00:00:20.000His 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.
00:00:29.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:42.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:45.000I am so honored to be joined by Pastor John MacArthur.
00:00:50.000Pastor MacArthur has been a hero of mine for a couple years.
00:00:55.000I actually heard him originally on Moody Radio in Chicago.
00:01:00.000They were rebroadcasting one of his incredible sermons, and he has made news recently where he has reopened his church in defiance to Governor Newsom's orders.
00:01:11.000And he is someone that I look to for such inspiration for theological and spiritual clarity.
00:01:17.000So, Pastor MacArthur, thank you so much for joining the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:20.000No, thank you so much for those kind words, Charlie.
00:01:27.000So, can you give us a little bit of an update and a backdrop of what your church has been going through and some of the decisions that you have made recently to reopen your church?
00:01:39.000Well, I'm going to give you an exclusive that just happened.
00:01:42.000Today, we had a court hearing, and we had basically posted an injunction against the county of Los Angeles and the health department to prevent them from shutting down our church altogether this coming Sunday.
00:01:58.000They filed against us to go ahead and ask the court to shut us down, and the judge ruled today in our favor.
00:02:06.000So, it was an incredible win for the church.
00:02:10.000And the judge said, outside, no restrictions at all.
00:02:15.000With children, no restrictions at all.
00:02:17.000They can go back to Sunday school and classes.
00:02:20.000The only thing we ask is that when you go into the worship center, you observe social distancing and masks.
00:02:27.000And, you know, that's okay because that doesn't invade the freedom that we have to worship in our church.
00:02:34.000If we have to look silly for three weeks, he said for the next three weeks and conform to that, that's good.
00:02:41.000He ruled in our behalf and basically against the county trying to shut us down.
00:02:47.000And I understand that he wanted to make sure that he protected our First Amendment rights, but he didn't want to play doctor because the conventional wisdom is, hey, maybe social distancing and masks helped.
00:04:37.000We started out when the pandemic was launched, and we were told millions are going to die.
00:04:43.000And so, we thought, wow, we don't want to be responsible for somebody's death.
00:04:46.000So, I preached live stream in an empty auditorium for a few weeks.
00:04:51.000And then, when the narrative didn't seem to hold water anymore, our people started coming back.
00:04:56.000They began to realize that there weren't dead bodies in the streets.
00:04:59.000And it became pretty clear that the death rate in California from COVID is 0.02, and the average age of the person dying is 78.
00:05:08.000And the average age of a person who dies without COVID is 78.
00:05:12.000They began to put the two together and say, This doesn't make any sense.
00:05:15.000So, they started coming back to church.
00:05:17.000So, there were hundreds, and then there were a few thousand, and then there were 6,000, there were 7,000.
00:05:22.000We weren't telling them to come, but the city was saying they can't come unless they make a reservation, turn in their name and address, get their temperature coming in, stop them at the gates, and then all these impossible rules.
00:05:39.000And of course, our great confession is: Jesus is Lord, he's the head of the church, not Governor Newsom, not Mayor Garcetti, and not the Health Bureau.
00:05:48.000We have protections by the First Amendment.
00:05:50.000We all know that the government doesn't give us the right to worship.
00:05:53.000The government exists by the Constitution to protect a God-given right to worship.
00:05:58.000And so, our people just said worship matters to us.
00:06:01.000They calculated that there was a very negligible risk from COVID, but there was a huge risk in not gathering together as the people of God.
00:06:11.000And I've said this, Charlie: I'm not nearly so concerned about the flu as I am eternal punishment.
00:06:21.000I'm much more aware of the fact that everyone dies, and after that, the judgment, and the only escape from judgment is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
00:06:31.000So, we want to stay open, preach the gospel, and be a shining light in the world.
00:06:36.000And our people just kept coming back and coming back.
00:06:41.000And we have in this system of government an opportunity to appeal that in an injunction against the county.
00:06:48.000And the judge upheld that and said, You can meet.
00:06:52.000Not only can you meet, there are no restrictions outdoors.
00:06:55.000And if you go indoors just for the next three weeks, the judge mandated that we wear masks and social distance in families, they can all sit together.
00:07:05.000And I thought, you know, that's reasonable.
00:07:08.000That's not an infringement on our right to worship.
00:07:12.000And we were so thrilled with the judgment itself.
00:07:15.000And it leads us down the right path to what's to come when the COVID slows down, because that's a court declaration that we have the right to meet, and that can't be impinged on by any government agency.
00:07:27.000Well, praise God, because the Supreme Court, I think, ruled incorrectly in the Las Vegas decision, where they said interestingly enough, Charlie, the judge today said he was disappointed in the ruling of the Supreme Court, and he even named the one justice that we thought would vote for the church and voted against it.
00:07:53.000Yeah, Neil Gorsuch in his dissenting opinion had a repudiation of the majority opinion, where he basically said, How could Caesar's palace have more rights to gathering than the Calvary Chapel in Las Vegas, where the First Amendment clearly states there is the free exercise of religion and the establishment clause, and those are two different things, but there is no constitutional right to gaming at all.
00:08:21.000And it was just an incredibly puzzling decision.
00:08:24.000So, Pastor, I guess the question that I struggle to answer, though, is just going verse by verse and word by word in Romans 13.
00:08:34.000Some people think that is a reason for Christians never to challenge their government.
00:08:41.000When is it correct for Christians to pause and say this is infringing on our God-given rights and I will not submit?
00:08:50.000Because that is the word that is thrown around a lot sometimes in Christian circles as to why we shouldn't question authority.
00:08:59.000Yeah, and I think the answer is pretty simple.
00:09:01.000Romans 13 basically says that government, the powers that be, are ordained by God, and they have two purposes: to protect those that are good and to be a terror to those who are evil.
00:09:14.000So that's a very clear-cut moral definition.
00:09:18.000They are to protect those who do good works, and there will be a terror to those that do evil.
00:09:37.000And even Jesus said to Peter, put your sword away.
00:09:40.000If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
00:09:42.000So our Lord actually affirmed capital punishment as it was basically established in Genesis chapter 9.
00:09:48.000So government is one of those critical entities that carries a huge threat and is a terror to those that do evil.
00:09:57.000Here's the problem: when that government flips that over and starts punishing people who do good and abetting and aiding people who do evil, it forfeits its right to that authority.
00:10:14.000I can give you an illustration of that.
00:10:16.000We say a father biblically has authority in the family.
00:13:23.000And oh, by the way, like Governor Newsom, open up the prison doors and let several thousand prisoners loose, 18,000 in the culture.
00:13:33.000Okay, that leaves one final restraint, and that's the church.
00:13:37.000And the church is salt and light in the world.
00:13:39.000And the church has the ultimate weapon that not doesn't punish but transforms, and that's the word of God.
00:13:45.000So if you've wiped out the law of God in the heart and the conscience and you've wiped out the family and you're taking down the police, guess who's next?
00:15:28.000And I think it's so courageous what you did and are doing.
00:15:32.000And you are a leader in the Christian world.
00:15:37.000And people have drawn inspiration by your courage during this time.
00:15:41.000And there are other pastors as well, Pastor Rob McCoy and Pastor Jack Hibbs, that are in similar types of battles right now and definitely exception to what's happening.
00:15:54.000So I want to dive into young people in our culture and kind of the crisis that's happening with this next generation.
00:16:02.000A study came out yesterday, according to the Center for Disease Control, a multi-million dollar study that they commissioned.
00:16:08.00025%, one out of four of young people under the age of 30, seriously contemplated suicide during the lockdown.
00:16:16.000This is a generation that has whatever they need at a moment's notice, whether it be a meal, a movie.
00:16:22.000However, it is the most miserable, directionless generation that is looking for truth, that has been taught a secular postmodernist narrative that they can indulge themselves up to some level of, as you put it, perfectly guiltless joy, which we know, of course, really any sort of joy can only come in Jesus Christ.
00:16:43.000Can you talk about the crisis that's happening with young people right now and kind of how you have looked at this and your approach to it?
00:16:50.000I'd probably shock you a little bit, but I'd like to quote Maya Angelou.
00:16:54.000She said, a young cynic is the most hopeless of all people because they go from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
00:17:11.000First, you don't necessarily go immediately from knowing nothing to believing nothing to nihilism.
00:17:17.000You usually go to hedonism before there.
00:17:20.000You just throw yourself randomly into every possible lustful fulfillment to see if you can satisfy your soul.
00:17:29.000And what that does is drive you deeper into despair because you have no meaningful relationships.
00:17:34.000And while your conscience has been attacked, it's still there and it produces guilt and guilt produces sadness and emptiness.
00:17:42.000So, yeah, the real problem is you have a generation of kids who start out knowing nothing and end up believing nothing.
00:17:51.000That is a formula for absolute nihilistic despair.
00:17:55.000And it becomes so severe that they contemplate ending their lives.
00:17:59.000There's no hope and there's no future because there's no truth.
00:18:05.000If I could bring anything to this age of millennials, and I think you're a tremendous illustration of what is happening in this country, and I'll tell you where the divide comes.
00:18:15.000Conservative millennials are seeking truth.
00:19:16.000Every day of my life is an incredible adventure, full of joy, full of hope, because not only do I understand what I'm doing in this world and why I'm doing it, I understand where I'm going.
00:19:27.000And once that eternal issue is settled, joy backs up into the temporal life as well.
00:19:40.000And it is a generation right now that has been sold this idea through pop culture, through our school system, and the lack of religion that they can almost become their own God and that they are the most important thing ever to exist.
00:19:54.000And this is why you see a generation that is very willing to destroy everything that came before them.
00:20:00.000They believe, many of them, that the church is just an obstacle to their power grab and their revolution.
00:20:08.000At a very fundamental level, these movements are made up of individuals.
00:20:17.000These are individuals that all individually have bought into a very dark triad of bitterness, arrogance, and deceit.
00:20:24.000And you combine those three things, of which Christ is the opposite of all three of those things.
00:20:30.000Not bitter, arrogant, or deceitful, but instead rooted in peace, love, and joy.
00:20:36.000Well, only that comes through Jesus Christ.
00:20:39.000What I call the disintegrationists or the cultural arsonists, they do not believe even truth exists.
00:20:47.000And so looking more broadly, you've dealt with young people throughout your church and ministry for quite some time.
00:20:54.000There's a lot of young people listening to this program.
00:20:57.000Hundreds of thousands of young people are going to hear what we have to talk about.
00:21:01.000What is your analysis of either young Christians or what young people can do practically and pragmatically right now in this time of chaos and crisis?
00:21:12.000First of all, you have to have something to anchor to.
00:21:15.000You have to have a foundation of your life.
00:22:34.000You got to turn to somebody who can transform you from the inside out.
00:22:40.000And that's the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ, that through his death and resurrection and faith in him, you become a new creation.
00:22:48.000Old things pass away and you become completely new.
00:22:52.000What I love to see is a young person with all that anxiety, all that fear, all those endless ideas that were thrown at him in a university experience, none of which carries the weight of truth, none of which is convincing, and he becomes a cacophony of voices and his heart is empty.
00:23:10.000I love to see that kind of person meet the Lord Jesus Christ, be totally transformed from the inside and be filled with joy and peace and a reason to live.
00:23:21.000And I'm surrounded by them all the time.
00:23:24.000Our church is just full of young people.
00:23:28.000There's probably a thousand college students here every Sunday morning coming to hear the word of God.
00:23:33.000And this is a dynamic part of our church life.
00:23:36.000So I love to see that happen when the Lord Jesus gets a hold of a heart and transforms them and takes them out of darkness into his glorious light.
00:23:46.000And young people right now, more than any other generation, need the word of God and need renewal in Jesus Christ.
00:23:55.000And I think that it's come to a place, an apex point, where the kind of nihilism that you articulated is so widespread.
00:24:05.000Typically, there is a bridge, and that's the hedonistic bridge.
00:24:09.000And some of them, at a younger age than ever before, kind of played around in some form of hedonism in high school or in college.
00:24:16.000And then they get into almost a Nietzsche-like belief in nihilism, that there is nothing and nothing I do actually matters.
00:24:24.000And then the only thing they can find meaning in is the destruction of somebody else's meaning.
00:24:29.000And this is what was always so concerning about me, concerning to me, because the church was always supposed to be the bulwark against societal nihilism.
00:24:39.000And when you remove the ecclesia, the gathering of believers, and then six weeks later, your civilization gets lit on fire, there's probably a direct connection between not having widespread church services and people then all of a sudden turning their back on the entire society and God and on Jesus Christ.
00:25:01.000Looking at things culturally right now and where your church is, I believe, what is your opinion on the state of Christianity in America?
00:25:12.000I believe we are on the precipice of another great awakening and revival.
00:25:16.000I have the greatest optimism that is about to happen.
00:25:19.000What do you see the Lord doing right now?
00:25:22.000I see the Lord building his church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.
00:25:35.000And I'm always excited and always joyful, even in the midst of this darkness, to be a useful tool that he can use to do that.
00:25:43.000At the same time, Charlie, in all honesty, I think in many cases, the church has been reduced to a rock and roll concert followed by a TED Talk.
00:25:52.000And that's just telling sinful people what their heart desires as if that's the way to bring them to salvation.
00:25:59.000By giving the unconverted sinner what the unconverted sinner wants is not how you bring him to salvation.
00:26:05.000The way you bring him to salvation is to expose the corruption of his heart and show him something far better than what he wants in his natural condition.
00:26:14.000And I don't think the church is just to be a sentimental experience where it's a feel-good about Jesus thing.
00:26:22.000I think it's just the constant pouring out of the truth.
00:26:55.000The Word of God is powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword.
00:26:58.000All scripture is inspired by God and profitable.
00:27:01.000And so I'm just going to open the Bible.
00:27:03.00051 years have been opening the Word of God, and I've watched it work in incredible ways.
00:27:10.000And to get back to kind of the original statement you made about the Lord doing things around the world, I've spent 50 years in one spot, and I've watched in 50 years the development of the internet.
00:27:22.000First it was tapes, then it was cassettes, then it was downloads in the internet.
00:27:26.000And I've watched the truth of the gospel circle the entire world.
00:27:30.000Every Sunday morning when I preach at Grace Church, it's translated into Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Russian.
00:27:56.000So we can say the truth is circling the world.
00:27:59.000I am concerned that somehow it's going right by the millennials because they're tuned into something else.
00:28:07.000And we've got to get them to the point where they're desperate enough to find truth, where their hearts are empty enough to find truth to turn to the word of God and find the truth that totally and permanently satisfies the heart.
00:29:07.000There was nothing else that was ever needed to be said before.
00:29:10.000And so I think that is a very important, the most important point, because what ends up millennials, for whatever reason, I'm still theorizing how this all happened generationally.
00:29:23.000They almost either feel as if they're, and there's plenty of wonderful millennials out there that love the Lord and are doing great things, but generally feel they're too good for it.
00:29:36.000And I think the Christian movement, the last 15 years, as you talked articulated it, that got more involved in Christian celebrity culture than in teaching strong doctrine actually has done more harm to play into that sort of thing.
00:29:54.000Because in the last couple of months, Pastor, I have been very disappointed by some pastors that have sizable followings that for the first time they have spoken out on very divisive left-wing cultural issues, and they would never speak out against pro-life issues.
00:30:13.000And these happen to be usually the same people that are having TED Talks at a Christian rock concert around them.
00:30:19.000How are we supposed to make sense of that?
00:30:22.000Well, let me just back up to say this.
00:30:25.000I can prove in a very short conversation that people believe in absolute truth.
00:30:30.000I ask them a simple question: go to the top of a five-story building and jump and see if there's such a thing as absolute truth.
00:30:39.000Bang your head on the pavement, and you're going to know that there exists absolute truth.
00:30:44.000For from the temporal side of things, from the physical side of things, the entire universe is run by inviolable absolutes.
00:30:53.000I mean, Elon Musk just fired his rocket up to the International Space Station and then did something incredible, brought it back down again.
00:31:02.000And all of that is because there are absolutely fixed laws that can be managed and monitored and worked with to do incredible things.
00:31:12.000So, why would we assume that the God who created the world with such inviolable physical laws didn't have any spiritual laws that were absolutes either?
00:31:22.000The laws of God are as inviolable and absolute in the spiritual realm as they are in the physical realm.
00:32:27.000And if I were a medical doctor, the first thing I'd want to do to help a patient would be to diagnose what's wrong so I can bring to that patient what's right.
00:32:36.000So no, I'm fortunately in the business of finding out what's wrong, exposing that, and then delivering the wonderful gospel of Jesus Christ that heals the soul.
00:33:04.000We have one or two podcasts a week about the gospel, highlighting different pastors.
00:33:08.000You talked about this a little bit previously, but I want people listening right now to be challenged, to do something dramatic, to accept Jesus into their life, or to make a choice right now.
00:33:21.000Because we are, this program is typically a political news of the day and also philosophical and cultural.
00:33:28.000But I think there's going to be someone listening right now that needs to hear this.
00:33:32.000Can you just give a call to action to our listeners?
00:33:35.000Yeah, I think, first of all, you need to go to the Bible.
00:33:40.000And the church, if you're a pastor or church leader, is to be the pillar and ground of the truth.
00:33:45.000Every time somebody walks in the door of your church, they ought to hear the truth of God: the truth about God, the truth about man, the truth about sin, the truth about salvation.
00:33:57.000And I would say to this generation of young millennials: open your Bible, find a Bible, get one from your grandma if you can't find one nearby, and go to the Gospel of John, the Gospel of John, and read the Gospel of John.
00:34:11.000Just read it and let it tell you who Jesus Christ is.
00:34:16.000Because at the end of the Gospel of John, it says, These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you might have life in his name.
00:34:27.000He's offering you forgiveness of sin, life abundant, and life eternal.
00:34:33.000That story of Jesus that leads you to that point of salvation is the Gospel of John.
00:34:40.00021 chapters, won't take you a long time to read it.
00:34:43.000Keep reading it until you understand who he is and then invite him into your life.
00:35:03.000Thank you for fighting and for showing us a path that we can challenge, as you put, tyrannical edicts and to protect the freedom of expression and the freedom of dialogue and worship that we have in this country.
00:35:21.000And I treasure you as Someone who is in Christ together, but also someone who is leading so many people to truth and to eternal life.
00:36:11.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:36:13.000Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:36:17.000Type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider.
00:36:20.000Make sure you subscribe, give us those five-star reviews, screenshot yourself doing that, and email it to us at freedom at charliekirk.com.