Continuing the Revival Charlie's Martyrdom Started

1h 29m

Charlie's greatest wish was to see a grand revival of faith in America, and after his martyrdom the seeds of that revival are sprouting. Pastors Mark Driscoll and Josh McPherson join to talk about how that revival can be nurtured for the long haul.

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Transcript

Buckle up everybody here.

We go.

I don't know if anyone is ever going to see this video,

but hi, my name is Haley.

And Charlie Kirk's death led me to give my life fully to Jesus Christ.

Charlie's death really ignited a spiritual flame inside of me that I have never,

never in my life experienced before.

It is,

it's like a spiritual switch.

I didn't know Charlie Kirk never met that guy before in my life.

And something else that I've never done before in my life is believing God.

I'm going to wear this suit to church.

I'm going to go to church.

I'm going to try to be a better father,

husband, and leader for my family.

I've never ever

opened the Bible before.

In fact, I know nothing about

Christianity or Jesus.

But yesterday after witnessing the assassination of Charlie Kirk,

something was calling me to my husband's Bible.

I'm going to be heading to church here shortly.

I'm excited to go and learn and get to meet new people.

Something that I've been wanting to do for a while.

The first time ever in over 15 years I'm going to church.

It has been so heavy on my heart that I just needed something.

So after Charlie Kirk's death and seeing what this world truly is, now's the time.

There's no more waiting.

This was my first time going to church in almost seven years.

Maybe even more than seven years.

I went to church today because of Charlie Kirk and his family.

I am heading to church today.

I have my Bible today.

There was literally dust on the cover when I pulled it out.

I've seen so many videos this week of Charlie talking about how time and time again, like he wants to be known for his faith above all else.

And I'm trying to be more of like Charlie Kirk.

And maybe if someone sees this video, they'll be encouraged to walk back into a church today too.

We are ready for church.

Now I have not been to church in years.

Today

will be my son's first day, first time to church

and

today is the first time that me and my fiancΓ© together collectively are going to church.

Today is the first day that my family, my family.

is going to church.

So this is all because of Charlie and his gospel, his words.

And today starts our turning point.

I just arrived at church for the first time in a very long time.

I needed some kind of refuge, some kind of, you know, hope that not all is lost.

Well, it's Sunday morning and I'm going to church for the first time in about 12 years.

I'm about to do something that I have not done in 25 years and I have never done of my own volition.

I'm going to church.

Good morning.

I thought I'd come on quick and give an update of what I'm doing today because I'm actually really excited and really looking forward to it.

I'm actually headed to church

for Sunday service for the first time

in

a long time.

I just went to church for the first time

in several years.

I had tickets to see Charlie October 29th at Old Miss.

I was really looking forward to it.

I've been a lifelong atheist.

I never believed in God, but I saw the joy that it brought to Charlie.

And

it brought me to God and

really moved me to see him.

And

I was looking forward to meeting him and telling him that you helped me find God.

After 10 years not reading any scripture, not stepping foot in church, not even making a prayer, Charlie Kirk

is the main reason for me finding my faith again.

You don't think it's crazy to get in church?

Here's the line for the second service.

And there's never a line.

By the way, there's never a line.

Okay, I've seen that you walk

There's never been a line here

Charlie Kirk look what you did no parking no parking at all none had to park like five blocks away from church cuz everyone wants to come now Amen.

Thank you Jesus.

Thank you Charlie

All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

I'm Andrew Colvett, executive producer of this fine show.

And we have had quite a weekend.

I will tell you that watching if you were watching on Real America's voice or on the stream you saw an intro that our team put together talking about how many people are going back to church because of what happened to Charlie

and you've heard a lot of people talking about revival you've been talking you've been hearing a lot of people bring up that God is working in their hearts for the first time in a long time that they're opening their Bible so I wanted to have a show devoted to that question.

What is revival?

What does it mean?

What are the necessary ingredients that make up a revival?

And how do we ensure that we do all that we can to press into it and pour into it so that it grows and grows and grows?

How do we not thwart the spirit?

So joining me today are two men that know all about that topic and they've studied it and they know much more than I do about it.

So and by the way, one of which book that we mentioned last week because it was one of Charlie's favorites and that's Doctrine by Pastor Mark Driscoll.

So welcome, Pastor Mark.

Yeah, good to see you, everybody.

Thanks for having me.

And thank you for your team.

Just cannot even imagine the difficulty of processing the grief of the loss of someone that you love and also the increased workload.

So, thank you for leading the team and praying for you, and Erica, and everybody.

Well, thank you, Pastor Mark.

We feel the prayers.

I think I told you before that this is the first time in my life where I could say I feel the prayers of strangers all around the country and world.

And I think that's

a big part of what you're seeing us pull off and whether it be the memorial or getting the show together and growing the tour and so many things.

I'm so proud of the team.

So I'm with you on that.

And then Pastor Josh McPherson.

Did I get it?

You got it, Neil.

Sort of-ish.

He's going to be nice about it.

And you're up in the state of Washington.

Wenatchee, Washington.

Yeah, Wenatchee, and you have StrongermanNation.com, StrongermanNation.com.

And you've been in and around TPSA Faith and some of the team with us.

So honored to have you as well

to talk about this.

I know you preached about revival over the weekend.

Yes, it's an honor to be here and I'll just echo what Mark said, marveling at the strength and grace of your team in light of the events.

And I'm very grateful for what you guys are doing and here to serve.

Well, that's amazing.

So,

Pastor Mark, start with you.

You watched the intro, and it's basically clip after clip after clip of people that don't look like

probably the image a lot of people have of what a Sunday Christian looks like, and yet here they are being so dramatically impacted by the legacy of Charlie and the life he led, the message he preached.

Are we seeing this at the local level with your guys' communities that you pastor?

Can you see, are you hearing about it from other pastors that you know?

Yeah, so I'll start maybe at a higher level.

So, a martyr is someone who dies for their faith.

And so, the Bible is written in a couple of ancient languages.

One of them is Greek, and the word means witness or testimony.

And you know that somebody really believes something when they're willing to die for it.

That's the ultimate allegiance that you can demonstrate.

And so the first saints in the history of the Christian church were martyrs.

They were people who were basically willing to die for their love and devotion to Jesus Christ as God and Lord and Savior.

And so the first Christians, they died out of their love for Jesus.

Early reports say that in the first few centuries of the church, there were between five and ten million martyrs.

Wow.

I mean, so

we just had a funeral for a great man.

Imagine five or ten million of those.

And then Tertullian, the church father in the third century, he said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

And so the reason that Christianity spreads so wildly and rapidly is people no longer fear death.

And so, you know, there is a mockery even of death in 1 Corinthians 15.

Where, oh, death is your sting, where, oh, death is your victory.

I said that in my speech, actually.

You did, and you did a great job, and I want to honor you for that.

And

so, within that, once Jesus came back from death, the believers no longer fear death because the issue of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That is the issue.

And so, once death is defeated, it is no longer feared.

So, people are willing to die for Jesus, and And that was an incredible witness and testimony.

And so when Charlie died, he died publicly.

I can't think of a more public death in my lifetime.

There hasn't been one.

And it was surreal for me, and I'm sure for most watching on the phone, going, is this AI?

Is this not real?

This can't be real.

I'm praying, Lord Jesus, please, I hope it is not real.

But Charlie loved Jesus Christ, and his highest allegiance and devotion was to Jesus Christ.

You know that.

I know that.

And so when it came to the funeral, everyone who talked about Charlie had to talk about Jesus because Jesus was the person Charlie was always talking about.

And so now in his wake, what I really honor about Charlie and I really appreciate about Erica, they pointed everybody who was following them in the right direction.

Get a Bible, go to church, keep going, Erica said.

And now people are actually following their leadership and their example, which is incredibly honoring to the Lord Jesus, and there'll be incredible blessing that comes upon them and the organization for that act of obedience.

That's right.

That's right.

We're seeing it on a local level.

I'm in touch with you know over 50 pastors and different text threads talking constantly.

And

there's been a series, I think, of tests for churches and pastors in the last five years.

COVID, different administrations, you know, BLM.

Would you say it's four?

Like

COVID was a test.

COVID was a test.

So then Black Lives Matter was a test.

The election was a test.

And the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, those are four tests for pastors and churches to do this.

That's exactly right.

And pastors who are passing the test in terms of stepping out, being public, being more bold, being more clear, setting forth the truth plainly, not worrying about parties, but cutting through the noise to speak the truth and not being afraid to...

to recognize that there is not symmetry between political parties right now in terms of morality and being willing to call that out.

Across the board, Andrew, we're seeing those churches and those pastors, Easter level attendance, Easter level salvation responses.

It's like there's a moment where,

and we're talking all day, you know, with these pastors and they're like,

you know, up 35%, up 45%, one church up 80%, and just an outpouring of people, like at my church, we baptized 45 people yesterday.

The consistent testimony, I'll tell one story, this is negative on myself, a guy had been coming to Gray City Church for 10 years, a little embarrassing, 10 years in a city group, his wife, a follower, stubborn, unwilling to submit to Jesus, had been following Charlie, had heard 100 sermons from me,

been following Charlie, and Wednesday afternoon, God breaks him.

And as a result of this event and Charlie's martyrdom, he breaks down weeping in his office, gives his life to Jesus.

He's this introverted, quiet guy who would follow his wife to church, but never never talk about Jesus.

We have not been able to shut him up.

He's bringing neighbors and friends

and co-workers radically saved in the wake of this horrific event.

That reminds me when I got saved.

I couldn't stop reading the Bible and I couldn't stop talking about it with people.

I think that's actually a really interesting proof point when somebody is really saved.

I am so honored by your guys' presence here today, and I can't think of a more important topic than

revival.

What is it?

I think a lot of people are conflating it with patriotism.

They're conflating it with just this, I think, a subconscious desire to be bolder, to live better.

Those are all good things.

But

I believe you guys would agree with me and say, but not a revival does it make, right?

So

what would be your message for people that are feeling like this, this stirring?

They're hearing the word revival.

They have no idea what the heck it means.

What's a quick word for what that is?

You want to take it?

You just preached on it, buddy.

Yeah.

Well,

Mark's talked about it before.

There's a counterfeit to revival, and that's rioting.

And I think what we saw in the wake of Charlie's murder was evidence that God's doing something unique.

No cities burned.

No precincts were shot up.

Nobody was destroying businesses.

It was prayer vigils.

It was worship services.

The memorial that we sat there that you guys led was a remarkably profound experience that will not be matched in my lifetime.

Because as you said, Charlie, by the nature of how he lived his life, put Jesus in the mouth of anyone who wanted to talk about his life because it was the most important thing.

And so one of the things I think that marks revival, and Mark's done a lot of study on this, is the suddenly of God.

The God who is everywhere decides to be somewhere.

So there's the omnipresence of God where he's everywhere.

And then revival, I think, one market is where the manifest presence of God overrides the omnipresence of God.

And it's kind of like taking a magnifying glass, as my buddy says, and takes the sun that's everywhere and all of a sudden concentrates it, takes the global sun and concentrates it in a local area.

It could be a church, a region, a nation.

And I think what we're seeing, at least what my observation with pastors and churches in my own local context and buddies across the country, is the universal experience of increased supernatural spiritual hunger for God.

And that's the mark.

They're curious and they're hungry and they're talking about Jesus.

They're talking about the Word of God.

They have an interest in eternal things that were not there yesterday.

And you can't explain it by efforts that men have made.

It's a supernatural outpouring from heaven that accelerates the work of the kingdom.

So work we would have seen in 10 years happens in 24 hours.

I mean, you're seeing that with

TPUSA.

Yeah, it's a feeling.

I'll never forget when Tucker came up to the stage at the memorial and he said, the Holy Spirit is humming like a tuning fork in here.

It was like everybody could just feel the manifest presence of God, as you said.

And I mean, but I was hearing people feel that all over the place, watching on their TVs.

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We're talking about revival, and we were just talking about this manifest presence of God and that you can sort of feel the Holy Spirit.

And this, is that common that that's this outpouring when you look at the history of revival?

And by the way, tell us some examples of a revival so that we have something to compare it to.

Yeah, so, and thank you for the honor of having the conversation.

And it's, for those who don't know, it's wild because, I mean, I've known you for how long?

I want to say 20 years.

Which is wild.

You were in college.

Yeah.

Teaching your kids in Sunday school at Marsh Hill was one of the stories.

Yeah, that's wild.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Wild.

And so what happens is what precedes revival is often a new way of distributing information.

So in the days of the New Testament, you wouldn't get Christianity and the Apostle Paul unless you had Roman peace and the road system.

So then Christianity could spread.

And similarly, when you get new technology, it tends to be used of God for revival.

So for example, the printing press with Johann Gutenberg.

It allowed the Protestant Reformation.

Then comes the advent of technology that allows people to meet in stadiums.

Well, now you get the Billy Grahams.

He couldn't do that before.

You get radio.

Now you're getting to go into countries and closed areas.

Then you get television, and now it's a new opportunity.

And now we're in a digital age, and Charlie showed with his life and legacy the impact of new media.

So what precedes revival oftentimes is new technology that opens new opportunity.

And then what usually happens in revival, God isn't doing something new.

He's doing what he's always doing in deeper and greater measure.

God is always saving people.

God is always changing people.

God is always manifesting himself.

But in a revival, it goes from like a creek to a torrent rushing.

A flash flood.

Yeah, to a flash flood.

And all of a sudden, it's like, okay, we're used to a few people coming to church or reading their Bible or asking about Jesus.

And now all of a sudden, it is a moment.

And so revival is usually preceded by a moment.

And in the early church, that moment was the martyrdom of Stephen, the first martyr in the New Testament.

And actually, revival started first time that I remember in the Old Testament with the murder of Abel.

Cain kills Abel.

The first martyr in the Bible was Abel.

And then it says, at that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord.

And so historically, there is a moment.

Oftentimes, that moment is a martyrdom, and then there's a movement.

And so it goes from a moment to a movement.

And now that person's life becomes their legacy, and other people are following in their footsteps and wake.

With the death of Charlie Kirk and his clarity about the gospel of Jesus Christ and him answering questions about Christ right before he was murdered, we now have a moment.

The question is, will it become a movement?

In 10 years, if people are still reading their Bible and still going to church and still learning about Jesus, you know you've got a movement.

Historically, one of the most interesting things in the history of movements, they tend to be ignited by young people.

I wrote a few notes down.

So, Jonathan Edwards, during the Great Awakenings, he started preaching at 19.

George Whitfield, 25.

Circuit riders were in their 20s.

The average died by their early 30s.

D.L.

Moody, the Methodists.

The Methodists.

Yep.

D.L.

Moody.

They were amazing.

Rode themselves in the future.

They rode themselves.

Yeah, there were certain guys that literally killed six horses just riding to preach.

D.L.

Moody, 21.

Bonhoeffer, 25.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 19.

Billy Graham, 19.

Charlie Kirk, 18.

Charlie Kirk, 18, started proclaiming.

And what you see is that most revivals are led by youth.

The United, this will be shocking to people who think that it's all political and not spiritual.

The United States of America was an attempt at a youth movement to spark a revival.

The pilgrims who landed and the Puritans who landed tended to be in their teens and 20s, and they were rejected and mocked for being, quote, mere children.

And they were coming to establish religious liberty and freedom.

Historically, we saw it with the Jesus movements in the 60s and 70s.

The entirety of the second.

They were all hippies and young.

In the second great awakening, it was mainly college kids.

So when revival hits, it's new technology.

It's a moment that activates a young generation that leads to a movement.

And so we have all of the ingredients are here.

And I hope and I pray that that is exactly what we're on the precipice of.

Yeah, I just want to affirm some of your observations there.

I mean, I was in the room.

I was watching the analytics come through, and we would see, I mean, we did 15 billion views on social media

in the lead up to the election.

And then we basically doubled it in the spring after it.

So, I mean,

we just, and I kept telling Charlie, I was like, you are insanely famous, man.

We need to like

no, I didn't.

I kept going, like, it was, I, I tweeted really close after.

We kept having to recalibrate because I just was like on a two-year delay somehow of just how many people knew who he was.

And I was like, I'm still getting used to this.

I felt like I was always on this delay counter, and then I would take Charlie somewhere very obscure, and I would be like, whoa, everybody, like,

this happened real quick because he was always famous, but all of a sudden it went like Beatles level.

And it was this, something happened where

the God was moving, and Charlie was answering the call, and we, you know, it was, it was providential.

There's no way to not see it that way.

The anointing of the Holy Spirit is what we would say: that God decided, I'm going to put some extra grace and favor on this man for this moment.

And that's exactly what happened.

It was like, you know,

we joke about Charlie didn't know what the word Riz was.

You know, here he is, like the Gen Z whisperer.

It's like their favorite word, and Charlie's like, what's Riz?

But that was how people were describing Charlie.

They were like, Charlie's got so much Riz.

And yeah, it wasn't an anointing that had come on him, especially in those last couple years.

And you saw TikTok just went through the roof, YouTube, Facebook,

and Instagram, of course.

Charlie had the number one Instagram account of anybody, any conservative, if you will.

And our team did a great job with it.

But you were just seeing this going like.

What's happening?

And, you know, we thought of it as,

you know, we're trying to get Trump elected.

Obviously, Obviously, we're Christians.

We're going to speak faithfully about our Christian faith.

And I was telling you guys this before we came on air, that it was like as soon as this happened, the scales fell off my eyes.

And I realized what we had actually been doing the whole time, what Charlie had been doing the whole time.

And that was, you know, we called them college debates, but they were tent revivals, complete with the tent.

And Charlie was a prophet.

And what do they do to prophets?

They kill the prophets.

And because he confronted evil and he proclaimed the truth in an age that is full of a bunch of lies.

But it's interesting that even we didn't understand that.

And I wonder how common that is for people that are in and around and associated with movements.

It's like God hid it from us because he knows, it was almost like he knew we would have screwed it up if

we would have had full vision of it.

And as soon as he died, I was like...

I was getting just hit by revelations about what we had been up to.

Well, I think one of the distinct marks of revival is that it's something God's doing.

Man's not manufacturing it.

Man's not running a really captivating PR scheme.

Man's not crushing the optics.

It's something that God is supernaturally, providentially deciding to do.

He decides when to do it.

He decides who to use.

And I think there is something to the fact that God goes where he's wanted.

John Tyson has studied revivals and he did like a four-month tour with his family and he came away with the one takeaway.

He's like, God goes where he's wanted.

And so there is something that I think draws the manifest presence of of God in our hunger and our desire and our prayer and our seeking.

And yet, God chooses the times and the days to do what he wants.

And I think God was providentially using Charlie and your team in ways you probably didn't know.

And God shields you from that for the sake of humility and for the sake of keeping you on point.

And I had the sense, at least in the memorial, did anyone have any clue how big a deal?

Charlie was and how far his reach went.

I mean, you're looking at the cabinet and the most powerful man in the world, the most richest man in the world, and everybody in between.

I have people in my church, never met him, listened to him twice, felt like they lost a brother.

It's just this remarkable impact he had in such a short amount of time, and no one can take credit for that.

That's something that God is providentially, sovereignly doing.

And so part of the market revival is it's not something that man creates or manufactures, but we must recognize it and then step into it and take advantage of it with, I believe, bold proclamation from at least a pastor's perspective.

Because you look in the Old Testament or the New Testament rather than in the book of Acts, the rhythm is

test,

bold proclamation, revival, riot and response.

New test, and they have a chance to respond with boldness and courage or cowardice and retreat.

And if they cowardly retreat, God's spirit moves, is removed.

If they respond in boldness, God's spirit falls, more revival.

And they grew day by day, those who are being saved.

And then you get smeared and attacked and riot breaks out.

And that's the pattern that we see in the book of of Acts.

And I think we're in the middle of that pattern right now.

There was bold proclamation.

God's poured out his spirit with this revival moment.

Now there'll be riots and response and smear Charlie, smear his leg, all that kind of stuff.

And we're going to be tested again as a church.

Will we respond with boldness and clarity or will we back off and cower?

Gosh, that reminds me of something you said about,

but I don't want to hit it yet because we're about to have our...

our longest segment of the hour and I think it's perfect for it.

But, you know, I will say this.

You're talking about where God goes where he's wanted.

Yeah.

And I'm reminded, you know, know, I helped with a vineyard church plant in Los Angeles at some point.

And there was always one of the famous stories in the vineyard is that Wimber, who started the Vineyard Church movement, prayed for four years for miracles and just nothing, nothing, nothing.

And it does remind me of Charlie with his youth movement.

Like, he wanted to reach the youth, and it was like

banging your head against the wall for years, years, years.

And then eventually it was just like

the floodgates, you know, sprung open.

Our Our good friends at Angel Studios, I love Angel Studios, amazing new film this holy week.

Phenomenal impact.

As I think about Charlie's life and how much of a support he was of Angel, it's hard not to feel so grateful for what he did.

He supported us in our darkest days and in our brightest hours as a company.

Jeff and I and Charlie were doing lunch together.

We asked him, he said, are you at all worried about one of these college campuses?

And he just said, with so much peace in his eyes and so much peace in his heart if that's how God takes me then that's how I'm supposed to go and I feel like that was a clear message that Charlie's life is a testimony to Jesus Christ his Lord and Savior and his relationship with him was the most important thing that he would want the world to remember about his legacy

man are we grateful to have gotten to be a little connection in the multitude of connections that he made throughout his life because it was so impactful to us.

Thank you, you, Charlie.

We love you.

We miss you.

We're going to continue to drive forward the good news.

So

I was just telling you about, because God goes where he's wanted.

And

Charlie wanted this.

He wanted to see the youth.

He devoted.

his life from the time of being 18 and he was mocked and ridiculed

and told it was a fool's errand, and he just kept at it.

He just kept at it.

He just kept at it.

And then all of a sudden, you saw that spring forth.

And I was relating to you that story of John Wimber, who founded the Vineyard, and he really wanted to see God's miracles.

We could debate the merits of whether that was useful or not, but he worked at it like a fool for four years.

There was

pure hunger and desire.

And then all of a sudden,

if you know anything about the vineyard church movement,

it explodes.

Worship movement.

Yeah, and they have this Toronto blessing, and a bunch of

people experience a manifest presence of the Holy Spirit there.

So I'm not relating the two, but there is this sort of thing where I want to tell people out in the audience: if you hunger and desire for the things of the Lord, if you push

when it feels like you're getting nowhere,

sometimes God's going to answer that moment with something truly remarkable.

I'm not promising it.

God will do what he will do, but I just couldn't help but think about how badly Charlie wanted this.

And so to see it come to fruition is amazing.

And then to hear you say that revival starts with the youth.

I mean, there was, you'd go to one campus and put Charlie there, and these kids were hanging from lampposts and finding stairs to climb up and hanging on railing.

And you couldn't fit them all in these campus squares.

And it just, it feels like that's what's happening.

And then you put together the final thing, and then the floor is yours, Mark.

When we met, you said, well, we're going to see, is God going to bypass the pulpit?

So, yes, I believe that.

So, in addition to revival, there's reformation.

So, reformation is God pruning, cleaning up a church oftentimes because of its cowardice or tolerance.

And tolerance is the counterfeit of repentance.

And so, any of the churches that have brought in, sort of bought into the progressive agenda of tolerance, they are not honoring God because that is the counterfeit of repentance.

And so, I believe that Reformation is God cleaning up the church.

And then revival is God bringing people to himself.

But if people want to go to church, if the church doesn't have any courage or clarity, it's not going to be helpful to those new people.

And so this is, I believe, what God is doing is he is in this moment.

He has bypassed the pulpits.

And he instead chose to have the gospel preached in the largest platform in the history of the world.

And there's two things, actually, three things I want to say about that.

Number one,

when we had lunch and you know, it was just good to catch up with you, there was one thing that I felt that the Holy Spirit told me to tell you, and that is that whoever decided to allow the live stream of Charlie's funeral and memorial to not be copyrighted, but to be freely shared, to say thank you on behalf of Jesus Christ.

Because that permitted the biggest gospel presentation in my awareness of any moment in the history

of humanity.

That's right.

And I believe you made that decision to allow it to be streamed and not copyrighted.

And for those who are tuning in, there's money, there's power, there's favors that can be curried through taking that moment and trying to monetize it.

And what you chose to do was maximize it.

That's right.

And so, in that moment, we as pastors honor you.

That's right.

Because in that moment, you decided, I'm going to allow the most people to hear about Jesus and not worry about what I get in return.

And so, I know I was your pastor for some years, and I love you.

And I just want to say I'm incredibly proud of you.

That's right.

And on behalf of Jesus Christ and Christians, thank you for being the person who allowed the gospel to go out to the largest audience in the history of humanity.

That's huge.

And most people don't know that that was your choice, and I know it was with Erica's full support.

Totally.

Yeah, it wasn't just me.

But the whole team didn't even question when it was like, no, we got to go forward.

And this is for everybody, for Charlie, for the gospel.

But then, too, the other thing, not to interrupt you, my friend, but the moment that if revival does break out, where there was, I believe, a shifting, a breaking in the unseen realm, was Erica Kirk.

That's right.

She was

elegant, courageous, emotionally present,

completely appropriate, devotedly loyal to her God and her husband and her family.

But the moment was when she chose forgiveness over unforgiveness and bitterness and vengeance.

And to me, revival is all about the forgiveness of sin.

And she modeled, if she can, this is like,

I want to be careful with this.

I don't want to turn Charlie into Jesus.

I know that Charlie knew that he wasn't Jesus.

But when

Jesus was on the cross, he prayed, Father, forgive them.

When Stephen, the martyr, was being martyred as the first martyr in the New Testament church, he echoed Jesus' words and he said, Father, forgive them.

And then when Erica said, I forgive him,

forgiveness of sin is what unleashes the power of the Holy Spirit.

And revival is all about one thing, the forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ.

And so in that moment, Erica used the platform that God gave her.

And in that moment, God bypassed many pulpits, and there was more courage and clarity with the presentation of Jesus on that day than in many pulpits.

And we were sitting there next to, we kept looking at each other.

We're pastors, and it was wild.

It was just, it was like, is anybody not going to do an evangelist?

I mean, is everybody here an evangelist?

I mean, it was wild.

I know.

And to hear Tulsi.

It looked like Tulsi, who's, you know, not a Christian.

She got darned.

She tried.

She tried.

She's about to preach the gospel, man.

Let's look at that.

And I'll leave it at this.

The second moment to me that was incredibly sacred and could be the spark of revival was the humility of J.D.

Vance.

When he said, basically, I'm paraphrasing that I've always been a Christian, but I've not spoken openly and boldly as I ought, and I've talked more about Jesus in the last few weeks than I have in my whole life.

To be the vice president of the United States of America and to publicly confess that your allegiance to Jesus has been less than 100%,

you don't have to do that.

And he did that, and he did that as an example of humility.

And I would say to all pastors and Christian leaders who maybe have not been totally courageous and fearless follow his example and apologize to your people yeah and so in that too though I mean when JD did that I believe that I believe that if he is going to become our next president I believe that was the moment

because that was the moment that he chose humility and to honor Jesus above all else and I believe Jesus honors those who live under his authority but you were saying backstage that that wasn't part of his notes no he ad-libbed that moment yeah because I could see backstage.

I mean, it was a surreal backstage.

You got President Trump walking around and,

you know, Don Jr.

and Pete Hegseth and all these people, right?

And I'm watching.

Who, by the way, preached a great sermon on the martyrdom of Stephen.

He did a good job.

And when Hexeth Rubio,

when Hexeth said Jesus is king over all, and I'm like, you run the Department of War

and you're under authority.

That's right.

I interrupted.

No, you're absolutely right.

Well, I just want to give JD a little bit more you know, kudos here.

He's not held back since.

He's changed.

Check out clip 18.

You said that you hadn't read the Bible or talked about the Bible as much as you have in the last two weeks since Charlie was killed.

I always felt uncomfortable talking about that because I grew up in a country that was very secular.

I don't feel uncomfortable talking about that stuff anymore.

I'm going to talk about God.

I'm going to talk about my faith because that's what Charlie would want.

And I think it's the best way to honor my friend.

When he said that, I had a thought, and this is kind of for theology nerds.

Aaron Wren wrote an article that was kind of broken up evangelicalism into three kind of epochs of time.

1954 to 1994 was positive world, where

it was socially advantageous to be public with your faith.

You couldn't get elected for public office unless you identified with Protestant or Catholic Christianity,

all these kind of things.

Leave it to Beaver era, whatever.

And then he identifies 1994 to 2014 as neutral world,

where

Christianity stock is kind of falling.

It's not necessarily socially advantageous to identify as a Christian anymore, but it's not socially disadvantageous.

Yeah, it's just neutral.

So people weren't hostile, they were just indifferent to Christianity, right?

And in 2014, he marks a distinct change.

Oberga fell, we have a ruling in the highest court of the land that's now codifying anti-Christian morality into our code of law.

So that's the change, right?

And he marks other social things where we went from culture being neutral or indifferent towards Christianity to culture being hostile towards Christianity.

So now it wasn't just socially advantageous or neutral.

It's now socially disadvantageous to identify yourself as a Christian.

Christians go underground, okay?

There's open hostility towards Christianity.

And what we see is people having a sense of moral duty to suppress Christianity because it's evil now, right?

One of the marks of this era has been like

the public offense is to go public with your Christianity.

I had the thought, and just a sense in my spirit, when JD said that, something broke in the reality of neutral.

He's saying, I will now be aggressively, unapologetically, consistently, passionately, clearly public about my faith.

And when you have one of the highest authorities in the land saying that, something's changed and something's shifted.

And Charlie was doing that when it was dangerous and when it was costly and when very few other people would do it.

And now you're seeing the prophets go first, right?

Boom,

there's a breach in the wall.

And it feels like talking publicly about Jesus now

could start becoming a cultural norm where it was culturally disadvantaged before, which is pretty raw to think about.

The impact that could have is it ripples throughout the land.

Yeah, that's kind of where I was going to go with our next, but we're already there.

We have one minute here real quick, Mark.

But,

you know,

I think people worry about the purity of the gospel being diluted a little bit when the leaders start happening.

That's not what I saw, though.

I saw a very sincere presentation from the heart from

the most powerful people on the, you know, in the planet.

And

is there power in that?

I mean, obviously it's what we've always wanted, but there is a concern.

I don't know for me that it would become hijacked somehow.

Movements are messy.

They just are.

And there's going to be mistakes made, and then there'll be

changes made.

And that's just the nature of everything that is in the process of growing and flourishing there's a little pruning along the way yeah well because you think about the roman empire right it was when it was when it was underground it was spreading like wildfire when it became institutionalized that's when you get some corruption get some corruption that's right this is something i've been reflecting on because you can't there's not a one-to-one parallel between an old movement and a new movement right we have new wineskin right and so we're we're going to look something we talked about at our lunch is a new wineskin.

So you can't, there's parallels.

You see trends in other revivals, but this is going to be something of its own.

So to see, yes, in the Roman Empire,

when Christianity became institutionalized, there was corruption that set in, but it also spread a lot still.

And if you see the conquering of the, or the conquering, the spread of Christianity throughout Europe, you know, in the Middle Ages, I mean, and

it probably wouldn't have done that without the institutional might of the Roman Empire and then, you know, as it splintered off, the power center that was still in Rome.

And so there can be really forceful, good things when people of power grab hold of the gospel and step into this new thing that God is doing.

Yeah, and we talked about it at lunch.

Jesus uses this little parable that new wine needs to go into new wineskins.

You can't put new wine into old wineskins.

And in context, what he's saying is when there's a new move of God, when there's a new movement of the Holy Spirit, it's like new wine.

It's still fermenting and bubbling and it's explosive and it's not stable.

And that's what happens when there is a revival.

It's a new wine.

The problem is, Jesus says you put it in an old wineskin.

Well, an old wineskin, the wine that it contains is settled.

It's no longer moving.

And so that skin gets stale.

A lot of churches and denominations, old wineskins, what's happening now could be new wine.

You're going to need new wineskins, new churches, new ministries, new movements, new leaders, new styles to handle the new wine and churches that won't talk about charlie they're just proving that they're the old wineskin or schools and universities i mean guys i am getting i'm getting flooded yeah with people

you know there's a story i won't i won't break it now i'm getting a whistleblower just why we've been on the show of a major company in america that won't let

their employees donate to turning point right now they because they have like a match

they won't they have a match program right so if you're a company you can donate oh i know

i won't say it but yeah i'm not ready yet i got to talk to them but i'm but i'm being alerted to this you know over the weekend i i

i highlighted lipscomb academy which is a christian school in nashville where a bunch of conservatives prominent ones send their kids to this school and about 20 young men showed up in suits and ties to honor charlie the day after he was murdered And the principal called him in and said, you got to take those off.

It's against dress code.

Because there's nothing worse than young men wearing a suits and ties.

Yeah.

And it's funny.

I told you this before the show.

There's just like a feeling that men want to put a suit jacket on.

That's a growing.

It's a good thing.

They want to grow up.

It's a good thing.

Put your shoulders back, Trinity.

Own your life.

Be a man.

That's right.

Move forward with dignity and respect.

That's a good thing.

And this school shut it down and punished the kids, and they haven't uttered Charlie's name since.

And so all the parents and teachers are really upset over at Lipscomb Academy.

We're going to be watching you, Lipscomb.

Well, you were talking earlier about,

okay, what happens when the lines get blurred and government, you know, Christianity, how this works.

I think one of the things to keep in mind is,

and this is more kind of Kuiperian jurisdictional theology, but God has different spheres of human sovereignty, and he appoints those spheres with responsibility and authority.

So you have the family, the household.

Mom and dad are in authority over the kids.

Their responsibility is to raise the kids, shepherd the kids, educate the kids, the well-being of the family.

Then you have the church.

Their responsibility is to preach the pure gospel, to administer the sacraments, and to be a culture and government's conscience in the bold declaration of the truth.

And then you have the government, and it's a distinct lane that God's given authority to and responsibility for, but it's a small lane.

And I think Charlie understood that.

But if that lane grows,

it starts impeding on the other lanes to the detriment of all the jurisdictions.

But the point is, God has given them a job, and it's to bear the sword against evildoers.

It's to reward the righteous.

And it's to defend the people by allowing there to be an orderly nation by protecting borders.

That's Romans 13.

And so I don't need those in government to necessarily even preach the gospel.

I mean, the memorial was like amazing.

What I need them to do is to do the job.

So one of my favorite speeches was Stephen Miller.

When he stood up and he's like, you are nothing, you have nothing.

We're coming after you.

It's like, I want the preachers to preach the gospel, and I want the government to bear the sword against unrighteousness, and then you're into morality.

Who gets to define what's righteous, what's unrighteous, who gets to declare the standard of morality?

So we need our government to be built on the morality of something.

And so the whole idea that's being exposed, I think, is the myth of

the neutrality of secularism.

Every government has to have a worldview that they draw from to know how to do their job.

And so the beauty of it, like, I don't need our government officials to preach the gospel, but we need them to stand on the foundation of the moral law of God so they can do their job and really stay out of the church's lane, which is what we could get into later if we wanted to, what we're seeing happen in the White House.

I think they understand the need for the government to get smaller so the church can do their job.

Yeah, one of the things I do want to talk about is

the tendency of the mainstream news media to describe what's happening as Christian nationalism.

So I do want to get to that, and I think that's instantly where I go there.

But I, you know, I, the other thought that I have, just based on what you're saying, is that Charlie was expert at sort of not bifurcating his faith and not compartmentalizing his faith.

His faith was just everywhere all the time.

It didn't matter what he was talking about.

That's right.

And I noticed the same instinct that I have.

It's like, well, okay, I'm talking about Lipscomb Academy, you know, on Twitter and X saying, listen, I'm hearing a lot of really bad things.

Like, people running that school are not on the team.

As a matter of fact, they're hostile to a lot of what God is doing in this moment, and they're hostile to the kids that love Charlie.

Well, that doesn't feel very Nashville conservative enclave.

It feels like people have infiltrated that school that need to be fired.

And that's all over.

But that comes from my Christian conviction.

That comes from a sense of righteousness.

Like, I'm not putting one in one compartment and putting another in another compartment.

I'm saying, listen,

Charlie was confronting evil wherever he saw it and he's proclaiming the truth.

Will you punish kids for

trying to honor Charlie by wearing a suit and a tie?

That's an amazing gesture.

You should have honored that, and they didn't.

And you talk about tests, and it's like

you passed the test or you failed the test.

Well, they failed it, and I don't see it any other way.

Now, listen, the school's going to do what they're going to do, but I think there's a power in us as Christians not saying, Well, I put my Christianity here on Sunday, and then when I go to Washington, D.C.

as your congressman or as your vice president or whatever, I'm going to put it over here and I'm going to put my faith in a little box.

There is a power being unleashed, and I got to believe that that's part of the new wineskin because the devil knew that this was going to happen or something.

He was helping architects.

Yeah, and by the way, and exactly.

But God,

like, there's, and I think he's laying the trap.

So a Christian national, Christian national, and Christian national.

Well, guess what was going to happen?

Charlie Kirk was going to die, a martyr's death, and then the world's most powerful leaders were going to get up on a stage with a hundred million people streaming it, and they were going to start speaking the truth about Jesus Christ.

And guess what?

Christian nationalism.

Is that really Christian nationalism, or is that just living your faith in public?

Well, so

Jesus is Lord overall, or he's not Lord at all.

We believe that he right now is high and exalted.

He's over government.

He's over family.

He's over nations, cultures, businesses, churches.

And so to say, Jesus Christ has jurisdiction here, but not there, is to be disloyal to his sovereignty and to his lordship.

It just is.

Yeah.

I mean,

even from a sociological perspective, you're either going to have nationalism.

Or globalism.

Or globalism or anarchism, right?

And so you're going to have tyranny, anarchy, or an orderly society.

So let's just start there.

Nations are a good thing.

And then that nation is going to be built on a worldview.

And we think the Christian worldview is a superior worldview that does the most good for the most people, even those who don't adhere to it.

But if our rights come from our creator, the question is, what's his name?

That's the question.

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So here, I want to now transition our conversation so that so I can't use that word anymore, by the way.

That word you're joking.

We are going to

shift the conversation.

We're going to pivot a little bit.

I'm going to go to this conversation about Christian nationalism, and I'm going to play some clips of what they're now saying about this.

And then we're going to talk about the demonic.

And then I want you guys to prepare your spirits for this.

I think it's important that pastors are encouraged, warned, and

given some guidance on what this season will entail.

You talk about new wineskins and new wine So I want to talk about that That's kind of I think where we're going.

We'll see if that materializes, but I'm gonna play these two clips here.

Let's go ahead and play cut seven What you are seeing here is a movement called Christian nationalism that merges Christianity as it's been practiced in America for you know centuries with a very specific interpretation of what the founding fathers wanted what Aristotle wanted this strain of interpretation of the Bible merge Christianity and protecting the Western civilization values into one and the same thing.

All right, so that's Tina Nguyen from

Verge.

I think she's with the Verge.

She was with Puck.

She's been with Political.

I've actually known her for a long time.

She's always been very nice to me and a stand-up operator.

I actually told her I was probably going to like slam her with that clip today, but I said I would do it nice because she's actually nice.

And she, listen, she is misinterpreting the signs of the times, but we can can get into that in just a second.

I told her that.

Let's go ahead and play cut eight.

This is Don Lamon talking about something similar.

What we saw in that arena was not simply faith-finding public expression.

It was religious nationalism on full display.

That is the truth.

That is my truth.

This is my freedom of expression.

This is my First Amendment right to be able to tell you the truth.

Mark, is that the truth?

So

our nation is founded on rights.

We are told that those rights come not from government, they come from God, and that God has authority over government, and that all governmental authority is derivative from God.

The question then is, what is the name of this God?

That's the question.

The Muslims would say his name is Allah.

The Christians would say his name is Jesus Christ.

And so at the end of the day, as soon as you answer the question of what the name of that God is, you're picking a team.

And what I find interesting is this is slanderous.

It is fear-based.

It is fear-mongering.

And as Pastor Josh said previously, you get anarchy, you know, which if you want to know what that looks like, you know, go to Portland tonight.

You get globalism, where we send all of our young men and dollars overseas until we cease to exist as a country and eradicate our borders and allow criminals and cartels cartels to be in charge.

Or you have nationalism, and nationalism is what God says is best for human life and flourishing.

The first attempt at globalism is back in Genesis in a place called Babel, that is ancient Babylon, that is today Iraq.

They all have the same language.

They all get together and they're trying to chase this Marxist-utopian counterfeit vision of a perfect life on earth without God.

And it's globalism.

God looks down and says, they're united, and unless we spread them into nations, they're going to do tremendous evil.

So united people without God are dangerous people.

And so then God scatters them into nations, and he confuses them into languages.

And so nationalism is what God did to save us from destroying ourselves.

At the end of the age, according to the storyline of the Bible, depending upon your reading, at the end of the age, all the nations will seek to come together into a globalistic vision.

But then the question is, who gets to be the leader?

And it's not Christ, it's the Antichrist.

And so, if all power is consolidated globally, one demonically, satanically possessed person wielding all of that power becomes the end of civilization.

And so, globalism is a naive myth from the earliest days of Genesis, and nationalism was God's answer to globalism.

It says in Acts 17: God determines the times and places in which we live.

God had me, though Irish by descent, born in America in 1970, and that was God's decision for me.

I love my God, and I love where he put me.

And

we were talking in the break, Pastor Josh, that

you have this,

you feel like you understand why Charlie was so dangerous to some of these

ideas,

whether we call them demonic ideas, whether we call them just far-left ideas.

And I don't think all left ideas, just for the record, are demonic.

I'm just saying there are some that are demonic.

There's some that are left and far left.

Why was Charlie so dangerous to kind of this

old lie?

Well, I think what made him effective and therefore dangerous was that Charlie was not primarily a political animal, and he said this in his own words.

And Charlie's political theory was rooted in biblical theology.

And he had an ability like maybe nobody I've ever seen to connect the dots with what's happening

in the political realm with what God has said from his moral law.

And so there's this obscure quote from John Frame, who gave us tri-respectivism.

I think that's kind of where you got it early on.

And John Frame talked about the necessity of understanding the gospel as the center.

Now, there's been a gospel-centered movement in American Christianity in the last 20 years, but what the gospel-centered movement did, I believe, is turn the gospel from the center to a boundary.

So, John Frame explains like this, and this is what I think made Charlie so profound and trigger me on time here for running out.

When you view the gospel as a boundary, it means all you can do is talk about the components of the specific gospel, justification by faith alone, regeneration.

What is the gospel?

For those who don't know, let it rip.

It's Jesus Christ.

Jesus is God, become a man to live without sin, the only human being to ever live without sin, declare himself to be God, the only founder of any major world religion, to declare himself to be God, to die on the cross in our place as our substitute for our sins, to physically, bodily raise from the dead, opening heaven and triumphing over Satan, sin, death, hell, and the wrath of God.

The gospel is the good news about who Jesus is and what Jesus does, and no one is who Jesus is, and no one does what Jesus does.

That's the gospel.

Amen.

So what the gospel center movement did, I believe, is turn the gospel into a boundary.

I totally agree.

I totally agree.

And this is one of the things with TPOSA Faith that we did.

We said, churches, if you don't speak into this void about

sex and identity and about

marriage, gender, gender, whatever, abortion, you are leaving this vacuum that will be filled by people that do not share your values.

And so you don't have to agree on post-trib, pre-trib.

You don't have to.

We're not getting into that.

We're saying speak up, stand up, and speak into the public arena because we are losing our country.

The first, The most important thing, and Charlie always says this, was preach the gospel.

The second most important thing is to make sure you can do the first.

And so stand up, church.

That's right.

Fill the void.

Do not be cowards.

And that was what made him

truly unique.

If the pulpits of America don't disciple the culture, the culture will disciple the culture to themselves because secularism has a God.

and it's the God of self.

And so when John Frame talks about the gospel being the center, he says it in such a way so as to say it doesn't limit what we talk about, actually gives us permission and obligation to connect everything in life under the sun to the reality of the gospel.

And that's what Charlie did, I believe, in such a powerful way.

Sex, relationships, politics, governments, and nations, connecting them to the reality of God, most explicitly found in Jesus Christ in the gospel.

You know, we're talking about

how

the

church, this moment, could bypass the pulpits, right?

But secondly,

that there is this other move.

There's a whole bunch of pastors that are stepping into

this space, and there's a whole bunch that are refusing to utter Charlie's name or whatever.

And which is wild, not to interrupt you, my friend, but like if you talked a lot about George Floyd because people were asking questions, you should talk a lot about Charlie Kirk because people are asking a lot of questions.

Just be consistent.

Yes.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I mean, this is, again, what happened at Lipscomb, right?

You had,

I mean, I'm going to keep hitting it because it's ridiculous, by the way.

But these kids are hurting.

They're reeling.

The day after they're.

They watched their big brother get murdered on their phone.

And so

and they do this beautiful gesture and then they refuse to utter it.

You know, they didn't do the same thing during George Floyd.

They issued a whole statement.

They made sure there was grief counseling, whatever, right?

Their changes need to be made.

And they couldn't even stand up for

this

cultural moment, this zeitgeist moment that was so much bigger than anybody, bigger than bigger than the show, bigger than,

any of those.

The Polish parliament had a moment of silence.

Correct.

Well, and then you see that in our own Congress that people could, you know, the moment of silence.

And they tried to pray, and it ended up being an absolute conflict.

Yeah, absolutely.

If the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys and the Polish parliament are talking about something and you're not, you might not be tuned into what's going on in the world.

Yeah,

part of this, too, is there is something within Christianity.

I want to be incredibly pejorative, but it's seeker-sensitive.

But ultimately, here, you're being insensitive to those who are seeking.

If there's a whole generation saying, What happens when you die?

And what happened to Charlie?

And are demons real?

And is Satan real?

And we have questions.

You're like, we don't talk about that because it's political.

No, no.

Any question that's being asked, if you are a pastor or a spiritual leader, you're supposed to open the Bible and answer the question.

That's the job.

And you're kind of famous for this.

You'll talk about all the things, all the things, whether that's sex life, political life, you know, cultural.

Our job is to be helpful.

You speak into the void.

I mean, you really do.

We have a fundamental conviction that Jesus rules and reigns over everything, which is not only permission, but obligation to speak into it.

Otherwise, Satan and the culture will disciple people with counterfeit truths.

So it's an obligation to speak into it and speak over it.

That's right.

That's right.

And so I'm going to wait till we get back to radio, but this is the question before us.

We're talking about revival.

It's marked by youth movements.

It's

usually led by a young leader.

There's a movement.

There's a young leader that started preaching around 18 or 19.

Yep.

Well, okay.

Two ingredients, check, check.

There's a moment that leads to a movement, right?

There is these other ingredients that people are called to repentance.

And you've got all these people and forgiveness.

Repentance and forgiveness.

And,

you know, that's been obviously true because

Charlie's legacy and his life was so exemplary that all these,

all these people are like, how do I be a better husband?

How do I be a better father?

And, you know, and so you've got all these things, but then what about the church?

Is it bypassing the church?

Is it with new wineskins?

What is your challenge and your instruction to the church?

The pastors out there that are seeing their pews filled

and maybe some that aren't.

You know, so there's like some, you know, there's a Fox News poll that says churches are experiencing a 15% increase in congregations.

Well, some are experiencing 80% or 100% lines out the door.

There is obviously, you know, when we think about Revelations, you know, you're going to snuff out the lampstands.

Well, are some churches going to

fold their, you know, to close their doors during this time while others explode and grow?

What is your word for pastors and chefs?

Go there in a moment.

So let me just say this, though.

For you, looking at the empty chair, I walked in, I got pretty choked up.

How many times have you sat

here with Charlie, and now you're possibly your best friend, I want to speak for you, is gone.

I mean, you've got a job to do.

You're leading all.

But just personally, as a human being, as a pastor, I just feel like asking,

where are you at in all of this?

You know,

a lot of these Army guys and Special Forces guys reached out and they said, you know, it comes in waves.

Don't be upset at yourself if you're not feeling what you feel like you should be feeling one moment.

And don't be upset if then the next moment you feel like you can't take a step forward and that my man that is true like it is so true I've been

you know there's moments like when we were getting ready for the the memorial it was just we were so busy I didn't have a chance to think or grieve it was just like let's go you know we got we have a job to do and then you get done with that I remember I was on Jesse Waters on the Monday and it was like Jesse asked me that same question.

I was like, you know, to be honest, Jesse, it's kind of hitting me all over again.

It was like the come down after the after that big event.

And then this weekend, you know,

it just hit me again.

So I think that's just going to be the way it is.

And I'm not afraid of it.

I embrace it.

You know, I tweeted out.

I was like, I can't believe he's gone because it still doesn't feel real.

It still feels very

real.

Yeah, it does.

And I miss him a lot.

And I, you know, these like old habits that you put, you know, we worked together for eight years.

I, um, you know, you're thinking about texting him or, you know, or something funny or something you know he would say about something.

And I guess,

you know, I just know that he's in glory.

And, you know, as Erica said, he's on a work trip with Jesus.

And,

you know, and I'm just truly humbled that I got to see it so up close.

And I know that the whole team here in the studio feels the same way at turning point.

Yeah.

Well, you're grieving the loss of your friend and under tremendous work doing things that there's no precedent or playbook for.

You're just doing the best every day as you're able.

And your team's doing an incredible

job, bro.

Well, thank you.

I mean, honestly, that's one of the blessings of being with this large team, you know, because, you know, you're feeling weak and then you see, you know, somebody else, you know, really doing a great job and being courageous.

And you're like, I can do it too.

And I think we all feed off each other.

You know,

it's a team, it's a staff, it's a job, but it's really a family.

And when something like this happens, it galvanizes you and really bonds you together.

And I think

there could be a lot of really weird ways to handle this moment.

And just my experiencing outside looking in, a lot of discretion, a lot of wisdom, a lot of grace in how you guys are handling it.

I just think is evidence of the Spirit of God

leading you guys and giving you guys grace for this moment.

I mean, we've got the whole world praying.

I mean, I'm not I'm very aware of that.

Yeah.

You know, and I said it before, but it bears repeating.

I think a lot of us feel it.

Like, we even feel the prayers of strangers.

Yes.

And that's a wild thing.

You know, I've heard presidents talk about that before, where

you feel sustained by the prayers.

And to know that so many people have been praying for us.

I mean, I don't talk to a single person that doesn't tell me we've been praying for you.

So thank you for asking.

We love you.

And you forget that, like, Charlie is a husband, he's a father, he's got a wife, he's got kids, he's got friends.

And to the team here, it was a very warm, personal relationship.

And sometimes in a media world, we think that people are just ideologies and not human beings with families and relationships.

Yeah, there was definitely this very distinct effort the entire career to make him wooden and two-dimensional.

And to us, he was always in

technicolor 3D and one of the warmest, most generous, gracious, loyal, just good-hearted people,

kind-hearted people.

Yeah, he's joyful.

Funny.

It's hilarious.

Doesn't get nearly enough credit for helping me.

I mean, one of Charlie's secret sauce was he embodied truth, goodness, beauty.

He was a truth machine that was anchored in the goodness of the moral law of God and the wisdom of the Word of God.

And he was demonstrating in real time with his beautiful wife and his beautiful kids the beauty of the Christian worldview working itself out in the heart of a man.

And when you combine that, just razor-sharp logic on truth, a commitment to fundamental goodness for all mankind, and then living out the beauty of a Camelot out story a beautiful wife a family he loved it it's a powerful one two three punch that you can't ignore it's self-authenticating that worldview is working i think that was part of what was so compelling about what's amazing is how much erica embodies all of those qualities as well remarkably always knew it but it's to see her have this platform uh to to be i mean i you know we've talked about the charlie effect and now one of the things i'm seeing more and more on social media is the erica effect right

she could turn a whole generation of young young women as he turned a whole generation of young men.

If so, that would be revival.

That's right.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, so

it would be revival when you, because we've seen this movement with young men, but the women have been lagging.

So, yeah, statistically, there's something called the GSS.

It's the general social surveys, sort of the gold standard

for trends.

There's a lot of bad polls.

This is sort of

a good one, yeah.

And so this is the poll from which a lot of other polls in social sciences are derived.

So they say that this is the most conservative generation of young men in the history of polling.

They're trending to the right.

This is also the most progressive, liberal, feminist generation of women in the history of the world.

And so literally, the Democratic Party is kind of the men's party and then the married women's party.

You mean the Republicans?

The Republicans, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Yeah, and so the Republicans are men and married women, and then Democrats are almost all women and progressive.

And so you've seen, though, what Charlie helped to do was pull a whole generation of young men toward conservative and what we would call traditional and biblical values.

And now, what you've got with Erica is the possibility of her influence and example doing the same.

Those young men are going to need girls to marry.

Yeah.

They're not out there right now.

Well, there was a poll that came out that the number one thing that a young conservative man thinks would make them successful is having children in a family for young women.

It was 12 out of 13.

So imagine this.

Men want to have kids and women don't.

So there needs to be be a massive reorientation of the mindset.

And what I saw with Erica was elegance and grace and courage and clarity and wisdom and devotion.

And it's like the worldview that she believes helped contribute to the woman that we all admire.

So if you admire the woman, examine the worldview.

Yeah, that's right.

No, that's 100% right.

And the line that always stood out for me from her speech, when she, you know, which is it's noteworthy, by the way, given what we're talking about, that Erica chose to bring up the role of men and women in marriage.

She went there in her speech, which I found to be a stunning kind of moment.

It really stuck out to me.

And she says, you know, to

women, your husband is not your rival.

It's an amazing, I felt like that above so many other lines, like it just drilled down into this core tension in our modern.

She put a spear through the heart of the Jezebel spirit.

Yes.

Wow.

Thank you.

That's exactly right.

Yes.

Well, by the way, way, we're talking about demons and demonism.

So, I mean, maybe that's the right.

I mean, when you talk like that, what do you mean?

Maybe if there's people in the audience that don't know what you mean when you say that.

So, Jesus' half-brother, a man named James, he actually uses a word in the Bible, demonic.

So it's a biblical word in California.

There are verses for it.

Yeah, and so the Bible says that there are two realms that form one reality.

There's the unseen realm of the spiritual, and then there's the seen realm of the physical.

These realms were one until sin breached them.

And now the unseen realm can still be involved in and have great impact on the seen realm.

And so there are certain things that just evildoers will do.

There are other things that you can't explain it apart from something that is a pure force of spiritual evil.

And so, for example,

when you see men sort of abusing, damaging, traumatizing children, that's purely demonic.

You've gone beyond just making a bad decision to being an oppressed or possessed person.

And so, you know, if you look at culture, you see that we have a culture of death, we have a culture of lies, we have a culture of victimization where those who promote death and do lie, they think that they're the victims and they're virtuous.

I mean, this is all demonic.

And what God creates, Satan counterfeits.

And so in the realm of the demonic, what we're seeing is we're seeing the demonic really come out of the shadows.

and they're and they're even looking at the uh the assassination of charlie like what is the causation did he have a bad family no did he grow up poor no did his parents get divorced no did he have any trauma not that we can see well what was it demonic satanic evil a force of pure evil working through a human being to do inexplicable devastation to a family and a generation and so you know if you believe in good and you believe in evil you need to believe in god you need to believe in satan

and spiritual beings.

Well, and you talked about there's that, you know, we all we know the verse.

Charlie believed in this very much that we do not, you know, wrestle against flesh and blood and blood, but powers, principalities, and spirits.

Yeah, and so when you say she put a spirit through the spirit, the Jezebel spirit,

is that so?

You're saying she it was a demonically inspired spirit of our age?

You don't see many strong women today who can stand up with beauty and elegance and confidence and godliness

and godliness build up men around them?

So I think one of the hearts of the Jezebel spirit is there's intimidation, there's a jealousy of mankind.

It's Genesis 3.

You'll want his position.

Erica didn't want to be Charlie.

She wanted to be who God made her to be as Erica and then helped Charlie build up Charlie, encourage Charlie, and the partnership was dynamic and unstoppable.

Well, I'm going to play that clip in just one second because I think it's so wonderful.

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You made this comment that I just felt was really powerful, Pastor Josh.

You said when Erica said this statement that you're not rivals and she's defining the roles of men and women, that she put a spear through the spirit of the Jezebel spirit of our age.

Let's play this cut and then I'll let you put a finish that up.

Clip 27.

But please be a leader worth following.

Your wife.

Your wife is not your servant.

Your wife is not your employee.

Your wife is not your slave.

She is your helper.

You are not rivals.

You are one flesh working together for the glory of God.

It's incredible.

Let's go.

It's incredible.

It's so beautiful.

It's putting a spirit through your heart of chauvinism that would look down on a woman.

Yeah, got both sides.

That's a good point.

She was an equal opportunity.

Everyone got to get shot.

You know, everyone got to get addressed.

So, chauvinism, there's no room for that in biblical Christianity.

Feminism, where men are put down and women are elevated.

And so it was powerful.

Can we read Bible verses on this show?

We could preach the gospel.

Let's go.

Because you reminded me of this when you said it.

It's in 2 Corinthians 10.

In light of talking about spiritual warfare, Mark, I'd be interested to think of this.

Paul says this.

He says, the weapons we fight are not the weapons of the world.

On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

Now, watch this.

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.

That's what she was doing.

And that's what made it so powerful.

And then, watch this.

And we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Christians typically read that verse, and a buddy of mine pointed this out, and we think of it as personal.

Take captive my thoughts, you know, don't have lustful thoughts, whatever.

Paul is referencing taking captive thoughts in the context of public argumentation.

He's calling Christians to, that's a wrong thought.

Charlie was going around campuses and he was publicly taking captive those demonic thoughts and ideologies that really had the hearts and minds of students captive.

And he was saying that's a wrong thought.

That's a wrong idea.

And he was demolishing these strongholds that set themselves up against the knowledge of God with the truth of the gospel.

And that's...

what Erica was doing.

And that's what made it so strong.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, Charlie, there's this great clip of him saying, My job is to confront evil.

We might actually have that clip.

I think we do have that clip.

My job is to confront evil and to proclaim the truth.

But let's just play this one just because it's fun to hear it in his own words.

Let's play cut 28.

This is Charlie with Tucker Carlson.

This is why your faith is the most important thing.

Because for those of us that are Christians, you actually see what's going on, which is that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and darkness and spirits, that there is a spiritual war war here.

There is a God and we are not him.

That there is an entire dimension of angels and demons and spirits that are constantly struggling around us, and that there is a supernatural dimension.

Amen.

Crushed it.

No notes.

Well, see, part of it, too, I said this is I think that of all the political pundits and commentators I've met, very few would qualify to be a pastor according to the qualifications in the Bible.

Charlie did.

His character, his marriage, his personal integrity.

And so I think an entire generation that was not in church, but they were online, I think they looked at Charlie as not just a big brother, but their pastor.

So they were looking to him as to, okay, well,

how do I get married?

How do I have a family?

What makes life meaningful?

How do I know where the truth is?

So Charlie was functioning as a pastor for an entire generation.

And so when he died, even those who weren't Christians,

they felt this devastating personal emotional loss.

And that's why.

And then they went to church because that's what Pastor Charlie told them to do.

And so I believe that he is well known for his political work.

I think that now we're seeing his spiritual work was at least as equally impactful.

He was bigger.

And so, I mean, this is where I want to end this conversation in the time we have left.

What's your word?

So Erica said, go to church.

Elon Mud Musk retweeted it.

Which is why

I would hope that I hope that he was tweeting it on his way to church.

Dude, I mean,

we saw Elon Musk singing along.

Singing some worship songs.

Let's go.

There's the tweet.

She's not a super active

tweeter, poster, but when she does, bingo.

She makes gold records.

And thank you for doing this, Erica.

Yeah, thank you.

And just to see

Elon post that, and he posted, you know, anyways, my point is.

What's happening there, I think, is I'm not sure where Elon is with Jesus, but there's just a recognition that cultural Christianity is good for everyone.

Yes, I think Elon

is very well aware that he does not want to live in an agnostic, atheist, Muslim country.

He wants to live in a Christian one.

He wants to live in one where people have virtue and honor and honesty and integrity, and they don't target him just because they don't like the fact that he's so rich.

I mean, I think he's that all that's very much playing into this, this, but I got to believe that you do not sit through, and he sat through so much of it.

He sat through hours of gospel preaching.

And you can't, it's hard to sit through that and to feel the Holy Spirit and go, it's not real.

Well, and to ask, too, what happens when I die?

Yes.

And what will they say?

Yes.

And what was so powerful about that memorial?

And probably be confronted with the fact that he's under incredible amount of threats.

That's right.

Oh, his life is constantly in danger.

Yes.

Yes.

I was just going to say, a friend pointed out to me, that was not an event that had been planned for 10 months.

Yeah, that was a week.

The event we sat in that was so sweet and so powerful didn't even exist 10 days earlier.

And what it demonstrated was when you bump Christians with tragedy, what pours out is hope.

That's what's so powerful.

Well, and so what is the message to the shepherds, the pastors out there, Pastor Mark, Pastor Josh?

How do they pass this test?

And

how do they step in?

to the anointing of this new wine that is being poured out on the country because I think it's critical.

One of the things Erica said, she said shepherd them.

Shepherd them.

So I'll pick it up there.

There is a wild misunderstanding of what it means to shepherd.

So in the Bible, you know, animals are out in the field.

They're exposed to wolves and predators.

And so the shepherd has two jobs.

One, to be tender with the flock, two, to be tough for the flock.

If we took out the word shepherd and we inserted the word cowboy, you would have the biblical understanding of a pastor.

A pastor pastor is supposed to be a cowboy supposed to be able to kill wolves and protect sheep and the problem we have today they're they're not fighting wolves and as a result they're really not loving sheep and so you know the whole cultural phenomenon of the West and Western nostalgia and Yellowstone People watching that, ultimately what they are thinking is this is what leadership should be like.

It should be more like a cowboy.

And so I think part of the new wine that is going to form a new wineskin will include pastors who are not just guys who feel comfortable holding sheep and walking around singing songs, but they're cowboys that also know how to defend and protect.

And when a wolf shows up, they are not afraid to put him down.

Dude, Charlie was a cowboy.

He was a cowboy.

Charlie Kirk was a cowboy.

That's right.

And he moved to Arizona and he fit really well because it's still a cowboy town.

Well, and he, you know, you're talking about the Old Testament would use the word shepherd, right?

The

David was a shepherd, but he was killing lions.

Yeah.

And then we'd come after the sheep.

He was carrying bags of enemies' foreskins around on his belt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One, two, three, not it.

Exactly.

He was a dude.

He was a dude.

He was a dude.

And I think that's what you're getting at, right?

There needs to be a little more masculine fortitude in leadership.

When I remember when I was sitting listening to your preaching, you were talking about

this thing that you would say,

we have this idea of Jesus being this spandex-wearing fairy princess that just, you know, is singing these beautiful hymns in the clouds.

It's like, no, look at Revelation.

He's wielding a flaming sword, you know, and he's coming to destroy the enemy and to protect his people.

Yes.

Yes.

That's the storyline of the Bible.

And so for the church, fear is contagious and so is courage.

And that's what you saw with Charlie.

If Charlie had manifested fear, nobody would have showed up for his funeral.

Because he manifested courage, there's an entire generation saying, I choose faith, not fear.

I choose courage, not cowardice.

Here, let's play this clip.

This is Charlie with George Janko, who's also

in the local area.

Let's go ahead and play Cut 30.

These moments where you're fighting for your country and you're getting these threats, does it alarm and concern you for your children?

I mean, yes and no.

I mean, my wife is the best person ever, and she's a patriot, and she's a believer, and we don't want to have to be accountable to God when this life passes.

And he asks, why did you not trust in me and not fight evil?

Because we as Christians are called to fight evil.

It's one of the lesser known scriptures, Psalm 97, 10.

For those of you that love God, you must hate evil.

Pastor Charlie.

There it is.

Well, it's funny because

he spoke in so many churches, like so many churches in the last few years.

And he was always very clear: like, I'm not a pastor.

I'm not a pastor.

You know, he was like, you know, didn't want the layout.

He was an accidental pastor.

Well, yeah, and,

you know, that was all him.

I remember when he was starting it, I was like, okay, Charlie, have you met any of these?

The church can be worse than politics.

Like, it's brutal out there.

He talked about, he was told early on not to combine the two, and then somehow, either on his own or through mentoring, he's like, no, no, we have to connect these two or we won't be faithful.

No, exactly.

He didn't bifurcate his faith.

He did not compartmentalize it.

So, guys,

you have, so I guess I'm going to throw it to you, Pastor Josh.

Your admonition, your exhortation, your encouragement for pastors, you've kind of got it systematized.

You've got a six-point list.

Well, I preach to the book of Acts, and just an encouragement, every pastor should preach verse by verse to the book of Acts.

You'll see profound patterns that apply to this moment.

Talking with pastors all across the country, I think there's reason to be encouraged.

We are seeing, I would call it like 3.0 church planner, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 church planner.

They're bold, they're courageous, they're differentiated.

They're not running the human calculus of how this is going to cost me politically or will the board throw me out or will the big donor leave.

They're just fearless for Jesus' sake and they're seeing their churches explode two three four five years in there's five thousand six thousand seven thousand people there numbers I've never seen in my lifetime so just to encourage people listening God is moving and working and there's a remarkable crop of leaders coming up who are differentiated fearless leaders but here's what I've seen there's three there's three kind of categories of pastors there's the confused pastor who's calling me on Saturday are you gonna talk about Charlie or not I don't know what to do and they're not necessarily nefarious or cowardice they're just unclear right and so I want to speak to those there's there's the cowards who know what they should say, but have run the human calculus of what it might cost them and chose not to.

Then you have the captured.

They're just playing for the other team.

It's the fourth Padre, the courageous, that I believe see the anointing of God and the move of God in this generation.

That's who Charlie was.

And so this six-fold grid, if a pastor is asking what to do, this is what I tell them to do.

We got time for this?

Yeah.

Number one,

set forth the truth plainly.

We see Paul said, I preached to both Jews and Greeks, repent.

Charlie was brilliant at this.

He had an ability like nobody I've ever seen to set forth the truth in a plain and understandable way.

Number two, demonstrate the Spirit's power.

Paul said, we came not with wise and persuasive words.

Here's the thing.

Was Charlie wise?

Was he persuasive?

Yes.

But why was he so effective?

Because he was working with the power of the Spirit.

He wasn't just there using man's arguments.

You know, Jesus said, hey, don't worry about what you're going to say when you go before principalities and powers.

I'll be there with you.

That was literally Charlie's life.

No notes, no AI in front of thousands of people on a microphone, right?

I think he was a walking demonstration of the Spirit's power.

Oftentimes, the Holy Spirit's the most uninvited guest in our church.

We have to invite the Holy Spirit.

We have to plant, preach, grow churches that God wants to be at.

Churches for God, not for man.

Charlie would say that often.

Third, boldly proclaim the truth.

Paul said, I have not hesitated.

And many pastors hesitate.

Should I, would I stop running the man calculus of the cost that it's going to require of you and boldly proclaim the truth, whatever the cost, because here's the cost that you should run: Will I say something or not say something that could cost me the anointing of God?

That's what matters.

Not who leaves or who stays or who tweets about you, but what God thinks about you.

And if that's the grid through which you run the decisions that you make, you'll please the Lord and he'll bless you.

Number four, live not by lies.

Eric Metaxas talks about the spiral of silence.

The less people speak up, the higher the cost for those who do.

We saw that with Charlie.

So speaking.

Start speaking up.

Refuse to pretend that boys can be girls and men can lactate.

It's like, do not live by lies in silence.

In this culture, is perpetuating the lies.

So we have to speak up about the lies.

If you're on the wall, it's being attacked and you're not at the point of the breach, you're not being faithful.

Number five, you got to enjoy the king.

Charlie did this so well.

Set forth a clear and compelling vision of the beauty of following king jesus which means don't stop laughing and loving while you're making war great okay we're to be laughing happy warriors and charlie embodied that so well he wasn't angry he wasn't brooding he wasn't shadowy i mean he he was he was strong he was strong and happy and that comes from erica and his children and lastly we got to fight downhill And this would be my encouragement: stop seeding the home field advantage.

That's right.

And I think this might look like if an institution is corrupt, we might need to step back from those corrupt institutions and start building new ones and better ones like our current plug-ins around the ones that are doing the right thing.

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right.

I love that.

And we should make that available to everybody.

That list.

In the minute I have remaining, I want to honor you, Pastor Mark.

Charlie loved this book.

This is called Doctrine.

And it was when he was asked a couple weeks before,

he mentioned this book, that this is one of the books that was really impacting him.

And it's by you, Pastor Mark, and Gary Bashiers.

And you generously have offered it free to this audience.

So I want to make sure we have this on the lower.

Text doctrine to 99383.

Please put that on the, there you go.

Text doctrine to 99383.

You'll get a free copy of it, PDF.

You'll get teaching sermons and all, you know, all these other resources.

Totally free.

No strings attached.

Just Bible teaching.

Just Bible teaching.

And here's the thing, guys.

You can also go to charliekirk.com.

We're going to put it up for download there.

And I asked if there was some way we could help you, and you just refused.

And I just want to bless you and honor you for for that.

Yeah, we don't want anything just to help.

No, and it's just a really sweet gesture.

And it's been my honor to host both of you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you, bro.

We'll see you tomorrow, everybody.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.