Chip Ingram: ‘God, Where Do You Want Me?’

Growing up, Chip Ingram believed that anything short of constant success meant failure. That all changed when he was invited to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp where he traded his ideals of success for salvation in Jesus Christ.

Chip now leads Living on the Edge, a ministry that encourages people to live out their faith in Jesus Christ. Hear how Chip’s journey from performance-driven living to a life transformed by grace is still impacting others on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. 

Connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Facebook at Billy Graham Radio.

If you’d like to know more about beginning a relationship with Jesus Christ, or deepening the faith you already have, visit FindPeacewithGod.net.

If you’d like to pray with someone, call our 24-hour prayer line at 855-255-7729. People are available to talk 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Transcript

MUSIC STARTS

Chip Ingram:
00:00:01 God uses ordinary people. I look in the mirror, in my mind I’m still a basketball coach that got a different assignment.

Jim Kirkland: Today, Chip Ingram is a nationally recognized Bible teacher, author, and broadcaster. He also leads Living on the Edge, a ministry that encourages people to live out their faith in Jesus. Chip shares his journey on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories., an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I’m Jim Kirkland.

What Chip learned about God’s willingness to use people is something Billy Graham also knew.

Billy Graham: 
00:00:33 If you’re totally surrendered and totally dedicated and say, “Lord, here’s my hand with all I’ve got,” God has a place for you. He can use you.

Jim: You’ll hear more of that truth from Billy Graham later in this episode, but if you’d like to learn more about God using you right now, visit our website: FindPeaceWithGod.net. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. Or, if you’d prefer to talk with someone, we’re here for you at the 24/7 Billy Graham prayer line, 855-255-7729. That’s 855-255-PRAY.

Intro: GPS: God. People. Stories.

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Chip Ingram grew up in a small, two-bedroom rental home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, with his parents and two older sisters. They were a typical post-World War II family.
Chip:
00:01:32 On the outside, we looked really good. I was a good student. I was a good athlete. My dream was to get a basketball scholarship. 

Jim: But on the inside, Chip’s family struggled. His dad was an ex-Marine who faced survivor’s guilt after having fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima, where so many lost their lives. 

Chip:
00:01:50 My dad had huge unresolved issues that a couple beers made him feel better and then four made him feel a lot better.

Jim: As a result, Chip’s father struggled to deal with his emotions and to communicate his love for his children.

Chip:
00:02:05 He felt like the way he would show his love is that his motto was: Successful people are happy. I will help you be successful. If you got four A’s and a B, we talked about wonder what happened. If you got two hits out of four, it was, ah, how many times have I told you that curve ball, that’s why you stepped out and you grounded out the shortstop.

Jim: So, perhaps not surprisingly, Chip became consumed by performance-based love. 

Chip:
00:02:33 By the time I was 12, I was a workaholic. I had two paper routes, lent my parents $3,000 at 6% interest, had eight or nine yards, was the shortstop on the baseball team, point guard on the basketball team, very undersized overachiever.

Jim: During Chip’s teenage years, his father became more absent. He often drank alcohol all day on Saturday and straight after church on Sunday. But by the time Chip was a high school senior, his mom gave his dad an ultimatum.

Chip:
00:03:05 You can have us and the kids, or you can have this bottle. You can’t have both.

Jim: Chip’s dad chose his family. He stopped drinking immediately. And that wasn’t the only notable thing that happened during Chip’s senior year. 

Chip:
00:03:18 Right before I went to play basketball in college, a football coach, I don’t know why me, I was walking in the halls and he said, Hey, there’s a camp and the best basketball players in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky are going to be there. I’ll pay your way if you want to go for a week. And I said, Well, hey, I’ve got a painting job with this coach, and I don’t think I can make it.
Jim: But it turned out Chip could make it because the painting job was delayed—a delay that Chip has come to see as God’s sovereignty. So, he attended the camp with about 600 other athletes. He says it was a moment of divine providence.

Chip:
00:03:54 I got there, and they gave me a little Bible, a Good News for Modern Man; a T-shirt that said FCA, Fellowship Christian Athletes, with a cross on it. And the only time I used Jesus’ Name was in expletives. I had a really bad mouth. I was deeply insecure. And since I was so small, I always recruited the sort of the strongest guy on the team to be my buddy, to be an enforcer. And I was just arrogant, filled with myself out of that insecurity.

Jim: The environment at this Christian athletic camp was very different from anything Chip had experienced before. He says he felt like he “got dropped in the land of Jesus freaks.” It was 1972, the year the big Jesus movement swept the United States.

Chip:
00:04:35 So the first two or three days I was not going to open the Bible and they’re not going to indoctrinate me in their stuff, but I saw the Gospel through men loving other men in authentic ways.

Jim: On the last night of the conference, a man preached a sermon straight out of the Bible. That was unlike any church service that Chip had experienced growing up.

Chip:
00:04:55 I had no idea what a personal relationship with God was like. It never made any sense before, but it actually made sense. They explained the Gospel clearly. I prayed a very poor prayer, I’m sure, but a sincere one, and asked Christ to forgive me, come into my life.

Jim: With that decision, God began a gradual and steady transformation in Chip that would continue when he headed off to college at West Virginia University.

Chip:
00:05:21 My second day there, the fullback for the football team walked by. I was in the athletic dorm, and he saw I had one little tiny poster with a Bible underneath of it. I thought, Well, I’m going to live this out, and he took me to a Bible study that night. 

Jim: That is how Chip ended up meeting Dave Marshall, the man who would become his mentor. 

Chip:
00:05:41 I ended up getting to know him and his family for the next four years. I ate meals at his house. I watched him date his wife. I watched him discipline and educate his kids. He discipled me, taught me to get in the Scriptures, how to pray, share my faith. We started leading Bible studies.
Jim: But during Chip’s senior year, Dave left to start a Bible study at another campus. So, Chip and a group of students began to lead the studies themselves. What God did with that was remarkable.

Chip:
00:06:12 We went from three or four students to about 250 students in Bible study—men and women—and God just did an amazing thing on our secular campus.

Jim: After Chip graduated from college, his passion for teaching, coaching, and leading people to the Lord continued in earnest. 

Chip:
00:06:29 My first job was a high school teaching and coaching job and had a Bible study with my players. And the town I lived in, I started a ministry for college students.

Jim: Then, Chip’s life took a surprising turn. Through basketball, he entered full-time vocational ministry.

Chip:
00:06:47 I got invited to play on an international team that was playing in all the countries in South America, playing Olympic teams and selection teams. And you got to share Christ at halftime. It was the precursor to Athletes in Action. And so, I found myself with guys from all these major colleges and at halftime, one guy would share his testimony. And for an hour or two after the games, people would come down, we’d share our faith.

Jim: Over the course of two summers, Chip shared the Gospel in nearly every country in South America. Sometimes, he’d lead 10 to 15 people to Christ in one day. At one outreach, a missionary who sometimes traveled with Chip’s team heard Chip share his testimony.

Chip:
00:07:27 He grabbed my arm, stuck a microphone on my face, and said, Preach to these people right after the game. And I said, Well, what do want me to say? He said, Kid, I’ve watched you read the Bible every morning and teach these guys, what did you read this morning?

Jim: That night, at a big outdoor stadium filled with nearly 10,000 people, Chip quoted from Psalm 19. It was in an area of South America where not even one evangelical church existed. 

Chip:
00:07:54 And I said, Stop. Look at the stars. “The heavens declare the glory of God.” And I quoted two or three verses, and I said, Come down here and I’ll introduce you to the one who made all those stars and loves and knows you. And people started leaving the stands and they came down. [chuckle] And that guy was like, after every game after that for a season, he would grab me, throw me up there.

Jim: Up until this point, Chip had been thinking he wasn’t qualified for ministry … because he’d say to himself, “I’m just a teacher. I’m just a basketball coach.” However, this experience completely changed Chip’s understanding of how God can and will use people. 

Chip:
00:08:36 I thought for God to use someone, they got to be way smarter than me and way more holy than me—and yet what I realized was the power is in the message, not in the messenger.

Jim: So, with that in mind, Chip started praying for guidance on what God wanted him to do. … And this is when Chip realized God was illuminating his next steps. 

Chip:
00:08:58 I went home and to my surprise, people started asking to speak to their youth groups and this and that. And I didn’t have any big moment. The only way I can describe it is I just kept following the little bit of light that God gave me.

Jim: One of those bits of light was to go back to school for a postgraduate degree. That’s where he met the woman who would become his wife, Theresa. Chip calls her “an amazing woman.”

Chip:
00:09:23 She had two kids, being abandoned earlier—came to Christ through that. We got married and about six, seven months after we got married, we put everything we owned in a Ryder truck … and two little boys that I became an instant dad, and we drove to Dallas.

Jim: They didn’t exactly go by themselves, though. 

Chip:
00:09:43 My parents who were now Christians followed us and found a little apartment with the Dallas Seminary and I squeezed that four-year program into five and added another child along the way. And that was really the call to ministry. It was just like, you know, I guess if You can use a basketball coach, then here I am.

Jim: With the call to ministry came a very busy life for Chip and his family. He worked full time and went to school full time. But that season of life came to an end when Chip started pastoring Country Bible Church in Kaufman, Texas.




Chip:
00:10:17 They taught me how to be a pastor. And that little group of 35 grew to about 450 or so in that little town of 3,000. God used that as sort of a training ground and great, wonderful people. 

Jim: It fanned in him the flame of wanting to be a missionary, of reaching people who were unchurched. But that wasn’t likely to happen where he was, because in Kaufman, Texas, his church was one of 17 churches in a half-mile radius. 

Chip:
00:10:46 And it was like, God, I did not sign up for this, to be stuck in a tiny town. I thought He forgot my name. I want to go where it’s cutting edge. I want to go where people don’t know about Jesus. I want to go where it really makes a difference. And I just didn’t realize I had a lot more of refining that needed to happen.

Jim: Well after a few more years of ‘refinement,’ God answered Chip’s prayer and led the Ingrams to leave Texas and head west.

Chip:
00:11:13 God took me at my word and we went from this hyper-rural environment to the most liberal city in all of America: Santa Cruz, California, that kind of thinks San Francisco and Berkeley is a little too far-right. And it was filled with all the alternative lifestyles, satanic bookstores …

Jim: They would spend 12 years at their next church, Santa Cruz Bible. Given how Chip and Theresa had grown up, they were uniquely suited for this assignment. 

Chip:
00:11:46 We were not very religious and Theresa and I both came from alcoholic homes. We were pretty broken people and that’s exactly what was there, and we could just be ourselves. And God just—I mean, shockingly, if Santa Cruz and that particular group with those particular needs was a glove, we were the hand to fit into that glove.

Jim: At the same time, though, the problems from their pasts that helped Chip and Theresa minister to those in their church also caused troubles in their own marriage.

Chip:
00:12:16 We had really big struggles early on in our marriage because we didn’t—you don’t know you have a bunch of baggage until you put it together, but we worked hard and we got good counseling and we were committed to the Lord, committed to the Bible. And, we thought option A is stay married and option B is stay married. So, option C is don’t do anything about it and be miserable. So that was not an option.

Jim: God used Chip’s and Theresa’s struggles—and their transparency about those struggles—to draw people to Himself through their church. 

Chip:
00:12:47 I think much of the favor that God has had on my life, particularly in teaching, and just saying, You know, what the heck? Everyone’s got problems. Why don’t we just share it? Faking it takes too much energy. And as a result, thousands of people showed up at this church. 

Jim: Soon people outside of Chip’s church would hear his sermons. A businessman got Chip’s messages placed on a local radio station. From there, they eventually got picked up by hundreds of other radio stations. 

Chip:
00:13:16 And then after a few years it just kind of went like wildfire. And a guy came to me and said, Would you consider taking some of these messages and making them a book? 

Jim: That question was an answer to prayer.

Chip:
00:13:30 I had privately, I had this thing for years I did. I wrote—I called them desire cards, and, you know, Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” And so I thought, what if I desired things that I knew were God’s will? And so I would write on my desire card: I desire to be a radically loving husband that raises my kids to know God’s will with all their heart. I desire to, you know, whatever they were. And one of them was, I desire to someday put some truth in the form of a book that would bless tens of thousands of people.

Jim: Chip was now an author and a radio Bible teacher, as well as a pastor of a local church. When he asked God for help on how to navigate his increasingly busy life, he sensed God telling him this:

Chip:
00:14:14 Chip, I want you to be a catalyst to transform how America thinks about God, how pastors think about preaching, how churches think about their community, and how everyday believers live out their faith at home and at work. Did you get that?

Jim: He did get it. And God’s calling for Chip to help pastors, churches, and people became the rudder of Chip’s life. More book deals came, and his radio audience grew. And then Chip took the job as president of Walk Thru The Bible, a ministry providing materials for 50,000 churches in America and 19 other countries.

Chip:
00:14:47 All the core teaching that I did in Santa Cruz became videos and traveled all around the world and got to see the world, and we ended up in, you know, I think a hundred countries and had 90,000 pastors and teachers. 

Jim: As Chip’s role at Walk Thru The Bible became one of CEO and fundraiser, he began to miss teaching from God’s Word. So he prayed about this, and God led him to begin the ministry, Living on the Edge. 

Chip:
00:15:13 And, the next two or three years sort of Living on the Edge became this ministry all on its own, and it went from kind of teaching to, you know, we’ve got a million people listening, that now with the internet, you can listen to great teaching anywhere, anytime. Shouldn’t we come up with a plan? And so we took some big steps of faith and began to create small groups and we launched them on the air. And I think we launched like 350,000 small groups in like a three- or four-year period. And as that all got started, then it was like, OK, God, where do You want me?

Jim: The answer to that question was Venture Christian Church in the San Francisco Bay Area. He served as senior pastor there until 2018, when he stepped down to lead Living on the Edge exclusively.

Chip:
00:16:01 Living on the Edge—we said we do three things for three groups for one purpose. And that’s kind of where I’ve landed is, we teach the multitudes, we train groups, and we develop tools for leaders—pastors primarily—and high-capacity businesspeople to help Christians live like Christians.

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Chip Ingram has devoted his life to helping people see the fulfillment that comes when your life is totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. You can experience that fulfillment that Jesus offers—and we can help you get there. Visit us at FindPeaceWithGod.net. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. 

Or, you can call the 24-hour Billy Graham prayer line. Someone is waiting to speak with you now at 855-255-7729. That’s 855-255-PRAY. That phone number and links to our website are also included in this episode’s show notes. 

In just a moment, you’ll hear a final word from Chip Ingram … a final word of encouragement. 

MUSIC STARTS

Voice-over: You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories., a podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Billy Graham:
00:17:25 If you’re totally surrendered and totally dedicated and say, “Lord, here’s my hand with all I’ve got,” God has a place for you. He can use you.

Voice-over: Billy Graham …

Billy Graham:
00:17:38 With God, you can be sure that you are a majority. That’s the reason for the cross. We find the Lord Jesus Christ dying on that cross for your sins. And every time you see a cross, it should remind you of what you mean to God. Jesus not only died for all, He died for each. “I’m with you till the end of the age,” said Jesus. He will be there with you. You are a link in God’s chain and God’s plan to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world right now in history. Are you as a young man, a young woman ready to say, “I’m ready to go. I’ll be God’s man … I’ll be God’s woman”?

Jim: You can find more encouragement about making yourself available for God’s work at our website, FindPeaceWithGod.net. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net.

Our guest on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. is Chip Ingram. Chip is a husband, father of four grown kids, and grandfather of 12. And with all that joyous responsibility, he also still has time to lead the ministry, Living on the Edge. It’s an organization dedicated to training pastors and teaching people God’s Word around the world. Chip left us with one final word of encouragement.

Chip:
00:18:59 God uses ordinary people. I look in the mirror, in my mind I’m still a basketball coach that got a different assignment. I’m teaching the body of Christ and coaching them. I’ve gotten to know—because of what the Lord said in my life—I’ve gotten to hang out with, quote, ‘A lot of really, really famous, really smart, really rich, really powerful, you know, Christian businesspeople’ and people that have been my heroes. And I just say, there are no superstars. Once you peel back the layers of this and this and that, everyone in the entire world is desperately insecure. We all need our identity in Christ. God uses very ordinary people to do extraordinary things. 

Jim: We’re thankful for Chip Ingram joining us on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode, would you please tell a friend about the podcast or leave us a review or both? And also, be sure you’re subscribed to GPS, so you can stay in the loop with us. Our next episode comes out in just two weeks.

I’m Jim Kirkland, and this is GPS: God. People. Stories. It’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—Always Good News.

CLOSING MUSIC

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