what matters most to Him. Well, that's what God

said to Moses. That's what Jesus reiterated, right? The first and second greatest commandment.

And so Santosh comes back and ends up two years later going to hear his daughter sing

when she was invited to be a part of a choir at a church.

As he walks into the church, he feels the presence, the same presence of that loving God,

and the messages on the narrow gate and how Jesus says, I am the gate

through which you must enter into the kingdom of heaven.

He goes back and reads the Bible and he said, everything I experienced was in there.

Because in Revelation, John describes the city with the 12 gates and the narrow gate,

everything, exactly like Santosh said. Exactly describes what John described in Revelation 21.

And yet he had zero background. And so what I'm showing through these 70 NDEs that are in Imagine the God of Heaven is that

their overlapping stories are pointing to the God who's been revealing himself throughout

history through the Jewish prophets and in Jesus.

For thousands and thousands of years. God didn't just start revealing himself

in the age of medical resuscitation and NDEs. That's right.

I think it's fascinating. And by the way, your publicist very kindly gave us

two copies of the book to give away.

So the first couple of listeners would get emails, lee at drleewarren.com, lee at drleewarren.com,

let me know your mailing address and your city, and we'll send you a book.

The first two listeners that we get, and that's really kind of the publicist

to give us those books, and people will benefit from this book.

I love how you put tables together of the commonalities between all these experiences,

and it's just a fascinating and well-done work.

But one of the things that I was really fascinated by is that it doesn't seem that God sort of

scares people into repentance in these events, and it's not like everybody comes back from

them and immediately starts going to church and, you know, gets baptized and all that.

So why is it that he doesn't sort of just arm-wrestle people into submission when we meet him?

And why is it that not everybody that comes back after these experiences sort of automatically

becomes a Christian? What's the deal in your opinion?

Yeah, I talk about that in the book, you know, because I think Christians get really confused.

They're like, well, why would a Hindu and a Muslim and a Buddhist and, you know, these

people who don't believe in Jesus, why would they, why would they see the same God of light

and love? Or in some cases, you know, like I have a Rwanda and a mom in there. And he

said, Jesus rescued me. And he said, he looked like Jesus. He had a beard and he had a, he

had a robe with a gold sash and he held out his hands and there were holes in his hands

right here. And that's how Swediq knew this was Jesus. And then he, but he said, but light

was coming out of him like the sun that pierced through my eyes and went deep into me. And,

he said, Swediq said, and Jesus said to him, I died for mankind. You are among those I

died for. Never deny it and tell everyone.

And today, he is an Anglican priest who has had seven attempts on his life,

seven or eight attempts on his life, because he won't shut up about Jesus.

He lives in a Muslim country. Yeah.

And so, you know, I think one thing I like to remind Christians who get confused is that the Apostle Paul

in Acts chapter nine was arresting Christians and having them killed.

Yeah. He did not believe in Jesus. That's right. When the same God of brilliant light appears to him on the Damascus road, and he asks,

Who are you, Lord?

And he says, I'm Jesus, who you're persecuting. But notice, Jesus does not tell him the gospel.

He doesn't tell him what to do.

Instead, after he sends Ananias to Paul to explain what Jesus had done, and Paul still

has a free will. He had a lot to lose. He was a well-to-do Pharisee. That's right.

And so he still had to decide, will he choose to give his life and heart to follow Jesus

or not? That's the same with these NDEs. You know, Revelation 1-7 says, every eye will see him, even those who pierced him.

So we shouldn't be surprised that everybody is seeing him. And the reason that he doesn't just, you know, strong arm us, and I talk about this in the

book is that God's motive for everything is love. God is love and he created us for a unique

relationship with himself. It's one of the most powerful things that moved me so much is hearing

so many of these people I interviewed saying in God's presence and they would often,

several of them would say, now I know this wasn't completely true, but I felt like I was the only one he loved, like I was his special one.

And over and over again, they would say that. Yeah.

Well, you know, the reason the reason he created us was for that unique love relationship.

But we all know, you know, you can't force someone to love you. That's right.

You can't force a child to love you. You can't force a love, you know, someone that you've fallen in love with.

You know, you can give them good gifts, you know, but bribery won't do it either.

How do you know they don't love the gifts but don't really love you? That's right.

And you can't hold a gun to their head and make, you know, out of fear, I mean, they

might say, I love you, but we all know that's not love.

That's right. And God, in creating us with the ability to love, created us with a free will by necessity.

And so love requires the ability to say no, even to the God who loves us most.

Wow. It seems to be, this is weird obviously, and it's a little bit extra scriptural, but it

seems to me, I mean what I'm about to say is, not your book.

It seems like God isn't done pursuing us even when our heart stops.

He still wants to have a chance for us to know who He is and have a chance to come to

accept Him. And I see that. And I see that.

Being sort of consistent where they've had a couple of missionaries on the show and,

J.D. Greer's written about this and and people who work in Muslim countries say frequently

Though somebody will knock on their door in the middle of the night and it'll be a Islamic person who had a dream

that said go down to this tent and ask for this guy and he's gonna tell you about Jesus and,

It happens all over the Middle East it dreams and visions it to me It seems consistent with God's character of what's happening in these near-death experiences. Does that make sense to you?

Yes, it's very similar.

Bebe, the woman in Tehran, who I interviewed, her son, actually, he came to our church,

and we had some Iranian people in our church who he had actually led to faith in Tehran. So he was visiting them,

but he wanted to meet with me. And so I meet with him for lunch and he brings his mother, who only speaks Farsi.

And I was sitting there thinking, wonder why he brought his mother,

she doesn't even speak English.

And he starts to tell me his story. Now he knew nothing about my studies or that I was an author.

And he tells me how in Tehran, he was Hezbollah. Wow. He was Hezbollah.

And he has this vision of Jesus one night, three times with his arms out saying,

come, come to me, come to me. and he ends up coming to faith and leads his sister to faith.

And Bibi was related to the Prophet Muhammad and like honored, lived next to the president's.

General counsel in a gated community, very wealthy,

but she has a heart attack.

And in her near-death experience, this almighty giant, just like Santosh saw,

saw comes and says to her, and this is not what she was expecting, says to her, I am he who is.

Wow. That's how, that's how Said translated it.

Which of course, that's exactly what Yahweh, this God of light in the burning bush on Mount

Sinai says to Moses, I am, I am who I am, or I am a self-existent one.

It's what Jesus said when he said before Abraham was born, Ego eimi, in the Greek, I am.

And so, you know, you're seeing this consistent all around the globe.

And most of them come back and they do seek. And just like God said,

when you seek me with all your heart, you will find me.

And they do find him.

Some don't.

And I like to point that out because a near-death experience

does not mean that person can't get it wrong.

It doesn't mean they never sin.

It doesn't mean everything they say is true.

I mean, I have near-death experiencers who say things that it doesn't seem like both can be true.

And so I'm always looking for the overlapping commonalities and how they align with what God's revealed in Scripture,

because I think we can trust what God's revealed in Scripture.

And I go into that in the book as well.

But it's important to realize that a near-death experience is something in between what we now know as clinical death.

And what I would call eternal death. Yeah.

So a commonality that people talk about is in their near death experience,

there was a border or a boundary.

They describe it different ways, but they knew if they cross over that,

they can't come back.

Yeah. And in Imagine the God of Heaven, I have Jesus saying to some of them,

you haven't died yet, you have to go back.

Now, they had died. They didn't have any brain waves. But I think that also makes sense of a passage I used to wrestle with

in Hebrews 9, 27, which says it's appointed for man to die once,

you know, and then the judgment.

And so, I think the way I liken these near-death experiences is I could go visit Buckingham Palace and see the place,

but that doesn't mean the royal family is ready to adopt me to move in. So this is just a visit. And these NDEs, they're not indicative of someone's eternity

either. They may see a vision of hell and of heaven. I mean, it's up to each person of whether.

They seek God and they realize, I do need your forgiveness and your leadership.

And I want what Jesus did, because that's what he did. He paid for every sin of every person

for all time so that the only thing that can keep us away from God is ourselves.

Our own pride saying, no, I don't need God.

I don't need your forgiveness. You know, I'm good. That's right.

And that's consistent with Scripture too, because we see people all through the Bible

that see His signs and wonders and walk among Him and watch Him raise people from the dead,

and it's not enough to convince them.

So the human heart can be so deceived or so self-serving that it, even in the presence

of God can say, no, that's what free will is all about, right?

And I have interviewed a few people, they're a minority, but they describe, and I was just

kind of dumbfounded because it described being in the presence of Jesus.

And then come back. And at first, so I found their story right after they wrote it.

And they were blown away by it and wrote it as this is what happened. But years later,

they end up going down a road, a very metaphysical path of this and that. And then it's like,

no, I don't believe that was real. They don't even say, I don't believe that was real.

This was one person said, now I believe that was just in the brain now. Yeah.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. So, you know, I think all of us think that if we had some encounter,

face-to-face encounter with Jesus, that we would be the, we would never be the one who turned away,

but the Bible's full of it.

So I guess what's the message from your pastor's heart? Like, what's the message for all of us?

Like, when we encounter Jesus, what's your message for us?

Well, the first thing I would say, You know, the last section of the book

is all about walking with the God of joy.

Yeah.

And I also talk about suffering.

And I interview some people like this one plastic surgeon who at 16, he lost his mom and his brother

when their house caught on fire.

He was trying to rescue them.

Horrible burns over 80% of his body. And he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

And he's there with his mother and his brother. He said, it was like we were sitting on the couch

watching TV, just so comfortable.

And God is there and everything made sense. So he said, I saw God's plan.

And he said, all I could say is, of course. That makes so much sense, of course.

It's perfect. And then the Lord says to him, it's not your time yet. I still have a purpose for you.

You have to go back. And he said, it's not going to be easy, but we're going to do it together.

And so Dr. Mark, he wasn't a doctor. He comes back and he went through 38 surgeries. Imagine

as a teenager, you lose your mom. You don't have a mom now. You don't have a brother.

And you are scarred over all your body and you're teased and this and that.

And then his dad became an alcoholic from the loss and then he did too in college,

realizing he had later that he had PTSD that he was trying to suppress.

But long story short, so he went through a ton of suffering.

But long story short, he ends up through that growing in a way

that he realizes he has the ability to go to medical school

because he wants to help other burn victims and he becomes a plastic surgeon. Yeah.

Who can have empathy as well as the skills.

And at the end of the day, he said, you know.

It doesn't take away all the questions and it doesn't take away the difficulty,

but it does show you that you can trust God.

Because I can't tell you how it all works, but I know when I was in his presence,

everything works for good.

Yeah, that reminds me of what you said about how so many of these folks

kind of see prayers coming into the kingdom

and how God stores up all your prayers and gives you the desires of your hearts.

Talk about that for a moment.

Yeah, yeah, so I've got multiple people. And you know, it's interesting, I said earlier

that I don't believe everything everybody says. Yeah.

So sometimes I'll be interviewing someone and they'll say something, and this was one of them.

So when I was doing my research, even back for Imagine Heaven,

you know, one or two would say,

Yeah, I saw these like, they were like shooting stars, or they were like these arrow, flaming arrows flying,

and they were prayers.

And I'd go like, huh, interesting, not sure. Yeah.

You know, and so I would just take that and kind of put it on the shelf over here.

But then when I heard person after person after person, and even like this agnostic commercial airline pilot,

Jim Woodford, his wife had been praying for him,

but he had never prayed to God, very successful man.

And he gets Guillain-Barre, which is a very painful disease, I'm sure you know.

And as he knows he's dying, he has an opioid overdose accidentally.

And he said, you know when you're dying. And as his head is hitting the steering wheel,

he cries out, God, forgive me, and he meant it.

And I jokingly tell Jim, I think you beat the thief on the cross for last minute salvation.

And he also first gets a taste of where he was going, and then he's taken by these angels,

in this beautiful place, you know, again, like Earth, but so much more, colors.

He said, flowers of colors beyond our color spectrum and, you know, over the mountains.

And he looks up in the sky to get his bearings as a pilot.

He said, I'm always looking for where the sun is is to get my North, South, East, West bearings. There's no sun.

He said, I'd never read the Bible. I didn't know that in Isaiah 60 and in Revelation 21,

it says there is no sun or moon in heaven.

The glory of God is the light.

And so he's walking along and then the angel says, touch my robe, Joe.

And he does. And suddenly he's up above this same holy city that Santosh described, that John describes in Revelation,

he's describing the same city.

And he said, and I guess God did that because I'm a pilot.

And he knew I would love seeing an aerial airborne view just like I've gotten over so many cities

as I've flown around the world.

And you know what's fascinating, Lee? I interviewed another commercial airline pilot, Captain Dale Black.

God gave him the same aerial flying view of that holy city.

And so Jim comes back down, and he's a very wealthy man. He has a horse farm, and he loves horses.

And the angel says, look, and across this field from behind these trees, he said,

come these three beautiful Arabian horses.

And he said, I didn't know there were horses in heaven. I'd never read the Bible that Jesus comes back on a horse.

I'd never thought about any of that.

But what he said was, he realized that God tailors our experiences to the things

that we loved on earth.

And there's a Psalm, Psalm 37, four, that says, delight yourself in the Lord,

and he will give you the desires of your heart.

And I like to tell people, you know, so many people don't wholeheartedly trust and follow

God because in the back of our minds, we're afraid we're going to miss out on something.

Yeah. Right. He's not going to, you know, I'm going to miss some joy or some fun or some experience

of life. And then I can never experience.

Well, that's a lie.

Yeah. That's an absolute lie. Heaven is not some other experience.

It's the continuation of life into real life.

That's right. That's what Jesus said, you know? And so this one other that I'll share, but oh, I was going to say, what I forgot to say

is Jim looks up in the sky to find the sun and he sees these six, what looked like shooting

stars going up and across.

And he says to the guardian angel, what are those?

And the angel said, Jim, those are the prayers for your soul from your family going up to

the throne of God even now.

Wow. While he was dead overnight for 11 hours, the the he's Canadian and the Canadian Royal Mounted Police came to the family,

and told him it's it doesn't look good. We can't find them.

Six of them gathered holding hands and prayed for Jim's salvation.

Wow. And their prayers were right there. He could see him. That's amazing.

Yeah, and I have multiple people who said the same thing, and that's when I kind of take it off the shelf,

and then I often go, okay, well, is that in scripture?

Like, has God revealed anything about that? And interestingly, though I have not seen it described

as shooting stars, John does in Revelation 8, I believe.

Describes seeing the prayers going up to the throne of God. Yeah, he does.

I don't know what he saw, but he saw something.

Wow, that's amazing. So you've done around 1,000 of these interviews with people, right?

Something like that, 1,000? More than that.

More than 1,000. Obviously, this isn't, we probably all think the first time we hear of these things,

we think it's sort of paranormal and all that.

I think in spiritual terms, it's probably just normal. Like this is what we're going to experience

when we go to heaven.

In your experience, like what's the one story that sort of raises the hair on the back of your neck,

kind of the got you the most. Like, do you have one that stands out as like, holy cow?

I have a lot. Put you on the spot. Yeah.

I mean, to me, Santosh's is one of the most phenomenal ones. Yeah.

Because again, it doesn't make sense on so many levels. One, for this manufacturing engineer

to make up this story of going with this divine being of light and describing the holy city, you know,

with, and he said it was square in shape, just like John said.

But then he also describes hell, which he sees down to his left as a black abyss

this with a lake of fire at the end.

Which, why would he describe it, you know? And then he turns and he sees, like I said,

he knew was Almighty God.

But then they have this conversation. And he feels the tenderness and the mercy

and the love of this God. And that's not what he expected.

He just saw all his sins and he realized, I deserve that. And yet this God has given him mercy

and compassion and grace.

And he knows him. He knows him very well, right? Better than we know ourselves.

And God said, and so Santosh, then he sees what he says. He said, all 12 of the gates that I saw

on this city were closed to me.

But right next to the throne of God, he sees this, what he called a narrow gate

that was open into the kingdom of heaven. Yeah.

And you know, he says to God, he said, I became more bold because I could tell he cared about me.

And I said, Lord, when I come back, I want to go through that narrow gate into your kingdom.

How do I go through that narrow gate into your kingdom?

And interestingly, again, the Lord didn't tell him everything,

but he did tell him this after he kept being insistent.

And the Lord said, because what Santosh was thinking is, you know, where do I go one day a week?

What church or what synagogue or what temple or what? What are the rules? Yeah.

What do I go to? And the Lord said, I want to see how honest, how real you'll be with me.

Not one day a week, but 365 days out of the year. How truthful, how honest will you be with me?

And then he said, the wages of sin is death.

And he said, surrender to me. And Santosh says, I should underline surrender daily,

in your life and walk with me.

And Santosh said, I didn't understand. He said, I come from such a different background.

This this didn't make sense. Like, how do I walk with this giant God?

Yeah. And, you know, he's thinking literally. And but like I said, he comes back and he realizes

everything he'd seen is in the Bible. And and Jesus is that narrow door through which he must

enter the kingdom of heaven. Wow. And he becomes a follower of Jesus. And he's a dear man. He's such

a sweet, dear man. But that story, the reason I come back to that is, it's just, I mean, to me,

that's so evidential on so many accounts. You know, he's describing something that wasn't in

his background. He was a manufacturing engineer who didn't even believe that he said, I believe

I believe that there's nothing after this life.

Maybe you'll come back as some animal or some other person.

But that's not what happened. Wow, that's amazing. So two more questions.

I promise you about 45 minutes, we're right up against it.

So two more things. One, what do you think the point is from God's standpoint?

Like why do some people have these experiences and others don't?

And what are we to learn from it, those of us who haven't had this happen or aren't so sure?

Like, what do you think the point of it is?

It's a great question, Lee, because I've wrestled with that,

because medically, not everybody who has a cardiac arrest, for instance, comes back

and reports a near-death experience.

And I don't know, and no researcher, medical researcher I know, knows why.

My conclusion is that these are testimonies from God.

And even though those people may not believe in God or may not come back and seek God,

there's still testimonies to the reality of the life to come.

And there are testimonies to the reality of the God of all nations, you know,

who wants all his children to come home.

And I believe Lee, that this is all lining up, you know, I mean, I don't know what's happening in the world,

but it sure seems like it's going crazy.

It does.

And wars and hatred and just like confusion and a lot of people are terrified, right? Really scared. Yeah.

And at the same time, and we see this with God, as evil increases,

God also tends to increase his testimony usually.

That's right. Think back to World War II and the Holocaust, the greatest evil against the Jewish nation, surely.

And at the same time, 1948, same time that's happening, we find the Dead Sea Scrolls,

which contain copies of 38 of the 39 books of the Old Testament predating Jesus,

including a complete Isaiah scroll.

To me, if you just study that, that was proof that convinced me

Jesus really was the Jewish Messiah foretold.

But he also regathered Israel in 1948.

And he had said that's what he would do in Isaiah chapter 11 and Isaiah chapter 66.

God said, in the latter days, I am going to take my scattered people and regather them a second

time. The first time, and all this is in the book as well, the first time was during the Babylonian,

reign in about the four and five hundreds. And they were regathered to Jerusalem. The second

Second time they were scattered was after Jesus' crucifixion in 70 AD, and they were

not a nation with no president, no land, no nation for 1,900 years.

And yet, go read Isaiah 11.

God says, as a sign to all the nations of who he is, I will regather my people from

every corner of the earth, from the north, south, east, and west.

And that's what happened in 1948.

A nation was born overnight. Go read Isaiah 66. He says, can a nation be born overnight?

No. Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than I give birth to my people. Celebrate with Jerusalem.

Wow. Now again, I think God is doing this for such a time as this. These medical resuscitations

happening all over the globe, our interconnected world where millions of people are seeing these

stories on YouTube from all parts of the globe. I don't think any of that's a coincidence. Yeah. And so what

I'm trying to do is show but there's biblical precedent to

what they're seeing.

And it's important to go back to what God's revealed throughout history to make sense

of these and to accurately interpret what do they mean and what does that mean for me.

And that's what I hope people get out of Imagine the God of Heaven.

That they'll see that God has been the same all along, but also it breaks open the box we put God in.

Yeah. And you realize he's far more majestic and glorious and holy and beautiful than we've ever imagined,

but he's also more relatable and more personal.

And he's more fun. He's a fun person. He invented fun, right?

He's fun. He created us with that ability. Wow.

That's beautiful. I'm so grateful that you took the time to do this and that your publicist Diana and Pamela reached out to me

and that we can make this happen.

I just have one more thing for you, John. This show is gonna be heard by people

in 160 countries or so, and most of them listen to my show because they're hurting, and they've lost a child,

they're going through glioblastoma, brain cancer, something has hurt them.

That's what my books are all about. How do you process pain? What do you do?

And so, what do you have to say to us as a pastor, as a person who's heard all these people tell us

about who God really is?

Somebody in the middle of it right today, What do you have as a word for us if we're hurting?

Well, one thing, let me just quickly tell you is that if you have lost a child, one of the most

beautiful things that just brought me to tears, and I put their stories in the last part of

Imagine the God of Heaven, of those who saw the children in heaven. And how Jesus said to this one

CEO, he said, do you see my joy? And he was seeing the children playing in heaven. And what he

realized from the Lord what the Lord told him is, I'm restoring their joy.

Yeah. They were taken too early from the earth, but they're experiencing the joy I intended for them.

And you'll see your child again.

Wow. But at the same time, you know, I interviewed Dr. Mary Neal, a spine surgeon who died for 30

minutes and she saw the wonders of heaven and she was held by Jesus and yet when she

came back ten years later, her 18-year-old son was tragically killed.

And she said, and I reacted just like any other mother would, I grieved.

And she said, you know, you can't take away grief. Even knowing the hope of heaven, grief is something we go through, but we don't go through

it alone. That's right.

God is in it with you, and he is the one that wants us to turn to him.

And the pain of the loss, though temporary, is real.

But here's the other thing that I would comfort you with.

You know, another person, the same CEO, Jesus was showing him all the suffering of his childhood

because he went through a ton of suffering.

And he asked him, why are you showing me this? I don't want to see this.

Yeah. And then he had the aha.

He said, were you there with me?

And he looks at Jesus and Jesus has a tear.

You know, people say, well, I thought there were no more tears in heaven.

No, it's life. There are tears. He just wipes them all away. That's right.

And he said, I was always with you, waiting for you to turn to me.

Wow. He's just, he's there. And even if we don't feel him there, he is there.

And when we turn to him in faith and we let him comfort us, he's the comforter, or we let him guide us.

We let him help us with decisions. You know, he really does lead and guide.

And he really does comfort. And in the end, all of that counts for eternity.

Wow. Thank you so much, John. This has been an amazing conversation.

Listener, I can't encourage you highly enough to get the copy of Imagine the God of Heaven.

It's just a wonderful look at who God really is and the ways that we get to encounter him.

And John, you've done a masterful job and I pray great success on the work and on your family.

Well, thank you so much, Lee. Appreciate you having me on. What an amazing conversation.

I'm so grateful that John took the time to be here with us today.

Please check out his book. Imagine the God of Heaven. This is a powerful it's entertaining.

It's enlightening. It's dumbfounding in some places. And it's just I just found myself in awe of some of the stories that he tells,

especially Santos. That's my favorite story.

Let me know what your favorite story is. And the reason I brought it to you, my friend,

is I think that there's good scriptural evidence. If you look at the Bible.

God communicates with people in different ways.

I mean, the prophet said in the last days, old mental dream dreams, your young mental dream visions.

And you recently heard Greg Pruitt on this show who spent years in Muslim countries in Africa.

How many people knocked on his door and said, hey, I had a dream.

They told me to come to this village and come to this hut and find this man who could tell me about a man named Jesus

and I'm supposed to ask who he is.

We've heard many people give witness to the fact that God comes to us in different ways.

He showed up for Peter. He showed up on the Damascus Road for Paul.

And why would you think that he doesn't show up now?

To get people's attention so that they can go back and be faithful witnesses,

so that they can change the eternal arc of destiny for families and cultures.

God never stops looking for you, friend. And that should give you great hope.

And I want you to remember today on Frontal Lobe Friday that the God of heaven loves you.

He is love, and he is light, as all these people say when they meet him.

And he said himself in scripture, God is love and God is light, and God loves you.

And I hope this episode has been helpful for you, friend, because I want you to remember,

you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today. One, two, three, four.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

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