thank you guys it is good to be with you i want to talk tonight about a single word and that word is history uh the bible says recall the former days remember the former times teach your children things that happened in the past and you'll find that when israel remembered its history it behaved differently than when it forgot its history so history is a key even to having revivals as you see under king josiah when they discovered the school in the temple they read who they'd been it took them backwards to where they should be backwards to their their roots and they became a very different nation there's a quote in history that comes from george orwell and the quote that he says is is a is a great look at history he says who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past now let me take just part of that if you take the part where it says who controls the present controls the past that is the teaching of today today what we're teaching in history today controls the past because those who teach today are teaching what the past is or at least choosing parts that they want to teach ignoring other parts they don't want to so the way the past actually appears to have happened to people today is because of teaching today now the significance of that is who controls the past controls the future so the people today are portraying the past in a way that will help them move forward their agenda and they're actually omitting much of what's happened in history because they want to go in a very different direction so history is a significant tool for keeping people in ground keeping the anchors anchor set doing being able to do the right things so with this let me show you where it started to change started to change in 1980 with a guy named howard zinn howard zinn was a history professor he wrote this book the people's history of the united states now if you look at the bible the bible is definitely a book full of history we have for example the history of king david we know that with king david here is a guy who is a god after a man after god's own heart he repented he had a tender heart he's a great worshiper most of the psalms came from david all the good stuff and yet the bible also tells us about the bad and the ugly tells us that david was not a very good father we're told that he never said no to adonijah his son his son added nycha his son absalom led a revolt to kill his father and the absalom ended up killing one of his brothers david's son who had raped david's daughter all in all david's not a very good parent and then you find that david fell david committed adultery with besheba and then killed uriah so when you read the bible in david you get the good the bad the ugly but there's definitely much more good than there is bad or ugly and you can learn as much from the bad and ugly as you can from the good what howard zen did was take all the bad and ugly he could find about america he had made a lot of it up and didn't teach any of the good it would be like teaching the the book of first and second samuel and the only thing you taught out of the first and second samuel was david committed adultery with sheba and killed husband uriah nobody would ever want to read another psalm in the history of their life because david is such a bad guy but that's not the story of david there's a lot more to the story so what howard dennis what howard zen did is called reconstruction we have it very actively today 41 years later for example with what we call the college board now the college board these are the people that do the sat and the essay the act test and the essay excuse me the sat test the act test is the other but these are college bound tests that are used today in school for students who are in there they also have 47 ap history courses out at the college board so an ap course is someone who's in high school a student in high school who is so good in that course that they can get college credit for that course at the same time with ap us history course there are about 460 000 kids in america today taking ap us history now the ap us history course that we have it and cheryl you may have to hit the back because it'll stop moving or even if you'll hold that receiver up but there's there we go there are about 162 pages in this ap us history course what's significant is what is not in the history course this is the current one being talked to the smartest history kids in america today and it lacks any founding fathers they're all gone it lacks the american war for independence it's gone it lacks abraham lincoln the civil war that's gone even if you get into modern history in world war ii there was no mention of any battle in world war ii there is not iwo jima there is not anything with guadalcanal there's no d-day invasion there's no battle of the bulge there's no pearl harbor none of that happened the japanese don't appear they weren't part of the war the germans don't appear they weren't part of the war the 48 million killed in germany the 20 million killed over the pacific theater none of that's part of it but it does say that america dropped atomic bombs in japan raising questions about american values the only thing you get out of this is that america is the bad nation in world war ii oh my gosh there is so much more there but this is what's happening and this is called deconstruction so deconstruction is what we're doing to tear down the nation and in tearing down the nation the reason we're tearing down the nation such a way that we're even seeing it in legislative standards well we own we run an organization called wall builders pro family legislative networks comprised of about a thousand state legislators that are godly people committed to biblical values constitutional values and these guys we have in states all over the united states we monitor about 110 000 pieces of legislation every year this year a number of states pass their history standards and depending on the state the history standard might be here's what we're going to teach for the next 10 years or 12 years or 14 years et cetera and when you look at what we have with the history standards that were introduced this year a lot of things were removed by a number of states and they said well here's the things we're not going to teach anymore we're not going to teach the american revolution we're not going to teach the civil war world war one world war ii or the holocaust all that is now going to be gone for the next 10 to 12 years now this is a real problem because what's left what's left of things like the 1619 project in critical race theory and things that are not accurate reflections what actually happened in american history so we are changing the direction of the nation by what we do with history now this is the reason that we see the rise of things like marxism and socialism and communism and by the way i will point out why is why was critical race theory not tried 30 years ago it was but everybody rejected it because we knew too much of our own history now that we have not taught history for 30 years we're buying into things that 30 years ago we never would have bought into because we knew too much about our own history history has been gone for a good bit and so what we have now is we have the rise of this and this is where we get critical race theory and with critical race theory you're also finding all these organizations being able to gain traction and so as you look at groups like the 1619 project or the various groups they're gaining traction and they're all united on things like radicalization rebellion and writing so this is what critical race there is in case you've heard that term i'm not really familiar with it let me give you a good definition critical race theory is very simple critical race theory tar starts with the the position takes as a starting point that america was founded to protect and preserve slavery now what they do is 1619 project they point to jamestown jamestown founded in 1607 1619 slaves arrived in america and this has been the whole story of america at the very beginning that's why it was founded timeout 1619 is not even correct slaves arrived in virginia in 1619 and they were not permitted because slavery was not legal in virginia so what happened was they became indentured servants they had been taken off this portuguese slave ship two english privateers captured that slave ships split the booty and they said we've got 40 slaves here voted with them i don't know you take half we'll take half we don't want slaves we'll do with that we'll drop it off in the nearest colony and that was virginia they dropped one of the ships dropped 19 slaves off there virginia said slavery is illegal we can't do this so those 19 slaves became indentured servants which is what whites also were whites blacks it didn't matter indentured servant you worked for a few years after that period of time they feel like you've given the state enough production that you've you've had an education you've learned your stuff uh we've covered your food and lodging and now you're free and on your own and so you get a piece of property you're a free landowner and that's what happened all 19 of these one of the 19 was a man named anthony johnson he was one of those original slaves that had been dropped off and he started sponsoring indentures of people to come to america he would sponsor them and i'll pay your way and you work for me seven years and in time you'll be free and you'll get a piece of land just like i did and he's doing that and in 1653 one of the guys he indentured was a guy named john kaser john kaser had come and he was not a very good worker as a matter of fact anthony johnson said you are such a lazy bum you'll have to work for me for the rest of your life to pay off what i've invested in your indenture so he went to court in virginia and in 1653 he said can i own this guy for the rest of his life because he'll never pay off he's so lazy he'll never pay off while putting the court said yes you can own him that's the first occasion of slavery in american history and it was when a black sued to own another black and that didn't come out in the 1619 project that's where slavery begins in america now i will point out the second slave ship that arrived in america arrived to the pilgrims and when the pilgrims got the slave ship they promptly freed all the slaves and they imprisoned all the slave owners and they quoted out of exodus where exodus said said men stealing was a capital offense man stealing was defined as going to a nation stealing someone out of the nation taking them to another nation and selling them that was a capital offense in the bible and that's exactly what happened to pilgrims which is why the northern states were very anti-slavery because they were very bible oriented the southern states were very christian professing but they didn't know much about about the bible and they didn't read it much they just professed to be christians so america has two very distinct courses one is the northern side which is very anti-slavery and by the way we had blacks elected to office in 1641 elected by white by white voters you had wentworth chazwell great founding father black founding father elected in new hampshire in 1768 by white community served 49 years held eight different political positions you have thomas hercules 1793 elected as a as a black man in a white community elected and served in pennsylvania so we have so many blacks elected to office so early which also is not in the 1619 project nor is the fact that blacks were actively involved in most of the good things that happened in america including the american war for independence every battle was not a segregated battle every unit was an integrated unit throughout the american war for independence and some of the best and greatest heroes in the american revolution were black patriots and i don't say that lightly because we own 160 000 artifacts from american history including 120 000 documents from before 1812. out of those documents we know that he rules the battle we know the hero of the battle of bunker hill was a black patriot we know the first man to die in the american war for independence was a black patriot we know that we would not have won the the battle at yorktown had it not been for james armist at a black double spy george washington general lafayette say he is the reason we want we start with the black patriot we end with the black preacher i can take you through all the black seal teams in the middle jack sisson i can take you through prince esther brook billy flores all these other black heroes not soldiers heroes and interestingly the american revolution was fought with a completely volunteer army you volunteered and you returned from the list of six months the average white soldier served for six months the average black soldier enlisted in eight additional times on average black soldiers voluntarily served nine times longer than white soldiers and we think it's a white movement back in the american revolution no we just don't know our history today again this is why 1619 project would never work 30 years ago we knew too much about our own history and heroes so america 1619 critical race theory takes a starting point that america was founded to protect and preserve slavery and that the american constitutional system is the source of our society's ills and the chief of our society's ills is racism so what we're taught today is the biggest sin we have in america is racism and racism is a product of the constitutional system so if you want to get rid of racism what you're going to have to do is get rid of that constitutional system because that's where it all comes from which is why we're seeing what we see now and the teaching we have about our country's founding by the way two weeks ago last monday interesting to see what happened with the constitution the constitution is housed in the national archives in washington dc along with the declaration of independence and two weeks ago last monday they put up a warning label in the constitution declaration that warning label says harmful language alert don't read this document it's got harm women are you talking about the declaration that has the harmful language that all men are created equal or are you talking about the constitution that has the harmful language that abolishes slavery in the 13th amendment they gave equal rights in the 14th amendment they gave voting rights in the 15th is that the harmful no no just don't read the constitutional declaration they take it so much harmful see they don't even want us reading it because we read it we'd scratch our head and say where's this harmful language you're talking about so now we put these alerts up even on that now the result of what we've done last 30 years is most americans don't have a very good appreciation for america today which they should if you look at america today we're one of 193 nations in the world now we had our revolution back in the american revolution 1776 and we created our constitution 1789. we've only ever had one constitution in our history i want you to see the rest of the world and look at how many constitutions the rest of the world has had so we've had one since 1789 and just look at all the other nations imagine living in any of these other nations and having constitutions as often as they do and these nations are both friends and enemies so it doesn't matter whether they're they're a free country or whether they're oppressive country they go through these constitutions at such a rapid rate now when you look at this a fair question to ask is alright 5800 years of recorded history what is the length of an average constitution in the history of the world and if you look at constitutions in the history of the world the average length of the constitution is 17 years three weeks ago on constitution day september the 17th we celebrated our birthday 234 years under the constitution now imagine being any other nation of the world averaging a constitution every 17 years or imagine being america who's had one in 234 years and we want to blow that one up and take it down and have a fundamentally different nation i think i like stability you know quite frankly the average is a nation averages a violent revolution every generation and it averages a new constitution every 17 years unless you're america it's very different and then even if you look at america with something like our creativity america is four percent of the world's population now four percent of the world's population should produce four percent of the world's creative whatever but america our four percent produces more technology more scientific cures more medical discoveries more space technology more entertainment we do more than the other 96 of the world combined now i do a lot of speaking publicly and i've got two kids active duty military i was over in germany they asked me to do some training on military bases there we got 26 27 military bases in germany and so i was doing training for officers and for chaplains and for different things and while i was over there they put me up in a five-star german hotel which is really cool because i'm a cowboy from texas got a really simple life a really easy life i like my cowboy life but to be in a five-star hotel in germany now that was elegant man you walk in and say hey mr barton they knew me by name they called me by name they got me anything it was so cool and that experience in that five-star hotel would have been even better if they'd had internet at that five star hotel now i'll point out even motel 6 in america has got internet we're at a five-star hotel in germany see we take for granted what we enjoy in the sense of technology and innovations we're just blessed with it our four percent should produce four percent of the inventions we produce more than the 96 percent and the same thing when you look at our prosperity uh america is only four percent of the world's population yet we produce 25 percent of the world's gross domestic product now according to the census bureau this year if you live in poverty in america your lifestyle is higher than the middle class in europe and a matter of fact if you're in states like hawaii or mississippi they have notified people there that unless you make more than 58 thousand dollars a year you should not think about coming off welfare because that's how much you get on welfare i'll point out the world bank sits a global standard for poverty and it's two dollars a day 730 a day is what they consider the world standard for poverty and in america we're over 58 000 whatever that might i mean do we realize how blessed we are no by and large we're just trying to blow it up and not say what's actually happening and this what we enjoy today is called american exceptionalism this is a term that was given to us back in 1831 by lexi toville who came to america and so a good question to ask is okay america's the exception not the rule who are the leaders responsible for that how did we get this and invariably we look to political leaders this is what i've been trained to do well leaders responsible would be people like george washington it would be people like john hancock it would be people like john adams and all these famous names that we have from founding fathers so as you see these founding fathers these are important names no question but i'll point out something interesting happened in 1816 a young man named hezekiah niles wrote george washington hezekiah niles was a millennial that generation he had not lived through the american revolution but america had become superb by that point in time 1816. he said i'm writing a book on the american revolution i weren't there but you were as an eyewitness as an active participant in what happened i want you to tell me who you think are the people most responsible for what we enjoy to america today and so john says well if you want to know who's most important who's most responsible for what we enjoy in america he said right up top you have to have the reverend dr samuel cooper and of course there's the reverend dr jonathan mayhew you've also got the reverend george whitfield you've got the reverend charles chancey now we might know something about whitfield today but the chances that we know anything about cooper or mayhew or chauncey slim to nut and he's calling out pastors saying these are the guys responding what i didn't get that in my history books and then by the way on top of that we don't study pastors today whether they were white or whether they were black i mean who in the world is richard allen or absalom jones or who's john morant or limuel haynes or even who is harry hoosier and by the way let me just take care of hoosier for a second harry who's your interesting man he was a revivalist in the great awakenings and back then you had a lot of famous revivals and you had george whitefield and you had john and charles wesley and you had lorenzo dowell and charles clay and all these famous people and you take someone like francis asbury francis asbury is a very noted name in that revival a great awakening and francis aaronsberry said yeah i've got huge crowds but harry draws bigger crowds than i do wow my gosh that's a huge crowd and then you've got people like benjamin rush benjamin rush is a founding father john adams said he's one of our three most notable founding fathers he said you got george washington ben franklin benjamin rush benjamin rush said i've heard harry preach and he's the greatest orator i've ever heard oh my goodness you've heard patrick henry you've heard all those guys know harry is the best order ever now harry had a ministry among blue-collar americans and particularly the guys that love to come to his revivals were really rough tough rugged guys they were frontiersmen they were woodsman they were trappers explorers pioneers and they had a rugged rough life to go with it and they would get converted and when they got converted they were different their language changed their behavior changed everything changed and harry preached largely along the east coast in america he preached over in the area of philadelphia and he would preach in delaware and jersey so he preached along the east coast but what happened is america started moving west those guys converted by harry these these mountain men county guys they moved west with the country because that's what they do they want to be on the front edge of exploring stuff and so by the time you get to about 1806 1807 somewhere in there the furthest west the country had moved was into what was considered the indiana territory now if you take the indiana territory it's interesting back up here as these explorers went in the other explorers said these guys are all they're really different they're not like the rest of us what's the deal with them and the answer was oh there are a bunch of those hoosiers now hopefully you connect the word hoosier with indiana because the hoosier state i wonder how many people who live in indiana know that they were named after a black evangelist probably very few now you would think that a dude who has a state named after might get some credit in our textbooks i know if not i haven't seen it in a long time again this is what we're not teaching our history if we're teaching stuff like this we have a whole different view of america so when you look at what happened here at this point with people like harry hoosier why would john adams say the preachers responsible because historians have documented that every single rite set forth in the declaration of independence had been preached from the american pulpit prior to 1763. now if you want a fun assignment read the declaration of independence as a list of sermon topics because that's what it was every ride in the declaration had been found in sermons preached 15 years earlier this see it was the church that taught people how to think how to have a biblical view on all sorts of things so john adams he talked about it and john adams said he said our pulpits are thundered and when you look at the sermons from back then there's no question that that's true and what you find with the sermons is they address biblical relevance in a way that we rarely do today let me give you some examples i mentioned that we have 120 000 documents from 4 18 12. let me show you some sermons this is a sermon preached by the reverend dr jonathan mayhew it's 1755 boston experience earthquake which is very unusual for boston and so he said okay here's what's in the headlines here's what's in the news let's see what the bible has to say about this now he preached a five-week series on what the bible says about earthquakes how many earthquakes do you remember in the bible well i thought well okay i remember i i remember amos talking about it i remember the the earthquake under your eye i remember the earthquake when jesus died the earthquake on his resurrection that's it now just do a search online and look at the earthquakes in the bible unbelievable how many earthquakes are in the bible we've never paid attention to it but we're not looking for practical stuff like they did anything that was in the headlines they were saying okay what's the bible said about so we have all sorts of sermons on things like natural disasters in addition to sermons on on natural disasters we also have sermons like this one this is the cry of sodom entered into it's a sermon on homosexuality this is lgbtq kind of stuff it's interesting that today 77 percent of christians self-censor rather than talk about lgbtq issues because they know they'll get beat up if they say something and so rather than have a backbone and talk about it we just go silent about it which causes other generations think well it's not that big a deal nobody really cares about it and so rather than be de-platformed or canceled or have people yell at us on social media we go silent no no that's not what we did back then we also have this sermon you see it's comets at the bottom it says two sermons occasion by the late blazing star really i can't think of comments in the bible just like i couldn't think of earthquakes they're there actually we had so many sermons that dealt with things like astronomy we had sermons on solar eclipses we had sermons on discoveries of planets and constellations it's really amazing to see the sermons we had on things like science and astronomy we had sermons on other topics this is a summaries on the infirmities and comforts of old age probably not a popular topic but certainly a much needed topic because everybody grows old and everybody deals with people who are growing old and it causes a lot of changes in your life so we had sermons on it back then we also had sermons like this religion patriotism the constituents of a good soldier this is a deployment sermon we had lots of military sermons there's a lot of military stuff in the bible even as john the baptist was baptizing he gave specific instructions to both officers and soldiers a lot of stuff in the bible and military we had sermons also like this the relation the medical profession to the ministry so health care sermons see the greatest health code in the world was the bible a great doctor essa mcmillan actually did a book he went through and he looked at every single health provision in the bible and pointed out that what god told those hebrew slaves 3000 years ago in the desert was about 3 000 years ahead of where science has finally gotten to we've now figured out that most of what god said and he said at that time they had studies that showed that nearly every healthcare thing in the bible they had studies showing that god was right way ahead of time so the health code provisions of the bible very few people have ever studied the health codes in the bible you have other other sermons we did there's a sermon on the character and tendency the property tax has adapted to a permanent system of taxation sermons on economics yeah because as christians we should know what the bible says about that by the way the bible does talk about the what we call the capital gains tax the capitation income tax the progressive income tax it talks about minimum wage talks about all these economic systems america is the first nation in the world to implement a free market system we did so historically in five bible verses second thessalonians 3 10 first timothy 5 8 matthew 20 luke 19 and matthew 25 those are the five verses that built the economic system that we have in america that's made as the most prosperous nation in the world most people think of economics as being a secular subject no no the bible is full of all sorts of economic guidance in addition to economics we had a lot of topics this is topic on the fugitive slave bill of the millions of federal laws passed this bill passed this law passed in 1850 sermon 1851 this law is probably the single worst federal law ever passed in history and as a result pastors took the pulpit and said okay guys if you obey this federal law you're disobeying god because here's what god says about this issue here's what the federal government says about this issue if you obey the federal government you're disobeying what god said they called for civil disobedience on this issue and juries across the united states regularly routinely found innocent those that were trying to be convicted in that law because it was an unjust law it violated biblical principles so we dealt with things like social policy in addition to social policy we also dealt with things like elections we have election sermons so we were dealing with politics there was nothing that was off the table and that's the biblical worldview that we had at the time so when you see this thing about okay john adams says our pulpits are thundered and the pulpits of thunder the biblical relatives say what would we say about today well it's interestingly every one of these issues that's popping up on the screen has been in the news in the last 24 months i specifically chose them because these are issues that are around us and their issues that are going and they're also issues the bible specifically addresses every one of these issues we as christians if we are reading the bibles we should it's my belief that every christian should read the bible from cover to cover at least once a year and that's not the pastor's responsibility that's our responsibility we're told in matthew 4 you don't live by bread alone you live by the words that come out of the mouth of god imagine eating a meal once a week you know because some people only get in the bible once a week matter of fact we know polling wise that only nine percent of christians read the bible on a daily basis there's a lot of famished christians i mean if you're only eating one meal a day then that's not real good for your health so we're not in god's word like we used to be but we should be and if we were we would know how the word of god applies to issues like this so what happens is most christians are not able to handle these kind of issues or talk about them and we did a lot of polling and work with george barnett george is such a great guy great pollster and george took 384 000 senior pastors and churches in america and in polling that found that only 2.8 percent of pastors are willing to address things that are in the news from the pulpit so we don't have the relevancy that we had for those generations the church and the word of god is relevant it's just that people don't know that as a matter of fact what we've seen is a big decline in church membership back in 2000 85 percent of all americans profess to be christians today 21 years later it's 65 we've dropped 20 points in the last 20 years and when you poll those who left church and said why did you leave church what you find is two out of three said they left church because it lacks relevancy they don't get anything that helps them deal with daily life and the things that go on around them so this is where that this generation is going to have to get back to that when you see stats like that this is why you hear people calling out for things like revival we need revival we need to be praying for revival i totally agree but when you get look at revivals in the bible like asa jehoshaphat and josiah you look at revivals historically i don't think we're going to have a revival in the way that we expect at all i think we have a major obstacle and that major obstacle is really the way that we have a national focus let me explain that you all get your news from somewhere some media source national media source if you're on the right you tend to go to fox news or the blaze or victory news or newsmax or whatever if you're on the left you can go to cnn or msnbc or whatever it is and you get news and we get filled with news on a national basis you haven't heard a single story about scott's bluff nebraska about waterton new york about uconn oklahoma about jax bro texas we don't get anything about where we live where we are we get stuff on the national level and so as a result we look and we look and say well you know i'm seeing and i'm hearing what's going in congress what's going in the supreme court what's going in the white house and by the way i'm very involved in all that i've been involved in 13 cases the u.s supreme court involved another case this year very involved legislatively not only with a thousand state legislators have dozens of members of congress who are very close friends as a matter of fact about six weeks ago glenn beck six years ago started what's called the nazarene fund to say persecuted christians about six weeks ago the military asked us to take over the airport operations going out of afghanistan so in the last six weeks i said six months ago six weeks ago in the last six weeks we moved almost 6 000 people out of afghanistan thousands of persecuted christians lots of americans and thousands of allies that we moved out of there and while we've had the taliban right in our face on every flight our enemy hasn't been the taliban it's been the state department we've had so many planes in the air and the state department called ahead the nation said turn those planes around and send them back had planes going to macedonia planes going to albania plain school getting people to safety in the state department sending them back so we start working at the white house start working with secretary blinken and then he starts telling the state department get these guys out of there let these planes go and state department told him no i mean even the secretary of state was being told no so we're dealing with this so i'm having to call congressman center say we need help hey can you intervene with the prime minister of pakistan see the prime minister of pakistan that's where the taliban comes from he's trying to get that nation turned around away from the taliban he's the guy who intervened and got all these planes out of there it wasn't the american government that did it we actually had to go to pakistan are you kidding me so i say this because i'm very involved in politics and national stuff and i've got a lot of good connections and a lot of people don't have the connections i've got you know what i am super frustrated with what goes on and i get paralyzed because i can't make any of these guys do what we need done i can't make congress pull down h.r 5 that they're trying to pass which would federalize all religious liberty and put it under the control of congress not on the constitution terrible bill but i can't get it stopped what happened last week with the most pro-abortion bill in american history passing the house last week couldn't get us stopped we only had one democrat vote against it i couldn't even get thr if i'd had three democrats vote against it we could have stopped the bill couldn't get three i mean i just it's frustrating but see i've got connections a lot of people don't have those connections but our problem is we're seeing national news when we should be looking at what's going on locally and let me give you examples of how we should look at what's going on locally let me take you back to the american war for independence if you look at the american war for independence the first four battles in american warfare independence on the top right you have lexington top left is two three hours later the north bridge at concord the bottom left is the road to boston battle about a six-hour running battle and then the bottom right is is uh bunker hill let me explain what happened here these first four battles nobody contacted george washington the national commander-in-chief said george we got 700 british coming to town we need help quick get the troops here now nobody did that the reason they did not do that was every one of them said it's our community we'll take care of our community george you've got bigger things to do we'll take the community now you'll find that out of the 80 or so battles we have in the american revolution nearly all of them were handled at the local level we needed george a number of times we had him at the battle of yorktown we had the battle of monmouth and battle brandywine but even those battles it was local people who turned out and provided most of the troops under georgia's leadership so you look at these and let's kind of go through them for a minute you take that first one there the battle of lexington this happened early in the morning april the 19th 1775 when 700 british came to to lexington and at that point 70 townsmen from lexington went out and said no we're going to withstand you now that's what we're told but that's not actually accurate what happened was it was not 70 townsmen it was 70 people 70 men out of the church of the reverend jonas clark the reverend jonas clark told his church go defend the town we can't let this happen so he said now guys i've been teaching you about what the bible says about war offensive war is not biblical you cannot start anything now a defensive war is biblical if they shoot at you you have the right of self-defense but you cannot do anything so when the 70 men got out there deacon john parker said now remember what pastor has been telling us and so don't fire unless fired upon but if they mean to have a war let it begin here we're not going to back up we're going to stand here so you got 70 guys lining up blocking the way 700 british troops and they get the first shot and that's why 18 americans hit the ground that morning because they got the first shot and we didn't get the shoot back so well we got to shoot back but at that point we were already laying on the ground it was pretty rough and that morning we had a number of black patriots and black patriots and white preachers wounded we had black patriots like princess brook white patriots like john robbins shot down that morning they all went to church together this is their community this is their town they went out to to stop the british from doing bad stuff well the british go through lexington they get next to the second battle which is the battle of north bridge of concord about three hours later as they come to north bridge the word is out the british have shot at us so now it's a war of self-defense we have the right to shoot back we didn't start anything when they get there there's 300 men from election from concord that go out to meet the brit and that's not true either we hear that it was 300 men from the church of reverend william emerson william emerson's church went out there he said guys we're not letting them harm the town we're going to defend our town and so they went out there and did that and that's where the first british hit the ground so now we're getting to shoot back so the british at the ground the bridge said this is not a good deal we had 70 americans that we faced here later we're facing 300 we better get back to boston quick and get reinforcements or we're going to be badly outnumbered so they go on the march back to boston and that is the third battle their third battle is a 19 mile running battle back to boston over about six hours and while they had 70 the first battle they had 300 second battle this time they had 4 500 americans out all along the road on both sides where'd those guys come from well reverend payson phillips grabbed his church and said guys got to go defend the area the british are trying to take over you had reverend benjamin ball take his shirt see we don't get the image of what happened back then this is why john adams pointed to pastors and said this this is what made america different from all the nations we had had biblical teaching biblical thinking in every area and we knew that we had to fight our battles at the local level and you defend town by town so what happens is we won the american war for end by the way the final battle is bunker hill same thing reverend joseph willard grabbed companies out of his church went across town by the way that he wrote that battle was peter salem 13 white officers that day said none of us would be alive if it hadn't been for peter he's the one who saved us all and for generations he was the hero in the textbooks and we had pictures of him we actually own documents from from peter salem great guy except we don't ever teach him anymore today so what happens is when you look at the battle we won the american war for independence because we won so many local battles we won the national battle it wasn't that we won national battles it's wherever the battle popped up locally we want it locally now we're praying for revival and if we want revival we've got to have the same type of local focus revivals occur locally what do you mean they occur locally we had the national great awakenings yes we did have the national great awakenings we had people like george whitfield he's a big name in the great awakenings if you look at george whitfield george whitfield preached 34 years in the first great awakening he actually preached 18 000 sermons here in america another 14 000 sermons in great britain he preached in 34 years about 32 000 sermons that's three that's about a thousand sermons a year or three sermons a day the dude was amazing and on top of that 80 of all americans physically heard him preach a sermon now you talk about market penetration there you got it eighty percent physically heard it and in the day when you had no telecommunications how'd that happen it's because he was in that many communities you see he got on horseback and run from maine to georgia back to maine seven times on horseback 34 years riding back and forth he stopped in every community he could find what happened was the great awakening was a whole bunch of local revivals he stopped in this town of 500 they had a revival stopped in philadelphia 12 000 they had a revival stopped over here in westchester 1500 they had a revival stop from this town 725 that that that many towns is how many towns he was in and having revivals in all those towns that's why it looks like a national revival it was local revivals that spread into a national revival so this is why today we don't talk about these three guys because we've got this concept of national you see the first guy samuel cooper is the guy mentioned by john adams he was the guy who kept the revival going in boston boston is where he pastored and that's what kept the revival going you take gilbert tennant he was the guy in philadelphia he kept the revival going whitfield's long gone he keeps the revival going and then you've got samuel davies he's in the rural areas of virginia keeps the revival going this is why the revival was a national revival because the local revivals kept going whitfield comes to town and preached but then you got to keep the fire going after whitfield leaves and these are the guys that did it and these are the guys we rarely talk about today so national revivals occur locally we're praying for revival it's a good thing to pray for but when we do stop looking nationally start looking locally so the obsession with the national focus has to be replaced with local focus let me give you a practical application of that when it comes to things like voting you take something like voting and we hear a lot about this every election cycle well this is not an election cycle so i'm going to talk about it now maybe it'll make an impact because when you look at what it takes to vote in the united states all you have to do to be a voter is you have to be 18 years old and a legal citizen 100 of all people who are 18 years old in legal citizens are eligible to be voters only thing we ask you to do is please register to vote and that way we can make sure that somebody didn't vote seven times in your name or whatever it was and registering to vote very simple thing fill out a piece of paper right now only 65.3 percent of americans are ready to vote so what we have done at this point is we've taken about 120 million americans who said i don't care what happens in the country i'm not going to be part of them i refuse to be salt and light in any way shape they can't even vote in an election because they're not registered to vote now when you take it and look at the national stats let's go down to the election we had last year it's called a presidential election in a presidential election if you look at the stats that have happened in the last 11 presidential elections the average voter turnout is right at 54 percent but that's 54 percent not of 100 that's 54 percent of registered voters which is 54 percent of 65 percent so only 67 percent registered 54 of those folks voted so what we're looking at is out of that 54 percent only 36 percent of adults actually vote it takes half of that to win the election so you win the election presidential election with only 18 percent of adults choosing the president united states next year we're going to have an off-year election in that off-year election we will have on average the last 21 off-year elections this is when we choose governors and congressmen and senators on average in the last 21 off-year elections 38 percent of registered people vote so that's 38 of 65 percent which puts us right at 26 which means it takes half of that to win which is only 13 so if you look at the numbers what we're talking about is for the last 11 presidential elections one out of five americans chooses the president and in the last 21 congressional and governor elections it is one out of eight that chooses our governors and centers this is not very high and when you get into local races it's even lower the average turnout in the local race is about six percent but that's six percent of 65 percent which means about four percent of adults vote in the local elections it takes half of that to win that's about two percent that you're looking at give an example that if you go to your near neighbor los angeles government the the mayor there garcetti now los angeles by the way size of los angeles is such that in los angeles los angeles city population is larger than the individual population of 23 separate states so garcetti is essentially the governor in 23 states if it were not los angeles he'd be governor in 23 states and garcetti brags about the fact that he was elected with a total of 2.9 percent of the vote that's that's a big position 2.9 yep that's what local elections are let me take you past that let me take you to another big city houston houston out of texas where i live in houston it is the equivalent of being governor in 20 states it's another one of those really large cities so a niece may anise parker was elected mayor there with 4.9 percent of the vote that's 4.9 percent of 65 percent about 3.3 percent of the vote she's the first open lesbian mayor in houston now when she was elected mayor she says you know i hear people saying that marriage is between a man and woman and i think that's really wrong that's a hate crime you're attacking me when you say that no we've been saying that before you were ever born we've been saying that for generations that's not an attack on you that's just a simple recitation of biblical principles biblical truth so what happened was she took it personal and she passed what was called hero now heroes stands for houston equal rights ordinance that houston equal rights ordinance ero equal rights ordinance or era equal rights amendment there's about 200 major cities that have passed that and so what she did was she said in houston anyone who says that marriage between a man and woman that is a hate crime you're attacking me and i will prosecute you for it now san antonio is another city who has one of those 1 200 large cities as eros or eras in san antonio if you say that marriage is between a man and woman that is a classy misdemeanor you're fined five hundred dollars a day you're not allowed ever to run for office in san antonio and you can't even do business with the city you can't be a paving contractor you can't be a landscaper you can so that that's a hate crime so what she said was this is a hate crime and she said i'm checking pastors and so she's particularly targeting six pastors who had preached traditional sermons and she said you guys you're guilty of hate crimes i'm subpoenaing everything in your communication 16 forms of communication i want to see all your social media i want to see all your sermons all your notes all your everything and if you've said that marriage between a man and a woman you're in trouble well in houston people said whoa time out this wasn't what we thought was going to happen with this this mayor and so what happened is we were involved in helping 4 500 churches get involved 4 500 churches got involved and said let's put this on the ballot and have a referendum on this let's see what the city really feels about this the day before the election washington i mean the houston chronicle houston post will forget which one did a survey did a poll and said hey the the mayor is going to win by 60 40 margin this this provision is going to be upheld it's going to this landslide well as it turned out on election day not three percent showed up special election it was 14 and we won the initiative by 22 margin we wanted 61 to 39 and so completely crushed that movement and i would say 14 that's a pathetic turnout yeah it is but it's five times higher than what they normally had and that turned the whole thing around they have not brought that amendment up in the last 10 years because of that because they got crushed on it so that goes and that's a local election 14 is not that much take you to what happened in fort worth texas this is my my near neighbor this is in my backyard fort worth texas six years ago fort worth independent school district said hey we've decided we're not going to have genders in the bathroom so boys and girls can choose any bathroom they want we're not going to have genders in the locker room and we're also not going to have genders in the shower room so you can just choose any you want you can go whichever one so boys and girls choose whatever you are and and well what happened was in fort worth did this out of texas considered a conservative state when fort worth did this arne duncan who was the secretary of education under president obama said this is a great idea he said here's the new policy from the federal government if your public school gets any tax dollars at all you're not going to have gender bathrooms and general locker rooms gender gender showers kids choose what they want and so this thing went national now i have to tell you this is pretty disgusting for me as a texan because we call for what we call it cal town usa that's the name of it cow town usa because it is a cow town this is where cattle drives went we still have the stockyards there i'm a cowboy let me tell you anybody who lives in the country can tell the gender of the critters that we have in our in our barn europe and i've never seen a bull become a cow and i've never seen a cow become bull they are the genders they are and it's pretty easy and somehow out of cow town usa we're saying choose your gender are you kidding me so i looked at the city and the city has 800 000 voters in the city so the 800 000 voters that we have in the city in that election the school board president who came up with this brainy idea and got it passed the school board president was elected with less than 1200 votes i think it was 1182 votes this is what became a national policy with less than 1200 votes and so i started looking i looked in the district where he was elected and i quickly found an evangelical church that evangelical church has more than three whoops that evangelical church has more than 3 000 bible-believing adults that one church could have kept him from being on the school board which is to save the whole nation from the nonsense it's gone through in the last six years on gender identity stuff came out of of one school district in four in fort worth give you two more examples if i take you to bentonville arkansas bentonville arkansas is in the northeast corner of arkansas it's a home of walmart walmart forty thousand people live in town there was a christian lady in town and said you ain't doing this in our town i'm running for school board she ran for pool poor she got elected and a town of 40 000 people she received a total of 35 votes and that won the election with 35 votes let me take you to riceville iowa riceville iowa the northern part of the state there was a farmer there who said you sure ain't doing this in our town and so he ran for school board and it turned out that on election day he got busy with what was going on on the farm and didn't go vote and don't jump to the conclusion that he lost by one vote because that isn't the case the case is that nobody at all voted in that election if he had voted for himself he would be on the school board see this is where the local stuff is and this is what we don't pay much attention to most people cannot name the people on their local school board or their city council or their water utility district or the junior college board or anything else we can tell you who the president is and we tell you who the speaker of the house is and the leader of the senate we can tell you all the national stuff but that's not what we change we change the local stuff and that's what we don't know and that local focus is where we have to get focused so in doing this why would we why would we engage in civil government well benjamin rush he's got a good answer to that remember he's one of the three most notable founding fathers by the way he started the first sunday school movement in america he started the first bible society in america he said evangelical founding father he started the first abolition movement in america but he's considered the top educator in early america he started five universities he's the first one to start academic education for women he's the first one to train black co-patriots for for medicine i mean just unbelievable what he did he wrote a piece in 1790 that dealt with public schools because he is called the father of public schools under the constitution he said we used to be 13 nations now we're one nation 13 states but what are we going to have to teach in our schools if we're going to remain a nation and so he came out with this piece in 1790 and he said here's the purpose of public education he said the purpose of public education is three-fold public education is first to teach students to love and serve god that's the first thing the second is to teach students to love and serve their country and third to love and serve their family now notice the order please god country family i think most christians today would object to that and say no it should be god family country your family is more important than your country he said no it should be god country and family why he explained that if you ever lose control of your country it will become the great enemy of your family so you stay involved with your country to keep a climate where your family can prosper and that's what we're seeing across the nation with education right now we're not doing math and science and reading we're doing all sorts of indoctrination and social issues and so you see all the things that attack our faith and attack and yes i am in the christian education i was a christian school principal started christian school but i also know that's only 12 of the student population 88 of the population is coming through those schools and that's enough to out vote my christians quite frankly and they'll be the ones that are becoming the governors and everything else unless we can do something to fix that system as well so i'm not focused strictly on my christian education system although that's what we had our kids and all and our grandkids and everything else i've got to have everybody else knowing the history of america otherwise they'll tear me up and and eat my family as they go along i mean you just can't have that that's why we're engaged in all these areas that's what benjamin rush pointed out and that's why right now across the nation school boards are the focus i've run all sorts of races from dog catcher up to being on presidential teams running presidential races and it's interesting right now i'm engaged in one state where we're running 170 school board elections that's more school board elections in one cycle than i've seen in the last 30 years put together of my experience i've never seen people taking to the locals right now like i'm seeing across the nation i think that's a good indication the revival of some kind is going on because we're getting engaged in our own communities again you'll see some things turn so finishing this out two more things i want to share with you one is okay if if we want to go after this how do you get good candidates to vote for because a lot of times we look at the balance the decision between the bad and the worse this is something the bible addresses if i can take you back into the book of judges in the book of judges chapter 9 there is the parable of what's called the parable of the trees of the field and what happens is all the trees of the field get together and they said hey we need civil government let's let's have a leader and like select someone to be our leader and so as we see in the passage it says the trees went out to anoint a king over them and they said we need a civil leader so they went first to the olive tree and they said the olive tree hey come down and reign over us and the olive tree said nah i don't think i'm going to do that olive tree said should i leave my fatness wherewith by me they honor both god and man to be promoted over the tree no i'm not going to do that i've got other stuff i need to be doing they said well if we can't get the the olive tree to do it let's go to the fig tree so they went next to the fig tree and said come down rain over us and the fig tree said no not my gig i'm not doing that and the fig tree said should i give up my my sweetness and my good fruit and go people over the trees they said well if we can't get the olive tree or the fig tree let's go for the vine and they went to the vine and said come down and reign over she'd be a great leader and the vine said nope not gonna be me i won't do it so shall i leave my wine with cheers both god and man and go be promoted over the trees so notice what they've done they've gone to all the good trees and the forest and said you need to be involved in civil leadership and they all had reasons why they shouldn't be involved so what's the rest of the story next the trees of the field went out and the trees said to the bramble now you can hear what's coming next this is not a good direction they said to the bramble hey why don't you come rain overs and the bramble said i would love to be your civil ruler and so the bramble said to them if you anoint me king over you then come and put your trust in my shadow now my question is how much fun is it to sit in the shadow of a thorn bush not just a heck of a lot of fun and this is what we're doing today we have way too many thorn bushes that are really in america we have too many thorn bushes ruling at local level at state level at federal level we've got too many thorn but so how do you avoid having thorn bushes rule well this is where the bible also gives guidance if you go to exodus 18 21 in exodus 18 21 moses was trying to rule the entire nation 3 million people in israel and deciding every decision his father-in-law jethro comes along says you got to be crazy. he said why don't you do something different this is the recommendation jethro gave to moses he told moses come on now if i can get it going here he told moses provide out of all the people able men such as fear god men of truth hating covenants and place such over them be rulers of thousands of hundreds rulers and fifties and rulers of tents moses you need local county state and federal people and the people you need to put in office are people that able men such as fear god men of truth hating covenants moses said that's a good idea you'll find that moses repeats this not only exodus 18 but you find it repeated also in deuteronomy 1 and deuteronomy 15 and 16. and in that moses says okay i'll provide out and so it's interesting if you ask the question who's supposed to do the providing out of all this who is the one who provides out the answer in this case was it was moses moses said that what he did was he went out among the people and he recruited those that were able men that feared god men of truth hating comes us and he said i brought these people unto you and let you choose from among the ones i recruited so they had elections but moses did a great job of recruiting the best people and so they had elections it's interesting that the spiritual people were the ones who went out and recruited the good trees in the field and said hey you need to be civil leaders i can't guarantee you'll win but you need to be on the ballot and we'll see what the people choose and that's what moses did he became a recruiter it's interesting that when you look at the next leader over israel actually generations later when you look when saul became king who chose saul king it was the prophet samuel because god spoke to him spoke in his heart and said this is the guy that needs to be your ruler see it wasn't the people with secular thinking that said archer ruler it was a spiritual leader who could discern the hearts and could hear from god and say hey this is what we need you find the same thing with david remember samuel is the one who anointed david and samuel said frankly i thought it was going to be jonah doubt because he looks like a king this guy's got freckles on his face i never thought it'd be him but again god made it really clear he's the guy who needs to be and so it's a spiritual leadership those who have spiritual discernment they're capable of saying you know i've watched you in the church for years you've been a great deacon you're really good at tithing you've taken care of your children you've done everything in first timothy and titus on what it says to be a leader in church and you'd be a great civil leader as well we've got a spot that you need to be on on city council and you see we need to be recruiting the good people and get them out there and we need to let people know that going for office is actually an honorable thing god created the institution of civil government just like he created family in the church so the the the notion we've had a compartment in our faith we can't do uh the final thing i'll close with here is from charles finney uh charles finney is a great awakening his second great awakening charles finney it's estimated he led a hundred thousand people to christ in just one year and charles when he actually wrote a book over half over how to have revivals it's revival system science just like second chronicles 7 14 if my people would you call my name my name will do this then i'll do this he said that's how revivals work if you want a revival you need to be doing this stuff over here so he looked at all the things and the scriptures and he said okay god says if you'll do this he'll do this you want god to show up you need to be doing this he said you can create a revival and so that's what he wrote this is one of the lectures he gave lecture number 15. he says the church must take right ground in regard to politics he said politics are part of a religion in a country such as this and christians from through their duty to the country is part of their duty god he closed it this way he said god will bless or curse this nation according the course that christians take in politics now god's put the nation in our hands we're the ones responsible for it and we can't say well i didn't know who the candidates were well if you don't it's your fault because you can find out and if you don't know that they're a good one go recruit one yourself or run for yourself either way we can get good candidates in there and by the way this was revival lecture number 15 which was titled hindrances to revival he said both historically and biblically if you refuse to get involved in the civil arena that will hinder revival so if you're praying for revival refuse to get involved you're going against your own prayers and that's from the biblical and historical standpoint so this is what i want to share with you that we need to rethink we need biblical relevancy every one of us needs to get the word of god and be able to apply to everything that goes on in our life we need a biblical worldview and if this kind of history is new to you i would recommend we have on the back table what's called the american story the american story goes through a lot of this god bless you guys thanks for letting me share