00:01:12.000His 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.
00:01:21.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:37.000We didn't know the data on the virus, and we were following all protocols.
00:03:42.000And it was the way we were, to the press's credit, they treated it fairly.
00:03:47.000They showed that we were going all out.
00:03:50.000And then when the governor did the social distancing mandate, we abided by that for one reason.
00:03:57.000Our sheriff is a good guy, and they were having to send officers into Los Angeles because that's when the Black Lives Matter riots were occurring.
00:04:16.000But then when the governor came out and quoted saying, God bless you to the Black Lives Matter protesters and empowered them and didn't enforce any of the rules for them, hundreds of thousands of people rioting.
00:05:30.000And I read that just like any other pastor does, and I'm in full agreement with it.
00:05:34.000But where the pastors in America don't realize, because we've abdicated our responsibility in the public square and we haven't embraced nor educated ourselves on the gift we've been given of a constitutional republic, when reading Romans 13, and it speaks of the authority, pastors don't realize that that authority is already outlined in the first three words of the preamble of the Constitution.
00:05:54.000We the people, we the people, we the people are the authority in America.
00:06:00.000And legislators govern by our consent.
00:06:03.000Who was the authority when Paul wrote that?
00:06:33.000These sort of religions, I shouldn't say traditions of Judaism were popping up, nothing close to Christianity eventually, but the Romans didn't take it that seriously at the writings of Paul's letter to the Romans.
00:06:47.000And I believe he actually hadn't even visited Rome when he actually wrote the letter.
00:07:34.000They put the law in the center of the community.
00:07:36.000When Paul, excuse me, when Moses comes down Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments and Aaron and everybody is having a party and they've got rave music and it's bumping.
00:07:56.000First five commandments, relationship with God, second five commandments, relationship with each other.
00:08:00.000As they implement that in the culture, for 40 years, three to five million people lived together without a police force or standing army because they had moral knowledge.
00:09:53.000And the law is simply how do we live together?
00:09:56.000But now Christians have relegated the law because we're so we've caused the gospel to be truncated and myopic where we say, this is the purpose of the church.
00:10:47.000But if Abraham believed God and it was accredited to him as righteousness, and the same thing applies in Ephesians chapter 2, why 430 years later would God give the law?
00:10:57.000He gave the law so that we could live together.
00:11:02.000As Francis Schaefer in his book said, how then shall we now live?
00:11:07.000And they lived together for 40 years without a police force or a standing army because they know you don't steal, you don't lie, you don't covet.
00:11:16.000So when someone comes to me and says, well, socialism is closer to the gospel than capitalism or a constitutional republic, I go, wait a minute.
00:11:25.000Socialism is a violation of two of the Ten Commandments.
00:11:27.000Thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not covet.
00:11:30.000And that's right there in the Levitical law, in the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue.
00:11:37.000So when God gives this law, he does it so we can dwell together.
00:11:41.000And then Paul goes on to write in Galatians, and I love this because you are so gifted in applying this.
00:11:48.000And I don't know that a lot of pastors across the country understand the role God's given you.
00:11:54.000Galatians 3 points out, why then do we have the law?
00:11:57.000And Paul eloquently says the law, Galatians 3, 20, I think it is, Paul eloquently says the law is a guardian, a school teacher, to point us to Christ and to keep us safe until faith comes.
00:12:14.000And then when faith comes, you're no longer under the law.
00:12:45.000They didn't force religion onto people, but they did declare that we are under a creator and there is an absolute natural and moral law that we are to abide by.
00:12:55.000So when is it the right time or the wrong time for Christians to rebel against authority?
00:13:15.000Anyone wants to get in the way of my relationship with God and stifle that in a constitutional republic that gives us the First Amendment, that is a constitutional protection, and I'll go through that more later.
00:13:29.000And for us as a church, we yielded to the requests of the governor during a pandemic, not knowing the full details of the virus itself or how tenacious it was.
00:13:40.000And so we yielded willingly as a wife submits to her husband, not because she has to, but because she wants to and she willingly does.
00:13:48.000That's what the church did in relation to the governor.
00:13:50.000You can't force me to do that, but I'm willingly doing it for the sake of the community.
00:13:55.000Now when we have the empirical data and we know that this virus has a 99.8% survival rate.
00:14:02.000And it's probably going to go even in the better direction as more people just ask that.
00:14:08.000But of course, we just see all the skewed numbers.
00:14:10.000And then you start getting censorship and they start messing with the data.
00:14:14.000At that point, you realize this has nothing to do with the safety and the health of the community.
00:14:19.000You are stifling religious freedom and you don't have that authority.
00:14:24.000We're going back to what we've been given by those in authority, submitting to Romans 13 by our religious liberty, that nothing comes in the way of us worshiping God, period.
00:15:00.000So when the Apostle Paul is contending with Rome and Rome has its literal knee on the neck of Christians and a third of the Roman Empire is slaves.
00:15:10.000And just like the three to five million Jews who are enslaved in Egypt, they cry out because liberty is intrinsic in every human heart.
00:15:16.000So the Apostle Paul declares in the book of Galatians, chapter 5, stand fast, therefore, in the liberty for which Christ has set you free.
00:15:46.000But the amazing thing about the early church, especially in Acts 5 and 6, is that when they were told to shut up and not preach the gospel and then threatened, and then after they were threatened, they were beaten.
00:15:58.000And after they were beaten, they plotted to kill them.
00:16:28.000And laws are established, the wise restraints that make men free.
00:16:32.000As we restrain towards evil, we have the ability to pursue excellence.
00:16:36.000And we want us to experience the fullness for what God created us to enjoy.
00:16:41.000And if we're subject to those things that enslave us, whether it's drugs or alcohol or sexual deviance or any of those things, a society grows great when it allows its citizens to have the freedom to pursue excellence.
00:16:55.000But if they think that freedom is everyone having equal, then you have stifled the creativity of mankind.
00:17:03.000And all of us are walking around as automatons, dressing the same, and it is just misery.
00:17:10.000It divides wealth and divides happiness to the point where no one has any of it.
00:17:28.000Romans 13, I read a little bit differently.
00:17:31.000And I also, I just come from the broader reading that Christ and Christians should not tolerate tyranny or the exploitation of the innocent in any form.
00:17:45.000And so that's why I struggle at times with Romans 13 and any reading of it, because I just don't think the CCP is a legitimate government.
00:18:07.000So who am I to judge another man's servant?
00:18:09.000If I look at my brother in China who has to choose the hills that they're going to die on, and they're meeting in churches that are underground, they're not meeting in those churches and underground because they're fearful and lack faith.
00:18:22.000They are counting the cost to see, is the return on investment to live another day?
00:18:27.000And every day they're having to make those choices and decisions.
00:18:30.000I think, I mean, based on what Christ called us to do and the early church, I think there is, putting Romans 13 aside, a continual pattern of fighting for free expression, for liberty.
00:18:45.000And also, as Bill Federer says, most important thing you can do is accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
00:18:51.000The second most important thing is make sure you could do the first thing.
00:18:54.000Protect the government that protects the preaching of that gospel.
00:18:56.000So I don't think it is in the best interest of the kingdom or Christianity or for what is moral, what is good, and what is true to allow tyrants to rule.
00:19:18.000And he said it was perfectly consistent with the Bible.
00:19:21.000But what he also said was, that's my calling.
00:19:24.000I don't expect anyone to understand that.
00:19:28.000But he labored over that because if he could put a wrench in the spokes of that machinery and stop the slaughter of what would ultimately be over 6 million Jews and countless others throughout the world, he would do it.
00:21:09.000He can pick anyone he wants because we're all totally depraved.
00:21:12.000Now, if he picks certain ones and doesn't pick others, then Jesus' death on the cross wasn't for all the world's sin, as it says in John 3:16, for God so loved the world that he was where I struggle.
00:21:46.000He takes it completely out of man's hands and puts it into God's hands.
00:21:49.000And I understand that because he's dealing with a church in Rome that was selling indulgences, and he just, he wanted to make purity of the gospel and put it in the sovereign hands of God.
00:23:55.000So there's a growing, I think, frustration in the church now.
00:24:00.000And a lot of Christians email me and email us at freedom at charliekirk.com to say, what do I do if my pastor is engaging in this nonsense, BLM Inc., the racial disunity?
00:24:58.000Calvinists, there's really, you can't go up and say to somebody as a real true five-point Calvinist, you can't say God loves you because that's not true.
00:26:12.000But inevitably, over the 20-plus years of ministry, that's been a struggle.
00:26:16.000And I say that because folks who bring in this Trojan horse and then they want to go with their agenda.
00:26:28.000And that's troublesome because that's what we're facing right now in the church.
00:26:34.000I don't want the people that are confronting their pastor to drive an agenda with a pastor who already has a direction.
00:26:41.000Either agree to disagree and remain with him and endeavor to keep the union of the spirit in the bond of peace or quietly leave and go start something else.
00:26:51.000Because that pastor may not be a fighter, may not be called to that capacity, but the bride of Christ, the church is a multifaceted diamond.
00:27:04.000And we all have a different facet on that.
00:27:15.000Now, granted, if it's heretical, granted, like in the book of Acts where you have Ananias and Sapphira, you need to point out those who are deceptive.
00:27:27.000You have to mark those who cause division and have nothing to do with them, the scripture says.
00:27:34.000And then if Satan can't attack the church from the outside, he tries to infiltrate it with deception on the inside.
00:27:40.000And if he can't do that, he tries to divide the church.
00:27:42.000And he does that, as you see in Acts chapter 6, with the Hellenists and the Hebrews contending over the lack of care for the Hellenistic widows.
00:27:52.000And in that case, you know, God creates race.
00:28:00.000And when they decided and they prayed to resolve this issue, the first thing they looked for were godly men who rightly divided the word of truth, who were filled with the spirit of the Lord.
00:28:14.000And you would think that's all that's necessary because we don't want to look at the color of the skin, but the content of the character.
00:28:18.000Well, they also looked at the color of the skin because they appointed the men who oversaw the distribution to the widows.
00:28:41.000So there's mending that's required, but the enemy is going to try to divide us by the color of our skin and our socioeconomic status.
00:28:48.000It's the Hegelian dialectic where you divide and conquer.
00:28:52.000The church must endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
00:28:55.000Long answer, but I'll close it with this.
00:29:00.000If you're in a church and you have appealed to your pastor and you've found resistance and no yielding, and he has made it abundantly clear that he is not yielding, you quietly leave and vote with your feet.
00:30:50.000Abraham Lincoln never professed membership to a church and we don't have any evidence that he was ever baptized.
00:30:57.000And his dying words in Ford's Theater on April 14th, 1865, the last words he ever spoke confirmed by the curator of the Lincoln Library.
00:31:08.000And Mary Todd Lincoln herself, he leans into her and he says, I long to, when this is all over, the Civil War, I want to walk with you in the footsteps of our Savior in Jerusalem.
00:31:18.000This backwoods, Kentucky boy who had never had a formal education, had been drinking from the streams of liberty his whole life and longed to come to its source.
00:31:27.000And for those young people out there, you've been awakened to liberty.
00:31:31.000And the reason why you have this hunger in your heart is because liberty is not man's idea.
00:31:50.000You have awakened and been used as an instrument of the Lord to awaken these young folks to this gift of liberty, to give them a hope in a generation that has been stifled and has been told that the world's going to end any minute now.
00:32:26.000He takes away fear and he gives you faith and he gives you a hope that this life is passing, but you're contending for ideals that will live long after you're off this earth.
00:32:39.000And what awaits you is what you've always longed for.
00:32:44.000The fulfillment of what God designed you to be, created in his image, with this ability to flourish with all the unique giftings you've had.
00:32:54.000It is a calling, Charlie, that God has used for you to awaken these young people.
00:32:58.000And I want to tell them you're on the right path.
00:33:01.000And any way I can help with that, I'm here.
00:33:03.000Well, it's the most important thing a human being can do.