Rick Green [00:00:11] Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It's WallBuilders Live, where we're talking about today's hottest topics on policy, faith, the culture, always looking at things from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. We need that right now in our culture and you can help spread the truth. You can help get this out there in the culture by going to wallbuilderslive.com sharing the links to today's program, frankly, all week, all of the programs this week, we've been bringing you this great presentation. David Barton did on running to the roar. We're going to jump back into that today. And then we'll get the final conclusion tomorrow. So let's jump right back into David Barton on running to the roar. 

David Barton [00:00:49] We get so much national news that our focus is looking at the national level. So we look at things that happen, for example, in Washington, DC, at the federal level, we look, we'd look at what's going on with the Capitol, the laws that are being passed or the decisions of the Supreme court, or we look at the president, what the president's doing and it's very easy to get paralyzed because nearly none of us can do anything to make that different. I know lots of members of Congress. I know hundreds of state legislators. And as well as I know them, as good a relationship as we have, I can't call Congress and say, that's a silly law, pass a different one. That's not going to happen. Don't call the white house and say you know, you shouldn't assign that one. Let's do it differently. I can get the Supreme court and say oh, that was a really bad decision. Let's make that different. We can't do that as citizens. So what happens is we feel paralyzed because we keep seeing the national news. We see all this stuff happening. There's nothing we're able to do about it. And so we kind of feel like it's checked out. There's just nothing we can do. Let me take you back to the start of the country. Back to the American war for independence, often called the American Revolution. When you look at that, consider what happened with the first four battles of the American War for Independence. Now you have the battle of Lexington, the battle North Bridget Concord, the 19 mile running battle on the road to Boston, and then the battle at Bunker Hill. You look at these battles and with all of these battles that occurred, if you look in those battles for anyone trying to contact the national commander in chief and set. Mr. Commander in chief over all the military, we've got a battle here in our community. We need you to come in and fix our battle. Wasn't what happened. They didn't put a call into the national command center and say, send us troops. They all said, it's our community will take care of what goes on in our community and a great example is when you look at what happened with the battle of Lexington and the battle Lexington right here, 700 British came to town. There were 70 Americans that went out there to meet them. They were all Americans out of one church. Reverend Jonas Clark, it was his church that went out and said, no, no, this is our community. We're not going to let this happen in our community, we're going to stand against what's happening here. So that was the first battle of the American war for independence was a church going out, the community and the church going out and facing what was happening. The second battle was what happened at North Bridget Concord. Just a few hours later as those same 700 British went on to the next town. When they got there, they were again met by the local community. Reverend William Emerson, 300 guys out there saying, no, not going to do this here in Concord. And at that point, the British said, you know, this is not really going the right direction. I mean, we had 70 Americans. Now we've got 300. There's only 700 of us that this keeps going, not the right direction. So they decide they need to go back to Boston, get reinforcements. So they turn around and go back. It's a 19 mile march back to Boston, the road to Boston. And all along the way, there were about 4,500 Americans lining both sides of the road as they were going by and shooting back and forth the British are shooting at Americans. We're returning fire. Where does 4,500 come from? Well, so many of them came from churches. Reverend Benjamin Balsh or Payson Phillips, Reverend Payson Phillips, they got their church and said, hey, it's our community. We're not going to let this go on in our community. And the same with the Battle of Bunker Hill, another local battle, and you had Reverend Joseph Willard, who took two companies out of his church and said, let's go over. This is our community, we got to be part of the battle. So the whole thing that you see in those early battles was we were focused on actually winning, but we were winning by winning local battles. We had national victories. There were times when George Washington had to bring the Continental Army in there. There were battles like at Yorktown and there were battles at Monmouth and Brandywine elsewhere. Although even those battles involved lots of the local community stepping in, the community didn't get this involved looking for a national solution. They said, it's our community. We're going to take care of this. And if we get some help, that's great. So we won a national victory by winning local battles all over the battlefields. I mean, the Battle of Kings Mountain, the battle of the southern part of the United States and the northern part and the central part, it was community stepping up to defend their community. So what you learn is this is really a local focus. We think of it as a national war for independence, which it was, but we won it because we were winning the local battles. So too much of our thinking is a national thinking. We think from the top down. No, no, you get healthy from the bottom up, not from the Top down. And it's interesting that that same pattern follows revivals. As you look at revivals, they're just the same. They occur locally as well. Let's go back to revival. Let's get back to something like the first great awakening with George Whitfield. When you look at the Reverend George Whitfield in the first great awakening, Reverend George Whitfield had 34 years of preaching in that great awakening. He preached about 18,000 sermons over that period of time. And over those 34 years preaching those 18,00 sermons, 80% of all Americans physically heard him preach a sermon. Now think of that 80% of Americans in that day with no technology to speak of, they heard him preach. What does that mean? Well, it doesn't mean he was having huge massive crusades where the 250,000 people would show up and he would speak to them. That meant he was going community to community to community. I'm in this town. I've got 300 people here. I got 50 here. I got 2000 here. I got 8,000 here. I got 750. He's going town to town, to town to town, the town across America. And that's where the revival came. There were so many local communities that revival. It produced a national revival and you get a lot of that also with the other figures who are there. We think of George Whitefield as a national figure and we rightfully look at him and study him, but we often overlook Reverend Samuel Cooper, who was doing so much of this up in the Boston area. That was his community and he is focused on that and really had spiritual renewal there. You have the same thing when you look at someone like Gilbert Tennant there in the Pennsylvania area around Philadelphia. What he's doing there in spiritual renewal is significant. The same thing with Samuel Davies down in the rural valleys of Virginia. I mean, these were significant guys, significant revivals. It was all part of the national revival. We too often look at George Whitefield as if he did the whole thing and that's just not the way it occurred. We had revivals going to city after city, community after community, region after region all across the nation. We had a national revival because it was really local revivals that occurred locally. So the obsession with national focus is something we have to set aside as we look at how do we handle revivals. It's not going to be from the top down. It's going to from the bottom up. It'll be community by community by community, which means we need to put a lot of focus on our own communities. We need to know what's happening in our own communities, whether it be school boards or city councils or water utility districts or whatever it is. We need be looking at what's going on in our local community because the more local communities that we can get healthy. The more we have a national movement. So that's the first thing is we have to get off that national focus. The second thing all deals with the concept that we have today of bigger is better. And we believe this in so many areas. We believe it, for example, in the area of business. We got all these big box stores. No more mom and pop shops. The more national change we have, the greater it is for us. We do the same thing with education. We have some universities that now have over 100,000 students in the university. Many have over 50,000. You don't get much individual attention then, but bigger is better. And so, wow, look how big this university is. We have the same thing with government. We keep increasing government. We seem to like bigger government because we keep making it bigger and bigger, doing more things in our lives. And we have the same even with the church. And it's interesting to see how the church is now thinking that bigger is better. If you look across the nation today, there's about 384,000 churches, senior pastors in America and polling done by individuals like George Barna national pollster, well-known pollster calling several hundred a day. What he's found is. There's about 72% of churches a day who say they disagree with major fundamental, pretty basic teachings of the Bible. They just don't agree with those. And so what you find is there's about 28% or about 107,000 pastors that do agree with fundamental teachings of the Bible, they think the Bible is the guidebook for life. So this is a group that are called theologically conservative pastors. Now in this group that uses the Bible for its guide. Asking that group, pastor, how do you know if your church is successful? It's interesting to see the top five answers that theologically conservative pastors gave about whether their church is successful. How do you measure success? Number one answer is by the number of attendees that come to my church. The number two answer is, by the size of the offerings, how big the offerings are. Number three answer is by how much square footage is in use. Number four is by the number of programs that we offer at the church. And number five is by the number of staff that we have. Now if you notice every one of those five things all is about bigger. 

Rick Green [00:09:32] Alrights friends, quick break. We're listening to David Barton's presentation just a couple of days ago and we will pick up where we left off before this break. So stay with us. You're listening to WallBuilders Live.  Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. We're going to dive right back in. Here's David Barton on Running to the Roar. 

David Barton [00:10:58] Bigger numbers, bigger offerings, bigger amount of square footage, bigger amount of staff, bigger everything. And so this concept of bigger is better. Even think about the number one answer, the number of attendees. Let's take mega churches. We have seen in America over recent years an explosion in the number of mega churches. Now, overall Christianity in America is declining in the last 20 or so years, the number of Americans who profess Christianity has fallen by almost 20 points. But in that same period of time, mega churches are just blowing up all over the nation. The number of mega churches is now up in the thousands. And so because of the phenomenon we have that bigger is better, even in the church, if you took a pastor of a country church that had 20 or 30 or 40 people, he's faithfully served there. It's a small community. There's not many that live there. He's been their pastor. And you suddenly say, pastor, we've chosen you to head a mega church of 70,000 individuals. Everybody say that's success. No, maybe success is dealing with that small community and being faithful to those who really need someone there. But we measure success by the number that we have, the number in attendance or the number of square footage and the number staff or whatever. We even do that as we think about, if you will, missionary work or revival crusades. We love big crusades and big revivals. If we took ten thousand dollars out of the church budget and gave it to someone to go have a crusade in some foreign nation. And they spent that ten thousand dollars there and only five people showed up. We thought that was a waste of time and money. How do you know it was? What if one of those five people who showed up had a dramatic change and go on to change the world? See, we're into numbers and it's the quantity rather than the quality we're now looking at. And so as you back up to even Jesus, we know that Jesus had really large crowds. We're told there were times that he would feed five thousand men with baskets of food. And when you add in the women and children, you're probably talking about a crowd 25, 30,000 somewhere and with a much smaller population they had back then. That's a massive crowd in that day. But those crowds are not what changed the world. What changed the world are the 12 guys that he spent the time with. Those disciples or the apostles, we call them. That quality of time that he put into that smaller group is what made the difference in the long run. Not all the people that showed up to hear him speak and to be at service. Not that we think that's a bad deal. We don't. But we think it's significant that you plant time and invest time into individuals. And so as you look at that, what happens is when you have a crowd, you don't think about it being my responsibility to do something. When there's 70,000 in the building, somebody is going to do that. When there is 10 in the building, I better do something about it. So when we think in terms of bigger numbers, it takes the responsibility off the individuals. And that's not the right direction to go. So when you look at world population, roughly about 7.5 billion is the population today. When you look at the demographics of what their religious affiliations are, you have about 32% that profess to be Christian. You have about 21% that professed to be Muslim. You have 14% saying Hindu and about 7% saying the Buddhist. So by far, Christianity is far and away the number one religion in the world today. Now, 200 years ago it was reversed on those top two. Christianity was well below Islam. So there's been a lot of progress from the Christian standpoint of spreading out and being able to reach more people and have more people come to Christ and know about the Christian faith. So when you look at what happens here, we are so serious in America about getting people brought to a knowledge of Christ in the Bible and Christianity that we literally hire professionals to do this on a full time basis. And so we have whether it be pastors or missionaries or evangelists, we put our money into putting people out there on a whole time basis and it's an interesting thing that we've been doing this for 2000 years. We've really turned into a professional mindset in the last few centuries. That wasn't the way it always was back in the beginning. And you look at what's happened. It's significant because in 2000 years we've now reached one third of the world, essentially. Consider something else. What if you took the Great Commission, which is every one of us should reach someone else? That's what Jesus told all the disciples gathered around him as he was ascending back into heaven. He says, hey, go make disciples of all men. You need to find someone and teach them and disciple them. And if we took that seriously and said, you know, I'm going to find someone and teach and disciple them, consider what would happen if we take this of 32% of the world currently being Christian. And let's just assume they're all Christians. Probably not all of them are biblical, but let's just make the assumption they are that they're all Christians, they're all serious about their faith. If you take that and say, okay, if every one of that 32% just reaches one person next year, I don't have to be big numbers. I just got to reach one person at the end of only one year. 64% of the world would be Christian at the end of only two years. The entire world when we Christian in just two years, if everybody just took a little piece of the responsibility, if everybody just said, hey, I'm only going to reach one person. I can't do a crusade. I can reach 10,000 people. I am not Billy Graham. That's all right. You be you. You go find one person if we did that. We could change the whole world in two years versus 2000 years. This is the mindset of getting down to the local level again. So when there's a crowd there, it shifts the responsibility. We don't think about what we need to do. We think about somebody ought to do this and we wait for somebody to do it or we pay professionals to do it. So what you see in these two mindsets is we have to get back to thinking individually and acting locally. Those two things we have to think individually, think locally, act individually, act locally. These are really important things. Now let's go back to the six characteristics that are part of revival. As you look at those six characteristics, the first one is just what we were talking about here. It requires individual and local action. So got that down. If you want a revival, look locally, not nationally. Second thing is with the revival, it's all about discipleship. Every one of the revivals that we see in American history was about discipleship, but literally was about the Great Commission. Just before Jesus ascended back in heaven in Matthew 28, 18 to 20, he looks at that group gathered around talking to all of his disciples and He doesn't have a church there, and those aren't professional pastors. These are the guys been following him from tax collectors to political zealots to to fishermen. He said, you guys right here. He says, very simply, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. He says therefore you guys go and make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. Now that's the Great Commission. But what's happened in America since about the 1920s through the 1960s time frame, we started changing the meaning of that verse. Not that we didn't buy into it. We did, but we just interpreted differently and we took that to be a command for evangelism. Go get everyone brought to a knowledge of Jesus or as Jesus says, unless you be born again, you can't end with the Kingdom of Heaven. Get them born again. Or as we see in Act 16, get them saved is the term that Paul used. Evangelism, that's what we've done. And that's good. I mean, we're told all the way back in Proverbs, he that wins souls is wise. This is a good thing to do. But that's not what that verse is. That verse says what you need to do is teach them everything I have taught you, not just a sinner's prayer, not just how to become a Christian, but how to live the life. And that is more about discipleship. That's why he said go make disciples. 

Rick Green [00:18:26] Our friends, sorry to interrupt once again as David's given his presentation, but we've got to take a quick break. Stay with us. You're listening to Wall Builders Live. 

Rick Green [00:20:41] Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us here on WallBuilders Live final segment of the day. We're not going to get all of David's presentation in. In fact, today is the second part in a three part series. So we'll get the rest tomorrow, but let's dive back in where we left off before the break. 

David Barton [00:20:52] That was the call was to make disciples, not just converse, make disciples. That's a step further than going into just converts. And so if we were to teach them everything that he taught his disciples, let me take you back to just a few Bible verses as an example. If we go back into Jesus's teachings in Matthew 19, we see Jesus covering no fault divorce and the definition of marriage. Now we as individuals should be saying, you know, the Bible allows for divorce and these specific occasions. That's why America had what was called fault divorce. We had divorced in America, but it had to be one of the biblical reasons, about half dozen reasons. 1968 America went to no fault divorce. The result of that by all statistical indications is we started breaking up the family. We started losing that cohesiveness of the nuclear family and the societal impact has been dramatic and it has grown just exponentially over recent decades as we've broken up the family. How about, let's teach everybody about when Jesus said about no fault divorce, you need to stay connected. It's a lifelong union between a man and a woman. That's what he told disciples as you read that passage and he said, and here's what a marriage is, by the way, it is a lifelong union between a man, and a woman. Four times in the Bible, we know that's the definition he uses and that's also where you find something about gender as well. So we could teach that. Another thing that he taught his disciples was out of Luke 19. If you look at the parables Jesus uses so often he says the kingdom of heaven is just like. So what he does is he chooses something that's going on around them that they all identify and he says that's what the kingdom of heaven is like. The kingdom of heaven is just like what you see going here. So when you pay attention to the parables he chooses, he's saying what you're seeing around you right here, this is the way that heaven works as well. So when you look in Luke 19 and by the way, so many of the parables deal with economic principles. In other words, he uses economic institutions. He uses economics to teach things about the kingdom of heaven. He talks here about how you reward profit makers. If someone makes more profit, you don't penalize them. You don't take away that profit. If they're good and productive, you give them more. You give them the benefits. You reward them for making profits. So much of our tax code today goes exactly the opposite way. Oh, you're making more? We've got to take more from you. Oh, and in business we call that a capital gains tax. Mr. Businessman, we need a greater capital gains tax because you're making a profit. We need to take that away from you Jesus said, no, the way the kingdom of heaven works is the more you make, the more you're going to get. Not the more taken away. So let's talk about economic principles like that, because he said the kingdom of heaven is just like what happens here. And the same way, when you look at Matthew 20 talks about what we'd call opposition to the minimum wage. He talks about how that every employer has a right to go negotiate a contract with an employee at the rate that they both agree on. Nobody says, Mr. Employer, you have to pay this much because this is the minimum wage. No, if someone wants to work for less than that or he wants to pay more than that, that's between the two of them. And that's why you have the inviolability of employer-employee contracts. That's another teaching that Jesus gives. You also find in John 8, the right of legal confrontation. Now, specifically John 8-12, this is a book known as Federal Practice and Procedure. If you practice law in the federal courts, this is the way you do it. This is the practice and procedure in the Federal Courts. Now, this set of books goes way out this way and way out this way. This is volume number 30. And Federal Practice and Procedure. And if you get in here, it's talking about the due process clauses in the Bill of Rights, the American Constitution. The Bill of rights is the first through the 10th Amendment. And Amendments 4 through 6 go in and talk about criminal justice and due process rights is what they're called. And it specifically talks about how that what we did in America, we took from Jesus here in John 8, the right of legal confrontation. In other words, when someone brings an accusation against you, we don't just take what they say. We say, what's the other side of the story? And that goes back to a teaching Jesus had in a legal situation at the time. So you find even that the Bible addresses legal issues. And by the way, as you go through about the 20 or 30 pages in this book, they go through Bible verse after Bible verse after Bible verse that helped shape the American due process system. So it was very practical what we did and looking. And so these are all teachings that Jesus had. If we were to teach discipleship, we would be teaching serious things about how to live out our life. And because we're into discipleship. The outcome of that is very practical. And that's the third point that has always gone with revivals. We're we own a number of original sermons. In fact, on our website at wellbuilders.com, there's about 260 older sermons that are up on the website. You can read the old sermons and as you read the sermons out of the great awakenings in America, you find out that they are very, very practical. It was about how to apply your faith in a daily setting, whether it be with business or whether it be with benevolence or whether it be what with relationships with others or whether it be a criminal justice or whatever is with they were very practical sermons because Jesus gave teachings that were very practical. 

Rick Green [00:25:55] Alright friends, that is the conclusion of our program for today, but not the conclusion to David Barton's presentation on Run to the Roar. We're out of time for today. So we'll pick up the rest of that presentation tomorrow. Hope that you have enjoyed today's program. We sure appreciate you listening and we appreciate your donations. Go to wellbuilderslive.com today and make those donations that allows us to amplify this voice of truth here on the program and then also spread the good news. Get the links from the program and share that with your friends and family on whatever social media you still have access to. If you haven't been silenced yet, but wherever you can get the news out there, share with your friends and family. Thanks so much for listening today. You've been listening to WallBuilders Live.