Veteran Missionary: Why Americans Miss The Supernatural with Dr. Greg Pruett

We got to this village in the middle of nowhere and there's this woman who starts wailing, and I asked the guy, what's wrong with this lady? Why is she wailing like that? Well, her son is dying right now. His chest is just heaving, he's breathing so labored, and then his eyes, his pupils were just huge. And when I shined the flashlight over there, nothing responded. And then all of a sudden I thought, well, you know, this is the pastor, and I'm like a missionary, my wife's a missionary, we're missionaries. We should like pray for this kid. Right. A word for prayer came out of my mouth, and I saw the kid blink at the same time. Hey, welcome back to the Gaining Ground podcast. Excited for today's episode. My name is Landon, and Gaining Ground is all about helping men grow. And we're so thankful for every single one of you that's tuned in to this podcast. We're so excited about your feedback and everything God's doing in your life. So thanks again for tuning in. As always, I've got my co-host with me today. My dad is here. Dad, how are you? I'm great. We've got a great guest in studio with us today. We're going to have a conversation about the supernatural. I think we're going to talk about prayer a little bit too. And I think regardless of if you've been doing this following Jesus thing for a long time, or if you're just like trying to explore it, see if it's even worth it. Maybe you don't even know if you believe in any of this yet. I think this will be a helpful conversation. I think talking about prayer too is so helpful for everyone because all of us have this,

you know, kind of position about prayer that we're just a little bit unsure of sometimes. Right. It is even worth it. And I know for a fact that today's guest has a whole lot to say about it. So join me in welcoming Greg Pruitt. Greg is the president at an organization called Pioneer Bible Translators. So they translate the Bible to the Bibleless people of the world. I'll let him fill in all the details on that. And he's got some incredible stories and he's an awesome man who grows in every single area of his life. So welcome to the Gaining Ground Podcast, Greg Pruitt. I'm thrilled to be here. It's really cool. When I heard you guys were doing this, I thought I got to get in on that. So. Well, you got a lot to offer. You got a lot to offer. And man, you got some expertise in an area that I want to dive into, right? Everybody, probably even regardless of if they would like call themselves a church person wants to know, like, how much does the supernatural actually play a role in my life? Right? Like, what does God see? What does He think? What does He hear? When I say stuff to Him, you know, does He actually hear it? Does it have any effect in my life? I mean, there's a huge interest in the supernatural among people who are Christ followers. Like every time we do a series, it involves like angels or demons. People just come out of the woodwork to watch it and to listen to it. But I think sometimes they're like, they can't really see themselves in that story.

Yes. And speaking of stories, I want to, I want to get to Greg's because I think the context for how he is doing what he's doing is super important, you know, in his journey. And then we're going to get, so Greg, tell us a little bit about you, how you, you probably didn't dream as a little, as a kid of starting a Bible or being a part of a Bible translation organization. Yeah, I absolutely did not want to do Bible translation. So what did you want to do and how did you get to where you are today? You know, I eventually decided that I wanted to do civil engineering and go to Texas A&M University. Yeah, come on. I had an idea. Whoop! I had an idea. So close. Honorary Aggie. The only guy at this table that didn't, didn't go there. Whoops. This is great. I always like to whoop. You know, you know, that is the best part of being an Aggie, the whoops. Okay. So I, I decided that I wanted to do civil engineering because I felt like, you know, that was kind of something I could do and be good at. And then I worked my way through seminary and my wife's way through seminary at Fuller Theological Seminary. And so I kind of became a, eventually my wife was the one who wanted to do Bible translation. Wait, wait, wait. Okay. You got to, you got to slow, you got to slow this down for a second.

Okay. So you were, you were going into engineering and then you decided to go to seminary. What, I mean, there's something that moved you. You were making a ton of money and then decided, I don't want to make any money. Well, the civil engineering doesn't make a ton of money, but I thought, you know, a civil engineering thing that could be really useful as a missionary as well. So I kind of had this passion to be a missionary anyway, to work among the least reached peoples of the world, you know, Muslims specifically, somehow God just kind of put that on my heart and I thought I could go somewhere in the Muslim world and be a civil engineer. That was my, my idea. And my wife came along and she was absolutely dead set on pioneer Bible translators. Mark Worley put her onto it when she was like a senior in high school. And she was like, we're, you know, I'm going to be a Bible translator. And basically, she wanted to be a Bible translator. I didn't want to be a Bible translator. And so we compromised, and we became Bible translators. It's kind of that. You get marriage, man. That's how it went. You know, that's a theme a bunch of guys that listen to this podcast, I think, probably. Yeah, exactly. And then later, I figured out, okay, so basically, this is actually what I'm designed by God to do. And so she turned out to be right, and now there's no living with her because if she was right about that, I mean, I would have missed my whole, the whole point of my life if I had not listened to her.

And now, you know, if she's right about that, she could be right about anything. So at that point, you know, it's definitely an impact. Our stories are similar, because just a long story short, when I, like, before I came to Compass, I got offered an opportunity in Colorado, and I wanted to go to Colorado, and Michelle wanted to go to Texas. I wanted you to go to Colorado, too, if I remember correctly, being like a six-year-old. Colorado would have been a lot cooler. I think you did. Yeah. And I ended up coming to Texas because my wife wanted us to come to Texas, and I'm so glad we came to Texas now. So you kind of get the feel for it. You got the feel for it. I feel you. The Lord speaks to the women sometimes, and you're like, you listen, blessed art though, and if you don't, you got trouble. Okay, so what is Bible, I mean, Bible translation is, you're suggesting, there are people that don't have a Bible in their language, right? I think that'll be surprising to some people listening. A lot of our men probably don't know that. Yeah, I think most Americans don't realize

there's like 7,800 languages documented in the world, and literally, most countries have 35 or even 400 languages, depending on the country. There's like a half an island of Papua New Guinea. This has how many languages, depending on the country? So like a country the size of New Mexico might have like 35 languages. Yeah, why? Because, well, you know, it's kind of how, anytime you separate people in history and 400 years goes by, that's two different languages. So- All right, that makes sense. People fight, there's wars, there's minority peoples, and they get chased up into the mountains, and their language sticks that way, and the people on the plains, you know, there's no rivers, that all becomes one language. People on the other side of a mountain or the other side of a jungle or the other side of a river, that's a separate language. Papua New Guinea, there's like 800 languages on just that half of the island, in Indonesia, Papua. Very confusing island. Yeah, I mean, it's like these deep valleys and high mountains and really dense jungles, and everybody there, well, you know, in history, people had a tendency to kind of fight with bows and arrows,

and they would, you know, it was like a reciprocation. So, you kill one of ours, we kill one of yours, maybe we eat yours, you know. So, that kind of thing makes like languages about- Like cannibalism? Yeah, I mean, that was a thing back then, and so there's like 1,000 people speak one language, and then the next valley over, 1,000 people speak a different language. Have you ever been around cannibals before? No, not really. No, okay. Can I ask one question? You said that you kind of had a heart to reach Muslim people. And I think just because of the way media, you know, represents Muslim people in America, I'm just saying, what do you, like, could you give us a sense, like our listeners, a sense of what your experience was just meeting people who were of the Muslim faith? Sure, you know, it's totally different than, I mean, there's a, you know, what is it, one, almost two billion Muslims. So, they're not all the same. And then, you know, there's a lot of content in Islam that might lead somebody toward a violent version of Islam. Radical version. So, if you, you know, if you get really into the contents of the Quran and the Hadith

and all these other holy books that they have, you might become radicalized from that. But most people, it's just a practicing of the five pillars of Islam, which is normal stuff you would expect in a religion like fasting and praying. So, that's their experience of Islam, is not about- Muslim people are very peaceful. No, they're just practicing their fasting and praying and giving to alms to the poor and those kinds of things. But there are, you're saying there are tenets of the faith that if you, you could be radicalized by it. If you dig into it, absolutely, it's all there. Yeah. So. Okay, all right. So, you went, you've gone to a bunch of different countries, some of which I've never even heard of, and you started translating the Bible. Okay. My guess is, and this is, Greg, by the way, has two books, Extreme Prayer and Extraordinary Hearing. You can get both of those on Amazon. I have them. Right here, I have Extreme Prayer, Extraordinary Hearing. I've read them both. They're excellent books. I've read this two or three times. So like I wrote that first one when I became the president of Pioneer Bible Translators

and I couldn't even get in the front door of a church. And I thought, well, you know, people who write books, sometimes they get invitations to preach. So let's try that out. And so what we were doing at the time was we had decided that we would organize the entire ministry around praying the kinds of prayers that Jesus promised he would answer with unlimited power. And so that became kind of like our whole thing in Pioneer Bible Translators was that. And so that's the study of like, what did Jesus promise he would answer with unlimited power? Okay, and I wanna dive into that. My guess is this book came out of desperation or hardship or the realization that you couldn't do this thing on your own, right? When you wanna translate the Bible to Bibleless people in the world, if you're a Christian, then part of your faith structure is that there's opposition. There's someone who doesn't want that to happen and you've probably encountered hardship and may not always look like cannibals like you mentioned, but there's a bunch of different stuff. So talk to me a little bit about that journey, right? What is like, what did it look like to have supernatural opposition? And then if that's the defense to use a sports metaphor, what's the offense? And what does that look like in everybody's life today?

So like, I worked for 12 and a half years in a small village in an ethnic group in Guinea, West Africa. So it's like a group called the Yalunka. You know, there's like 100,000 of these people that speak this language and 99.9% Muslim. So, you know, when we went over there, I got pretty comfortable living in that setting. You know, it's kind of like National Geographic Magazine, you know, where like, it's just, my whole neighborhood was around mud huts, grass roofs, back then it was, and they've since then kind of gradually swapped them all out for tin roof, you know, square houses. But back then it was all, it was like, if you picture like a village in your head, you're probably not off. And I loved it. I mean, I got really good at hunting warthogs and, you know, fixing my own washing machine. We lived off, absolutely. What'd you kill it with? Well, I prefer the .30-06. Ah, every redneck in here just said, amen, come on, every deer hunter's dream, let's go. There's nothing quite like shooting a .30-06. So, but I had that because people had brought it across the border. There was a war across the border. You know, you might've seen the movie, Blood Diamond. Yep.

That was my neighborhood. We lived right across, Are you serious? right across the border from this war. Oh my gosh. And, you know, they're over there. Blood Diamond. Like, you know, we would go into town to buy bread and it's, you know, 25 minutes drive away. And there's people all over town with one arm missing or one leg missing because these rebels are across the border terrorizing people, cutting off arms and legs. And that's, that's where we live. So when we talk opposition, that's what you're talking about? We could hear the artillery shells from our house at night. Okay. And out of that came this idea of extreme prayer. So let me ask you this question, then we'll get to prayer. What is, what is every, he mentioned, dad, you mentioned everybody loves the supernaturals. Anytime we talk about that in church, it's a big deal. What does that actually look like practically? Like we talk about Jesus and how he's conquered death in the grave. And I believe all those things because the Bible says it.

And I've experienced it in my own life. But can you walk us through just like a framework for what the supernatural, both good and evil, how that works right now? So now it can be experienced. You know, our Western culture has not done us any favors in believing the Bible because at some point we taught people that only what you can see and touch and prove is real. And there are no unseen powers really impacting your life. And if there are no unseen powers really impacting your life, then there is really no impact that God has on your life. And it really just stripped the spirituality right out of Western European and United, you know, American people almost all the way. But in fact, like sometimes in church, it kind of makes me sad sometimes when people claim to have like an experience of the supernatural. Other people, other Christ followers will say, they're kind of weird. Yeah, it's like, well, it must be your imagination. You know, why would you even talk about that? God's never said anything to me. But if you read the Bible, it's not like that. Right. I mean, the supernatural is just like right there, and the rest of the world functions in that domain, where they have personal experience with demons, they have personal experience with angels or unseen powers, things that are impacting them, and they also believe in God. So it's a lot more like what you read in the Bible.

So I guess, you know, people here, once you've sort of turned your back on thinking about those things, it doesn't matter what, you know, it doesn't matter what you encounter or experience, you can only see what you expect to see. The things in your worldview kind of filters out any kind of data that doesn't match. You see on the news some kind of inexplicable thing, and instead of saying, wow, I wonder if there's an unseen power going on here, they'll just say, well, there must be some rational explanation. And that's our worldview foundation coming out into conversation, and that worldview foundation does not put us in good standing to understand the Bible and to practice a spiritual life. So for the guy that's listening to this right now, there's an opposition to anything that is Jesus-centric in his life, correct? Yeah. So what people don't, you know, people don't think there's angels, and consequently also they don't think there's any demons. And they're, you know, what could be more vulnerable than somebody in the middle of a spiritual war, they don't believe in the enemy. I mean, they're just, they're just taking bullet and bomb after bullet and bomb, and they just, like, that's weird, man, why is all this stuff happening in my life? You know, they're like, what happened to the… Or they blame it on God. What happened to the youth minister, you know, getting addicted to porn, and how did the elders get into a big row, and how did this happen, and what's, what could he possibly explain this? You know, think about the guy who climbed up in the top of a hotel and, and, like, wounded 400 people in Las Vegas all those years ago, and there's no, never been any explanation for that. Right. You think, wow, that's so weird. Why would that happen?

You know, well, there's evil. Evil. Yeah. Well, put the words in Google, school, and see how many suggestions down it is school shooting. It's like four. Why in the world would going into a school and shooting children be even a thing? But I think ultimately we all know that there's evil. We can tell. It's felt. We can tell. But our culture doesn't equip us to know how to, to deal with it. So how, how have you dealt with it then? Right? I mean, like, we said earlier, extreme prayer was a, it was an answer to a problem you were experiencing. The problem of evil in the world, you're going, oh my gosh, you know, you're seeing people with their arms chopped off in the middle of a civil war in the bush, and then you're reading this stuff in the Bible and saying, wait a minute, there's a way to fight back against this. Right? Yeah. I guess that would be, I mean, you know, it's a whole lifetime of trying to figure out what in the world's going on. So, you know, that would be a short version. Okay. So tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me how you got there. Okay. Um, you know, an early experience I had, we, we got to this village in the middle of nowhere in this, uh, there's this woman starts wailing.

And I, I asked the guy, one of the few guys who could speak French, this was before I spoke the language. I said, Hey, what's wrong with this lady? Why is she wailing like that? And he said, well, her son is dying right now. And I said, well, where is he? And they said, well, we took him out to the witch doctor for treatment, but you know what? We'll go get him and you can treat him. I was like, wait, no, what? And so they bring this kid back from the bush and they, they call me in and I go with the pastor and Rebecca and we walk into this dimly lit hut and this kid's laying there and he's, his chest is just heaving, you know, he's breathing, uh, so labored. And then his eyes, his pupils were just huge. And when I've shined the flashlight over there, nothing responded, there was no sign of any kind of reaction. And I thought, okay, you know, I've watched enough emergency TV. This is bad. People's fixed and dilated. That means something. I'll have to look it up later. You know? So that's the kind of thinking I'm doing at this moment. And I'm like, well, you know, it could be maybe cerebral, cerebral malaria, but I don't know how to give an unconscious kid the malaria pills I have at the house. And, you know, well, you know, I hope it's not meningitis cause I don't have any medicine for that. You know? And then all of a sudden I thought, well, you know, this is the pastor and I'm like a missionary. My wife's a missionary.

We're missionaries. We should like pray for this kid. Right. The word prayer came out of my mouth and I saw the kid blink at the same time. I thought, you know what? We need to hurry up and pray for this kid because I think God's already healing him. And we prayed for him and by that night he was fine. And that was the kind of the first moment where I realized, okay, so like this might work. God is real and I didn't really fully know that. And he doesn't want us to wait, like leave him for some sort of last ditch effort. If everything goes completely off the rails and everything we try fails, what if we pray? That's our normal weird position as Christians, whereas God's like, you could start with that. It's become a last resort. It's just, it's just a weird idea that we don't need to have it that way. So that was just like on the, on the positive side, I began to see God move in power to answer prayer. And then, you know, I remember doing like a whole couple of months long sermon series on casting out demons and, you know, praying for healing. And so people started coming from all around the area with sick people and demon possessed people and we started praying for him as a church. And we really saw some powerful healings and, you know, people with chronic headaches. This one, this one lady come up to me like years into my ministry. She comes up to me and she says, Hey, do you remember me? I was, I was blind. And you gave me some medicine and I, and I, and I got better, you know, I was like, Oh, you were? Well, what did it look like? And she was like, she starts asking people around her.

Hey, do you remember that medicine? What, what did it look like? I was like, Oh yeah, you were blind. You really were blind. Like you had no idea what it looked like because you couldn't see it. And so I prayed for her, gave her like vitamins or something and she, she can see now. And I'm like, so the vitamins get the credit, you know. Great, give her Flintstone vitamins. I'm like, I don't have, I don't have, now I can see medicine. I don't have anything that, well, I don't think there is now you can see. So I would like give people vitamins or worm medicine or something and I would pray for them and they would be healed and they would think, Oh man, that was good medicine. What'd you give me? I'm like, there's so much to the supernatural. I mean, you have any stories that are just like, wow, you know, amazing demon stories, that kind of stuff. I do. Way too much to just go into in one podcast, but I'll give you, I'll give you one, probably like the quintessential, like I was one day I was up cleaning the, the algae out of my water tank, you know, up on my roof and a guy comes over and he says, Hey, a guy I grew up with lives over at this other village, you know, it's six kilometers away. And he says, I went over there and this guy, they've got him chained up and he is, you know, he is just like, well, you know, out of his mind. I walked into the room, this is the pastor's, I walked into the room and he looked at me and he said, Jesus Christ has come to save me. And he said, well, could you loan me your vehicle and we'll drive down there and we'll pick this guy up and bring him back. So they got, they got all these, you know, three or four really strong guys to hold him down. So he wouldn't kick out the windows in the car.

They drove over there and they put this guy in the back of the truck, in the back of the Land Cruiser and he's like kicking everything and they're holding another guy, they've got a guy sitting on him and, and they drive in the six kilometers and they get him into the, kind of the area right next to the church where the, the old pastor's huts are and stuff. And they, they put him in one of those huts in there. And this guy, he said that he had gone, I can't remember if it was like, like 10 days where he couldn't eat any food, like no food or water would go through his throat. And so he is, he was like, just get a little bit, just a little bit of trickle of water or something. But basically he couldn't, he said his throat was closed and some kind of demonic experience where he couldn't swallow anything. So he's just, basically the whole town over there was just waiting for him to finally stop screaming and die. And they took him to the, this hut and they prayed for him. And he said, you know what, you can let me go now, I'm better. And they're like, no way, we're not letting you go. There's no way. And he's like, no, no, seriously, like, I feel a lot better now, like you could, you could let me go. And they said, well, if you're feeling better, you know, how about, like, could you eat something? And they're like, he's like, I think I could. And so by the time I got down there to pray for this guy, they were just literally shoveling rice into this man's mouth, like a baby bird, just like big piles of rice, just shovel, and he's just, he's eating like I've never seen anybody eat. He's just dying to eat. And we prayed for him, and he became basically like one of the members of the church. Wow. He became like just as sane as any of the rest of us. And you know, we went back to the village where he lived when he had kind of finally gotten strong again and gotten better.

One Sunday afternoon, we were like, hey, you know, let's go over and we'll hunt monkeys in Lye's hometown, because that's how we roll in West Africa on a Sunday, like, let's go check out hunting monkeys, you know. So we go back to town where this guy lived and where he, last they saw him, he was screaming. They had to chain him to the ground, you know, he was trying to run off. He was, he said in his own words, he couldn't see human skin without trying to bite it. So like, if you got close to this guy, he would try, literally try to bite you. And we show up with this guy, we're going to go hunting, and he gets out of the car and everybody, the whole village just surrounds the car and they're all just staring at this guy. You can just see on everybody's face. They don't trust it. They're like, how did this happen? How is this guy fine now? And what does Jesus have to do with this? Who is Jesus? And how is he so powerful that you could just take him over there and pray for him and he's fine now? Yeah. At the name of Jesus, demons flee. That's amazing. We have a lot of experiences where casting out demons and people losing their minds because they're just getting mixed up in some evil stuff. Even people dying in that state. It's just fascinating. Who needs Netflix, right? Yeah. Amen. Okay. So one of the things I think that I'm thinking through is like, there's a gap for people

and you already alluded to this, Greg, in like what they see and experience in the Bible, specifically the New Testament. And then their life, right? Where there's a, or you even have people that are like in our church and they go over to Africa or India or some other foreign country, you know, not in the Western world. They're like, oh man, you know, God just moved in a way that I've never actually seen before. Why does it feel that way? I think it's kind of like when, you know, there's a couple of times when Jesus says, and he was, where the Bible says, and Jesus was amazed. In one case it's by their faith, in one case it's by their lack of faith. And I feel like the lack of faith one is his hometown. And maybe we've just become Jesus's hometown. You know, we just don't, we just don't believe he'll do anything. We just treat him a little too familiar, familiarly. Like we're decent. Yeah, it's just Jesus. It's just Jesus. You know, whereas in other places, when Jesus shows up for the first time and he's just working miracles, that doesn't have to be the exception. It doesn't only have to happen in Africa. Like it could happen in Colleyville, but where it's our lack of faith, it's like if you even just had a mustard seed, you could do this. Jesus said, anyone who has faith in me will do the things that I am doing. So he didn't say like anyone who's like a super Christian or anyone who's an apostle. He said, anyone who believes in me will do the things that I am doing. And then he says, he will do even greater things than these, because I'm going to the father and I will do whatever you ask in my name. So one of the big parts of that is, are you doing anything consistent with the will and the nature of Jesus Christ in your neighborhood? And if you're not, you probably won't see Jesus do anything.

But if you are, you'll see great answers to prayer. Can you unpack that a little bit? Like I've heard you give that talk before, Greg, and it's awesome. And I actually think it's the framework for extreme prayer, that phrase, in my name. Can you walk us through like a few times Jesus does say that? This is like five times right before he is crucified. Five times. In John. And how can we use that to fuel a prayer life, whether that's something that currently exists or we're just starting? So the assumption that people might not have is that they were created for something. You know, like they have a, there's a point to their lives. and God is the one who gets to decide what that point is. It's like he's a craftsman and he's working and he creates each person and he's like, I'm gonna work through these people to accomplish my purpose. And so everybody, you know, people fail to realize how significant they are and how important it is that they discover this special purpose that God has kind of built into their capabilities and their gifts and how he will use them. So the point is, you know, like when you pray in Jesus name, that's not just like adding a magical formula at the end, but Jesus's name in the Bible names mean something a lot and Jesus's name means salvation. And so, you know, when we're ushering in to the presence of Jesus, our neighbors, or the people at work, when we're representing Jesus, whenever we're acting consistently

with the character of Jesus in our workplace, we're beginning to realize the created purpose that God made us for, and we'll begin to see power in prayer. I think that, I think when I go through periods of my life where I'm lacking in my prayer life, and that happens from time to time, there's seasons where you tend to not disregard prayer, but it's like you get busy with life. Absolutely. You're so busy, it's like, oh, I'll pray when I get time. Last response, not first response. Yeah, what I've learned is that's the time I'm most vulnerable to be prideful. And the reason I say that is I think prayer, when I have a good prayer life, I'm in a good prayer rhythm, I feel like I'm letting God know that, man, I need you. There's a perspective. There's a dependence there, yes. And you talk about in your book, Extreme Prayer, you just say something simple, all good prayer begins from a position of weakness. And I think that, I love that because it reminds me, man, I need God every day in my life, so I should be seeking him out in prayer every single day. By the way, just one quick thing, man, if you're trying to figure out where to start, this book, it's a pretty quick read, Extreme Prayer. It's on Amazon.

And I'm telling you, this changed my life as it comes to prayer, as it pertains to my prayer life. And I think it can change your life too. But talk a little bit about that. All prayer comes from a position of weakness. Okay, so like the first chapter of the, the first story in that book is about a really bad moment, or a really bad maybe year at the beginning of our ministry. And you know, we became missionaries because we thought we were really good people, you know, but it turned out we weren't. But later, you know, maybe we learned a little bit more about it. So like when you go overseas and you just show up in this village setting, and then, you know, you've got, you have your first child, your child's not sleeping at night and you're just exhausted. We called it sleep depraved, you know, where you don't have any sleep, so you just act like a lunatic. Yeah, there's some tired heads listening right now. There's no, and you can't go like medicate your stress and your anxiety with going to a movie. There's none of that. People say, well, for your marriage, you need to be sure to keep date night, you know. There's no date night.

I mean, there's no restaurants where there's no, there's nowhere to go. We tried, like we would like go out into the bush and drink a hot coke on a blanket and ants just pour over the, these are African ants and bees and stuff. This is not okay. It just wasn't cool. It wasn't working out. So like, you know, you're just stripped away of all of those things. And so that moment, we were just like basically yelling at each other, you know, it wasn't, we were not being good missionaries. And I got to the point where literally I decided, I just walked out the door and I was never coming back. I was just going to become Tarzan, you know, just go out into the bush and just never, never come back. I literally walked off and it took me a couple of hours before I even started to feel like I had walked a long ways. I mean, I was just walking as fast as I could. So mad, so furious, I think with God. And I got way out there and I realized it's getting dark. I'm like hours from my house. So I started to kind of like do the math on that. I was like, I'm going to be eaten alive by mosquitoes if not leopards or something else. There's no lions there, but leopards there. You know, I started thinking I'm in trouble.

And then I started to kind of hear the road again. basically I had walked down one river and gotten to the point where two rivers come together and walked up the other river and ended up back at the road and just walked over to my house and walked in like nothing had happened. I was like God, I don't know how you did that but I'm glad I'm not outside right now. It's kind of humiliating and you had to come to the end of yourself a little bit. But we got to the point where we were we had to make a decision. The only reason we say this in joking, there might be some truth to it, the only reason we didn't just like leave the mission field is because we were so far from the airport and neither one of us wanted to get in the car and drive like you know a whole day with the other sitting next to him and so we were like you know it's a good thing we're just this far from the airport and we decided okay let's just take a week to pray about you know we had basically decided we're gonna quit being missionaries and get a divorce you know why not you know at this point we're that bad off. And then we said okay but instead of doing that what if we just take a week to pray. So we went to this cabin, a place where missionaries had made these cabins up in the mountains, a little cooler up there. We thought we'll just pray up there. Our child immediately got sick, Rebecca got sick, we spent the whole week me cleaning up all the sick and yeah prayer nothing could happen in that setting you know so we got back in the car and we're driving home and we had the best prayer time driving from that place to our house and nothing was the same. Like we were so desperate, so absolutely dependent on God at that point and there was nothing we knew there was no strength left in us and that's when God really stepped in and changed everything. You know one of the things that God's been teaching me in my life people ask me all the time and I get a chance to spend a lot of time in prison through God Behind Bars and people you know people ask what you know what's it like and and they're probably the same way you do Greg with missions it's like you know is it scary to go in there and who are the people you've met and here's what my answer is. I've met more people who are

physically incarcerated like they get walked they have no freedom they get walked to their cell they get told when to sit when to stand when to go to the bathroom even and yet they are more spiritually free than most people that I meet on the outside and I know that's surprising to hear and I think the reason is real simple they had to come to the end of themselves like they had to acknowledge their weakness because it was everything was actually stripped away from them and they had to make a decision like when you screw up and and their noses is pressed in there the like the reality of the decision that they made in the sin they committed that landed them where they are 24 hours a day seven days a week and they had to make a decision when I screw up am I gonna run from God or am I gonna run to God. Yeah when you get down to the basic element like there is nothing left of me there's nothing left of me what am I gonna do and I'm gonna run to him and I'm actually gonna trust him. If you make that decision to put yourself in God's hands you will show up. Yep. That moment is when you show up. And and what's crazy about it to me is that's not every person in prison they're still grumpy sour upset angry people who refuse to run towards God they're running from him and then there are those that had everything taken from them and yet they experienced the power of God every single day and and and you can't have that unless you come to the end of yourself and I think that's hard for guys to to get there sometimes because we want to be strong you know mm-hmm but second Corinthians says my grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness. It's hard to admit weakness I have such a value on strength. Yep. You know I'm out there trying to build my strength and trying to you know get good at whatever. So how do you you say pray in Jesus name right and that and the name means something it's not just a magic phrase it's something that's congruent with his spirit and will. How do you how do you do that? What are some common examples of maybe what that would look like in the daily life of somebody listening to this podcast? I think most like like Drew was saying it's very hard to build out that spiritual life consistently and you know anybody who's a professional they know there's

consistency is important you really gotta you've got to build that consistency but what happens is people think about it like a discipline like you know running or something they're thinking yeah you know prayer prayers a spiritual discipline it's like it's like running and you kind of treat it like that and the problem is I hate running. Exactly. That's, we hate discipline. Running's terrible. Okay, so we should. I've never actually tried it. I don't know if it's terrible or not. I think it fits better in the category, in a different category. But even most pastors, like when you preach about prayer, you're going to preach in a spiritual discipline series. So you're saying it might be different than that. I know that spiritual disciplines is a thing. But when we're under pressure, we don't rise to the level of our disciplines. We fall to the level of our habits. It has to be habits. It has to be bulletproof habits. If you've ever had a really bad, bad habit, it's almost impossible to break. A good habit is as powerful as a bad habit, but on the good side. So you talk about tenacious prayer. It builds faith and minimizes pride. You talk about that in your book. Yeah. What's an example of tenacious prayer? Yeah. How do you do that? Well, I mean, it's going to sound really simple for me anyway. Simple's good, but I like simple. It's just building a pattern into your life. Like I find the best, the best pattern is in the morning. But there's like these inflection points in your day. I go to work. I come, I eat lunch. Like basically every single day of my life so far, I have woken up in the morning. So that's the most consistent part of the day, right? Yeah, I like that. So like if you hang a pattern, if you hang a habit on the start of the day and you kind of like figure out, okay, I'm going to have a particular chair that I go to. It's going to have my Bible next to it. And you just sort of like build the environment around this habit. You've got your reading glasses if you're over 50 like I am. You've got everything you need is sitting right there. You wake up in the morning and you've done this 60 times in a row. When you get under stress, it's not going to stop. Yeah. Because you're going to have this as just this is what you do in the day. I have a spot. It's a pattern, right? We have our dining room table. I sit there and I can see the fireplace. And when it's cool enough, I have the fire going. I have coffee. That's how I start my day. Make a coffee pot. I'm on the way there. If you get that habit going,

then that's basically everything. Yeah. So how do you suggest to somebody who doesn't have that habit? How do you build it? Obviously, your suggestion, at least in part, is start in the morning, but pattern. At first, it's going to take some discipline to start. Okay. And then it's going to take repetition. Then you're going to want to like have a plan for when you fail. You're going to be like, okay, if I mess up in the morning, I'm going to run out the door and I'd forget my normal pattern. You know what I'll do? I'll just read a verse at lunch and that'll be the replacement for it. So you have how to reestablish or how to fix it when it's broken. Got a little backup plan. Got a backup plan. And you just start doing this. If you do it 60 times in a row, it's done. But if you only do it 12 and you get off track, the question is how do you get back on track? So that it just kind of starts building over time. Greg, can you talk about, because I think this is one of the most helpful things in your book and this whole topic is like, so one of the hardest parts about prayer is like, how do you know what to pray for? And what does God care about and what does he not care about, right? And do I have the right words? And I remember like in youth ministry, it was always like a punishment in a small group of the kid who had to pray, right? You get freaked out about it and it's intimidating. If you ever want to be like that guy, just write a book on prayer. There you go. Because you have to pray no matter what. You'll always be the one they say, hey, let's have the prayer guy. Oh, that's what it's like being a pastor where you're in a random place. Like it's like a Super Bowl party and you're standing there and everybody's already eating, but they look at you and you're like, oh, would you like to pray? There's something special about the pastor. Pastor, could you pray? If they only knew that, you know, like I used to think, oh, you know, someday I'll be such a good Christian that I won't have to, you know, repent anymore. Oh, no, no. I'm just as bad as I've ever been. I have to every day confess, every day repent. But I love to think about this, like, okay, so let's think about, and this is just how my brain works. Jesus is pretty clear in the Bible about what he cares about, right? What is encouraging to his heart? I remember one time, Greg, you told me like prison ministry is near and dear to the heart of Jesus.

So if you pray about things consistent with his nature, he's a good father and he wants to give that to you, but you have to ask, is that right? Yeah, I think you have to start by knowing a little something about Jesus. So, like, you can be guided in your prayers by reading a little bit of the Bible first, and then you're like, okay, you know, this is God's word. Every morning I'll do a little bit of reading, and I'm reading for two things. One, to find something to obey during the day. Like, what am I going to change about myself today? What adjustment? Because, like, if you're only one degree off today, you know, 20 years from now, you're way off. So, you know, you need that every single day adjustment, but also to figure out, okay, who is this Jesus? What is he like? What is he not like? And then talk to him about the stuff that you read in the Bible. If it's just like, I read this for knowledge, and I learned about Jesus, that's not early enough to keep you going, because sooner or later you're going to be like, I know enough. I don't need to read that anymore. Right? But this thing is alive. The Bible is alive, and the Holy Spirit comes to us when we read these words and teaches us stuff. And if we pray about the things we see in the Gospels, the things we are learning about, we say, Lord, I see here that you want me to take care of poor people. I think I know one way I could obey that today. And you just try to figure out, how can I obey the Bible today? You're reading along in Deuteronomy, and you're like, man, I don't know what to do here. I'm not going to sacrifice a goat. But you come to a part where it's like, but, you know, God loves the foreigners, God loves

the poor, and, you know, you're supposed to take care of and give to the poor. You know what? I could probably figure out how to give to the poor today. I could do that. Could you also relate that to, like, your family? Absolutely. I think one of the things that I loved about being a Bible translator when I was working like eight hours a day in the Bible, it made me a better father. Even like if I was just doing the mildew chapters in Leviticus, at the end of the day, my kids had a better dad. Somehow, I couldn't even tell how it was working. Even if it's just you gained perspective about something. Something changed inside of me, and I treated my wife better. This is what a lot of people, guys, guys don't understand about reading the Word of God. He's just hit on something, Greg's just hit on something. Not only do we find things to obey, but we also, it also gives us a prayer to say, like, because like if I'm reading something in the Bible and I was like, Lord, this is an opportunity, I can be kind to the poor. You know, there's your prayer. Father, send someone into my life today. Help me to find a way to obey this and be kind to a poor person today. Send me one person that I can be kind to today. Or if it says, you know, be holy as I am holy, or there's a little something about purity. You're like, I could do a lot better in this area. In my mind, I am thinking in pure thoughts more often than I would like to admit. Let's take that down. Let's just kill it. I'll be helping not to hold that thought captive. Yeah. Right.

And so you're just like, Lord, today, I see here that purity of mind is important to you. I would like to have a pure mind, but I don't know how to do it. Could you show me today something about a little bit more pure mind? Yeah. And you just pray about something that you read in the Bible. And even too, I think about people that are struggling in marriage, and we just spent the better part of the last month talking about marriage. Paul's advice in Ephesians chapter 5, that's a prayer that God wants to answer. I love that sermon. It's a good one. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, it was a good one. The one you gave. I think so. Yeah. No, no, no. I did the sex one. Didn't I? I think you did that one. You did that one. I don't remember. You did that one, Drew. You did that one, Drew. I always know what sermon I'm about to preach. I can never remember the ones I just preached. It's like, they're done. Yeah. That's, you know what? Actually, now that I think about it, you preached all the, like, you know, man, love your wives

as Christ loved the church. You gave me the one on purity and sex, and you were mysteriously gone that week. What's funny is I gave that to you, and I said, hey, do you want to do one of the marriage messages? Yeah, Dad, I'd love to do that. I said, I'd love to, too. I'd love to. That's great. Okay. And then, like, a couple weeks later, he's like, wait, wait. This is about sex. This is how- I mean, you've been married 10 years. You know a little bit about it. You got to watch the, those of us who are a little older, been around the block a few times, we know how to stick it to the young guys. One funny moment, and then I want to draw us back to this conversation. I was on a Zoom call with my 85-year-old grandmother yesterday for her birthday. Awesome. And she, she, look, she's your grandma, right? When nobody's in your corner, your grandma's going to be in your corner. And so after I preach, she'll send me a message sometimes. She told me, she goes, hey, I just want you to know you haven't lived till you've heard your grandson preach to you about sex. That's so great. He's 85. Wait, wait. And I just, I don't even want to think about that. That's, that's so bad. Okay, since we're at a light moment,

I just have to know, does warthog taste good? Oh man, it's fabulous. Is it? It's the other. It's probably just like I would think wild hog and it's the other white meat. In Texas. It's the other other white meat. But, I mean, the guys know how to cure it and smoke it and all that. Man, it is so good. Okay, good. It is so good. It's just lean, lean, real white like fish. They're mean, right? Warthogs are mean? Well, they've never been mean to me. I've always been the one with the 30-06. Okay, so you've had the upper hand. Yeah. So you killed Pumbaa several times. Absolutely. Okay. Hey, this is, so one of the things, you know, we started this conversation about the spiritual realm, supernatural, and Greg, you made the point that like all the evil in the world or those seasons in life where it just feels like, hey, the hits keep on coming. What I'm hearing from you, though,

is that every single guy that is intentional enough, strategic enough, and has enough faith to take the words of the Bible that Jesus gave us as a gift, living and active gift, we can pray those prayers and actually push back against the evil forces in our life and have victory over them. Is that correct? Absolutely. We don't teach in church very well how to do spiritual warfare, but it's like a thing in the Bible. And I think the thing that we do the least of is, like I'll come into my house and I'll be like, you know, Lord, I dedicate my whole house, my whole family for the gospel, you know, for Christ, for faith in Christ. This is just a holy place, just like the tabernacle is holy. My house is holy. And then I'll actually say, well, I don't know if there's any evil spirits in this place that have some kind of designs on me, but if there are, get out in the name of Jesus Christ. I feel like people, probably most people who are listening have never done that, you know, but if they, you know, it's just like when Jesus would cast out a demon, it would leave or like when Paul was being followed around by the young servant girl who had a demon and he's being followed around. He tolerated it for a while, but it left when he cast it out. It didn't leave before that. And so I think, well, you know, let's just,

in case they're there, let's just drive them out of my, out of your house. And I feel like that is an opportunity to see some changes in your marriage. You know, maybe we've, you know, you roll out red carpet when you sin. You have a hidden sin. You have a secret sin in your life. You're just rolling out a red carpet for demons to get involved in your life. And until you actually drive them out, they might just be still hanging around in your house. So for the guy that's addicted to pornography. Easily. That's like rolling out the red carpet for Satan to come into his life and mess with his marriage. And so you can go in and say, in the name of Jesus Christ, I drive you out. And then what, you know, I usually will follow up with, you have nothing to do with me and I have nothing to do with you. A lot of times at that moment, I'll get a, oh yes you do. Here's how we're in your house. Here's how you brought us in here. Yourself. And then I'll be like, okay, I get that. But not anymore. Because as of right now, I'm turning away from that sin and I'm turning towards God

and you have nothing to do with me. You are no longer welcome. Get out of my house in Jesus' name. If you've never done this, I recommend it. It's a life changer. Do you think that that might be something you need to do habitually? I do it about twice a week. Do you think, yeah, I was going to say, because there might be somebody who's sitting here going, man, I'm struggling with alcohol or porn or... It isn't every day. To manage a human being, like in leadership books they say, if you want to lead, start by leading yourself. It's the hardest leadership you'll ever have, in my experience, is to lead yourself. You get stressed and you fall into some sort... You're medicating that stress with some sort of comfort. And that comfort might be a sin. It might lead you into addiction. And it's the easiest thing in the world to end up addicted to two or three things. So it's an everyday fight. I just have one question. I guess, for both of you as we finish, and it was going to be, if somebody is looking, you know, they've heard what you guys have had to say today, and they want to start. And I think that's one of the coolest parts about gaining ground is we got guys who have been following Jesus for forever, and then men who are going, hey, for the very first

time in my entire life, like they're claiming that verse from the Old Testament, that's for me in my house, we'll serve the Lord, like are starting today. How do you start building these practices into your life? Well, I recommend the morning. You can do it at night if you need to. I recommend saying, I'm going to start, I'm going to pray, and I'm going to read the Bible every morning. If you will pray and read the Bible every morning, you know, you're going to have bad moments, but you will tend to have the spiritual power to overcome them. But if you don't, things tend to go off the rails and you don't even know what's going wrong. And if you miss a day, don't miss two. Yeah. You know, forgive yourself and just say like, you know what, I'll try again tomorrow. And that's really literally every single day, spirituality is like that. You're going to be like, man, I really, really fell off the rails yesterday. I yelled at my kids. I did whatever it might be. But not today. I don't have to do it two days in a row. You know, I'm going to instead, I'm going to, I would start with Matthew five, Matthew five, we start into the Sermon on the Mount and just sort of listen to Jesus's teachings. Five, six, and seven. And just keep, just keep going from there. I wouldn't start at Genesis, you know, I would start at Matthew five. And then I would just read a chapter or read until you find something that really applies to you and then just sit and think about it and then pray. And if you need more structure than that, you can, you can, you know, go to YouVersion. There's just structure upon structure. Get a Bible plan.

Absolutely. And I think that's important. But I would say this too, here's the way I would answer that question. It's kind of, it is, it is, it is easy and practical to start reading, you know, a Bible plan and just try to be disciplined with that, but don't discount and forget prayer. And a lot of men say, man, I just don't know how to pray. Just remember this, the easiest person to talk to is someone who loves you. And God loves you with everlasting love. He sent his son to die for you. So don't make this more difficult than it is. God is never going to sense that what you're saying to him is not important. It is important to him. It is significant to him. So if you have the ability to speak, you have the ability to pray or even think you have the ability to pray. So don't forget that, that he loves you and that he's interested in what you have to say. And I think just kind of add to that, as soon as you get started, you're going to get distracted. Of course. There's going to be other ideas you're going to think, you're going to be tempted to think to yourself, I'm really bad at this. Yeah. I've fallen asleep praying before many times. Okay. Well, I'm not going to even talk about that, but. You've never done that? Absolutely. Okay. I do it more often than not. But, you know, when you're trying to pray for your wife or, you know, pray to the Lord about the people you influence and love, but all of a sudden there's this thing you're

worried about. It's coming into your mind and you're thinking, man, I'm really bad at this. If you will turn that around and pray about that thing, you might be the greatest prayer warrior yet. Because if you, if you're like, man, I'm so full of anxieties and worries and you learn to pray about those anxieties and those worries, you could pray a long time. Because all of a sudden you're like a prayer warrior for an hour you've prayed because you're just praying about the things that, that, that are just coming into your mind that are worrying you and, and, and you're harried and, and concerned and all these. Well, if you start bringing those before the Lord and say, here's another thing that I'm losing sleep over. Here's another thing that's happening at work. Here's something that's happening in my child's life. And you just bring those things one at a time. You might actually be really good at prayer if you pray about what worries you. Yeah, actually, I think that's great. You know, I think everything changes when you recognize that what you experienced in the New Testament can actually happen for you, right? The Bible is not just some, it's not an antiquated book that's out of touch with your reality. Like it's living and active. It can transform your heart, soul, mind, and strength. It can rescue your family, bring salvation to your household. And I'm just excited to see what guys are going to do with what we talked about today and put it into practice in their life. Absolutely. Well, guys, thank you for your time. Greg. Men, thanks for listening. We hope this is helpful for you. As always, if you need anything or looking for resources, reach out to us, gaininggroundmen.com.

You can find all your information there. Appreciate you guys. We'll see you next time. See everybody. All right. Hey, thanks for joining us on the Gaining Ground Podcast. If you enjoyed today's content, it would help us a ton. If you could like this video. If you want to be in the next podcast, you can go to gainingground.com. Click the subscribe button and turn on your notifications And if you want to be in the next podcast, you can go to gainingground.com. All right. so you never miss an episode. If you're looking for more resources or how to get connected, please feel free to look in the description below and find our website, gaininggroundmen.com. We'd love to connect with you there. We'll see you next time.