Greg Laurie
speaker
159 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Greg Laurie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so it's almost like my mother engaged in a form of pre-evangelism. She sort of in her way showed me the adult world had nothing that I really wanted. And so the answer must be somewhere else. But unfortunately, the whole drug culture was happening. And I bought into the lie of turn on, tune in, drop out, you know, along with a lot of other young people. Timothy Leary.
Yeah, Timothy Leary, exactly. And I quickly found that wasn't true. And I tried, I smoked a lot, I did those things every day with the And I saved that for weekends. And I had a couple bad trips, and I thought, this is not the direction I want my life to go. And I lived for a time with my grandparents, and they had a portrait of Jesus on their wall.
And I would often look at it as a young boy and think, I wish I could have known Jesus. It's too bad He was merely a historical figure. And somehow I made a connection on my high school campus when there were these kids that were very outspoken for their faith, that were talking about Jesus. We called them Jesus freaks, not meant as a compliment. And I thought they were all crazy.
1952.
Yes.
And that was the year that I, well, I saw these Christians on my high school campus that would sit around at lunchtime and sing songs about God. And I just looked at them and thought, they're all crazy. And then I tried a thought on for size. What if it's true? And I quickly dismissed it as impossible. It couldn't be true because I'd become very cynical because of my upbringing.
I've been so disillusioned by the adult world. But then I tried that thought on again. What if it's true? And there was a guy speaking that it's in the movie, the Jesus Revolution movie that it's shown in the film. Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, plays the role of Lonnie Frisbee, this evangelist who had long hair and a beard, who was speaking that day.
And he made one statement that got my attention. He said, Jesus said, you're for me or against me. So I looked at all these questions. Jesus freaks, and I thought, well, I'm not one of them. Does that mean I'm against Jesus? I thought, well, I don't want to be against Jesus. I believe he's out there. I've seen all of his movies. What I know of him, I have a respect.
But then I realized, but I'm not a believer in this sense. Could this happen for me? And I ended up praying, and that was the day that my life changed. And so coming back to fathers again, my mom had been married and divorced so many times, I had a full-time ministry trying to evangelize my former father, so-called. But, you know, here's what happened.
Yeah.
Norma Jean.
Well, I think it's just that they seem fanatical. They seem extreme, and it seemed too obvious. Like, are you kidding me? Are you telling me that... after my search into all these things, thinking maybe it's in astrology, maybe it's in Eastern religion, maybe it's in drugs, maybe it's in this or it's in that, that it's literally Jesus Christ, that portrait hanging on my grandmother's wall.
Like I never even considered that is what I was looking for, or I should rephrase it, that's who I was looking for. But there it was in plain sight. And so it was, it can't be this simple. That seemed too absurd in a way. Well, yes, but then there was something. Some of these kids, I knew them. I grew up with them. I partied with them, and I saw they were changed.
So I couldn't dismiss them as all being crazy people because I knew them before, and I saw transformation had happened in their life. So I prayed a prayer, and I said, God, if you're real, you need to make yourself real to me because I'm full of cynicism. I'm full of doubt. How old were you at this time? I was 17. Okay. Yeah, but I felt like I was older because I had to grow up faster.
And so I think my life experiences were not the typical 17-year-old, but yeah. Well, especially for that time, because at that time, where'd you grow up? I grew up in California, Newport Beach, Orange County.
No, not really. Not until later, where there was one person, Oscar Lorre. So my mom almost looks like she kept marrying the same guy. They were kind of, you might call them bar flies. You know, the guys that have just a few too many of their buttons on their shirt undone. And they're hanging out in the bar. And so she kept marrying like the same guy in a sense.
And then she met this guy from New Jersey. He was an attorney. He was intelligent. He was educated. He was very conservative. And I don't know what my mother saw in him. He was so different, but he literally took an interest in me. He adopted me. He gave me his last name and treated me as a father should treat a son. So one day- So you had a-
So he was that one bright spot. And then there's a neat connecting story where I was able to reconnect later with him and in a sense, return the favor a little bit. But so he, when I came out of school one day in New Jersey, where we were living at the time, the car was packed up with all of our luggage. And I said, well, where are we going? My mom said, we're going to Hawaii.
I said, well, where's dad? She said, he's not coming. And I didn't see him for the rest of my childhood. So we flew to Honolulu. She had already met another guy who was the most abusive of all of her husbands. In fact, this guy knocked her unconscious with a wooden statue when they were having a drunken fight.
And I climbed out of the window of my bedroom and ran to the neighbors and we moved back to California. But, you know, so this was, I remembered him. And he was someone that was stable. He disciplined me. He gave me an allowance. One time I stole something from a store and he took me down to the jail and introduced me to the prisoners trying to keep me away from a life of crime.
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