America's Four Great Awakenings—LIVE from Dream City Church
Live from Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, Charlie joins Pastors Tommy and Luke Barnett to deliver a call-to-action to the church, establishing a monthly meeting called The Freedom Square. In an ambitious plan to train up thousands of pastors all across the country to get back engaged in the public square and advocate for Christian values in our public policies, Charlie recounts America's four Great Awakenings to build a case for igniting a fifth, restoring the promise of the nation.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, super important episode.
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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.
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Well, I'm thrilled to be here today.
I want to say hi to all of our Turning Point USA team here.
We have our headquarters right down the street.
And I grew up in Illinois.
And the fun thing about being from Illinois is we have term limits in Illinois.
It's one term in office, one term in jail.
Right?
Right, Barry?
You know all about that.
And I came here to Arizona because I wanted it to, I thought it was a freedom-loving state, and it was at the time.
And I think we all agree as we look around our state, we're like, whoa, this is not what I remember.
It's not what I moved to.
And all of a sudden, for the first time, there's people that are saying, I'm leaving.
And just in this last couple months, legalizing marijuana, highest taxes in the country.
We're starting to see curriculum taught in our schools here that is totally outside of values that we share.
And we're talking, we're trying to ask ourselves the question, what's happening here in the state of Arizona?
And so Eric and I are getting married May 8th.
We're very excited here in Arizona.
And I am not going to be able to live with myself if we have our office in Arizona and if we're spending our time here and we're not doing everything we possibly can to impact the city and the nation and the state around us.
Because this state right here, as people know, this is, as Arizona goes, now the nation goes.
This is a state where, depending on the values and the decisions of every person in this room and in this area, the entire nation goes that direction.
So, some churches are saying, we're not getting involved in this stuff.
We're just doing nothing but the gospel.
Now, first of all, we all do the gospel every single day.
The gospel is all-encompassing.
It's salt and light.
It's not compartmentalized.
It's comprehensive.
It's in every arena.
It's in sports.
It's in athletics.
It's in marriage ministries.
And yes, it's in civics and in government.
I think some Christians and churches are afraid to get into this for two reasons.
Number one, they're afraid that it's going to be too controversial.
Well, the word of God is kind of controversial, isn't it?
It's true.
It's inerrant.
There's one way, one truth, one life.
It's uncompromising.
And so I think that's a little bit of a cop-out.
The second is, I think people are afraid.
They're afraid that they're going to lose tithes and offerings and they're going to lose attendance.
First of all, why does that matter?
But other thought is it's actually the opposite.
I think a lot of people in the church today are looking for moral clarity.
I think a lot of people are coming to the church and they're saying, hey, the world around me is confusing.
My 14-year-old is being taught that there's no difference between men and women, is there?
And if a church is not willing to use biblical truth and to offer clarity, then all of a sudden people are going to say, I'm not looking to the church for much of anything anymore.
And so where we are as a nation right now, dare I say we're at a turning point in our nation.
But I also believe that it's a decision point.
You know, in the Bible, in Mark in particular, the Greeks had many different words for time.
The Greeks had different words for love as well.
I'm sure you guys have covered that very well, Agape, Phileo, Eros, Thorge, just name a couple.
But also the Greeks had a couple words for time.
For example, first there's Kronos, where we get the word chronological from, and then Kairos.
Two totally different ideas for time.
So Kronos is, hey, what time is it?
What day is it?
Kairos is a completely different type of time.
It's in a decision moment.
It's a time that's built different than others.
I really believe that we're in a time that's more consequential than that even 10 years ago or 15 years ago.
And the Bible tells us this, that it's a linear time, as you talked about previously, Luke, which is exactly right.
We do not believe in a cyclical or a circle, but we believe in a linear way of looking at time.
But this time right now is a Kairos moment where we're going to be tested, where the body of Christ, for the bride of Christ, for the church, is going to be asked the question: are you going to contest for moral righteousness in the public square when it matters most?
When you might lose friends, when people start saying you're a bad person because all of a sudden you want to speak moral clarity into these issues.
And this is where the church is supposed to take its proper role.
And if you look all throughout the Old Testament, Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Joseph, just to name a couple, counselors to the king, the people that, the people, the heroes that we look in the scriptures that go to government, that go to our leaders and say, this is what is right and this is what is wrong.
And so this is the time for the church.
This is the Kairos moment for the church where we must step up and we must speak moral clarity for our nation.
It's so good.
So about a month ago, we went to our church board and we said we have an opportunity before us to really make a difference to really impact the young people of our city.
And we shared about what we're wanting to do in partnership with Charlie and to hold a specific night here once a month.
And we're going to call this night Freedom Square, where people can come all the valley and fill this place and talk about the issues they're dealing with in their school, in their workplace, and speak truth into these issues.
And so starting on May 4th, we are starting a brand new extension ministry here at the church.
It's called Freedom Square.
And you're all invited to come, bring your friends.
Now, we don't mind preaching to the choir, you know, or preaching to the choir for the most point here this morning.
We also want to bring free thinkers, your neighbors, your young people, who are still trying to figure out what truth is and how to stand in this day and age that we live in.
We want you to bring them to this place and we're going to talk about the very issues that they're battling with every single day in their school.
So, we're believing this is truly going to have an impact on the state of Arizona.
Talk a little bit more about Freedom Square, and then we're going to turn him loose for about 30 minutes to share right from the start.
Well, thank you.
And I wanted to say this about the Barnetts: power shows the men.
Aristotle famously said that.
And I think pressure shows the men.
So, when things get tough, you get to find out what people are made of.
I think that the last year we learned that, right?
When things are tough, you get to see who people really are.
Well, I got to see who the Barnetts really were.
So, I'll tell the abbreviated version of this story.
Things were locked down.
It was uncertain what was happening.
And I actually met the Barnetts on an airplane flying from Miami to Phoenix about a year and a half ago.
And we immediately hit it off, and we had a wonderful time.
And I came to this church and I was blown away.
And we had an opportunity to host an event with a certain speaker.
And that could draw a crowd.
And that's all I'm saying.
And look, it was a time where people wanted to gather.
It was difficult.
All sorts of stuff.
And I asked Dream City, and you guys said yes.
And it got tough.
There was pressure from the public and everything.
And your leaders here didn't give an inch.
They leaned in.
They did not succumb to cancel culture.
And they were amazing.
And that's courage.
That's courage.
And that's the right thing.
And I was blown away.
I said, whatever it is, I want to do something again with them again because I have been trained to be disappointed.
Like just you get calls, some universities call, you're under attack here.
And it was so amazing.
It's like, wait, they're going to stand with us?
They're actually, they're not going to just pull our contract.
They're not going to cancel us.
It was so rare.
It was like, oh, my goodness, someone's actually willing to fight for something in our country.
It was amazing.
No, seriously.
And I was so touched by that.
And a lot of you remember that moment, and it was really special.
And so I moved.
And I know what you guys are made of because that was incredible.
And so this is why we're doing it.
People have questions.
And you should have questions.
I do this for a living.
I do three hours of radio a day.
I do two podcasts a day.
I give over 300 speeches a year and I spend two hours of my phone off every day learning and reading and listening.
So this is my full-time job.
I get it if you're confused about what's happening in the country.
What does the Bible say about this?
That's okay.
Bring your questions.
Bring an open mind.
That's what we're not, we do not even begin to say that we have all the answers, but we have really good starting points.
We have good places where conversations can be started.
I think you can think differently about these issues.
Because what I find, and I've spoken over 50 churches in the last year, from Steve Smotherman's church to the great Juergen's church to many others, is that the body of Christ is hungry for knowledge.
They're hungry for what to do.
They're hungry to say, Charlie, I know something isn't right in my soul.
That's the spirit telling you, but I can't always find the words to articulate it to my friends.
I can't always find the scriptures to reinforce it.
And that's what we're trying to do here.
And it really goes after a verse in Jeremiah that I'm going to share in a second, which is to seek for the welfare.
And those are two Hebrew words.
We're going to go through them.
For the nation or the city of which you are in.
Guys, we're losing Arizona.
And I don't mean politically.
Forget the politics.
I'm talking about values.
You guys know it.
You drive down Scottsdale Road and you're seeing things you've never seen before, right?
You're in the communities.
You're like, wait a second, something's changing here.
And it's not the Arizona that it used to be.
And that also involves the public square, the ecclesia.
And we want to be solution-oriented, right?
One of my biggest complaints is when people just complain.
When they just talk about everything wrong, I'm like, hey, let's do something about it.
We're in this beautiful state.
We have this beautiful facility and the Barnetts and the leadership team here.
And everyone on staff has just been unbelievable.
They said, you know what?
We want to be part of that solution.
We want to be the place that opens the doors.
And it's a ministry opportunity, everybody, because believe it or not, there's people that would call themselves conservatives, but they're not yet Christians.
What a great ministry opportunity to say, hey, I know you agree with me politically.
You're not yet a Christian.
Let's open the doors and have you come to the church and hear from this.
And I could tell you this: it's the Galatians 3 model.
You know, our whole podcast team is over there.
They get the emails just like I do.
And there are people that are giving their life to Christ that were burned by the church 10 years ago.
But you know what?
They saw something I said and they said, I like the way he thinks.
I'm going to listen more.
And they started drinking from the streams of liberty and they wanted to find its source because liberty is not man's idea.
It's God's idea.
And the Galatians 3 model is this.
The Galatians 3 model is that the law, the teachings of civil government and self-government, keeps you in place until faith or revelation comes.
So amazingly, in the reverse of what people are telling you, this is actually going to help bring people to Christ.
Is that we're going to open the doors of the church.
We're going to say, tell us what you're hearing in your schools.
Tell us what your concerns are.
And there'll be a teaching.
First movie, Luke and I. We're going to bring in some of the biggest speakers you can imagine.
You guys have seen our conferences at turning point.
Imagine us bringing that into the church, but it's always going to be around a biblical framework, always.
And there will always be a call to action for people to give their lives to Christ.
But I think, and I know, in fact, I see it in this church and other churches, the churches that offer this in one shape or form-Rob McCoy's Church, James Cadiz, Steve Smotherman, Juergen, Troy Maxwell, is that the body of Christ digs deeper.
The body of Christ says, Now I see the intersection of my faith and the action in that Kairos.
So circled on your calendars, everybody, we want to pack this place up.
And it's going to be every Monday, every month, first Tuesday, every month, starting on May 4th.
I got a 30-minute, 30-second comment here.
And that is, we have a pastor's conference every year.
And over the years, we've had 250,000 pastors that have attended this conference.
They're going to be here.
We have a chance now to literally change America through Pastor School to get this message out and say the church doesn't have to be afraid.
And I got to just throw this in here.
I am so proud of my son.
He's the toughest guy that I've ever met.
He's a tough guy.
I'm just going to keep it going.
I am so proud of Charlie Kirk.
We love you.
We stand with you.
We are friends who won't just pray for you, but we will fight for you.
That's what friends do.
It's helping.
Come on, one more time.
Welcome, Charlie.
She shares.
Thank you.
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I just want to say again, the Barnetts have been amazing.
And our vision is to bring Freedom Square to over 1,000 churches across the country.
We need 1,000 Dietrich Bonhoeffers in our country.
We need them fast.
We're going to talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is a teller of truth.
I want to take a couple minutes and just build out what the role of the church is in all of this, more specifically, and give you some historical context.
And so, first, I want to read from the scriptures in Jeremiah.
But seek the welfare of the city.
Okay, the word seek, that's not a great English word, honestly, for what it's supposed to be.
It's actually a word, it's bakash, it's aim, desire, or demand.
So, the scriptures are saying to demand the welfare.
What is the word welfare?
We think of welfare as getting stuff, and that's not what the word welfare means this way.
It's shalom or shalem, peace, that which is unbroken, stable, serene, right?
So, right there, in four words in Hebrew, it's saying we must demand peace, serenity, and stability of the city or the nation where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf.
And this is my favorite part, for its welfare, you will find your welfare.
Wow, your welfare is tied to the welfare of the nation you're in.
Now, that's not to say that your righteousness or your eternity is tied to it.
That's not what we're saying.
But I think it's fair to say a historical observation is that your welfare, your ability to be free is tied to the government you have.
Just ask anyone that grew up in the Soviet Union or in Cuba.
Was the gospel raging in the Soviet Union?
Of course not.
How about communist China today, North Korea?
You see, there's a belief only someone who lives in a free society could believe this, which is that politics doesn't matter.
Only someone who can live in a free society has the luxury to believe that you should not get involved in the government around you because you don't actually see the threat of the tyranny that comes there.
Ask anyone who fled any one of these dictatorships or tyrannies what that looks like.
So, the most important thing you could do in your life is give your life to Jesus Christ.
Number one, uncompromising, no question.
What's the second most important thing?
To make sure you can do the first thing.
You know, the window of religious liberty is actually closing in the world, not opening.
More countries are locking down and going after Christians, not opening up.
There are more people that live without hearing the name Jesus every single day or every week than here.
We take that for granted, and that's the default position, by the way.
The default position of humanity is to not have gratitude, not have respect, just act like these are the things are always, not understand the sacrifices that were made before that gave us what we have around us.
So, why do we have what we have around us?
And is it special or is it exceptional?
Yes, it is.
We have plenty of problems as a country.
I talk about them quite often.
We've made plenty of mistakes, but make no mistake, America is not a mistake.
America is a moral good for the world.
It's an exceptional nation.
It's a big difference.
So, what is our country?
Our country is founded by Christians.
One of the biggest lies, the things I was never taught, is that this country was just born out of nothing, and it was atheists and deists that founded America.
Half the signers of the Declaration of Independence studied divinity in college.
All but three signers of the Declaration of Independence were Bible-believing, regular church-attending Sunday, Sunday church-attending Christians.
God is mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.
It says clearly, laws of nature and nature is God.
This idea that God is the most important and not King George is a uniquely American idea.
In fact, but the question is: what happened before that in 1776 when three documents were written?
And I encourage everyone to dive deep into them, but that's why we're going to have Freedom Square so we could dive into them together.
And we're going to have readings and we're going to get into it.
Common Sense by Thomas Paine, Wealth and an Inquiry into the Wealth and the Inquiry into the Cause of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and then the Declaration of Independence.
But what's happening in the 1740s or 1750s?
That's a pretty good question, right?
Was just everyone just meandering and kind of minding their own business?
No, America's gone through four great awakenings.
And the way that we should teach awakenings is how we're not teaching them in our schools.
It's more than a religious revival.
It's a firewall and a backstop against America crumbling.
I'm going to prove it to you.
So America was founded by the First Great Awakening.
George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, pastors that were getting out into the streets and preaching the word of God, talking about you are free through Jesus, not through King George, and you must give your life.
If you want to go read a harsh teaching, if you think your pastor gives you a hard time, go read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards and come back to church and you're going to be like, okay, I've now heard it all.
Go, the need to repent.
I mean, it's only said 35 times in that sermon.
It was given all across the eastern seaboard.
So all of a sudden, for the 1740s, 1750s, 1760s, this Protestant, Bible-believing, dare I say, evangelical, bottom-up revival was happening in America.
Now, this was a new thing because all of a sudden, literacy rates were increasing for the first time in human history because the word of God gave everyone a reason to go read.
So all of a sudden, people were asking questions.
They were saying, now that I've given my life to Christ, I believe God is in charge.
I believe that there's an ultimate creator.
Why are we governing ourselves this way?
Why do we not have the consent of the governed or separation of powers?
These questions were starting to be seriously asked for good reason.
The first great awakening led to the founding of our country.
And our founding of our country, despite what you might be taught in schools, was founded on freedom, not on slavery.
I'll prove it to you.
The Northwest Territories, the first new sovereign part of land in America, new land went in front of Congress in 1783.
Their first act of Congress, they needed to approve or deny the Northwest Territories.
You know what the Northwest Territories were?
Ohio, Michigan.
They're not with the Northwest we'd consider.
That was the Northwest back then.
The capital of the Northwest Territories was War in Ohio.
But do you know what made the Northwest Territories different?
It was the first new sovereign piece of land in the history of the planet that prohibited slavery.
Prohibited it.
They don't teach you that in schools all the time, do you?
The new piece of land.
Now, of course, we wrestled with this.
We fought a war over it.
We'll get to that in a second of how Christians were involved in it.
But then America started to rest on their laurels a little bit.
Get a little apathetic.
Sounds familiar, right?
1820s rolled around, and drunken debauchery and self-indulgence was spreading throughout the land.
And that was the second great awakening.
So here's how I want you to think about awakenings in the church.
You guys ever do a trust fall in school?
Or you just kind of fall back, right?
That's the natural state of humanity is to fall back.
You want to know the Old Testament in like 25 seconds?
God blesses, Israel rejects, and they do it again.
That's the Old Testament.
It's true.
It's the natural cycle to mess it up, right?
One over the other.
So there has to be a backstop.
So that trust fall, someone catches you, right?
Well, America was 1820s, and who caught them?
The Second Great Awakening did.
The church did.
Activist pastors going out in the street talking about the need to repent, and then all of a sudden, America was brought back into its place.
Fifth president James Monroe wrote about this extensively.
Then John Quincy Adams, and then Andrew Jackson, and then Martin Van Buren.
John Quincy Adams is an abolitionist, by the way.
We'll get to that in a second.
Went back to Congress just to go talk about the abolition of slavery because he was so moved by the scriptures.
What about the third great awakening?
Well, it was what I call the second great crisis in America, which is what do we do about this moral travesty of slavery?
Now, just so you understand, slavery was the norm prior to America.
Every civilization had human beings owning human beings.
In fact, before we get on our moral high horse, there are more slaves on the planet today than there were back then.
Just go to the southern border, parts of Central America, the Horn of Africa.
The fact we've abolished it is a huge leap forward and something that we should applaud.
We must understand why.
Abraham Lincoln famously said, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.
It was William Wilberforce, an evangelical Protestant Bible-believing Christian in Britain who led the abolitionist movement.
John Quincy Adams, who was inspired by the scriptures to argue for the abolition of slavery, Thaddeus Stevens, the Frederick Douglass.
It was the church that founded the anti-slavery party.
Now, the anti-slavery party is better known.
And again, I'm not getting into politics.
This is facts.
It was actually founded in a church, a little white church in Ripon, Wisconsin, and was called the Republican Party.
It was founded on one thing, that we must abolish slavery.
We'll figure out the rest.
That if we can't abolish slavery, then nothing else matters.
You can go visit the little white church house up in Ripon, Wisconsin, middle of nowhere.
And they said, we are going to argue for this idea of equality, ella uutheria, nisonomia, the Greek words for freedom and equality, under God.
Now, it's tough.
It was messy, literally.
A lot of people died, a lot of sacrifices were given, but it was Christians that were pushing it forward.
It was the church that was getting into it.
And the church, again, America was falling backwards, right?
The church caught it and brought it back into where it was supposed to be.
The next great awakening, and historians argue, some say there was a great awakening in the 1920s.
There might have been, but the great awakening that I would accept, that all of us know the most about, that some of you lived through, but we don't talk a lot about, is that we know that socialism and communism was spreading through the world through the 1940s and 50s.
China became communist.
Cuba became communist.
Zimbabwe became communist.
Do we ever ask ourselves a question, why didn't America become communist?
That's a good question to ask.
A seventh grader, right?
Why didn't it work here?
Well, a man that is known for a bigger and better thing, but should also be known for this, that all of you know, was an anti-communist crusader for Christ in the 1950s.
His name was Billy Graham.
I encourage all of you to go listen to the sermons of Billy Graham in the 1950s, where Billy Graham was talking in open-air revivals against the rise of Soviet communism and its infiltration in America.
So when America was falling backwards, who was there to hold it up?
Billy Graham getting back in the word of God, saying, give your life to God.
Do not give yourself to the utopian promises of secular-run socialism or communism.
It was the church that put it back into its proper position.
How many people here have been impacted by Billy Graham?
Every hand should go up because we're all basically here thanks to the teachings of Billy Graham.
The people that he taught, the people he inspired, the type of Bible-based, open-air, expositional, verse-by-verse teaching.
He made that mainstream in America.
Millions of people to Christ, but the people he inspired, but he also said, no, no, you have to have a vertical relationship with your creator, not a horizontal relationship with your state.
You must understand where your rights come from.
So now we are in this time right now.
We've had it really good.
I was born in 1993.
Many of our staff right around the same time.
People always laugh when I say that.
It's like, I remember, I don't remember 1993, actually.
So a couple years after the wall fell, we beat Soviet communism without ever having to fire a shot.
We beat them because we beat Soviet communism because Ronald Reagan, God bless him, he decided to make this a theological debate.
Ronald Reagan famously said, America's going to win because America understands that God's in charge and Joseph Stalin is not.
Pretty amazing.
Now, what do we know through the course of human history?
Things get good, you get really wealthy, get lazy, get atrophy.
And that's what's happened to the church.
Not this church, but the church in general.
Focused on budgets, baptism, and buildings.
I love all those things.
But all of a sudden, if the public square around you is decaying, then who's going to catch America when it's fallen?
Because America's fallen again, not trust fall.
And the church is doing this right now.
Go ahead.
Some pastors are saying it doesn't matter.
We're like every other nation.
Some pastors are saying that's not our role.
Some pastors are saying, I only do the gospel.
When the right way to say is, no, we're going to catch you because we care about bringing people to Christ.
Because if America falls, it's going to be a dark day for the gospel.
We're going to move it right back where it needs to be.
A few decades ago, private citizens used to be that.
Private citizens.
What's changed?
The internet.
Think about everything you've browsed, searched, for, watched, or tweeted.
Now imagine all of that data being crawled through, collected, and aggregated by third parties into a permanent public record.
Your record.
Having your life exposed for others to see was something only celebrities worried about.
But in an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure.
To keep my data private, when I go online, I always turn on ExpressVPN.
Did you know that there are hundreds of data brokers out there whose sole business is to buy and sell your data?
The worst part is they don't have to tell you who they're selling it to or get your consent.
One of the data points is your IP address.
Data harvesters use your IP address to uniquely identify you and your location.
But with ExpressVPN, my connection gets rerouted through an encrypted server and my IP address is masked.
Every time I turn on ExpressVPN, I'm given a random IP address shared by other ExpressVPN customers.
That makes it more difficult for third parties to identify me and harvest my data.
And the best part is how ExpressVPN, how easy it is to use.
No matter what device you're on, phone or laptop, maybe smart TV.
So if you're like me and you believe that your data is your business, go to expressvpn.com/slash Charlie and get three extra months free.
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Go to expressvpn.com slash Charlie.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as heritage.
Acts 5, 29.
Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reparation or is repulsive to any people.
Proverbs 29, 2.
I could go on about the scriptures saying the nation will be judged.
And I'm not saying that we're necessarily going to win.
People ask me all the time.
They say, Charlie, what's the point we are going to lose?
I say, that's awfully fatalistic, isn't it?
And they say, the end is here.
Who cares?
The house is on fire.
Let's get the kids out.
I always laugh.
I say, if the house is on fire, why don't you put out the fire?
Like, what a kind of crazy belief is that.
Why don't you do something to fix around you?
I think this kind of apathetic, we're going to run to the hills and wait for the hurricane to pass and we're going to get zapped up.
You guys can determine your own eschatology.
I'm not here to talk about it.
Here's what I'm going to say.
Is Jesus said occupy till I come?
Is Jesus said to be salt and light?
Is Jesus wanted you to be in the public square?
And I'll tell you right now, did Jesus ever call for comfortable Christianity?
Who are the Christians that get the New York Times articles right now?
The Christians that all of a sudden believe a certain political philosophy of the world, not challenging the world with biblical truth, right?
So all of a sudden, if you're winning approval over that whole, let's say, organization, you're probably not doing what Jesus promised you if you were doing the right thing.
Blessed are you who are persecuted in the name of me.
James 1.
That you should be thanking the Lord that when you get persecuted in the name of Jesus.
So should Christians care?
Should we care about the welfare of the city around us?
Now let me be clear.
Let me be very clear.
You shouldn't care more than righteousness or you shouldn't care more about eternity.
That is always the number one, the number one, the number one.
But also a holistic view is to ask yourselves the question: boy, if we do nothing, we're all going to be sharing the gospel from prison.
And that is not an exact.
If you think that can't happen here, I got a Soviet dissident for you to meet.
If you think that can't happen here, you should go meet Joseph Bonduranko, who is a Soviet preacher who was locked in prison for 23 hours a day for 15 years for preaching the gospel.
Is the gospel on fire in communist China right now?
Of course not.
Now, here's a reason why the church has been targeted.
There's a reason why, and this is why this church is taking the right posture and the right tone.
Is these churches that decide to do nothing, man, they don't really realize the game that's being played here because the appetite of the tyrants, and by the way, it is, just go through, look throughout the Bible of how people always want to centralize power for themselves.
Right?
Refusing power, which by the way, George Washington did, which he's a hero.
The humility it took for him to actually say, I don't want to be king for life, changed the course of human history.
It did.
George Washington was a Bible-believing, prayerful, reverent, pious man who understood that God's rights came from God.
But understand that some of the churches that are deciding not to get engaged or get involved in this, they don't understand the game that's really at play here.
Understand what you're doing here.
When you're worshiping, what are you really saying?
What are you really saying to the rest of the world?
You're saying that this is my ultimate purpose.
My ultimate purpose is not given to me through government fiat or through a bureaucrat or through a top-down order.
You see, that's a challenge and affront to anyone that wants total and complete control.
And before anyone in the external world says, oh no, they don't want total and complete control, just read a little bit of 20th century history because it's always more.
The Bible clearly says that if you do not find Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you will not stop to try to conquer your earthly desires.
Satan tempted Jesus and said, You can have the whole world.
No, that's not for me.
But there's people today where they always just want another inch.
They just want another piece of territory.
But the church gathering, what you're doing physically today, is a threat to them.
And you can understand in the last year, and this is one of the reasons I got so passionate about this.
I spoke with over 50 churches in the last year, Juergen, Steve Smotherman, James Cadiz, Rob McCoy, amazing people.
Is that when I started to realize the church was being singled out in this entire equation?
Some of you might be unconvinced.
What you're doing right now is illegal in San Jose.
Why?
Because of government, because of decisions people make in the ballot box.
What you're doing right now, a brother in Christ, Mike McClure, is facing $2.6 million in fines in San Jose.
And he continues to open his church and have his doors wide open because he says, if I even have one person that gives their life to Christ, that is worth it.
But that's just the reflection of the leadership or in the government around you.
Why is it that Walmart and Home Depot, cannabis dispensaries, and abortion factories were open, but the church was supposed to close?
You know, so I get a chuckle out of this.
People say, you know, we have to, why is it that there's so many mental health issues?
I say, it's interesting.
You don't understand that there's a correlation between closing the church, people's community, their ability to worship and find salvation, and then we're stunned when we start to see all these things start to skyrocket in the country.
It's not that just the church is essential, it's the most essential institution in the entire country, and it should never close again.
Period.
So, in closing, we're doing something about it.
We're not just going to be observers.
We're going to be gathering.
We want you to learn.
We want you to see.
And this is going to have a national component to it.
We're going to blast it out to other churches.
But I'm going to tell you guys right now: I'm going to go down swinging for this state.
It pains me what's happening in Arizona right now.
This has been happening in real time and you feel it, right?
It's changing.
Well, who's going to catch Arizona and with it, the nation?
That's where Dream City is coming in, right?
Is that that backfall, that natural movement is like, we're going to catch it.
We're not just going to prevent it.
We're going to build up new.
We're going to have godly people that are going to raise their hand and say, I'm going to go run for school board.
We're going to have godly people that are like, you know what?
I'm going to go become a precinct committee man.
I'm going to have godly people that are like, you know what?
I am going to start to ask questions what my kids are learning.
Godly people that are going to be engaged and involved and aware of the welfare in the city.
And you're going to realize that there's a new level of your belief and your faith where you're like, wow, I now can spread the good news and the sweetness of the gospel in all arenas.
And so I want to pack this place out on May 4th and every month there.
And so tell your family and tell your friends.
And it's going to be something that you can count on and that we really want the spirit to move in this.
And so two things in closing.
If I said anything that really captured your attention, you guys want to listen or learn more.
We do two podcasts today on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast and we spend a lot of time on them.
We are the number one Christian conservative podcast out there on all of Apple.
And so if everyone took out their phone and subscribed to the Charlie Kirk show, we would beat the New York Times and the podcast chart by tomorrow morning.
So that would be kind of a fun thing.
And Rachel Maddow, too.
Which, hi, Jeff.
How are you doing, man?
And so if you guys feel moved to do that, it's a great blessing to me and to us.
And we're going to be rebroadcasting these discussions in Dream City on our podcast feed so that millions of people can hear them.
And so if you do not know how to subscribe to a podcast, there should be an eight-year-old around here that can show you how to do that on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
I know it might seem insignificant, but it's a real blessing to us.
And thank you.
And once you hit that subscribe button.
All right, here's in closing.
People ask all the time, they say, Charlie, why do you do what you do?
It's because I gave my life to Jesus in fifth grade.
And every year, it starts to mean more and more as I realize how broken we actually are and how in need of salvation we are.
There is a creator.
For those of you that are logical and rational that are here today and you like my videos, you say, oh boy, he's getting all mystical on me.
Explain to me the laws of mathematics and thermodynamics and physics as an act of randomness.
Explain to me the ability to build superstructures like this without the roof falling in.
And the laws of nature, and yes, of nature is God.
So if there's creation, we all agree there's creation.
Some music sounds better than others.
Some things move you more than others.
So there's a hierarchy of the good.
Well, then therefore there must be a creator that made it that way.
So if there's a creator, when has the creator ever revealed himself?
Well, we have a book for that, where there's a beginning and there's an end, and we're somewhere in the middle, where we're made in God's image.
We rebelled.
We're good at that, right?
We rejected him.
We decided to push it away.
And we're kind of now in this period where this gift has been given to all of us.
Now, we say it's a gift, and here's why.
You can't earn it.
It's not the varsity basketball team.
It's not a promotion.
This is a different type of thing.
Every other religion is going to be like, check this box, come to this thing, do all these things, and then eventually you can get closer to God.
Christianity is different.
Instead of you getting closer to God, God got closer to you.
Totally different.
And so the gospel in four words.
Jesus took my place, three words, him for me, two words, substitutionary atonement, one word, grace.
What is grace?
We talk about it a lot.
We have songs about it.
Well, first, what is justice?
Justice is getting exactly what you deserve.
You stole something from a store, you go in front of a judge, they sentence you to six months in prison.
Mercy is you go in front of a judge, you steal something, and you get one month instead of six months.
You get less of what you deserve.
But grace, boy, grace is something that human beings can't even comprehend.
We only have a little bit of an understanding of it.
So you go in front of a judge and he lists everything wrong that you ever did.
And by the way, this is what's going to happen.
When you pass from one life to the next, you're going in front of a judge and he's going to list everything wrong you ever did.
It will be a long list for all of us.
All of us, myself included, that you've ever done wrong.
And he's like, the only way that we can reconcile this is you're going to have to be in a bad place forever.
And you're about to get that judgment.
And then someone says, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
They interrupt the proceedings.
No, no, no.
I'll serve that sentence for him.
He's good.
He can live forever.
That's grace.
We don't deserve it.
We can't comprehend it.
It's God giving us an opportunity to be with him because he wants to come back into contact with you.
And I say to young people all the time: if you ever find anything better than Jesus Christ, please let me know because you won't.
So you could search every chasm under every book and everything at all points that ultimate purpose.
So if you have not given your life to Christ and you feel the spirit moving, I highly encourage you to do that.
It's the most important thing you could possibly do.
And then as a second of that, I encourage you to make sure other people can continue to do that.
That churches can remain open, that values can be expressed, that speech is still allowed in our country.
And that's exactly why we're doing Freedom Square.
I want to close with this.
This is a special church with great leaders.
And together we are going to make a positive imprint on the nation and the city around us.
I'm so blessed to be part of this and the act of boldness and courage, which is so lacking in our country.
And all of us are in this together now.
And this is going to be a great day forward for our state and our nation.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts and questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
God bless you.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.