00:00:00.000Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
00:00:02.000Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
00:00:08.000Hey, everybody, Chris Cross in the country, as always.
00:00:10.000I'm excited to share with you an exclusive conversation now made public that I did at Rise San Marcos Church, Rise Church in San Marcos with Pastor Greg Denham.
00:00:20.000You guys are going to really enjoy this conversation.
00:00:22.000We talk about what young people are missing on the moral landscape right now, how to get your life together, and also what is socialism and how we fight against it.
00:00:31.000Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:35.000Type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider.
00:01:26.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:45.000My children are here, and that's going to go a long way.
00:01:49.000Charlie, listen, I have heard you say that you see atheism on the rise.
00:01:54.000Of course, the idea of atheism is that, you know, we came from nothing, we are nothing, we're headed nowhere, or we came from mindless nature at best, educated beefsteak, and there's no authoritative, there's no authoritative answer to the meaning of life.
00:02:09.000I'd like for you to talk to us a little bit about this rise of atheism that you see and why it matters.
00:02:17.000Why it's important we understand and what maybe we can be doing about it.
00:02:20.000Yeah, first of all, it's honor to be here.
00:02:24.000And so I love coming to California and I love being around California Christians and conservatives because you're in such the ideological and spiritual minority.
00:02:32.000It almost warrants a more exciting and more bold form of Christianity and conservatism.
00:02:57.000First of all, I want to divide atheism into two categories.
00:03:00.000I think that there's an evangelistic atheism in our country.
00:03:03.000And then I think there's kind of a passive atheism.
00:03:05.000And I've said this before, and I'll say it again: that the fastest growing religion in our country is atheism.
00:03:12.000And if you've sent your kid to public high school or to university, they have been proselytized by people that are trying to get them to believe in nothing.
00:03:19.000And when we really boil it down, it's a very depressing worldview.
00:07:07.000Because for them, it's just nothing but just chemicals firing.
00:07:10.000And the reason why, when you hear a beautiful concerto from Mozart or from Bach, that you feel something that is beyond what your words can possibly put into articulation is because God gave it for a reason to be able to demonstrate his love, his mercy, his compassion, something that is broader than just linguistics can dive into.
00:07:33.000So they'll say, well, it's animals use music.
00:07:37.000So birds, there might be songbirds, but the social Darwinists, they cannot explain that they might, the songbirds might make noise, but they don't make music.
00:08:26.000Maybe there was a God that put in the laws of nature.
00:08:28.000Why do we have the perfect composition of oxygen and nitrogen in the air so that we're able to be able to breathe and we're able to actually thrive in this world?
00:08:38.000Maybe it's because God breathed us into existence that we're able to breathe ourselves.
00:08:42.000And so the final point I'll say with this is that we as Christians need to, I think, take a step back to go a step forward.
00:08:50.000And in a lot of different ways in this secular world that we're living in, because it's very, very secular, we have lost the zeal and the passion and the excitement of the early church.
00:09:02.000We've almost gone into a position of negativity and defensiveness.
00:09:07.000And when I see more people that are committed to bringing people to believe in nothing, the atheists, than Christians, I know that's a problem.
00:09:15.000And so I'm happy to talk into where this actually leads us societally, but this is really something that's happening in our country, which is a theological debate in our country.
00:09:23.000And this is something that is very missed.
00:09:25.000People say, oh, we're so politically divided.
00:09:46.000The reality is we have no idea who God is, and we have no idea who we are and why we're on planet Earth unless he reveals it to us.
00:09:55.000So let's get a little running start to a little different aspect of faith because as Charlie will talk a little bit about, ecclesia is a community of those who worship God, a community of faith and the true and living God.
00:10:10.000Okay, so just track with this real quick.
00:10:13.000I mean, when we talk about faith, we're going back to a father, Father Abraham, who's been in the news these days because of this Abrahamic kind of pact now that Israel is entering into with the UAE and the Bahrain.
00:10:29.000Okay, but look, the Lord has revealed himself.
00:10:32.000There's a plan unfolding from eternity past to eternity future, through Abraham, through David, in the Messiah of the Lord Jesus.
00:10:41.000When we receive communion as Jesus Christ's followers, we are celebrating this genius plan from eternity past to eternity future through Israel and the Messiah of Israel, and ultimately believing that Jesus is returning to Israel where one day the nation of Israel live her full potential among the nations.
00:11:02.000Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
00:11:06.000Are you guys tracking with me on this?
00:12:12.000Do not forsake the gathering of believers.
00:12:14.000Now, let me talk about a technical reason why this is true, because somebody tonight is going through something very difficult, and you're going to confide in somebody else tonight that will hopefully be able to help you.
00:12:28.000See, what happens in church is it's more than just the 90 minutes or the two hours of the service.
00:12:34.000It is congregants helping congregants through real-life problems.
00:12:37.000All that is shattered completely when you just decide that the church is nothing more than a live stream.
00:12:42.000Now, I am not saying that certain people need to listen to the radio to be able to consume service.
00:12:47.000Everyone should have the liberty, which means you have responsibility, the agency to make the decisions that you see fit.
00:12:52.000The problem is when you shut down all the churches and say, we know what's best for everybody.
00:12:57.000Have the liberty, open your doors, and trust your congregation to assemble.
00:13:01.000And if they do, then they're making the right choice.
00:13:04.000All of a sudden, what we've seen, and I've been very excited about certain pastors like yourself and like Pastor Rob McCoy, they've been opening their church.
00:13:13.000And also, I'm challenging some of these other pastors in Southern California that are not opening their churches.
00:13:18.000And I'm saying, you understand that this right now that we're living through is the greatest opportunity in our country's history to advance the kingdom of God that we have ever lived through.
00:13:30.000And so, explain to me, and by the way, there's a remarkable and horrendous double standard right now.
00:13:39.000Remember, if the left did not have double standards, they would not have any standards at all.
00:13:43.000And so, which is they're allowed to have 600,000 people march down the streets of Los Angeles because they say the right phrase.
00:13:51.000They're allowed to do whatever they want because looting, I guess, is an essential activity in the new world that they're trying to create.
00:13:57.000However, the gathering of believers is something that they don't want.
00:14:01.000I got very frustrated, and I have to stop myself and just kind of pray.
00:14:06.000I was flying cross-country yesterday to be here with you guys, and every single seat on an airplane was taken up, every single seat.
00:14:12.000And people were right on top of each other.
00:14:15.000And I looked down the row and I said, this is coming from Chicago.
00:14:19.000I was going to Arizona, going to Arizona, then connecting through to California.
00:14:23.000But in California, Christians can't gather, and in Chicago, Christians can't gather.
00:14:27.000But everyone is allowed to be slobbering on top of each other for four hours across the country in a confined air circuit.
00:14:34.000Somehow, this is essential, and church is not.
00:14:37.000Maybe it's because you're being targeted.
00:14:39.000Maybe it's because they want the believers not to assemble.
00:14:42.000And for pastors not to realize that for thousands of years, we've had ecclesia, which, and this is a very important thing.
00:14:56.000And Christ said, on this rock, build my church.
00:14:59.000But it really was ecclesia, which is together we're all one.
00:15:03.000When you heard that worship earlier, you realized I'm actually feeling something, a higher connection than if I was just sitting in my living room right now.
00:15:12.000And if you didn't feel that, then okay, but I'm sure a lot of you did.
00:15:42.000So we were talking about how at times the way forward is the way back.
00:15:46.000Sometimes to get right perspective, it's good to go back to the early church, get context, which gives us clarity to the course that God has intended for our lives.
00:15:54.000So if we go back 2,000 years, just real quick, you had Jewish followers of Jesus who were being mistreated.
00:16:01.000They weren't the only ones being mistreated, but they were being terribly mistreated, terrible injustice, some being put to death.
00:17:22.000God has given us a conscience that accuses or excuses our actions, but only it works as if, only if it knows what is right or wrong.
00:17:31.000We live in a culture that is increasingly relativistic, and that the conscience that God has given us to protect us is not even operating properly.
00:17:42.000Therefore, it's one of the things that we have to understand as Jesus Christ's followers, we are a conscience.
00:17:46.000We are the conscience to a generation that is breaking down.
00:18:39.000Sounds like what we're living through generally in the Christian landscape in our country with obvious exceptions, and that's Jack Hibbs and that's yourself and Pastor Rob McCoy and Ken Graves and so many other terrific pastors and Pastor Jürgen down the street who's doing an amazing job.
00:18:52.000And when I say this, List, it's not an exhaustive list, but they are the exception, not the rule.
00:18:57.000Look, he's onto something here, and we have to be very clear about our history in our country.
00:19:01.000I went to public high school in the suburbs of Chicago.
00:19:04.000So I know what your children are learning if you've sent your kids to public school.
00:19:07.000I debate the products of left-wing indoctrination at the highest levels of colleges.
00:19:42.000Jonathan Edwards, who was preaching activistically across the eastern seaboard, it was the sons and daughters of the Great Awakening that all of a sudden took these Christian ideas and principles where we saw the greatest return to the kingdom where alcoholism was on the rise, where debauchery was on the rise, where criminality was on the rise, but it was the great awakening outside of the state.
00:20:03.000And you saw the British monarchy be very confused by this new evangelistic Protestant religion that was growing throughout the colonies.
00:20:16.000This is something that we have to do a much better job of explaining to the general population.
00:20:21.000But first and most importantly, explain it to Christians.
00:20:23.000Is when you all of a sudden believe that we're all made in the image of God, that we're depraved by nature and we need Jesus Christ to literally raise us from the dead, then all of a sudden we're all equal in sin.
00:20:34.000We're like, huh, why is King George bossing us around so much?
00:21:16.000Thomas Paine argued very clearly that it has now come time to rebel against this tyranny, but only worked because the people had the moral foundation for it.
00:21:27.000And then Ben Franklin said it so perfectly.
00:21:29.000You just couldn't have captured it better.
00:21:31.000When all of a sudden the Constitutional Convention was ending in Philadelphia, they come up to him to write the newspaper.
00:21:37.000They say, so, Benjamin Franklin, what is it?
00:21:49.000And what he meant by that, and it's so clear what the founding fathers said.
00:21:53.000They said in the Federalist Papers, this thing's going to work only if you guys stay on a moral track.
00:21:57.000You guys can screw this up really easily.
00:21:59.000This thing is just basic firewalls that if you guys make some mistakes, it should hopefully catch you.
00:22:03.000But here's the elemental and fundamental point is the church that has always prevented us from allowing these Marxist insurgent forces from taking root in our country.
00:22:15.000This is why the Soviet Union, this is why Italy and other countries that did not have the Protestant ethic built within it were so quick to follow Marxism and communism.
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00:24:32.000Let's talk about ecclesiastic in a little different way.
00:24:35.000And that you mentioned just a little bit, but in our history, in our history, do we understand the significance of how Jesus Christ's followers or the church have impacted the civilization in which we know?
00:24:52.000And are we, I think you may mention this, but are we on a verge of another great awakening?
00:24:58.000Which actually I actually believe, because I believe that's what the Holy Spirit is doing.
00:25:52.000I said in my RNC speech that President Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization.
00:25:57.000Immediately, it just like volcanic reaction from the activist media.
00:26:03.000It's very delightful to see in real time.
00:26:08.000I wasn't sure what part of it they hated the most, the bodyguard or the Western civilization or the President Trump part, but it was just like a beautiful, just perfect, right?
00:26:24.000It is, it's really this incredible experiment of self-governance where we have created the government that we're the sovereign, we the people.
00:26:36.000It's a republic, values private property rights, biblical.
00:27:17.000So the hundreds and then eventually thousands of years for the West to be born.
00:27:26.000But really, The fuel, the gasoline on the fire, I guess you could say, was the Protestant Reformation, where all of a sudden you had the widespread dissemination of the word of God, which actually allowed for literacy rates to expand dramatically.
00:27:41.000And as people were able to read, they were able to question.
00:27:43.000And then you saw the Enlightenment, both you had the Scottish Enlightenment and what we consider to be the traditional Enlightenment.
00:27:48.000But then the West was this incredible fusion of reason and revelation, right?
00:27:54.000So revelation and the Word of God, but not forsaking our capacity to be able to make sense of the natural world.
00:28:02.000So this is something that's very important.
00:28:04.000So if you go to India, for example, they have three religions that are bigger than Christianity, or at least they used to be in traditional times: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
00:28:15.000Now, in India, if you go to Calcutta or Hyderabad, you will see, up close and personal, human suffering that we in the West would never tolerate.
00:28:27.000Now, some people will say it's because of colonialist rule or it's because of the lack of resources.
00:28:35.000While there might be some merit to that argument, they also do not have the same sort of moral-centeredness that we have in the West.
00:28:42.000Unfortunately, because of the Hindu moral construct, if someone's on the side of the street in the caste system, they're meant to be on the side of the street.
00:29:03.000The rest of the world, not the rest of the world, most of the world, whether it be in China, the world's largest country, or India, the world's second largest country, lives without Western values.
00:29:12.000They have hundreds of millions of people that do not have freedom of dialogue, speech, or basic technology that we hold near and dear.
00:29:19.000For example, if you go to an African village and a woman has to wake up before the crack of dawn and walk six miles to go get water and walk back six miles, we in the West say, that's not right.
00:29:31.000However, unfortunately, some cultures would say, why is that not right?
00:29:36.000Well, no, it's not right because you're not able to spend the time necessary for your kids, not able to lift yourself up to a higher socioeconomic status.
00:29:43.000So I could go chapter and verse of exactly how the West was created, but without diving too far into the philosophy of it, what we're experiencing right now is so miraculous, we don't even realize it.
00:29:52.000In fact, we are at the later end of modernity where we have things so good, so incredibly abundant, where we throw more food away than we consume.
00:30:02.000We have an obesity problem, not a starvation problem.
00:30:06.000We have more information out there, yet we're lacking in wisdom.
00:30:10.000We have piles full of plastic in our garage so incredibly overwhelming.
00:30:15.000We have dollar stores to sell us that garbage back to us.
00:30:20.000And then we have garage sales where we ask people to sell it away from us.
00:30:24.000And then we have a whole cottage industry of self-storage where we're like, I have so much garbage from the last decade, I just need to go find another place to go put on my garbage.
00:30:32.000And so we should not forsake that there have been incredible developments in Western society, thanks to free enterprise, that has made life sweeter and better.
00:30:42.000But life is not sweeter and better because of those developments.
00:30:45.000For example, the ability to operate on a brain tumor, have open heart surgery, be able to eradicate polio, diagnose infant mortality, make that go down.
00:31:23.000I can give you two examples in the last week, if that's okay.
00:31:26.000The new Netflix series called Cuties and SB 145 here in California.
00:31:33.000If you do not have a moral center in your society, protection of the innocent, protection of children, understanding the passage of a young woman or a young man to adulthood, then all of a sudden you're going to have the sickest people that I can think of all of a sudden to take levers of power in culture and in politics.
00:31:56.000And that's what's happened here in California and also in Hollywood.
00:32:23.000And I see people that message me and say, Charlie, I thought you were alarmist two years ago, but this cuties thing on Netflix is just too much for me.
00:32:30.000And I say, good that you have woken up.
00:32:33.000Now it's time to do something about it.
00:32:36.000Because just this is not a spectator sport.
00:32:38.000The West, you have to be involved in everything that you do.
00:32:54.000Countries that do not have a biblical worldview and have nothing but technological advancements will get into a state of chaos and will not be able to get the same sort of socioeconomic and also moral success with being able to join the West.
00:33:09.000Hey, you know, it's interesting to me.
00:33:12.000I know you love the book of James, James chapter 1, verse 5: that the Lord, if we ask Him, He'll give us wisdom, which is like right application for life, He'll do so generously.
00:33:21.000You know, it's interesting in that context, the first application of a genuine faith, righteous shall live by, could someone tell me, faith, can be informed by the truth of who God is, His genius plan in His Son, in the personal work of Jesus.
00:33:35.000Jesus, the evidence of that will be the movement towards protecting and fighting for the most vulnerable and needy amongst us.
00:33:46.000Pure and undefiled religion is to care for widows and orphans.
00:33:51.000Now, 2,000 years ago, I mean, those were the poster children, I hate to use it that way, but of vulnerability and need, okay?
00:34:00.000So I would like to ask you, like, in terms of application today, we look at the landscape of our culture.
00:34:09.000If it's in the context of James, that the first application of a genuine faith, in other words, being rightly aligned with the true and living God, that it would then translate to a horizontal level to care for, to fight for, to protect the most vulnerable and the most needy.
00:34:29.000What do you think that looks like in application today?
00:34:51.000And the reason why I'm speaking in as many churches as I can is I'm saying, guys, why is the church generally so silent and non-active and non-mobilized when you have the truth, you have the comfort of knowing what comes next?
00:35:07.000You should be the most mobilized and the most active and the most vocal on every single one of these issues.
00:35:13.000And so What it looks like applicationally is this, is that every church in the country and every Christian should be doing something about the fact that in California they have passed SB 145 to normalize and decriminalize pedophilia in this state.
00:35:30.000That should bother you so beyond anything I could put into words as a Christian, as an American, any with a moral center, then do something about it.
00:35:38.000How they got that passed is they obsessed in a religious fervor, by the way.
00:35:44.000Every single day they met, they gathered, they focused, and they got it done.
00:35:48.000And so while we rightly gather around biblical truths of what the text tells us, if there's no application in the public square or the decaying world around us, I do not believe it is fully living out the great commission that Christ gave us, truly.
00:36:04.000Number two is this, which is, what does it look applicationally?
00:36:10.000I think that in a lot of different ways, Christians and the church, and let's just talk about just Americans in general.
00:36:22.000And so many of you, and this is why I want to call out Pastor Rob McCoy, who opened his church, who has been criminalized by the city, state, and local government, and has just been punished for fully opening his church and has taken a stand and has refused to back down from these tyrants because that's what they are at every single turn.
00:37:50.000I get messaged, thousands of messages on my podcast every single week.
00:37:53.000And the messages that get me the most angry are from people that are searching for Christ, that have been, all of a sudden they have some interest.
00:38:01.000And they send me, they say, Charlie, I now have interest to commit my life to Jesus Christ.
00:39:20.000I understand the issue of Judea and Samaria and the nation-state of Israel and not just its geopolitical importance, but its moral importance in the world.
00:39:28.000And what's incredible to me, and I've joked around with Dennis Prager, who's amazing and Ben Shapiro about this, is when I go to college campuses as an evangelical Christian, I have to debate American Jews about why Israel should exist.
00:39:48.000That's a completely different issue, but it's a real thing.
00:39:51.000And so, look, there's just talking about the state of Israel and why we have to continually defend it and the rise of anti-Semitism, or your question was, is that there's a great book that Dennis Prager wrote called Why the Jews?
00:40:06.000And it talks about the historical repeating of the persecution of the people of faith and the people of the law.
00:40:14.000And it talks about that this is not a mistake, is that the Jewish people have been long persecuted for multiple different reasons.
00:40:22.000But I believe that we as Christians have a moral prerogative to defend anyone that is persecuted, to defend anyone that is wrongly accused.
00:40:32.000In the public square today, you go to a college campus and they say, We stand against hate.
00:40:46.000And five minutes later, you could turn to your right and see the boycott divestment sanction Palestinian authority, Muslim Brotherhood group walk through campus with a eliminate Israel from this river to the sea, which is a euphemism for basically destroying all of Israel.
00:41:59.000I said, what do you mean we get killed?
00:42:01.000And he's like, like a Westerner, like right in your face.
00:42:04.000Like, I know I only have four hours of sleep, but this is a lot to comprehend.
00:42:08.000And so he said, he said, well, that's controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
00:42:11.000And he said, if we drove another mile down that road, past one more warning sign, they'll throw rocks at our car.
00:42:19.000200 people will come in and they'll kill us and they'll drag us through the streets and we'll be left to fend ourselves.
00:42:23.000It is a no-go zone for the Israeli Defense Force.
00:42:26.000I said, what happens if an Arab goes into Jerusalem or into Israeli occupied area or Israel?
00:42:32.000And he's like, well, we probably give him the right to vote and some food and some welfare.
00:42:36.000This nonsense that Israel is an apartheid state is such a lie that is sold to overly privileged, clueless Western students that have no idea what oppression actually is.
00:42:49.000It is Israel that allows the three monotheistic faiths to openly express their religion, to be represented in the Knesset, to visit their holy sites.
00:42:57.000The Palestinian Authority, which is nothing, they are no greater morally than the Mexican cartel run by a money laundering maniac by the name of Mahmoud Abbas, who has not been democratically elected in over a decade, who has laundered the West's money, played victim while launching rockets at Israeli children while subsidizing terrorism.
00:43:18.000We have to do a much better job of explaining what's happening in the Middle East because we have totally abdicated our role in that.
00:43:24.000And I believe Christians have a moral responsibility to contest for that and to go against the ugly and disgusting movement of anti-Semitism that is now normalized and funded at the top levels of Hollywood culture, athletics, and education.
00:43:52.000You know, I just think it's interesting.
00:43:53.000Like, the Lord told Joshua, you know, in this transition to lead the children of Israel into the promised land, speaking of the land of Israel, unfolding plan, that he told him three times to be courageous.
00:44:06.000You know, and I, even though he's like, I'm fully backing you, Joshua, it's just like set your feet on the piece of real estate and it is yours.
00:44:13.000But the implication is because he's saying, you know, have heart that you're not necessarily always going to be feeling like this rush of adrenaline.
00:44:22.000Like, to be honest with you, because we had some coffee before we got here, you know, in the morning, I feel particularly courageous after I had about four shots.
00:45:19.000I think we're lacking all sorts of things that we consider to be fruits of the Spirit.
00:45:24.000But boy, are we lacking courage right now?
00:45:26.000And I'm not saying that there's not courageous people, but a courageous nation is one that, first and foremost, you have to know what you're fighting for.
00:45:37.000So that helps when you know truth, right?
00:45:39.000The second thing is, I get asked this question a lot.
00:45:42.000You know, I was at a meeting recently.
00:46:10.000I was at an event in Virginia, and I was either in Virginia or somewhere else, and someone asked me, they said, Well, Charlie, do you think we are going to win?
00:46:17.000I knew exactly why they were asking the question.
00:46:19.000I could see it because I've been asked this question many times.
00:46:30.000That's why they were asking the question.
00:46:32.000So, before we judge whether or not we are going to get involved in this very brutal but necessary struggle for our civilization, we have to just disregard the probability of winning or losing as a completely irrelevant metric.
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00:48:36.000That's partly what you're saying, isn't it?
00:48:37.000And also, in Matthew 5, I think 28, I'm paraphrasing here, but Christ has one of the greatest mic drop moments in the Sermon on the Mount where he says, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he says, Blessed are you who are persecuted and condemned.
00:48:51.000And then it's the dot, dot, dot, because of me.
00:48:53.000And so you should consider a blessing if you're being attacked right now.
00:48:56.000And if you're not being attacked, why aren't you being attacked right now?
00:49:00.000And let me just say, you know, remember, remember when the Lord said, you must pick up the cross, deny yourself, and follow me.
00:49:08.000In context, I mean, he's speaking to the Jewish boys who are following.
00:49:13.000I call them boys because, you know, I'm much older than they were.
00:49:16.000And he's saying, look, here's the thing.
00:49:19.000You think this is going to be a popular movement initially, but the reality is, is this movement is going to start like a grain of mustard seed.
00:49:28.000And you think I'm going to go to Jerusalem and I'm going to knock out the red coats and establish my kingdom or something.
00:49:34.000And no, first I'm going to give my life.
00:49:36.000I'm actually, I'm going to defeat the darkness behind the darkness because the core problem of man is a broken relationship with God.
00:49:43.000And that's why Jesus gave his life on the cross, really giving us the chief penicillin of what is needed for man, the cure for man.
00:52:42.000One of the concerns that James had, Jesus' half-brother, is that the adversity that they were experiencing would lead to the temptation of reactive anger and that they might fight evil with evil.
00:53:12.000You know, I think Peter and John, like when they were rebuffed when Jesus was moving through a Samaritan city and the Samaritan city would not welcome with hospitality as they were making their way to Jerusalem, they turned to Jesus and asked, do you want us to call fire down from heaven upon these liberals?
00:56:04.000But now it's, if you dare say something, I'm going to crush you.
00:56:11.000If you don't say something, I'm going to crush you.
00:56:14.000If you don't post that black square, I'm going to find you.
00:56:18.000I'm going to crush you and destroy you and find your family.
00:56:24.000We have to just kind of take a societal deep breath and then just center ourselves and say, what is going on right now?
00:56:31.000And there's a lot of different contributing reasons to it.
00:56:34.000But if you cannot think, as Renee Descartes said at the beginning of the Enlightenment, I think, therefore I am.
00:56:42.000If you cannot think, you've lost your identity.
00:56:45.000And if you've lost your identity, you will go back into tribalism, which is a dangerous, disgusting thing that Christ brought us out of quicker than you can imagine.
00:56:53.000And so what is really happening in our country, it's not just political, it is theological.
00:56:57.000And I'm happy to get into the president, and I'll talk about that in a second.
00:57:00.000But this is now a referendum on whether or not you can think something that the ruling class does not think.
00:57:32.000But if in November it looks like the president wins on election night and all of a sudden they find a bunch of ballots to, if it's a red mirage, as the Bloomberg group said, that's a very dangerous thing for the country, I'm telling you.
00:57:49.000And I don't want to live through that moment where people think something happens and then they reverse it almost instantaneously.
00:57:55.000The founders gave us voting as a pressure release valve.
00:57:58.000It's the best way that we have prevented ourselves from tearing each other apart.
00:58:03.000Because the one thing that all of you have, you're just screaming at the TV and you say, at least I can go vote, right?
00:58:10.000At least I can go show up and do something about the founders knew that.
00:58:14.000But if that pressure release valve goes away, we human beings are a lot more simple in the state of nature than I think we give ourselves credit for.
00:58:22.000And I'm telling you right now, if they are allowed, if they're allowed to just say, you can't think that, you can't do that, there's no gap between civilized society and chaos.
00:59:02.000By the way, if your pastor endorses BLM in Inc., that's who they're endorsing, just so you understand, wishing death among our police officers.
00:59:09.000Truth can be hard sometimes, but it's necessary.
00:59:12.000American Christianity has embraced these people, just so you know.
00:59:14.000The Southern Baptist Convention has embraced critical race theory.
00:59:33.000And I want to reinforce what you said, which is so true.
00:59:37.000The statement, Black Lives Matter, is absolutely true.
00:59:40.000However, it's almost semantic overload because it's three things at once.
00:59:44.000It's a true statement, an organization that wishes for rioting and crime to happen, and also an incantation that is used so much that if you do not say that when we say it, we're going to punish you.
00:59:54.000It's like, whoa, all these three things are happening simultaneously.
01:00:13.000I've gotten to know him over the last couple of years, and I could go on a lot about it, but there's something about him that I think gets really misrepresented in the media, which there's a caricature of him where they're trying to make it seem as if he has no care for the office or for the country, and he's just trying to either enrich himself.
01:00:36.000It's this very bizarre caricature, right?
01:00:38.000And I can tell you this: that I've been around a lot of politicians.
01:00:42.000Congress and ISA is the exception to this.
01:00:44.000But this president, quite honestly, has been so targeted by the opposition, spied on, impeached at every single turn.
01:00:53.000And I understand it's very hard for certain Christians, and maybe there's some people in this room, they're like, well, I don't understand how a three-times married, twice-divorced, former cover of Playboy magazine is someone that I should support.
01:01:03.000Well, he's also the most pro-life president in American history.
01:01:07.000He's also moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Golan Heights, canceled the Iran deal, Gorsuch Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, 200 circuit court judges before the virus, the best economy in American history, lowest black, Latino, and Asian American unemployment, deregulated the American economy, gone after child sex trafficking in record numbers, first step act, VA Accountability Act, also the Right to Tri Act.
01:01:49.000Elections are binary, whether we like it or not.
01:01:51.000We don't live in a parliamentary system, okay?
01:01:53.000So you can either say, I'm going to invote.
01:01:55.000I'm going to go vote for Senator Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, the most liberal senator in the United States Senate, who decides to go out of her way to go do all sorts of things that all of you know in the state.
01:02:08.000Or you could go vote for President Trump and Mike Pence, who stand fearlessly as the most pro-life president in American history.
01:02:14.000And presidency stands for people of faith and for the state of Israel.
01:02:17.000I could go on through the list of accomplishments.
01:02:19.000And so the last thing I'll say is this, is that I believe every Christian has a moral obligation to show up in record numbers in November.
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01:03:40.000Look, there's no person in all of history as courageous as the Lord Jesus, right?
01:03:45.000So, I mean, he came for a specific hour.
01:03:47.000And I want to ask you a personal question because I want to ask you how his life, in terms of courage, that's my question, has influenced you.
01:03:54.000But look, I just want to say, look, he knew coming into Jerusalem on Passover, biblical calendar, Nisan 14, historically, the same day that the Lord delivered the children of Israel out of Egypt, right?
01:04:08.000So that was a precursor to the ultimate Exodus and salvation impact the entire world, which would be in the Son, in his Son, the Messiah, who John the Baptist said is the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world, right?
01:04:26.000He's always going to be treated as if he committed every stinking sin in human history, from the killing fields, the Holocaust, to the rapes, the murders, to my sin, because I'm a sinner.
01:04:40.000And despising the shame of the separation he's going to experience on the cross and being treated as if he committed every stinking sin in human history, he endures it for the joy set before him.
01:04:51.000So therefore, from the most terrible injustice comes the greatest, beautiful shalom and healing.
01:04:59.000And he was just like courageousness times a billion.
01:05:03.000And I just want to say before we leave to move to freedoms, excuse me, how has Jesus's courage been an inspiration to you?
01:05:12.000Well, the thing that we actually all have in common in our country and in civilization on the planet is that we're all going to die.
01:05:20.000This is actually, you all have a time clock, and we don't know how long it is.
01:05:26.000And so actually, at the root of all of it is that there's a lot of anxiety for people that know they're going to die and they don't know what comes next.
01:05:32.000There's a lot of malevolence that can come out of that, actually.
01:05:36.000A lot of dissatisfaction if you have no, if you have just nothing but uncertainty.
01:05:40.000And so then, if you also understand, in my opinion, this, a lot of what's happening in our country, again, goes back to a miscalculation of human nature.
01:05:49.000I believe that human beings, because of original sin in the state of nature, were nasty, brutish, and short to each other.
01:05:55.000We're worse than we could ever put into words.
01:05:57.000That we're depraved by nature and we're dead.
01:06:01.000And God gives us life through his son, Jesus.
01:06:04.000Once you realize, I mean, if you kind of want to realize how broken you are, just sit for an hour by yourself, no phone.
01:06:12.000Just think of all the awful things you've done.
01:06:29.000It's actually more liberating and a better gift to be given than saying you're the best thing ever, the self-esteem nonsense that we tell our kids all the time.
01:07:08.000Where you just have to surrender and accept that gift.
01:07:11.000And so once you truly do that, where you just not just say the words, but you're born new, that's why we call it born again to a new person.
01:07:19.000I think there's great comfort in that.
01:07:21.000And so when I travel the country and I have people coming after me and all these sorts of things, I say this to Pastor Rob and to my girlfriend and people, if I wasn't a Christian, I don't know if I'd be able to do this.
01:07:32.000That if I did not have Jesus and at least some sort of way to make sense of all this for myself, it'd be very hard, much harder than it is now.
01:07:42.000And so, and if there's somebody out there right now and they say, I don't know, this is all just mythology to me and all that sort of stuff, and I don't quite get it.
01:07:50.000And I'm happy to talk experientially or I can talk from a reason standpoint.
01:07:54.000But here's just the, here's just something that I've learned.
01:07:58.000Go out for a year, and if you find anything better than Jesus, tell me.
01:08:44.000That whom the sun sets free is free indeed.
01:08:47.000So he is the great freedom fighter times a billion.
01:08:51.000All right, the question I have for you is this: is there a cost to freedom?
01:08:56.000And if so, why is it important that every generation understands this?
01:09:02.000Absolutely, there's a cost of freedom.
01:09:04.000I mean, the natural state, as I mentioned, and Thomas Hobbes hit this perfectly, who wrote The Leviathan, one of the most important books that people understand, where man in the state of nature is nasty, shortish, and short and brute.
01:09:17.000Nasty, short, and brutish to each other.
01:09:25.000And actually, he found great commonality with John Calvin.
01:09:27.000That's why you get the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes because they both, that's actually where it came from.
01:09:32.000Because they both agreed in the state of nature, man was completely depraved.
01:09:36.000And so when you have that belief, you realize when you create a society with first principles, when you have any sort of freedom at all whatsoever, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom to own property, we're in the rarity of human history.
01:09:56.000So most of human history was living under a non-elected, hereditary dictator that abuses their power.
01:10:04.000You live to maybe you're 27, you're lucky you get married, and you're probably going to fight some war halfway across the continent for something foolish.
01:10:12.000That's the arc of human history for almost all time.
01:10:17.000And so now when you have self-government created, you see human flourishing increase.
01:10:22.000life expectancy, medical advancements, technological advancements, not the least of which is because when you have truth as an agreed upon idea in a society, you're going to have the most patents, the most excellence, the most breakthroughs, the most entrepreneurs, because everyone's trying to find truth, which in a micro sense, of course, we know what real truth is, but also, it says in Philippians, whatsoever is true, they want to find the best way to get in the air and fly an airplane or go to the moon.
01:10:49.000I mean, when you have those agreed upon centeredness, all of a sudden you have an entire society that gets up every day and tries to find the best way to do things, where it's a Christian principle to say that we as men or mankind are here to actually overcome nature.
01:11:06.000That it's a good thing that you can fly halfway across the country.
01:11:09.000That is us using technology to be able to overcome nature.
01:11:12.000It's a good thing that we can operate and have brain tumors removed, right?
01:11:16.000And so we're living in this very short time in human history, very short, incredibly.
01:11:23.000And so, but here's the thing about freedom that is so incredibly important.
01:11:27.000We do not teach our young people this.
01:11:28.000We teach them a misapplication of freedom and a complete misinterpretation.
01:11:32.000They think of freedom as, awesome, I'm free from my parents.
01:11:45.000And so there is a necessary precursor to freedom that we don't talk enough about, which is responsibility.
01:11:51.000That if you do not have responsibility, you actually are never free.
01:11:55.000And so in fact, you're always going to be in bondage to either the sin or held captive to the false promise of whatever that is going to give you.
01:12:07.000And so the founding fathers recognized this.
01:12:09.000They knew that if you do not have responsibility, you cannot have freedom.
01:12:13.000That is why you have a generation, my generation, Generation Z millennial right in between it, that have been given the freedom to do whatever they want to do.
01:13:16.000So we can take freedom too far, right?
01:13:20.000I mean, well, like we broke away from King George and from the tyranny of King George.
01:13:26.000I mean, is it possible to actually shake our fist at the Messiah king?
01:13:32.000And is that taking place increasingly so in our culture?
01:13:36.000And, you know, because the USC Supreme Court reflected this in the Planned Parenthood versus Casey case, at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
01:14:49.000And then you get even a more dangerous place, which is what the postmodernists believe and what your children are learning in public school, private school, and in college, which is even more dangerous than this, where everyone has their own truth.
01:15:00.000It's my truth, which I always love playing out.
01:15:03.000I say, so you believe that there's no such thing as absolute truth.
01:15:48.000Because the more we learn about science, the more it actually affirms what we already believe.
01:15:52.000The more we have mapped the human genome, the more we realize that there's no way this is a mistake.
01:15:57.000The more we learn about our environment, the more we realize there's probably a creator behind all of this, right?
01:16:02.000The more we dive into what DNA actually is and the miracle of life.
01:16:06.000And so I'll say this, is that that is a false idea of freedom.
01:16:10.000I think it's actually serfdom and it is bondage.
01:16:12.000And I know you're just quoting that, but yeah.
01:16:14.000You know, some of you hearing the messages tonight and hearing about God and Jesus and things, I want to give you an opportunity to actually respond.
01:16:23.000And I'd just like to private moment here, just in prayer.
01:16:27.000And you say, Greg, what do you mean respond?
01:16:28.000Well, and recognize what the Lord has done for you because you're not a mistake.
01:17:41.000It's standing up against micro-tyranny.
01:17:43.000It is not allowing lies to go across your radar screen without confronting them, standing straight with your shoulders back, getting your words right, looking people in the eyes and saying, that is not true, and here is what is true.
01:17:56.000And so, as Benjamin Franklin said, it's a republic if you can keep it.
01:18:11.000I'm not going to let this thing disintegrate.
01:18:13.000And so, one thing is, if you guys removed by anything I said, one thing that would be awesome is if we could stick it to the New York Times by, if you guys could subscribe to my podcast, it's free of charge.
01:18:28.000You just type in Charlie Kirk show to your podcast provider.
01:18:31.000Everyone did it in this room right now.
01:18:33.000We would beat the New York Times by the morning.
01:18:35.000I do two a day, one Saturday, one Sunday.
01:18:37.000We talk about the gospel at least once or twice a week.
01:18:41.000And my call to action is: whatever you're doing now, fight harder.