How to Spend a Day (or Half Day) Alone with God—and Why It Matters

Pre-Order Pete Scazzero's forthcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success, at www.emotionallyhealthy.org/success and get a free chapter. When I finished the first chapter of this book, I was ready to move on to the hopeful part. My editor sent it back with a hard word: "Pete, you can't get to the cure until you've told the truth about the disease." I didn't want to climb back down into that pain. I had already lived it. But I did, and it became the hardest chapter in the book to write. In this ...

Pre-Order Pete Scazzero's forthcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success, at www.emotionallyhealthy.org/success and get a free chapter. This is Part 1, and we're starting where the book starts: the lies we call success. For years I measured my ministry the way most of us do. Attendance. Budget. Baptisms. Conferences that promised the next strategy for growth. It worked, for a while. But underneath the numbers, I wasn't reflecting on Jesus. I wasn't in touch with my own shadow, my fears, my per...

Pre-Order Pete Scazzero's forthcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success, at www.emotionallyhealthy.org/success and get a free chapter. What if you could succeed brilliantly at something God never asked you to do? Is it possible to succeed at the wrong thing? I spent a good part of my ministry answering yes to that question without knowing it. I built something big at New Life Fellowship while becoming increasingly unhealthy. The numbers were up. My joy was down. It took a church split and two...

Pre-Order Pete Scazzero's forthcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success, at www.emotionallyhealthy.org/success and get a free chapter. For years, I measured ministry impact by one word: bigger. I remember walking into one of the largest churches in America, watching thousands of people fill the room, and thinking, this is it, this is critical mass. A staff member who'd been there since it was a thousand people told me something shifted at 7,500. Point people in a direction, he said, and it fe...

Pre-Order Pete Scazzero's forthcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success, at www.emotionallyhealthy.org/success and get a free chapter. For my first seventeen years in ministry, I led for Jesus without listening to him. My prayer life was mostly a list of requests. When a door opened, I walked through it and called it faithfulness, following my best ideas and telling myself it was discernment. In this episode, I walk through the third of four reversals from my new book: the move from ou...