History from God's Perspective

I want to share some things I think will be very encouraging to you and at the same time give us a specific strategy for how we can win the battle for the 21st Century.

Francis Schaeffer told us that if Christianity goes up, the culture should go up; if Christianity is going down, the culture is going “to go to hell in a hand-basket.” Although America was experiencing a supposed spiritual awakening in the Jesus movement in the late '60s and early '70s, the culture was going to hell in a hand-basket. My wife and I prayed about it and thought what should we do? We started a ministry called Restore America Ministries.

I found that the Christian community was not ready for the message. For the most part, I found that as I went to them, I could scare them. I could always get the men motivated, because men are always guilty and you could always get them to do something—at least the first week, until they fall back into the same rut they were in before. After you've done that you find that a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

What they did not need was Marshall Foster's preaching; what they needed was the Holy Spirit convicting them of the truth of the Word of God and of history and that what they needed to do in their involvement for their culture and for their God was a central priority for Jesus Christ. Until they saw that as a central priority and until the Holy Spirit convicted them, we could browbeat them to death and tell them that only 28 percent of the Christians are registered to vote (which is true) and that 95 percent of the bar owners are registered to vote (which is true), but that does not change their activity. Guilt only leads you, usually, into deeper despair.

We were told in most of our churches that there was a “separation of church and state” and to be truly spiritual and holy was to go to Bible College, become a missionary, or be a pastor in full-time Christian service. The truth is, we're all full-time Christian workers, and if we understand the Kingdom of God and understand what God has done in history, we would want to be involved in the great cause of God. What was needed was for us not just to motivate, not even just to inspire, but to train them in the truth. Jesus said it well in John 8:32, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”—and that, He alone can do.

In Romans 1, Paul says that men “are without excuse,” because “what may be known of God is manifest in them” through the created order, through His magnificence and excellence, by application through all of time. It's not the creation that glorifies God. All that has happened from the beginning of time to this present moment points to a covenant-keeping God who is all powerful. You don't break His laws. His laws break you.

To know that history from God's perspective is to be encouraged and to be fearful toward this God. To not know that history from a providential perspective is to have it perverted and so you have a perverted view of God. We have a “happy, happy, happy” view of God in many churches today, which says that God is just so loving and kind, and whatever happens, He will just help you get along, so don't worry about it.

I see the God of history and that's not what I see. I see that covenant keepers win and covenant breakers lose. I see that God promises, in the book of Exodus, for those “who hate Me” there's a curse of iniquity to a third and fourth generation from the father to the son. My question as I began to study this was: could I prove out what God says in His Word in time and space?

Could it be that history is no more than the working out of what God says in His Word in principle over time and space to glorify Him before the heavenly host? Could it be that history has that kind of significance and that kind of meaning when it's understood from that perspective? Could it be that one of the reasons we lack cause and purpose in the body of Christ today in America is that we have lost that sense of destiny and providence that dominated the biblical believers coming out of the Reformation—who came across on those little ships to America? I believe that is the case.

There was a brother by the name of Patrick Henry who was led to Christ in the Great Awakening by an outlawed Presbyterian minister named Samuel Davies. Patrick Henry's mother took him to hear Davies for 10 years, out in the woods, since they wouldn't let him have a church because it was illegal to be anything but an Episcopalian if you lived in Virginia at the time. Baptists were often beaten and, of course, everyone lost their church if they were not a part of the Church of England.

At the age of 36 he was a member of the House of Burgesses. America was in a desperate time. She was faced with literally standing against her own king. There was little hope of victory and almost an assurance that all of the wealthy farmers and planters like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington would lose everything they had.

They were a little bit hesitant on March 23, 1775, when the resolution came up to declare liberty from the English crown. The room was rather silent and they were about ready to close for a recess when, extemporaneously, Patrick Henry stood to his feet. I won't give you the whole speech, just the last few paragraphs. I want you to pick the secret weapon of history out of this speech.

In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.

The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?

What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

That speech, elicited silence for about 30 seconds. Suddenly the entire house arose to the term “to arms, to arms,” and the American revolution started. But it didn't just start. It had been 5,000 years in the making. The weapon that he announced was the weapon that God preplanned before the foundation of the world to work out with His Son. What is that weapon? He announces it here. He calls it a weapon. He says “armed in the holy cause of liberty.” They had tied together a holy righteous God with the cause of liberty.

You know what we've allowed to happen in our day? We have allowed the movements of our time to be divested of their spiritual and holy root. It's only the holy, righteous, loving God who, before the foundation of the world, planned to liberate his children and glorify Himself through their liberation on this earth, and to then glorify His Son that every knee should bow, that every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. That is God's cause. It's not man's cause. God is the liberator, and only He can free us from the bondage of sin. That weapon is the forgotten weapon.

What I'd like to do is share with you the history of the Lord in light of that weapon. I want you to see that world history is for the people. History is something we should be teaching to our children in the morning, in the noon, and the night, teaching the testimonies of God. This isn't something just for the professionals. This is something for everyone in this room to know so you can tell stories to your children that they might be encouraged—not by focusing on the six o'clock news and finding out what the latest secular humanist tells them is the latest disaster that makes it impossible for them to change the world for Jesus Christ. They must hear from Mom and Dad, from Grandma and Grandpa, on a consistent basis, a biblical world and life view that so portrays what God has done in history—that He is King, He is God, He brings liberty, He is the Great Liberator.

Isn't it time for us to come out of the back of the intellectual bus? We've been hiding back there for a hundred years in the evangelical movement, in a pietistic escape from the reality of the culture our forefathers built with their own blood—hiding in our pietism saying, “We're just going to love the Lord. The end is near. There's not much time to do much except evangelize.”

How long have I heard that? It hasn't happened yet. It may be the year 5062; we don't know. We don't know the timing of the Lord's coming, but we know He's going to hold us accountable for what we do now in building His kingdom.

What I know is that what we have done in the past 50 years in hiding from our responsibilities to take Jesus Christ into all of American culture could cost millions and literally billions of people their lives. America is the fountainhead of evangelical Christianity, where 80 percent of the missionaries and 85 percent of the money that has gone to the world in the last 200 years has come from. If you were the Devil, where would you be spending your time? I'd be trying to destroy America right now, and if you can destroy America, you drive the Church of Jesus Christ underground for perhaps a thousand years.

Before Francis Schaeffer died in 1984, he said, “I see a great dark age coming upon Western Civilization, and if it comes, it will be the Christian in America that will be held accountable at the judgment seat of Jesus Christ for the fall of Western culture.” Why? Because we had all of the Bible studies, the theology, the Christians, the institutions that for thousands of years had been the dream of other nations, and we let it go in the lifetime of one man.

I believe that history not only convicts us, but as we understand it from His perspective, it will encourage us. We don't have to be intellectually incapable of defending ourselves from assertions that we are the cause of the witch hunts, the cause of slavery, and the cause of all guilt-related diseases and homophobia. Every disease that is out there, or every major problem, whether it be the Crusades or Adolf Hitler and what happened to the Jews, has often landed upon Jesus Christ.

It can land upon sinners, yes, who have oftentimes used the name of Christ for sinful things. Those need to be repented of. But the truth is, Christ is the great liberator. And He alone has liberated nations, liberated individuals, given us the free enterprise system, given us monogamous family life instead of group Indian life like they had here long before we came. He has transformed massive non-cultures into Western Civilization, which is truly Christian civilization.

Do you know what I see is lacking in the body of Christ when it comes to history? We need to see God's providential hand. Where are we? If we don't know where we are, it's awfully difficult to know where we're going. Our Commander in Chief has a battle plan that's been going for over 5,000 years and it began before the foundation of the world.

Do you know that God the Father and God the Son planned to save your miserable, rotten little soul, and mine too, long before you were ever born? They planned the death of the holy righteous Son of God for you and for me. But not only that we might be saved, but that we might glorify Him, that we might then fulfill the mandate of Genesis 1 to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it for God's glory, that the time would come, as it states in Scripture, that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

The purpose of history is not your salvation or mine. Sometimes evangelicals have made the mistake of making evangelism the goal. Evangelism is the major means of accomplishing the goal. But God's goal is that He might be glorified. His glorification is our goal, not evangelism. Without evangelism, of course, there'll be no cultural change, but God's way starts with understanding that the purpose of history is to glorify God.

That was true in the Garden of Eden, wasn't it? But they didn't want to go that way; they had a better way. All the cultures of ancient civilizations turned their back on God. In so doing, by not knowing God and not wanting to know God, they created their own laws, their own societies, and they all had the same basic sins. They all persecuted saints; they believed in human sacrifice. The truth is that these civilizations were simply debauched because they were fighting God.

But what a backdrop in the middle of that ancient world for Jesus Christ to come at the perfect time. The whole backdrop of evil is so that God might be seen as holy and perfect and righteous and having the plan for restoration. Jesus said in Luke 4:18-19 that He came to preach the Gospel to the poor, to bring liberation to the captives, to bring first internal liberation. He used the term “liberty” twice there.

Liberty of the individual, heart and mind and soul, only happens through salvation. He came to give liberation from captivity to those in bondage. He said he came to give sight to the blind and preach the Gospel to the poor. How much clearer could it be that Jesus Christ was going to become the One and only great Liberator, and that through Him, his twelve disciples would go out and take a miserable Roman Empire, where you had only one vote; it was called “up to the hilt.” If the emperor didn't like how you voted, he simply put the sword in your groin and pushed it up to the hilt.

Six-thousand Christian soldiers, in 284 a.d., took a stand in their legion for Christ, and the emperor Diocletian had them decimated. One in ten had their heads cut off in front of all the other men. Then he did it again. He took one in ten of the rest that were left and said “Now, will you bow down and worship my image and will you kill all the Christians in France?” The Theban Legion, all of them Christians, said, “No, we will not,” and they wrote a declaration of independence saying, “We will do anything for you, emperor, but we will not kill Christians, and we will not bow down and worship your image.” So he had 40,000 men come down and kill all 6,000 men.

Isn't it interesting, though, that exactly six years later Diocletian was dead, Maximian was dead, and the new emperor was a man named Constantine, who found himself worshiping a sun god one morning on the way to a battle and he saw a cross of light over the sun. He said, “I'll put the crosses on my shields,” and he went off to battle, won the battle, and ended up making Christianity the preferred religion of the empire and ended persecution.

The truth is that Christ is the Liberator. You say he wasn't much interested in political liberty. Well, why then is it that as the truth grows wherever this Bible is unleashed, political, economic, educational and moral liberty are the result? That's because covenant keepers win and covenant breakers lose. It's because the Scripture tells us in Deuteronomy 7:9 that for those who love me and keep my commandments, I shall bless them to a thousand generations. The Scripture makes it clear: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:1).

And so this is not a theory we're talking about. This is something we should take for granted. My history classes at the University of California gave me what I call the “public school twitch.” I basically learned that we were founded by deists, adventurers, and religious castaways who came here to rape the Indian, put the Black man to slavery, and stumble into natural prosperity that was lying around on the ground. Isn't that the summary of History 101 at every major university in America today? Why do you think that the men and women who do not love Jesus Christ have so focused upon the history and political science profession? Because one's view of history determines one's view of God.

If you do not see God as sovereign, if his Word is not all powerful, if obedience to His Word does not bring blessing upon you and your children, wouldn't it be a sad commentary on the power of God? But the truth is that history does teach that if we obey Him, we are blessed.

Martin Luther translated the first great German Bible and turned Germany from a bunch of pagan barbarians into one of the great Christian civilizations of history. It wasn't until 1544 that a man converted to Christ under Martin Luther came over to Scotland and begin to preach the Gospel. They built a stadium for George Wishart, but the stadium was not for him to preach; it was so they could smell his flesh. Mary Queen of Scots and her bishop wanted to smell his flesh as he was burning.

He said, “Bishop, as you see me today, so you will be in a few weeks.” A few weeks later 90 people broke into a castle and stabbed him to death, holding the cloak of George Wishart.

That day there was a bodyguard by the name of John Knox who began to preach the Gospel of Christ to the people of Scotland. He found himself on a French galley for two years as a slave fighting his own people. As he looked out that porthole, do you know what he said every morning? He said, “Give me Scotland or I die.” He saw the cathedral and he said, “God, give me Scotland or I die.”

They thought he was dead; he was so close to dying they threw him off the boat on the shores of England. An English couple nursed him back to health. He became the man in charge of the King of England in training him in the Gospel. When Edward died, Knox found himself out of sorts because Mary was a Catholic and was going to kill him and every other Protestant. He went to Geneva and spent four years with Calvin. He came back in 1558 and preached the Gospel so powerfully that he was able to see the end of the queen, the end of the whole concept of the divine right of kings in Scotland, and to set up Protestant biblical Christianity in this land of barbarians.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ was so powerful in Scotland by 1638 that they set up a national covenant in which they covenanted as a people to raise their children to the glory of God under the doctrines of Christ—even against the king, at any cost. They went into Great Friars churchyard and pulled out their own blood and signed that national covenant, and at the end of their signature they put “unto death.” Eighteen thousand ministers and their wives were then killed over a 50-year period by the English king because they would not obey his command to raise their children against biblical doctrine.

One of the leaders of this movement was the pastor in Sterling, who was captured, brought to Edinburgh, and tried. Five thousand people gathered around to watch him hang. James Guthrie got a chance to preach his last sermon. They gave him one hour. So he preached to the people of Scotland to ask them to stop compromising and to take a stand for Christ. He took his little boy Willie and put him on his lap, and his little girl Sophia, and he said, “They hate me and they hate our God so much that they say that I am dying in hatred of my beloved Scotland and of the Lord Jesus. But I'm going to be with Him, and I love them both so much that I will not compromise. Willie, never compromise before this king, but always take a stand for Jesus.”

He put his little daughter and son down. He went up on the scaffold. They put the rope around his neck, and as they were about ready to pull it, he lifted his hands to heaven and said, “The covenants, the covenants, shall yet be Scotland's reviving.” They took his head and stuck it on a spike, and for 27 years it hung over the port of Edinburgh. Every night little Willie would walk under his daddy's head and go home and tell his mother, “I saw my daddy's head today. I saw my daddy's head.” How would that be a reminder of your faith?

Twenty-four years later, little Willie grew up to be a mighty theologian for God and died a martyr's death, just like his daddy. After 50 years of persecution, the glorious revolution in 1688 brought about some religious liberty in Scotland, but King Jesus was never fully enshrined in Scotland. They had constant struggles with the king. So in the 18th century about a third of the population emigrated to a little group of colonies in America.

In fact, they took over much of South Carolina and North Carolina. In 1776, George Washington's generals and colonels were almost exclusively Scotch or Scotch-Irish covenantors who had come over here to the glory of God to stand for the doctrines of grace.

How many people know that story? You want to know how this affects America? Almost every one of you comes out of persecuted stock. Some of you Anglo-Saxons think you're holy, right? Let me tell you, I was just over there. I saw Stonehenge. You used to dance around and sacrifice your children about 3,000 years ago, so don't talk to me about being so holy. And if it hadn't been for the Venerable Bede and others bringing you the Ten Commandments and the Gospel in the sixth century, you'd still be dancing around Stonehenge.

But by God's grace the Word of God was unleashed in the sixteenth century through men like William Tyndale, who gave his life to translate the Bible into the language of the people. And at the age of 36 he was burned at the stake and was preaching the Gospel to the king while being burned. He had no idea that the Gospel, the Word that he had translated but never had printed, was going to be printed by the very king that had him killed. Miles Coverdale took his Bible to King Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn, his second wife, and whispered in his ear “You need a Bible of your own.”

Henry brought in the very Bible of the man he had killed for translating the Bible. He said, “This looks good. Give me 11,000 copies of this book. I want it put into every parish of the land.” He just took a divine time bomb and blew up the divine right of kings forever. He destroyed himself. You see, God takes the wrath of men to praise him.

Evil men don't do what they want; they do what God has ordained they do, until they drop into the eternal flames of Hell if they don't repent. God is in control. As a result of King Henry, we have a Bible. As a result of King Henry, the people of England, by 1588 and the time of the Armada, became what the English call a “people of the Book.” They began to read the Word. And those miserable Anglo-Saxons we talked about had now been converted. It had a real impact.

You see, the people still were worshiping at the government trough. Have you ever seen anybody that worships at the government trough? About 70 percent of the people in America today worship at the government trough. Do you have your government loans, your Social Security? Are you making sure the government is taking care of you? We live in a day once again, of the revitalization of the divine right of kings. It's happening among us with new names and new titles in a “democratic society.” But in the time of the 16th, and 15th and 14th centuries, the divine right of kings was manifest through the kings of France and England. By the time you get to King James, and before that Queen Mary and others, that was exactly what the people worshiped. They were so afraid of the king they wouldn't stand. But ministers of the Gospel stood for Christ because they knew his Word and they knew His Truth, and when they did, they paid a terrible price.

There was one brother, a minister, who was put on trial for having a tract of the lordship of Christ over the king. The night before he was brought up to the flames to be burned, he met with three of his friends. The three friends said, “Will you give us a sign when you're in the flames that Christ is with you?”

This brother, Stewart, said, “Yes I'll give you a sign. I'll clap my hands three times while I'm in the flames and you'll know that Christ is with me.”

So the next day they put him in the flames and the bishop was there yelling at him, “Repent, recant, turn back to the holy church, and if you do, we'll make it a short death.”

He said, “No, no.” He forgave the executioner, he forgave the bishop, and then he lifted his hands to heaven and glorified God and said, “Into Thy hands do I give you my spirit.” Then his body burned. It burned like a candle, and finally you saw his breath go out of his body, and he dropped into the flames.

Everyone was rather discouraged. In fact, the 5,000 who had gathered turned away and began to leave the place, including his three friends, who never saw the sign they had asked for. Suddenly, the crowd gasped. There was nothing but bones on the body, but two hands began to rise out of the flames and “clap, clap, clap.” Then they dropped back down. The crowd picked up the bishop and threw him into the flames, picked up the executioner and threw him into the flames, and the Protestant Reformation was off and running.

Let me tell you, you don't mess with God, even if you're a king. What happened to kings soon after that is that one of them lost his head. You remember that after King James died, his son tried to claim the divine right of kings, and Oliver Cromwell put him on trial and cut his head off. But you see, even in England and Scotland and France and Germany, only partially could they see a full reformation.

They were waiting for a time when there could be a land perhaps 3,000 miles away that could have been hidden for 5,000 years from civilization and not even discovered until 1498—a time when the sea compass could be developed, a time when a small group of separatists could learn this Bible and be taught by their pastor for 13 years the biblical principles of self and civil government. All of this was fitting together at a perfect moment in time so that a nation could be founded for the purpose of bringing that liberty to full fruition.

That place we're talking about is America. When the Pilgrims came across the ocean, they came across with a major motive. William Bradford, in his original Plymouth Plantation journal, says he came for four reasons. One, that they might be successful and free to have land so that others might follow them, rather than have their nose cut off in England. He said that if we could only be free, people would believe our doctrines. He said the second reason they came over was that their children were involved in the immorality of Holland, and they felt they would rather have them dead than immoral. They brought their children over knowing they faced certain death.

The third reason they came was that they were afraid they were going to be killed. The Spanish were coming to kill them in Holland. And the fourth reason they came was, as Bradford said, “for the propagation and advance of the Gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world, even though they should be but stepping stones to others in the performance of so great a work.”

Our Pilgrim Fathers came here to be stepping stones that the Gospel might be proclaimed to the nations. You want to talk about a vision. You're dying in the wilderness, half of you are dead the first winter, and you came to propagate the Gospel to the remotest parts of the earth. Who do you think you are? You're God's children. You're God's ambassadors. You're coming here on a holy cause and are under divine providence. They knew the story of 5,000 years before of the blood of the martyrs. Have we forgotten the story?

Do our children know the story of the martyrs? Do they know the story of the sacrifice? Do they know the story of the biblical principles of self and civil government that was built into the hearts of our patriot pastors. Those pastors then preached those principles for 150 years through the Great Awakening in the 1730s up to the American Revolution, so that by the time we reached the Revolution, this holy cause of liberty was a central focus.

America was not fighting for economic freedom alone. It wasn't over a tax on tea. America was founded upon the principle, very specifically, of religious liberty. They wanted to be free to worship their God apart from the control of an ever-powerful state church in England. That was the major reason they fought. You know they were outnumbered and they were out gunned. At Trenton, on December 25, 1776, George Washington had been running for his life for nine months. He had had an army of 14,000. It was now down to 2,200. He had not won a battle; he lost seven in a row. General Howe had 30,000 troops, 100 ships, and the power of the English empire behind him. He had forced General Washington up through New York and across New Jersey. Washington was beside himself, and in four days he was losing the rest of the army because half of their enlistments were up on the first of January. So what do you do when you're outnumbered 30,000 to 2,200 and your army is going away in four days? Well, you attack, of course! That's what you do.

So if you feel like we're down right now, just get yourself into Washington's bunker and realize it's time to attack. And sure enough, he attacked, and the rest of the story is history. Those men crossed that river in the middle of a snowstorm on Christmas night to attack those 1,400 Hessians. They walked nine bloody miles down to Trenton and surrounded the town without the sentries or anyone seeing them. And at 7:30 in the morning they attacked. The Hessians were all drunk, because they thought the Americans could never attack. Sure enough, the leader himself got a bullet in the chest. There were even orders that warned him, but the orders were in English. He spoke only German, and he never got them translated.

General Washington won a great victory. But before he won, he read to his army that night,

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves; whether they are to have any property to call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them.

The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.

Do you see his perspective? It was a providential perspective. He was literally saying that the fate of unborn millions was at stake with what they did that night. Do you see how he was looking at it? He had a generational—what I call a family dynasty—perspective.

What I want to do is share with you the strategy. Let me give you four principles real briefly. Do you know what God's strategy is for winning the battle for the twenty-first century? As best as I can summarize it, this is it. Number one, we must evangelize. James Kennedy was absolutely right in his Evangelism Explosion.

If we do not convert the souls of our neighbors, our neighbors will rise up and put us away. We must make friends of our neighbors by loving them into the kingdom of God by bringing them the Gospel. So many are hungry, but so few of us are evangelizing on the elevators and evangelizing our neighbors. We have lost that original spirit of evangelism that was here even 20-30 years ago. I sense it on the college campus when I travel. We used to talk to everything that walked. Now it's kind of politically incorrect to talk to people about Christ on the campus. We have to forget the “politically correct” stuff. People are dying and going to Hell. We need to evangelize the world.

Number two, we must build a family dynasty. Do you want to change America? Then build a family dynasty. You know what Scripture says in Deuteronomy 6 when it talks to the people about what their hope is for the blessing of God? It says you must know God, love God, and obey Him.

Thirdly, train your children in the morning, in the noon, and in the night. Live it out from your hearth to the decks of your house and on out to your gates. In other words, live obedience in your own life. It's self-government to family government, family government to city government. If we want to save America, it begins by building family dynasties. We must know God, and parents must teach Him every night to their children.

That was the fall of America. It wasn't the public schools. The fall of America was that Christian men stopped teaching the theology of God to their children through daily devotions in the home. When we fail at that, we have failed America. Know God, love God, teach our children in the morning, in the noon and in the evening.

Be involved in the local church. The Scripture says that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against my Church. We're not just individual families hanging out there. We are the body of Christ hanging together at the local level as the body united in America, and we must hang together or we shall, as Benjamin Franklin said, certainly hang separately.

The fourth principle is that we must be involved in limiting civil government. What does limiting civil government have to do with God's strategy for rebuilding a nation? Because one of the three great institutions that God created was civil government. He created it in Genesis chapter 9. But he created it with the power of the sword. It is a most dangerous, as well as a very awesome and good, organization. There is nothing wrong with government if it stays within its limited responsibility given in Scripture. But if it gets out of control because of the power of the sword it will go crazy against the Kingdom of God.

That is what has happened again and again. It happened under Adolf Hitler and it's beginning to happen in our blessed America because we have forgotten, in our optimistic humanist day, what so many of our Founders kept saying over and over. Like Thomas Jefferson, who said, “We must bind the tyrants down with the chains of the Constitution.” Who did he mean by that? You and me. We are all tyrants if we're given absolute power and absolute money. Right?

And so we can't trust a man. That's why we have limited powers. That's why we have elections where you have to re-elect men. That's why we have checks and balances and various branches of government. All of that was a Christian philosophy or worldview worked out in a governmental structure, to hold men accountable at the local level.

So we must do all those things if we are willing to know God, love God, train up a family dynasty—training up those children in the way they should go, so when they grow old they will not depart from it.

If we're willing to do that and then work with our local churches to reach our local communities, and if we're willing to move out and limit civil government to its proper role and responsibility while we fulfill our roles in the family and the church, then we can see blessing.

The truth is that America is a gift of God that has been given to our Christian forefathers. It has been bought with the blood of so many who never saw freedom and never saw liberty, and yet it has been God's goal to liberate the captives for thousands of years. We must continue that chain of Christians. The baton has been passed to us.

I'll never forget watching the Good Will Games in 1993. We had the fastest 4 x 100 relay in the world. It was on national television. The Jamaicans were right behind us and we were coming around the track. I'll never forget this. I saw on the fourth pass the guy drops the baton. The two racers, who didn't continue to run, turned and grabbed the baton and dropped to their knees. With U.S.A. across their chests they began to weep and fall on their faces. It wasn't that they lost a race. It was that they had let down their whole country.

We are in a relay race for the kingdom of God. Our forefathers, by the tens of thousands and millions, have laid their lives down, hoping for a day when they could raise their children to the glory of God, reading the Bible, and evangelizing the world. That day has come for us. We have experienced it now for 228 years in America. How blessed we have been, and how thankful we must be—by spending the rest of our lives committed with all we have to the restoration of this nation, to the glory of God for what He has done.

Marshall Foster's speech "Winning the Battle for the 21st Century Mind" can be found in the book Tipping the Scales.