Carl Lentz
speaker
537 appearances
7 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Carl Lentz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It was like a really rough night. It was my sophomore year and I was at a party and some really bad things were going down at this party. And I remember distinctly feeling if I participate in this, I might lose my soul. Like I might, I don't know if I can ever, cause at this point I'm still kind of like, I'm trying to do the right thing. And you know,
and falling on my face all the time and just kind of just had God adjacent views. And I just remember going, I can't I can't do this. And I left that party, went home, and my parents took me to a church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and a guy named Steve Kelly was preaching. He's still there. And I'd never heard the gospel presented in that way at the end. And I've heard the gospel a lot.
But the way that he did it just compelled me to go. I want to make a decision to change my life and do this. And I did. I raised my hand, walk up to that altar and it began significant changes. And I went back to NC State and realized I can't be here. Like I'm not going to make it if I stay. I want to I want to begin this new journey. Went home and then ended up going to my dad.
Hey, I want to go study the Bible because I'm like you. I'm a I'm a theology nerd. And I was like, I want to figure this out for myself, because if I'm going to commit my life to this Bible that I don't really believe is. necessarily at this point all true. I want to see this for myself. And that began my discovery journey of just trying to figure out what this faith is for me.
Come out here to California to Church on the Way, which at the time had a really cool seminary. It might still be going called King's College and started my little Bible college journey and got a job here in L.A., worked at Gucci, Rodeo Drive. I lived in a house in Van Nuys and took my little Honda Shadow motorcycle to
through laurel canyon to rodeo drive every day it's my first real experience as a christian was working with all um gay people i didn't even know that you know most christians don't have access or contact with people that don't believe like them at this point i'm 20 i'm like if you're breathing and moving you're a candidate for this good news yeah i loved it like my so that's why i learned quickly on my feet how to explain what i believe to people that were already like
Oh, here's this young Christian dude. I'm like, hey, I don't know why you feel like that, but this is what I know. And so all of my initial relationships were with people really far from God in their mind. And then I heard about Hillsong and ended up going over there to go to a conference and check it out. Loved it.
And then went back and stayed for four years and met my best friends there, met my wife there. Kind of felt compelled to continue to look at ministry as something that could be for my life. And left till song went back to Virginia Beach. We did young adult ministry for like, you know, seven, eight years there. Took a little tiny little thing to something that became really awesome.
And that's when we started realizing, you know, there's something special about all of us. Like you have a special call.
everybody listening has a special call and once you give that to God it's amazing what can happen with it we realize that about us like we have you know we're not like supernaturally gifted or anointed but we're like everybody if we plant our feet God will bless us you know use us and so we started seeing that in Virginia and then at that time Joel Houston who's a phenomenal songwriter he he said meet me in New York I'm up here doing some stuff and I met him up there and he was like
my dad wants to do a church in in america and i'm like where he's like let's do it here in new york and i was like well nobody else should do that but me and you because we know so much like you know early 30s and uh but we were genuinely like man that's a once-in-a-lifetime shot let's go to the the city of church graveyards where apparently nobody wants any piece of this
And let's give it a shot. And so we took our little family. We moved to Brooklyn, New York and started pastoring Hillsong, New York City. And as it grew, you know, our life changed a lot as as as it does with kids. And I loved it all. I love being a part of it. I love what God was doing. We saw hundreds of thousands of people get saved, hundreds of thousands every year.
Like it was it's a real move of God. And throughout that time, I had some stuff that was broken in me. And I didn't know what I know today, which is if there is a crack in your armor, if there is a hidden habit or struggle that you face. and you don't bring it out for somebody to help you wade through, it's not gonna go anywhere. So I got saved and I had a crazy past.
Not crazy, I think I just, I live like a lot of young guys do who don't know Jesus. You like girls, you have sex when you can, and you party. And what that does, what you don't realize is as you step into a new phase of life, Jesus forgives you, saves you, cleanses you, empowers you. And the consequence of your sin, eternity is off the table, but you still have to pay for what you did to a degree.
So for instance, if you had a lot of sex, you're going to have to fix some of your wiring. You're going to have to retrain your mind. You're going to have to get specific help for that. In that time, you know, decades ago, we weren't looking at stuff like that. And so I just kind of trucked through. And, you know, when I found myself in New York at the end of our time there, I
You know, it just was, I was in trouble. I was broken and I was hurting and I was really, really, really scared. And God graciously saved my life again. And some people can call it an explosion, a scandal, a fall from grace, whatever they want to do. Nobody matters when it comes to your story, except for you. That's one thing I've learned in this. I get to frame my own story.
So you can call it what you want, but you don't live my life. So my story about my life is that God saved me again. And had he not done that, I definitely wouldn't be sitting in Van Nuys with you today, with a smile on my face and a family at home that is together. health in my in my mind so it's been a journey bro and I some of the pain I didn't have to go through, but I did.
And what you find is that God can use it all. Absolutely. So to spend any time looking back in regret, it's the most fruitless human emotion we have is regret. So I don't look back. There are times I look back and I can feel sad, but I'm able to frame it correctly again, which is, you know, thank God I learned. And there's going to be stuff that's always going to be sad.
That's the thing about decisions. But Overall, I look at the collective story that God's helping me write about my life. And, you know, it's been an exciting journey.
Yeah. We, at that time, man, like Instagram, it just kind of started being Instagram and we didn't have a whole lot of money to market anything. So we were just like, we're just going to do this super hood style. We're going to, we're going to use Instagram and we're going to get the word out, you know, on the streets.
Showing 421–440 of 537 · page 22 of 27
← Previous
Next →