Prayer
Our Father and God, Lord of Heaven and earth, we pray to You now, coming to You in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Father, Your Word tells us that if You turn us, we shall be turned. If You restore us, we shall be restored. If You forgive us, we shall be forgiven. Father, we confess that we have sinned away a great and glorious heritage, and we know that we don’t deserve to ask for it back . . . but we nevertheless do ask for it back. Although we don’t deserve to ask for this great petition, we are praying in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and He does deserve it. With His blood, He purchased all the nations of men, and Father, this includes our nation. We confess our ingratitude, and all our various idolatries, and we ask You to do for us what You have done countless times in the past when Your people, who are called by Your name, humble themselves and pray. We do this now, asking you to move in a way that glorifies You, and brings good to Your people. In the name of Jesus, we pray, and amen.
Remarks
It is a very great privilege to be speaking to you today, and I do thank God for the opportunity. In addition, I am very grateful to the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, both for starting this meeting, and for inviting me to be here with you today. Thank you.
What I would like to urge upon you this morning, Lord willing, is that many American Christians need a Copernican revolution in their hearts and minds when it comes to their relationship to God and to His Son, Jesus Christ. We are all familiar with the wording of the conversion prayer where we ask Jesus into our life. But strictly speaking, we don’t have any life to ask Him into. He is the way, the truth, and the Life, and we were dead in our transgressions and sins. The gospel is the place where Christ invites us into His life.
This understanding of conversion then carries over into our daily walk with God. We learn the meaning of Paul’s exhortation to the Galatian church, which is that we don’t begin with the Spirit only to continue by human striving.
When it comes to standing firm in Christ, we need to learn which is the cart and which is the horse. We need to learn that wet streets don’t cause rain. We need to understand that when Jesus summoned Lazarus from the tomb, it was not a matter of the Lord pulling and Lazarus pushing. The Lord brought all of the life, and He then bestowed it, and as a result Lazarus came forth.
So let’s turn to it. We are looking to God to provide us with what we desperately need in a desperate hour.
The promises of God are a shield and buckler, protecting you. Your resolve, your strength, are not a shield and buckler, somehow protecting the promises of God. The promises of God need absolutely no protection from us. We are called by God to stand up straight in the promises. The promises are not propped up by us. We do not strengthen the Spirit; the Spirit strengthens us.
The apostle Paul teaches us that if we present our requests to God with thanksgiving, then the peace of God will guard our hearts and minds. Notice that His peace protects us. Whenever we become sinfully anxious, we are somehow assuming that our hearts and minds are supposed to protect the peace of God. We think of the peace of God as this little guttering candle, and we have to guard it against all the drafts as we shield it with the firm resolve of our hearts and minds. But this is precisely backwards. It is not just a mistake, it is a drastic one. It like trying to protect your helmet with your head.
Noah was protected from the Flood by the ark, but it was an ark that God had had him build. The ark was not his idea. It was the gift of God, and he remained secure in it.
David went out to confront Goliath, and he was not protected by so inadequate as Saul’s armor. What was David’s breastplate? What was his helmet? “I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts” (1 Sam. 17:45). He stood firm in the name of Jehovah. He conquered the giant Goliath in the name of someone else. If you bear the name of Jesus Christ, there is no armor greater than that. Not only so, but all the devil’s R&D teams have not come up with armor-piercing anything.
So we do not go out and perform great exploits for God, bringing credit to His name through how wonderful we are. Rather, God fulfills His promises in and through us, and He is the one who performs the exploits. We do not bring credit to His name. Rather, He works through us, and as He does so, He brings glory to His name.
This is the thing that stops the mouths of the principalities and powers. This is how God demonstrates His left-handed wisdom. This is how He does it.
“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”1 Cor. 1:27 (KJV)
We should not want God simply to win. We want God to get great glory in and through the win. And getting great glory means that Gideon goes into battle with 300 instead of with 10,000. Getting great glory means that Jehoshaphat goes into battle with his choir in the vanguard.
God getting great glory in your challenges means that you are likely to be a little bit nervous about the situation that is taking shape around you. So stand firm in the Lord. When you learn how to stand firm in the Lord, and in the strength of His might, you are going to start sounding to your wife like a spiritual version of “Chesty” Puller, after the Chinese came into the Korean War. “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.” And he also said, of course . . . “All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us . . . they can’t get away this time.”
When God made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, there was a line-up of sacrificed animals, all of them cut in two. When that happened in the ancient world the parties to the covenant would then pass through the pieces, as much as to say, “may all this happen to me, if I do not remain true to my word.” The striking thing about this covenant with Abraham is that the Lord was the only one who went in between the pieces. Jehovah God took upon Himself all the responsibilities of the covenant . . . and Abraham stood firm, simply by trusting in what God was doing.
“And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.”Genesis 15:17 (KJV)
In short, the good Lord did not call us to Himself because He was looking around for great talent. He did not do it because His resources were running low and He had to make an alliance with us humans to keep the devil from conquering everything. No, not at all. Let the book of Deuteronomy tell us how God did it.
“For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.”Deut. 7:6–9 (KJV)
In the words of Paul, God does whatever He does with us in accordance with “His good pleasure.”
“He hath remembered his covenant forever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations.”Ps. 105:8 (KJV)
Every historical event, no matter how remarkable, can be demonstrated to have been inevitable by any number of historians . . . after the fact. But somehow these same historians did not predict the remarkable event before it happened, even though they would later claim its inevitability. Such an event is what is called “a black swan.” What we are praying for, what we are working for, what we are looking for, is a black swan reformation, a black swan revival.
We know how to start a fire when the wood is dry and the conditions are right. And when we do it, we can feel quite pleased with ourselves. But God can start a fire anywhere He pleases. If He so desired, God could ignite a sunken log on the bottom of a frozen lake. Fire came down from heaven and consumed the altar that Elijah had soaked with water. Fire consumed the food offering that Samson’s parents had presented to the angel. Tongues of fire came down and rested on the heads of the apostles at Pentecost, each one of them a sanctified altar.
We see the fulfillment of all such images through how God has worked in the history of the church. The Spirit empowered an obscure Anglican priest named George Whitefield, and the awakening in England and America transformed both countries. The instrument for transforming Scotland was a galley slave named . . . John Knox. A nineteenth century explosion of missionary activity came out of a prayer meeting at a haystack. God can do what He likes, as we all should know by now, and what He likes to do is take the most unlikely materials and do something glorious with it. Take a prayer meeting at the Pentagon for a possible example . . .
“And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness.”Acts 4:31 (KJV)
What will be the evidence that the Spirit has determined to bless us with such a grace? The followers of Christ, filled with the Spirit, will stand firm and they will speak the word of Christ with boldness.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.