God and the Nations

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Thank you.

What a gracious introduction.

Thanks to Pastor James for the invitation to be here.

It's always a joy and an honor to return and speak at this great church.

I just went around and met so many people before the service, got a chance to shake hands with people.

You know, Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.

I didn't know he just meant gateway.

I don't know how many countries I met here at this great worship service.

It's a joy to be here.

We want to also welcome all of the campuses across the DFW Metroplex, all of those that are suffering for Jesus in Jackson Hall, Tough Life, the Gateway Gatherings, and those that are joining us online, and especially those that are joining us at the prison campuses.

Will you just welcome them all in a wonderful way?

After the service, there will be a couple of my books that are for sale: Did the Great, which I premiered here at this church some years ago, as a matter of fact.

And then a new book which is called Of Kings and Prophets.

It's a book about the intersection between secular power and supernatural authority.

And I use the theater of the kings and prophets in the Old Testament to study that.

Those books are available after the service, and I hope that you will buy them.

It probably doesn't matter to you to hear this, it matters to me to say it.

I do not take one penny for any book I've ever sold, hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

It all goes 100% to support the girls' homes of global servants.

And so I hope you'll go out there to the bookstore and spend yourself into bankruptcy.

Ignore Dave Ramsey.

Refinance your house.

Steal the children's lunch money.

Come on.

Well, you're jolly tonight.

Wasn't it great to drive in and see all those flags?

Wasn't that beautiful?

And then that wonderful patriotic music.

I'm so proud of a church that is proud to be American and proud to be patriotic on this, the 4th of July weekend.

It makes me proud also to be invited to speak on this matter of God and country, and I'm proud to be here.

I understand that some are cautious about being overly patriotic in church, but their fear is unfounded.

I don't understand it.

I know that they are, and they're cautious about some kind of nationalistic idolatry.

And I gather that there may be people on some fringe level that are out there.

But what patriotism in church is about is saying, look, God has blessed us.

God has blessed this country.

God has blessed us by being here.

Nobody, nobody is swimming, crawling, crying, planning, trying to get out of this country.

I am proud to be here with you on this patriotic Sunday.

Now, if you have your Bibles, if you'll take those, please, and turn, if you will, to Psalm 33.

Psalm 33, I want to begin reading at verse 8, and I'm going to read through to the end of the chapter.

Psalm 33, beginning with verse 8.

Let all the earth fear the Lord.

Let all the inhabitants or nations of the world stand in awe of him, for he spoke and it was done.

The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nothing.

He maketh the devices of the people of none effect.

The counsel of the Lord standeth forever.

The thoughts of his heart to all generations.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.

The people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.

The Lord looketh from heaven and he beholdeth all the sons of men.

From the place of his habitation, he looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth.

He fashioneth their hearts alike.

He considereth all their works.

There is no king or leader or nation or president saved by the multitude of an host.

A mighty man is not delivered by such strength.

A horse or a tank or a battleship is a vain thing for safety.

Neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.

Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them, the nation, the people that hope in his mercy, to deliver their soul from death and to keep them alive in famine.

Our soul waiteth for the Lord, for he is our help and our shield, for our heart shall rejoice in him because we have trusted in his holy name.

Let thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us according as we hope in thee.

Put your hands on your Bible if you will, and let's pray together.

Necessitamos un palavro de esperanza.

Ayuda me por favor.

Y llename con tu Espiritu Santo y usame a su gloria, si es possible.

Father, we praise you, we worship you, we Lord and magnify your holy name, and we ask that your Holy Spirit will brush aside every barrier to divine communication.

That you will have a word within us.

In Jesus' name, amen.

The United States of America began with a dream, a vision, a concept, an idea, an ideal of what might look like to have a nation that existed and thrived in a whole new way from anything that its founders had known or experienced in Europe.

This grand vision foresaw a nation of equal law, of justice before the law, of a free capitalism unfettered by the restraints of the monarchial aristocracies of the Europe if they had fled.

Their vision was one that might be summed up in one word: a nation that would not hinder individual liberty.

In fact, this great dream, this splendid dream, was greater than the men who dreamt it.

Those men, our founding fathers, if you will, were great men, but they weren't perfect men.

They were great, but they were not sinless.

They were not perfect.

Benjamin Franklin was a notorious skirt chaser.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slave owners.

But the dream had to mature.

It had to endure.

It had to come into some kind of a of a clearer focus.

There were things ingrained in the national culture that had to be dealt with, rooted out.

Slavery, for example, at a terrible cost.

Slavery was ended in this country through the deaths of hundreds of thousands of patriotic Americans who said, I love my country.

But this is wrong.

It was a bloodbath.

Oh, that it had been dealt with in the Constitution.

But it wasn't.

But the ideal, the dream of America, had to be purified in blood.

And it is still being purified.

The dream had to mature, to grow.

Universal suffrage had to be achieved.

It was not achieved without struggle and without protests and opposition, but it was achieved.

This fundamental bedrock truth upon which the nation exists is that the rights of humanity are God-given.

Everything, everything that we believe to be true about the United States of America at her best is based on one great truth.

Yes, a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, yes, a nation of law, yes, a nation of equal justice.

But above all things, that the rights of humanity are given by a creator, God.

This nation, in its earliest and infantile longings for liberty from its European masters, proclaimed this one truth in its declaration of separation that this is self-evident.

Do you understand the phrase self-evident?

It means requiring no other proof.

Obvious.

Obvious.

That the God who made us endued us with rights which shall not be abridged by the government.

Now, I know this may seem like a little bit of a civics lesson, what I'm going to do now, but if you'll be patient with it and wait, I think I can tie it together at the end.

Indeed, one of the time-honored and classical functions of the church is to serve the purpose of education.

And I have been a professional educator, and perhaps I can't quit it.

But I want to give you a little bit of an understanding about what the Constitution of the United States of America is all about at its fundamental best.

The Constitution of the United States is based on one great truth.

Now listen to this.

And it is this the government does not give us rights, that the government must be hindered by the Constitution from abridging those rights.

Indeed, when the Constitution was formulated, signed, and agreed upon after a great deal of struggle and debate, they were, after all, politicians.

When it was all finished, signed, sealed, and delivered, several of the leaders, particularly James Madison, said, we need to enumerate some of those rights.

Yes, we have said the government shall not tread upon the rights which are God given, but let's name some of them.

And so they tacked on ten amendments, which did not change the corpus of the Constitution, but illuminated specific rights.

I just want to go through those quickly.

The First Amendment is what is called the Establishment Clause, and it is to say that the government shall not establish a religion.

This was an obvious backhanded swipe at the Church of England, at churches, all at national churches all over Europe, the continent which most of them had fled or from which their ancestors had come, saying we don't want a church of America.

We don't want a governmentally established church.

But the establishment clause, as written by our forefathers, in no way ever envisioned the possibility that that First Amendment would be used to hinder religion.

It also assures the right to free speech and a free press.

That, of course, envisioned that we might actually have one.

The right to assemble, the right to petition the government to say, we don't like what you're doing, and we want it changed, and that we could do that and had the right to do that without being arrested or imprisoned by a king somewhere.

The Second Amendment was the right to keep and bear arms.

This one never had anything to do with hunting.

It had to do with the government hunting the guns.

The Third Amendment and the Fourth Amendment have to do with private property.

That the government has no right to quarter soldiers in our houses.

That the government has no right to an unreasonable search and seizure of private property.

The Fifth Amendment is about trial.

You shouldn't have to stand trial twice for the same thing, no double jeopardy.

And no seizure of private property.

The Sixth and Seventh Amendments were about trials.

The trials were to be done in a civil and legal way with the jury, and that they should be done in proper order.

The Eighth Amendment was about cruel and unusual punishment, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment.

Remember, at that time in England, thieves had their hands cut off.

People were drawn and quartered publicly for the entertainment of the masses.

And the visionaries of the American Constitution said, we're not going to have that in the new country.

The Ninth Amendment is the most interesting one of all.

The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution says, okay, we've listed some of these, and we may list some more, but we can't list them all.

So we're just saying here there are rights, and the government doesn't have any power to take them away.

The Tenth Amendment says that the powers not delegated in the Constitution to the United States federal government are reserved for the states.

Now that is extremely important.

I'm gonna come back to it.

Upon what was this grand idea based?

Where did it come from?

They didn't precisely find it in the Bible or in the specific writings of any of the great writers of the day.

But it is based on a biblical worldview.

That personal ownership is a right that that might, even the might of the government, doesn't have the right to come and take away what we own, that we have the right to own.

The European system of serf, being serfs, that the lord of the manor would own the castle and all of the land around about, and everybody else were just serfs, um, sharecroppers working his property.

They said, this is not what America is gonna be like, they said in 1776.

America is gonna be a country where people can own their own stuff.

And the the Lord of the manor, the monarchy, the dukes and duchesses, the kings don't have the right to come and take it just because they're the kings.

It means that that is repugnant to the Constitution.

What it also means is that socialism is repugnant to the Constitution.

Not even the government, not even the government has the right to declare that you and I own his house.

It is it is upon this fundamental truth that the nation is based, the cornerstone of Christianized thought, of Christian values, of Christian sense of justice and honor and and and the ripeness of a legal system that sees everyone of the same, of the same value and importance, irrespective of any of the variables, racial, age, monetary, anything.

So that leaves us to an awesome question.

Is this a Christian country?

Is the United States a Christian country?

In the sense of being a country where one must be a Christian, or where one has advantage politically or militarily or economically because one is a Christian, or because one has to be a Christian as the government decides Christianity looks like, in that sense, it is not a Christian country.

But in the sense that our way of thinking, in the sense that our our way of understanding the rights of humanity given by a creator God, in that sense, at least this country rests upon the reality of the Christian faith.

Which begs then a second question.

And it is much debated.

Is the question of American exceptionalism?

Is America an exceptional country?

In many ways, America is an exceptional country.

It was built on an exceptional idea.

It was created by exceptional people.

Not perfect people.

Not perfect people, but exceptional.

It was guarded at the cost of the blood of exceptional patriots.

America is different.

America is an exception among the tribes of nations.

There is one way, however, in which America is not and will not be exceptional.

And that is God's judgment upon the nations of the earth.

Every nation will appear before God.

And unto whom much has been given, much will be expected.

We are blessed, brethren.

We are blessed.

I have traveled on every inhabited continent of the globe, dozens and dozens and dozens of countries.

And let me say this to you: that some of the poorest people in this country are living a better, healthier, happier, more financially blessed life than some people in other countries who consider themselves to be well off.

We are blessed.

And we thank God for it.

But that means that we will be held accountable before God in a higher way, not a lesser way.

We are not exceptional in the sense that God will wink at America's sins.

I'm a patriot.

I love my country.

I'm a weepy patriot.

I burst into tears when the Boy Scouts march.

I love the flag.

I love the people in the past who died for the flag and who fought for the flag.

I believe in America.

But I want to say this prophetically.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

We will be held accountable if we do not make course corrections.

Jeremiah 5 and 25 through 31 say that God will judge nations of deception, where the rich are wicked, where they are merciless with the poor, and will judge nations that tolerate false prophets.

In their midst.

And worst of all, nations where the people love to have it that way.

Joel chapter 3 and verse 3 says that God will judge nations that exploit their children, where boys are given for harlots and girls are sold to feed addictions.

Joel 3 · chapter mention

Something is wrong.

Something has slipped in the national conscience.

When we allow our children to be slain in their mother's wounds and mutilated in childhood.

Listen, before you don't bail out too soon, it was not particularly a moral decision, the Dobbs decision that sent abortion laws back to the states.

It was not particularly a moral decision.

It wasn't a religious decision.

It didn't make abortion illegal.

It didn't do anything with abortion.

It simply said those rights which are not specifically given to the federal government revert to the states.

All the Supreme Court said was, we still believe, some of us, in the Constitution.

So it reverted to the states to deal with the issue of abortion.

I'm not just preaching to the peanut gallery here.

I want to deal with a very important issue.

The church must call upon state legislatures in every single state to pass laws that protect the unborn.

Now that the issue has reverted to the states, it doesn't relieve us of pressure, it increases our pressure.

Beyond that, laws must be passed to protect defenseless children.

In my darkest nightmare, I never dreamed that parents would allow their children to be mutilated sexually in this country and that it would be done with impunity.

This is not a political issue.

If anyone makes this about politics, they're missing a fundamental point.

In Europe, in the 14th, 15th, 16th century, people discovered scientifically that little boys who had not been through puberty could sing in a beautiful way, in a way that even a grown woman with a high soprano voice couldn't sing.

They wanted to preserve that prepubescent male voice, that little boy's voice.

Well, there isn't any way to stop that, except to castrate him.

And so they did.

Thousands upon thousands.

By the middle of the 17th century, 5,000 boys a year were being castrated in order to turn them into singers.

Not just for the opera, but God have mercy for the church to sing in church choirs.

How horrible that parents would allow their little boys to be emasculated in order to have the fame and money that that would provide.

How much worse that parents would now allow their little boys to be emasculated not for fame or money or celebrity, but simply because they bow the knee to the God of woke.

This is a great country.

I love my country.

I'm a patriot.

But we will be judged if we allow drag queens to dance naked in the aisles of churches.

We will be judged if pedophiles are protected by the rich and powerful, if our politicians take bribes, and if our poor are exploited for the greed of the few.

Not money, not fame, not celebrity, not Hollywood, righteousness exalteth a nation.

But sin is a reproach to the people.

Proverbs 29, 2 says, when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.

When the wicked bear rule, the people mourn.

We will be held accountable for whom we vote.

This is not a political speech.

I'm not trying to tell or even advise anyone about whom they should vote for.

What I am saying is we must vote for politicians who will at least promise, God knows what they will actually do when they get in office.

But we must vote for those leaders who promise to appoint judges that will live by the Constitution of the United States.

We will be held accountable for how we vote.

Psalm 144 and verse 15 is my favorite.

Happy is the people whose God is the Lord.

Happy is the people whose God is the Lord.

I long for a happy United States.

I long that the dark winter of our discontent would be ended, and that we would know the happiness of a people that are ruled by righteousness.

Our founding fathers were not perfect, and no politician today is perfect.

Some are supremely imperfect.

But what we long for are simply leaders who will say that they understand what America rests on, and that they do not want to see that fundamental cornerstone dislodged, that the whole thing collapses.

When we sing the song, God bless America, it's not an arrogant song.

It's not saying God bless us because we deserve it.

It's a prayer, it's a petition.

God, please, God, please bless America again.

That we may be a happy people.

Will you stand, please?

God bless America.

Let alone stand beside through the light from the sweet.

Beautiful, beautiful.

Come on, go on and praise the Lord in the house.

Praise his holy name.

Magnify the Lord.

Praise God.

At some point in this holiday, amidst all the fun and the baseball games and hot dogs, will you pause a moment somewhere and lift your arms heavenward and just pray?

God, bless America again.

Now may the love of God and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the communion and sweet fellowship of the Holy Ghost keep your hearts and minds in perfect peace until the day of his appearing.

And when the battle's over, we'll all wear a crown.

God bless you.

Happy Fourth of July.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.