00:00:30.000And I want to thank Ramdee from Arizona, charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:34.000Make sure you come to AmericaFest this weekend, A-M-F-E-S-T.com.
00:00:39.000We have Tucker Carlson coming, Kaylee McEnany, Greg Gutfeld, Candace Owens, Jesse Waters, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, Donald Trump Jr., Pete Hegseth, Madison Cawthorne, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Rand Paul, Jack Pesobic, Benny Johnson, Kat Kamick, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gates, Burgess Owens, Louis Gomert, Sean Foyt, Sarah Palin, Brandon Tatum, Michael Chandler, and Moore, James O'Keefe, Pastor, Jack Hibbs, Brantley Gilbert, Dustin Lynch, Russell Dickerson, Rayland Lee Greenwood, and DJ Silver.
00:01:22.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:31.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:02.000And I think that, you know, we needed an updated culture war battle plan because this has gone beyond culture war.
00:02:10.000It has descended, I think, into a full-blown cold civil war now.
00:02:14.000It's just, it's not the Soviets and the Americans from when I was a kid.
00:02:18.000It's really now the left America versus what's left of America.
00:02:22.000It's really authoritarianism, whether it's from the public or private sector.
00:02:27.000As you watch major news outlets like the New York Times now, after playing class warfare most of my life, they're now just ripping and reading press releases from big pharma companies as news without any scrutiny or skepticism whatsoever.
00:02:41.000So it's really authoritarianism, whether public or private.
00:02:44.000And when you put authoritarians in the public and private sector together, what do you get?
00:02:47.000Good old-fashioned fascism versus everybody else.
00:02:50.000And I think you're seeing some of the old left-right Venn diagram is being violated by people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan.
00:02:59.000I think that a lot of people that maybe don't understand where people like you and I are coming from and don't fully agree still think that they ought to be allowed to be free.
00:03:07.000And so this new paradigm, I think, particularly for Christians, requires a new level of culture war.
00:03:14.000And, you know, I was years ago, I read Francis Schaefer's great The Christian Manifesto, but that was written for the 80s and the 90s.
00:03:21.000And so, yeah, so this is my attempt to update that for the era in which we live now, because I think that we're way beyond let's just wait every two, four, six, and eight years and vote our way out of this.
00:03:32.000I don't think that's that's going to suffice here.
00:03:34.000So there's a lot I want to unpack with you, but let's start with the obvious question, at least for me, do what you believe.
00:03:41.000Most people don't know what they believe.
00:03:45.000And, you know, there's an ancient kind of a stained glass window word known as hermeneutics.
00:03:53.000And in modern parlance, we refer to it in a secular academic setting as epistemology.
00:04:00.000And there is an epistemological nuclear winner in America.
00:04:04.000A lot of Americans don't know what they know or why they know it or why they know it is true.
00:04:12.000And I think that's true of a lot of Christians as well.
00:04:15.000There was a Barna poll last year that showed a majority of Christians didn't know what the Great Commission was.
00:04:21.000It's only the first fundamental command that Christ gives the church in the new covenant, for example, to go ye into all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
00:04:44.000And so we have been, we've witnessed in this last generation, there's been a cultural hijacking that has taken place in the co-conspirators or in academia and pop culture.
00:04:55.000And then ultimately, government has acted upon their success to then act authoritarian in response to that.
00:05:04.000And a lot of America, and I think that's why you're seeing, you know, it's fascinating to me.
00:05:34.000And it's Sarah Silverman is now deflecting that she's not a racist for telling Joy Reed to stop telling things that are blatant lies because they hurt their own side.
00:05:43.000It's not that we're dealing with a new truth or a different claim on the truth.
00:05:49.000We live in an era of untruth, an era that lacks intellectual curiosity, that doesn't really want to know what really happened with the Las Vegas shooter, what the real motivations were, doesn't really want to know what really went down in Kenosha with Kyle Rittenhouse.
00:06:07.000We don't want to be intellectually curious.
00:06:11.000We don't want to know if Jesse Smollett was lying or not, or if he's the first person to actually try to trust the Nigerians who emailed him.
00:06:19.000No, we just want a particular narrative affirmed.
00:06:24.000And as long as my narrative is being affirmed and satiated and is pleasuring me intellectually, that is good enough, whether it is true or not.
00:06:34.000And that is a dangerous place, Charlie, for a culture to be.
00:06:37.000So I want to focus obviously on the Christian element of this because that's really who you're writing this for, if I'm not mistaken.
00:06:43.000And there's a whole aspect to this where you're going to get a lot of pushback from institutional Christians who, you know, there's a lot of different reasons why they don't want to do anything.
00:06:54.000They don't want to lose membership or ties and offerings, which is a ridiculous excuse.
00:06:59.000They don't want to lose social media followers, which of even worse excuse.
00:07:03.000Or some are so focused on eschatology, study of the end times that they say, what's the difference?
00:08:33.000Talk a little bit about Romans 13 because Romans 13, I'm glad you start with it in chapter one, was the number one most quoted verse in Nazi Germany.
00:08:41.000It's the most quoted verse now for Christian inaction.
00:08:44.000And it is the least understood yet most cited political verse in the entire Bible, please.
00:08:51.000If you know the background of the Declaration, Romans 13 was a stumbling block to getting the Declaration passed.
00:09:01.000Most of the colonies, I think except for Rhode Island, were settled by a specific denomination of Christianity.
00:09:10.000And so you had a heavily or heavily quicker influence in a place like Pennsylvania, for example.
00:09:16.000They come out of a tradition known as Anabaptism post-Reformation.
00:09:20.000And these are your Quakers, your Mennonites, these are the folks that kind of retreat from society to live out their faith without civic or civil entanglements.
00:09:32.000And we see that even in our modern times today.
00:09:35.000And so they debated amongst themselves, some of these various Christian traditions.
00:09:39.000Are we not sinning in violation of Romans 13 if we rebel against England?
00:09:44.000And this is why Jefferson frames this argument.
00:09:48.000He says, hey, we're appealing to the supreme judge for the rectitude of our actions, meaning judge our motivations.
00:10:23.000And now they are faced with a conflict because if they continue to obey these unlawful, what they viewed as unbiblical mandates, then they are now sinning.
00:10:32.000They are now violating the kingdom of God in order to obey the kingdom of man.
00:10:36.000And it was this hermeneutical connection that eventually brought the rest, brought those colonies that were resistant to revolt online.
00:10:45.000In our day and age, we shouldn't have to wrestle with that whatsoever because of what you just articulated.
00:10:51.000The Constitution begins with we the people in order to form a more perfect union.
00:10:56.000So therefore, the people were not made for the constitution.
00:10:59.000The constitution was made for the people.
00:11:01.000Similar to when Jesus says the Sabbath was not made for man.
00:11:05.000Man was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath was made for man, that it was there to bless us, not to hold us hostage.
00:12:28.000But even beyond America's particular civic arrangement, there remains the point that if what Paul meant, you know, I know we live in an era of philosophical reconstructionism or reductionism, that we can determine and throw out things that people write that we don't like, or we can redetermine what they thought they meant.
00:12:49.000But, you know, we know what Paul's words mean by how he lived them out.
00:12:53.000If Paul really meant that in Romans 13 to do every cotton pick and thing a king tells you to do, why did Nero cut his head off then?
00:13:00.000If he was that compliant, if he was that willing to do whatever the state said, why did he live his last few years under house arrest until he was decapitated by Nero?
00:13:09.000And Peter reasserts something similar later in the New Testament in one of his epistles.
00:13:13.000Well, if he also meant total subjugation to the state, even when it comes to the actual living out and preaching of the gospel, then why was he crucified upside down?
00:13:23.000So clearly, there is a line somewhere.
00:13:25.000When the Roman government executed Jesus, now we understand theologically as Christians that Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins, that we were the ones, all of us who have ever lived and sinned, we are the ones that killed Christ.
00:13:38.000He is the sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice for us.
00:13:40.000But in the pagan Roman mind, what was the charge?
00:13:44.000When the religious leaders say he's claiming to be a king, and we have no king but Caesar, he's charged with sedition or leading a revolt.
00:13:53.000That's why they put a sign over his head on the cross that's corrupting the minds of the youth.
00:14:30.000It means that there are certain things that Caesar could demand that he is not due, that do not belong to him, that belong to jurisdictions above him.
00:15:04.000And then we created a system through our founders where we wouldn't be faced with such choices, ideally, because ultimately the people rule here and not a ruling class.
00:15:15.000Yeah, it's not even a question in America.
00:15:17.000Australia, you have to go through a little bit deeper of a reflection, but it's very simple.
00:15:22.000If you go back to the Greek of what was written in Romans, it was this idea of the sovereign.
00:15:31.000And the founders solved that problem for us.
00:15:34.000And Romans 13 was the big hang-up of the Declaration because we know that 55 out of 56 of the signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing, regular church attending Christians.
00:15:44.000And Jonathan Mayhew was the leading pastor who inspired the American Revolution.
00:15:51.000He famously said, he said, obedience to tyrants is disobedience to God.
00:15:59.000And also the framework of Whitfield and Edwards and many others, and you mentioned Rhode Island well before that, Roger Williams helped kind of lay this foundation of what eventually became, you know, the freedom-loving, liberty-demanding people of America.
00:16:50.000We are called to disciple the nations, teaching them the commands that Christ has given us, a new covenant, a new way to live.
00:16:59.000Now, I am someone, as you may well know, I've been pretty critical in the pre-Trump era of how cozy to completely sold out to being mouthpieces for the Republican Party some well-known Christian conservative leaders and clergy were.
00:17:18.000And I think what's happened is, you know, I'm Gen X. My generation is now taking over the pulpits.
00:17:24.000And I think you're seeing a lot of the men that are taking those pulpits over, they don't want to be mascots for the Republicans, especially in the current state of a party who often doesn't fight for us and defend us unless we put a gun to their head anyway.
00:17:37.000But now we've kind of gone the other way to becoming completely passive aggressive about it at the exact same time, along the lines of what you're talking about.
00:17:46.000And to me, I just think that when you look at the, when you, when you see the arc of God's interaction with his people and what he commands, this, this teeter-tottering of going back and forth to extremes, that's actually not a fruit of the spirit.
00:18:01.000That's actually more of a reactionary, ungenerated sort of a pagan mindset that we represent a new way.
00:18:09.000We don't have to fall into false choices.
00:18:12.000It's not a choice between being a mascot for a Republican party, for a political party that frankly, most days isn't worth selling out to anyway, or we just passively, aggressively let this thing go to hell.
00:18:27.000No matter where we're at, whether we are politically engaged, whether we serve in a ministry formally, whether we are at a blue-collar job, whether we are a business mogul, whether we're doing a podcast, what is the point and purpose for why we're doing those things?
00:18:46.000Do you glorify God by keeping silent when the Pennsylvania women's team is replaced by men who weren't good enough as men, but are now allowed to recategorize themselves as women and now dominate women?
00:19:03.000Does that glorify God to not call out that distinction?
00:19:06.000Do you really believe, stop and think for a second?
00:19:18.000But in the middle of the man who had completely bedeviled the town with his sorcery and in front of this and in front of the townsfolks looked at him and said and called him a son of the devil.
00:19:28.000Do you believe that if St. Paul were alive today, he'd have nothing to say, nothing to say about the gender bending that is going on.
00:19:37.000A man who used his Roman citizenship, by the way, in order to recreate for himself a trial that gave him a platform to preach and teach the gospel.
00:19:46.000You think he would not use his American citizenship for similar means and similar purposes.
00:20:00.000He doesn't want you to engage the process whatsoever that is invading the moral and spiritual space that the church is supposed to occupy.
00:20:11.000Not to mention the first thing God did when he created his own people is he gave them a covenant and formed a formed a form of a government, a direct theocracy.
00:20:22.000So this idea that God has nothing to say about these areas whatsoever and doesn't want his people to, I'm all for not being a mascot.
00:20:29.000That's, hey, David was God's anointed.
00:20:32.000God still sent the prophet Nathan to him to call him to account.
00:20:37.000But the idea that the opposite or the antecedent or the or the antidote to not becoming sold out mascots that tarnish our witness for a political party, whether it's Jim Wallace for the Democrats or somebody else for the Republicans, that the answer to that is to therefore passive aggressively, laissez-faire, just let the pagans have the most influential arena in any culture.
00:20:59.000I just don't see how you can make a biblical case for that on any level whatsoever.
00:21:05.000The real estate market is extremely hot right now.
00:21:08.000People are taking advantage of low interest rates, economic uncertainty by investing in real assets.
00:21:12.000Whether you are a first-time buyer or just looking to make a change, the key is to get the property you want is being pre-qualified and having cash in hand.
00:21:19.000That's why you guys, all of us, myself included, I had to stop doing this.
00:21:41.000Then I met Andrew and Todd, Andrew Del Ray and Todd of Aiken, who become great friends of mine, AndrewandTodd.com.
00:21:47.000They are with Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
00:21:49.000My producer, Andrew, he's working with them right now, and he tells me they are part counselors, part financial planners, and they're really helping them.
00:21:54.000And I'm about to use them for something.
00:23:14.000Yeah, the case comes from a variety of three different categories, right?
00:23:18.000So one is the complicit church where they think the Bible is a series of allegories and poetry and that we must always be changing the Bible to the times, which is a thing that some pastors are saying.
00:23:33.000Like, oh, the Bible doesn't speak that clearly about adultery or the Bible, who says homosexuality is wrong in the Bible, like things like that, right?
00:23:43.000Then there's the complacent church where they just kind of sit around and they don't do much, but and they never really preach anything that definitive.
00:23:53.000Great music usually at those churches, you know, really good coffee and fellowship, phenomenal car parking operation.
00:24:04.000It's just kind of like we got a great youth ministry and we will never say anything that will offend you.
00:24:11.000That's like basically the whole thing.
00:24:14.000And those churches are extremely popular, as you well know.
00:24:18.000Then there is the courageous church, and you and I know many of these pastors that have, especially during the Fauci virus lockdowns, they deserve a lot of credit.
00:24:26.000People like Jack Hibbs, people like Rob McCoy, people like James Cadiz, people like the Barnett family here in Phoenix.
00:25:49.000But the idea that this is unavoidable, that there is some secret incantation tone, some way of doing this.
00:25:56.000We understand that our, you know, Paul says that the entirety of the New Testament, of the gospel, and all of the teachings that follow herein are all predicated on if Christ be not raised, then our preaching is in vain and we're all still dead in our sins.
00:26:14.000Murder, crucifixion, from being tortured beyond recognition and then being nailed to a wooden cross to die of asphyxiation in the heat of the desert sun.
00:26:33.000There's nothing pressed and folded and seamless about that transaction whatsoever.
00:26:40.000So the idea that you are going to be able to preach that message in a way that doesn't alienate, that doesn't, that doesn't push people away, that is non-confrontational.
00:26:52.000If you think you can do that, then either A, you have fooled yourself into believing you're nicer than God, or B, you're not actually preaching that message.
00:27:02.000Well, yeah, and it doesn't tell us to be nice, unfortunately.
00:27:22.000And Jesus spoke very clearly about the consequences of eternity and also the consequences of rejection.
00:27:31.000Even in the most feel-good verse in the discourse at night with Nicodemus, which is one of the most famous, most quoted verses ever in John 3, Nicodemus is like, wait, what do you mean you could be born again?
00:27:43.000Like you'd be born once and then born again.
00:27:46.000This is where we get the, you know, the, you know, the framing of born again.
00:27:50.000And Jesus says, no, you're born obviously by water and then you're born again by blood.
00:27:54.000Basically, you're born again when you accept me.
00:27:56.000But then Jesus goes on to say, and we all know John 3, 16, for God so loved the world, for God so agape the world.
00:28:24.000And so I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I won't say any names, but two of the kind of mega churches models, one in particular, I will say Willow Creek, which is I grew up kind of going to that church passively, you know, maybe a couple times a year, largely because, Steve, it was a spectacle.
00:28:40.000I mean, you could not go if you lived in that area, right?
00:28:43.000It's an auditorium with 15,000 seats and they run it like a machine and great car parking, might I add, awful politics, but great car parking.
00:28:51.000And, but so I saw that firsthand and it always bothered me kind of how they were expanding and almost like a private equity firm like absolving other churches and stuff.
00:29:01.000But I suppose a question I have for you, Steve, as you write this towards Christians is how much of this is directed at the pastor in the church?
00:29:08.000And then how much of your kind of, you know, do what you believe book is also directed at the actual regular church attendee?
00:29:20.000That ultimately, one of the, one of the things that pieces of feedback I've gotten the most since I've moved from sports to news talk broadcasting, well, it was radio back then, but now it's just podcasting, everything else, 15 years ago, is why don't I hear this more in church?
00:29:38.000Or pastor that have come up to me and said, your show has prompted me to get questions from my congregation that I have never gotten before.
00:29:47.000And to me, I think that there's a symbiotic relationship here.
00:29:51.000I believe in the priesthood of every believer.
00:29:54.000I also, though, at the same time, believe there is nothing other than the risen Lord himself.
00:30:00.000I don't think there's anything that the enemy is more threatened by than one bold man standing in a pulpit with his Bible open, letting it rip.
00:30:10.000And that's why those pastors will be attacked spiritually, but continue.
00:30:14.000The local church, the local church is the weapon of mass.
00:30:18.000The scriptures in the local church are the weapon of mass destruction in God's economy.
00:30:22.000And then in a New Testament, where we're now not a nation state as we were in the Old Testament, in the old covenant with Israel, but we are now a house of prayer that is open to all nations, as Jesus quoted from the Old Testament when he tore over the money changers in the temple.
00:30:38.000Now that the world is not separated any longer between Jews and Gentiles, but there is nor slave nor free.
00:30:44.000There is neither Greek nor barbarian, male nor female, not in a binary sense, but in a stationed sense, standing in society.
00:31:10.000And that is the worship and observance of Christ as the Son of God, as God, and therefore his word as essentially eternal law.
00:31:21.000And that ultimately requires an anointed authority that we recognize beyond even the best of small groups.
00:31:31.000That requires an anointed authority that we recognize because the creation was made on headship.
00:31:36.000That's why when you look at studies, if mom takes the kids to church without dad, when the kids go up, they're grow up, they're often very, sadly, not likely to continue going to church.
00:31:45.000But if dad goes, the odds that they will go to church increase exponentially.
00:32:53.000You'll be stifled by the head, by what's at the head of the operation.
00:32:57.000Similarly, the people within the congregation can be very, very motivated to go and do righteous things for the kingdom of God.
00:33:05.000But if the pastor doesn't give them that charge and is complacent, they'll never receive that calling fully the way that will most motivate them.
00:33:15.000That's why it is about who ultimately is in charge here.
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00:35:07.000That if our motivation is right, you know, the same Paul that, as I cited earlier, says to Simon Bar Jesus, the sorcerer, you're a son of the devil, also says, though, to rebuke softly using words of love seasoned with salt.
00:35:54.000Jesus says, for this reason, I came into the world to testify to the truth.
00:35:59.000And in that same gospel in John, he says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that that testimony of truth was given for love, that as you said in John 3, 17, that God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but so that through him the world may be saved.
00:36:22.000When my daughter Zoe was young and she never wanted to stand still, one day in the grocery store parking lot, one day in the middle of the winter, it's cold.
00:36:29.000I want to get the groceries in there and I don't put her in her seat yet.
00:36:32.000So I say, sweetie, stand right here and give daddy just a second to put the groceries in.
00:36:36.000I look over my shoulder three seconds later and I see her out of the corner of my eye dart, take off for the parking lot.
00:36:48.000I don't want anything bad to happen to you because, you know, if I yell at her or if I'm cross with her to get her attention, people might think I'm being mean to my daughter.
00:37:25.000I grabbed the back of her hoodie and yanked her neck first out of traffic because that's all I could get a hold of in order to stop her from an oncoming car.
00:37:33.000Now, if you had no idea the context of that action, if you were just walking out of the grocery store and saw me yank my toddler daughter by the back of her hoodie, you might think, hey, that's a terrible father.
00:37:44.000I don't, but you don't know the full context of this action.
00:37:47.000Instead, what I did is I saved her life that day in that parking lot.
00:37:54.000If my motivation was I was angry with her and that's why I yanked her hoodie, then that would be bad.
00:38:00.000If my motivation was I love her and I want to save her, I don't want her to die.
00:38:05.000I don't want something bad or tragic to happen to her.
00:38:08.000And then I committed that action for that reason, then my action was good.
00:38:12.000We've got to begin with what are our motivations?
00:38:15.000To me, a great articulation of this is actually in the lion, the witch in the wardrobe.
00:38:19.000When Lucy goes to Mr. Beaver the night before they're about to meet Aslan, the Christological figure in the story, and Lucy is scared and she goes to Mr. Beaver and she asks, is Aslin safe?
00:39:10.000It's not always easy to articulate this.
00:39:12.000The best example I have is that truth is actually the highest form of love.
00:39:17.000And so the reason you yanked your daughter back is because there was a metaphysical and Newtonian truth that your daughter hitting a car doesn't end well, right?
00:39:29.000That's something that that's just, that's true.
00:39:32.000When I went to go, I can't stand the dentist.
00:39:34.000I think they're, they're all kind of medieval torture people.
00:39:44.000And but so I was in a, what you could call it, I guess a, she was giving me, not an analysis, she was giving me, she gave an x-ray and she went through the whole thing and she said, okay, you're going to need to have wisdom teeth surgery in the next 10 days or else, you know, this infection could go to your brain and you could die.
00:40:03.000And I said, no, no, no, there's got to be another way.
00:40:10.000That was an insensitive thing to tell me.
00:40:13.000But she, as a brother to a sister, fileed me enough because she's actually a conservative Christian that she's like, okay, well, I like what you're doing so much that if I don't tell you this, you could die.
00:40:23.000Not what I wanted to hear, by the way, at all.
00:41:15.000I certainly don't believe in nationalistic idolatry.
00:41:19.000You know, to me, the flag, we get misty-eyed when we hear the flag and we hear the drums or when we see the flag and we hear the drums because of what it stands for.
00:41:31.000And if we, if we do lose those things that it stands for, then you can sink into idolatry where this is just nostalgic, nationalistic, jingoistic fervor.
00:41:41.000But what it really means that differentiates it from every other place on earth has been lost.
00:41:46.000And this is where I love Chesterton, GK Chesterton, the great British Christian theologian, his observation that America is the only country that was ever founded upon a creed.
00:41:58.000And that creed is the mission statement to the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
00:43:04.000But ultimately, that creed is based on our belief system.
00:43:10.000The idea, and it's and next to the church itself, when this country has observed this creed, and it hasn't always done so.
00:43:18.000That's why we have legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and things in the past that we've had to, we've had to confront.
00:43:25.000But when this country lives up to that, it has done more good east of Eden than any institution on this planet other than the church itself.
00:43:52.000I am looking at history and observing what is true, best, and beautiful for the human condition and attempting to conserve that for this and future generations.
00:44:01.000And the creed that this country was, was founded upon is one of those things, Charlie, that is worthy of conserving because of the amount of good that it has done in this world, the lives that it has saved, the cultures that it has brought back from the brink is worthy of conserving that for as long as there's life in that creed.
00:44:23.000I think that we have an obligation really to the credibility of our own witness to the world.
00:44:29.000Because here's the thing, the rest of the world sees this as a Christian nation.
00:44:33.000Whether that is true or used to be true and isn't anymore, or maybe it was a nation inspired by Christianity, but it wasn't specifically a Christian nation.
00:44:44.000Whatever those academic theories we posit and want to debate now, just about anywhere else outside the world, especially the or outside of this country, especially the pagan world views this as a country heavily imbued and inspired by Christianity.
00:45:00.000So the idea of now at the time that the world is watching as it is invaded by wokeism and trainingism and all the various crazy paganisms attacking us now.
00:45:10.000And so now, now that there's a great trial where we can show up in front of a watching world and reintroduce them, reintroduce them to the laws of nature and nature's God, that we have a chance to show them what a biblical worldview really means and really does.
00:45:25.000We've got a Mount Carmel moment here with the prophets of Baal.
00:45:28.000Now we want to back away from that opportunity in front of that large cloud of witnesses and say, not our fight.
00:45:35.000I just don't see that that lines up with the spirit of what the Bible has to say about where we are in the world.
00:45:43.000Demand the welfare of the city or the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to the nation's welfare.
00:45:48.000And that's the Lord speaking in Jeremiah 29, 7.
00:45:51.000He calls for you to care about the nation you're in.
00:45:54.000And just put more simply, this is our home.
00:45:57.000I don't have to go into some long kind of moral argument of why you should defend your home, especially one that has such a beautiful history, tradition, and exceptionalism.
00:46:08.000And then you also look at the people that are, it'd be one thing if the people that are like trying to change the country were kind of morally superior to the people trying to keep it incumbent.
00:46:24.000It'd be one thing if like the people that like, you know, we should stop having America the way it is and get back traditional marriage and get rid of abortion.
00:46:30.000I'd be like, we got some arguments here.
00:46:32.000Instead, you got the people that want to destroy the country that believe in drag queen story hour and sexual education for eight-year-olds and sex trafficking children.
00:47:02.000If there's nothing godly or biblical about the creed that America was founded upon, then why is it such is it under such attack by the enemy?
00:47:13.000If there's no value there, if there's no righteousness there, if it's not a restrainer against evil in the world in any way, shape, or form, and it has no, no eternal significance at all, then why does the enemy devote so many resources to unraveling it?
00:47:32.000That's the question for every apathetic, complacent, or complicit pastor out there.