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 after the meal was over, he said, Greg, I'd like to, would you walk with me in the morning? He had to walk every morning. One thing I left out, he was older. He blacked out behind the wheel of his car and almost died. He was having heart issues. So he said, Greg, I'd like you to walk with me. So the next morning he knocked on the door of my bedroom. It's three o'clock.
California time, six o'clock, East Coast time, and we start walking, and he said, I listened very carefully to what you said last night. I said, right, and I'm calling him dad at this point. Yes, and he said, I would like to accept Jesus Christ into my life right now. And I said, well, Dad, let me go over that one more time. And I explained it again. He goes, I want to do that right now.
I said, well, he says, what do I need to do? I said, well, we need to pray. And he drops to his knees. We're in a park at this point. I wasn't going to get on my knees, but he's down there on his knees, so I get down on my knees with him. And I put my hand on his shoulder, and I lead him in that prayer I was talking about, similar to the prayer that I prayed. And he said, pray for my heart.
Pray God heals my heart. Okay, let's pray. So we prayed for his heart. And he gets up and he was so excited. And he said, Greg, I wanna go to my doctor's office and I wanna have him do a check on my heart. I believe God has healed me. I said, well, I don't know if God's healed you. And so we go to his doctor's office later And he's a nice Jewish gentleman. And my dad introduces me.
He says, this is my son from California. He's a preacher. And I just accepted Jesus into my life. And I'm thinking, oy vey, this is like, this doctor's going to think this is crazy. And so they ran tests on my dad and his heart condition was gone and he lived 15 more years. So I lived in California.
I left and I got him a Bible and I came back, oh, maybe three weeks later and I started saying something from the scripture. He'd read the entire Bible already. Because he was always reading, reading, reading. Read the whole Bible. He's quoting it back to me. His life was radically changed. And so, you know, it was really a great thing for me to be able to... Right, right.
To go back and, you know, the Bible says that God can bring beauty out of ashes, right? So, and we, you know, we've had to deal with this because our... Another story about our oldest son, Christopher, died in an automobile accident 16 years ago. So we've dealt with severe pain and suffering. But we've seen how even in tragedy, God can still do amazing things.
And, you know, we're all dealt a hand in life, so to speak.
we don't determine what that hand will be but we have everything to say about how we will react to it what we'll do with it you know we can harbor bitterness and anger we can also choose to forgive uh and you know so i was able to do this for him and i felt when i said return the favor i felt like i was able to say thank you for being a dad for me when i didn't have one
And now let me introduce you to your Heavenly Father, coming back to your original theme of fathers and the importance of fathers. And so that was a beautiful— That's what happens in the Pinocchio story. Why would Geppetto—I mean, the puppet turns into a boy, and the next thing you know, he sends him off to school. Yeah.
It's like, maybe you want to nurture him a little, teach him— Well, he'd give him a foundation, right?
Yes.
It would have been a different life with him.
And in a way, even though I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone, all of those things through process of elimination brought me to that crisis point where I made that step of faith. And if I'd been raised by Oscar Laurie, it would have been a better life. It would have been a safer life. an easier life. But I don't know that that is what would have happened to me.
So you can look back into the Bible says, God cannot cause all things to work together for good to those that love God. And that doesn't mean that everything that happens will always lead to something better. There are things that happen in life that are just awful things. And coming back to my son, you know, that was, I never have thought, wow, that happened. So this good thing will happen.
I see that more as this horrible thing happened to me. I wish it had not happened. If I could bring him back, I'd do it in a heartbeat. However, despite this, now my life has changed. And now I want to help other people who are maybe suffering something similar. You know, the Bible talks about comforting with the comfort that we've been comforted with.
It's been said, you know, if you preach to hurting people, you'll never lack for an audience. And I think it kind of broke me in a new way. And it made me want to help other people who've lost loved ones, especially children, because when it happens to you, you wonder if you can survive it.
I mean, even though I'm a pastor and I have been for 50 years and I've done the services of many children, which are the hardest to do, by the way. And I believed everything I said to those parents. I would say as I would leave that service, I hope that never happens to me because I don't think I could handle it. And it did happen to me.
And instead of being behind the pulpit, I'm sitting in the front row as the grieving father and my wife. as a grieving mother, but I found, interestingly, that when I helped other people, it helped me.
And even when I was closer to the event, when our grief was still very fresh, when I would meet someone that maybe had just happened to them, they lost a child, because people that lose children somehow find each other very quickly. And I would find when I would tell them, you're going to survive this. You're not going to get over it. But you will get through it. And life will be better.
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