3/5/2022 - A Conversation with Laurence Perry

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together. It's reasoned, relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know. From Alex McFarland Evangelistic Ministries.

Welcome to Truth For A New Generation Radio. And now the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland. Life is a journey, and with all journeys, there are things that are memorable. Sometimes there are things we'd like to forget. Hi, Alex McFarland here. Welcome to Truth For A New Generation.

We've got an amazing show. We're going to be visiting with a Christian sister who has got one of the most amazing life stories that you will ever, ever hear. I want to begin with a scripture from 2 Corinthians 1, and verse 3 of 2 Corinthians 1 says, �Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds by Christ.� Notice those words in 2 Corinthians 1 where it says that the God of all comfort comforts us, and then someday down the road we can comfort others.

And I've got with me Lawrence Perry � Lorenz, forgive me, my French is probably not great � but we're at Cares Bible College and I meet so many wonderful people. I wanted you to give some of your testimony. First of all, I want to say thank you for being on Truth for a New Generation, and we're going to talk about how God has guided you and how the ways that God guided you, you're using to guide others toward Jesus. But welcome to the program, and thank you for sharing with us your wonderful story of Jesus Christ. Thank you. It's nice to be here.

It's very much of an honor for me to be doing this with you. Now, you grew up in Belgium, right? Yes, I did, in a little town called Brien-le-Chateau. And did you grow up in a Christian family? My entire family was atheistic, non-believer, God-hating, Christ-bashing, very much into science.

Many of my grandparents were doctors. So no, no Christ at all. How did you find Jesus Christ? So coming out of a context of secularism and atheism, but you, you're a dynamic Christian lady. How did you find the Lord?

Actually, it's an interesting story. I believe for myself that I always had a belief in a higher power. And as I mentioned to you before, as a little child, I used to talk to aliens because science fiction was allowed in my house, but not religion. So I spoke to something, and I believed in my heart there was something.

So I had an innate bent for that. But my first encounter with Jesus was actually in my early 20s, when a friend of mine, I was a martial arts instructor at the time, and one of my students was a married father of three bisexual gay guy. And he went to 12-step programs for survivor anonymous, you know, people who have been abused. And we had talked about situations that happen in his life and mine. And he is the first person who told me about Jesus. And he taught me the Serenity Prayer and told me about this guy, Jesus.

And I decided to go to the groups, and I learned interesting things. A funny anecdote, when I first went to a 12-step meeting, they all talked about how we needed to surrender our life to the higher power, and the higher power could restore our life to sanity. And I literally looked around the room, tried to figure out which one of them was the higher power. I had no Christian language whatsoever.

Dr. Darrell Bock Wow. Isn't it amazing how even through imperfect people and imperfect situations, God can reveal himself to us? So you found Jesus eventually. You began to realize Christ died on the cross for our sins.

And what was the situation that led you to invite Christ into your heart? Elisabeth Leibovitz Well, that's another kind of a dark story I went through. One day, my children's father decided that he wanted to do life with someone else, brought up a truck to the house, emptied the entire house in front of my eyes. And in four hours, all that was left of 10 years of marriage was the furniture and prints on the carpet and the stark realizations that I had to bring my little boys to an empty home that night. And that happened. And after my kids went to bed, I literally went into the depth of despair.

I feel as though Satan was dancing in the room saying, I did it, I did it, I destroyed your life. And I wasn't yet a Christian. And I mean, I knew about God, but I really didn't know a whole lot. And one of my, after despairing until three o'clock in the morning, I called a girlfriend. And she told me that this guy, Jesus, would help me, and that he would never leave me or forsake me, and that he had good plans for me, plans to grow me and prosper me and give me hope in the future, not to harm me. And I needed that hope. And so she took me through the salvation prayer.

And I think out of sheer exhaustion, two hours later, I fell asleep. And basically, my whole life changed from that moment on. Dr. Darrell Bock Wow.

Wow. Folks, if you're just tuning in, this is Truth for a New Generation. Alex McFarland here. We're talking with one of the students at Caris Bible College, Lorenz Perry, who, even though you're at a Christian college, you've got enough life to have made a book and a movie. And we're going to talk about the woke philosophy, because you've got some really good insights about that. But I want to continue with your story, because the Lord has led you. And when I hear your story, I think about this 2 Corinthians 1, that God comforts us, and then we are able to comfort others.

And we can come alongside people, and we can say, I understand. I've been to the bottom of the valley, and God was there, and God will help you, too. Do you feel, Lorenz, that a lot of what you went through was God was preparing you to minister to others? Lorenz Perry I think that for all of us, our life stories is the preparation for whatever our ministry will be. I think whether we fully step consciously into that ministry or not, we are always, every step of the way, prepared.

And the preparation is not for me to have this big, great, fabulous, rich, wealthy life. The preparation is to make disciples. How do I turn other people into disciples? How do I make them understand the free gifts that were given by Jesus Christ on the cross? Dr. Darrell Bock And just becoming a Christian doesn't mean that we're going to have a problem-free life, does it?

Lorenz Perry Quite the opposite. Coming from an atheistic background and family and stepping into a Christian life, I've not experienced that freedom from problems. There's been a lot of problems, including a lot of persecution. I'm called the Jesus freak, the Nazi, the nun.

My family has all kinds of lovely names for me, yet I'm the one who has peace. So I'll take the gift. Dr. Darrell Bock Amen. So stay tuned. We're going to come back on Truth for a New Generation, talk about God's great message of salvation, how Jesus has a great plan for you, and He'll work through you to touch the lives of others just as He's done in the life of Lorenz Perry. Stay tuned. We're back after this brief break. Have you ever wanted to raise your hand during a sermon?

Well, here's your chance. Hi, Alex McFarland here from the nationally syndicated radio program Exploring the Word. For more than 10 years, my cohost Bert Harper and I have taught scripture and answered hundreds of Bible questions. We've compiled a brand new book of the top 100 Bible questions from listeners of all ages, from questions about supposed Bible contradictions to apologetics facts that prove the truths of Scripture. This new book features practical content that will make the Bible come alive for you.

Can we really be sure that God exists? Are there contradictions in the Bible? I need a book that will help me understand the Bible better.

There is so much good content in this book. One hundred Bible questions and answers published by Broad Street Publishers and available at your local bookstores and also through resources.afa.net. Send your kids to a summer camp that will change their lives for the gospel and equip them to defend the faith. Truth for a New Generation presents the Unashamed Biblical Worldview Camp, Go Deeper with God, at the Refuge Camp of eastern North Carolina, July 17th through 22nd. Your eighth through 12th graders will hear from evangelist and apologist Dr. Alex McFarland, as well as conference speakers, pro-family activists and radio hosts Will and Miki Addison from American Family Radio as they share with your kids ways to effectively engage and transform the culture. Campers will also enjoy swimming, canoeing, fishing, soccer, volleyball, archery and a whole lot more. A great summer camp of fun and faith building. The TNG Unashamed Biblical Worldview Camp, July 17th through 27th at the Refuge Camp in Aiton, North Carolina. To learn more and to register, visit alexmcfarland.com. For apologetics resources, books by Alex McFarland and to find out where Alex is speaking, visit alexmcfarland.com. Welcome back to the program.

We're talking with Lorenz Perry. And the bottom line in this segment, folks, God has a plan. Take the hand of Jesus. God has a plan for you. God will guide you. God will provide for you.

God will be with you, as he was with Lorenz. I want to thank you for sharing your story. You became a Christian.

Your family didn't immediately understand. How did God continue to lead you in the journey? I know you've had businesses.

You've done a lot of things. Tell us how God guided and cared for you along this journey. Well, I've been very blessed to have had a fantastic pastor, Pastor Mike Atkins of River Crossing Church in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He was an amazing gifted teacher. He definitely has the gift for teaching people. And under his care, I grew and learned so much about Christ and about life with God. I also, out of that church, made some fabulous friends. And I'm a big proponent of mentoring.

I believe that mentoring is a fabulous step in people's life and that we should be mentored and we should mentor back. And I am privileged to have been mentored by my best friend, who is an 80-year-old woman who basically exudes the love of God and the truth of God. And she has exemplified for me what this thing we hear about, what we hear about the agape love of God.

And for people like me who come from an unbelieving background and a difficult childhood, you have no frame of reference. What do you mean this fabulous love? She exemplified that. So she has mentored me for the last nine years. She has been my best friend.

She still is my best friend. And that has been an avenue through which I've been able to grow and learn all kinds of things about God. And together we put together a women's covenant group. And we have eight women who meet every Tuesday.

We do some prophetic writing, a little journaling, and we watercolor, and we have some food. And that has become a massive covenant group where we've literally shared the soul of our lives with one another. And for women, that is just such a great avenue for growth. And don't you think everybody – I mean, there are so many things that are common to all human beings. We all want to feel like we are loved. We all want to feel like we have value. We all want to make sense of some of our pains. And in the body of Christ, I mean, we come alongside people, like the 2 Corinthians 1, who says the God who comforts us that we may be able to comfort others. Really, the hurts and scars and wounds and circumstances of people, it ultimately becomes opportunity for ministry, doesn't it?

Right. It's a choice that you get to make. God endowed us with free will. And how you use that free will will make a massive difference in the trajectory of your life. I chose to use my free will to not hold on to hurts and violations and wounds.

So when you get bumped across life, which happens to everybody, you have a choice to make. Do I hold on to that offense? Do I identify with it? Do I become it? Do I regurgitate it? Do I ruminate it? And do I then attack someone else with it?

Or do I just decide to peel it off like a band-aid and say, you know what? You're not going to stick to me. This is not me. And I've shared with young people before who struggled through difficult times in their life that this is something I want everybody who's listening to really imprint on their mind, you are not the sum total of what happened to you. I want you to say that again. This is brilliant.

This is so vital. Folks, listen to what this woman is saying, because this is wisdom from God. Say that again, please. You are not the sum total of the things that happened to you. You are a different person. You have a Christ-given identity. Before you were born, He formed you in the warm. For those who He formed you, He formed you before the beginning of time.

He created you to have an identity and a personality and a mission and a destiny. The things that happened to us in life, may they be accidental, or may they just be because other people, you know, you forget to remember, hurt people hurt people. Most of the people who will hurt us are people who themselves are hurting. And that actually is the basis of where my forgiveness was able to arise from, is to take a look at them as people.

They're broken hurt people, and they did the best they could with the information that they had. Out of that came some hurt. But I have a choice.

Do I choose to hold onto it or not? And I've chosen to peel that little Band-Aid of a wound off, and with my Christian knowledge and life, I stuck it on the big cross. And I want you viewers to imagine, I'm a person who's had many wounds, so I want you to imagine a woman standing in front of you with about 350 Band-Aids stuck on her, and each Band-Aid has a little cross on her. Those are wounds, those are offenses that life has given me and probably many of your listeners. What I want you to do is peel that Band-Aid off, and it has a little cross on it. I want you to tape it to the big cross.

Give it to Jesus, because that's why He died. He died so that you wouldn't have to carry those wounds, and then you can live out your true identity. As I said before, you are not the sum total of the things that happened to you. Lolo, which is my nickname, is not an abused, hurt, broken, betrayed, whatever person.

Lolo is something else. So what do you say – and this is wonderful, because you really can stick it to the cross. Just as we take our sin to the cross, and He saves us and washes us clean, and Jesus forgives us, we can take our wounds and our bandages to the cross, and He can restore and heal. One of my favorite verses is Joel 2.25, that says God restores the years the locust has eaten. In the ancient world, the locusts were an insect, and if the insect destroyed the crops, you go hungry till the next year. You might starve, you might die.

And if the crop is gone, you've got no hope till the next season. But no, it says God is bigger than time. God can intervene.

God can restore the years the locust has eaten. And we believe that, and I know you know it, but here's my question for you. What if somebody says, well, okay, this happened to me, and someone hurt me, so I'm just letting it go? You mean I'm just saying that it didn't matter?

It's not that. I mean, we acknowledge the hurt, but in Jesus, we're healed, and we can move on. And moving on doesn't just mean that we disregard it, but we understand in the cross, that's where our closure comes, isn't it? The big misconception that people have, or maybe the hurdle that Christians have, is to assume that forgiveness means forgetting. I have not forgotten one single thing that happened to me, but I have chosen to not let it torment me and have power over me by forgiving those people. I realize that your forgiveness and my forgiveness is proportional to the level to which you trust God and His Word.

Get it tuned. We're going to be right back with more of Truth for a New Generation. The Apostle Peter wrote 1 Peter to remind us that Christians have true and lasting hope in their Savior, Jesus Christ. Because Jesus conquered death in an incorruptible, glorified body, we can be sure that our salvation has permanence as we walk through everyday life. The Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove presents Jesus Christ, Hope That Lives, Hope That Lasts for Every Believer, a special three-day seminar with Alex McFarland. Alex will dig into 1 Peter to help you gain truths to live by and assurance to keep going. Come to The Cove near Asheville, North Carolina, July 8th through 10th for three days of in-depth Bible study, fellowship, and refreshing.

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Welcome back to Truth for a New Generation. Alex here with Lorenz Perry. Before we resume our conversation, I want to remind you to please go to our website, alexmcfarland.com. My schedule is there July 8 through 10. I'm going to be at the Cove, the Billy Graham Training Center in western North Carolina. We're going to be teaching the book of 1 Peter, how you can defend the faith, learning apologetics. Then our youth camp is July 17 through 22. Our theme this year is Unashamed, Building Your Biblical Worldview.

So it's great for middle school, high schoolers, so much more. Please keep us in prayer. I'm on the road and we're mentoring young people. We're doing what we can do to evangelize the lost and equip the saved.

Please check out alexmcfarland.com. Well, Lorenz, before the break, you were sharing and you said something that I want you to elaborate on. You said the degree to which we can forgive is really proportional to the degree to which we trust God. I think that is absolutely true.

That is absolutely true. And as a pastor, as a speaker, I've sat down with hundreds of people, maybe thousands, and I've talked with people that have nursed a pain from decades ago. And look, people have moved on and forgotten, but people are eating themselves up on the inside because they've not been able to forgive. And like you said, I mean, forgetting, we're not forgetting because we have a memory, but we have chosen not to hold animus and anger.

Talk about how do we trust God more so that we can begin to forgive more thoroughly. Well, it's a difficult subject because it's a big subject, and I'll try to explain it in the way it worked for my life. Most of us try to solve our problems ourselves.

And so, for example, I had a very difficult childhood with abuse of all kinds. So as a little child, I decided that I was too visible. So starving myself, becoming anorexic and invisible, was the way I'd solve the problem. How many of you know that that didn't solve the problem? So then as a teenager, I became angry because that's what teenagers do.

They have great power in hormones. And I decided, well, I need to be able to beat somebody up. So I became a second-degree black belt because I thought that's how I'll solve the problem. Didn't solve the problem. So then as a young mother and a wife, again, in a difficult situation when my life has had a lot of difficulties, I decided, well, you know, my problem is I need to make money because if I had some money, I could get away.

You need a bus, you need an apartment, you need avenues. So I made a whole bunch of money. I worked really hard and thought that would solve my problem.

It didn't solve my problem because the problem was I still felt unsafe and unfulfilled in the world. So what's the answer? The answer is when you open that Bible and you read it, at first it's utterly confusing. What are all these crazy words, especially if you get to King James?

How is this supposed to affect my life? All I could tell to your listeners is maybe start in the New Testament versus the Old Testament if you're a newcomer to the faith. But continue to read the word and ask yourself some questions. Who is this God? What does this sentence tell me about who this God is? Like what kind of person is he?

Is he a meanie or is he nice? Who is this God? So that's one question I would ask as you read. And then the other question, and I actually play this little game with myself as I read my Bible because I read it every day, is, is this about me?

And so every sentence that I think applies to me, I put a little L next to it. And then you can go back at the end of the year and read everything that is in the Bible that's about you. And you just read it from beginning to back and you read every promise, every statement, every advice, every turn of event, everything that's been said about you. Doing those two things really helped me understand God, not as a mean father, as I had experience with fathers, but as this absolutely benevolent person who's in my corner and wants me to win. And he gave me the answers. And my kids were so great.

My kids helped a lot. Raising children helps you understand that agape love, right? I did not understand it until, you know, my, my baby smacked me and I looked at him. I'm like, well, that's not acceptable, but yet I still love you, right?

I love you to pieces yet you just smacked me and that's not acceptable. So as parents, you learn how to deal with that agape love and that you don't always like what someone does. And I think many times in my life, the Lord was grieved with some of my choices and it saddened him and it grieved him, but it never diminished his love for me.

Just like my love for my children is never diminished even if they draw on walls with crayons. So all of those things helped me. And as I told you a little story of how I read the Bible, once I understood the character of God and once I understood that it did pertain to me, there was messages in there for me, everything changed. And when my kids came back from Bible school, one day they said, Mom, do you know what Bible means? I'm like, no, basic instruction before leaving earth. And ever since then, I really took it to heart. You know, it is my driver's manual. And when I don't know what to do, I go to the Bible.

I had a friend who was struggling last summer and she was having issues of faith and truly believing that this would pertain to her life. And I told her, let's, let's do a challenge. You and I will listen to Proverbs, you know, on YouTube.

Let's listen to Proverbs every day, the entirety of Proverbs for 30 days. And so we did it. It was a great little challenge.

And you know what? She was dealing with a difficult person. And then she had, you should not rebuke a scoffer or it'll go poorly for you.

Oh, I got the answer to my problem. It's actually in the Bible. And so forgiveness comes from understanding more of the word. And it is a hard book to read because it's not in modern English for many versions. But if you understand that it is about you. It's a story about who God is and who you are and how you co-labor in this universe to make something good happen. Amen.

That's beautiful. Let me just say to everyone listening, God loves you. No matter what you've done, Jesus will forgive you.

No matter what has been done to you, Jesus can heal you. And there is a purpose. Lola, if I can use your nickname, one of the beautiful things about the Christian worldview, there is purpose. And good can come out of all of our circumstances.

Yes. And I would like to, before we close, just also mention that the Bible tells us that when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, He's in us. We're in Him. And there's no condemnation for us. That was a hard one for me to wrap my head around because many people who cause me harm in my life are Christians. But guess what, folks? There's no condemnations on them either.

And if God can forgive them, then why can I not forgive them? We've got a little book, folks, called What Does God Say About My Relationship With Him? What Does God Say? It's in English. It's in Spanish.

It's on the web. But if we can help you in any way, Truth for a New Generation Ministries, Alex McFarland Ministries, just go to our website, alexmcfarland.com. If we can encourage you in your walk and witness for Jesus, please don't hesitate to call. God bless you. We'll reconvene very soon.

In the meantime, stand strong for Jesus. TNG Radio is made possible by the friends of Alex McFarland Evangelistic Ministries, P. O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina, 27404. That's P. O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina, 27404. Call us at 877-YES-GOD-1.

That's 877-YES-GOD and the number 1. Or give online at alexmcfarland.com. While you're there, listen to Program Archives, read Alex's blog, invite Alex to speak at your event, or contact Alex with a question or comment, alexmcfarland.com. Thanks for listening today and join us again next time for more Truth for a New Generation on TNG Radio.