Saving a Nation: full transcript and answers

▶ 0:00 Everything written in the Bible was written for us to learn by. So Old Testament Scriptures are very important to us. All the Scriptures are important to us. And to remind you of this, Romans 15:4 says, “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope.” So everything in the Bible is for us to go back and learn by. When God dealt with a nation, or a nation fell, or whatever, we need to learn why they did that and how to turn it around.

▶ 0:45 1 Corinthians 10:11 says, “All these things happened.” Now, not like Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, who says these were allegories, fictitious stories, myths, okay? That’s what Schuler [unclear] also taught, that the Bible was just a bunch of allegories and myths. But it says here, all these things, what? They occurred, okay? They weren’t myths, they weren’t dreams, they weren’t fantasies. They were actually things that occurred to them for examples, and written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the earth are come. And we know that the end of the world started when Jesus died on the cross and ascended back into heaven and started his church. We’re in the last days of God’s calendar. We don’t know how many years that’s going to be, but we’re in the ends, and this is for our learning. You got it?

▶ 1:56 Now, there are people that say the Old Testament Scriptures are outdated, you know, it doesn’t work. They’re not reading their Bible. You learn tremendous things from the whole book, all the Scriptures, all right? And then 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture” — how many? All of them — “is profitable for reproof, correction, instruction in” what? Righteousness. It’s righteousness that’s the focus, folks. I keep telling you that, all right? “That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all” what? Good works.

▶ 2:32 So we’re supposed to do what? Good works. These people that say, “It’s not by works, no matter what you do, if you believe in Christ you’re going” — no. The focus of the Bible is to turn you from bad works to good works. And this is one of the important things that the baptism of the Holy Ghost does: the Holy Spirit turns you to good works. And we need that baptism of the Holy Spirit.

▶ 3:03 Now remember, everybody knows that America is not the nation it was sixty years ago. All you’ve got to do is read history. I happen to have lived through it. We showed you how we got to where we are at. Conservatives and fundamentalists versus liberal Christians has been since the early 1800s. Liberal and conservative economics has been since the early 1800s. And Republicans versus Democrats has been since the early 1800s. This is not a new thing, and you young people need to know that these terminologies are not a new thing for your generation. We have been struggling with these issues since our nation basically started. Amen?

▶ 3:59 Now, we reminded you that in 1927 the conservatives and fundamentalists dropped out of political involvement until the ’60s and ’70s, when they were taking our religious liberties away. And then they bowed out again because of the media pressure of standing up for Bible morality. Our leaders at that time, including Jerry Falwell and Robinson [unclear] of the 700 Club and all that, and Buchanan — they all, when the pressure came on, they dropped out. I lived through it. Phyllis Schlafly is about the only one left, Eagle Forum, that hung in there, and she’s a Catholic.

▶ 4:50 We showed you that that left politics to the liberal churches, the socialists, the liberal economic people, and they had no opposition to making civil laws for decades. And I want to remind you that a person can be liberal in social issues and conservative in economic issues. They can be conservative in Bible issues and liberal in economic and social issues. It can be a mixture. Are you there?

▶ 5:35 And so, see, America needs to understand these things. The American church, as I showed you, has the pivoting power. The believers in America can turn an election any way we choose, because we are the majority. I showed you that. But to do that, we’ve got to inform these believers. You’ve got to get informed. You’ve got to learn more than, you know, salvation and going to heaven and the second coming. Can I hear an amen? We’ve got to learn the whole gospel of God.

▶ 6:13 Entitlements, we told you, started when Roosevelt started the New Deal. And Roosevelt himself said this: up to this time the family was a firm, like a law firm, a self-supporting group. The family took care of family. But see, when this Depression came along — I showed you pictures — people were out of work. Families couldn’t take care of families anymore. Many families could not take care of their families anymore. And Roosevelt came in with the New Deal, and he gave stimulus to people, gave aid to people, and so forth. And the poor people, of course, they turned Democratic and voted that way because they needed to survive.

▶ 7:09 Amen. The problem was it never got removed. It kept growing, even when our economy was great. And these entitlements were expected. It was a right: “It’s my right as an American to get these things.” And then it robbed the families of being a self-supporting entity for each family member’s success. See, and folks, in the Bible the family is still a high priority, and they are held accountable to take care of family members in the Bible.

▶ 7:50 But we’re going to look now in the Scriptures at how to turn a nation back to God. All right, it starts with the church. We’re going to go to Judges chapters 17 and 18 and find an illustration there of a condition that brought destruction. And here’s what we’re going to find: they’re going to reject Jesus and the Scriptures ruling over them. All right, this is what they did. We’re going to see they’re going to reject God ruling over them — Jesus Christ and his Word, the Scriptures.

▶ 8:32 Judges 17:5-6. Micah was an Ephraimite, and he had a house of gods. He had his church in his home, all right? And he made an ephod like the real priest in the temple, with the shoulder stones with the tribe names on them, and the cloth and all that. And he had a teraphim — that is household gods. He made his own little images and idols, all right? And he consecrated one of his sons to be his priest. Isn’t that nice? He paid his son to preach what he wanted him to preach. Are you there? See, an Ephraimite could not be a priest, but it didn’t matter, you see, because there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes. That’s why. And is that America? Absolutely.

▶ 9:35 Now, in the Bible, government — a king, a leader — was instituted to go to war, to unite the people, to protect from invaders and other nations that would come in and take what they had, and to see that justice was done in court. That’s what the leader was for. And they were given the authority to take taxes to support themselves to do this job. That’s the three areas: taxes, judicial, and war. But there was no king; there was no government. Actually, God wanted to rule over them through his Scriptures, through the Levites.

▶ 10:14 But they rejected God. They rejected the Scriptures and did what they wanted to do in their own eyes.

▶ 10:21 In 1 Samuel 8:7, just a few years after this scripture, Samuel was the last judge of ten judges, and God said to Samuel, “They have rejected me that I should not rule over them.” They haven’t rejected you, Samuel; they rejected me. See, the people didn’t want God telling them what to do. Is that America? Yeah. We want to go to heaven. We want his blessings. We want him to prosper us. But we don’t want to do what he tells us to do.

▶ 10:58 Even in the New Testament, in Luke 19:14, the parable of the Lord going off and coming back, his citizens say, “We will not have this man to rule over us.” And that parable was about Jesus Christ. See, people want to go to heaven. People want God’s blessings and God’s approval, but God wants to rule in their life. He wants the Scriptures to rule in their life, and they don’t want it.

▶ 11:35 So it’s not just an Old Testament thing. And this is where we’re at in Judges: the people doing what’s right — they didn’t want God telling them what to do. They’re coming up with their own way of worship, their own religion, and their own home and their own family. And this is the setting.

▶ 11:54 Now, here’s a map of Israel back in the days of the Bible. Here is a city up here. Israel had all this territory here, okay? Laish was right on the border of the kingdoms, the Canaanite kingdoms that God told them to conquer. They were somehow connected with Sidon, over here on the coast, the Phoenician Empire. The Phoenician Empire — God did not give God’s people authority to conquer them, all right? And the book of Judges covers a period of 1400 to 1100 BC. The Phoenicians were not conquered until 351 BC by any other nation, including Israel.

▶ 12:58 All right, but Dan, down here in the southern part of the kingdom by Judah — they decided that their inheritance was too small and they needed more land. Now, the truth is, they hadn’t conquered all of this area. The Amorites had all the valley areas, and the Danites, God’s people, were forced up into the mountains. They were hillbillies like me, all right? The nice bottom land, where the farming and everything was great, the enemy had it. A lot of people think that God’s people conquered Canaan land, and they didn’t. They conquered it, but there were pockets of resistance they didn’t conquer because of their sin, because they didn’t obey God. They didn’t win the full war. That sounds like America. Yeah.

▶ 14:00 And so, because they wouldn’t conquer the people that God gave them, then they went up here to Laish. They went looking for more property, more land. Ephraim is kind of in the middle here, and it’s kind of a big area. This is where Micah is; he’s an Ephraimite. And so they come to Micah’s house and they see his gods and his son as a priest. And by this time Micah has got a wayward Levite — because of money, Micah offered him money to come in and be his priest. This wayward Levite that was supposed to be ministering down here in the temple in Jerusalem said, “Sure, you’re going to pay me? I’ll be what? What do you want me to preach? Oh, you want household gods? Fine, that’s great, hallelujah. Oh, you want an ephod? Oh yeah, it’s great, whatever you want. Yeah, I’ll do it. Give me the bucks.” Are you there?

▶ 14:57 So they picked up this guy’s gods and this guy’s Levite, and they went up to Laish, and they found some people that had this kind of attitude, this kind of lifestyle. The people of Laish dwelt careless. All right, “careless” there in the Hebrew is they felt secure — their feelings.

▶ 15:34 See, when I feel this is okay, I feel I’m going to heaven — sounds like America. Yeah. Going by their feelings, not by Scripture, not by the Lord. They dwelt careless; they dwelt quietly. They were not involved. They’re really libertarians. You know what a libertarian is, don’t you? Yeah. As long as I’m not hurting anybody, I have the freedom to do what I want to do. That’s the libertarian mentality: don’t get involved, don’t stand up for anything. I am an individual, and whatever you want to believe, you believe. And so this is their attitude.

▶ 16:22 All right, they were secure. Now, “secure” and “careless” are very close words, very close in the Hebrew. But this word “secure,” unlike “careless,” they felt secure; this word “secure” is they had self-confidence. Now, you ever seen these football players, before they go to play a game? They get in a huddle and they’re all pumped up. “Man, oh yeah, we’re going to win, we’re going to win, we’re going to win, we’re going to win! If we say it, we’ll get it. If we claim it, we’ll get it. Oh yeah, yeah!” And they hype themselves up psychologically, and they go in there feeling self-confident, and they lose. Somebody’s got to lose. Both teams are doing it, and one of them can’t come off a winner. Sound like the American church? Absolutely. They got personal self-confidence; they psych themselves up.

▶ 17:20 Just like Sidon dwelt — lived this whole Phoenician thing — so they were connected to this Phoenician Empire, but they were on the border, and there was no magistrate, no judge, no government to shame them in anything. You see, this is the libertarian mentality: there’s no central government to deal with anything, everybody was independently, individually doing what they wanted to do.

▶ 17:57 They had no business with anyone. See, our churches in America, in their little corrals, not having any business with the church down the street. Now this word “business” also means “speech.” They never talk to anybody. And that’s the downfall of the church right now: we don’t get out there in public places and speak Bible morality. If we do believe in it, we speak it to ourselves. We preach to the choir, people that already believe what we believe. We keep preaching to each other.

▶ 18:36 This is the condition of the people of Laish. Now, where did it lead? Okay, Dan smote them with the edge of the sword and burnt the city with fire. He came in and destroyed them: one bad group destroying another bad group, doing what’s right in their own eyes. And that’s what’s going to happen to America if we don’t turn things around. Do you see it?

▶ 19:13 Remember, these things were written for us to learn by. They weren’t there for history; they’re for us to learn by. They are history, but they’re recorded for us to learn by.

▶ 19:25 Now, just summarizing again, this illustrates the American church, okay? We have many churches, many groups doing what’s right in their own eyes, hiring and appointing ministers to flatter them, to please them, not God, as it says in Isaiah 30:10: “Speak to us smooth things. Speak to us deceits. Don’t speak to us right things.” And what’s the scripture we read? Profitable for what? Righteousness. Good works. We don’t want to hear about good works. We don’t want to hear about what’s right. We want to hear that we’re okay. And so they give them the money, they get the big fancy houses, they get the cars, they get the fame. They pay ministers to preach what they want to hear.

▶ 20:27 We live careless. We feel it’s okay. I talk to them all the time: “I don’t see nothing wrong with this. I feel this is all right. I feel I’m going to heaven. I have confidence I’m going to heaven.” I witness the people every year, and they mean it. They actually believe they’re going to heaven. They have the emotional carelessness; they have the safety of their self-confidence. Carelessness — and they’re sinning, and doing sins that the Bible says you will go to the lake of fire, with no God-anointed leader to shame them to do right. The pope isn’t doing it. No united moral business with other churches.

▶ 21:12 See, somewhere we’ve got to get fired up. We’ve got to unite with other churches over right issues. Can I hear an amen? Not the wrong issues — the right issues. Making our own gods: all roads lead to the same God. We covered that thoroughly. You know, Muslims are going to heaven, Hindus are going to heaven, everybody’s going to heaven — I don’t know why Jesus ever needed to die on the cross. The liberal churches believe that there is no hell.

▶ 21:51 The result, here in Jeremiah 12:17: “If they will not obey, I will utterly pluck up and destroy that nation.” You want to do what’s right in your own eyes? You believers want to worship God your own way and serve God your own way and do what you want to do? I’m going to destroy you right along with the rest. Are you there?

▶ 22:20 But Jeremiah 18:8: “If that nation I have pronounced destruction turn from their evil ways, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.” This is why we need to get the word out, because he said also, in Isaiah, that he would bring his people, the righteous ones, under his wings. You see? Hallelujah. And he said a thousand may fall at your right hand and ten thousand at your left, but nothing shall touch you. You see, if we get them to embrace Bible morality, it is also an umbrella of protection when God judges. Hallelujah. But if we don’t, we get punished right along with the heathen.

▶ 23:15 I want to give you a couple of quotes from Hitler. 1930: “Our adopted term ‘socialist’ has nothing to do with Marx and socialism. Marx and socialism is anti-property; true socialism is not.” That’s the University of California Press, 1982. 1927, Hitler said: “We are socialists, enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy the capitalistic system under all conditions.” Doubleday, Hitler, Adolf Hitler, 1972.

▶ 24:07 “Scientism is reliance on science for answers, the belief that science alone can explain phenomena” — that is, miracles and other occurrences, any kind of occurrence, as well as natural things. That’s the Bing dictionary. “The only source of genuine factual knowledge is scientism. They alone yield true knowledge about man and society.” The Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1999. See, science has become a religion in America.

▶ 24:43 Opponents, and some believers, attack any church’s moral standards. This is Jeffress [unclear], the pastor of the Baptist church in Dallas, Texas. He had Tim Tebow invited to his church, and Tim Tebow canceled out at the last minute because of homosexual groups — homosexual activist groups — putting the pressure on Tebow not to affiliate with this guy, because he’s against marriage between the same sex. He’s against homosexual acts and adultery and other Bible moral issues. Okay, and so the media really got on that, and they called him a hate preacher.

▶ 25:29 You see, this guy, we agree on the moral issues. But when O’Reilly interviewed him, he said the earth was 12.5 billion years old. He said, us fundamentalists, there’s many fundamentalists that say the earth’s 6,000 years old, and the Bible doesn’t say that. Well, my friend, the Bible doesn’t say it’s 12.6 billion years old either. But you’ve got six twenty-four-hour days, and you add that up — any fourth grader can figure this out. The earth was created in six days, and it started from Adam and his generations down; it’s about 6,000 years old. Are you there?

▶ 26:15 See, he’s caved in to the evolution pressure. So he and I would disagree on that, but that’s not a Bible moral issue, so I could still unite with him. He believes in the pre-tribulation rapture theory. These pre-tribulation rapture theory people can show me no proof in the Bible of a pre-tribulation rapture. They can give me — they have to twist, bend, stretch everything to get it done. There is no statement in the Bible, “I’m coming before the tribulation.” None. In fact, there’s a statement that says, “After the tribulation, I’m coming.” How many of you know that? Anyway, so we disagree on that.

▶ 26:56 But disagreeing on that is not a Bible moral issue. See, it doesn’t hurt anybody. He doesn’t believe in us tongue talkers. I mean, I’m a tongue talker. I got filled with the Holy Ghost, and I spoke in tongues when I got filled with the Holy Ghost. So we disagree. In fact, he thinks tongue talkers are evil people, a cult. But I would unite with this guy any day on Bible morals, amen, because that’s what we unite around.

▶ 27:34 Here are the list of things we do not unite over: fornication, sexual immorality, homosexuality, incest and all that. A believer who wants to say it’s okay — we are not to fellowship with them. Nothing to do with the second coming, nothing to do with a lot of these things that we divide over, how you’re baptized and all that stuff. Greed — not just wanting what somebody has, but doing everything you can to get it. Idolatry.

▶ 28:07 A railer — that is a sharp-tongued person, a person that’s degrading, attacking with their voice. You probably looked at one when you washed this morning in the mirror, putting down everybody else and exalting yourself. I hear it all the time. I hear it every week. I hear a person telling me how bad this other person is, and they are bad themselves and have no intention of changing their badness. “But Pastor, you should really get on this person.” And a lot of times they’re doing exactly what that person is doing. Are you there?

▶ 28:46 See, with our mouth we attack, we destroy. A drunkard — and yet Christians want to drink intoxication, and we know now one shot of whiskey is intoxication. An extortioner — that means you take things by force; you use your title or your position to make people do what you want them to do. With such a one, no, not even to eat. Mark 16:17 [unclear: the passage he reads is Romans 16:17], “Mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you’ve learned, and avoid them.”

▶ 29:23 There’s people that come in — 1 Kings 12:8 — Rehoboam forsook the counsel of the old men, who gave him right counsel, and consulted with the young men that grew up with him, which stood before him, and they gave him bad advice, and he did it. And it did split the nation. It caused a civil war. Are you with me?

▶ 29:49 This video of Obama, I’ve showed it to you before. He’s saying, “My outlook on homosexuality has changed because of my friends and my acquaintances and people on my staff who are raising kids in a homosexual family and doing a good job. These are great people.” So now I am for homosexual marriages, same-sex marriages, and the homosexual lifestyle. Because he said he was against it when he ran for president, in 2007 or ’08, and right — but see, he listened to [unclear], and he says he’s a Christian, and he says he believes the Bible. Now, does this action tell you he believes the Bible? Does it tell you he’s a real Christian? No. A Christian is one that follows Christ.

▶ 30:45 See, it’s just another example that we are like the tribe of Dan: we got God, but we do it any way we want. And this kind of stuff is going to destroy our nation. That’s the bottom line.

▶ 31:13 But if we can get the message out, and the word will work — remember, the Bible says the word will not return what? Void. But it will be profitable and to the purpose that I have purposed it. But it’s the word. It’s not the Catholics, it’s not the Protestants, it’s not the Jews; it’s the word that’s got to get out. And we need to really get a hold of God and get organized and get a desire and a drive in our hearts to get the word out.

▶ 31:45 For too long the church has been in its four walls, worshiping and praying, and not outside the walls telling the people that are believing wrong that they are wrong. Not in that way, but just by speaking what’s right, by speaking the word. Don’t go up and say, “You’re wrong.” You speak the word, and the word convicts and convinces people. The word does it. You don’t have to force them. The word will do the job.

▶ 32:22 So we saw the start of the turning of a nation starts with who? The church. We’ve got to turn around, and we’ve got to help others turn around.