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Pete Greig is the Senior Pastor of Emmaus Rd church, and the bewildered founder of 24-7 Prayer, an international, inter-denominational movement of prayer, mission and justice operating in more than 100 countries.
Pete’s books, which are available in various languages and formats, have won the following awards:
+ ‘Dirty Glory’ - UK Christian Book of the year
+ ‘How to Pray’ - short-listed for the ECPA Christian Book of the Year® Award, 2021
+ ‘How to Hear God’ - Best Christian Life Book, 2022, Winner, Resources of the Year, 2023 in the Spiritual Growth category.
+ ‘God on Mute’ has been described as ‘a Christian classic’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Pete’s free, online resources include The Prayer Course - downloaded more than three million times, The Lectio Course, and Lectio365 - a daily devotional with more than 225,000 regular users.
He and his wife Sammy are members of The Order of the Mustard Seed (OMS). They split their time between a barge on the River Wey near Guildford, England, and a cliff top retreat on the Isle of Wight where they host and mentor leaders from around the world. Pete is an Ambassador for the NGO Tearfund, a visiting lecturer for St Mellitus Theological College and one of the founding conveners of the Wildfires festival.
Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Theology Thursday,
and we are bringing you the 2024 Podcast Award nominee for the first finalist.
Yesterday, I brought you back the episode with Maddie Jackson-Smith.
She's going to go head-to-head with today's guest, Pete Gregg,
and we're going to choose the winner to become the first finalist,
who will, in December, go up against the winner of the second half of the year
to determine who's going to win the 2024 Podcast Award.
If you missed Maddie's episode, I played it for you yesterday,
so you can hear that. Listen to Pete Gregg today.
And then over the course of the next week, whoever has the most downloads will
become the finalist to go up against whoever wins the second half of the year.
We've got some unbelievable guests coming up, including one on Monday.
We have an episode on Monday coming up. I can't even believe we're going to
have, and you're going to love it, an incredible guest on Monday.
So look forward for that.
And here we go with Pete Gregg. We are going to choose the winner to give back
something to these incredible people who have spent so much time giving us books
and insight and challenges and thought processes to help us become healthier
and feel better and be happier as we try to go all in, in our faith,
in our life, and in self-brain surgery. Here's Pete Gregg.
Let me know by downloads who you think should be the finalist between Pete Gregg
and Maddie Jackson Smith.
Let's get after it. So today I'm going to bring you back the interview conversation
I had with one of my very favorite authors, Pete Gregg.
He's taught me so much about prayer and three of his books that I've read.
I've read all five of his books now, but three of them that I started with when
I was really struggling.
Every once in a while when you're a bereaved parent, you go through a season
where you feel kind of dry and you can't hear God very well and you feel stuck.
My friend, I hope you enjoy this conversation, this potentially soul-changing,
life-changing, eternity-changing conversation.
Conversation with my favorite prayer resource, Pete Gregg.
Let's get after it. 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, out.
But I remember this episode, I started planning in my mind when I read a book
called God 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 and 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 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 you're 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 doubt her 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 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 that the Lord is going to arrange another opportunity or maybe
more than one an 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 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 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.
First reached out to rachel in november of 2022 um to try to get this done and
then you 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 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 way. 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 alright,
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.
So 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 examine, which, again, is an old Ignatian approach to
prayer. That's taken off. That's that's just gone crazy.
We're translating 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 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.
It went back then. We used to say it went viral. We probably can't say that anymore.
And 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 i'd never seen anyone have
a seizure before let alone that you know the face i loved more than any other
and she bit her tongue there was blood coming out it was it was terrifying 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 he said it's the size of an orange. And for a while they didn't know if
they'd be able to operate. So it was a very, very dark time.
And so we were kind of plunged into this. And then, you know,
we're incredibly lucky.
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 um 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.
She has a very bad kind of seizure. It's 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 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
um i started to realize that the
bible was more honest about suffering than the
church was or is yeah i
started to um relate to
that aspect of god's nature 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 god who suffers with
us martin luther says became the the atheist on the cross. My God,
why have you forsaken me?
Through to Easter Sunday, okay, but very importantly, tarrying at Holy Saturday,
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 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 i just land it here lee you know
what why does a 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 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. You know, 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. and 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 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 lee i don't think I think
it's just about everything bad is Satan, everything good is God.
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.
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.
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 your do his PR for him.
You know, God is not insecure if you ask him a few questions.
And sort of be real with God.
I, in the very darkest days of life,
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 a horrible time.
I remember always thinking, well, I wonder if they have to show them photos
and try and describe who their mum was to them, you know. Wow.
And I know you, Lee, have been through your own absolute shattering heartbreak, you understand.
And so I ended up praying one night. My friend Dan had come round.
Somehow our conversation became prayer. I don't even know. There wasn't a let
us pray moment. We just, it became prayer.
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.
I want my wife to live. I want my kids to know their mom.
And if you have some plan on a heavenly wall planet to take my wife from me,
I'll fight you for her. Wow.
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 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.
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 yeah so um 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 Thank you. I'm not like that other man.
And the tax collector is praying this snotty 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 so so so be real with God. There's many other things I could say,
but that's that's one on one for me.
I love that. And, you know, that's a completely biblical kind of prayer to 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?
Like, remember, he said, what do you want me to do for you? So it's OK.
Tell God what you want. I love that.
And I love I love the way you kind of gave us the tools to process and navigate
through. So listener like you're like, check out that book, God on mute.
It changed my theology, changed my own look at my own suffering.
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?
Look how to pray like that that had to be a little bit nerve-wracking for you
to say hey i'm going to teach people how to pray like yeah it's terrifying and
and especially because remember lee i said i only got into this because i one
day held up my hands acknowledged i was bad at prayer.
As a pastor 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 to work it out and
eventually sammy my wife took me
aside and 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 that that we
like to be you know very self-effacing but the truth is that in 25 years is
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 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 has 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 is everything's a miracle or nothing's a miracle.
I mean, what could be more miraculous than getting out of bed?
This morning is 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 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, I can't remember.
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 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 better than acts
yeah and i just thought i wonder if
we can do something with pray um and we can and it goes like this and this really
works okay i know i don't i'm not really into acronyms i know they can be reductionists
know 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 yeah and so it
goes it goes like this it's super simple Paul, just before you start,
before you stop, before you start, stop,
you know, before you, you know, fill your Amazon cart with all your prayer requests
and ram it into the shins of the Almighty,
just stop, be still, you know, center your scattered senses,
become aware of God.
It's not him that's absent, it's you, it's me.
You know, we, 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 rejoices is 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 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 were 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 god is with me
so take a bit of time rejoicing then the bit
we find easy ask uh 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 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.
She can't talk. She says the word yes very occasionally. No, that's about it.
And my prayer life went like this for her. The start, I was in warrior mode, God healer.
She's in the hospital, God, praying for a miracle. That's where we always start, right?
Then it moved into more of a kind of state which flipped the request for a miracle
from healer to take her home.
Like, this is no life. She knows you.
So my advice to you, God, is this is 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 to bed and say hey let's take
some deep breaths and 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 going.
Calm 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. Oh, please, 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 where you're sort of discouraged from talking about
things that might sound sort of charismatic or 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 the 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 didn't expect
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 if God's unchanging word is, it turns out, is quite controversial for some people.
So um you know i i
can talk at length about that but you probably don't need me to
um so so the the bible is
is that it's 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 then to electio 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, to 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,
so you know how to switch into that limbic system
so you suspend this belief and you become emotionally connected to the movie
that's right and 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 limited 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.
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 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 akoua, 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.
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.
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, that's it.
I've been trying to figure that out for 55 years and you gave it to me on one page. I love it. Yeah.
Yeah. Tell me, can I ask you a question? Of course. Absolutely.
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.
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.
We'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 is 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 always true.
Our feelings are always facts.
And you said that the majority of our thoughts are negative.
Why is that? Why are we so prone towards negative thinking?
Well, I think the evolutionary biologists would say it's a survival thing.
You know, our brain's primary job is to help us not get eaten by the bear,
you know, and help us not get killed by the caveman.
And 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.
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 you're gonna something bad's
gonna happen to you the next day that 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 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, counselor.
Wow. 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?
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 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 that you the more attention you pay
to something the more it stays stuck in that state and 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 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 Instead of saying, okay,
here's how we feel. What can we do to not feel that way?
And so part of the behavioral therapy, 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.
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, hey, 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 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.
So helpful. I mean, this is this is self brain surgery. Yes.
Well, yeah. 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 through
the 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 It's more like Christ.
Oh, that's so interesting. Isn't that interesting?
Yes. And we do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. That's right.
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 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. It's got such big implications.
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 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. point
they know now that that the path from amygdala the
path from hippocampus to amygdala so 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 it only goes
one direction that is oh
this is so interesting it's good
stuff pete this is 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 I mean,
it develops a new mental muscle memory.
That's great. Yeah, I love that. I had a thing recently. I was getting some counseling.
And my counselor, who's great.
She, someone had hurt me a lot. And she was pushing into asking how I felt.
And I realized I felt a little bit angry about it.
And she said, I want you to unpack that more. The more I talked to them,
the more angry I was feeling.
About this person. And I eventually stopped. I said, can I just ask?
I said, at the start, I didn't feel that angry.
This isn't helping. This is making it worse. I'm going to leave this counseling
session furious with this person.
It doesn't feel healthy. And I processed it with Sammy, my wife,
later. She said, yeah, that wasn't the best bit of counseling.
Because numbers of studies now have shown that, for example,
if you do scream therapy, you punch your pillow, you become more angry, not less. That's right.
She said that 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 and mindfulness 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. 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.
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.
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 we're
in a podcast so just going silent and crying isn't going to help much so let
me just say a couple try and say a couple of things i'd love to pray if that's
right afterwards but the the um 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 of,
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 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 midst of the the brokenness, the MRI tube at the funeral.
And, you know, we recently, we had a new couple, lovely couple who had become
Christians, not married yet, living together, had a little baby.
The baby, in fact, we baptized her, the mom, as she was carrying this baby in
her stomach, and she didn't want to go over backwards into the water because
she had lost a number of children, miscarried before.
And so she we she knelt in the water and
we poured water over her head she was so careful about
this baby and um 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 going to cope.
And the funeral, the coffin was the size of a shoebox.
I mean, 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.
Before they knew God, it 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 how hard you find it to hold on to 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 yeah,
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 a 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 just pray for those folks. Okay.
If you're able to do so as 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.
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 Instagram or Facebook, whatever,
Pete Gregg, G-R-E-I-G, weird
scottish spelling uh and then uh
24 7 prayer.com love it
and then the app you mentioned leg to your three absolutely
hey god bless
you and your work keep praying and uh hopefully see you
soon face to face sometime thanks lee god
bless you see you god bless you 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 and so vulnerably put your work
out there and your life out there it's a it's very helpful thank you sammy's
great so people come through the door to meet me and they stay because they
meet sammy that's what i say about lisa like that's awesome hey enjoy your day
thank you so much brother yes see you bye i 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 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.
P. Greg 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. Thank you.
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Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
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It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
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Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
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And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
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Music.