Intercessor, were you at our 50th Anniversary event? If not, you may have missed this excellent speech from Eric Metaxas!

Let the IFA community know how to pray for you.

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At our 50th Anniversary Shaping History Gala, Metaxas spoke about the power of the Church. He discussed the plight facing the American Church today, likening it to the rising evil that faced the German Church in the 1930s. You can view this excellent speech in the webcast embedded below:

Metaxas is clear: True Christian faith requires action, especially action that is taken against the prevailing evil of the day. To claim otherwise is to dispute the faith modeled and taught by Jesus Christ Himself. The question is, what will you do? How will you respond in the face of evil?

Metaxas ended his speech with a challenge to the intercessors in attendance. The Lord, he said, is saying that “this is the hour of the American Church.” If we choose to be complacent, things will get much worse. But if we opt to stand on the side of righteousness, “we will see revival and reformation, and things we have never dreamt of.” Will the Church be the Church in this moment?

The Lord leaves the choice up to us. Metaxas claimed that “we would be crazy to not obey the Lord.” So, intercessor, what will you do? Will you stand against evil today?

Share this article with your fellow intercessors to encourage them to stand.

We have included the unedited transcript of Metaxas’ speech below.

The title of my talk today, this title was given to me, was The Power of the Church. And when you’re talking about something like that, some of you know that I wrote the book Letter to the American Church, and I want to tell you bluntly, I know the Lord called me to write that book. It was not an idea, it was not a career move. It was not, “I have got a great idea for a book.” Sometimes, you know, all of my books, honestly, I believe the Lord led me to write them, but I’ve never, ever felt anything like this book ever. And I wrote it out of obedience, quite frankly. And I knew the Lord’s hand was on it for many reasons I won’t get into, but it will soon be turned into a film to a documentary film. It’ll be available in January. And what could be better than watching that film with some consumer goods and some chips? We’re all gonna have a good time. I’m gonna keep milking that throughout the program. I just want to say I like that idea.

The book Letter to the American Church the reason I wrote it, some of you are familiar with the concept, right? Is that basically a number of years ago, I know the lord created me to write that Bonhoeffer book. Like I know that. My mother with whom I spoke earlier today grew up in Nazi Germany. Okay. And my father grew up in Greece, you know, after the war, and went through the hell of the war, as my mother went through the hell of the war in Germany. My dad’s 96. Uh, I speak to him about every day. And they lived through that hell. And I think many Americans have been so blessed, we haven’t lived through much hell. And that’s bad. Because if you don’t live through hell, you kind of forget that there’s such a thing as hell. And you begin to forget such a thing as satanic evil. Because you think, well, things are pretty good around here. We’re doing okay. Maybe my 401K is down a little bit. We forget that there is evil. So when you hear Chad Robichaux just share a little bit of what he shared, the church needs to wake up.

Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save you from a little marital trouble. He died to save us from death and hell. And because we in America have forgotten about satanic evil, the Lord in his mercy is giving us a little taste right now of things to wake up the church. This is God’s mercy to the church of Jesus Christ that we are seeing the things we’ve seen in the last three years.

This is God’s mercy. This is Romans 8:28 all these things will work together for good because the Lord in his mercy Just as with with our own children You know sometimes you need to get tough with them because you love them Because you don’t want them to go down the path that you see them going and the American Church like the German Church in the 30s has been so spoiled and blessed and fat and complacent that we have drifted and drifted and drifted.

We took our eye off the ball. We actually, many of us, got this bad idea in our heads that the church was something we do on Sunday mornings, a thing I do. And, uh, I’m a Christian because I believe this and this and this and this. Well, the devil doesn’t have any evidence that you believe it unless you are living it out.

And if you live it out, Now, I, I hope I don’t have to tell you like, oh, we’re not saved by works. No, we’re not saved by works, but the scripture says faith without works is dead. So, how many Christians do we know who are deluded into thinking that they are saved? You’re not saved because there’s no works, you’re not living it out.

You bought into this enlightenment rationalist idea that I, I believe that, that, that, that, that. Believe me, God knows you don’t really believe that because if you actually believe it, you’re going to live it. And to live it… Is to live it in a way where what you just heard Chad Robichaux say, is it worth it?

You’re not asking, is it worth it? You’re not asking, what do I get back? You’re just saying that Jesus died for me, and I need to die to self for him now and forever. Or, or, I actually don’t believe he died for me, which means I’m not saved, which means I’m going to hell. Should, would the church think about that?

We gotta think about, when we save the church, When we say the church, we know we’re talking about a holy remnant that actually lived this way. And it is the job of the holy remnant to awaken those who are not yet awakened and to say, you’re in danger of hell fire. And you know what? I hope the Lord in his mercy doesn’t send you to hell, but I’ll tell you what.

If you think, because you have some intellectual theological ideas that you’re a Christian, that’s not biblical. That is not biblical. And so the German church in the 30s was basically there. The German church in the 30s basically said, we’re Lutherans. We gave the world Luther. So… It’s as good as it gets.

We’re a Christian nation, and if I’m a Lutheran, by the way, I’m saved by grace, so I don’t need to do anything, and we’re all good. And when evil came, they did not understand that it was their job to stand against it. They didn’t understand. They had this theological idea, I don’t need to do anything, I just need to believe.

Well, again, the Lord is not convinced you believe anything if you’re not living it out. And the devil loves you to be deceived into thinking that you believe stuff, when he knows you don’t, because he sees your life. And so the church in Germany was so complacent, and again, many good Christians, I’m talking about wicked Christians, I’m talking about good Christians believed this.

And so when evil came in Germany, they had been brainwashed into thinking, I don’t need to do anything about it, or into thinking that, Oh, Romans 13, I’m not supposed to be political. Ladies and gentlemen, you know, you know where bad theology comes from? Yeah. I don’t have a lot of time. So I’ll just say the pit of hell that is Satan’s theology.

That is Satan’s view of the church is that you would just say, we’re not supposed to do anything, just be theological. We’re just supposed to be pietists. We’re only supposed to pray. We’re not supposed to be involved or get active or not. We’re not supposed to live our faith out in every sphere. And that is not biblical.

And if it’s not biblical, it is satanic. And that’s exactly what the devil wants is for the church to have Satan’s view of the church as their view of the church. So we don’t need to do anything that affects. Our life out there. We’re just gonna live our life in that building on Sunday morning for a couple hours.

We’re gonna have nice church service, and then we’re gonna go out there. And I’ll tell you, uh, you know, if you live in China today, the Chinese communist government, the atheist communist government that butchers young people for their organs. That is evil, satanically evil. They will let you have that kind of church in China.

They’re not threatened by it. It’s like you go into that building, you do your little weird ritual on Sunday morning, and then when you come out, you bow to the secular authority of the state. The Church of Jesus Christ does not do that. The Church of Jesus Christ takes the church out of the building and says, I am the church, and I will live out my faith in every single sphere, and you can’t stop me.

Because I have this crazy idea that Jesus defeated death. Even if you kill me, you can’t kill me. We need to know that that is true. Not to hope, say that’s a nice idea, to know that’s true. Because if you don’t know that’s true, you cannot live out your faith the way the Lord would call you to live it out.

When we talk about Bonhoeffer, people say, oh, he was so brave. I don’t think he was brave at all. I think he actually believed Jesus defeated death on the cross. He actually knew that was true. He actually knew the scripture was true. He didn’t need to work it up. If you know, that’s true. You live differently.

And there are many in the church today who don’t get that. They don’t live that way. They think, you know, that’s for radical people in other countries where they might kill you for your faith here. You know, I just, we just don’t need to do that. We’ve kind of evolved past evil in America. Well, that’s why the German church failed.

in their hour. That’s why Bonhoeffer, he was a prophetic voice trying to wake up the church, trying to say to the German church, Hey church, this is it. This is it. Now you must stand now against evil. As though you actually believe all that stuff. And they gave all the reasons for not doing it that we’re hearing many American Christian leaders give today.

The same reasons, exactly. Pious, religious reasons. Um, Romans 13, that’s real clear. We’re not supposed to, you know, do anything against the government. You know, if they tell you to shut down, shut down. If they tell you to get a vaccine, get the vaccine. Like, you just do whatever the government tells you.

It’s biblical. It’s kind of not biblical, actually. Right? Uh, maybe they never read the book of Esther. I believe that’s part of the canon. Uh, I believe there’s many things that… Thank you. I believe there’s many things in scripture that say, No, you don’t do that. You die before you disobey God and the German church forgot that and Bonhoeffer tried to wake them up and they dithered and dithered and gave their religious excuses that kind of religiosity again to be clear is from the pit of hell.

That kind of religiosity is what nailed Jesus to the cross. The religious leaders were unbelievably religious, and Jesus condemned them in ways that winsome Christians today don’t use that language. Because they’re holier than Jesus, mark it down. They’re way holier than Jesus, yeah. We have forgotten about evil. We have forgotten about satanic evil.

We’re supposed to be wise as serpents, not wise as doves. Right? But I think that there are many in the church today that don’t understand that. And so, we have the example, and, you know, the Bonhoeffer story is, it’s the story of someone who tried to wake up the church and say, Church, if you don’t stand now, we’re gonna, we’re gonna lose it.

And I always think of the image of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians, right? I was an English major, so I read that book. Gulliver being tied up by the Lilliputians. Gulliver is huge compared to them. And they’re tying him down by, with a little twine, right? But he’s sleeping. He’s sleeping. If the church is asleep, keep sleeping, keep sleeping, the, the, the secular…

atheistic, satanic authorities, they want you to keep sleeping, church, keep sleeping, and they’re gonna tie you down and tie you down. That’s exactly what Hitler did to the church in Germany. He convinced them, just keep sleeping, I’m not gonna do anything, take it easy. He was not gonna declare himself, cause he was wise as a serpent.

And, the fact of the matter is, the church naively continued to sleep, and Bonhoeffer said, church, you need to wake up, if you don’t wake up, it’s gonna be over, it’s gonna be over, and so you think of that image of Gulliver, if he had woken up at any point, He would have just ripped up those steaks and crushed the Lilliputians, but if he kept sleeping, at some point, it’s game over.

At some point, he wakes up, and he can’t move. That is what happened to the church in Germany. Bonhoeffer tried to wake the church up before that, and obviously, the church would not hear what he had to say. They said, he’s a hothead. He wants to get political. We just want to preach the gospel. I don’t know what dead Useless, satanic gospel.

You’re preaching in your church, if there were Jews being taken to Treblinka and Auschwitz, little children being taken to these places to be murdered, and you think you’re preaching the gospel. But that’s the history of the religious church. We had those churches in slavery times. I don’t want to get political, I don’t want to talk about, you know, there’s good people on both sides of the slavery issue.

The church is called to every one of these issues. And, and if people say you’re being political, that’s just the devil trying to shut up the voice of God. Which he speaks through his church. And so, this lie, that you’re, don’t be divisive, don’t be political, you know, we’re not in it to win it. I hope you didn’t read Andy Stanley’s horrible book.

Um, but I mean, there are many people that are convinced that, that’s not my job, I’m not supposed to go, just do a nice church service, you know, Jesus doesn’t draw lines, he draws circles, he invites people in, he doesn’t build walls, you know, he wouldn’t do that. Nehemiah would do that, right? Well, thank you.

I appreciate that guy. I don’t know who he is, but I really appreciate it. Thank you for encouraging me. The Lord’s using you. Um, so, we have… We had a church in Germany that believed, like, we’re not supposed to be divisive, we’re not supposed to wade into those waters, right? We’re not supposed to, well, again, that’s not biblical.

You’re supposed to take your faith everywhere. And if somebody says, oh yeah, you’re being political, tell them, excuse me, shut up. Because I am doing the Lord’s will. And when Christians get political, and they get involved in culture and in everything, guess what happens? People get blessed. Slavery gets abolished.

Some of you know this story, uh, Of William Wilberforce, my Wilberforce book, I saw it out there. And by the way, I’ll be signing books till midnight in case you’re interested because I want to meet everybody. But honestly, the story of Wilberforce is the story of a politician. He didn’t say, oh, gotta get into politics.

No, no, no. John Newton, who was a minister, said to him, you stay in politics. The Lord called you as a Christian in that sphere. And what happens when Christians get involved in things like politics? Slavery gets abolished. The poor get fed. Good things happen when Christians bring their values into the public sphere.

And when we don’t, bad things happen. And so Bonhoeffer tried to wake up the church, and we know what happened. They didn’t hear it. Eventually it was game over for the German church. When they woke up, finally many of them did, it was too late. It was too late. And satanic evil was unleashed on Europe, and on the Jews, and on the world.

And I really believe we are there now. And when people say, oh, if I was alive in Bonhoeffer’s day, if I was alive in Wilberforce’s day, I would have been right there. Yeah. Are you there now? Are you speaking against all these things now? If you’re not speaking against these things now, now by the way, you might be speaking against it, but if you’re going to a church, or tithing to a church, or giving five cents to a church, that it’s not a wake to this issue, I would get out of that church a week ago.

I would, you know, there’s always a chance that you could give the pastor a letter to the American Church and they will kind of say, oh, I didn’t, you know, that has happened, okay. But I’ll tell you folks, the hour is far later than you think. It is far later than you think. If we understood how late the hour was, I don’t think we would spend five minutes wasting our time in a church that is not awake to this issue.

Because Jesus cursed the fig tree. He didn’t mince words. He cursed the fig tree because it did not bear fruit. And I believe those churches that are not awake to all of these things, these evils that have arisen, I can hardly mention them. It’s no different than the German churches that were just saying, well, we just want to do church while the Jews are being taken to the death camps.

Or even if it wasn’t at that point, the point is that it was going to get there soon because of the silence of these churches. Because churches want a little pious, little church service. And God will judge that. God is a judge. He expects us to do exactly what Chad was saying. You do everything you can.

You risk your life because he gave his life for you. And by the way, folks, that’s the only way to live. That’s the only way you could live freely and joyfully, is that way. Abraham Kuyper, the famous Dutch theologian, some of you know the quote. Chuck Colson, my hero, used to say it in almost every speech. He said, there’s not one square inch in all of creation over which Jesus Christ, who is sovereign, does not say, mine.

We’re to take our faith into every single sphere. And just as the German church was silent and inactive as the evils rose, Bonhoeffer tried to convince them, first of all, that The church has the power, the power in the culture to stand against these evils. This is, this is not a fool’s errand. We’re not tilting at windmills.

We are called by God to do that, to stand. And by the way, even in the natural, it makes sense. It’s not just some crazy thing. If the church would be the church and stand, if they had done that in Bonhoeffer’s day, the Nazis would not have been able to do what they did. And I will say the same thing about the church in America.

The evils we see rising around us, which are real evils, which wake us up, uh, are waking us up that we say, well, you know what? I didn’t think this could happen here. Did any of us dream that we could actually doubt the results of an American election? Like, did you think that could ever happen in America where you actually thought?

I, I don’t know. It’s doesn’t, it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look, I never dreamt that we could live to that point in, in America. And, and listen, if you’re not convinced. The election was stolen, which it was, but you don’t need to be convinced. I’ll just tell you that if enough of your fellow Americans don’t believe.

that our elections are fair, America’s over. Because we, the people, have to be convinced that we are the ones who choose our leaders. We are the government. If that goes away, if there’s enough corrosion in the system that people aren’t even sure… That when, when, when they, when they drag themselves to the, when I think of my old parents dragging themselves to the polling booth, the idea that their vote might not count because of some corruption, that corruption is a moral issue.

It’s the job of the church to deal with that issue. The, the trans madness we’re seeing, if you don’t think that that is a moral issue, children’s lives are being destroyed, that is the church’s job to scream about that and to say that’s madness. And my parochial view is that the word of God says there are two sexes.

And I’m going to impose that as much as I can, because I believe what the word of God says. It’s not sensitive if somebody says, I believe I’m Napoleon Bonaparte, that I’m going to pretend like you actually are Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m going to weep for you, and I’m going to pray for you, but I’m not going to agree with you.

We have ceased in the American church to understand that the Lord calls us to boldness, the boldness of Elijah. I don’t think Elijah was really winsome. We, we all, we all drank the winsome Kool Aid, right? And I was one of them, believe me. And I’ll tell you, there’s a time to be winsome, there’s no doubt about it.

But there’s a time not to be winsome. When Jesus said some of the things he said to the Pharisees, Can you imagine the vitriol that came out of his mouth? He said, you are of your father, the devil. That was Jesus. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, said that. We need to completely rejigger our view of who Jesus was and what the church is.

How can we possibly proceed along? I think we’re supposed to be nice and winsome and whatever you tell me to do, I’ll do it. And let’s just be nice and we’re just going to gather people in. Into what? Into the same dead, useless religion that is serving… The devil? Is that what it is? Because Jesus said your blind guides leading the blind.

He was talking to the most religious men of the day. And he is, he was saying to them, he was condemning them. And we forget that that’s Jesus. That’s Jesus, that’s not some hothead preacher. That is Jesus of Nazareth. And so, we’ve seen evil in our day. And, and, and many are waking up and beginning to speak against it.

And if that’s not enough, if we haven’t seen enough evil. We’ve seen open anti semitism. I got a letter, my daughter graduated from Lehigh University a few years ago, and I got a letter from the rabbi over, you know, the Jewish students at Lehigh today, today, talking about mezuzahs being ripped down and swastikas, noticing swastikas being drawn.

We have never seen this before, but I’m here to tell you folks, this is God’s mercy to wake up those who are still not awake. How far can it go? Are we willing to speak up now? What about now? What about now? When will we wake up? When will the church wake up? So Bonhoeffer utterly failed. But my question is, the prophetic voice of Bonhoeffer is speaking to the American church now.

It’s saying, American church, you are going down exactly that same path. Unless you repent. Unless you repent and, and we have far less excuse than the German church did. They didn’t have the separation of church and state. They got fooled by listening to the state. They didn’t understand that separation of church and state, this healthy idea that the state has, in America…

The government has zero authority over the Church of Jesus Christ. That is in our founding documents. It was not in Germany’s founding documents. So you could see how they got confused. Why would we be confused by that? We’ve been drifting along, drifting along. I want to tell you, um, I think we’re living in an historic hour.

And when I say that, even that is an understatement. I think we are living in the last days. Now the question of where we are in the last days, but I’m saying like, Whatever was happening in our lives before, things have changed. The Lord in his mercy. Has appointed us to live in days where your prayers count more than they ever did.

I think Dutch said it, uh, earlier. We are living in an hour right now where our lives count on a level we cannot even comprehend. What we do and what we pray and so the power of the church today. God has given us the terrible power. The awesome power, we are created in his image. He has given us the power to be his ambassadors and his voices and his hands and feet now.

As satanic evil is arising around us, and he’s saying, Okay, church, this is your hour now. You could sleep, you’ve been sleeping through the decades now. We’ve not all been sleeping, but the point is that more and more and more people are awaking now. Will enough awake in time? to save America. Now America, y’all know that America is not just some country, right?

As America goes, the world goes. So we have a responsibility because, you know, those who have been blessed, you’re blessed, God blesses you to be a blessing. Okay, so whatever you have, if you have money, if you have talent, if you have power, if you have freedom, if you live in the United States of America, whatever God has given you and has blessed you, he gave it to you for his purposes.

And he has given us this sacred honor of living in this nation to be, you know, in the words of Jesus as quoted by John Winthrop and so many others, to be a shining city on a hill for God’s purposes. We’re not on our own here. We represent Him. And, and the Church of Jesus Christ has always been at the heart of who we are as a people.

Now, we don’t impose our faith on everyone in America. But without Jesus, without Christians, America would have never come into existence. That’s historical fact. Now, when I say that, I wrote a book, I know there’s not… Copies here because I was just out at the table, but I wrote a book called if you can keep it and in that book I got all these ideas from Oz Guinness I’ll rip him off all day long, but he talks about the golden triangle of freedom if you need to be convinced of the role of Christians in a free society.

Uh, Oz describes that as the Golden Triangle of Freedom. And it basically says that, and when I understood this, it just blew my mind that I’d never understood this before. Because we’ve been living in this secular world. And we’ve drifted along that even the church doesn’t understand how this works. So how are faith and freedom connected?

They’re connected… Intellectually, this is not just like, rah, rah, I believe in Jesus and I believe in America. No, no, no. There’s an intellectual connection that you would never have America and self government without serious believers. And how does it work? Well, basically, uh, the, the triangle of freedom is.

Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith in turn requires freedom. What that means is freedom, which is self government or liberty, which means I govern myself. I’m not governed by a government, I’m not governed by a king, I’m not governed by a deep state, by a bureaucracy. We govern ourselves.

That’s called freedom. Freedom requires virtue. You cannot have freedom unless people govern themselves, unless we have virtue. We do it ourselves, right? We don’t not steal because there’s laws or there’s cops to catch us. We don’t steal because we believe it’s a sin. It’s wrong. We govern ourselves. The founders all understood and they all wrote about it that if we have a virtuous people, self government is possible.

You need very little government. You don’t need people threatening you with guns and swords to do the right thing. If you have a virtuous. And so a virtuous populace, we can govern ourselves. We do the right thing when nobody’s looking, when nobody’s threatening you. You don’t need the laws, you have a higher law, right?

And so, Osgood has made me understand this, that freedom requires virtue and then virtue in turn requires faith. Because why would you be virtuous? You’re virtuous because you answer to a higher authority. So, in the, in the 18th century, as George Whitefield is preaching up and down the 13 colonies, and revival is breaking out, what is the result of that revival?

All the founders, you know, including the, uh, the less religious founders, uh, whether it’s, uh, Jefferson or Franklin, they all saw the same thing. When people get crazy about Jesus, crime goes down, domestic abuse goes down, uh, alcoholism goes down, and good things go up. The ability to govern yourself goes up.

Wow, that’s interesting. Even if you’re not a Christian, as you’re a sociologist, you say, that’s very interesting. So when faith comes in, it leads to virtue, which leads to self government. So, so freedom requires virtue. Virtue requires… Faith, but faith in turn requires freedom, because our founders all understood we can’t impose our faith.

We can’t say, okay, so if you’re a Christian, we’re going to make everybody become a Christian. You can’t do that, because if you do that, you destroy freedom. It has to be free. And we all know that if you’re forced to go to church, or if the government says you’ve got to go to that church, or that mosque, or this, if the government gets involved, then you just do it because you’re told to do it, so you’re not really doing it.

Faith has to be free. So freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, but faith in turn requires freedom. So what we have in America, which is this glorious gift which we don’t deserve. It’s a gift from God and it does not, uh, sustain itself. We, the people have to live it out. And at the heart of that over and over and over in history is the church of Jesus Christ.

When the church is the church, there will be freedom. We will teach these ideas. We will have a society that understands these things. And so there is no way around it. If you care about freedom, freedom of anybody, you have to understand it is the church that guarantees that freedom. And the government can’t force the church to do that.

The church has to do it. But we’ve done it through our history until fairly lately, until the last few decades. I really believe that we are now in the third existential crisis of our existence. The first was… In 1776 in the revolution, we ought never to have come into existence. Anybody who knows that story, you know, Dutch told a story about Dunkirk today, but that miracle, right?

Well, we had the miracle of the battle of Long Island, the battle of Brooklyn out and out miracles that enabled us to come into existence in the natural, this country never should have come into existence. So the Lord does actual miracles in history. And I think there are many people in many churches.

They forgot that. They think, yeah, he used to, maybe. I don’t know. If you’d asked George, if you’d asked George Washington in 1776, Hey, George, how’s it going? How’s it going, George? The answer would have been very poorly. It’s going very, very, very, We should be wiped out. But, if providence be with us in this cause of liberty, if providence be with us in this cause of liberty, we may get the victory.

We will fight on. Our job is to fight on and pray on and fight on and pray on. And it turns out, wait for the punchline, America became a country. Did you hear about that? Now, again, we’re so blessed. That we forget. What we have here is an astonishing hint thing in the history of the world. We forget. We forget how amazing it is that it ever came in existence.

And Benjamin Franklin was asked, coming out of the Constitutional Convention, you know, what have you given us, Dr. Franklin? A monarchy or a republic? What did you, did you pull it off? And he said, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. We, the people, have to keep the republic. And I promise you, at the heart of that is the Church of Jesus Christ.

There is just no doubt about it. Our second existential crisis was the civil war. I won’t go into it, but again, we ought not to have succeeded. Uh, Michael Medved wrote two amazing books. If you, um, Go to Socrates in the City, which is the, uh, speaker series, conversation series I do. I interviewed Michael Medved.

His book called, uh, The American Miracle, and a sequel. Miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle in the creation of the United States of America, in the sustaining of the United States of America. Just the most amazing miracle stories, true stories from history, of God’s hand. And so I believe we’re now in our third existential crisis.

We’re facing globalists. Communistic, uh, atheistic, cultural Marxism. I mean, we are now facing an existential threat and we ought not to survive just as we ought not to have come into existence in 1776, just as we ought not to have succeeded in the civil war to hold the union together, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, they believed.

In the God of the Bible, they believe that his will, if it was his will, and if they fought on, they might succeed. We are there now we’re there. We ought not to succeed. Uh, but I believe we have a small window of opportunity where if the church will be the church in the way that the church was not the church in Germany, in the thirties, We can succeed, if.

But it requires us to be utterly self sacrificial. Most of you know, we’re living in a new hour. The evils that we’ve seen in the last few years, most of us just never dreamt this could happen in America. We never dreamt that we could have literally millions of strangers pouring across our southern border, and, and, and raping children, uh, and, and flooding our, our, our, We never dreamt that any administration would allow these things.

And folks, you’ve got to be willing to call evil evil. You can’t say, well, I don’t want to take sides. Well, you have to take sides. And, and the church is expected by Jesus, who took sides against evil, to take sides against evil. We don’t war and fight as the world wars and fights. But if we cease to fight, we forget why we’re still here.

We, we don’t get translated the moment that we are born again. Uh, did that happen to anybody? I’m just curious. No, we’re still here. So I really do believe that the Lord is calling us. In this hour to be the church, I believe that this is an historic hour. I, I would say we have roughly a year that the window is that tight and that if you knew that that were true and I’m here to tell you it’s true, what would you give?

What would you do? Would you hang back? Would you say, well, I want to keep some money for a rainy day. I want to be careful. There’s no rainy day after a year from now. If we lose this battle. If the people who want to take power away from you and freedom away from you succeed, they will take away your ability to govern yourself.

They will take your money. The money that you’re not spending for God’s purposes now will be taken away from you. If you’re in a war and you say, well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep my powder dry for for next week. Well, you know, that powder might be taken away from you and the bullets will be taken away from you.

They’ll be used against you next week. You need to use what you have now. So you have a voice, you have, there’s a lot of money in this room. I’m here to tell you folks, God, you know, it’s like I could say God will judge you. But the reality is, there’s this thing called reality. And if this really is the hour of the American church to be all in now, and we’re not, it’s, it’s over.

It will be taken from you. The voice you have today to speak truth, to fight. When I, when I, when I hear about Coach Kennedy, do you know how many people would shrink from doing what he did, and did not do what he did? They say, let him do it. I don’t want to lose my job. This is our moment, church. This is the moment for the church to be the church.

To live the agape love of Jesus Christ. That says, I, I, I absolutely want to give everything that, that I have for God’s purposes now. This is an existential battle that we’re in. If we lose this, folks, I’m just, I want to be clear, so you heard it from somebody. It is over. People say, oh, this is most of the power of an important election, you know, you could say that, and say that, and say that.

At some point, if you don’t deal with this stuff, It’s over. You don’t get to deal with it. There’s not another time. This is the last exit before the toll. This is it. And the Lord looks to his church now to lead the way. We are the ones that are supposed to be utterly fearless because we believe. Jesus defeated death on the cross.

Church, we believe that. We actually believe that. And we believe we can’t out give God. And, and the Lord looks to us to lead right now in this hour. So I just want to be real clear that You know, this has been 50 years, and I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re here right now. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that, uh, Israel is going through what it’s going through.

That we’re seeing satanic anti Semitism on a level none of us dreamt of. That we’re seeing evil everywhere we look. This is the Lord saying to his church, Church, do you get it now? Do you get it now? Will you wake up now? Will you understand? The battle is now? Not next year, not in five years now. It is now.

This is the hour of the American church. This is the hour of the American church, and the power of the church is sufficient. God has given us that ability that if we will be the church, if we will get serious, if we will stop attending churches that don’t get this, and we will stop giving money. To things that don’t get this and stop giving your time as though there’s another day.

There’s not another day. Believe me, if the German church understood in 1933, where it was going, they would have spoken up if they knew where it was going. If they honestly knew where it was going, they, they, many would have spoken up, but they didn’t know. They, they said, we’re just gonna, we’re gonna take it easy, we’re gonna see how it goes.

The Lord is, is saying clearly to us, if you read the news, you don’t need to hear it from me, you see where this is going. This is the hour of the American church, to stand and to be the church. And on the other side, folks, I want to tell you, we’re not just gonna avert disaster. If the church would be the church now, we will see revival and reformation in things we have never dreamt of.

And I want to tell you, that is the Lord’s will. That his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Not just that we avert disaster, but that his will be done, and Dutch was talking about it. I see that, but the Lord lets us decide. He gave us the ability to choose whether we obey him in this or not. And you know and I know.

That we are be crazy not to obey the Lord and to give him everything we have to leave nothing on the field. This is the hour of the American church. God bless you.