General

A lot of prayer is taking place this year. There’s also been a huge uptick in Islamic terrorism.

On June 29, I stood with thousands on the Washington State Capitol lawn to repent and pray as a part of Franklin Graham’s Decision 2016 tour of all fifty state capitals. On July 3, I had the privilege of leading my home church in the Call2Fall movement. July 10 is another day of coordinated special prayer for America.

And then comes Together 2016 on July 16 where hundreds of thousands will gather on the Washington, D.C. These calls to prayer focus on unity, repentance, and petitioning heaven to restore His protective blessings. 

But did you know that after the American Great Awakening (1730s-40s) and Revolutionary War (1770s-80s)–a time of increased prayer–the threat of radical Islam actually created the US Marines?

Here’s the untold story.

I know that the crescendo of prayer now taking place in America begins with individual humility, repentance, salvation and “turning from our wicked ways.” But the final aspect of 2 Chronicles 7:14 talks about God “healing the land”–which most certainly involves His divine protection and favor.

If you have a little time and want to watch the best video on radical Islam you’ve ever seen, pause for a moment and click here. The video is called “The True Threat of Islam in Fourteen Minutes.”

Then, ponder for a moment how the prayers of the 18th century actually led to the creation of the US Marines and halted the dangers of radical Islam in the time of our Founding Fathers.

Here’s the brief story.

“At the height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates (the “Barbary Pirates”) were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic.  They attacked every ship in sight, and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Muslim captors demanded.” 

“These extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers – collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast – and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic.” 

“Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain.  When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France.  However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets.  Thus, the birth of the U.S. Navy.” 

“Beginning in 1784, 17 years before he would become president, Thomas Jefferson became America’s Minister to France. That same year, the U.S.Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States rather than engaging them in war.” 

“In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the leader of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000.  It was a plain and simple case of extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments.  Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into peace.  A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.” 

“In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.” 

“The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja answered that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran that all nations who would not acknowledge their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who was slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” 

“Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen years the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages.”  

“This payment in ransom and tribute amounted to over 20 percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.”

“Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply.  America had a tradition of  religious tolerance. In fact Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. A religion based on supremacy, whose Koran not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers, was unacceptable to him.”  

“Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming.  That changed everything.”  

“Jefferson let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand.  The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States.  Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit.”

“Jefferson, until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but, having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.”  

“He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget.  Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to ’cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify'”. 

“When President Thomas Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is the now the Marines (sea going soldiers).  They had been originally commissioned in 1798 by President John Adams but never used in this manner.”

These Marines were attached to U. S. Merchant vessels.  When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels they were repulsed by armed soldiers. Then the Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman, and child in the village.”  

“It didn’t take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels alone.  English and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the Mediterranean to secure safe travel.”  

“The bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as “leathernecks” for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim when boarding enemy ships.” 

“When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli.”  

“President Jefferson’s greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States.”

It’s now back-in a time period in which the Western World has turned away the God who gave them liberty.

May God hear our prayers in the 21st century, forgive our sins, and raise up a new force of brave men and women to deter and destroy evil as happened three hundred years ago.

I have prayed for a spiritual and moral awakening in America for over forty years. Why? Because I believe that  a great reformation of the world’s leading nation would make a profound and positive impact on fulfilling the Great Commission in this generation. 

Also–it’s happened before–three times actually. And each time revival came to America, a surge of spiritual life sent waves of blessing all over the world. 

Are you a part of the Call2Fall?

Here’s America’s revival history:

The First Great Awakening – It began in the 1730’s in New England and lasted for over a decade. One-fifth of the Colonies committed their lives to Christ and the moral steel to build a new nation was born. Our founding fathers were children of the America’s first great spiritual gusher. 

The Evangelical  Revival took place in the early 19th century centering in camp meetings in the “western” frontier. Thousands of people renewed their faith in God with much supernatural phenomenon. This was the mega-church movement of the time, and greatly aided America’s continental development and missionary advance around the world. 

The Great Revival – It began after the Stock Market Crash of 1857 and lasted through the Civil War. Over 60% of the Confederate Army gave their lives to Christ during the awakening–and following the war’s end and the abolition of slavery, the largest missions movement up-until-that-time was launched. The Student Volunteer Movement sent 100,000 missionaries world-wide between 1880 and 1930. Many of them were women (because 600,000 men had died in the War Between the States). 

There have been other moves of God in the 20th century including the Pentecostal Revival, the charismatic movement, and the rise of evangelicalism–including the national and spiritual renewal during the Reagan years.

But there has not been a great awakening for over one hundred and fifty years. 

By American standards, we’re overdue. Will 2016 be the year that God visits us once again? 

Only he knows–and he usually doesn’t tell. He just “sets his people praying” and comes in power when we meet the conditions of humbling ourselves, seeking his face, and turning away from sin (2 Chronicles 7:14). 

That’s what the Call2Fall is all about.

On Sunday, July 3, 2016, millions of Christians in the United States will fall to their knees in repentance and prayer and ask God to do in our hearts and nation what no man or government can accomplish. I have been working with the Call 2 Fall for seven years and and encourage you to talk to your pastor or priest and make sure your congregation participates. 

Here is the vision for Call2Fall. 

“We’re asking churches as an act of humility, on behalf of the church first and the nation second, to get on our knees and cry out to God on July 3,” said Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins, who is spearheading the initiative. “On July 4 we celebrate our independence, and it’s our desire on July 53to declare our dependence upon God as a people and as a nation.” 

Perkins hopes to see millions of Christians in scores of thousands of churches nationwide kneel in prayer for three to five minutes this coming Sunday before Independence Day, and he is urging pastors to register their congregations at the Call2Fall Web site. Perkins noted that the prayer call is not to advance public policy, but to see spiritual renewal. 

“I think the church is coming to a point where we’re coming to the end of our own devices and we’re looking to God for the prescription of what it will take to turn this nation around,” Perkins said. “And I think we can’t come to God on our terms, we have to go to Him on His terms, and He’s made it very clear [in 2 Chronicles 7:14] … that we are to humble ourselves before Him and seek Him and turn from our wicked ways—and that’s not the nation, that’s the church. So I’m very encouraged that if the church will take this challenge, take the call to fall, that God will move in this nation.” 

Although other movements have called Christians to prayer and repentance, the Call2Fall uses Independence Day as a touch point for addressing the Church’s need to seek God for national renewal. 

“We feel deeply and passionately that if something is not done quickly, we really could lose our whole country,” says Pastor Larry Stockstill. “As Paul Revere woke up the nation to the invasion of the British, we’re waking up the nation to the invasion of the demonic powers that are pulling us away from God.” 

“There really isn’t a new political agenda we can pull out of the hat or any other form of medicine for America,” Stockstill added. “It’s only prayer and fasting.” 

Another Call2Fall supporter, Dr. Richard Land, notes that great revival movements typically start with fasting and prayer, and he expects Southern Baptists to be very receptive to the prayer effort. “We are similarly convinced that the only real answer for America is spiritual renewal and revival that must start with those that claim the name of Christ,” Land said. “We believe that as Christians we have failed to live in a way that would be as pleasing to the Lord as we would hope, and we need to repent of that and humble ourselves, and we need to seek His face and seek His guidance and direction for ourselves, for our churches and for our country. 

“I think that the Holy Spirit is leading different segments of the Lord’s kingdom in a very similar direction to call for the revival that our hearts yearn for.”  

African American pastor Wellington Boone says the nation is at a point of repentance or humiliation. “I know that I’d rather be voluntarily humble than to be humbled by God,” said Boone, who leads a national network of churches.

“Our nation is seeing some judgment, and the men of God have to stand up and say what’s necessary to get God to turn for us instead of turn against us,” Boone added. 

Stockstill, who helped New Life Church address a sex and drug scandal involving its pastor, Ted Haggard, in 2006, said the call to repentance begins first with pastors, whom he said are often failing to offer moral leadership in the nation. He said churchgoers, too, have drifted into carnality, prayerlessness and compromise.  

“[Christians must] decry our own failures, our own sins, our own loss of influence to the nation and ask God to restore first pastors, then churches and then our nation into revival,” Stockstill said. 

Another supporter, Bishop Harry Jackson of the High Impact Leadership Coalition comments:

“This is not an anti-Obama or anti-administration movement. Every president needs the power and wisdom of God in order to take our rightful position in the world and appropriately administer justice and represent not only the nation but the world in God’s name. … I am just expectant that we’re going to see something dramatic happen. Not through demonstration, not through political action … but the spiritual dimension, God awakening and quickening the hearts of our people, causing them to be revived by His grace.”  

However, Jackson said religious liberty will be in jeopardy without a significant cultural shift. “We need to recognize that if we do not violently—in terms of spiritual violence, not physical violence—violently, aggressively seek God in these spiritual things, we are going to be the Christian community and oppressed people, discriminated against and put down by this culture,” he said. “But God has ordained that we turn this around. I believe we’re going to see America changed.”  

Real change. Spiritual and moral change. That’s what we need in 2016.

Just thirteen days following the Call2Fall, hundreds of thousands of believers will converge on the Washington Mall for Together 2016: Re-set, another special day of prayer for revival in America.

The Call2Fall is the heart cry of primarily older leaders in the Church.  Together 2016 is a vision of the younger generation to “re-set” our nation back to seeking and honoring God.

July 30, 2016 is also the 60th anniversary of our national motto:  In God We Trust. There is a movement underway to saturate the nation with “window decals” as an expression of the American identity and our true hope for the future. You can get your window decals here.

America’s fourth great awakening is upon the heart of God. Let’s prepare ourselves. Let’s pray individually and in small groups. Let’s fall to our knees on July 3. Let’s converge on the nation’s capital on July 16.

Let’s not ask God to bless America. Let’s change our hearts and lives  so that we can be a blessing to Him in reaching the world for Jesus Christ.

The worldview battle in Western culture is reaching the point of force and stupidity.

At war on both sides of the Atlantic are the Judeo-Christian values of freedom, family, sexuality against the opposite principles of atheism. I know “atheism” sounds strong, but I’ll use it because it best represents reality. I could use the terms secular or humanist, but a lot of people don’t know what those words really mean. 

“Atheism” they understand. And the value system now being forced down the throat of Western culture by progressive activists and an unthinking populace is clearly anti-God, anti-Christ atheism.

Now it involves corporate bullies and gender confusion.

I’ve talked about this subject before. Beginning in the 1950s, the USA began to drift away from its faith-based origins, including our socially-accepted understanding of sex. Satan’s ideas began to replace God’s maxims of human love and sexual relations. It was slow, deliberate, and satanically-inspired.

And it was progressive–just like the upgrades of computer software.

Here are the first four versions to date:

Sexual Atheism 1.0 – The first domino to fall in corrupting God’s view of sex was toleration for adultery including easy divorce and re-marriage. This was initially popularized by movie stars who slept around with their married co-stars and started an affair/divorce revolving door. Elizabeth Taylor is a prominent example who did it seven times. After a decade or so, the American public began to tolerate both adultery and divorce as never before. Today, adultery is common–and in some ways, expected.

Sexual Atheism 2.0 – Next, the Baby Boom generation, who’d grown up idolizing the unfaithful movie stars and now rock stars of their generation, made fornication fashionable. In that era it became “okay” to sleep around with anybody of the opposite sex–even if you weren’t married. Venereal diseases increased, babies out of wed-lock sky-rocketed, and over a number of decades, sex before marriage became the new norm for many singles. 

Sexual Atheism 3.0 – From the 1980’s until recently, the next logical deception in sexual practice became sex between members of the same gender. In some ways this was a reaction to the debasement of marriage, but it still came from the same source–the satanic world. Same sex relationships are not normal–they are abnormal when judged by universal and biblical norms. But in the last twenty years, the American nation has moved so far away from God and his principles that love itself has been re-defined to mean “doing what I want with whomever I want.” 

Secular Atheism 4.0 – In 2015, the newest version of sexual atheism burst onto the American scene with Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, channeling trans gender ism into mainstream culture. Not only could people change their gender identities physically (by operations and hormones), but if they just “thought” they were a boy when they were born a girl, then that mental switch should be celebrated by everyone around them.

At this point, I must remind us what is really behind these “sexual releases.”  It is a diabolical, satanic world that has one goal for human beings: to destroy the image of God in them and separate their souls from their Creator forever.

In 2016, enter Sexual Atheism, or should l call it, Satanic Destruction 4.1. Here is its goal:

1. Change all the bathrooms to let trans genders go where they want.

2.  Enlist business sponsors and sporting groups to force states to comply. 

Target became the latest corporate sponsor to announce it would boycott states that tried to stop the move to trans gender-ize bathrooms. They join a long list of companies, entertainers like Bruce Springsteen, and even the NBA and NFL who are economically bullying 330 million Americans to accept the trans gender confusion of 990,000 people.

That’s .3 percent of the population.

And we should let men who think they’re women pee in the girl’s locker room?

I can’t explain it better than columnist Ben Shapiro.

“Your Daughter Must Pee Next to a Man and You Will Be Compelled to Agree”

“The rules of bigotry according to the left represent a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of nonsense. This week, we learned that if you don’t want your small daughter peeing next to a giant man who thinks he is a woman, you are a bigot; if you are a woman who is uncomfortable with a man who thinks he is a woman whipping out his male genitalia to urinate in front of you, you are a bigot; if you are a religious person who doesn’t want to participate in an activity you consider sinful, you are a bigot.”

“Conversely, if you are a man who thinks he is a woman and you want to force a small girl to pee next to you, you are a freedom fighter; if you are a large man who thinks he is a woman and you want to be one of the girls, right down to hulking into a Macy’s ladies room, you are a hero; if you are a gay man and you want to force a religious person to serve you, you are a hero.”

“If all of this seems odd, that’s because it is.”

“It’s obviously logically incoherent, to begin with. The left insists that a man who believes he is a woman must be treated as one, even if his biology dictates that he is a male. However, if a man believes he is a man, he cannot discuss vital issues of national import (like abortion) since he lacks the vital prerequisite: a womb. Men cannot understand women, the logic seems to run, unless they are women. But men cannot be women, of course, except in the fevered imaginations of people on the left. Even the left doesn’t believe that. Leftists simultaneously want to enshrine unchangeable sexual differences (although, according to them, men and women are inherently and unchangingly different with regard to their abortion perspectives) and deny that these differences exist in the first place.”

“’This is nonsense,'” you say.

“‘Shut up,’” they say.

“In the end, leftists don’t have to be coherent — they just have to control the government gun.”

“The baseline definition of freedom in Western Civilization has been this: You do not get to force me to serve you, and you do not get to force me to think the way you want me to think. As follows, you cannot force me to think that you are a woman if you are a biological man. You cannot force me to spend my taxpayer dollars to pretend along with your mental illness. You cannot force me to run my business as you see fit because I have no affirmative duty to you.”

“But the left doesn’t believe in freedom — except the freedom to destroy the right. Thus, leftists believe that Bruce Springsteen has an absolute right to cancel concerts in North Carolina, but that bakers in North Carolina can’t stop baking wedding cakes for same-sex couples. The left believes that the government must compel elevated pay rates for women, but government should compel men to be treated as women based on their subjective feelings on the subject.”

“The kaleidoscope of leftist morality never stops shifting. But in the end, only one moral counts: the left’s ultimate insistence on use of government force to compel obedience to their kaleidoscopic morality.”

I don’t use the terms left and right because they’re directions, not philosophies. And what we are fighting to the death in the West is the philosophical worldview of atheism–which, as Ben describes, wants to force you to believe that any sexual perversion should be exalted and celebrated–against the principles of Judeo-Christian culture that gave the world a moral foundation that truly blesses individuals, families and nations.

God’s views of sex and gender produce identity, meaning, wholeness, and life. Atheism’s perversions, based on Satan’s lies, give birth to confusion, apathy, disjointedness and destruction.

Let me show you how deep the gender confusion has been engrained in the Millennial generation via our public schools who once had a Judeo-Christian basis of teaching–and have now gone atheistic.

You’ve got to watch this short video by my friend Joseph Backholm, head of the Family Policy Insitute of Washington, on Gender Confusion 4.1. It is absolutely brilliant–and tells you in four minutes what happens when we lose the concept of right and wrong and absolute truth. Watch it here.

The video’s so good, it’s gone viral nation-wide.

It will make you laugh–and should make you cry.

Most of all, let it motivate you to resist the corporate bullies, live for the truth, and love your lost friends back to freedom in Christ.