Live from Calvary Chapel San Juan Capistrano, Charlie along with Pastor Rob McCoy and Pastor John Randall share stories of faith, perseverance, and fortitude in troubling times. Charlie offers insight into his personal faith journey and advice for young men looking to find a partner. The trio also discusses the newly reconfirmed importance of President Trump's MAGA movement in keeping this new administration accountable for their actions and applying pressure & engaging in elections to get power back in the hands of people who love this country and truly want what's best for it. All of that and so much more in this extensive Sunday morning conversation on The Charlie Kirk Show. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey everybody, happy Saturday.
This episode is brought to you advertiser-free by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
What does that mean when you support us?
Well, that means our team who's here right now running the cameras, editing, researching, fact-checking, diving into documents, they're able to do what they do.
We are able to do what we do.
And we try to make all the episodes on the weekends advertiser-free so you are able to have an uninterrupted programming because you support us and you allow us to do that.
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We're not going to do advertisers on the weekend.
That's charliekirk.com slash support.
We are so blessed by all of you that do that.
And so please consider supporting us this weekend, charliekirk.com slash support.
This episode is a conversation I had with my pastor, Pastor Rob McCoy, and Pastor John Randall from Calvary Chapel, San Juan, Capistrano, or is it Capistrano?
Whatever it is.
It's a fun place.
Great guy.
We talk about Christianity.
We talk about politics.
We talk about Joe Biden.
We talk about depression.
We talk about even a little bit of my life story and so much more.
This episode is very important.
And again, thank you for supporting us at CharlieKirk.com slash support.
John Randall, Rob McCoy, answers to your questions.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
And here we are.
So thank you guys.
Thank you guys for being here, both of you.
And Charlie, thanks for taking time to be here with us.
And I want to start out because I thought what we could do is I want to begin the discussion speaking on a personal level.
And, you know, Charlie, I want to get a little bit of background about you personally.
I mean, I've heard so much about you from my kids.
In fact, I was asking questions and they were answering.
I was like, don't tell me.
I want to ask Charlie that question about himself.
But I guess one of my questions was, where did you grow up and who was it that instilled this passion in you to do the work that you do?
Because it's really a blessing.
Well, thank you.
First of all, it's awesome to be here in person with all of you.
It's just such a blessing.
It's awesome.
And you have a phenomenal pastor here who is really leading you guys wonderfully.
And I can tell you that is something that you're not finding a lot right now.
You're seeing some pastors that are not doing things that I think they should be doing, not opening their churches.
This is a great, great pastor.
So I'm honored to be here tonight.
It's such a blessing.
So I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, was saved right around when I was in fifth or sixth grade.
I said the words, but I didn't really quite understand what it meant.
But saying the words actually wasn't meaningless because that was kind of a very specific pivot point in my life.
And then as I grew older, the words started to mean a lot more when you start to realize the suffering that you kind of have to endure, the difficulty you have to go through in life.
And the harder you try, the more you're actually going to slip up and fall in what grace actually means.
And so, you know, I speak on college campuses quite often, really haven't the last nine months for obvious reasons.
And I get asked about all sorts of different things.
Obviously, we lead with the political side and the philosophical side, but people ask me all the time about kind of religion and why I believe what I believe.
And, you know, what is exactly what Christians just like, Christianity is just like every other religion is what I get from a lot of people.
And I'm sure there's some people here tonight or might be watching on the live stream or outside that might not yet be saved.
And so it's just, there's a real simple way that I'm able to distill the gospel.
I didn't come up with this.
I heard a pastor say this like 10 years ago, and I never forgot it.
And so, whoever that guy is, thank you.
I'd love to meet this guy.
But it's the gospel in four words, three words, two words, one word.
In four words, the gospel is Jesus took my place.
Three words is him for me.
Two words is substitutionary atonement.
And one word is grace.
And grace is, you should approach.
And grace is a word we throw around a lot, but there's a really easy way to explain grace.
There's justice, mercy, and grace.
And so justice is you get exactly what you deserve.
So you sin, you slip up and fall.
You're going to pay a punishment for that.
Mercy is you get a little bit of an alleviated sentence.
Grace is you screw up and someone serves that prison sentence for you.
That's what grace is: is that you get something you don't deserve.
You get something that you're not worthy of.
And so that means more and more to me as I grow older.
And it has been an amazing journey, you know, being able to do this.
It's been a phenomenal blessing in my life.
Turning point USA has just grown beyond our wildest expectations.
We've now been doing podcast radio for just about a year and a half.
And that has just been a phenomenal venture for us.
We're now on about 200 radio stations across the country.
Our podcast is ranking amongst the top out there.
And so, you know, we're doing everything we possibly can to spread the good news and spread truth.
And a couple years ago, I met Pastor Rob McCoy, who's my pastor.
We did three services this morning in Thousand Oaks, which was awesome.
And then we came down here to all you guys.
We did three services.
Yeah, well, I had a lot to say.
Go figure.
And we're, you know, I told John, we'll go overtime if you guys want.
Like, I got a lot.
We got a lot to say tonight.
So, see, there you go.
But it's a three-day weekend, so we're good, Charlie.
Yeah.
And so this is a defining moment for our country and our time.
And, you know, for a lot of young people out there that are looking, you know, for what do I want to do next in life?
And what do I, you know, where do I go from here?
You know, my story is one where I found something that I had a little bit of a talent in and a passion in.
I just went and did it.
Never went to college.
Probably won't one day.
So I'm on my ninth gap year now.
So, so, but it's been an unbelievable blessing.
And our story, I wish I could take credit for, but it's just been all of God's favor.
Oh, man, Charlie, that's so powerful.
How many of you listen to the podcast?
I just want to see.
Wow.
Okay, there you go.
Fantastic.
Hey, something else, which is pretty exciting.
And this is like, this is another chapter in your story.
And that is congratulations on your recent engagement.
Thank you.
Hey.
Thank you.
Now, when I heard that, I was thinking to myself, man, what kind of, this girl must be strong.
I mean, just as I observe your life and watch what you go through, I think, man, she must just be like awesome.
I want to know what it was about this young lady that you knew that's the girl for me.
And then also, could you let us know how you asked her to be your wife?
Yeah, and so I'm definitely marrying up.
That's a good piece of advice for all men out there.
And no, I mean that.
She runs an unbelievable ministry that's called Proclaim Street, where I saw some people actually wearing the shirts around here.
Really high-quality American, made in America, fabrics and threads.
It's awesome.
She does a Bible and 365 ministry where she walks people through the Bible every single day, sending them different verse.
So you subscribe to that.
You'll be able to read the whole Bible an entire year.
She's a speaker.
She does podcasting.
Not to mention, she already has her master's in Jewish jurisprudence, getting her doctorate.
So I'm way underqualified for this deal here.
And not, but she's also, she's so incredibly loving, but she's also tough.
And she knows what we're going into.
She knows, you know, kind of this partnership that we're forming is going to be one that is going to obviously be under a lot of attacks from the enemy, right?
And she's a gift from God.
I can honestly say that.
So cool.
So how did you propose?
Because I want the, what's the proposal story?
How did you do that?
Yeah, so I did the right thing.
I asked her a couple months ahead of time, kind of how do you want to be proposed to?
Because, well, because I was a recipient of so many of her complaints of other people's proposals, right?
Not complaints, but let's just say critiques, right?
The pictures weren't right.
So I got a list of things that she wanted or didn't want.
She didn't want a lot of people.
She wanted really, really good pictures.
She wanted to be surprised.
So I kind of put all that together.
I said, got it.
Not a lot of people.
Okay, so I surprised her in the midst of a photo shoot.
So good pictures, right?
So that got that done.
And so we have incredibly high quality pictures of the moment and a video of it.
And she didn't want a lot of people.
So it was just us and like two or three other people that she was really close to.
And so, you know, we're super blessed.
You got to ask him how they started dating.
And seriously, this guy is like, he's to the point.
You got to hear that.
How did that start?
No, yeah, it was a lot of fun.
So we actually, one of our people at Turning Point USA, Tyler, originally wanted to hire Erica to come work for us at Turning Point USA, which started as a job interview.
I ended that like five minutes in.
I was like, yeah, that dog's not going to hunt here.
So let's get on to like other business here.
And so I was very direct at the end of the conversation.
And I was like, look, I'm not going to hire you, but I'd like to date you.
No, by the way, I tell young men all the time, be this direct because women now, they're not used to it now because everyone's playing games.
They're doing all this weird social media stuff.
All right.
Okay.
And I felt, but obviously be respectful.
You don't have to be, you know, disrespectful or anything, but just be very, you know, tell, say what you mean and say what you want.
And, you know, it ended up being an amazing, you know, amazing thing.
Yeah, I asked my wife after 19 days to marry me and she said yes.
Amazing.
So anyway.
All right.
Charlie, you've also written a book and it's called the Mega Doctrine.
I believe it's the New York Times bestseller.
Yeah.
And can you tell us about, yeah, it's really exciting.
Can you tell us?
Oh, I see one.
Can you tell us?
I'll design it for you.
Okay.
Awesome.
Can you tell us what the book is about and what inspired you to write it?
Yeah, it's so I want to segue into the obviously the political part of this discussion with that.
So thank you.
I think the book is actually more applicable now than it was when I even wrote it, which was a year ago.
So I wrote it for a variety of different reasons.
It's called the MAGA Doctrine.
It's the only ideas that will win the future.
We were so blessed.
We sold almost 100,000 copies and it was awesome, beyond anything I could have imagined.
And really what bothered me is that the way that Trump's supporters and President Trump was being described at the time was as if there's no philosophical basis for anything he's doing.
It's just all just people that are following him that are less than desirable and he has no idea what he's doing.
I said, there's a lot more to this.
There's an economic anxiety and there's a lot of positives that he wants to put forward for the country.
And I thought he's actually changing the Republican Party for the better and what those ideas actually were.
And so We wrote the book, and it was more quite honestly to make the case in the midst of an election, right?
And now that the election's over, people say, Oh, that book is irrelevant.
Actually, and look, I do want to just get this out of the way.
Rob has this wonderful term called hope and opium, called hopium.
What drives me nuts more than anything else is when someone in a position of authority intentionally misleads you.
And so, I'm going to tell it to you bluntly: Joe Biden's going to get sworn in on Wednesday, okay?
If you're reading something other than that, you're getting misled.
So, we just got to get that out of the way because we had a whole discussion about that earlier today.
So, when Joe Biden gets sworn in as president, the question is: what's going to be the opposition party?
What is that party going to believe in?
And do we want to go back to the Republican Party prior to Donald Trump?
And what was that party?
And that book makes the defense that we shouldn't, that we should actually re-embrace this really exciting new movement that has emerged.
And what is that movement?
Well, first of all, it's a movement that wants to give a voice to people that shower before work and after work.
It wants to give a voice to people that didn't necessarily go to Ivy League schools, to police officers, to firefighters, to military veterans, to carpenters, to welders, to entrepreneurs, to people that might have quote unquote been in flyover country, that were always kind of the pawns of the political elite in both parties.
It's a party that, quite honestly, is a little bit sick and tired of these endless wars while we can't even take care of our own affairs here at home, or we're playing war games in the Middle East without any sort of desire, any sort of specific outcome being able to detail.
It's a party that understands that without a vibrant manufacturing base, you actually don't have a country.
It's a party that actually wants immigration policy to benefit the American people and American citizens, not some weird esoteric bumper sticker from some person in Malibu that has the comfort and the ability to say that we should just open up our country to every single person always, regardless.
Why they live behind the house of games?
Yeah, precisely.
And so, but more than anything else, it's a movement and a party now that the president will be exiting office.
Hopefully, that will be able to keep and moving forward is that listens to the people and listens to their concerns and their anxieties.
And one of the reasons why President Trump was able to get elected in the first place is that you had multiple decades of people that had valid concerns that were completely and totally ignored and silenced.
Like, shut up person in Ohio, it doesn't matter your factory is closed.
Like, shut up person in Maine, it doesn't matter your kid is overdosing on meth.
You know, shut up person in El Paso, Texas, doesn't matter if the border remains wide open and children are getting sex trafficked across the border.
Like, you don't matter.
All that matters is corporate tax cuts.
And President Trump, in his very unique style, came onto the political scene and really highlighted three big issues that the Republican Party never wanted to talk about, which is immigration, trade, and corporate skepticism.
And those three things I think are very, very healthy, especially right now.
And so that's really what the book is about.
And it's more important than ever because this, the kind of the argument over the Republican Party is already beginning.
Like, what kind of party are we going to be?
Who are we going to be?
I want to be a party where President Donald Trump gets called all these awful things.
He, as a Republican, won more of the black and the Latino vote of any Republican running for office since 1960.
That's amazing.
And that's something that we as the Republican Party should learn from.
Like, how did we do that?
And so he was the first candidate as a Republican since Reagan to win these traditionally Democrat areas where people predominantly worked with their hands, where people were in the manufacturing, the trades.
And so that's something that I think is really, really important.
And also, I want to say this as well: President Donald Trump was the most pro-life president in American history, and he deserves a lot of credit for that.
And I have a whole part in my book about this where, albeit at times, it can be very confusing for certain people that haven't really understood it and studied it in the Christian world saying, how could a three-times married, twice-divorced guy who used to donate to planned parent to be so pro-life?
It's like, well, maybe God was working really significantly in his life where he was courageously pro-life.
First president ever speak at the March for Life.
And so the kind of party in the movement I want to be in is a party that is unapologetically pro-life, that believes the church is essential, that wants to protect the dignity of the American worker, that wants to end these senseless foreign wars, that actually wants to challenge big tech with their crackdown on free speech in this country.
That's the type of party that we want.
That's good.
Good stuff.
We'll come back to more of that in a minute, but I'd like to, for a moment, kind of discuss, if we may, gentlemen, the subject of the pandemic.
And I just want to talk a little bit about that.
Of course, we've had people, maybe you have, people who have been hospitalized.
We've had people who have lost loved ones who either died from COVID or died with it.
And so many have been affected by this.
And I'm just curious what your perspective is, Charlie, on this pandemic, obviously, how it's affected our country and why this has become so polarizing, so political in the days that we've been living the last eight, nine months.
I also want Rob to comment on this because he's been keeping his church open and has dealt with a lot of this.
Look, it's a real virus with real life consequences.
I've lost friends with it.
And I don't think anyone should say it's not real or anything.
However, let's talk about the facts of what we're dealing with, who's actually at risk, and what is the cost of any measure to try to mitigate that risk, which is what a mature society and a civilization should be doing.
Where as soon as after two weeks to slow the spread, which we're still doing, I guess, right?
We're still in this two weeks to slow the spread nonsense, where we should have asked ourselves the question: okay, now we know how it works and operates.
How much individual liberty and multi-decades of economic progress are we willing to throw away?
And what can we actually prove the lives we're going to be saved through the lockdowns?
And a mature society would have weighed those costs and benefits and would have said very simply and clearly that if you're over the age of 65, you should take this unbelievably seriously.
And maybe you should stay at home.
You make your own decisions.
That's the whole idea of liberty with responsibility.
But especially if you're under the age of 25 and schools should never have been closed anywhere.
That is just, it is an absolute moral outrage.
And so then the question is: well, what about 30 to 50?
That's where nuances start to come in.
You understand?
The mark of a mature civilization is the capacity to communicate nuances to its people.
Well, maybe some people have preexisting conditions.
Maybe some people are willing to encounter the risk because they want to live freely.
That's part of what a free society is all about.
We decided to do the opposite.
We tried to kill a mouse with a Tomahawk missile.
And the cost to our society Because of the lockdowns, not just the virus, will take decades, if ever, to be able to untangle from suicide, mental health, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, job displacement, business closures, all of it.
And not to mention the cost that it did on just the psychological, sociological, and even spiritual health of so many people.
And so, one of the reasons why it became so divided, unnecessarily, is because you saw a lot of governors, like the governor you have in this state, that quite honestly awful that never followed the science.
He followed the scientists that he liked.
And Rob was fighting up against it so much.
Rob, do you want to?
Yeah, Rob, I'd like to ask that because that's a very good question that segues into something I was wondering.
As you look at the different governors, as you pointed out, our governor and all that he's done, or I should say hasn't done.
I don't know what he's doing, but you would assume that those who ran for office and got in genuinely cared and were concerned about their citizens.
But this is what I'm struggling with.
What is the benefit of closing it down and crippling your economy in a state like ours?
Like, do you think you're keeping people safe?
Rob, why keep everything shut?
Why all this?
So I was a city councilman in the city of Thousand Oaks April 3rd.
And I had been the mayor when we'd had a shooting, the borderline shooting.
12 of our young people were killed by gunmen.
Two of them were from my congregation.
I buried them both.
I love my city.
And I was the mayor when we buried them and dedicated the park the year later.
So I love my city.
I don't want any harm to come to my city.
I ran for that office.
On April 3rd, I resigned.
And the reason why I resigned is because April 4th was Palm Sunday.
It was our holy week.
Our sacrament in the church is communion, first Sunday of the month.
The governor said the church was non-essential.
We couldn't be open, even if we followed CDC standards.
Because at the time, we didn't know the severity of the virus.
Costco, abortion clinics, cannabis distributors, but not the church.
So I resigned from my seat because I knew I'd be censured.
And I opened the church on the 4th and we did communion where our sanctuary holds 400.
I had 10 seats.
Good.
Good.
So it took us three and a half hours to do communion with 10 chairs.
And the press came out like we were killing everybody.
But they, to their credit, they saw that we were cleaner than any Costco or Trader Joe's.
But as we went along, we got the data.
Our county, for example, we have 856,000 people.
We've done over 800,000 tests.
And of the entirety of the population today, we've had 412 deaths.
That's four one-hundredths of 1%.
So the death rate is 4100s of 1%.
And yet, we have adversely affected 100% of our community.
65% of our restaurants in Ventura County will never reopen.
We've quarantined the abused with the abusers.
We've shuttered our schools.
And in the history of the United States, a 12-month period, the largest number of opioid deaths in our nation's history.
And then we get this from them that we don't love our neighbor.
And the judge, when I had to sit before him when we violated the restraining order, he said, you need to look at the second greatest commandment: love your neighbor as you love yourself.
And I said, that's great.
Thanks, Judge.
And what book of the Bible is that in, Judge?
Could you tell me what?
But my point to him, and I said it in the court, is I said, we do love our neighbors.
And it's coming at great cost.
We're being fined by a tyrannical government every Sunday that we're open.
And it's immunity by community.
And at that point, we hadn't had a single case, let alone a death in our church.
Now, folks have gotten COVID.
They got it here, there.
We had one death.
It's a person who never attended, hasn't attended our church in over two years, but they're a congregant.
I went and visited them.
So we've gone through the pain.
And I'm not dismissing the 412 tragic deaths.
But what I am focusing on towards my neighbors is the fact that we have devastated Californians with this tyrannical stupidity that is unacceptable.
And we really have to govern better.
That's right.
You know, Charlie, we were talking about how up in San Jose we were dialoguing about what's going on up there at Calvary San Jose and what they're experiencing.
Yeah, and I just want to add on to Rob's point.
That's 412 deaths under a lockdown, right?
And so the virus still spread in the midst of a lockdown.
And so what the public health officials never were able to clearly communicate, because they've never been grilled correctly, because you have a one-party rule in this state, is what does success look like?
Give us exactly what you believe a lockdown will achieve.
And then also tell us the costs: suicide, overdose, addiction, alcoholism, abuse, weigh them against each other, and then we'll have a better informed decision.
Instead, it's we must lock down at all costs.
And just so we in America are so unbelievably blessed, we will get out of this because of our incredible amount of ingenuity, entrepreneurship, wealth, and all this.
Just so everyone knows, hundreds of millions of people across the world have re-entered absolute dire poverty and starvation and famine because we shut down, not because they shut down.
Why?
All the supply chains got screwed up, all of it.
And they were dependent on the Western world being open.
You want to look after the least of these?
Go explain that to people in Honduras and Nicaragua and El Salvador and all across Africa that are now going back into 1940s-style poverty that took decades to break them out of because you shut off the Western supply chain.
I can't think of anything more immoral than that.
You know, I question on this too, because obviously, for some of you believers attend church and so forth, you know, Rob, this comes up, and maybe Charlie can weigh on this too.
You know, you heard a lot about the Romans 13.
Hey, you guys are, and so the church being attacked by the church, which I found difficult.
I thought we were on the same team, but we couldn't disagree agreeably.
But that came up, and you're not loving your neighbor, and also you are violating Romans 13.
You want to put that in context for us so we understand, you guys, exactly what that means.
Maybe you've heard that.
Anyone heard that argument?
Anybody?
Okay, all right.
You've heard it too.
All right, Rob?
Yeah, I get that across the country.
So Romans 13 says that you're to submit to all positions of authority.
They're appointed by God.
And I'm in full agreement with that understanding of it.
And I agree with my brothers who bring it up.
And I say to them, we're in agreement.
The only problem is you're ignorant of the government in which you live and you don't know who the authority is in Romans 13 because the first three words of the preamble of the Constitution defines that authority as we the people.
And in this form of government, which is unlike any in this 6,000 years of recorded history, where it's bottom up and the authority is given to the people, and those who govern govern by our consent.
They govern by our consent.
And it says in our birth certificate that if they violate that, it's our right and our duty to push back.
And they're constrained by the seven articles of the U.S. Constitution that they swore to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So when the governor says to me that the church isn't essential, he's in violation of the First Amendment.
And I have to stand and push back.
And he's governing by our consent, and I don't consent.
Now, give me what I'll face, but I will take you on because I do love my neighbor.
I love liberty.
And I am not in violations of Romans 13.
The folks that are not pushing back to tyranny are in violation of Romans 13.
There you go.
You know, it's good.
This is helpful.
You know, Charlie, I want to ask you this question.
Um, why do you suppose that people say, and I get this from time to time, even having, you know, you hear tonight, there's those out there that say, hey, Christians shouldn't talk about politics, and especially pastors should never have an opinion or be involved.
Don't you know the separation in the church and state?
What are you doing, Pastor John?
Charlie's coming to you.
Why are you?
Can you just please help these people understand what's going on?
First of all, yeah, yeah, let's help unpack that.
And thank you.
You know, what's amazing is these pastors never say this to me.
It's always about me and behind my back.
I'm like, what are you guys so afraid of?
So, yeah, first of all, separation of church and state is not in the U.S. Constitution.
It's in a singular letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Convention.
However, let's just take that premise.
I want to keep the state out of the church.
Like, let's just start there.
Like, let's take your flawed premise.
That's why we're here tonight, so that Newsom doesn't come into the church.
Like, that's part of why we're here.
So, they can't even defend their own faulty premise.
The second is this: it takes, it is hard to be, it's hard to be a Bible-believing Christian and actually believe that statement.
Esther, Mordecai, Daniel, Jeremiah, Joseph, as just that list is just the beginning of people that went after to influence secular government for God's purpose, all throughout the Old Testament.
It is a story repeating of people trying to be the counselor to the king to influence secular government for God's purpose.
And those people are viewed as heroes in the biblical narrative time and time again.
So, we're called to do this.
Not to mention, one of the most famous verses that I think is sometimes misunderstood from a scriptural standpoint is when Jesus Christ goes up to Caesarea Philippi and he says, On this rock, build mine.
And people say, Church, right?
Well, it's a little more actually complicated than that.
That's the filler word we use.
However, Tyndale, when he was translating the Bible, which ended up getting him killed, actually, it was hung and then burned.
Yep, for just translating the Bible, late 1500s, early 1600s.
It's actually led to the King James Version of the Bible, 1613, 1617, right around there.
He was translating the Bible, which was an act of rebellion against the Catholic hierarchy at the time, where he said, I'm going to go back to the Koine Greek, and I'm going to translate it to English, and I'm going to not translate it from Latin to English.
Understand, he was going back to the original texts, right?
Which, because he wanted to skip the middle step.
And this was a big no-no, especially at this verse.
This verse was the breaking point, right?
Because if all of a sudden this verse said something other than hierarchical structure located in Rome with a papal authority, that all of a sudden a lot of that whole governmental structure gets questioned.
So this was a no-fly zone for the rulers of the time, but he did it anyway.
And English was the language of the peasants.
I hope everyone understands that.
English came from Old English, which was kind of a kind of a weird mixture of Germanic tradition and kind of Highlander kind of tribal speak.
And English went to Old English to English, but English was not a sophisticated language.
In the 1500s, 1600s, it was spoken by our people, right?
It was a bunch of Scots up in and so Tyndale went to translate.
So, anyway, he goes to the original text, and Jesus Christ said, On this rock, build my ecclesia.
And it didn't say church.
Now, church can be a filler word for that.
It can be, but it's actually not a complete and total, it's not a comprehensive, it's not a comprehensive view of that.
So, what was an ecclesia?
An ecclesia is what you're doing tonight.
An ecclesia was an actual thing that took place in ancient Greece, which was basically a local government meeting when people met and fasted beforehand about local events, local affairs, how to improve their community with two desired objectives.
And it's the Greek word for isonomia and eleutheria, which means freedom and equality.
Freedom and equality.
I wonder what country has those two things built into the charter documents.
So Jesus, as written very clearly, didn't use the term synagogue, didn't use any sort of secular terms.
He used the secular term ecclesia, which I believe and Rob believes that just goes to show that Jesus wanted comprehensive Christianity, not compartmentalized Christianity.
And so here's the other question I have, and I push back against pastors that say this, and I mean this as lovingly as I can.
They're so unbelievably wrong about this.
And I will talk to any of them about it because I want them to, okay, so tell me what else we're not supposed to be involved in as Christians.
So are we not supposed to be involved in sports?
How about marriage?
How about business?
How about financial counseling?
I want to know specifically where all of a sudden Christianity is not supposed to go, right?
So not supposed to go to government, not supposed to go to politics.
It is a coward's way out for just trying to build a church and stay popular without saying something that might offend anyone.
That's really what it is.
Okay, so Charlie was at our church, and he needs to get here.
And we're going to drive together, and John knows I'm driving.
He says, Hey, why don't you come?
You can sit on the panel.
And I said, I'll do whatever you want, but the reality is I'm his driver and I'm your biggest fan, so whatever.
And as Charlie and I are sitting in the front row and we see that you put up Sanctity of Life Sunday, I want to say something about your pastor.
He's one of the few pastors in the country that understand that the greatest moral tragedy in this nation is the obliteration of a million babies a year.
And he's standing in defiance to tyranny and death, and he's doing it bravely.
And he's up here trying to articulate to the rest of the Christian community what is necessary.
Men like him are few and far between.
He also hates it when you do that.
It's called humility.
When all this lockdown happened and we have a virus that has over a 99% survival rate, nobody is questioning the intensity of this virus.
But to use it as justification to call the church non-essential.
I met John's wife, Michelle, and she happens to have the same name as my wife, Michelle.
You, you, yeah, okay.
Relax there.
All right.
Yeah, Michelle.
All right.
The church, the ecclesia, is the bride of Christ.
And you're going to say it's non-essential.
You come to me and tell me my wife of 30 years is non-essential, you'll be picking up your teeth with your broken arm.
Where are the shepherds defending the bride of Christ?
Right there.
Right there.
Yeah, praise the Lord.
Which brings up a good question.
Charlie, I want to ask you this, and I appreciate the fact that you're so you're loving and but straightforward.
What do you say?
And again, this is not to offend our brothers, but what do you say to pastors who are not opening their doors?
And I want to tell you what I've observed just from my take.
You know, I think of the words of Jesus when it says he saw the sheep were sorry, this always gets me when I talk about this, but weary and scattered.
And we see people coming, you know, people who have shut their doors until people come in and they show up at a service and they just break.
They break because they say, my pastor won't open the door.
My pastor won't open the door.
So I'm asking you, Charlie, what do you say to pastors out there tonight who are still shut?
What do you say to them?
What should they be doing?
And if you can lovingly.
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be honest.
I'll first just say, I'm surprised this thing's still going on.
Like, I'm going to be honest with you guys.
Like, I'm so disappointed and not even angry.
Like, that was a different phase.
That was like me, Jack Hibbs in July, right?
Now, you guys can go look that up, right?
That was angry.
Now I'm just saddened and I'm disappointed.
And that's why heroes need to be lifted up like these two men.
But I'll tell you, here's why it's a realization that is a very important one for everyone here, which is that the natural state, the temptation from the enemy is to resort and retreat to fear, not towards liberty.
And actually, our default condition being naturally sinful because of original sin, we're always going to screw it up, is actually to resort towards what is easy, what is safe, and what can be not necessarily rooted in what takes responsibility or liberty.
And so for pastors that are still closed, as lovingly as I can, you know, articulate this, it's, do you trust your congregation or no?
It's come down to that point.
It's no longer about the severity of the virus.
Everyone knows exactly how it works, their risk.
They're making their own risk decisions every single day.
And so, but they say, well, I don't want to become a place where it might possibly spread.
That's not your intention.
God knows your heart.
You're not opening your church to become a super spreader.
So you won't be judged for opening your church for that.
Instead, you're going to open up your church for people to find Christ, have the ecclesia, and be able to gather.
And so, and here, here's the way it works at Rob's Church and Greg Farrington's church up in Sacramento and Jack Hibbs' church, which is, and you guys know this tonight.
There's a risk you can get it.
There's some people here that have already had it, which is basically better than being vaccinated, right?
And so it is.
I mean, getting it, you know, you have natural antibodies built up against it.
And so here's the question for pastors: which is, is liberty a value that you are willing to contest for?
And so, based on their current opinion, they should never reopen and they should just have a live stream.
They should become a YouTube show.
They should close.
No, I mean that.
They should close their church permanently.
Because now that we are almost 10 months into this thing, that they can't be open in any form or fashion, whether they need to have different spacing agreements or whatever it might be, then the message that that tells me is that they are resorting to total fear and they actually don't trust their congregation to know that there is something going on to make informed choices leading up to it.
I'll tell you that, you know, we hosted probably the largest event of the entire calendar year in 2020 in Palm Beach, our Student Action Summit.
Thank you.
And it was an amazing event.
And we had thousands and thousands of young people.
And it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life.
And it wasn't hard for the reason you might think fighting city council, restriction, like everything you could imagine, right?
And it was, you have the whole national media coming on to you and all this stuff.
But I was really glad we did it because there were fellowships and relationships made for a lifetime and people that had breakthroughs and all these amazing things.
People found Christ there.
It was awesome, right?
But then the reason we did it more than anything else, and the first thing I said at the opening night was that if you are afraid of getting the virus and getting the virus and dying from it, you should leave.
Like, this is a place of people that are making the conscious decision that they know the cost and they are willing to go through that anyway.
That's what matures, that's what a mature society does.
And so, um, I really encourage every pastor to fully open the doors.
We said it in May, we said it in July, we said it in September, and now we're saying it in January.
So, I pray they'll reconsider.
You know, I was going to say such a good word.
You know, here, the truth is, here at this fellowship right here, and like Rob and Jack and others, we have open and remained open.
And, you know, it hit us like a wave.
And I remember it was right before Thanksgiving.
It's like it came in, and boom, there was one wave.
If you're a surfer, you know what a set is.
And it just came in one set.
And I was like, okay, that cleared out some people.
Then the next set.
And then, like the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, you'd think that we were starting the church over.
It was crazy.
And I sat here at this pulpit, and I remember there was, it was, and I thought, oh, Lord, you know, and what was amazing to me, and I've been preaching to our church: listen, the only way that we're going to come through this is by going through it.
We've got to come through this, we've got to go through it.
What?
And here's the awesome thing.
I just testify and give glory to God on this point.
People got sick.
We had guys in the hospital, and I was on my knees saying, God, do not let them die of COVID.
And you know what?
They didn't.
They didn't.
But listen, and I want to say this, I want to shout out.
I won't say his name, but one of the brothers I texted him and who's an older gentleman in our church is a seasoned saint.
I love this brother.
And I said to him, I said, hey, he was in ICU.
I said, what do you want me to do?
I said, well, how can I help you?
What do you want me to do?
He said, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to keep the church open.
I want you to keep doing it.
I'll see you in two weeks.
That's what I'm talking about.
And you know what?
The church now, guys, is so much stronger.
I feel like our faith is stronger because a lot of us were like, that was it.
I couldn't taste and smell.
I'm not downplaying some of the more serious symptoms, but like, hey, I ate by faith through Thanksgiving.
Like, I just, I ate from memory.
It's funny.
I thought, like, maybe this will stop me from eating, but actually, it didn't.
I thought, you know what, God, just miracle, Lord Jesus, do it now.
Do it.
And he didn't.
He didn't.
But that's all right.
I made it through.
So we're stronger because of it.
So thank you for saying that, Charlie.
I so appreciate that, brother.
It's a good word, isn't it?
Okay.
I want to get into something now.
I want to get into a little more of the political realm, if you don't mind.
And, okay.
And I'm sure this is on some of your minds.
Charlie, please help us understand, okay, how?
How?
How did it happen?
75 million people, you know, a thousand people watching on YouTube for, you know, who I'm talking about.
Biden coming in, like, and then there's the steal.
What happened?
And then all the lawyers and all the evidence.
And we're thinking, like, can you please help us?
What happened?
Can I help you?
How did it happen?
So, yeah, let's, I'm going to kind of repeat something I said earlier at Rob's Church, which is, what an awful last week and a half.
And I've actually enjoyed having the first like 40 minutes not be about that, to be honest.
But now we just kind of got to get back to reality, right?
Which is this last week and a half has been awful in more ways than one.
And from the Capitol tragedy to the impeachment to swearing in of Joe Biden coming on Wednesday, the NRA declared bankruptcy.
Sheldon Adelson passed away.
Social media is like a complete horror show now.
And so that's just the beginning, right?
And so that's all the stuff to unpack.
So let's just take a step back.
And sometimes when you're down and things are going terribly, it's actually really useful just to kind of take an inventory for a damage report.
And so I think that's what we should do for a minute here.
And so let's go back to the election, right?
I think that there were three factors that mainly played in, which is the mail-in ballot nonsense, the signature verification issue where ballots were going all over the place.
And we were woefully unprepared.
for the tactical and infrastructure side of really what was happening there.
The second thing, and I could get deeper into that, but I love this church.
I don't want your YouTube channel to disappear.
And I'm not kidding.
So if you guys want to go deeper into that, I'm actually not kidding because I'm actually not in the business of getting people's YouTube channels taken off.
So if you guys want to really go deep into that, you guys can go into all my podcasts.
I did literally 50 hours of research on this, as you guys might know.
And I could talk about this at length.
But if I talk about it right now, then we're all going to get digitally assassinated.
So, no, no, no, but I'm going to assume it's.
No, no, okay.
He knows what he's talking about.
Yeah.
So, but there's a way, I'm going to frame this in a way that we can still talk about it, right?
And so there's a couple other things I think that really went wrong, which is the first is we completely, as Republicans, conservatives, ignored, and not necessarily all of you, but our leaders did, the social media tech issue for far too long.
I mean, this, they, they, they, you want to talk about interference in the election?
I mean, this was the greatest act of private corporate election interference in the history of our country.
And so let's just take a super easy example that everyone agrees with, which was grotesque, yet no one got held accountable for this, which is incredibly, you know, the coke head, Hunter Biden, left the left a laptop.
And that's what he is.
Like, I mean, I don't, I mean, I'm sure he's a nice guy, but like, you know, and he left, he left a laptop at, you know, in some repair shop, and Rudy Giuliani stumbles upon this, you know, laptop, and Mr. Costello, his lawyer, gets it.
And all of a sudden, you have the laptop of the, you know, the guy who's running for the Democrat Party's son, you're not allowed to talk about any of it, right?
So you talked about it in the month of October, you got kicked off of Twitter, you got kicked off of all that sort of stuff, right?
And out of nowhere, we all of a sudden saw this new kind of political reality set in where you weren't allowed to criticize the power structure.
And social media played a massive role in all of this.
And now we've seen that this is their big kind of, this is their blue terror, if you will, where they're going through and they're just taking out accounts.
The president doesn't have access to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, like he was going to use that.
Spotify, like, I mean, just like, really, that was something that needed to get done.
Huge.
Yeah, it's like huge.
I would have loved to have, in a stunning turn of events, Donald Trump creates a TikTok to communicate to his constituents.
So they kicked him off of that, which was just, you know, terrible.
And so that's another part of it.
I think that the other aspect is this, though, going back to the election, which is that the president could have had a better first debate performance.
I think that there was a lot of momentum building and he got the virus.
And then the first debate, he might have had the virus or not, but I do not think that was his best performance.
And I say this was a friend to someone of his, but just looking at it analytically, I think that that set some things back.
But more than anything else, the question is, how are we going to conduct elections from this point forward?
And here's something to actually kind of work a little bit of optimism, if you will.
Does anyone here think the election in Florida was stolen?
No.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So not everything was stolen.
Right.
So let's just like slow down here.
Who won Florida?
Oh, Trump by 470,000 votes.
So let's, how did that happen?
Okay.
Florida used to be a horror show.
It used to be a circus when it came to elections.
Yeah, in Miami-Dade County and Broward County back in 2018, a woman by the name of Brenda Snipes used to run the elections there.
Ron DeSantis wins narrowly.
He asks for her resignation and changes the way elections are done for the better.
And so none of us are questioning what happened in Florida.
It's the third most populous state.
And all of a sudden, a Republican, President Trump, won by 470,000 votes.
So what's the lesson from there?
Is that these elections can be reformed.
These elections can be fixed.
And especially in Georgia and Arizona in particular.
It is inexcusable that those states are still doing these backwards practices with not intent signature verification, voter registration nonsense and all that sort of stuff.
So that's something that we really, really have to focus on.
And then there's the Georgia runoff, which was a little bit in some ways different.
It was similar but different.
Definitely shenanigans and tomfoolery happening around all of that.
But there were just some parts of Georgia where people didn't show up, where just people did not show up on election day because they were either told not to vote, they were uninspired by the candidates, but the Democrats showed up in massive numbers.
And also the churches were completely on the other side in Georgia, where you had Lecrae, I don't know if you know who that is or not, a Christian rapper who was doing events with Raphael Warnock, who is outwardly advocating for pro-abortion Raphael Warnock, Lecrae, the Christian rapper.
And so it really makes you pause and say, you know, how exactly did that come together?
And here's kind of the biggest lesson for all of us from some of this, as kind of tightly as I can put it, that persuasion matters a lot.
The amount of money you spend, all that stuff matters.
But now really, we have to get into how elections themselves are conducted, which is something that has always disinterested us, right?
We're like, well, it doesn't really matter, but you send in your ballot or whatever.
Like, no, now it's the practice of how you vote is going to be more important than either can you get your message out.
But then we can't even do that because of social media.
And so that's one of the biggest lessons and the takeaways here that unfortunately I think that resulted in Democrats having unified government.
But at the same time, there's an incongruency here where Republicans were supposed to lose 20 seats in the House, and yet we gained 17 seats in the House, and they only have a seven-seat majority.
We were supposed to lose state legislatures, and we flipped three state legislatures in one governor mansion.
And so we were supposed to get our clocks cleaned, and Michelle Steele and Young Kim won and Mike Garcia won.
And so it feels like we got our, you know, completely run over, but we have a lot of victories.
And there were some counties that need forensic examinations.
I mean, real examinations and hopefully some form of a criminal investigation, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen at this point, to be honest with you guys, that will go into exactly what happened in these five counties in these four states that suddenly and dramatically changed the trajectory of all these votes.
To give you an idea of how just perplexing a lot of this is, Joe Biden will be the first president since 1907 to be winning the White House while losing 10 or more House seats for since 1907.
Usually those are really tied together.
And so Trump won, I think it's 28 of 29 bellwether counties across the country, the ones that usually dictate the rest of the race around the country.
You win Florida by four points, you win Ohio by eight and a half points, and then you win Iowa by seven points.
And so the question is, is who's actually verifying the ballots?
Who is registered to vote?
Who's overseeing it?
And so that now needs to be the top focus, especially in Arizona and Georgia.
Yeah.
Do you think, again, I think some of us were maybe trying to watch what we, I think you question everything that you see.
Well, I don't know if that's real or not.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
I'm not sure.
But with all the evidence that the lawyers were presenting, and my question too is, I was kind of, again, I'm, what happened to the DOJ?
It seemed like, hey, they had his back, and then it's like they disappeared.
They didn't want to investigate it.
Why didn't they investigate it?
What happened with that?
I was always wondering.
Yeah, I mean, I'll talk more about the courts because I don't really know with the DOJ stuff.
And so with the courts, though, they are inherently apolitical and they don't like the idea of overturning an election.
And that's the way it was framed to them, despite the fact that there were so many outstanding questions and so many things that warranted cross-examination.
What we consider to be evidence, the court doesn't.
And they say to themselves, okay, these affidavits mean nothing, which I think is ridiculous.
And they basically say, where is the forensic evidence?
Well, we're never given access to that, right?
So you keep running up against these different obstacles.
And then in Georgia, you have a Secretary of State, Rothensperger, who says this election was perfect.
There's nothing to see here.
And so the byproduct of all of this is then people are going to start losing trust in all the institutions of how we elect our leaders.
Therefore, then they're going to lose trust in the leaders themselves.
And that's not a small thing.
That's how civilizations all of a sudden fall apart.
That's how they basically untangle.
And so the courts, they don't want to get involved in this.
The Supreme Court, though, I think that a disservice to this country to not at least hear that case, in my opinion, to and let's just put all this other stuff aside.
Let's just get to a very constitutional argument, if you will, just a strictly constitutional one.
What Georgia did to change election law without the consent of the state legislature is unconstitutional.
You can't do that.
You cannot change election law, federal election law, without the consent of the state legislature.
So let's get, let's just, let's just say all this other nonsense and shenanigans put aside.
That's the one where the Supreme Court should have come in and they should have said, you're right.
It does say in the Constitution very clearly that the state legislature shall decide how the electors are delegated or are apportioned.
And that wasn't the case.
You had out-of-court settlements with Rothensperger, with Stacey Abrams, settling the way that this was done.
In Pennsylvania, you had the same sort of thing.
In Pennsylvania, it says very clearly in the Pennsylvania state constitution that mail-in balloting must only be used under extenuating circumstances.
The state legislature just ignored it.
They were like, oh, we're going to do universal mail-in balloting under emergency provisions under the pandemic.
Of course, you can go in a BLM protest.
You can go to Home Depot, Lowe's, Abortion Clinic, Canada.
You go and vote.
You're like really going to be a threat and menace to society.
And so they saw that as an opportunity to have universal mail-in balloting.
And so to give you an idea of just the scale of what we're dealing with here, Georgia used to have about 250,000 mail-in ballots every single year.
That's a lot.
1.3 million this last November.
So just think about any of you that run businesses.
I want you to think about it just from a church standpoint, right?
So that's a scale up of a six times multiple.
So I want you to imagine if you have your normal attendance every Sunday, and then the next Sunday, unexpectedly, six times the amount of people show up and they all want seats.
And you just need to discover the infrastructure to do that.
That's what happened in Georgia, right?
It's like they did not have the practices and the methods to be able to do this.
Now, here's why Florida is such a great example: is that Florida did mail-in balloting the correct way for 10 years.
He was like, How is that?
Well, because they have an elderly population, a lot of people voted by mail, and they also had really good state and local leaders.
And Ron DeSantis cleaned it up.
He said, Okay, we'll do vote by mail.
That's fine.
But you got to photocopy your ID when you send in your ballot.
You got to do a 96% signature match.
You have a chance to cure it.
And if you vote by absentee via mail and vote in person, you're going to jail for 10 years.
And we're going to publicize all these prosecutions.
No tolerance.
And so, and so in Florida, they made it work.
In Georgia, it's been the wild west.
And so you have a six-time scale up of mail-in balloting.
And couple that with the apathetic churches, the motivated, you know, black base, and all that sort of, all those things have just combined into a worst possible storm for that.
And so I just, I guess my biggest kind of piece of advice to all of you, though, is don't translate this frustration to cynicism, is that we have to now translate it into action, to real reform, because there are states that do this right.
This is not one of them.
But even in this state where you guys do things however you do them, Mike Garcia still won despite all of that.
I mean, Young Kim still won, and Michelle Steele, you don't think that they wanted those seats?
You don't think that they wanted to do everything they possibly could?
And that goes to show that you can, and part of the reason was after 18, there was such outrage and such a spotlight in Orange County, especially with Young Kim.
Maybe some people are a little more gun-shy, right?
Maybe some people are a little more skittish.
And so that's why the focus matters a lot.
But my personal, the one that I'm really most upset about is the Georgia ones.
The Georgia, Arizona, we're going to figure out.
We're headquartered in Arizona.
The Georgia one is unacceptable.
It really is.
Because not only did they screw up the presidency, but then the Georgia runoff, and their tone and their hostility, those Brian Kemp and Rothensperger, the way that they handled themselves, in my personal opinion, through the month of December, was outrageous.
Where they called any of us that had questions to be just like awful human beings.
And I just, I think that they had a month to all of a sudden say, you know what?
Maybe we weren't prepared for a six-time increase of mail-in balloting.
Ron DeSantis, can you come help us?
Like, I would have respected them if they would have done that.
Seriously.
Instead, it was pride is the downfall.
We know that.
And they had this very prideful, just arrogant, smug attitude.
And look at the results.
Georgia, which used to be a deep red state, has two Democrat senators and they sent their electors to Biden.
Charlie, in light of what's happening with the recent elections and now seeing the differences, can you explain to us what it means in Congress in light of the House and Senate and how that affects conservatives and what we believe and all of that?
Can you explain that and why it was such a give us some assessment on that?
So I'm going to give you guys some hope because I think we all need some hope, right?
Real hope, right?
Real hope.
And it's a biblical principle, Genesis 11, which is that which is built without the blessing of God will crumble and will get scattered and confused.
Power of babble.
It's a biblical truth.
Paraphrasing, but yeah.
I got you.
I was good.
Yeah.
But, right, Rob?
That's a good one.
Yeah, I like it.
Let me look it up.
Yeah.
What do I mean by that?
The Democrats are going to miraculously screw this whole thing up.
And I know it's there's, look, there's the law of the thermodynamics.
There's the laws of Newtonian physics.
Force equals mass time acceleration.
Object at rest will stay at rest.
And then there's the laws of the left.
And the law of the left is they destroy everything they touch.
Right?
And so everything.
And it is their default, their default position is absolute corrosion, parasitic intrusion of things at work.
And so look at California, you look at New York, you look at Illinois, and they don't build, they, by definition, destroy everything they touch.
And so they are going to screw this up.
And it's going to take probably 200 days for them to do it, maybe less.
Here's the second thing of hope that I'm going to give you.
That was very hopeful.
No, but I'm hopeful.
No, but it's good.
Only 200 days.
No, but it's a logical sequence.
You'll see.
So it actually, it ends well.
The second thing is they're going to fight like wild.
Okay.
They're going to act like they have 56 seats in Congress.
They have a 50-50 tie, right?
They have also some blue dog Democrats, Manchin, Mark Kelly, all that.
They're going to fight over the feast, okay?
And let them.
Let them fight over transgender bathrooms and like federal buildings, whatever the thing that gets them their base excited, right?
Whatever.
And so they're going to have committee hearings about pronouns or something, right?
And so, no, seriously, this is the type of stuff we're going to have to.
It's the type of stuff we're going to have to endure.
And so, but here's the third thing.
Here's the hope, okay?
Yes, thank you.
I'm listening to you.
Because scatter confusion, collapse.
All of a sudden, the people are going to quickly, and I mean quickly, they're going to all of a sudden say, we want Republicans back in charge quickly.
Where are the Republicans?
And it's not going to happen.
It's going to happen, as Ernest Hemingway said, gradually than suddenly.
And because of the, here's the amazing brilliance of the founding fathers, is you actually can't take over this country in less than six years.
Think about it.
You have to win every federal election on the House, state, and presidential level for six years straight with your agenda reinforced to get something very big and bold done.
Even the Civil Rights Act took nine to 10 years to get done with broad-based consensus.
The founding fathers intentionally put in these provisions and these safeguards to slow down the process, everybody.
As Scalia said, fall in love with the gridlock, right?
No, seriously.
Like, just because we get mad sometimes when we can't get our agenda through, but then we have to remind ourselves if we ever in the minority, we're going to love the fact that there's the ability to sue the Supreme Court, states' rights, constitutional republic, 50-50 tie, right?
All of a sudden, now we're going to kind of geek out at all these different trapdoors and these provisions.
And thank you, God, for giving us the brilliance of the founding fathers to do that.
So here's the point is that the people, the citizenry is going to basically say, hey, we want, at some point, we want Republicans back in charge.
And it's going to happen quicker than you can imagine.
The question is this.
There's two ways that can kind of go.
Either we're going to be a conservative Christian Republican kind of movement community that will have given up in January of 2021 and will have no candidates, no infrastructure.
We'll just have given up.
And all of a sudden, all these people are going to come back to us.
We're like, oh, I thought it was over.
Like, I thought it was done.
And all these people are like, no, no, no, we actually want you back in charge.
What do you got?
Like, do you guys have vibrant schools and churches and business?
Like, if we disconnect, or we can start building now with the faithful expectation that the people are going to come running back to truth very, very quickly under the current power structure.
And that's what gives me hope.
Their agenda right now is to break your will.
Their agenda right now, because they want you to raise the white flag and say, I surrender.
That's what they want.
They want to break your will at all costs.
And so as long as we keep that resolve, that grit, that will, that perseverance, and we build new at this moment, we strengthen our commitment to this.
I'm telling you right now, thanks to the beauty of our system and we fix some things on the elections, I really believe that our brightest days are happening.
You also pointed out that the folks that are on the tip of the spear, we need to build community and stick together.
You know, you and I, though we met in passing, I am now your best friend.
I'm not leaving your side.
Thank you.
I'm so, I don't know what to say, speechless.
Thank you.
I love you, man.
I want to say too, because this is kind of segues, and I think, Rob, as a pastor, you can answer this also, but because this is a question that I have a lot of times from where I sit and from what I do on a regular basis, and of course, Rob and you interact.
And how do we live as Christians with a new administration that brings in things that we are opposed to?
And, you know, it just seems in one sense like there's not a lot we can do about it.
But how do we live as Christians in the midst of an ungodly world and with an administration coming in pushing things that we are completely opposed to?
How do we respond in a way that honors God and maintains the witness?
Because the natural tendency sometimes is, you know, you want to respond with anger and you want to overcome evil with evil.
But the Bible says overcome evil with good.
So help us understand the good that we can overcome the evil with.
How do we do that?
Amen.
I'm an eternal optimist.
And I'm with Charlie where he's laying out all this stuff and you're like, wow.
And you think the hope is, well, in spite of the events, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
But Charlie and I look at the horizon and this is God's handiwork.
Sorry about that.
It's not often I get him to laugh like that.
This is God's hand.
Because when Lincoln looked down in the second inaugural address, and I covered this earlier, where he looks out and you have a nation that's embroiled in war.
2% of the nation's population died.
That's 650,000 people.
Today, that'd be 6.5 million people in a civil war.
And in 1860, we had, what, 4 million slaves?
And that vile institution that called someone less than human based on the content of melanin was done away with.
And the price paid was 2% of our nation's population.
Every family suffered a death of someone.
And you think God's going to sit idly by while we abort a million babies a year, 320,000 of which are black children, 4.5% of our population, black American female childbearing is responsible for almost 35% of the abortion.
It's a Holocaust of the black community.
And the church is going to put a black tile up.
And they don't do what you did.
And at our church, while we're doing this, we've got Seth Gruber speaking on life.
So we need to re-engage what is important to God because as Lincoln said in the second inaugural address, they pray to the same God, read the same Bible, expecting different outcomes.
It's God's will we're looking for here, just like Joshua said to the commander of the Lord's army.
Are you on our side or theirs?
And the angel said, neither.
We need to align ourselves with what God wants.
So this is an exciting time for the church, number one, because we're awakening to what's important to him.
Two, we're being pruned.
We're getting a lot of dead weight cut off.
I mean, we're watching those videos.
People are losing attention and they're dropping their numbers and they're all showing up at your church.
And yeah.
And then here's my final point.
We always talk about the swamp.
Swamp is a geographical location where water ends up.
It's the lowest point.
You follow that water stream to its source and it just settles at its lowest place.
That's why we call Sacramento and Washington, D.C. swamps, because they are geographically and figuratively, you know.
If you want to change where it ends up, the content of what's in it, you got to go to the source.
And the source is everything's local.
Now, Bible says pray for kings and those in authority that we would live quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and reverence.
Okay, praise the Lord.
Can you name for me your five city council members and your five school board members that you pray for by name and the issues they're dealing with in your community that would allow your citizenry here to live quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and reverence?
Oh, I don't go to those.
Those are boring.
Well, today's council members are tomorrow congress member.
You need to get involved.
This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people that we've abdicated.
We haven't been in the ecclesia.
While we've been doing church, the secular progressive left has dominated the ecclesia.
And then I'll leave this with you.
This idea of engaging at the source, Jonas Clark, Lexington and Concord.
This wasn't a national movement where we got to go against Britain.
And they did a federal and the Continental Congress met together.
No, everything that they contended against Great Britain was local.
Jonas Clark was a preacher.
He preached.
He trained his congregation.
The British came to Lexington and Concord.
He got up and did it.
Every city did their part.
The grandpa's walking with his grandson on the beach after a hurricane.
All the starfish have been washed up and they're dying in the sun after the hurricanes receded.
The grandson's throwing them back, trying to keep them alive.
And the grandpa says, there's too many of them.
There's millions.
You'll never make a difference.
The little grandson says, well, grandpa making a difference for this one and for this one.
And then the two begin to do it and they double the out.
Throw your starfish back.
Quit looking at the horizon and being discouraged.
Turn off Fox News.
Turn off the television.
Spend time with your family.
Educate your children.
Go to the school board meetings.
Go to the city council meetings and be the keeper and the salt in the light of your community.
In your lifetime, this entire congregation can change this city.
And if every pastor does what you do, we'll own the state and they can't stop us because we'll light a thousand fires across the country.
Amen.
Good, God.
I also want to mention, and I want to just say to you, something that's kept me solid through this season and like many of you is understanding and having and filtering everything that we see through a biblical worldview.
I say this to our congregation on a regular basis.
Listen, if you don't filter, if you don't spend time in the word of God daily, you can go to every meeting you want, but listen, that's what's going to make the difference.
God's people, and I believe, and I was sharing with Rob and Charlie earlier, that I believe that God's doing a real sifting in the church through this process.
Through the pandemic, there has been a sifting through the political, it's been a sifting.
People are going to have to come back to foundation.
And depending on what you're building on, will determine whether or not you stand or crumble.
And I think we're seeing people crumble because their foundation is faulty.
Listen, I'm a patriot.
I love this country.
My dad went to Vietnam.
I'm all about this country.
There's no greater place.
And I've traveled to third world countries and ministered in places that it breaks me when I think about it.
But what I'm saying to you is: listen, we have to understand also that there is a real devil.
He's behind all of it.
But even above and beyond him, there is a real God.
And he's working all things according to his purpose and plan.
I know from the scriptures how this ends.
Now, that doesn't lessen my responsibility in what I've been given.
Don't go down that road and swing the pencil.
Like, and there's some believers, you know, I don't need to do anything.
I don't need to do anything man.
Jesus come back.
I'm just going to go kick it on the mountain and wait.
I'm pretty sure he said be active and occupy till I come.
And there's a lot to that.
So there has to be a balance in this.
And I'm seeing within the church, you either see people swing one way, this way, and they're not doing anything, or you see people swing this way and they got, you know, God-golden guns and barracks and they're hiding out and they're ready to charge this and do that.
And they're getting into all these conspiracies and sending them to us.
What is all of this?
What is this stuff?
No, I'm going to, can I just for a second, Charlie, you, you who know all the conspiracies and you know, about these things, and we dialogued a little bit.
Can you just clear the, what are the most popular conspiracies right now that you can just help people understand?
Stop sending these.
Yeah, and let me go ahead, Charlie.
Let me say this, though, with, and I mean this with, you know, with love and with understanding that if you are currently going through these and believing in them, it's really actually not totally your fault.
It's a symptom of the media that has misled you, a symptom of our institutions that have deceived you, of our leaders that have lied to you.
And you go and resort to anything you possibly can that might make some sense, that might have some crafting of a different narrative because you know what you're seeing on CNN is not true.
However, just because something that is not on CNN is not true doesn't mean the message board is true.
And so, look, and I think that some of these things have real life consequences.
And I'm going to be speaking out a lot more forcibly about this.
But I'm going to, you know, do a little bit of it now, which is that, look, it says in James 1:5, ask for wisdom, and God will give generously.
It's one of the few things that God guarantees he will give generously.
So before you read a news story that sounds too good to be true, just ask for wisdom before you read it.
Ask God to give you wisdom.
The second thing is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
And the third thing is, please use some common sense.
God gave you a brain.
So let me just go through some of the stuff I've been reading.
Like, Mike Pence is not in Guantanamo Bay.
Okay.
I don't know where this one came from.
And that.
What about the barges in the he was having barges in Guantanamo Obey?
I heard that one too.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, that's not true.
The president was not in Texas last week.
I don't know.
I got in a debate with somebody and they're like, you don't know what you're talking about.
Look, I'm like, look, I don't like the whole argument from authority thing, but like, maybe you know something I don't know, but the president's not in Texas right now.
Like, I don't know how else to put it.
That he's the president's going to declare martial law.
Like, no, he's not.
Like, that's all a lie.
Whoever's telling you that is wrong.
And it's designed to make you believe something that's not true.
And so, and there's, there's, we need to all of a sudden, now that we're in this kind of damage report phase, say, like, maybe there's people that are writing these things to make you believe something so you're not active.
Because you know what the underlying promise of all those stories are?
I'm not going to have to do anything because Trump's going to serve four more years and save us.
Those message boards have created a political messianic figure out of Trump, where all of a sudden it's like, I don't have to do anything.
He's going to swoop in and our country is going to be saved.
Like, actually, I love our listeners and I get these emails and I get all this stuff.
And they say, well, what about this?
And what about that?
And I ask myself, just go through an analytic, evidence-based process of this.
And yeah, you know what?
Sometimes some of these wacky things end up being true.
Sometimes some of these things that start on the absolute fringe are a great example of it.
That's why you should entertain everything.
You should be skeptical and you should look at it.
You should ask for wisdom.
Like a great example of this, the stuff that used to be on the message boards was the Epstein thing.
Like the Epstein thing used to be kind of like an underground thing that no one talked about, but everyone thought to be true, and all of a sudden ended up being a real thing that everyone thinks that everyone knew at all times.
No, it's not.
That used to be something called the conspiracy theory.
So I'm not discounting that everything that might be entertained.
But if all of a sudden the guiding premise of it is I want this to be true more than I know it's true, then you got a problem, right?
And that's where all of a sudden your earthly will is blurring with what actually might be happening.
And so this is something that is very serious because a lot of people were told not to vote in Georgia based on a lot of these communications.
A lot of people were told, and they believed it.
And we know that.
Now, would it have made the absolute difference?
I don't know.
I think there's plenty of agreement or disagreement here.
But also, we have to understand that we as Christians, we have to be very careful with the types of news and information that we process and we spread.
And so I go through exhaustive amounts of hours talking to real life sources before I say anything on my podcast.
And people say, well, who are your sources?
Like the actual people you're talking about.
Okay.
Like, I don't know how else, like, I mean, you know, like, I don't know how else to put it.
Like, and I'm not saying that maybe I'm being misled and maybe there's this whole plan and like four-dimensional underwater chest.
And we're all like, all right, okay, Tom Clancy, slow down, right?
Like, but there's also a point to this, though, where be caught.
And again, a lot of this is not your fault of that, right?
I just want to make that very clear because you've been misled.
And when you've been misled by so many institutions, the LA Times, CNN, you want to go grab onto something else, right?
You're like, they're lying, then the inverse must be true.
It's like, no, actually, the inverse might also be untrue.
There might be something else that, you know, you know what I'm saying with that.
And so I think that we really have to get, as a conservative movement, we got to fix this problem in like the first 30 days because it's a real, real issue.
And I see it because, you know, I have a really interesting window into this because I think we have one of the more accessible podcasts and YouTube live streams out there where we take in hundreds of thousands of emails, right?
And I see what people are thinking and seeing.
And I can tell you, this is not a small thing.
These are millions and millions of people that are, if you scale it, that have told me, Charlie, don't you know Mike Pence is in Guantamano Bay right now about to be shot for treason?
And I'm like, what on what are you reading?
Like, no, I mean, this is like not, I got hundreds of emails like once about this thing.
And then I talked against it and they said I'm a liar and all this.
Anyway, the point is that that needs to be confronted, right?
And it also goes to show that there's a gaping hole in news in this country.
And we're trying our best to fix it.
And anytime we get something wrong, we correct it on our program.
But we also go through a lot of different, because we take a responsibility of that.
And Rob, you've seen our production of our show.
We take it really seriously.
Yeah, I've been there live while someone is sending you an email stating one of those hopiums.
And he's, I won't say who he's talking to, but he's got his earpiece in with the person in question saying, they're not there.
I don't know how else to tell you that either.
I don't want to divulge all that stuff.
So a rumor is just a lie with legs.
Don't participate in that.
We're Christians.
We deal in truth.
Whatever things are true.
Do your homework.
Don't send it to your pastor and go, read this.
First of all, site source it.
Tell me where you got it.
A friend who's in the FBI.
Of a friend.
You can trust it.
I don't.
We're done now.
And then you're going to be blocked.
Seriously, stop.
Yeah.
We're Christians.
We deal and represent the God of truth.
Amen?
Yeah.
And I also, we're getting close to wrapping up here in a few minutes, but I also would like to say, in addition to what these gentlemen have said, listen, if it causes you to fear, the Bible says that perfect love casts out fear.
That's not from the Lord.
If you suddenly just get into this fear and panic, listen, I don't care who wrote it.
The devil's behind it.
He would love for you to be afraid.
And there are a lot of people who are both hopeless and afraid.
And that combination is deadly.
It's deadly.
So listen, if it's causing you to, you overcome fear with faith, go back to what God said.
Go back to his truth remains.
It's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
It's not going to fail you.
So make sure that you are majoring in the promises of God's word when you're dealing with all of these things going on.
You don't need to be afraid.
God's with you and he's for you.
Amen?
Well, a couple other things, and then we'll go charge.
You wanted to have some text in questions.
Yeah.
You guys have some questions you want to text in.
You can do that now.
And do you want to put that up on the screen?
A, it's, you can text the word Charlie.
There you go.
Hey, John?
Sir, go for it.
I want the congregation to know, really, they're already, they're blessed by you.
But Calvary started in 1968 with Chuck.
Broke away from the Four Square Church.
In 68, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was shot.
We had the Meli massacre.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was shot.
The nation was in turmoil, divided.
Socialism, it was awful.
Apollo, what, eight, circles the moon and reads out of Genesis.
And then Madeline Murray O'Hare sues.
68, Chuck stays away from politics and just preaches the gospel.
And we've been doing that for 52 years, 10,000% growth across the world, 1,800 Calvary chapels.
It started here in California.
There's more Calvary chapels here than Dunkin' Donuts.
That's right.
South of Ann Is, there's 350 Calvary chapels.
In 68, we had the fifth largest GDP.
We had the water delivery system, California Aqueduct, Marvel of Engineering.
We were the state of the future.
Reagan was governor.
52 years of just preaching the gospel, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book, and that's 10,000% growth.
That's conversion growth, not transfer growth.
What do we have to show for it?
By staying out of politics.
We no longer have the fifth largest GDP.
We now have the sixth.
We have the highest gas tax, sales tax, income tax, corporate tax.
We lead the nation in debt.
We have the highest homeless and the highest poverty.
Our kids can't afford to live here.
We're the authors of No Fault Divorce, Transgender Bathroom Bills, and we've aborted more children in the state of California, the entire population of Canada.
But we don't do politics.
Well, that now changes.
We're in, right?
That's the highest form of community is politics.
And I also want to say, in light of what Rob said, you know, there's a lot of similarities to the heritage that we share.
And I think, in my opinion, and I'm seeing it, and Rob, I know you're seeing it too, that we are primed for revival in the church.
We're primed for it.
God's doing it.
We're getting to the end of ourselves, and it's bringing us to the beginning of God and his strength and his power.
So I've got a couple questions that are coming in as we speak.
But Charlie, here's one.
Someone came up with a question and they said, you know, well, here we go.
There's a pastor who shall remain anonymous, organizing a class on racial reconciliation.
Of course, hey, listen, I get it in light of everything that's happening, and they're actually embracing parts of the CRT, which you're familiar with.
Critical race theory.
Critical race theory, right?
And saying that they're going to use that as a...
Can you kind of explain what that is and why that's not a good thing to explain that?
Yeah, and I'm happy to go a couple of minutes or whatever you guys want to think for a couple of the notes.
Are you guys still good?
Everybody good?
Okay, good.
Okay.
I want to get some of these questions answered because that's my whatever you cut me off whenever.
So, yeah, look, this is a super important thing, and this is more cultural, and we have to hit this head on, which is there's a different type of virus that's spreading across this country, and it's the virus of critical race theory.
And critical race theory is an existential threat to our country.
Critical race theory comes from the critical theory written by a guy by the name of Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt School.
He was a communist dissident that was in Germany, came here as an expat, and started basically this new way of thinking that there is no absolute truth.
It's very Nietzschean, right?
It's this idea that all we are is just a mixture of molecules, and we're going to have to find our own meaning through power struggles.
And all there is in life is the struggle of the oppressed and the oppressor, someone in charge, and someone being oppressed.
That's basically the way they view the world.
So, while we view the world through everyone made in the image of God, individual rights necessary for protection, everyone has the capacity to improve your own life, make better decisions, climb up in life.
They look at life as you're actually always going to be in prison based solely and simply on the class that you've been born into, what you look like, and whether or not you're a man or a woman, which is weird because I thought they didn't believe in that.
But anyway, we'll get to that later.
So, there's so many inherent contradictions in this, right?
And so, this idea of critical race theory is even more dangerous than that.
It goes a step further.
And there's a couple beliefs in the critical race theory, and this is now in churches across the country.
This is now in almost every school teaches this now, by the way, every university, every high school.
And it is actually, it's not just inconsistent with the Bible, it's diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Bible.
Okay, there's a couple things that critical race theory teaches.
First and foremost, that there is no such thing as individuals, that you're not actually made in the image of God, you're actually part of a collective.
So, we're all part of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant collective, and us, us three, regardless of our decisions, regardless of any agency, we're always going to be in a position of privilege and power, regardless of anything we do.
That's one of the things, and us three, as white Christian Anglo-Saxon men are given this special mantle because of that.
Now, that's an inherently racist belief, right?
To believe that all of a sudden your skin color matters, that gives you some form or fashion of built-in privilege.
Okay, so also it's totalitarian in nature.
It's not a matter of what you do, it's what you don't do, and you're judged based on that.
Here's a great example of this, right?
And it's super relevant for a lot of the young people in this room.
It's not enough that you, during the entire kind of BLM thing, if you did nothing and didn't post, you're still called a racist because you didn't post the black square, right?
So, it's not enough that you post like a white square, okay?
They would lose it if you did that, right?
And I wouldn't, by the way, I'm not recommending it.
I'm saying that would be the opposite.
I'm just saying that, like, it's this you didn't do anything, all of a sudden you're called an awful person because you did nothing.
And it's like you must submit to us at all costs.
Like, take the knee.
Like, we are in charge, you are in, you are not, right?
Here's the third thing, and I just thought we were past this moment, and this is regressive in nature.
Um, they believe melanin matters.
I don't.
I actually think your skin color is absolutely inconsequential to who you are as a human being.
I think that your skin color is irrelevant.
Like, yeah.
And so, the fourth part of it is they don't believe in any form of dialogue.
They think speech and the expression and the exchange of ideas are actually just reinforcing pre-existing white Anglo-Saxon heteronormal logocentric power dynamics.
If you don't know what those are, good.
You haven't been to college recently, right?
It's just a bunch of nonsense that your children are learning for a lot of money going into debt to study things that don't matter to find jobs that don't exist.
But so, but so then, no, but then the last part is this.
And I could do a whole thing on college later if you guys want, but the last thing is this, which is that they don't believe in the scientific method and they don't believe in mathematics, right?
So they believe that everything, Newtonian physics to the laws of thermodynamics to, you know, the laws of trigonometry, all that stuff, those are actually just aberrations built by white men for white men to reinforce white men's power structures.
If you think this is insane, you're right.
Every single college, every high school, and most churches are now teaching this stuff.
And to give some grace to some pastors, though, they don't actually understand it.
They don't.
And no, I mean that.
I actually, I'm giving some grace to a lot of these pastors that I think they're trying to do the right thing and they're actually doing the exact opposite thing.
And so I encourage all of you, I've done a lot of podcasts.
I have the critical race theory expert who's actually a liberal atheist who's speaking out against this.
His name is James Lindsay.
I've been on my podcast twice.
He has more clarity on the subject.
He wrote a book on this that I encourage you guys to check out called Cynical Theories.
Okay.
It's written from just a pro-Western enlightenment perspective, going through how nonsensical critical race theory is.
And so, and if you guys have further interest in that, you guys can check out those episodes on it.
That's great.
That's really good.
Thank you so much.
I also want to ask, and my phone is blowing up.
Hold on, people.
We don't have all night.
Stop.
Make it stop.
Like, no.
But the question is: you know, some people are asking, you know, Charlie, if Joe Biden is to issue a national lockdown, what do we do if Biden introduces a nationwide lockdown?
How do we react in the right way?
It's a great.
Can I start with that?
And then, so I'll first just start with this idea of resisting.
And this is super important.
And I think, and I was an outspoken, outspoken critic and was condemning what was happening at the Capitol in real time.
And a lot of people, you know, were coming against me, calling me weak and all that.
Like, okay, yeah, stop it.
And actually, a lot of those people actually have come back that were listeners.
And I think they said, you know, that was, we got a little bit too heated in that.
And I believe it.
I think that what happened is wrong.
I think it's disgusting.
It's not who we are to get to violence or confrontation.
It's not.
And I will be clear and specific that there were different types of people that were there at the Capitol.
I've done lots of podcasts on this and delve into it, but they were agitators.
They were Antifa.
They were far-right-wing people that call themselves Trump supporters that I would never associate with.
And then there were legitimate Trump supporters that were there that seemed to have gotten caught up and, in their own words, made the worst mistake of their life, right?
So that's all kind of being looped together.
What's the point?
Is that all of a sudden people say, well, Charlie, what are we supposed to do since we can't do civil war?
I'm like, hold on.
Like, no, no, this is a thing.
Just so you're clear, that's a question I get probably a lot.
Yeah, where it's like, so what are we supposed to do now?
Like, weak man.
I'm like, wow, okay.
I actually think it takes more courage and more strength not to go act like a barbarian than to, okay?
To actually be sophisticated and strategic and, you know, ever-loving and trying to pursue dialogue and all that.
But there's also a thing that we as Christians really have perfected over the centuries, which is civil disobedience, which is completely different than civil discord.
And I want to be very clear about this.
Civil disobedience, if done for a moral purpose and done prayerfully and done with around the physical assembly of other believers and elders in a church structure, can be moral, which is what you guys are actually doing right now.
So let me tell you what civil disobedience is.
It's completely different.
It's nonviolent in nature, and it always is.
It's nonviolent.
A law of civil disobedience written by Henry David Thoreau with Emerson was you never steal other people's stuff.
You don't ruin their property.
You don't hurt other people.
It's number one.
Number two, you must be willing to accept the penalty.
This man right here is willing to go to jail.
He opened up his church, opened up his church.
They said, I'm doing this for a moral good.
Put me in prison, right?
I'm willing to accept the punishment.
So that's pushing back, right?
That's all of a sudden saying, I'm not going to do this, but you're going to have to then arrest me, right?
Nonviolently.
And the third thing is this, which is really, really important, which you must be willing to go through the entire process is you just can't cop out as soon as you go down that.
And so I want you to just do a mad, like, so let's say he does a national lockdown.
Let's just, which is unconstitutional in nature, right?
I will be leading the charge for civil disobedience.
I will.
And I will be saying, you know what?
We will.
We'll open the church and you're going to have to arrest every single one of us.
And we will go to jail.
We'll get booked.
We'll pay the penalty.
And here's what happens.
We know this is a great civil disobedient people throughout the 20th century, Martin Luther King Gandhi.
There's so many that public opinion will sway in your favor instantaneously.
Is that you want to effectuate change quickly?
Do that.
You want to lose everyone?
Go, you know, go do whatever the heck those guys were doing in the Capitol, right?
You bash windows and you storm halls and all that nonsense, right?
You see the difference between the two?
And I think that it actually takes more courage to do the civil disobedience.
So I would encourage everyone to think very carefully about that.
Rob, you actually, again, as we mentioned earlier, were instrumental in that.
And I know you, and I watched and I observed from a distance, you know, you saying over and over, I don't want to do this.
This is not my intention.
I really don't, this is not, I don't want to be the face of this.
And you were hesitant, but you were also resolute.
And when it came down to it, you said, this is what I'm going to do.
And what was it like for you to actually stand in that moment?
And you're still standing.
You're still standing.
You're still doing it.
Can you kind of share with us what you went through as a believer in the process and where you are now?
So it got serious in August when they cited me in a thousand doze, which would be congregants or visitors, with a citation.
And they wanted to enforce it with the Sheriff's Department.
And that Sunday was coming up where we were going to either open and violate it or yield to them.
And I tried to get some vacation time.
I was up at Grass Valley with my in-laws and my shoulder.
I had the worst headache.
I have a pain in my shoulder.
I couldn't do anything.
I was miserable.
I got to take the flight back that Saturday for Sunday services.
I haven't decided yet.
I call our attorney.
I go, what are the consequences?
He goes, well, you get an IRS audit.
You lose your house.
You lose the church.
You're going to get death threats.
He starts going down the list.
I go, is there anything else?
He keeps going.
About the fourth time over, he goes, I can't think of anything else.
I'm like, whew.
I said, thank you.
And then, you know, my wife and I looked at it and we said, this is a cost.
She said, Rob, I'm in.
I said, I'm in.
We told the kids, we're in.
I took it in front of our executive staff.
They were in, told the staff they were in, took it to our 15 elders.
I said, you guys have fiduciary responsibility.
You could lose stuff.
They were all in.
But I told him a little different.
I said, I said, you don't have to yield.
I'm going to do this.
And if you disagree, then you got to let me go because you've known me for 20 years.
I'm doing this.
Now, if you want another pastor, I'll quietly leave.
We're in.
And then the last was a landlord because I don't want to own property.
And the guy in Texas and I said, look, we have fiduciary responsibility.
You either can lock your building, turn off your water.
He goes, I gave that to the Lord a long time ago.
You go ahead.
So we counted the cost and I said, we're going to violate that.
And an attorney can't counsel you to break the law.
But I said, we're opening tomorrow.
He said, well, we'll be by your side.
Immediately the pain left.
My son-in-law was next to me.
I'm like, look, and I'm not that kind of guy.
I mean, it was like, it was crazy.
Now, this is the last part is after we did all that, the Lord showed me that whatever is given to God first will never be lost.
So whatever they're going to take from me, I already gave it away.
So all the fear is gone.
Take the church.
We already gave that away.
We counted that cost.
There's nothing left you can take.
Take my life.
what do you threaten me with heaven we're good to go we are free we are free We're free.
Well, there are so many more things that could be spoken of tonight.
And my goal really and my intention from the outset was to have these two gentlemen here with us tonight to be able to be equipped to understand what is the role of the church in all of this.
And I realized several things tonight.
One, I really should have paid more attention in history class.
I feel like, man, Charlie.
Now my kids say, Charlie, I know, I know he said it.
And I need to dial in that podcast.
But this is a great source of information.
And I also, I mean, I'm just so blessed by what you guys have shared.
And it's been my prayer to you tonight that you would be strengthened in your faith.
And that, as Charlie mentioned, that there would be genuine, real hope.
And ultimately, folks, and we concur with this and agree, I know that, is that there is hope.
And that hope has a name.
And his name is Jesus Christ.
Ultimately.
And let me just tell you, you can be as conservative as you like, but if you're not converted, it doesn't matter.
Listen, there's a lot of conservative people in hell.
You need to be converted.
You need to give your life to Jesus Christ.
And listen, that's what makes a difference because one day we're all going to have an appointment with death.
I stood here Saturday, Saturday afternoon, as we said goodbye to my cousin who was like a brother to me.
He was just two years older than me.
He did not yet reach 50 years of age and he died.
His life was over.
And you realize as I stood right here on Saturday, life is brief.
It is short.
And you've got one shot.
What you do with the life that you've been given by the Lord makes all the difference for all of eternity.
And so listen, redeem the time.
Yeah, things are not the way we wanted them to be or voted for them to be.
God's still on the throne.
We got work to do and let's do it.
Let's do it.
And if you're not saved, if you don't know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you don't know that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and then rose again on the third day, he is the way, the truth, and the life.
And nobody gets to heaven through him.
Listen, he loves you.
He died to prove it.
I would challenge you tonight.
I would plead with you tonight.
Cry out to God.
The Bible says whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Friend, I would encourage you to do that.
What I'd like to do as we end tonight because I'm just, man, Charlie, I'm so thankful for the, and it is, it's a ministry, man.
You're helping us.
God has raised you up for such a time as this to be a voice.
And we're very thankful.
And I want to pray for this man and his future bride and what God's calling them to, and that God would expand the borders, brother, that he would just expand the borders and it would go above and beyond what you had even, you know, the Bible says that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask or think.
And he's doing it and God's using you.
And hey, listen, we're behind you.
We support you.
We're excited to see how God's using you.
Amen.
Lord, pray for Charlie.
I want to pray for you.
You can sit down.
I'll be Rob, give me a boost.
These guys are so tall.
Yeah.
Father, we're so thankful for our brother here tonight, Lord, for Charlie.
And first and foremost, God, we thank you that as he shared at the very beginning, how he committed his life to Jesus Christ.
And Lord, you have put him on a trajectory with a calling that is powerful and anointed.
And Lord, there are many adversaries.
Lord, I think about what Paul said when he wrote to the church.
He said, Listen, an open and effective door.
An effective door has been opened to me, but there are many adversaries.
But Lord, I thank you that you're for him.
Lord, that he's more than a conqueror through you.
And we pray for just a greater anointing upon his life.
God, that you would give him the continued courage and boldness.
Lord, we lift up his upcoming marriage.
We thank you for his bride to be.
Lord, we pray that they would just be a formidable force, God, for what they're doing right now, that you would strengthen them, Lord.
And Lord, we're just so grateful for this young man.
And we pray that you continue to bless him.
Thank you for Pastor Rob and his ministry.
And Lord, the way that you're using him, both of these guys, Lord.
And we pray for the church at large.
God, make us bold in all of these things that we've heard tonight.
Lord, help us to be salt and light in every area, Lord, that you've called us to.
We thank you.
We love you.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen.
Thank you, Lord.
Thank you.
Amen.
Let's give Charlie a hand, you guys.
Charlie.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your questions, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you want to get involved with Turning PointUSA, go to tpusa.com.
And again, thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.