Lisa Harper: When you think of the Bible as a rule book or that it’s primarily about biblical ethics, then it becomes punitive. It’s something I have to get right. When you see it as primarily a love story, then everything changes.

There’s Hope in the Residue of Our Heartache: Lisa Harper & Richard Gamble – Episode #483

Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. This week, beloved Bible teacher and speaker Lisa Harper shares her perspective on how she traded theological study for a personal God experience and began seeing the Bible as a love story. She stresses showing up to God just as you are—imperfections and all—illustrated by a story of shared heartache.

Then, we’ll hear from Richard Gamble, the founder of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer in the United Kingdom, which is set to open in the fall of 2027. Richard shares the vision behind the largest Christian landmark in Britain, which will contain one million bricks, each one containing a scannable QR code which will reveal someone’s answered prayer. 

Let’s begin with Lisa’s story. 

Lisa Harper: Hey y’all. My name is Lisa Harper, and I have two claims to fame. One is Jesus loves me even though I’m a hot mess, and He has been so kind to redeem so many of the mistakes in my life. And then secondly, purely by His grace, I got to become a mom through the miracle of adoption. So I am the second mom of an amazing young woman named Melissa Price Harper. I brought her home from Haiti eleven years ago when she was four and a half years old. I write books and have been teaching the Bible for almost forty years. 

Moving Beyond Academia to Intimacy with God

I became a Christian when I was a kid, five years old. Around that time, there was some abuse in my backstory, some molestation. And so from my earliest memories, I felt dirty and I felt less than. I knew Jesus had saved me, but I thought that was really just because it was in God’s job description. I didn’t see how in the world a holy, perfect God could actually delight in a messy kid like me. So I resolved from the time I was really young to just try to do better and be better. And so because of that shame, by the time I got in my twenties and thirties and was in vocational ministry, I pursued theology really as a smoke screen, memorizing all these multisyllabic theological terms about God so that people wouldn’t look under the hood of my life and find me to be a fraud. For years, I thought theology was an academic pursuit, and I even used it that way as a young Christ follower. 

If we compartmentalize our relationship with Jesus to only when we’re reading the Bible, to only when we’re attending church or in a Bible study, then it can become segmented in our lives. In these last fifteen or twenty years, God has just continued to woo me closer to Himself and kind of break more of that shame off, when you come to realize, Oh, theology is not about academics. Yes, that’s one facet—I’ve been to seminary for eight years and studied, but theology at its core is relational. It’s less about accruing data about who God is and it’s more about developing an intimate relationship with Jesus.

“If we compartmentalize our relationship with Jesus to only when we’re reading the Bible, to only when we’re attending church or in a Bible study, then it can become segmented in our lives. Theology at its core is relational. It’s less about accruing data about who God is and it’s more about developing an intimate relationship with Jesus.” – Lisa Harper

Now, if you’re a Christ follower, you put your hope in Jesus. Jesus has “called you” (pun intended) and you’ve responded. Your theology, your conversations about God are informed by the way God reveals Himself to us—and that would be through this love letter we call the Bible. 

The Bible as a Story of Love

When you think of the Bible as a rule book or that it’s primarily about Biblical ethics, then it becomes punitive. It’s something I have to get right. When you see it as primarily a love story,
then everything changes. You see this consistent wooing. 

“When you think of the Bible as a rule book or that it’s primarily about Biblical ethics, then it becomes punitive. It’s something I have to get right. When you see it as primarily a love story, then everything changes.” – Lisa Harper 

You look at Malachi. God’s people are disappointed because they’ve been in captivity in Babylon, so they think, This has been so hard. It’s almost like at the end of keto, and you wanna be able to wear your skinny pants. They’re like, We have suffered, now we want something good. They get back to Jerusalem, and instead of it being this wonderful thing, they get to Jerusalem, and it’s not at all the land of their dreams. It’s turned into a nightmare—the city walls have been torn down, the fields don’t bear any fruit or vegetables anymore, and they’re just like, Oh my goodness, this is so hard. And they see the pagans driving BMWs, and they are like, This isn’t fair. 

In Malachi chapter two, God’s people raise their fist at God, and effectively say, “If you’re such a good God, then why are our lives so hard?” And instead of frying them into a grease spot of oblivion, God says, “Christmas is around the corner.” He talks about the Messenger whom you’re seeking will soon come into His temple, and then He says in Malachi 3:6, “I, the Lord, do not change so that you, descendants of Jacob, will not be destroyed.” In other words, “I know you’re disappointed. I know you’re angry. I know you’re frustrated because you’re humans and you see in time and space and you can’t fully understand that my boundary lines for you will fall in pleasant places, that ultimately everything will work out for My glory and your good.” 

We can’t always see the goodness of God. That’s where faith comes in. Instead of eviscerating His people, you see this consistent love story. He’s always saying, “Come closer.” He’s always redeeming His people. If you look at the Bible, even the Old Testament, we tend to almost have a binary view of God—that He’s an angry God in the Old Testament and sweet Jesus with hair extensions in the New Testament. But if you look at all of Scripture, including the Old Testament, through a socio-historical context, you’ll see this ongoing theme of a good God who’s always in the process of redeeming our inherent dignity as His children. And you see that theme over and over again. He’s constantly saying, “I see you. I love you. I see you. I love you.” Even His discipline is braided with mercy. I think we have to start with, He’s a good God, He loves me. And if we don’t start there with Scripture, if we see this as a primer for our ethics, then we’ll run out of room really quickly. So, it’s holy and it’s authoritative, but at its core, it’s a love story.  

“If you look at all of Scripture, including the Old Testament, through a socio-historical context, you’ll see this ongoing theme of a good God who’s always in the process of redeeming our inherent dignity as His children.” – Lisa Harper

The Residue of Our Heartache

All of us experience exquisite loneliness, but that also shows we are hardwired for relationship. 

Recently, I was at a women’s conference and there was a woman who stood up for prayer. She said she was lonely, and it was like the dam broke, and she just began to sob. I’m old, you know, I’m sixty-one and so I can usually hug anybody and it’s not weird because it’s like being hugged by your grandmama. And so I thought, I’m just gonna make a beeline for her and hug her. I thought, This will probably be a short prayer. She just kept praying and praying and praying, and after five or six minutes of me in this really tight embrace with this woman—she was on the front row and the stage was really close, so we were in this kind of forced intimacy that I had initiated, like our sweat was co-mingling—I thought, This is like getting to the point of awkward. So I kind of pulled my head back from hers a little bit because I wanted to inject some levity into it and say, Ma’am, I’m so sorry that we’re in this, we’re just stuck from stem to stern. And she said, “I am so sorry.” And I said, “Oh, no, no. This is the body of Christ. This is what we’re supposed to do!” And she goes, “No, I’m really sorry. I just got a lot of snot in your hair.” I was like, “Oh!” And then what do you do? I was up next to pray, and I got so tickled. 

That night, I went home from this event and had to wash my hair. I was struck by the fact that I’d been to fifty speaking engagements on the road, 150 days a year, and I thought, The most Christ-like thing I think I’ve done in the last twelve months is to be close enough that the residue of her heartache got in my hair. And I thought, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, He chose to be accessible to us, to be near to us when our lives feel crushed, to get the residue of our heartache on His personhood. So sometimes it takes something tactile like that for me to go, Oh, that’s right. He doesn’t just love me because it’s His duty. He delights in me. 

“Jesus Christ, the Son of God, He chose to be accessible to us, to be near to us when our lives feel crushed, to get the residue of our heartache on His personhood. He doesn’t just love me because it’s His duty. He delights in me.” – Lisa Harper  

You get to let it all hang out with God because we aren’t the hope—He is. I think for those of you who do feel like you’re in a rut—first of all, my Christian counselor says to me on a regular basis, “Lisa, you have a tendency if somebody’s not beating you, you’ll pick up a bat and swing it at yourself.” Don’t beat yourself up if you’re a rut. All of the saints in Scripture went through seasons where they lost their spiritual groove. Elijah had just seen God’s glory fall on Mount Carmel. He gets one snarky text from Jezebel; and it just sends him reeling, and he finds himself under this acacia tree, saying, “I don’t want to live anymore.” You would think that he would get a divine lecture, and instead, God gives him a nap and snacks. How kind is our God. It’s His mercy that leads us to repentance. So, recognize that if you’ve lost your groove, you’re in good company.

I love the authenticity you see modeled in Jesus Calling, because what I think God used Sarah [Young] to teach millions of us is that God doesn’t want your curated life. God doesn’t want what you would present to social media with filters and holding in your stomach. Sarah wouldn’t say it this way—Sarah’s much classier than I am—but you don’t have to wear Spanx with God. And bring that to the Lord. Tell Him, “I feel like my prayers are hitting the ceiling.” Read some of Sarah’s words out loud in Jesus Calling. You’ll probably find your heart there. Whatever you do, don’t believe the lie that you have to clean yourself up first before you turn back to God. Bring everything to the Lord, even your disappointment, even the places where you’re stuck. Then ask Him to restore unto you the joy of your salvation, and He will. 

“Whatever you do, don’t believe the lie that you have to clean yourself up first before you turn back to God. Bring everything to the Lord, even your disappointment, even the places where you’re stuck. Then ask Him to restore unto you the joy of your salvation, and He will.” – Lisa Harper 

There’s a million kinds of prayers, and they represent real people with real problems and real trauma and real grief and real joy. And they bring all that to a real God. He’s not an existential construct. He’s an up-close, personal Savior. He is the King of all kings and He’s close. That’s a miraculous juxtaposition. My own prayer life has changed so much because I don’t worry about if I sound spiritual. I just want to be closer to my Redeemer. Some days that doesn’t look pretty. Some days, that’s really, really messy. But He says, “Bring me everything.”

This is from Jesus Listens, one of my favorite ever devotionals. This excerpt is from October 22nd, and it reads like this:

Glorious Jesus,

I realize that You guide each of Your children individually. That’s why listening to You—through Scripture and prayer—is essential for me to find the way forward. Please prepare me for the day that awaits me and point me in the right direction. Because You are with me continually, I don’t have to be intimidated by fear. Though it stalks me, I know it can’t harm me as long as I cling to Your hand. Instead of being fearful, I want to walk trustingly with You along my pathway—enjoying Peace in Your Presence.

In Your high and holy Name, 

Amen

Narrator: To learn more about Lisa Harper, you may visit www.lisaharper.org, and please be sure to check out her latest book, A Jesus-Shaped Life: How Diving Deeper into Theology Can Transform Us and Our World with the Radical Kindness of God, at your favorite retailer.

Stay with us as we have a conversation with Richard Gamble after the break.

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 Jesus Listens for Every Season!

Jesus Listens: Prayers for Every Season is a 365-day devotional prayer book by Sarah Young which offers topical prayers for issues like anxiety, grief, and gratitude and aims to help believers grow their prayer life through consistent, scripture-focused prayer.

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Our next guest is Richard Gamble, the visionary behind the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer. From a life-changing childhood moment to carrying a cross seventy-seven miles on foot, Richard shares how a simple act of obedience sparked a national movement to make Jesus known. 

Richard Gamble: Hi, my name’s Richard Gamble. I am the founder of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, which is a project to build a national landmark about Jesus in the heart of the United Kingdom. 

I was not raised in a Christian family. One of the key moments in my childhood was when I prayed for my mom when she was unwell, and I just felt like God was in the room. From that moment as an eleven-year-old, I believed that Jesus was real. But it took another nine years—when somebody shared the gospel with me when I was twenty, I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I didn’t really need persuading—that moment just utterly changed my life, and I was just sold out for God from day one. 

A Vision Sparked By a 77-Mile Cross Walk

One Easter, I felt God speak to me and tell me to carry a cross around my county, which was like a seventy-seven mile walk. The aim of it really was just to get people to think about Jesus during Easter, instead of Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies and all of that, taking the message outside of the four walls of a church building for normal people to see. 

I started to get fed back to me all these ad hoc conversations that people were having in their workplaces, in their schools, and in their colleges. Interestingly, my father, who’s not a Christian, was in a governmental meeting, and somebody said, “Hey, I saw the weirdest thing today. I saw a bloke carrying a cross, dressed in a suit. What’s all that about?” And my dad said, “Well, that’s my son,” and then proceeded to share the gospel with the whole room, you know, “This is what my son believes…” 

As I’m walking around, I sort of feel this is my calling, but I don’t really know what to do next. And so, I’m talking to Jesus as I walk, like, “Jesus, what do you want me to do next?” In an instant, this flash came through my head of a vision—it felt like a foreign thought, which I now know is one of the ways that Jesus speaks to me—a wall made of a million bricks. Every brick represents a testimony, a story of when somebody prayed and Jesus answered. I got home that day and my wife saw that little twinkle in my eye, and she was like, “Oh, what’s going on?” And I went, “I think we’re going to build a national landmark.” So 2004 was the beginning of this incredible journey that me and many others that have joined me have been on—to make Jesus famous across the United Kingdom. 

God’s Fingerprints on the Land: A Prophetic Journey to The Perfect Site

Over the last ten years, we have had some amazing stories of God’s favor, but perhaps the most pivotal one for me is when we got the land. My wife and I were invited to go to a conference in California, and we were just at this stage where we had a concept design, but we needed land now. That was the next step. 

We go to California, and nobody knew who we were or what we were doing. This lady came up to us, and she said, “I believe I’ve got a word of God for you.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay.” And then she said, “God wants you to know that He has got some heavenly land prepared for you.” And that for me was really cool to be over on the other side of the planet and have God speak clearly to me about something I’m doing in the United Kingdom. 

We have a team of intercessors who are praying for the project all the time, every day. I said to them, “Hey, this is what God said,” and one of my intercessors said, “Well, if God’s told us He’s got the land, I’ll just ask Him where it is.” So she goes off and prays. Sometime later, she sends me back a Google map circling this piece of land, and what she didn’t know was the person who owned that land had emailed me just a few days before asking to meet, which is pretty incredible. So, I met with him, I pitched my heart out, and I shared the vision.

I think year-wise we were in about 2015, and I told him that God spoke to me in 2004. He then tells me at the end of the meeting that God gave him the same vision in 2003, and he’d set up a trust fund for it. He then says, “I’m gonna go and pray about it.” I didn’t want to tell him about the woman circling the land—I didn’t wanna manipulate the situation. He goes away, comes back and says, “Yes, we’re going to give you some land.” So, he gave me this piece of land—it was not the one that was circled, but I was still happy. 

After six months, he phones up and says, “I’m really sorry, we can’t use that land anymore.” And so, when you’re in that position, you’re like, “God, what are you doing here? I’m losing all the momentum.” He gave me another piece of land, then another six months passed, and he phones up again and says, “I’m embarrassed about this, but I can’t give you that land anymore.” 

They decide to pay an architect to look at all the land that they own—they own a lot of land across the country. The architect comes back with, guess what—the piece of land that the lady had circled two years previously. And so that for me is amazing because you can’t make that up. That is God’s orchestration. The answer wasn’t a smooth line—it took a long time for us to get the signature on the dotted line and the land approved. Now, we’ve got this incredible story of God’s favor that is bonkers—nobody could make it up. But that is a real rock for us, because we now reflect on that story all the time and that helps us through our difficult times. 

Designing the Impossible: The Monument That’s Never been Built Before

It’s really difficult when you get a vision when you don’t know what to do. I just didn’t know what to do with it. I’m not a practical man. I’ve set fire to my own bathroom, and I’m banned from DIY. So how on earth am I going to build something? The first thing I did was to speak the dream. I think that’s an important step—when God gives you a vision, to actually speak it out to others. Then I really prayed, and I was praying off and on about it for ten years, not knowing what to do. I’d keep speaking the dream and sharing the idea with people, and they’d give me that look on their face, which was like, Oh, that’s a nice idea, Rich. What they were really saying was, It’s never going to happen. 

“The first thing I did was to speak the dream. I think that’s an important step—when God gives you a vision, to actually speak it out to others.” – Richard Gamble

After ten years, I just felt God say, “Green light, time to go, time to get stuck in.” I met with an architect who suggested the best way forward was to run a global competition. So that’s what we did. We raised the money. We did a global design competition with the Royal Institute of British Architects. I think we had 133 entries from twenty-six different countries, and the winning design is this giant, colossal, white infinity loop which arches up into the skyline fifty meters high. If you take the Statue of Liberty off her plinth, you can fit her underneath it—that’s how big it is. The base is about the size of an American football field. The structure is so complex because it twists and turns all the way through. It creates some unique engineering challenges, which are without precedent. Nothing like this has ever been built before. 

And that’s the craziness of God for me—that He would pick somebody like me, who set fire to his own bathroom, who’s nearly chopped a tree onto his own house, whose wife won’t let him do DIY projects at all, to build a really complex structure. I think that’s important because it shows that it’s not about human effort, this is about God moving and God orchestrating this whole journey of getting this built. I hope that part of the story in itself encourages the listeners, because if God has given you a dream, the success of that dream is not limited to your ability. The success of the dream is just predicated on whether God has chosen it to be. And if God is behind a dream, everything is possible. That’s certainly been our experience. 

“If God has given you a dream, the success of that dream is not limited to your ability. The success of the dream is just predicated on whether God has chosen it to be. If God is behind a dream, everything is possible.” – Richard Gamble

A Million Stories of Answered Prayer, One Brick at a Time

We want to demonstrate the colossal nature of God answering prayer. A million is a huge, huge number, but when people come, they’ll see these tiny bricks and they’ll start to get their head around the concept of what a million looks like. And when you’re presented with that vast structure with these tiny bricks, you will inevitably start thinking, “Well, what if one of these is true? Could a million people be wrong?” Ultimately, what we want people to do is to find stories that inspire them to go on their own personal journey to find Jesus, the God who answers.

“Ultimately, what we want people to do is to find stories that inspire them to go on their own personal journey to find Jesus, the God who answers.” – Richard Gamble 

We’ve allowed staff to access the database to help other people. In Revelation, it says, “They overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of the testimony.” In other words, you can overcome by sharing your testimony with somebody. An example of that is we had a young man working for us who said, “Look, I can’t work anymore. I’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome, and I’ve been hiding it but I just have to stop.” And we’re like, “Wow, okay.” So we went through the database and we found six stories of people being healed from chronic fatigue syndrome. We sent him the stories, and six months later I got an email from him saying, “Thank you so much for the stories.” He read them every day, and in his prayers as he came before God, he was like, “If you can do it for them, you can do it for me. Do it again God.” And he emailed to tell me that after six months God had healed him, and he was back to work. For me, it’s the first fruit of what it’s gonna be like when we do the Eternal Wall. 

“You can overcome by sharing your testimony with somebody.” – Richard Gamble

So, you’ll be able to search through this database of stories of answered prayer. If you’re standing in front of it, you can point your phone at it and your phone will light up and it will tell you the story of the brick you’re looking at. But if you are a few thousand miles away, you’ll just be able to go online and search through the stories. 

I think most people are gonna search through the topic that they are currently encountering. I also think people will want to know, “Does God answer prayer where I live?” Currently, I think we have stories from about 130 countries. We’re encouraging people from all over the world, but if I’m in Dallas or Mexico City or the Falkland Islands or wherever it is all over the world, wouldn’t it be amazing if you type in where you live and you can see through history the answered prayers of the people who live on exactly the same spot that you do? I think that is going to speak to the nations of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who just wants to engage with them. 

Overcoming the Impossible with Faith, Memory, and Scripture

The challenge with this project is just its enormity. It’s an enormous amount of finance to raise. Praise God, we’re up to about eighty-five percent so far. We’ve created a structure that’s never been built before. We’re using new technology on a scale that’s not ever been seen before. And on top of that, we’ve got the hardest job, which is trying to encourage people to spend time to share their stories of answered prayer. 

Within all these moments, there are times when you just feel overwhelmed by the task. What I’ve learned to do, and what the team has learned to do, is [in those] moments, remember what God has done. We write down every time God blesses us. We write down every one of our crazy stories that we’re encountering. And when you read through those, it just changes your take on the situation, and you go, “Wait a second. If all these things have happened, why would we fail now? It makes no sense.” God could have allowed us to fail early on and saved us all this heartache, yet here we are. And so we use those stories to recalibrate. 

It is important that we’re in the Word, whether that be through devotionals like Jesus Calling, whether that be through worship, whether it just be through working our way through God’s Word, what happens is that the more those overwhelming moments come, if you are grounded in that truth of who God is daily, you don’t get the anxiety, you don’t get the fear—it bounces off you because you know the truth. We are bombarded by facts on a daily basis that tell us this can’t be done. But we call on the truth of God and His purposes to know that what we are doing is in line with Scripture and He’s gonna bless it. 

“The more those overwhelming moments come, if you are grounded in that truth of who God is daily, you don’t get the anxiety, you don’t get the fear—it bounces off you because you know the truth.” – Richard Gamble 

Narrator: To learn more about Richard Gamble or to contribute to the Eternal Wall project, visit www.eternalwall.org.uk. 

If you’d like to hear more stories about finding hope in heartache, check out our interview with Josh Baldwin.

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Next week: Christian Dearman

Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from Christian Dearman, a professional baseball player for the Savannah Bananas. Christian talks about the joy of utilizing his platform to bring light and positivity to those around him. 

Christian Dearman: I do firmly believe that God has been answering my prayers and that this path that I’m on is one that He is proud to put me on and one that will really light up everyone around me and do what I was meant to do—that is to inspire others to be great and to be able to follow the Lord no matter what’s going on.