Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the WallBuilders Show. Short on time, so we're gonna jump right in. We're picking up where we left off yesterday with David Barton at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. 

David Barton [00:00:16] Pilgrims, when they did their code of 1650, they they quoted specifically from Exodus 15, where the man stealing was a criminal offense. It was a capital offense in the Bible in Exodus, part of the the code that Moses had. So man stealing was out, and they talk about that, what what this means. And today that would be human trafficking. Now, back in the slave trade back then, between 1501 and 1876, 375 years is 12.7 million slaves involuntarily taken out of Africa and moved elsewhere in the world. 12.7 million. Today, with 198 nations or 193 nations at the UN, there are 94 nations today that still have not criminalized slavery. Slavery is still legal in 94 nations. There are currently 40 million slaves in the world right now. So we have three times more slaves this year than in 375 years the African slave trade. Where's the noise about that? Who's who's talking about slavery now in the world? So we had sermons on on slavery back then. This is marriage scripturally considered a sermon. This is 1837. The New Hampshire legislature passed a law on marriage, looked at it, said, okay, this is a good law. It lines up with what the Bible says on marriage. Here's called the higher law, the fugitive slave bill, a sermon, duties owed to God and the governments. You know, the scriptures talk about a fugitive slave. What happens if a slave escapes that you don't go bring him back into bondage? And so it's interesting that when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in eighteen fifty, and in my opinion, that is the most wicked federal law that's ever been passed in the history of the United States. People say, Oh no, no, Roe v. Wade. No, no, it wasn't a federal law. That was a court decision. As far as federal laws go, I think that's the worst federal law ever been passed with the Fugitive Slave Law. Said if you escape into freedom, we're going to chase you down anywhere you go and drag you back into slave. If you make a free state like Massachusetts, we're going to drag you right back into Alabama or wherever it was. And so that violates all the stuff on the scriptures. That was the the the law. Interesting. You see what it says, the higher law. I have a stack of these sermons preached in eighteen fifty, eighteen fifty-one, and they're calling on people in churches to disobey the federal law. They say if you obey that federal law, you're disobeying what God says to do. And you have to choose to obey God rather than men. So calling for widespread civil disobedience out of the pulpit because the policy just passed violates what the Bible teaches on that specific issue. So all sorts of sermons on social policy. Here's a sermon on elections. We covered that a regular part. It goes back to Exodus 1821, the first choosing out of leaders. We have sermons like this, a voice of warning to Christians on the ensuing election of President of the United States. We covered elections and candidates and looked at candidates and talked about what they believed and didn't believe and how that lined up biblically. We did the same thing with a s sermon on government. This is a sermon preached in front of John Hancock, the governor of Massachusetts, Sam Adams, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and the legislature of Massachusetts started in 1633 until about 1900, states opened their state legislative session by having a minister come in and give ideas on what the Bible said about public policy, things to look at, things to do. And so we had sermons from government. There's so many point two, but again, this is out of the Great Awakenings, the first, second, third grade. See, this is the type of stuff that's being done to train people on the right way to think. And that's why you see the culture change. It's because we're getting lined up with biblical thinking. And that hasn't been an emphasis since maybe 1870. So the first thing involves personal biblical discipleship. The second thing is it becomes applied to public living. And this is in your wheelhouse. This is where you are. You guys are gonna I think as a result of what's going on now, you're gonna have opportunities to deal with things you have never dealt with before. And I think that's gonna be really good because we're gonna have opportunities to do some things that haven't been touched probably in a hundred and fifty years in some areas or or some types of things. So going in the scriptures real quick, everything you see on the screen in front of you, I put it up there because the Bible addresses those things. Everyone of those things are addressed by the scriptures. So this is the type of stuff that we were thinking at the time. We know that God's the wisest, the greatest, the smartest. He's not one of us. We're not a little one of Him. He is God, and He is wise, and doing it His way always works 100% of the time. And so trying to get that understood and and back into thinking is key. And so that that goes back to biblical thinking. I mentioned the pilgrims. You'll always find them a Bible in their paintings pretty much. That was what they were centered around. They were called the people of the book. I mean, literally, you see that every one of them's got a Bible. And that's different from the Jamestown calling others. When you look at the pilgrims, these items, they're the first to institute elective government, Exodus 1821. They're the first to introduce the free enterprise system nearly a thousand years, at least in a government setting. There were five Bible verses they pointed to. They were the first to create private property in this continent. They would not take any land from the Indians unless they had a title deed to it. And for generations they made that their policy. And the longest lasting treaty in American history between Native Americans and Anglos was with the pilgrims, the treaty they had, because they would not take land that they didn't have a title deed to, and they purchased it at an agreeable price. Both sides agreed on it. Civil civil rights, the same thing. They're the first ones to pass a law against the slave trade, executing. I think it was Exodus 15, is what they cited. I forget the verse on that. Manstealing is what it was called. And so they passed the law against that. The same with education. They passed the first education law in America, 1643, then again 1647. They started the public school system. They're the ones who instituted due process, the witch trial for going, and three ministers came and said, No, you're doing what Europe's doing. Here's what the Bible says, and that's where we got the right to confront your accusers and all those things I mentioned before. The pilgrims or the Puritans instituted that in the midst of those witch trials, which is why their witch trials only went for eighteen months when the witch trials from the rest of the world went for almost two centuries. So we participated in some bad stuff, but we got out of it faster than everybody else did, because we had people who pointed to the scriptures. So public policy And this is where over the last weeks, I spend a lot of time talking to groups of Christian ministers and leaders, pastors, trying to help them understand public policy, understand what you guys do and how they need to help in that area. And one of the things I point to is the book of Genesis. Genesis, I think is appropriately called the seed plot of the Bible. Everything we believe as Christians has its origins in the book of Genesis. I mean, that's you go back and you look Genesis, you know, God's three institutions that we point to typically. You have back in Genesis one, two, three, God makes man, God makes woman, they have children. That's the institution of the family. That's a God ordained institution. He introduced that. We defend the family, we fight for the family. That's a God ordained institution. Then after they have more kids, Cain kills Abel, and the whole world just spirals down and it gets worse. And it's like God says, Oh, let's just wipe them out and start again. We have the flood, and God selects Noah and his family, but everybody else wiped out. So as Noah is getting off the ark in Genesis 9:6, it's interesting. God says to him, Noah, whosoever sheds man's blood, by man will his blood be shed. Oh, that's capital punishment. We're not going to have this stuff we just had. Not anymore. This is the institution of civil government. The Noahic Laws, seven categories of and by the way, my rabbi is here tonight, Rabbi Lapin. Every Christian needs a rabbi. That's my rabbi. So you need to know more about the Noahic laws, ask Rabbi Lapin. But that's the first civil code that we have in in the Bible, and that's where we get the institution of civil government. The third institution that we point to is that of the church. Last part of Genesis, early part of Exodus, God says I want my people coming together, congregation, I want them here at the tabernacle. And so that's that joint kind of worship stuff. And those are the three institutions that God ordains all the way back in Genesis. And it's interesting that for the last hundred and fifty years, Christians have been told, Oh, we don't get involved in government. Why would God create an institution that tell us people to stay out of it? That makes absolutely no sense. But that's what's happened over the last hundred and fifty years. And so as a result, we have a lot of two-thirds Christians in America today. And there's a whole lot, and that's part of why we're having revivals without reformations,  without enlightenment, without the the awakenings. So, going back, it's significant that when you look at just those two institutions, you look at government and church, there's no question that government shapes culture. There is no question that is not debatable. Laws have an impact. And there's also no question that government shapes culture more than the church does. You doubt that, just look at the last hundred and fifty years and see which side one, the revival side or the government side. So it shapes much more than the culture does. So if you change the heart and don't change the culture, you'll end up losing both of them. And that's what's happened. We've had a lot of people who have professed faith come to faith. And then the culture is so bad that as I pointed out, about 80% of Christian kids now leave the faith when they get to university because it's such a hostile place to be. And so if you try to change the heart and stop there and don't change the culture, you'll lose both of them. So those three institutions, we're encouraging pastors, you gotta get involved. You gotta be a three-thirds Christian. There's no basis for you staying out of politics, staying out of government. You've got to get your congregations involved. You guys, it would be such easier for y'all that to to be able to do things if I'm the case. So the scriptures become applied to public life. That becomes significant. Now, the question we've got. That America's gonna have to deal with now is do we want a revival or an awakening? And hopefully we choose an awakening. Now, I don't think most people know what that is yet, but a great awakening, as you've seen, impacts the culture. And closing down, I want to give you some insight into a great awakening. You're probably not gonna like what I'm gonna tell you here. I'm gonna do it anyway. George Whitfield, first Great Awakening, he's probably the most notable name in that period of time. He's the most notable preacher in all that he did there. He preached from 1730 to 1770. Over that period of time, he had thirty four years that he preached here in America. Now, he did 18,000 sermons here in America. Another sixteen thousand sermons in England. So the dude preached thirty-four thousand sermons in thirty-four years. That's a thousand sermons a year. That means he's preaching about three times a day. If you can imagine that. That's tough. And he wasn't in the same city all the time. He moved from city to city to city. And that's why eighty percent of all Americans physically heard George Whitfield preach a sermon back then. Now you think about the 13 colonies. You're going from Georgia up to Massachusetts, and 80% of all Americans, no no technology, no mass media. 80% of all Americans heard him preach a sermon. How is that possible? Because of what he did. He traveled on horseback. You see, he was he literally was the the chaplain down in in he's the official chaplain in Georgia. So he got on his horse in Georgia and he rode all the way to Maine, and Maine was a colony within Massachusetts, but that's as far as you can go, Northern America. So he took his horse and he rode all the way up to Maine and he carried this portable pulpit with him on his horse. And so he would stop in towns and sit it up and preach a sermon, get on his horse, go to the next town. So when he got to Maine, he turned around and rode back to Georgia, but he took a different route. So he's hitting different towns. Then when he got to Georgia, he turned around and rode back to Maine and took a different route. He did that seven times. He covered America on horseback seven times. That's why eighty percent of of people physically heard him preach a sermon. Now, he had a lot of opposition. And as far as we can see, all of that opposition came from the religious community. Now here's a religious guy with opposition from the religious community and it reminds me a whole lot of Moses. Forty years with the children of Israel. He only fought the Egyptians one time. He fought his own people for forty years. I mean, that's and that was the story. Is is so often you get frustrated at what your own people do to you. And that's what we see. That's just the nature of religious people, quite frankly. I have a friend when I helped run the Texas State Party here for nine years, just one of the two leaders in Texas Party. And I had a friend who reminded me of Noah. He's from Arkansas and he joking about things. He said, you know, he said he said, Noah and all that he had to face with the flood and everything else, he this is just his country way of saying it. Noah wasn't nearly as concerned with the floods on the outside of the Ark as she was with all the woodpeckers on the inside of the Ark. And it's like, yeah, that's right. You know, a lot of times our grief comes from those around us rather than outside. And so going back to Whitfield, what we know about Whitfield we have records that pastors would tell their people, Whitfield is coming to town. Go get in a tree over him and pee on him and defecate on him while he's preaching. Hit him with cabbages, hit him with stones, hit him with potatoes, throw hurt him. This is pastors telling their parishioners because they didn't like what Woodfield was doing because they're the ones in charge and whatever. What I learned in politics is I learned I have to wear a flack jacket. But I always wear it to the back because it's a friendly fire that kills you. It's not it's not the opposition. You know, I expect the Democrats, the Liberals, progressives to do what they do. It's all the it's like the Judases, you know, with the Jesus people among you. So my axiom I had in politics was I don't need enemies, I got friends. And that's essentially how things go. So understand this is what he faced when he was in the midst of a great awakening revival. So to think that having a great awakening or revival is a smooth sailing time and finally we get unity, nope. It's just pretty much the opposite. It's when you get opposition, but that's when you can start making progress on some of the best policies and start putting things institutionalizing good things so that we don't have to go through this every twenty or thirty years with another diminishing of culture where we go from sexual revolution to a gender revolution to whatever it's going to be next. 

Rick Green [00:15:24] Quick break, everybody, we'll be right back. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:16:34] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show, jumping right back in with David Barton's conclusion at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. 

David Barton [00:16:39] There's one other sermon I want to point to that he did and I want to show you the impact it had. It was called his Father Abraham Sermon. The sermon is talked about specifically by Ben Franklin, by Thomas Jefferson, by John Adams, 'cause they heard Whitfield preach like most other Americans heard him preach. And there was a particular sermon that he loved to preach. Franklin says, I remember when he would raise his hands up with this black robe and and what he would say. And so what Whitfield, is a founder of the Methodist Church. He and the Wesleys founded the Methodist Church. And so Woodfield said, I had he would tell the crowd, he he said, I had a dream last night. He said, Well, asleep, I had a dream. I had a dream that I died. And I had a dream that I went to heaven. And when I got to heaven, he said, Father Abraham was there to meet me at at the gates of heaven. And when I got there, I was so excited. I said, Father Abraham, I can't wait to meet all my Methodist brethren here. I'm so sorry. There's no Methodist here. There's no Methodist here? Well, I've got a lot of congregational friends. I can't wait. Sorry, no Congregationalists made it. No congregation. And he went through all the denominations. And he said, Well, then who's here? And that's when he said, Father Abraham quoted, and this is out of Acts 10:35. He said, The only ones here are he that feareth God and worketh righteousness shall be accepted of him. It's like we don't care about labels. In heaven, labels don't make a whit of difference. Do you fear God? Do you work righteousness or accepted by him? And that was what he preached all over the United States. That's what the founding fathers heard. Now that's a fun sermon. It's a good sermon. It's it's a lot that can be helpful there. And for 40 years he preached that Father Abraham sermon. Well, he dies in seventeen seventy. In seventeen seventy-four, the first continental congress gathers together. John Adams recorded what they did, and he wrote eleven hundred and seventy-three letters to Abigail, his wife. And in talking about that, he wrote her about that Congress. And he said when they first met, and you gotta understand that that first Congress and they got together, most of the guys did not know each other. America was thirteen different nations then. We were not a nation with thirteen states. A lot of the states didn't even like each other. It's a lot like Europe is today. Try to get Poland to do something with France that ain't gonna happen. Poland insists on God being part of everything, and France says God's gonna be part of nothing. So they have real problems between those two nations. And it was that way in America with the 13 colonies. And so the guys from Georgia really didn't know the guys from Massachusetts and the guys from New York weren't really familiar with the guys from Virginia. And so they didn't know each other as founding fathers. They were there from the 13 colonies. And so John Adams says, when the Congress first met, Mr. Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts first made a motion that it should be opened with prayer. He said, but that motion was opposed by Mr. John Jay of New York and Mr. John Rutledge of South Carolina. Now, both of those guys are extremely religious guys. So you've had a motion that we should open Congress with prayer. And two very John Jay, he's a founder of the American Bible Society. I mean, he is a Dutch Reformed guy. He's really strong. And he said, absolutely not. We're we're not going to open this as prayer. And he said he explained. He said, it was opposed to Mr. John Jay of New York and Mr. John Rutlers of South Carolina because we were so divided in religious sentiments. Some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians, some congregations that we could not join in the same act of worship. There's no way we can get all these different groups that pray together. He then talked about Sam Adams. He said, at that point, Mr. Sam Adams arose and said that he was no bigot, and he could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue who was at the same time a friend to his country. That's a reference back to the Father Abraham sermon. It's not the groups that you hang with that matter. It's there's bigger things at stake here. And so this is the painting that was done that depicted what happened at that point in time. Now, to go back, this is John Adams who's describing all this to Abigail. And this is this guy right there is Cushing. He's the guy who made the motion that that we should open with prayer. And John Jay and Rutledge oppose that. You see John Jay there. And so over here, you've got Sam Adams, and Sam Adams is the guy who said, I don't care. Let any guy anybody who fears God, let him pray. Now, the reason that's significant is Sam Adams was known as a strict Puritan. If there is one group the Puritans disliked, it was the Anglicans. And Sam Adams is the guy who said, let's look at this Anglican preacher and the pre to do over here. So they invited Reverend Jacob Duchess, who came in with his pontificals and all the formal regalia that goes with that. And Sam Adams is the guy that invited him. And Sam Adams is the guy that should oppose him the most historically. But Sam, as long as you fear God, go ahead. Come on. We we've got bigger things to fight about here than just that. And so that was that was what broke things down with the founding fathers to where they started cooperating as a result of what Sam Adams did. They had a two-hour prayer session. They studied four chapters of the Bible together that morning in Congress. Things went totally different. They they became a unified 13 nations into one nation at that point. And so that's the fight you're gonna have. I think I think we're in a great awakening right now. And that means a lot of opposition. It's a lot of opposition from those who ought to be our friends. Don't worry about it. Blow it off. There's bigger things to do. Be Sam Adams, keep moving forward. We've got things we've got to get done, and we've got better things to do than than fight each other. And that's what the founding fathers learned. So that's gonna be part of what happens here. It's gonna be part of every one of us. It always goes in politics. But again, choice is do we want a a revival or a great awakening? We want a great awakening because that's what will impact the culture. That's what will make a difference. And I think that we're at that point now. Hopefully we'll live to see all that. My message to pastors, hopefully that will support you, is based on Charles Finney. I'll close with this. Charles Finney was in the second he was in the third grade awakening. Charles Finney, by the way, in 1792, Charles Finney wants to be an attorney. So he goes to law school. And in law school, he testifies that as he was reading the law books in America, when he read the law, he gave the Bible verse on which the law was based. And in the process of reading his law books, he read so much of the Bible that it he became a minister instead of an attorney. Now, try that in a law school today and see how that works out. But that's what happened back then. So he becomes one of the greatest ministers in that period. The second, third great awakening time is when he's there. He starts Oberlin College. I would never recommend Oberlin College to anybody today, maybe the worst college everywhere. But at that point in time, you could not be a student of his at Oberlin College. And by the way, his college was the first one to take blacks and whites and men and women and educate all of them, all youth. And he didn't care if you fear God, if you'll live with standards, but you could not be at his college unless you actively participated in civil disobedience against the federal government on the Underground Railroad. See, the fugitive slave law had been passed, and if fugitive slave law if you're a kid at this college, you're going to be part of the Underground Railroad, because that fugitive slave law is really bad. So he is actively engaged in political stuff, good side. Opposing bad stuff. And he wrote a book in 1835 on how to have revivals. He's one of the greatest revivalists. It's estimated that in one year, 1857, 1858, he led a hundred thousand people to become Christians in just one year himself. So he's very active, but he's very active in anti-slavery policy as well. And in talking about how to have revival, this is what he said. He said "the church must take right ground in regard to politics. Politics are part of religion. The country is this, and Christians must do their duty to the country as part of their duty to God." He said, "God will bless or curse this nation according to the course that Christians take in politics." Now it's interesting. The title of that chapter was called Hindrances to Revival. He said, If you were on if you want to goof something up spiritually, just tell Christians not to get involved and stay out of politics, which is what we've been doing for all these years. What I'm doing now with the group called Faith Wins and others is we're doing one to three pastors conferences a day when we're out traveling, and it's about this message. You've got to get behind your legislators, you gotta get some help. And some of these guys are gonna be real pains for you, I'll tell you. You know how it is with constituents and and you get more people involved, you get more mess involved. What the Bible says where the oxen are, the stall's not clean. It's true.  You got messes to clean up, but oxen is where you have productivity as well. You don't want an empty stall. You get nothing produced from an empty stall. So messes go with production moving forward. And so closing down, I think we're at a real significant point in America. I think we're at a place where we haven't been in 150 years. I think this time we will make the right decision to do some policy things and shift the culture in America, not just have a spiritual renewal, but have a cultural renewal where we get back to being able to see some things differently. That's part of what we'll cover in this conference is giving you some opportunities to see some things that are new, some ideas that are new, and maybe you want to apply them, you'll have to look and see. We'll certainly see some courageous people across the country doing some great things. 

Rick Green [00:26:16] All right, everybody, if you joined us in the middle of today's program or towards the end, you can actually go to our website, wallbuilders.show, and catch not only all of today's program, but yesterday and the day before, because it's a three-part series to get this full presentation from David Barton that he just gave a week ago. What a great update on where we are as a nation and what what we need to be doing going forward as people that understand the times and know what to do. All of that is available at wallbuilders.show. Have a great weekend. Thanks so much for listening to the WallBuilders Show.