Pastor Greg Laurie

Greg Laurie (0:24)

You know, Jesus said he used two pictures to describe how a Christian should function in the world. One was salt and one was light. So in the first century, salt was like they used it to preserve meat. They didn't have refrigeration, obviously. When they'd get the fish, they'd either eat it fresh or they would put salt on it to eat it later. So salt was valuable in that culture. Roman soldiers would be paid in salt. I think, number one, it says you're valuable. Your life matters. Number two, salt stimulates thirst. And I think we do that too, hopefully. I think if a person is walking with God as they ought to, they will create in others a thirst for a relationship with God. The greatest compliment you can be paid is when someone says, yeah, you know what, how can you be joyful at a time like this? What makes you tick? Your marriage or your family or whatever it is they notice, and then you can say, well, that's my relationship with God. And the other is preserving, salt preserves.

And as Christians, it's important for us to speak up for what is true, sometimes speak out against what isn't true, and to tell the truth. And so a pastor, my job, a pastor is to feed the flocks. I'm there to feed our church, spiritually guide them. But then I'm also called to be an evangelist. And the difference between a pastor and an evangelist are like different callings. Like pastors tending a flock, teaching people the word of God. You're there to be involved in people's lives. But an evangelist is one who's proclaiming the message to the culture. Spreading the message. Yes, spreading the message. So that's, so it's always been a little bit of a dichotomy inside of me because I'm half pastor, half evangelist, but we do outreach events that we call Harvest Crusades and stadiums where we're on social media, we're on television, radio. We've always, our kind of our goal is to reach unexpected people in unexpected places with an unexpected message. So it's like, I want to kind of come into their culture and not blow them out of the water, not condemn them, but to hopefully stimulate a thirst in them and tell them there's a God in heaven who loves them and they can come into a relationship with him. So that means there's a lot of bridge building and attempts to reach people where they're at. I've been doing this for 52 years now, I'm 73

I don't feel 73, but I've been doing this a long time, but I love it more today than when I started. I started at 18

I didn't even know I was starting a church when I began. I was just teaching at a Bible study of young people, and I came to faith during the Jesus Movement, which is the last great spiritual awakening in America.

And so I just was hearing the Bible for the first time. I was a blank slate. I wasn't raised in church. The only thing I literally knew about Jesus was what I saw in movies, like Ben-Hur, King of Kings, the greatest story ever told. And I always had this admiration for Jesus. My grandparents, there was a portrait of Jesus hanging on the wall, and I would just look at it, and I just had admiration for Jesus. But I never knew that he could be known today. I just thought of him as a historical figure.

So the reason I was living with my grandparents, Rick, was because my mom was married and divorced seven times. She's a beautiful woman. I'm not exaggerating when I say she was a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe. She was like a man magnet, and she was also a raging alcoholic, meaning she drank to excess and passed up pretty much every night. Sometimes she didn't come home. So I had to grow up really fast and take care of her even as a kid. In some ways, I was like the adult in the relationship, and I was exposed to things that kids shouldn't be exposed to. But that was my life. That was normal to me.

So when I got a little bit older, my teen years, I started drinking and partying at high school.

I don't like this drinking, partying scene. This is what my mother's done. Then the whole drug culture was coming in strong. It made sense to me because the mentality was the adult world, they don't know anything. It's a youth revolution. So I started smoking a lot of weed and taking LSD.

And after about two years of that, I knew this was a dead end street. My background is I like to do art. I'm a cartoonist. I created a little world of art that I would retreat to when I was a kid. So I saw all of my creativity being sapped and I saw that this is bad. This can't be what I'm going to keep doing. So I already knew I wanted to stop doing that. So in my 17-year-old brain, it was like process of elimination. I don't want the adult world of my mother. I don't want the drug culture of my peers.