MT: Hi everyone, I’m Melissa Taylor from Proverbs 31 Ministries and here we are in
week four. With us again is Pastor Craig Groeschel. How you doing?
CG: I’m great, Melissa. Thank you guys for staying with us.
MT: Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you guys are doing the Online Bible Study with us,
we are in week four of “Dangerous Prayers”, and so, as you know, we’re still in “break
me”. We’re spending two weeks in that section of the book, and one of the things
that you wrote is that, “in our brokenness, we often experience God’s greatest blessings”.
So just talk to us a little about that.
CG: It’s a promise that almost seems too distant to believe, or that’s not a path
that I want to choose, but I think that anyone who does have the courage to pray “God break
me” and is open to just a real transparent moment with God, on the other side of pain,
of failure, of setbacks, what we often do is a little bit like Peter in Scripture, when
he was really bold and confident - he had something that was special, but on the other
side of his failure, where he had to see the eyes of Jesus and say, I just let you down
and then was completely forgiven and restored - it did something in him, I think that was,
that there was a path of normal success and forward movement couldn’t have done what
the breaking did to teach him the true grace of God and the presence of God. And so, it’s
again no one just says, “I want to have a horrible day, I want to have a massive setback,
but I think that on the other side of real brokenness can be an intimacy and a strength
and a spiritual confidence that you cannot discover on any other path.
MT: Right, no, I agree. And you know I love to read that in the Bible, but then going
through it is a completely different thing. It’s like you said, you just want to get
to the end. Okay, let me get to the blessings part, because this is really hard.
CG: And you’ll find, I think, Melissa, if someone is going through something they thought
they could never, ever survive, you’ll hear them say things like, you know, I didn’t
know that there would be strength to help me through this. And then on the other side,
one of the most common things you’ll hear is, I wouldn’t want anybody else to ever
go through this, but I wouldn’t change what I experienced in learning to trust God or
His people or what He taught me through it.
MT: Well, I have a story where that is exactly what’s been happening in my life. I thought
a long time about what I was going to share with all of you today. The prayers I have
been praying for the past seven months has been for one of my children. I have four children,
the youngest is 18, the oldest is 26, so they’re pretty much grown and out and making their
own decisions now, choosing their own path in life, and wow, that is hard as a parent
to watch. You still have influence in their lives, but they’re getting a lot of other
influences in their lives that they didn’t have, you know, when they were living at home,
and I’m not going to be specific about the prayers that my husband and I have been praying
right now, but this situation, what God has done in our lives personally, I wouldn’t
have thought seven months ago that this is where we would be. So with this situation,
in the beginning, when I was praying, you know, when you get that news that just confuses
you or you weren’t expecting, and I started praying Lord, just help me. I’m distraught,
I can’t sleep, I’m worried, you know, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I
don’t understand. Lord, just help me. And Lord, help my child. Just help my child, I
want my child to come back to you, to trust you, to - I just want you to work in my child’s
life. And I want my child to accept that from you. And basically, everyday, so it’s almost
like I’m just begging God to fix things and to make them right, according to how I
think they should be. And it was about this time when I heard about your book. And I feel
like, you guys, I have the greatest job. I got to read this book before it was ever out
on the shelves because originally when I started reading it I was reading it to help decide
is this the right fit for our audience and do we want to do this as an Online Bible Study.
But as I was reading it for review, it quickly turned very personal for me. And I love when
that happens and that’s usually when we know, when that happens, we’re like, “Oh
this is, this is a good book.” And so like I said, my focus had kind of been on, give
me, Lord. Fix this. Change things. And through reading “Dangerous Prayers”, those three
sections, “Search Me”, which we’ve already read about, we’re in the middle of “Break
Me” right now, and you guys, what’s coming up is “Send Me”. Those three words have
defined this journey so far for me. And as I was reading, I was like, okay, I’m going
to start being bold and I’m going to ask God to search me. Instead of asking him, Lord,
please do this, God search me, know my heart, test me, if there’s anything you want to
reveal to me about me or about this situation or about anything, I am open and I’m listening
and I want to know. You know, as a woman who works in ministry, what I realized is going
to make me sound like such a hypocrite, because I work in ministry because I passionately
believe in Jesus and the Word of God and I want everyone to have that as their anchor
in life. And yet here I was not trusting God at all. You know, we read in the Bible, we
hear other people’s stories, we’ve experienced it ourselves before that movement of God to
get us through situations, but yet here I found myself in one and I was in despair all
the time and it showed in my work, it showed in my personal life. I mean anyone who knew
me could, without me even saying, could tell something was going on. But just that realization,
it turned me from having those, kind of- I call them cry-baby prayers - instead of the
cry-baby prayers to like, saying, okay, Lord, you’ve revealed this in me. I’m going
to keep going. So, okay what’s it time for now? Break me. Lord, break me. Scary prayer,
like you and Kaylee talked about last week. No one wants to pray break me. And you wrote
in your book that someone said to you one time, you know, you were like, okay am I broken
yet? They were like, you’ll know when you’re broken. And I knew when I was completely broken
because I was completely ready to depend on God. It’s not working, my way is not working.
And I’m wasting so much time. It’s like I was paralyzed, I was just stuck in this
paralysis and fear was ruling my life, but it was in that brokenness that I found hope
and remembered the hope that I knew all along. And you know, there is a worship song called,
“Do It Again,” and we sing it a lot at church and just the same words over and over.
I’ve seen you move, you move the mountains and I believe I’ll see you do it again.
You made a way when there was no way and I believe, you know, I’ll see you do it again.
I sing that with such, you know, I believe it. So I need to believe it you know, I need
to believe it for myself, for my children, for what’s going on in my life as well.
God doesn’t just do that for other people. He can do it for us too. And so it was then
that I was like - I’m still reading through your book and we’d already decided it was
going to be an Online Bible Study - but you don’t just read the book and go, okay, search
me, check. Okay, break me, check. Alright, Lord, use me, send me, you know. But when
I finally got to that point where I was ready to say, okay, I’m done, I’m ready, send
me. But my prayers haven’t been answered. I’m not on the other side to where I know
what’s going to happen, or you know, I don’t know. And I don’t even know in my lifetime
if I’m going to know. I remember my grandmother used to pray for like an hour or two every
night and if you were spending the night with her, then you sat with Grammy and you listened
to her pray for an hour. When you were eight years old, that wasn’t your choice of things
to do at night, but now, I’m so thankful. But long after she died, those prayers, some
of them she never saw answered, but I’m seeing them be answered in the lives of her
children. That gives me great hope. So, I was like, ok Lord. I’m ready. Send me. And
another thing in your book that you say in there is “instead of always asking God to
do something on our behalf, then what if we dare to ask Him to use us on His behalf”.
Those words were perfect, because when I didn’t really know how to word, you know, and ask
God to send me, that was perfect. Lord, use me on your behalf. And so instead now of focusing
so much on asking God to fix everything, I’m more in a place of Lord, what can you use
me for right now. And it’s been so clear, in fact it determined my word of the year
is love because I can love. I can love my child always. Always. My child will always
have a home with us. We’ll love my children no matter what path they take in life. And
I can love even when I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can choose to encourage
others, I can choose to smile. So many ways that the Lord can use, but I wasn’t able
to do that until I kind of had that break through. And so now that is my desire for
God. I still have my cry moments, but I have such hopeful moments. And I’m enjoying the
people in my life so much more. I mean, I think I can see a clear difference in the
past month just because I’m closer to God than I was at the beginning of this. I have
to be, you know, I have to be. I’m getting up every morning, I’m listening to worship
music more than - I liked it to begin with - but it’s just helping me to get through
and bringing that smile to my face that I wasn’t sure could be there for a while.
CG: My heart goes out to you. I think that anybody with children you tend to know that
you don’t write the parenting book early, because things just get so complicated. And
if there is somebody who has a situation like this where you’ve got a child making decisions
that you may not understand or there may be someone that’s facing a real financial challenge
or a health issue and what tends to happen is we do tend, we think I can handle this
or- or it’s the opposite - I don’t know what to do. And I would just encourage you
to kind of do what Melissa did and that is just go all in to the brokenness and just
say, I can’t necessarily fix this. I don’t have the power. I don’t have the strength.
I can’t do it on my own. So I need all of You God. And it seems like even in the middle
of your trial you do still have a little bit of joy of knowing what can I do. I can love.
And that is a good place to be and you’re at a point of surrender where you say I can’t
- doing this doesn’t fix anything, but doing this and saying, “Here’s my child, or
here’s my greatest fear, or here’s my hesitancy, or here’s my marriage that’s
broken, and I trust it to you.”
MT: I’ve seen you move mountains before...
MT & CG: And I believe you’re going to do it again.
CG: Yes, yes, that’s right.
MT: Right, right. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much again this week. Looking forward
to another week of Break Me in “Dangerous Prayers”.
CG: Thank you for your transparency and I believe on the other side of this trial you
will see God do it again.
MT: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you guys for joining us again this week. Bye.