Ep. 34 - Yes, Thoughts And Prayers Could Save Us
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
158.7748
Summary
10 people were killed and another 13 injured in the latest mass shooting at a Texas high school, and gun control advocates are quick to point the finger at "gun control" and blame it on the "pro-Second Amendment" movement.
Transcript
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Ten dead at Santa Fe High School, another 13 injured.
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The shooter is reported to have walked into the classroom and shouted woohoo as he sprayed bullets.
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Although after the shooting, the police say that he showed no emotion at all, which is the same story that we have heard many times before.
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There have been two mass shootings in our schools in the past four months, leaving 27 kids dead, another 30 injured.
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Now, CNN claims that there have been 22 school shootings in 2018.
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You have two mass shootings, 27 kids killed by mass shootings in public school in four months.
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See, that's the whole problem with gun control advocates when they make up or exaggerate mass shooting statistics, school shooting statistics.
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The second problem is it's completely unnecessary.
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You know, people are not imagining things when they say that mass shootings seem to be happening with a much greater frequency these days.
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Now, people in my generation, we remember, you know, if you're around my age, then, of course, you have a distinct memory of Columbine.
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And Columbine happened and it was like unlike anything that we'd ever seen before.
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And then nothing like it happened again for several years.
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But now you have a school shooting and you say, oh, another one.
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The top five deadliest mass shootings in America have all happened in the previous five years.
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The top five deadliest mass shootings in America have happened in the last five years.
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Two of the top five were committed in the last 12 months.
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14 of the top 22 have occurred in the past 10 years.
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The deadliest mass shooting in American history was in 2016.
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And then a new deadliest mass shooting in America happened in 2017.
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Whenever this happens, people say, well, this isn't normal.
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Destruction and misery have been, well, they've been the norm since the fall of man,
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but especially they've been the norm since the last century.
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Close to 100 million people were killed by communism alone.
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And then there was the Holocaust, many other genocides, not to mention two world wars, two nuclear bombs.
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Now, we're told that that was the previous century.
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And what we're told is that we've entered into the most peaceful time in human history.
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But the people who are making those declarations as optimistic and pleasing as they sound
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are simply ignoring the fact that 50 million human beings are killed by abortion worldwide every year.
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The world's been on a pace of approximately 50 million abortions a year since 1990,
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since at least 1990, which means that we've killed 1.4 billion people in less than 30 years.
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20% of the world's population has been murdered in less than three decades.
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This is what we're living in right now is by far the most violent and destructive and deadliest time in human history.
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I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's just a fact.
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We've simply gotten better at ignoring how bad they are.
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We've gotten so good at it that we've got this entire chunk of 50 million humans killed every year,
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and we could just completely put that to the side, like it's not even happening.
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We could just discount that and then go around talking about,
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I mean, even the Santa Fe shooting, which just happened on Friday, by the way,
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seems to already be forgotten by a lot of people.
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It seems like the next morning we forgot about it.
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I know the royal wedding had a lot to do with that.
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The royal wedding, which was, I mean, it's such an amazing romantic story, right?
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Of a woman ditching her husband, leaving him in the dust, and then going to marry someone who's richer.
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Destroy your marriage and go marry somebody else.
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So we've moved on to that, and we're good at that.
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And there is a difference between those two things.
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Now, it should be noted that there's one other conspicuous global trend that's been happening across the world,
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along with all the bloodshed and the death and destruction and murder.
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However, over the last 100 years, along with that, there's been another trend,
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and that other trend is secularism, godlessness.
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Most countries in the world have become increasingly godless as the years have progressed.
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The West is seeing historic levels of atheism and secularism,
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to the point now where there are some countries in Europe that are predominantly majority populated by unbelievers.
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The nightmare that we've lived since the turn of the previous century has been the direct result of this.
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It's been the direct result of the world rejecting God.
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We have fled from God, and we have fled out into the wilderness.
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And what we've found out here in the wilderness in our freedom is evil and despair and death on an unprecedented scale.
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We have become an empty country, an empty country, an empty world.
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Emptiness is the thing that kind of ties all this together.
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The war, the shootings, the genocide, everything, abortion, ties it all together.
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Because there's this void that's left behind when you push God out.
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And as a world, as a world, we have pushed God out.
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And now we're struggling and fumbling to fill it with something.
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you know, they have this emptiness, this hole inside them.
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This is yet another school shooter who was an avid video game player.
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It's completely, totally, absolutely unrelated.
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It's got two things of nothing to do with one another at all, of course.
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Because as part of our emptiness, we are so desperate to justify all of our entertainment choices.
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It's just making sure that nobody questions our entertainment.
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So if anyone mentions, oh, no, we can't talk about that.
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Now, that's going to make me angry if you question my entertainment.
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The school shootings, they don't really make me that angry.
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But if you question my entertainment, that'll make me angry, Matt.
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So these school shooters, they look for something to fill the void.
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After they get tired of wallowing in their numbness and their indifference,
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they explode in this ball of rage and destruction.
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And as I've said now many times, I think the main thing that they're doing, why they do this,
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and there might be other individual motivations we hear about with this kid.
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He apparently had a grudge against at least one of the girls in the school.
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You know, every high school in America is filled with boys that are rejected by girls.
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It's like the main thing that happens to high school boys, yet most of them don't go down that path.
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And I think mainly it's because of that emptiness inside him.
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And what he was really doing, what these school shooters, mass shooters,
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what they're all really trying to do is they're trying to feel something.
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You know, they want control over life, over just this mysterious empty thing.
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And that's the trajectory that the entire human race has basically been following.
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You know, we need an Old Testament-like prophet type of person in this day and age.
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Because in the Old Testament times, they had guys like Jeremiah, they had the prophets to come and say to them,
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listen, you idiots, do you understand why this is happening?
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Do you understand why all these bad things are happening?
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And oftentimes they would put it just like that, pretty much, using their own language.
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You want to live your lives of sin and you're surprised when this stuff happens.
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We need something like that in our day because what we really need,
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the only solution is a mass spiritual revival and a collective return to faith.
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Everything else is just kind of reshuffling the problem, rebranding it.
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And that's been our, that has been our solution for the last 100 years or so,
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is to take a problem and just rebrand it and call it something else.
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So we took the genocides of the 20th century and we rebranded them.
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We put them in a clinic and we call them abortion now.
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Hey, so what's going to be our rebranding solution for school shootings?
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There is no solution other than returning to God, all of us.
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You know, stupid, arrogant people, stupid, arrogant, foolish people like to laugh
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at the idea of thoughts and prayers in the wake of tragedy.
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If we really had our thoughts on God, and if we really had our knees on the ground and
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unceasing prayer, things would not be like this.
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A pious, prayerful country does not kill its own kids, whether in the classroom or the womb.
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So yes, thoughts and prayers could change everything.
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And please don't come in and say, well, yes, Matt, we need thoughts and prayers, but also action.
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If you say that, then I'm going to have to suspect that you've never prayed because you don't
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It's not necessary to stipulate thoughts and prayers and action.
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If you have a deep prayer life and your mind is focused on God, then of course you're acting.
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Action is a natural conclusion that flows from that foundation.
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It's almost impossible for a prayerful, spiritual, humble man or woman not to act.
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It's almost impossible because a person like that has so much grace pouring into them as
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a result of their connection with God, that to resist it and not to act would require much
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It's just like within your own family, you know, if you're praying every day for the spiritual
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and physical protection of your own children, which I certainly hope that we all are.
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But if you do, of course, you're also taking practical steps to protect them because that's
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And you're taking the right steps because God is showing you the right steps and you're
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doing the right thing rather than not praying about it and just trying to randomly arbitrarily
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When you pray first and that's the beginning and the foundation, then the actions follow
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that and they're the correct actions, not just random arbitrary actions.
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So the problem is not that people are relying too much on prayer and not enough on practical
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We rely entirely on so-called practical steps and we don't rely at all on God.
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So what I'm saying, what I'll say again, is that if everyone in the nation had their thoughts
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on God and their knees on the ground in prayer, things would get better.
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We are a nation that is falling more and more into the clutches of evil and Satan and away
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And we are still too stubborn to cry out to God to save us.
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So instead, we cry out to the government and doctors and psychologists and the law and
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policy and pills and the media and Hollywood and ourselves.
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We cry out to all of them to save us and none of them can.
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And we look everywhere but up where the answer actually lies.
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The key is to pray to God unceasingly to seek his help.
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Not to trust in our actions alone, but to trust in God and to act in faith and to go to God
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People who don't understand prayer and don't have faith in it, it's because they don't do it.
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But if you actually pray, and people who actually pray unceasingly pray, you know,
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They know that if they pray consistently over a certain problem, answers will present themselves.
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And if they go to God consistently and say, God, what do you want me to do about this or that problem?
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The part of the story that the movie Dunkirk, which is a movie that I really liked, but
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But, you know, we know about the, and the movie shows us how the Citizen Navy was mobilized
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What they leave out is that a day of prayer was called across the country, and the British
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people poured into churches, and they prayed together in mass.
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They prayed for a miracle, and they received it.
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Mysteriously, Hitler ordered his troops to halt when he could have easily destroyed the Allies.
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Then there was bad weather that grounded German planes, but then the weather, miraculously,
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was good when the British needed it to be, so they'd get their men off the beach.
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The people prayed, and they acted, and a miracle occurred.
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And it's very possible that that miracle not only saved those men, but saved Western civilization.
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The dawn of time itself was a miracle, a supernatural act that made possible all things.
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So God works miracles, but we have to ask for them, and we have to come to him, and we have
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He's healed the blind, cured the lame, raised the dead.
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He brought forth water from a rock, brought manna down from heaven.
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He brought himself down from heaven, rescued us from sin.
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And I'm speaking now, I'm speaking now specifically to those who believe, to those who believe,
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and that, or at least claim to believe, and that's, what, 80% of the country or more claims
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to believe in God, I know that this message to people who don't believe in God, to people
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who are atheists, who are completely secular, who reject God, they hear this conversation
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It's not possible for me to talk about the power of prayer to atheists on the internet
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because they will just laugh like children about it.
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I'm talking to people who actually pretend to believe, okay?
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You and I, those who are left, we say we believe.
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It's only through his grace that we do believe in the first place.
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So what do you think God's going to say to us in the end if we took all this grace that
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So why are we acknowledging his presence through his grace and then just leaving it at that?
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And then just continuing about our days in a way where that fact has no bearing whatsoever
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on our lives, on how we operate, on what we do, on how we think.
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If everything that's been happening around the world for the last 100 or more years,
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if that isn't enough to wake us up and to make us turn back to God,
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even though we claim to already believe in him,
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if this isn't enough to make us cling to him desperately
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and to turn to him and have faith in him and to seek his help,
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if this isn't enough, then I think when we die, we're in for a rough time.
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Anywhere else we look, any other solution will be a failure.