Transcript
WEBVTT
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Pull up a chair across the counter, your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity.
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I'm Grant Lockridge and I'm here with my co-host, jared Tafta, and we have across the counter Matthew Stephen Brown.
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He is the pastor of Sandals Church and I will kick it off to you, jared, to ask the first question.
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Yeah, I'll just open up by saying thank you for being here, Matthew.
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Well, you said we could call you Pastor Matt, so thank you for being here, Pastor Matt.
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And I guess the first question off the top is how are you doing today?
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That's what's on my mind right now.
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I'm okay, man, my back is out, so I was just coming.
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The reason I was a little late I was coming from the chiropractor.
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Oh man, Does that help you?
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Yeah, it does.
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I've had varied success, yeah, so it always seems like something you need to do consistently, but when it's hurting it's immediate.
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Yeah, so sorry about that.
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Well, a lot of times we kind of kick off with just getting to know you as a person and I don't really know anything about you.
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So would you be willing to share, kind of where you're originally from and maybe where you're originally from in a spiritual sense as well?
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Yeah, yeah.
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So.
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Born and raised in California, I'm 52 years old.
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Gave my life to Christ in my early 20s.
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I've been a pastor of Sandals Church for 28 years old.
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Gave my life to Christ in my early 20s, Been a pastor of Sandals Church for 28 years now, and so started a church in my living room with eight people and now we are 14 campuses.
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About 10,000 live on a weekend and about another 30,000 live on what do you call it on video?
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So many people from California now just watch church from home since the pandemic.
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So we've shifted.
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So pre-pandemic we were more people in the buildings, Now we're more people in their living rooms.
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So just like what we're doing right now.
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Gotcha.
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What's your faith?
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Heritage from your family side.
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I grew up Baptist, so a conservative Baptist.
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My dad was a Southern Baptist minister and I had a great experience.
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I don't have a lot of church hurt, had one bad experience.
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But you know, people are people and what I say all the time on my podcast is people say, well, the church hurt me.
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I say, well, what was their name?
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Tell me the name of the person.
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So a lot of times we throw the church under a bus because of two or three bad apples.
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And so, just to for your listeners, there's 360,000, uh, churches in the world.
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You know a 3.2 billion Christians.
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And so when you say I've been hurt by these people, it's like no, I mean, you know, the most terrible instance is such a micro percentage of Christians.
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And so that's not to minimize people's hurt, it's just let's, let's call it out for what it is, Use the name, Tell me who the people were, and so that's important.
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Yeah, it would be like if somebody of Asian descent killed my brother and then I said I've been hurt by the entire Asian community.
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Yes, the Asian community would say like that's not representative of us, and so there's similarities there.
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I 100% agree.
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Last question, and then I'll let Grant kind of follow up.
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That's on my mind is a lot of times.
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You know, we've only got a little bit of time here and we can't dive into all the history of Sandals Church, all the history of Matthew Stephen Brown, and I believe that God is alive and speaking and has something to say today, and today we're sitting here with you, pastor Matt, and so what I want to know is what is God teaching you right now?
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What are you going through right now?
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What is the?
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You know the rhythm, the new rhythm that you're learning, or one that you learned before and then you're attending to again.
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Yeah, well, I would say, right now, god's teaching me humility and patience.
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Those are the two things that I'm learning.
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I tend to be a go fast, go hard, go all in guy, and so oftentimes people around me are not moving at the same pace that I am, and you just got to realize that God's you know he's moving in everybody's life at the pace that I believe he's moving in everyone's life at the pace at which they can go and is their maximum.
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So, um, um, so that's important for me.
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So I think, um, just what does God continually teach me is that his plans are different than my plans.
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So, you know, I wish that he would tweet me and let me know what's going on, but oftentimes I feel like that's just not what happens.
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Yeah, I want to know about this new book you had out.
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What's going on with that?
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Yeah.
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So I got a new book out called Everyday Miracle, and so, growing up a Baptist kid, I would say that I believed all the miracles in the Bible.
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I never had any reason to doubt.
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I didn't grow up in like a super liberal, deconstructionist church, you know, if it said Jesus fed the 5,000, that's what I believe.
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But I had never experienced it for myself.
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I'd never seen God do a miracle.
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And so, um, you know, I've seen God do a lot of things, but in 2012, I was on a medical mission trip and, um, the surgeon made a mistake and accidentally killed a kid.
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He put the wrong size airway tube in the kid before they put him under for anesthesia and so, when they pulled the airway tube out, his airway spasmed and closed.
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And I'm not a medical professional, but what I'm told is, when that happens, there's just nothing they can do.
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Like, if your airway is closed, your airway is closed, and so this kid didn't breathe for eight hours.
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Uh, one of the doctors a part of this trip was a Christian.
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He said I don't want to call him dead until Pastor Matt comes in praise over him.
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So I'm clueless.
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I walk into this situation.
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It's just chaos.
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Um, doctors yelling, people screaming Um, it was in Vietnam.
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So people are interpreting back and forth.
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And then I see this little 18 month old toddler on the surgical, surgical um table.
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He's obviously dead.
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You know, I don't know what a dead person you know, I mean I'm not a surgeon, but we all know when somebody's dead you look at him like oh wow.
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And so Dr Vianne Dunn says pray over him.
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And I'm overwhelmed.
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I mean I, no one has ever asked me to do anything like this before.
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I've never encountered this.
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And so I pray over this little guy and I just said, jesus, we did this, I need you to fix this, please heal him in Jesus name.
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And the kid woke up, like, like that, I mean in Jesus name, amen.
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And he was alive and well.
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And um, you know I know a lot of your listeners are like how can that be?
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But the same thing.
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I thought how?
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I mean, you know, I believe in God, but I'd never seen anything like this.
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And the little boy was fine, no brain damage, totally, totally well.
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And I remember the surgeon was in the corner and he's not a Christian and he just was weeping and he said it's just like the stories in the Bible that my mom would tell me about.
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He said it's a miracle, and so that's really where the book comes from.
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And so the book is just a highlight reel of my encounters with miraculous things.
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And so what I would tell your listeners is I don't see a miracle every time I pray.
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I wouldn't even say I see a miracle the majority of the times I pray.
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I wouldn't even say I see a miracle the majority of the times I pray, but occasionally I just see crazy things happen in my life where there is no scientific explanation other than, okay, god just did something.
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I'm curious about your headspace when you're praying.
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You know, you see this little boy, this little toddler, just dead.
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What is your headspace on prayer in that moment?
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Is it just like, you know, I don't believe this can happen, but I'm just going to like, do this?
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Or is it more on the lines of God, you can do this, You're going to do this.
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You know, that's what I think I would say now, I would say I have more faith now.
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I would say, in the moment I just was overwhelmed with the chaos of the moment.
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Just, you know, what I say in the book is when you can't breathe, go to the doctors, Don't go to a church.
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You know what I'm saying.
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I mean I would still say that, Call 911.
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In the moment I didn't realize this, but I was.
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I was encountering God as I walked into the surgical room and so in the book I talk about it like a weight, like an enormous weight.
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And for anybody who's been a diver, when you go down below about 80 feet, you start to feel pressure in all areas of your body pressure on your lungs when you breathe, pressure on your bones.
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The deeper you get diving, the weight just magnifies.
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Every so many feet.
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I think it doubles every 32 feet.
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I can't remember how it dove in years, but just this weight, and what I believe it is now is it was the presence of God, because I've never felt anything like that before or since, and just a holy moment, and you know, touching the little guy, praying over him, and so I would say in that moment it wasn't a matter of faith or not, Grant, it was just like me talking to Jesus.
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I wasn't worried about the outcome, I was worried about being heard and I thought we were all going to go to jail because this was in communist Vietnam.
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They don't like Christians, they didn't want us there.
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No-transcript.
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But I mean God's going to do what he's going to do.
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Say more about that.
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Like, because I have a few interpretations.
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Like as soon as I say amen, there's a result.
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Is that what you mean?
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Well, I think in the instance of a dead person, like if you're battling cancer, we can pray and I cannot know, when I say amen, what the result is.
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But if you're dead and I say amen and you don't wake up which I have had before I had a guy at a men's retreat die in my arms, you know he said, pastor Matt, I don't feel good, and I was like you'll be fine.
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And you know he hit the ground and you know we said, pastor Matt, I don't feel good, and I was like you'll be fine.
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And you know he hit the ground and you know we did CPR on him for 40 minutes.
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In all honesty, I don't think I prayed over him to come back, I think we were doing CPR, I was in shock, and so you know he was my roommate at a men's retreat.
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So in this instance, you know, I wasn't asked to do any medical intervention, I was only asked to do a spiritual intervention and so so I don't know if that answered your question or not, but yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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You just said.
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You said you know, being afraid to say amen and that's exactly what I heard was like, when I say amen, there's like either we're going to jail this kid comes back to life, something else happens that's unknown, like that's how I heard you say that and that's significant.
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Have you met other people with experiences similar to yours?
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Yeah, you know, almost casually, flippantly, my charismatic friends.
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Oh yeah, I remember the first time, you know, I saw somebody come back from the dead and I don't always know what to do with that.
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You know, I mean because here's what I say in the book everybody dies.
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Even Lazarus in the Bible had to die again.
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So what miracles are as extensions?
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I think the best example of that is in the book of Isaiah, when Isaiah tells Hezekiah hey, you're dead, god's going to take you home.
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Hezekiah repents and prays and the Lord says I'm going to extend your life for 15 years.
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I think that that's what we need to consider.
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All miracles are merely an extension because everybody dies.
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That's the consequence of sin.
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It is dying is as natural as being born.
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It's just, it's just a part of our process on earth.
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And so you know, I mean, you know people come up to me hey, my grandmother's, you know battling heart disease.
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Well, how old's your grandma?
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Well, she's 98.
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Would you pray?
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And I'm up to me hey, my grandmother's, you know battling heart disease.
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Well, how old's your grandma?
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Well, she's 98.
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Would you pray?
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And I'm like okay, well, so the Lord, the Lord, does this miracle then.
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So do we just keep, you know, do we just keep asking God to extend her life till what?
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110?
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You know what?
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What is that?
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And so I just think, in our world we're so shielded from death nobody knows how to deal with it anymore.
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And you know, to me, if you live 90 something years, that's a good life.
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And and I'm going to, rather than asking for God for more time, you know, I, I think about the kids in my church I've buried.
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I think about Tiffany, four years old, fell out of the car, um, four years old, hit her head, you know, um, and that's not, that's not a lot of life.
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So I have a hard time asking for God to extend 94 years when Tiffany didn't get five, you know.
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So, um, but that's just me, you know, I think, as a pastor, especially of such a large church, I've seen so many crazy deaths.
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Um, you know, I've seen crazy miracles.
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A guy in our church got shot in the head, brain matter came out the side of his head and he was fine and alive and, you know, wasted his life, got right back into gangs and was killed a month later.
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You know, like, what I tell people is if you get a miracle, don't waste it.
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That guy wasted his miracle, so yeah, so as a as a pastor, and you write a book about miracles right, I'm assuming you're currently pastoring, correct?
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Yeah, as a pastor, you write a book about miracles.
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You tell people, hey, this stuff can happen.
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Yeah, you had a lot of experience saying we're not pentecostals, kind of thing.
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Yeah, but what?
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What do you tell your congregation when you're like I'm sure you've gotten an equal and opposite response of hey, this miracle didn't happen for my son, or this miracle didn't happen for my daughter, can you make this happen, kind of thing?
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And what was your response to that?
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I can't make anything happen.
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There's no magic in these hands.
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You know, in that moment, for whatever reason, god in His sovereignty decided to act and he doesn't have to ask me.
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You know he used me and I'm grateful for that, but you know, I don't know man grateful for that, but you know, I, I don't know man.
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Like I said, death is a part of life.
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I think that, uh, you know, the early, the early church, the first couple hundred years, we assume death, we assume suffering, and now we're shocked by it and surprised by it.
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I know I am and, um, you know I think we invent, you know, uh, we invent levels of suffering that the early church would have been completely confused about.
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Wait a minute, you're stressed about things that didn't actually happen, you know.
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I mean, you know which is what anxiety is right.
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Anxiety is the fear of, of, of the future going negative.
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It hadn't even happened.
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And so levels of suffering that the early church would not have even been, that they would have been confused about.
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Yeah, I mean, can you imagine explaining?
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You're stressing about something that didn't happen.
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I mean you know so.
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I mean they just, they just lived in a world of death.
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You know where the average age of a Roman citizen was 30, you know so most people, half of all pregnancies, ended in death.
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You know, of either the child or the mother.
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I mean it just was a hard, hard time, yeah, and so.
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Yeah, I wrote I actually edited that statement that we invent levels of suffering that the persecuted church would not understand, because I've been around people that have genuinely been persecuted as well.
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I'm thinking about actual persecution, legitimate suffering for the faith in the Christians in the Roman Empire that stayed during the Black Plague and sacrificed themselves.
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Don't get me wrong.
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I don't want to belittle anybody's.
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We have to step so lightly like anxiety.
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When you stress about something, it still does something to you physiologically.
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It doesn't mean I'm not saying it's not real.
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I'm just saying, and I and again I don't mean this for anybody who's battling a clinically diagnosed disease I mean just your general run of the mill.
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You know I'm worried about you know, does this person like me, not like me?
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You know, you know, I mean just this, I mean this silly stuff.
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I don't at all mean the crippling form of anxiety that you know keeps people in bed.
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I believe those are the kind of people Jesus would have healed.
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You know, a rise and walk.
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I'm talking about, just like I said, the run of the mill, stupid stuff that we all worry about, overwhelmed with.
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And you know, really, rather than a prayer for healing, what we should be giving is a prayer of thanks because our life is so incredible.
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Right, right, okay, so this shifts, and thank you for clarifying, because I didn't hear you saying that, but I know that many could say.
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Many could say well, does that mean my anxiety is taken lightly?
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I battle anxiety, it's just different yeah, absolutely, and we've Personally.
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Once you leave the States for one occasion and go be near someone that is living in third world poverty, it is legitimately like you've breathed fresh air for the first time You're just like oh actually my life is pretty good and I don't know how to explain that, um, and it touches you.
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So this shifts gears a little bit, but it's.
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It's still back to your original kind of topic.
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Like I've experienced, um, I really like the way you put like feeling the intensity and the chaos of the situation and then I wrote your prayer down because it's the best like clarification of a prayer.
00:18:39.429 --> 00:18:40.439
I've prayed in a few times.
00:18:40.439 --> 00:19:22.384
Like you know, jesus, we did this and we need you to fix it and like that's the kind of that's like that's the prayer in the trenches or like in the middle of like I don't, like I'm not really thinking about theology or doctrine Like there's the pressure and the weight of just death and I just need you right now, and I've seen miracles happen where what you're talking about is true, that there's the pressure of death and then there's almost a weeping and a shedding of the weight of that mattering more than God, and then the weight of his, his glory.
00:19:22.384 --> 00:19:36.580
You know Lewis called like the weight of glory, like it just I remember being pressed into the floor, yeah, and and it's like I don't know if that was two minutes, two hours, like I have no idea.
00:19:36.580 --> 00:19:39.627
Um, I know it was all the tears I had or whatever.
00:19:40.214 --> 00:20:01.416
But after experiences like that, you can talk about people who chase highs or people who long for the days that they were locked in a prison cell worshiping God, because that was more palpable than the moments when the monotony, than the moments when the monotony, but more than that.
00:20:01.416 --> 00:20:17.107
I've struggled sometimes with a bit of what Grant said, which is like how do I continue to pray, or how do you continue to pray bold prayers, when so often the answer is it is unknown.
00:20:17.107 --> 00:20:21.778
You know, this child comes back to life, this child doesn't this, you know.
00:20:21.778 --> 00:20:26.580
85-year-old is healed and then this five-year-old passes Like I believe in the sovereignty of God.
00:20:26.580 --> 00:20:27.464
I know God is sovereign.
00:20:27.464 --> 00:20:28.840
I know His ways are higher than my ways.
00:20:28.840 --> 00:20:45.412
I've struggled personally with where, like where is my, how is my fire being stirred up to pray fervently when it's just like, if it's not a situation where the pressure is applied, if that makes sense.
00:20:45.731 --> 00:20:45.912
Yeah.
00:20:46.516 --> 00:20:48.363
So have you felt that?
00:20:48.363 --> 00:20:49.940
Do you deal with that?
00:20:49.940 --> 00:20:51.599
Am I making any sense at all?
00:20:52.282 --> 00:20:58.840
Yeah, so in the book I talk about, you know, faith is not in what God will do, faith is in what God can do.
00:20:58.840 --> 00:21:15.028
And I look at Mark, chapter nine, where and I love Mark nine because remember that Jesus takes Peter, james and John up to the mountain to Mount Transfiguration and leaves the other nine and a father brings his son to the other nine to be healed.
00:21:15.028 --> 00:21:23.807
And you know, I think a lot of us as Christians sometimes feel like JV, and that's why I love that story, cause it's the JV Christians that get.
00:21:23.807 --> 00:21:28.022
They get the hard case, you know we don't.
00:21:28.063 --> 00:21:31.696
We don't have the aid team, you know and um, that's awesome.
00:21:32.318 --> 00:21:33.761
And so it turns into this.
00:21:33.761 --> 00:21:42.238
And the reason I love that is we're all, we're all JV.
00:21:42.238 --> 00:21:44.627
I mean, none of us are the 12 apostles man.
00:21:44.627 --> 00:21:44.970
We're not even.
00:21:44.970 --> 00:21:46.194
We're not even as good as the losers he left behind.
00:21:46.194 --> 00:21:49.638
And so you know, they come back right.
00:21:49.659 --> 00:21:54.298
And there's this huge argument between Pharisees and the disciples and everybody's opinion, and this is really where I think the conversation on healing is right now.
