Open Your Eyes—God and Religious Freedom in America

Here we are on the 4th of July, and it's a time to remember that God has given us incredible freedom in this country.

And so today, God has sent me to you as a scout from the front lines in the battle on religious freedom.

And the scripture he's given me is 2 Kings 6, verses 15 through 17.

2 Kings 6:15–17

And you're probably aware of this story.

It's a story of the prophet Elisha.

And Elisha was in working with the king.

Israel was under attack from the enemies of Israel, and God was giving a download to Elijah about where they were going to be attacked and where to avoid.

And so the king of the enemy was very upset that Elijah was thwarting all of his plans against Israel.

And so Elijah wakes up the next morning and his servant goes out and looks, and the enemy has figured out where Elijah is and surrounded the city with horses and chariots.

And the servant wakes up Elijah, and Elijah says, What?

He says, We're surrounded by the enemy.

And Elijah then says something, and again, you probably remember this, but he says, he prays and he says to the Lord, Lord, open his eyes so that he can see.

And when he does, all of a sudden his servant can see that surrounding the enemy were horses and chariots of fire from the Lord.

They were totally outnumbered.

And so he just couldn't see it.

And what I want to talk to you about today is God is doing something dramatic in this country that he wants us to see.

And it's going to elicit a response from us when we see what's happening.

Before I get into that, let me start with the basics.

Who am I?

My name's Kelly Shackleford.

I'm head of First Liberty Institute.

We're the largest legal group in the country.

All we do is religious freedom.

So if you're a five-year-old girl and your name is Gabriela Perez and you're praying over your meal in the lunch cafeteria, and one of the teachers comes to you and says, Stop that.

You're not allowed to pray in school.

It's not good to pray in school.

What do you do?

Do you go out and hire, if you're that family, do you go take$200,000 out of the bank, hire a great legal team?

No, this is a poor family outside of Orlando.

So we come in, we provide the best attorneys in the country, they all donate their time, so that when we do, we don't just win for Gabriella, which we did, but we set a precedent that protects all of our children and our grandchildren.

And we've been really busy.

The last uh year alone, we've had three wins at the Supreme Court in religious liberty cases.

Uh we've had uh all kinds of interviews, over 9,000 interviews and stories that we're in.

We had over 300 cases last year, so it's been busy.

How did I get involved in this?

Uh back when I was in high school, I knew my gifts were in analytical thinking and speaking.

And I thought, well, I either need to be a pastor or a lawyer.

And people said, Well, that's like a God or Satan choice, isn't it?

Now that's not true.

There's a lot of really good lawyers uh who are doing great things.

But I went to my youth pastor and he said to me, you know, if you're called to be a pastor, that that's a wonderful calling.

But I will say this we have a lot of Christian pastors, and boy, we sure could use some more Christian lawyers.

And as I really analyzed my DNA and what was God was doing in me, I realized that he was really calling me more to law than to be a pastor.

And so I went to law school, I got out of law school and really had a heart for ministry even in law school and did very well and got out and I clerked for a federal judge.

And when you clerk for a judge like this, you get to see what it's like on the other side of the bench.

It's a really unique perspective.

What's influential, what's not, what's persuasive, what's over the top, you know, how do things work?

And so all the big law firms want you to come work for them.

So I had these really nice offers at these law firms, but I I knew God was saying, that's not what I want you to do.

And I sat in my little office and I remember thinking, well, what do you want to do?

And I thought, well, I want to use my legal skills because God's showing me he wants me to do that, but I want to help pastors and churches and religious freedoms and our founding principles.

And I even like to go to seminary part-time.

And I laughed because there was no job like that that paid you money.

Two weeks later, two major partners in big law firms called me out of the blue.

They said, Will you come to lunch?

I said, sure.

They said, Look, we we started doing religious liberty cases uh just pro bono, but it we're now getting so many calls, it's hurting our ability to practice a living.

So we were wondering, would you be willing to come on, do legal cases, help pastors, churches, religious freedoms, and our founding principles, and you can even go to seminary part-time.

Now, being a little young uh in my faith, maybe a little immature, I said, Let me pray about it, like that wasn't an answer to the prayer I had already given.

And I immediately realized this is God answering the very prayer I just prayed.

And that was 30 years ago.

These guys said, How much you need?

They pitched in out of their pocket, we started a nonprofit.

Thirty years later, First Liberty is the largest legal organization in the country that all we do is religious freedom.

Now, one of the first things I do as I start to talk about religious freedom is we've got to make sure we understand why it's important.

Now, you probably immediately understand because you're a believer.

You're watching a church broadcast, and obviously, if people can't hear about Jesus, there's really no hope for our country of them having their lives redeemed, of our country improving.

So we Christians immediately know how important religious freedom is.

But one of the things our founders tried to help us understand is religious freedom is important to everybody.

Even if you're not a person of faith.

I I speak all over the country, and I tell you this happens at least once a month.

Somebody will come to me after the talk, and they'll be from an Eastern European country or another country where they've lost their freedom, and they'll come up to me.

I'm thinking of one guy in particular right now by the name of Peter.

He walked up and he said, I'm not a person of faith like you are, but I think what you're doing is the most important thing anybody is doing in this country.

He said, I saw this happen in my country.

They took down the religious symbols, and within months, we all lost our political freedoms.

And he handed me a check for$5,000.

And he said, I'm going to be supporting your organization from now on because I want my freedom.

Now, this is something that we all need to understand.

What happens when you lose religious freedom is you lose all your freedoms.

The best way I can describe for you why that's true is that the one thing that a totalitarian government can never allow are citizens who have an allegiance to one higher than the government, to the Lord.

And whenever you see that type of an oppressive regime come into power, the first conflict is always going to be these people that won't bow a knee to the government because their knee is bowed to someone higher.

And when you lose, if you lose at that point, incredible evil begins to occur without freedom and without God.

Whether it's socialism or communism or fascism, millions of people usually are murdered.

So this is important to everybody who cares about freedom.

It's important even beyond those of us who are Christians, although it's obviously very key for us who are trying to let people know about the Lord Jesus Christ.

So that being the case, this being so key, how are we doing in this area of religious freedom?

Well, we've never seen anything like the numbers of attacks that we're seeing.

Eight years ago, we had uh 40 some odd cases.

Last year we had over 300 cases.

And I don't have to tell you this, you've seen what's been happening just in the last couple of months during the pandemic.

And we knew there would be problems.

When this opened up, we said, look, churches are going to want to cooperate, they're going to want to help, they're going to want to save lives, they're going to want to serve people who need food, who need help.

But we knew that there would be people as this went on, there would be governors, mayors, political powers that would like the power they were using and would want to use it in an improper way against the church.

And sure enough, we began to see that.

So we we really prayed.

We were like, Lord, there's never been a case, a constitutional case, in the middle of a pandemic, especially on religious freedom.

This is all new ground.

So we've got to be very careful about the first case we bring.

Lord, you you need to show us, you need to bring us because we were getting hundreds of calls from churches all over the country that horrible things were happening to by abusive local officials and others who were doing things that were totally discriminatory against the church when the church was needed at the greatest time.

And the first case that really hit was a case out of Greenville, Mississippi.

And this uh I think you've got a picture of what this looks like and the pastor that you can see.

This is Pastor Charles Hamilton.

Wonderful church, and what they did, this is a small African-American church in Greenville, Mississippi.

And they didn't have the money to be able to do online service, et cetera, and they had a lot of elderly people that didn't even have access to things like that.

So what they came up with was the idea of a drive-in service where everybody could drive into the church parking lot, stay in their cars, be safe, and Pastor Hamilton Hamilton could boom with his booming voice, and they could all hear.

It was so small that if you look closely at that picture, you would have found that there were like six, seven cars in that parking lot.

They were surrounded by eight police squad cars.

The city had made it illegal for churches to even get together in their cars.

Meanwhile, right down the street at the Walmart, there's a hundred cars, and people are getting in and out.

There was zero danger, but this is what they were trying to shut in.

These were criminal violations.

I kid you not, on film, a white police officer said to this African-American pastor, and I quote, your rights are suspended.

I'm sorry, not in America, not in the United States of America.

Your rights are not suspended under the Constitution from holding a religious service that meets every CDC guideline and is safe.

That was the beginning.

Then, just days later, we had a case in Louisville, Kentucky, the On Fire Christian Church.

This was a church that was trying to figure out what to do on Easter.

They wanted to have services, they wanted to be able to get together, but they wanted to be safe.

So again, they did a drive-in service, and they had cars that were going to come in the parking lot, they were going to be very safe.

Again, nobody's going to catch the coronavirus from one automobile to another.

And so they did it all right.

There's a radio frequency that you can speak through, there's bullhorns, there's different ways to do this, and a number of churches did.

But we knew we needed that case.

People were seeing pictures at this time of a father being handcuffed in front of his children for throwing the baseball with them in a public park.

A person coming off the beach all by themselves, being arrested for being on the beach illegally.

And people were beginning to wonder have we lost our freedoms?

Have we lost our constitutional system?

And so it was only right that the church would lead the way to answering that question.

And so this case in Louisville, Kentucky was what we call the shot heard around the world.

It was the first case during the pandemic to come down with a decision.

And the judge, the federal judge, Justin Walker, issued a powerful decision reminding us that this country was built on religious freedom and that what they were doing here, they were not only telling them it was illegal for them to meet in the church parking lot in their cars, but the governor and the and the mayor had said they were going to be writing down license plates of everybody throughout all the churches who they could find at Easter at their church, and that they would be met and they would be quarantined into their homes.

Something that we couldn't even imagine.

This judge issued a powerful ruling saying this is totally unconstitutional and really striking back.

And everybody in the country watched as our constitutional system got reinserted.

But this didn't stop.

This is happening as you've seen around the country.

We had a case in Washington in the state of Washington.

The governor there outlawed all religious meetings of any sort.

We had to file a lawsuit on behalf of two individuals who simply wanted to get together for a Bible study outdoors with social distancing.

So it's been crazy and it's not over.

Just two weeks ago, the Seventh Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that churches really had no rights against these orders in a pandemic.

Meanwhile, just a few days later, the Fifth Circuit, which is where we are, Federal Court of Appeals, Judge Ho issued an opinion saying exactly the opposite.

Are you kidding me?

He said.

So this is a battle right now for whether the government has control and authority over the church in ways our founders could never even imagine.

But it's not just in the situation, the pandemic.

We've had cases all outside of that.

I mean, just two weeks ago, we had to file a new case on behalf of a woman, an elderly blind woman.

The story that I can tell you about Gail, and I think we have her picture, is that Gail Blair was a woman who was slowly going blind.

And as she realized that, it really brought her to think about what was really important.

And she realized the most important thing in her life was that people know about Jesus Christ.

And so as she got blind, she has a park across the street.

And she went to that park and she would carry Gospels of John.

And she couldn't tell, she couldn't see anybody, but if she could feel their presence, they came, they sat next to her on the bench.

She would say, Would you like a Gospel of John?

And that's what she did.

Gail has now been banned from the public park and the library because they don't want her handing out a gospel of John.

Now that is a massive violation of the First Amendment.

And she is going to stand up against this.

But these are the kind of things that are happening.

It's not just in the coronavirus, it's happening in all kinds of other ways.

Some of you probably have seen a lot of these cases with Christian businesses.

People trying to run their business according to their faith, trying to be faithful to what God has had them do, and trying to make sure that the way they treat their employees, the policies, the things they do are God honoring.

One of them is a case you might have heard about that we have called Sweet Cakes, Melissa and Aaron Klein.

This is a Christian couple that formed a bakery because Melissa was a good baker, and people started noticing that.

They started wanting more of her baked goods.

And then she she actually was able to open a store.

And one of the things she did is custom wedding cakes for people who wanted those, but she always did them with a biblical flair.

She would want to make sure she did it in a way that was unique and biblical and towards that couple.

And then she had a couple come to her, two women.

They said, We want you to do a cake for our marriage.

And Melissa was very gracious, but said, I'm sorry, I can't do that because of my faith and what uh I believe about marriage, but let me refer you to someone else.

Well, the next thing she knew, the state was coming after her for violation of civil rights laws.

Uh she was fined,$135,000.

Her business was bankrupted, and she was told uh that she could not speak publicly her beliefs about marriage.

Something you can't even imagine in the United States.

Fortunately, she and Aaron have stood their ground.

But it's been tough.

For seven years, their business has been under, they've been being faithful.

You know, they we've been all the way, they're in Oregon.

The system has not been friendly to them.

Bad decisions there.

But we went up to the Supreme Court and they vacated that decision, sent it back down and said, why don't you try this again, this time looking at hostility to religion.

But Aaron and Melissa, they could have moved.

In fact, they've been asked, move to Texas.

We'll buy your baked goods here.

We won't treat you this way.

And they know they could do that.

But they know if they move, they have to drop their case.

And they don't want to do that because they know millions and millions of other believers will be impacted by the freedom that they're hopefully going to win.

So these battles are going on.

It's going on with churches, as I mentioned earlier.

One of our clients uh is Light of the World Church.

This is a story of Paul and Jen Malcolms.

And Paul uh was actually uh in a conference in Ireland when he heard a Native American Indian woman speak, and she said, No one will come to the area where I live and bring Jesus.

And she started weeping.

And at this conference, for some reason in Ireland, Paul couldn't shake this.

God just wouldn't let him shake the image of this woman saying, Nobody will come with Jesus.

So Paul was faithful.

He couldn't help but be faithful.

He brought his wife, his children from Ireland to start a church in a little town called Walt Hill, Nebraska, with an Indian reservation right nearby.

And as a result of his faithfulness, God is changing lives dramatically in that community.

Many people are coming to know the Lord.

People in the Indian reservation, where there's much darkness, drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse, they're coming to know the Lord and their lives are changing.

Ten percent of the city, it's only a city of 700 people.

10% of the city is in the Bible study on Wednesday night.

That's really changing the community.

But as a result, the people who run the city don't like these changes.

So they are attacking this little church.

They're trying to zone them out of the community.

The picture you saw was a broken windshield that we showed you just a minute ago.

That's because they're literally having bricks thrown at their cars on their way into church.

Jen, there's a grocery store just a mile away.

But she can't go to that grocery store to get her groceries because it's not safe for her to be there.

She has to drive 30 minutes away.

So these are cases that are happening in the United States, not in some third world country.

They're happening in here.

As we go into the Fourth of July, even in our military, we've had a lot of cases during the coronavirus pandemic where chaplains have been ordered not to put their prayers or anything else online.

Chaplains who are supposed to be spiritual.

Just this week, the Navy sent out a requirement that no one in the Navy is allowed to attend an indoor religious service.

And it's backed up by a court-martial if you violate this.

However, you're allowed to go and participate in a protest.

You're allowed to have a party in your home with however many people you want.

Needless to say, we are on this already to try to get this rectified.

Probably the most well-known case we have in the military is the case regarding Shields of Strength.

Shields of Strength is a ministry started by Kenny Vaughn.

Kenny is just a wonderful, wonderful Christian guy.

When he was a competing for ski jumping national championships and water skiing, his girlfriend told him, because he used to get nervous, you know, you ought to do some things with scripture verses to help you with your anxiety.

And he started putting things on his arm and things to remind him of scripture, which really made a difference.

That led him to the idea of those who serve us in the military, maybe I could provide something for them.

So he came up with these little dog tags that had scripture verses, like, Be strong and courageous, says the Lord, that said, Do not fear, for I am with you.

And he started making these, and there's there's literally probably not a single unit in any branch of the military where people don't have these.

Because when you're in the military and you're scared, and you need to look down and remind yourself, that's of crucial importance.

I want you to watch this video and then I'll tell you what's happened with this case.

Almost seven weeks ago, an Army Ranger, Captain Russell Ripatoaster, was laid to rest in section 60.

Russell Ripatoaster was distinct in operating Iraqi freedom.

On the back of the doctor from the book of God.

Be strong.

Of good courage.

Be not afraid.

Neither be thou dismayed.

For the Lord of thy God is with me.

And he wanted to know if he could get another thousand of them for Russell to faith.

Just as believe me.

That you're going to live.

And even if you die, you're going to be holding hands with God.

Very good.

That's what it means to me.

And every veteran that I know means the same thing.

When I was in Afghanistan in 2008, we took a mortar attack my very first night there.

I was scared to death.

I found this bookmark in the back of my Bible, and it had a Bible verse on it that talks about I will not fear the terror that strikes by night or the arrow that flies by day.

And I clung to that, and it meant so much to me to have God's word with me at that moment.

You walk into your first combat, you're shot at.

You're scared.

So it angers me to think that some activist group is trying to take that away from me.

When we first heard that there was going to be resistance to what we were doing from the military, it blew my mind because they had so embraced us and they had asked us to do it.

In 2019, Mikey Weinstein and his Military Religious Freedom Foundation sent a letter to the Department of Defense demanding.

That they stop shields of strength from being able to provide this source of hope, inspiration, and encouragement to our service members and veterans.

Maybe they ought to walk a mile in my shoes.

Maybe they should have a child in the military.

And maybe they should lose that child.

Doing the honorably thing, being a hero.

I mean, I gave you the right.

My Marines gave you the right.

The guys under me that died gave you the right to believe what you want to believe.

But I also gave that right to everybody else.

I've wanted every sense, along with the dog tag that was attached to its coffin.

I can barely see the writing anymore.

It's tarnished.

But I know what it says.

I know it says, I will be strong and courageous.

I will not be afraid.

I will not be discouraged.

You have no idea what this little piece of metal is meant to mean.

It's not a piece of metal on a chain.

It's honor and dignity and glory.

We will not stop until Field of Strength is able to continue to provide this source of hope and encouragement to our military.

And if I couldn't have it to remind me of my brother, I don't know what I would do.

Because this is really him.

As you heard, this is a situation where somebody complained and they literally denied the ability of those in the military to have these dog tags, these shields of strength.

That's really intolerable.

We we are in conversations right now with Secretary of Defense, and we're not going to stop until they have the right to have these with them.

So some of you are saying, gosh, you know, 4th of July, I was looking forward to being happy, and I go to church and I get all this depressing news.

So let me let me give you the good news.

The good news is we have a method of dealing with these attacks, and it's not just a theory, it's working.

And it really is the body of Christ method.

And that is if you were to look at nonprofit legal groups that are out there, I don't care what their issue is, whether they're left wing, wing, right wing, whatever, whatever their issue, same model.

Raise as much money as you can, use that money to hire as many attorneys as you can, put them in an office in DC, LA, New York, somewhere, and then fly around the country and cover as many of those issues as you can.

That is not our model.

Our model is there's all these believers who went to law school because they wanted to stand for what was right.

Thirty years later, these are the best litigators of the best law firms in the country, in fact, in the world.

And they've done honorable work for their clients, but they've never gotten to do a case for the kingdom.

And we go and we sit down with those best of the best and we say, look, if we give you everything you need, are you willing to give your time on one of these cases?

And they're like, man, I've been waiting 35 years, sign me up.

We know what's going to happen when we give them that first case.

For the first time in their life, all their talent, all their gifts, all their training, everything they've learned is lined up with their faith and their love for the Lord.

It's kind of unfair, but we now know we have them for the rest of their lives as one of our volunteer attorneys.

And they give cover as the big partner to the younger attorneys who then get to be involved in the case as well.

And so if you were to go through the top 100 law firms in the United States, you'd find that most of those firms don't just donate their time with us, they'll fight each other over who gets to donate their time.

And the purpose of this was really, my purpose originally was we could get a lot more bang for our buck.

And sure enough, average case, every$10,000 we spend, we get$60,000 donated by these attorneys.

So it's an incredible multiplication of God's resources for his kingdom.

But what I didn't count on was the win-loss ratio.

And that is, if you watch the nonprofit legal groups, they're fighting huge monsters.

They're fighting the government, they're fighting major industry, whatever.

Their win rate, if they're really good, maybe their win rate is 40%.

Our win rate now, for 20 years in a row, every year has been above 90%.

And that's because of God's grace, but it's also because this is his method.

His people are representing his people to set precedence for his people.

This is the body of Christ helping each other exactly like we should.

You know what?

When we have a case in Montana, our attorney is from the biggest law firm in Montana, one of the best lawyers in Montana.

When they go in and they see the judge, they grew up together.

That's a huge advantage.

Only the body of Christ could be everywhere across the country with all the best people with the best talent ready to give of themselves.

So we should win these cases.

We have the best lawyers, they're in these local communities, and this country was built on religious freedom.

So we should win the cases, and we are.

And normally I would say, that's the good news, and I would be done.

But I've got even greater news.

Something, I've been doing this for 30 years, and over the past year or so I started saying, you know what, I think something huge is happening right now.

I think God is doing something I never thought imaginable.

I can't say that anymore.

Uh He is, there's no doubt about it.

He's changing history when it comes to religious freedom in this country.

What do I mean?

Well, let's start with judges.

Uh, you know, we don't care who's in office politically, we're not a political group.

We just push for religious freedom with whoever's there.

And so when this new administration came in, one of the things we noticed were there were 132 federal judicial seats open, which is very unusual.

And we immediately felt called by the Lord, if you want to have impact, make sure and put strong people of faith who are going to protect religious freedom in those positions.

And we started working on that.

And I'm telling you, I have never seen anything like it.

It's never happened, like what we're seeing happen.

And again, a lot of people know things like the Supreme Court, like Justice Kavanaugh.

Did you know Justice Kavanaugh donated his time with me 20 years ago as a young attorney on religious freedoms cases?

He's a person who's cared about religious freedom his whole life.

I have no doubt about where he'll be on that.

But I'm not talking about the Supreme Court.

I'm talking about all the lower courts.

You know, there's been 200 judges confirmed so far.

And what I'm telling you is it is the system has been flooded with people who could sit in the pews of this church, with strong believers who love Scripture, who love the Lord, and who are brilliant attorneys, and who are young.

Remember, I told you earlier about that uh judge, Justin Walker in Louisville, who issued that great decision on religious freedom for the church, the shot heard around the world?

He's 38 years old.

Well, just a week or so ago, we got him confirmed to the Federal Court of Appeals in D.C., the most powerful federal court of appeals in the country for the rest of his life.

Again, he's 38.

I just I don't know how to get this across to you to let you know.

The future is set in major ways.

This is gonna be decades to come.

My children, my grandchildren, my grandchildren's children are gonna walk into court, and these are the judges they're gonna have.

So God is moving something, He's changing something here, and this is leading to the change in how the cases are being handled.

There are two religion clauses.

There's the free exercise clause and the establishment clause.

Both of those clauses have major decisions that have caused tremendous damage to religious freedom over the past 50 years.

If you would have asked me four years ago, do you have any chance to get those taken out?

I would have said, not in my lifetime.

But now I'm watching it happen.

Uh take the free exercise clause.

The bad case there is called the Smith decision.

Well, we have a case, the Coach Kennedy case.

You probably heard about Coach Kennedy.

Coach Kennedy was in the Marines, got out of the Marines, and saw that movie facing the Giants, and just convicted him that after every game he was going to go a knee and say a prayer.

And so that's what that's what he did.

Until they said, if you go to a knee again, we're gonna fire you.

All he wanted to do is pray for his players after the game when they go to the center of the field.

And so they said, They're gonna fire you.

He said, I made a pro pledge to God.

So he went to a knee and they fired him.

And we filed a lawsuit.

And he lives in the Ninth Circuit, which is very hostile to this type of thing.

And the Ninth Circuit rule, coaches are not allowed to pray in public if anyone can see them.

Which is not the law, but that's what they'd like to make the law.

So we went to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court only takes less than 1% of the request.

On all the rest, they just say cert denied, and it's over.

So we were praying, Lord, I know the odds are against us, but don't give us a cert denied.

And then we got cert denied.

And we were like, oh no.

And then somebody said, Wait, there's something attached to the opinion of cert denied.

Usually it's just cert denied.

There was a four justices, that's all it takes to take a case, said, This is only cert denial for now.

Go back down, there's some facts we want you to look at.

And then they added this to the end.

They said, by the way, we noticed that the first claim to reach us here was a free speech claim, not a free exercise claim.

Maybe that's because of the Smith decision that has caused so much damage to religious freedom over the past 30 years.

But we haven't been asked to review that decision yet.

Not a subtle hint that we are in the process, maybe, of blowing up this bad precedent that has caused so much damage to religious freedom for 30 years.

The establishment clause is the other one.

That clause says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

I think most of us know that means the founders didn't want there to be a national church that we all had to support and therefore took away our religious freedom.

But 50 years ago, in a case called Lemon, the court uh in a time when uh the 60s and early 70s, when things were very liberalized, they decided to reinterpret the establishment clause.

And in Lemon they said, no, no, no.

It means much more than not establishing a national church.

It means separation of church and state.

It means uh offended observer status, meaning if you're offended, you can now bring lawsuits, which normally you can't do, but only in the area of religion, if you're offended by religion, you can bring lawsuits.

And it's led to, you've seen it our whole lives, attacks on nativity scenes in public, attacks on uh Ten Commandments, attacks on a cross or menorah.

These are things the founders would be shocked by.

But that has been the law because of this case.

Well, we had a case, the Bladensburg Cross case.

You probably heard about this case, but it involves a memorial that was put up almost a hundred years ago by mothers who lost their sons in World War I.

And the American Legion helped put it up.

And it was sat there for many years.

And then a lawsuit was brought by the American humanists saying, you can't have this memorial because it's a cross and it's on government property.

And at the Federal Court of Appeals, one of the judges said, I kid you not, why don't we just cut the arms off the cross?

That way people won't be offended and we won't have to destroy it.

Well, needless to say, they ruled wrongly.

They ruled it was unconstitutional after a hundred years this cross.

And so we went to the Supreme Court.

And we could have gone for just a victory for this cross, but we realized, you know, there's been a change with the judges.

We think we might have five votes now to overturn a lemon.

And so we made that argument.

And the result of the case was a seven to two victory at the Supreme Court upholding that cross, but even more importantly, five to four.

We're not following a lemon.

I want you to understand what that means.

For 50 years we've gone in this direction of hostility to religion.

The court just turned.

We are now going a different direction.

Everything is changing.

Now we still have to build this out, but I'm telling you, we just history just shifted on its axis.

God is moving things in a different direction.

Now, you might say, well, why is this happening?

Well, you know, I would love to tell you it's because we're great attorneys, really smart, and these things.

No, this is the hand of God.

And I could tell you this for a lot of different reasons.

Let's just get take the example of the Bladesburg case.

Uh, in this case, three weeks before our old argument, a new movie was released called They Shall Not Grow Old.

I don't know if you saw this.

First time in the history of our country, a World War I documentary that brought to color and video and adding together things that had never been done, the most brutal war we've ever seen.

And it's powerful in its impact.

Peter Jackson, the famous director, was the one who led that.

And three, you might say, how did you get this powerful, sympathetic movie released three weeks before your oral argument on a monument that was up to remember 49 young men who died in World War I?

What an incredible feat to fertilize the ground, to soften the ground.

You must have a great relationship with Peter Jackson.

Of course I don't.

You'll never be able to convince me anything other than God released that three weeks before this crucial case.

And two weeks before the case, I was having lunch with our lead counsel who was going to argue the case.

He said, You know Chief Justice Roberts is our swing boat.

And I said, Yeah.

He said, Did you know that 30 years ago that we made the same argument to get rid of Lemon and that the Justice Department filed a brief agreeing with us?

I said, Yeah, I was aware of that.

He said, Do you know who the author of that brief was?

I said, No.

He said, a young attorney by the name of John Roberts.

Thirty years before we even started this case, God was already preparing the swing justice and understanding the issue so that we could overturn this horrible precedent.

There's no question who is behind what is happening.

It's the hand of God.

So I hope you understand what I'm trying to describe to you.

In the midst of all the chaos you're watching in the country right now, God is doing something incredibly good.

Every American in my life, if you think of all the Americans, I really believe this.

Every American is about to have more religious freedom than they've ever had in their entire lifetime.

And I think we're just at the beginning of this.

This is unbelievable news.

Again, open our eyes to what God is doing.

But the problem is that then requires us to respond to that.

What is God having us to do with this?

Well, number one, I sure hope you'll pray.

I sure hope you'll pray for what God is doing.

I hope you'll pray for people, you know, like Gail Blair, the blind woman we're representing, you know, who are standing all alone in these situations.

Number two, I hope you'll educate other people about their freedoms.

When people know they have freedoms, they're much more emboldened with their faith and walking out and doing what God's calling them to do.

Now, if you're not getting this information, I'd love for you to be a part.

We're building an army of people who care about religious freedom.

I've got a slide you can look at.

You can just text the word liberty to 474747.

And you'll get a deal you can fill out, and you can get this information so you can know about these cases to pray for, so you can get information and educate others about their freedoms.

But I think the really big point of what God is doing in this country is how are we, if we're being given more freedom, what are we going to do with it?

What is our responsibility?

What is God calling us to do?

We're going to pray about that here in just a minute.

But I want you to not be intimidated by that.

Don't make it more complicated.

Roberts laid out lots of ideas on, I mean, can you invite somebody to church?

Of course you can.

Can you invite them to watch the service online?

Of course you can't.

What about when you're out eating dinner with your family and you're about to pray?

Can you ask the waiter or waitress, hey, is there something we can pray for you about?

There's lots of things like that.

I was just at a church not too long ago, not far from here, and I didn't even propose this.

But as we were praying and people were praying what they should do, two of the people, the associate pastor and another, decided they were going to run for office.

One of them is now a state representative, and the other is on the city council.

So I don't know what God's going to call you to do.

But don't allow yourself to be intimidated.

Sometimes we think, well, what impact am I going to have?

That's such a lie.

Remember Paul and Jen, and I told you at that church that came all the way from Ireland.

And you might think it's already great what they're doing, all the lives they're saving, all the community they're saving.

But God even had a bigger plan.

People from the Indian reservation are now coming to the Lord and they're saying, we want you to commission us because we want to be missionaries to all the other Indian reservations around the country.

And this is becoming a breeding ground, a training ground for God to take the gospel into all of the Native American Indian reservations.

God's got great plans for you.

We just need to be obedient with what He's asking us to do.

So if you join me with prayer right now, let's pray for that.

Father, we just thank you that we live in a country where we are free.

And we thank you that you are even broadening that freedom.

Father, we want to be faithful.

Can you put in each of our minds and our hearts and our soul right now what you want us to do?

Even if it's a little thing, what actions, what people are you bringing to our mind?

What places that we visit each day, each week, where we can bring Jesus more effectively?

Would you show us?

Would you lead us?

We want to be obedient to you, and we are just so thankful for what you are doing.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Thank you for the privilege of letting me be with you.

God bless you.