Charlie Kirk Explains Why the Church Must Rise Up to Preserve American Freedom and Liberty

good to see you here this morning i wanted to read a proverb proverbs 29 2 he says when the godly are in authority that people rejoice and when the wicked are in power they groan and surely today we need not only a new government but we need a new king and we know for sure that our king is jesus christ as our lord and savior so we love that awesome awesome well we have the privilege this morning having charlie curt here with us and it's been a really neat thing just kind of to know him in the back and he did a great great message on uh first service just blew us away so we're gonna have him come out now and we want you guys to greet him great great greeting to him right now thank you thank you everybody it's great to be here and thank you rob what a wonderful church this is it's so great to be here and um i i do want to meet the person responsible for the 8 a.m service though that's that's not no we're not doing that again um i will say though that the first service every message we're going to give here today is going to be different the first one at 8am i said okay if you really got your act together to come to church at 8 a.m on a sunday morning um you don't need to hear about grace and forgiveness and mercy that's for the 12 p.m they made very bad decisions yesterday so we talked about satan and we talked about all the threats again i'm half kidding by the way um but i i i get it you know you come to the you come to the 10 and the 12. you had some fun last night maybe watching some football or whatever but we're going to be every message will be different this message i want to talk about a couple things in particular and um kind of first give you some background if you kind of don't know uh what we do or what i do i go to college campuses and speak so you don't have to um i spread the message of freedom and liberty and also ultimate purpose and i spread the gospel to nations young people we do it through podcasting radio college campus visits we were just in minnesota and michigan we're heading to texas later this week we're going to university of vermont next week so please intercessory prayers when i go to university of vermont i'm going to need it and then university of oregon especially pray for me when i go to the university of oregon um and so we're on thousands of high school and college campuses across the country at turning point usa we're starting to get into churches and starting to strengthen um some of the church communities and pastors to speak out on these issues and so i want to kind of ask a couple kind of this question to start out with it today which is uh should we care about what's happening around us and that that is a well i'm glad to hear the enthusiastic response but that's not an thank you it's not an overwhelming answer at every church i speak at and so there's this question of okay charlie i know things are terrible right i know that things seem to be falling apart right now i mean you can't watch the news and i think from a fair perspective and think things are going well right now and the question is you know should we be bothered by that as christians should the church care about that and what and to what degree and to what extent and this is a very fair question because i grew up in a church that was a wonderful bible-believing church in the suburbs of chicago and they said we will never comment on anything that happens outside of the walls of our church in the news cycle we are going to be verse by verse chapter by chapter and i totally support that however i felt unequipped to be able to ever be able to understand how this the word of god was able to give me comfort and clarity in a very confusing world and i was always very um unsettled about that and so then i met my now pastor pastor rob mccoy who is the pastor of calvary chapel god speak up in newberry park not too far from here and he said charlie know what you are doing to talk about freedom and liberty and trying to make a cogent defense of america is completely consistent with what the message one of the messages of the bible is the main message of the bible which is that god jesus is here to set the captives free to set us free from our own sinful nature and we should we should always be worried about you know the things that are happening around us but that is not the consensus unfortunately in most of american christianity and so that that is something i want us to dwell over which is what should the church do when all of a sudden that we start to see injustices or we start to see tyranny start to creep in because it's very tempting to want to just say we know the truth the truth will set us free and who cares what happens outside the walls the rapture is coming next thursday we got it all figured out it's tempting isn't it it's harder to say hey it's wrong that there are a million abortions a year in america let's try and do something about it that's harder it's harder even to just say that out loud because you're going to lose some people some people say well charlie who are you to judge who are you to say that that's wrong well we have a book that tells us a lot and we always rely on the word of god and and so i want to try and challenge some of us today to try to say hey the church here should take an active role in these sort of matters we must be prudent which is a gift from the lord common sense prudentia over how we go about it but we should always yield back to the scriptures and so a lot of us feel as if there's a divide in america and there is a divide in america right now big time and there's four major questions of what is dividing america the first is what is justice the second is what is love the third is what is true and the fourth is who is in charge these are the four questions now here's the cool thing about those of us that are christians and there might be people that are not christians here today and i i pray that today you make a commitment to make jesus christ your lord and savior and the chairman of the board of your life it's the most important thing that you can do in your life that i hope you make that decision today i truly pray for that but for those of us that are christians that read our bibles we're going to get into the why we need physical bibles not the bible app by the way we're going to talk about that it's an important side note and tangent totally unrelated to my message but very important um which is we can tell through the scriptures what is justice what is love what is true and who is in charge those four questions are what is dividing the country right now and so let's start with what is justice now if you turn if you go to a college campus they'll say we need social justice racial justice environmental justice we need all these different types of justice we need a kind of potpourri of a buffet line of every different type of justice well the bible tells us very clearly that justice must be giving a man what he is due never favoring a poor man in a legal proceeding or in any sort of giving out justice in one of the levitical laws it says very clearly that justice must be based on the action of an individual now this is very important because if you start to believe that justice is trying to right the wrong of something you did not do but something that someone that looked like something you did well that's a completely different definition of justice isn't it that you look like someone who did something evil and terrible or you might have been related to somebody but not you as a specific individual well then that completely changes the idea of what is just and what is good and this is actually understood by toddlers if you take away an 18 month old toy just totally out of the way they'll say that's not fair how many times do you hear that from an 18 month old or from a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old that's not fair they stole my stuff that's not fair they know justice in our imprinted in our own soul is a yearning for justice now we as christians know though that if we actually got what we deserved we would go to hell that's why we need jesus but earthly justice as we create civic and governmental structures justice must be blind it must not favor it must not favor any sort of group or any sort of tribe or any sort of ethnocentric focus because then all of a sudden it will become a competition of saying we deserve it more for any specific reason not giving a person unto what they are do the scriptures speak very clearly about this the second is what is love now this is going to be one of the more controversial parts of it i really don't care um love is not in the sen it's not doing what you feel is good let me say that again love is not doing what you feel is good there the greeks had four different words for love and i'm sure a lot of you that have been listening to ralph for years know this very well but the greeks had storge phileo agape and arrows those are the four they had more words than that and i i one of my greatest complaints of the english language of as it came to be is you know my complaint of 600 700 800 years ago is how we overuse the word love i think that it's one of the greatest tragedies in america i love this hamburger i love my wife we all know it means different things but boy do we conflate them a lot right you know i love this movie or i love my brother is different than i love my favorite netflix television show but brotherly love is also different than romantic love but also how about sacrificial love so the four different types of loves is taught in in ancient greek is let's start with phileo brotherly love this is where we get philadelphia the city of brotherly love which is a love so strong for another person that is not romantic in nature but those of you that have very very close friends or obviously siblings you understand this type of love the second type of arrows this is romantic love this is the type of love that you have for a spouse this is a type of love that can be very charged in the flesh but a true a good marriage is not just eros i'm going to get to that in a second a true marriage is not just that type of love then third type of love um so it's storge is storge which is a love for a child which is a a father or mother type of love for a child and the fourth type of love which is christ's love for us sacrificial love which is so much love that i will replace you i will i will forgive you for your what you've done wrong and i am willing to lay down my life for you for god so agape the world that he sent his one and only son jesus christ now this is christianity 101 for a lot of people here but i think it's very helpful to repeat it because i know a lot of people that actually don't always hear this and so the question is in society what is love that's a really important question because i hear all throughout the month of june well love is love and you just must leave it as such that you must allow people to do whatever they want to do and look i'm not trying to say that we should have some sort of government task force not allowing it but is that what love actually is is just allowing people to do everything they see fit of course not love and you know this when you see a successful marriage love requires work love requires sacrifice love requires understanding not indulgence it's a big difference if it was you could have a big sign that says indulgence is indulgence that's fine you can say pleasure is pleasure however it's difficult to say that you must be with somebody completely opposite than you are i got married in may it takes work you know that for those of you that are married and by the way if you're young please get married very early and reject hookup culture let me just tell you that get young seriously i say this to somebody i get a golf clap when i say that it's the church should be enthusiastically apart but it's actually very revealing the church doesn't applaud that because we've done a very bad job raising our children we tell them i'll go pursue your career and get married later what awful advice it's unbelievably dreadful we got to change that as the church i i tell you as a rule when i say that at church i get golf claps it's amazing it's like you don't want young people to get married early i i don't i really maybe maybe there's something i'm missing okay third thing what is true we know this the truth will set you free you only know that a line is crooked when you have a straight line to compare it to i'm going to say something that you're not allowed to say in modern america but i really don't care which is if you do not believe in god right and wrong is merely an opinion if you do not believe in an absolute transcendent creator right and wrong is merely an opinion when in genesis 1 1 it's one of my favorite verses of the entire bible because it says so much and it frames the entire biblical text and our existence from that point forward in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth you're like okay yeah what's the big deal there it's a big deal it tells you these two things number one there is a god and you are not him that's a lot i could i could spend the rest of my time up here going into the significance of that by the way i won't but that's a really big deal that there's something greater than you worthy of worship and understanding and the beginning of wonder which is the beginning of philosophy that's a pretty awesome thing and honestly it should be liberating for those of you that think you have to figure it out yourself that in the beginning before you by the way you were not there at the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and also kind of comes to this idea of creation that god spoke it into existence that's a god worthy of worship it's a god worthy of trying to understand it's a god worthy of trying to grow closer to how do we do that through jesus christ when god himself came to save us from our broken nature and so what is true well it's very interesting because when i visit college campuses i have to be lectured by students all the time because i take questions i allow people who disagree to come to the front of the line maybe you've seen some of our videos maybe you haven't encourage you to check them out they can be mildly entertaining at times um where one of my favorites is one of the students said charlie there is no such thing as absolute truth i say well do you believe that absolutely because maybe it's not true maybe there is absolute truth and you didn't know that and you're actually making an absolute truth statement which is we as christians must understand the divide in the country comes down to this it comes down to these things what is objectively true now thankfully we don't have to overthink this because god gave us the word of god to be able to understand this but what is true we know in physics force equals mass times acceleration we know an object at rest will stay at rest and we know that an equal and opposite reaction that if you have if you act on an object there will be equal and opposite reaction those are the three laws of newtonian physics we know those things are true so we know at some point the world is willing to accept some form of objective truth and reality we know that we know that if you get in a car you you admit that there's some laws of nature in nature as god as the founding fathers said but the question that unsettles most people the reason why so many people are unhappy and christians should never be unhappy by the way i believe unhappiness is a sin i really do i could talk about that at great length but if you are born new as a christian and you still walk now you might be temporarily displeased about something but having a state of unhappiness when you're born new in the in thanks to jesus christ no that that is active defiance against the goodness and the gift that that jesus and god have given you let's be very careful about to think about that which is people say i'm so unhappy really that's you get to live forever like that's a big deal yeah be a little bit more cheerful about that and so minorly and we have to be a better job of that as christians by the way i think that if i could submit some kind of recommendation improvements for the christian body let's just be a happier people i mean okay the world's falling apart great would you rather live in a boring time like i mean fine whatever there's a lot to do so and be happy while doing it but so the but here's the thing is that the unsettled nature of most people that are not christians which i think is the beginning of self-pity and unhappy is that people don't know what happens when they're going to die and human psychology tells us this this is the primary driver and motivator which is why people want to try to build the biggest house imaginable and collect the most amount of stuff which is they think that next endorphin kick is going to give them some sort of connection to the divine we know that's not true obviously and deep down they all know at some time at some point the clock's going to run out they know that now we as christians know that and we're kind of excited that we get to enter in to the heavenly domain we get to go to eternity we know that that so for us it's like what are you gonna threaten me with heaven like this is like the biggest and if that makes you an easy hearing maybe you don't believe it and that's okay because that's a big thing to believe by the way it's a big thing to believe that there is an invisible gift waiting for you but it takes faith and you can use a lot of reason to get close to that we could talk about apologetics we talk about that but it absolutely does take faith what is true it's not even that people believe that this book is not true is that the new predominant viewpoint is many people believe that nothing is true that's even worse i'm okay with agnostics no problem agnostics come from a greek word agnosis without knowledge atheists are who bother me atheists are people that see the wonder and the brilliance of the planet around them the complexity of the human soul and make proclaim in with religious fervor there is no god now a couple things about atheists i deal with them a lot always try with cheerfulness and and whimsum because they need it honestly we try to save as many atheists as possible and again let me be very clear agnostics no problem agnostic people that are just searching but people that say i have figured it out there's nothing like really you've you've gone into every corner of the planet in the universe and now you proclaim there's absolute there's a belief in nothing and i always find it kind of weird that people proclaim themselves as atheists it's like i'm going to make my world view about something that doesn't it's like saying i'm a santa claus or something right like i'm my view is a against a being without like i am without theism i'm without god it's always kind of strange to me and so first of all without god there would be no atheist you could spread the word to your atheist friends drive some nuts when they say that when you say that um but it's even beyond atheism so atheism is in itself i think a problem a big problem because i believe the more secular america has become the less free we have become let me say that again the more secular we have become and the more hostile towards christianity the less free america has become that as america becomes less religious and america becomes less obedient to the scriptures and to jesus and god we start to see things start to fall apart that man does not know how to exist in a state of freedom without a relationship with his or her creator and so when when we ask ourselves atheism is bad enough in itself but it's even worse than that it's this question of and it's it's it's like with evangelistic zeal it is getting into the hearts of young people in the minds of young people and we must be very vigilant about this as christians which is what is the point of existence you see very quickly a student a young person will say well what's the point since there's no god which is what they teach at most colleges since there's not why why even continue and this is why people get into drugs and they get into alcohol because why not i might as well make myself feel good right might as well pursue pleasure where we as christians know that there is a beautiful and wondrous and true existence beyond just feeling good you know after doing something and actually we believe that those things can actually harm your existence and harm your spiritual development that some of the least free people in the world are people that do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it however they want to do it but that's not a form of freedom that can actually be the opposite of that it can actually be someone who is beholden to those certain substances and so when we ask ourselves what is true we must be understanding that the divide in the country is the other side is unwilling to say that there's a transcendent order and the transcendent order all of us are in we are all made in the image of god and the promise of the united states constitution is one of human equality is that you're all made in the image of god you're all the same sort of thing we are humans we are not cats we're not dogs we're not dolphins we are the speaking beings now aristotle said we are the speaking beings meaning that we have the gift of rational and reasonable and logical speech and so i could bring up a dog i could bring up a cat and they will not be able to do what an 18 month old does speak they can make noises they can differentiate pleasure from pain they can seek food if necessary but they're not able to speak now what is the significance of speech speech is how we organize a wildly confusing world and speech also requires memory memory is very important and so if i teach a three-year-old this is what a chair looks like do you know what's so amazing next time they walk into the room they'll say that's a chair even though they've never seen that type of chair before they organize it into a type of thing say that's a ball that's a pig that's a cow all of a sudden because god gave us the gift of logical speech what is once confusing can get a little bit more orderly and then you go back to genesis 1 and john 1. how did god create the earth with a wand he spoke it into existence think about that we're made in the image of god so when we speak we are doing what god did when he created the heavens and the earth when he created when he created man when he created the animals when and it says in john 1 in the beginning was the word and the word was god and the word was with god that word is actually logos in the greek which means logical and reasonable speech we are the speaking beings that's who we are as human beings and so when you say what is true what is true is that all human beings that means all things that are human all things that can reason that have logical speech are deserving of rights those people have been given those rights to them by god then finally who is in charge this is this is the most important question well who's in charge the ultimate person in charge is god we must continue to say that that when you look at this transcendent order the person on top of the hierarchy is someone that you cannot see but you can experience you can get divine revelation and healing from but also it requires something that is so missing and in myself included sometimes but it's very important which is humility we have built a country that is prideful not humble it takes a lot to say you know what maybe we're not going to be able to understand every single corner of the universe and the planet through a microscope maybe the bible has more wisdom than anthony fauci who's in charge now from a governmental standpoint the people are in charge and it says very clearly in the united states constitution there are seven promises in the preamble to the constitution that we do ordain these truths ordain the blessings of liberty i should say that's a that's a religious term ordained ordination is when you bring a pastor into a community of a church and so you ask yourself the question who's in charge should it be as should it be a group of unelected experts or bureaucrats that we don't know should it be a bunch of harvard scientists or should it be the people now it only works that it can be the people if as james madison said so beautifully he said the constitution might have been john adams actually the constitution was written wholly for a moral and religious people it's wholly inadequate for the people of any other i think it was john adams who said that and so here's a provocative question for you here today which the bible tells us very clear which is do people want to be free now some people say yeah sure of course yeah of course we want to be free some well what does the bible say so god's chosen people at the beginning of exodus were in slavery and in captivity and they were being abused so moses comes up he starts to challenge the pharaoh challenge the czar challenge the king you can replace it with anything you want same sort of behavioral pattern all throughout time but it was a pharaoh at the time and pharaoh says uh yeah we're going to double the brick output like who's this moses guy he's terrible it's like he's making us work harder but moses being a messenger for god was able to obviously deliver god's chosen people out of egypt and into the desert now every child in sunday school is taught that story but what they're not taught is what i think the most revealing part of the entire story which is when they're in the desert in the wilderness and some time passes by now mind you they needed and wanted for nothing the scriptures told us god blew quail off course and sent manna from heaven they were not hungry they were just a little bit cantankerous that's your word for the day so out of nowhere they're no longer in captivity they're no longer in slavery and they kind of say why are we here like who's this moses guy why did he get us out of egypt again and i kid you not it says quote at least in egypt we were able to eat meat they desired slavery where they could eat better than freedom where they wouldn't eat it as nicely freedom and liberty is not an instinct it is a value it is not something that left to our own devices absent jesus christ and the teachings of the bible we naturally resort to it is not safety and security is an instinct that is something that is written into our natural code i'll prove it to you what happens as soon as adam and eve rebel from god do they continue to walk around without clothes and they're proud of it or are they ashamed and they hide from god where god has to say hey are you there where are you god of course playing somewhat of a humorous game he knows where they are they're hiding and he says no no we can't come out because we're naked and he says well who told you that you were not wearing clothes because of course they ate from the tree that allowed them the awareness of good and evil their natural instinct in the broken nature was not to be try to be free and live so confidently no they resorted to a place of shame and security and trying to be safe so that is a struggle isn't it that absent the word of god which thanks to jesus christ sets us free do human beings want to live in that place and here's the question and we all know this freedom is what america was founded on freedom's really hard it's tempting to say we want to get rid of freedom to be taken care of all of us go through that deep down there is this unspoken psychological instinct that says i would rather just have things provided for me do i have to go to work today can't you just send me a stimulus check come on self-pity is the beginning of satan running your life all of us have a pity party that we can do today we get to bring it all up all of us friends that are sick things we're dealing with spiritual battles jobs that are being lost injustices that are happening to you being fired because you don't want to take a vaccine whatever it might be i could bring you up one by one all different types of things but as soon as that happens satan will use that as a way to try to say hey then why don't you just go get drunk tonight come on you deserve it come on like come on why don't you just go to this website you don't need to be faithful to your wife come on all these bad things are happening to you self-pity and the beginning of that is a gateway to sin and that broken nature it's the same thing when it comes to the lack of liberty and i say this to audiences the fact that america has been able to remain as free as we are which is increasingly less free is remarkable to me it really is i thought this project would have folded a long time ago because we really are fighting against human nature which is why the founding fathers said hey this thing's only going to work if you have a moral and religious people that's kind of a pretty that's like a fire alarm for the church isn't it well where do we get morality and religion from we get it from the cdc hope not we get it from the church that's got to be an active and courageous church willing to say this is right and this is wrong willing to tell their congregation that this is what the bible says i'll give you a great example willing to say god created man and god created woman that's it willing to say that and some people say well there's a natural urge to want to be free in some of these totalitarian governments i want you to study russia after the soviet union fell i want you to talk to people they did not know what to do many of them actually yearned to be back under the control of the commissar the select few the younger the ambitious they heard the whisper and the promise of freedom and they were able to make something of themselves i was so struck by this young um this young dissident from north korea yemeni park who's phenomenal and it was one of the most amazing hours i've ever listened to in my life where she grew up in the most totalitarian government that we know today and she said it was so powerful she said i had to take a nap for two hours after i thought for five minutes because i had never thought before everything i did someone told me to do wake up get dressed go to work dig dig the hole eat go home that's it but as soon as i started to sit down and think about what am i going to do today what am i going to wear there was no wardrobe choosing in north korea you were you're told all of a sudden it was it was like mentally fatiguing for her she had to build up the muscle of actually thinking and when she was interviewed by dennis prager and we're going to have her on our podcast too he said well did you ever want to be free you know what she said she said i'd never heard the word yeah that's that's how people are in north korea that's not an instinct if it was an instinct it'd be like eating she never had to think about eating and then she tells a story of one day when a dangerous predator came into the village without thinking she knew where to hide and she knew how to avoid that predator safety is an instinct but she never had the instinct to flee never had that why did she why did she fully you might say they ran out of food and eventually she had to cross the river into china and try to go pursue freedom this is a very this is a dip this is a thing the church does not always talk about i'm telling you right now if we do not talk about what true liberty is which let me be very clear it's not doing whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it that is not liberty okay liberty is doing what you ought to do it's the pursuit of virtue it's doing the right thing now you might say well charlie how do you know it's the right thing i'm glad you asked how much time you got let's start with god's gifts to us all you might say what are god's gifts to us all well this is this is why one of the reasons why i believe the bible is divinely inspired is because how negatively it frames the jews seriously no one that would write this would they would only write this if it was true it makes the hebrews look like the worst people ever they're rebelling against god they're like worshiping golden calves like no way it's like this is this only if it was true would you actually write this and so it's like at every moment they're messing it up david is getting like generals killed to go cheat on his wife it's like wow um that's not how we should live um but it's actually very resonant with us because it feels like our daily lives which is a promise from god we get up and go to work and by lunch we're already sinning we're like lord i need forgiveness it's kind of like a kind of resident if it was like these perfect people and they never messed up they'd be like yeah there's no way this is true but the fact that they're always messing up it's like you know what actually this might be divinely inspired and so the ten gifts from god of course the decalogue which are actually the ten statements from god which is the ten commandments now one one of the most amazing things about the law in the old testament is that the law came before the king only civilization ever in the history of the planet where the law pre-existed the king so you have hammer rabbi's code you have kind of confusion codes the difference is that you had somebody in charge who wrote down every way that you want to live the difference in the old testament and in the christian belief is that god gave the law and then a king came into place what does that mean means the law is superior to the king especially where you say where the law came from which is god now one of the ways that and i tell students this all the time which is they say charlie how do i live a better life how do i live free just focus on living the ten commandments there's obviously more than that but the ten commandments i i'm sure we don't have i hope we don't be murderers here today that's not a big i don't know whatever um jesus's grace be upon you um and so but there's definitely some parts of the ten commandments we don't take as seriously as that one right that one that one's a high threshold like how about keeping the sabbath as soon as i started to keep the sabbath back in july turn my phone off no one can contact me the lord has blessed me infinitely i see things more clearly i'm able to kind of come yesterday was my shabbos from friday night to saturday night and jesus did question some of the religious zeal behind it and the kind of sanctimonious part of it never does it say that we as christians should dishonor the day of rest that is not true some christians say oh that we shouldn't take it seriously that is not correct at all in fact i believe that if god rested after the creation of the planet then i think we can take one day and dedicate that day to god and it's hard it's like i got a lot of stuff to do i got a lot of deals going i get it okay trust me got a lot of things going on take that one day how about honoring your mother and father it is the only commandment with a promise in it honor your mother and father so you might live long of which in the land i've sent you depending on the translation that you are reading you do that you will live you will live blessed lives and it's hard it's hard especially for students to do this because you want to believe that your teachers are smarter than your parents you want to believe that they don't have the best interest i'm going to rebel against them let me be very clear one of the reasons why america is in the place that it's in is because the state has intentionally obliterated the relationship between parents and children when the when the union between a parent and a child goes away the country falls apart that's why the promise is there in the ten commandments that you might live long in the land i sent you in we're not going to live long if we keep on destroying parental children relationships the country will fall apart it's very simple okay a lot more i wanted to get to but you guys can come to the last service because all these are different by the way i have all these different things that we can get into okay um by the way the third service will all be about education if that interests you uh and why that's so important what does the bible tell you about education and what we can do about it and why we need to have a no excuse policy with education um let me just talk about one thing here okay let me talk about why the founding fathers i love the founding fathers i think they're phenomenal and i think they're worthy of appreciation i think we should have gratitude towards them let me just say this one thing there's another divide in america which is the people that are thankful and the people that are unthankful a thankful nation lives long and is strong an unthankful nation tends to tear itself apart and gratitude is the fruit that you eat that makes everything else taste sweet gratitude is incredibly important now when you're thankful for something all of a sudden people say well who are you thankful to we could say god this is why gratitude is not a secular value this is why the secular are never thankful it's because they don't believe in god well who are you thankful for who are you thankful to i had this debate against a left-wing podcaster where i thought i believed that education the goal of education should be trying to instill gratitude in a generation to be thankful the sacrifices before that and the blessings given to by god you would have thought i would have said the you know the the point of education is to create ax murderers or something like he never heard of this before so what are you talking about gratitude it's like we got work to do we got things to change we got progress to make see the divide all of a sudden you're in two different parts of the spectrum if you're not thankful then just change everything obviously where i say no no no not only should we be slow ourselves down we live in the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world we we we have we have a gift given to us and we should understand where it came from and the complexities of it and the separation of powers and consent to the government and the independent judiciary and all these different components of it and so as i say i'm a big fan of the founding fathers one thing that i just found to be so interesting is that first of all john adams himself spoke hebrew uh which just to go the biblical literacy of the founding fathers and this is how i know the founding fathers knew their bible they put a verse from leviticus on the liberty bell okay not psalms not proverbs not john leviticus okay and it was like deep into leviticus like leviticus 25 which is proclaimed liberty in the land like these guys they knew their bible okay that's what they put on the liberty bell and that's why they understood that if we as the church stop being the church and start being some sort of kind of corporate organization that does budgets baptisms and builds bigger buildings and that's it then all of a sudden the country starts falling apart and that's something to dwell on and pray about is it was like what is the right balance well the balance should always be the church should proclaim moral truth regardless of the cost that will come after the church from the world no matter what say what the word of god says says when it says in life life begins i knew you before you were in the womb very very clear you should proclaim that from from the the from the scriptures and also from the pulpit but also we must understand that the church is the exception and has created the world around us it is no mistake that as church rates go down in america which they are church rates are going down so god bless you guys for being here today it's a big deal that all of a sudden moral chaos goes up it's that simple and so what is the church supposed to do about it here's the way i equate it is that the church has always been in a position to catch america when it's fallen that the church founded this country did you know that the bible was more cited than any other piece of literature in the founding of the country the founding fathers in their private journals so well in exodus it says this in deuteronomy it says this in leviticus it says this and john it says this that they founded a country trying to strive on the promise of the bible which is to set the captives free they understood human nature too they knew human beings did not want to be free that's why they said this system is only for people that are religious and moral you get rid of religions and morals you live in a totalitarian tyranny it's all going to fall apart and so what i want to try to challenge us to do today and we'll continue this in the next service which is that the church should be talking about praising our leaders when they do well preaching to them when they do wrong participating in our government and then finally praying for our leaders by name those are the four p's right which is praise praise preach participate and pray those are the four things that i want to encourage us to try to do we'll get into that in the next service in particular but i also want to say this though that it's tempting for certain churches and christians to do the following we know how this all works out the house is on fire jesus is coming soon we know the truth i want nothing to do with this this is all dirty this is all messy this is terrible i'm here to tell you right now as it says in jeremiah 27 29 7 the lord spoke this is god talking at the end of jeremiah demand that means badras in the word hebrew the welfare the shalom of the nation i have put you in because your welfare is tied to the nation's welfare i want to ask a very d a very simple question does the church continue to prosper and grow and have the freedoms we enjoy if totalitarianism and tyranny sets in of course not we know that's true in north korea you think the church is growing quickly there is no church they don't even know the word freedom it's satan's playground there now it might be for some people they say well charlie you know that's just not for me that's fine i'm not asking it to be free i'm just asking to be aware and do those four things right those are the four things is the basic elements praise preach praise preach participate and pray i'm going to be very clear my my job my day-to-day job is not the most important thing you can do it's not it's the second most important thing you can do so the most important thing you could do is to win souls for christ bring people to jesus right that's the most important thing you can do so you might say charlie what's the second most important thing so my life is focused on number two i want to make sure you could do the first thing that's my life's work i want to make sure that churches can stay open against government mandates i want to lock them down i want to make sure that people are not forced to take medicine against their religious conscience i want to make sure that people are not forced to fund things against their deeply held beliefs i want to make sure that we live in a society that has some moral centeredness and truth both are super important so my job is focus on number two and my my prayer is that more people in the church say man we gotta start focusing on number two too because without number two we can't do number one i'm not saying it's more important i will never ever say that but i'm saying at times they're tied together and we know that from history we know that from the kind of where the world is today so let me kind of close with this and then um please come to the third service which will be totally unique does anyone wear the first service any first service people this was different wasn't it i i was good on my promise i told you it was okay um i never got to the physical bible thing which is okay get rid of the bible app everybody okay you need satan tries to corrupt your bible readings okay don't write don't read on an iphone or an ipad where satan can interrupt it get something that's dedicated strictly and solely for your relationship with god and it allows people around you to hold you accountable they're like okay you're reading the bible right now because when i'm when i'm on my phone reading the bible my wife's like are you really reading the bible i'm getting there right i know for me that there's a comfort and a peace that when i open up the word of god i'm reading the same way that my ancestors read i have the same sort of weight and feel the book every time i pick up this is my sword against satan this is a comfort for me and i know and i smile because i i put my phone away i just like okay put this away that absent you know a deer flying through the window or something weird right i don't think that even happens like whatever it's got other problems of that's happening no one's get in the way of this where i know that if i'm reading on this i got dings and bells and whistles i just this is an anxiety machine like get it away from me right like i i want to get to a place of comfort it says in the word of god the word of the lord is a place of solitude that he he brings you to places of comfort so i encourage i say that half jokingly i get the angriest emails about this by the way charlie i'm a great christian and i use the bible app how dare you that's not my point okay i'm just trying to bless you okay maybe it's not for you and you want to keep on looking at a screen while you read the bible i think that's weird but like whatever just consider it okay um people ask charlie how can we help you thank you for uh supporting us at turning point usa and what we're doing on high school and college campuses and it's tough work it's tough to go to college campuses it's not easy it really is kind of the den of lions a lot of times another way if if what i said interested you and you're like man i want to get a new news source i want to care about this we're doing two podcasts a day every single day in addition to three hours of radio giving 330 speeches a year all from a biblical world view and so if that interests you you guys can subscribe to our podcast on all of your phones it's charlie kirk show podcast it actually really blesses us so i would ask you to please consider doing it because we're under attack from all these big big tech sensors trying to restrict us super simple you open your podcast app charlie kirk show if you don't know how to do that i saw an eight-year-old around here somewhere that can easily walk you through how to subscribe to a podcast and our wonderful turning point usa leaders raise your hands they can help you through how to subscribe so so let me let me close with this it's a pastor's close so it's a multiple rounds of closing which is if you don't have your life right with christ i encourage you to do this the gospel in four words as jesus took my place three words him for me two words substitutionary atonement one word grace all of us need that this is what human equality means there's no special passes there's no exemptions we all need jesus to be able to get into eternal life there will be a time when we are judged when everything we did wrong is going to be listed out that's going to be a long sentencing hearing for me very long and thankfully i know at that very moment i've been given grace that instead of going to damnation i have someone that says no no i know him he can go into life everlasting that's a beautiful gift and so we must always put that first everybody and so i'm going to continue focusing my life's work on the second most important thing so that all of you in this church can keep on doing the ultimate thing and we could do it in harmony and do it together if the church does not rise up everybody things will continue to fall follow fall apart and get into chaos the church is the hope of the world the moral beacon the place of clarity for a broken world let's lean into it together god bless you guys thank you so much well this book will keep you from sin the single keeper from this book that's really important the bible especially in these last days as he said we live in a very critical time all these liberals are trying to close on the churches when you speak truth that's what happens you know charlie's been speaking all over the country and just incredible that people hate him but we love him that's the whole thing you know the bible the word of god being given and the bible says that you know when god has worshipped his worship in spirit and in truth and we need more people to worship the lord in spirit and in truth but at the same time like he said our telephones our little ipads man we got to get rid of this thing spend time in the word of god get a real bible one that you can have and you can handle the word of god i think that's important let's all stand i've been sick so forgive me father we thank you so much for your grace your love and mercy we pray father for the next service we thank you so much for this service lord lord whatever has been said here today lord god let us fall in hearts that are going to be changed lord lord we pray for all his speaking engagements to give him the strength the power to speak and the people would have an ear to hear what the holy spirit says lord so lord we thank you once again for this time you given to us in jesus name we pray and everyone said amen may the lord bless you may he keep you may he watch over you we'll sing one more song