Charles Stanley dies at 90: My books were "born out of my hurts and pain"

from the age of nine you had a very angry stepfather he didn't ever speak one word of kindness or encouragement to you never and it was violent at times how has this temperament resulted or survived the years of of abuse that you experienced I had a difficult time with that for a while and even after I had gone away to college and left home deep down inside of me I could still think about the things he said to my mother it was not so much what he said to me or what he didn't do for me it was where he treated her and I remember one occasion that I came in and he was acting like he was going to choke her and I ran and shoved him off her and I told him I said if you ever do that again I'll kill you now I probably didn't mean it but um he never touched her again for one thing and I had to deal with that and I was a pastor so one day I was just praying and thinking about something I was going to preach just like the Lord said to me you have unforgiveness in your heart I thought well we're taught him because in my circle at that point I didn't have any and he pointed me back to my stepfather so this was old stuff that had just never been cleaned out that's right so I went to see him my wife and I went to see him and my mother and um we sat down and I said to him I said John I said I want to ask you to forgive me for something and immediately he said oh you don't need to ask me to forgive you I said yes I need to ask you to forgive me and I told him I never accused him of what he did I never mentioned anything that he did I just said I need to ask you to forgive me for holding an unforgiving Spirit towards you now if I had said because you did this and this and this that would have canceled it out because if you're going to ask for forgiveness you don't name the problem maybe in some situation when the person doesn't really understand what it was and so um I can still remember that uh yeah came around the table and hugged me and asked me to forgive him for that he had done and that was a very emotional moment for me how beautiful and uh I am I tell him naturally he was forgiven and and God sent me forever that day and I knew that if I could forgive him for hurting the most precious person in my life I could forgive anybody and you know the lord always tests you and things that you thank you took it out and and then later on when I was um I was associate pastor at First Baptist and um there were folks there who wanted to get rid of me and they did their best worked hard to tried to get rid of me and uh I had to learn forgiveness but I knew how to forgive and I remember one of the greatest lessons I ever learned people would come up to me after the service and tell me how much they love me and appreciate me the next Sunday they wouldn't even speak to me so I was deeply hurt and I I didn't know I didn't know how to deal with that I was just in my 30s late 30s and I was in the prayer room one day praying and it's like God said to me this is the way you win this battle because I had been hurt I had been I had been deeply hurt and by people that I really loved and thought you know loved me so it's like the Lord said if you want to win this battle here's what you do you have to begin to see everything that happens to you is coming from me not from them well then I thought about some of those characters and I thought I can I think this is from God so if you want to win this battle this is where you win it no matter what you hear what you see what they do you have to see this coming from me if you'll do that you'll be able to forgive them you won't grow bitter and resentful and hostile and angry you'll win this battle without defending yourself and so I remember lying there for a pretty good while thinking okay God what about sons and I named a few people said you've got to see it all coming from me and so I thought all right that's what I'm gonna do well by the spirit of God he just gave me the ability to walk out there on Sunday morning preach like everybody just love me to death it was just it just transformed me you didn't feel the fire I just I just kept doing what he called me to do and I didn't fight back I didn't say a word I just said Lord no matter what they say and then I sat in the business meeting when they finally made a decision I set up under the back on the right hand side nobody knew I was there I slipped in after it started and I listened for I I see it was about two hours two hour business meeting and it was interesting that in two hours of trying to get rid of me and all the people who spoke not one person ever said one negative thing about me I'm sitting over there thinking if I want to get rid of me here's what I'd say and so I I I kept thinking well Lord there's got to be there's got to be some way for me to just handle this quietly and peacefully the problem is it's hard for me not to be emotional when I think about how good God is and so I sat there and listened to them for two hours and then they finally voted and and voted me as a pastor only about 65 percent but you know what that didn't make a difference I knew that God sent me there and I knew that he was going to take care of me if we wanted to keep talking about forgiveness I'm going to say then of course one day my wife walked away she couldn't tell me why then she couldn't tell me why today and that was probably the greatest test of forgiveness because I didn't think I deserved it I didn't know what would happen and in a Baptist Church in our country if your wife walks away and about a week you're gone they'd have to step down from the pastor right they wouldn't let you do that they said to me you've been here for us when we needed you and that you need us we're going to be here for you and you know God just gave me the ability not to be not to be unforgiving toward her in any way and I look back and see how God Set Me Free to serve him set me free to do what he called me to do and we're not thinking about all these circumstances I think about what deepens a man's message is not just things it's his own hurt and pain and suffering and so when I think about the book how to handle adversity and that we're going prayer and all these others how much of that's born out of you know your own hurts and your own pain and your own experiences in life and so somebody says well do you regret your past not a bit of it and the reason I don't is because I see the effect that it has on people when you and you know when people are hurting they don't want to just read a book they want to hear from somebody who's been where they are and who hurts like they hurt then they believe you and so um I have you know God has just blessed me and blessed me and blessed me and and the pain he's blessed me through that he set me free and and can I remind you of one of my favorite stories we're we're complex creatures you talk about this being a powder keg or or a pressure cooker or it's the slower boil but different intensities and in our anger sometimes we don't know why we're angry we don't know why we feel like kicking the nearest thing around why we're discontent there's a chapter in your life that I love to share because you are already a popular preacher and a best-selling author and you reached a dry place in your spiritual journey and you called your accountability Partners to come and check out and help to figure out what what was wrong tell us that story because I think it ties very much to what you're illustrating right now well what was happening was the Lord is just blessing everything and yet I was miserable I couldn't figure out why I thought man God what are you trying to say to me and I kept praying and praying and and I was coming out to Salem Oregon preaching to a group of pastors out there and uh and so they we spoke at night time and so I finished they say well don't stop now just keep talking because we're just getting blessed just keep talking so I was just blessed in every way and yet I knew something wasn't right couldn't figure out what it was and so when I got back home I called for my friends one of them was sort of a distant friend but I knew he was very capable of man and two of them were counselors and uh and two of them were pastors so I said look I call them all I said I'm trying to find God's will in all of my life I've always been able to find out what he was saying so I said I somehow I'm missing something would you be willing to meet with me and let me tell you everything I know about me and then whatever you tell me to do that's what I'll do so one of them I had a condo out in Colorado so we all met at on a Monday afternoon and I said well here's what I'd like to do I'd like to tell you everything I know about myself and then you ask God to show you what he's saying to me because somehow I just I'm not getting it so we talked still about oh we talked till dinner time and then after that we talked a little while and then I went to bed and during the night I wrote 10 pages I'd wake up and write down something I want to be sure I didn't miss so all night long I'm writing in legal size Pages things I want to tell them so the next morning we had breakfast and we start meeting again we probably met an hour or so or something like that and um so then one of them said so I was telling him I was up to the point about my father passing away when I was nine months of age and I didn't have a dad and so forth and so one of them said to me I never then I told him I said look that's everything I know about myself I haven't left at anything they said okay so they talked on about 15 tournaments and one of them said Charles put your head on the table and close your eyes so I did he said your father just picked you up in his arms and held you what do you feel I just broke out and we've been weeping and we've been weaving your Earthly father yeah our Earthly father whom you don't remember at all and he said he did he picked you up in his arms and held you what do you feel it's like I whipped and whipped and whipped I said finally I feel loved I feel accepted I feel warm inside and I broke out crying again and that day I realized something that for the first time in my life have felt God's love for me now I've been a pastor but this was my fourth church so um that was in uh probably in the 80s so I've been a pastor since I was um 24 so I've been a pastor about 20 some years and I don't know how to ever learn that and and I think about how simple that question he said just your father just picked you up and held you in his arms and I realized that in all those years I believe God I trusted God I'll watch you I do some awesome things he was blessing the preaching of the Gospel but I never emotionally felt God loved me so after I left I thought I'm going to go back and look at all my sermons and see how many sermons I preached on love and I had a sneaking suspicion one I preached one sermon on God's love it wasn't even worth listening I mean I looked at the outline I thought yeah I now know Hawaiian preached in the sermons on love because I didn't understand that so I look back and realize how how people can miss the best in life and I was missing a whole aspect of life that if you'd asked me if I believe God loved me I'd have said absolute and I quote you some scripture but emotionally there was this something between me and him and I said to them I said you know I feel like there's something between God and me I said I've confessed and dependent of everything I've tried to make up something to repent of to get through whatever this was and God had so much more for you a successful pastor of so many years how many people watching us right now have come to faith in Christ but they're dealing with derailing issues there there are parts of their heart God has never been able to get at and and they need to take a step of faith to become all that God is waiting to be for them you know I think one thing people do they look for a solution in all the wrong places God is the solution he's the one who I think God will show anybody what the issues you may have to have some help you may have to have a Godly counselor like my four friends or a lot of times he's shown me things and just in prayer and being quiet and listening and that's why I feel like that meditation a person's daily meditation with God is so absolutely essential to everything page 72. I have marked this because I hope you don't mind calling these um anger cocktails because you've combined things that I'm sure we can visualize in our life Journey anger plus urgency equals Panic anger plus confinement explosive behavior anger plus constraint mums tantrum right think of that two-year-old anger plus grief cloudy thinking anyone who's gone through a personal loss knows you just can't make a decision and and then two anger plus too many options equals poor decision making anger can affect our lives in so many ways and combinations why did you write this book now because I think Americans are more angry than I have ever known them in all my 78 years by far do you think it's tied to a sense of loss of control an unsafe world too many things going on I think you're right I think people all of a sudden who had security don't have it anymore the threats that they've never felt that their fears about things their own personal safety allows that home lose their car they can't put their kids in college and think about all the divorce rate that's going on in other words we have lots of reasons humanly speaking to be afraid and if you don't have a right relationship with the Lord that will overcome you sooner or later and I think that's what's happening you think about all the all the bad things that are going on people and you know interesting if you sit with this in my country if you sit at the corner of the intersection and just watch people pass by you they got these angry looks on their face everybody's in here everybody's angry I can't get that fast enough get out of my way blow the horn I mean this is an angriest time of life you've cultivated a congregation that comes to church Bible in hand and notebook they are students of the word of God and am I imagining it or have you I don't know if it's since 9 11 or certainly in recent years Dr Stanley you have been very bold in some of your positions and statements you've made challenges you've been giving to Applause to Applause well the message I preached uh the Fourth of July message I'm turning the tide uh we got over a million hits on there internet and um just lots and lots of people calling you know and they said in the oven so um I think I think it's time to be bold and what I discovered was a lot of pastors call me an or email me and text me and said thank you for saying that because I needed to say but I didn't have the courage to say it I didn't think I could say it and I think it's fear I think a lot of pastors are afraid of what that people say well so what 30 people got them walked out of a particular group 30 people walked out at the first service 25 the second service but that's okay I said you know what keep going because this is the truth and it's interesting that to the best of my knowledge they all came back and now when I say things they're clapping like everybody else and I said in the very beginning when the political things changed I said now you're not going to understand some things I'm going to tell you but you wait and see if I'm not right and now they know it's right you've challenged us for years not to live a settle for Life absolutely I love that what now for such a time as this in an Angry World in an unsafe world an unpredictable World you've talked about time in God's word meditating what else would be your most most important encouragement for those who who want to have the seemingly unattainable uh personal piece you can have peace with God and not have the peace of God ruling in your heart I can tell you exactly what the answer is you know when God spoke to Joshua in that first chapter he said to him he said you to meditate upon God's law day and night don't turn from to the left or to the right then I'll make your way successful and then I'll make your way prosperous I think this is the key the key is beginning your day in the word of God this is so simple but overlooked and ignored beginning your day reading the word and asking for God's guidance and Direction and not just reading but meditating on it taking enough time to think about and meditation means that I read it I ask him questions about that passage I I want him to speak to my heart what are you saying to me and sometimes some passage I'll read every morning for a week or two same passage because I know he's saying something and I want to be sure I finally get it you want to get everything out of it right that God does if a person will learn to meditate upon the word of God they'll have peace no matter what and it's just that simple we want to make it difficult and the truth is I'm too big a hurry not too big a hurry God lay you out flat on your back you got plenty of time for him in other words that is the key to living a Godly life is staying in the word because what he does he keeps my focus on him and where all these things around me may cause me to have fears if my focus is on him I'm not going to be afraid and I love what he tells you've told him three times be strong and of a good courage be strong and of a good courage be strong enough a good courage why do you tell him three times because he knew there were going to be reasons from the bees have to be strong and courageous especially when he was going to tell him and he didn't know at that moment that the way you win the battle in Jericho was just marching around the wall and saying nothing I mean that's ridiculous so that is the key and you can name a thousand different things that keeps your focus on God keeps your interest in him keeps you listening to him and keeps you confronted with him and keeps you confessing an opinion of things in your life are not right it's the key [Music] thank you

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Id: nWihzodUKdw

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023