God and Government David Barton

we have been dealt a hand unlike anything the church has had to contend with for the entire 2000 years of church history it has fallen to us now to step up and be the one in your generation welcome to revival radio tv jesus commanded the church to occupy until he comes on revival radio tv we've talked about george whitefield and the sweep of revival that changed the hearts of the colonists this was the first great awakening and it birthed our nation so i asked myself what did the other pastors do during the awakening you hear us talk about american exceptionalism but what does that mean and what does the early history of america have to do with revival it turns out everything watch this now i learned from a founding father named benjamin rush that some of the greatest blessings that we enjoy our life are things we really don't notice most of the time benjamin russ was the signer of the declaration of independence john adams said he's one of our three most significant american founding fathers he started the first abolitionist society he started the sunday school movement he started the first bible society he served in three presidential administrations he was the father of public schools under the constitution started five universities three still ago today and keep going the guy is amazing and we own a lot of his original writings we own about and 120 thousand writings before eighteen twelve so i've got a lot of original stuff including his prayer journals and he would write down what the holy spirit was showing him as he was going through things it's really cool and and his memoirs he he talks about how that as a good christian he's trying to thank god for all the the blessings he's enjoyed in life and as he goes through and lists those blessings it's interesting one of the blessings he lists he says i thank god for all the times i have not fallen down stairs that's a little strange now i will point out i just came upstairs over there and i didn't fall and nobody noticed it if i had fallen everybody would have noticed it it would not have been fun see it's like when you go out driving go to the grocery store if you don't have a wreck and get back home nobody thinks about it if you have a wreck and don't get back home that's when you notice it so it turns out a lot of the things that we don't notice are some of the biggest blessings we have like our health until something happens a job until something happens a family until something happens and so in that sense what we have with america i think is one of the greatest blessings that we under appreciate um if you look at where we are with america and i'm going to show you a bunch of slides here but looking in america right now with the united nations we have 193 nations at the world at the u n right now out of 193 nations if you go and look at today and back up for the past 5800 years recorded history and you look at where the nations are the average length of the nation the constitutional world is nowhere where we are look at how many other nations and look how often they have constitutions in the same period of time we've had one look what it would be like to live in different nations and experience the kind of turmoil instability that is common with other nations as it turns out most nations not only do they have a lot of change and go through a lot of things but the average length of the constitution in the history of the world is 17 years this year we go 234 years that we experience this year now we are the longest ongoing constitutional republic in the history of the world most nations not only average the new constitution every 17 years they average a violent revolution every generation we've had one revolution we've had one constitution nobody in the world is close to where we are in the same way if you look at what we have in the way of creativity uh we are four percent of the world's population which means we should produce four percent of the world's whatever that's not the case the four percent that lives in america has produced more technology more cures more scientific inventions more discoveries more medical more everything than the other 96 percent of the world combined now i speak a lot of places including across the world and i do a lot of military bases and i was in germany doing some military bases over in germany helping the military there and i got to stay look cowboy from texas live out west of here our ranch is out west of here so i got to stay at a five-star hotel in germany that's really elegant you know it's like castle kind of stuff and just it's just the old world elegance and it would have been a whole lot more elegant if they would have had internet at that five-star hotel now motel 6 has internet here in the united states we live at a level that we take for granted and we just assume the rest of the world enjoys what we do that's just not the case and it's the same not only with what we see with in the way of creativity but what we see with prosperity you see america is four percent of the world's population it produces 25 percent of the world's gross domestic product and it's not because we have greater natural resources being from the country agriculture is a big deal but america is only number 66 in the world in percentage of formal land there are 65 nations with a greater percentage of farmable land than we have and yet america is number two in the world in agricultural production so we're way down here with natural resources way up here with production we take what we have and make it go further than any other nation that's why this is a phrase known as american exceptionalism this is a term that was given to us back in 1831 by alexis tophill and it's not a matter of arrogance and pride oh look at us we're america we're better than everybody else no this is a matter of saying america is the exception it's not the rule this is not the way most of the world goes what we do in america is different for some reason and it's not just happy accident if you look and say all right who are the leaders responsible for what we have in america invariably we generally go to our political leaders for example we look back historically say oh well you've got george washington he's got a whole lot to do with the constitution in america et cetera and you would say john hancock the president of continental congress you could say john adams who had so much impact as a founding father and as a president policymaker and it's interesting that in 1816 a young man named hezekiah niles went to john adams hezekiah niles young guy he's kind of like the millennials of that time period and he told adams is that i'm i'm writing a history book and we have this history book came out in 1822. he said i'm writing this history book and i was not there when so much of this happened but you were this was 40 years ago for you and if you can remember back 40 years ago tell me who you think was most important in helping america become an independent nation who was most important in helping america take the direction that she took and it's interesting right off the bat john am says well if you want to know who's most responsible in america being an independent nation he said right off the top you've got to save the reverend dr jonathan mayhew the reverend doctor samuel cooper so he starts listing preachers and of course you can't forget the reverend george woodfield and you've got the reverend charles chauncey he goes through the list preachers now we might know who whitfield is today but the chances that we know chelsea cooper or mayhew slim to none and yet these are the guys that adam starts and see we don't study these guys today even though the founding fathers point to them we don't study guys whether they're white or black i mean who in the world is richard allen or absalom jones or john moran or liberal haines or harry hoosier or anybody else names we don't know let me just give you an example of why we should know these names and how influential they are if you take harry hoosier harry hoosier was a preacher during the great awakening and at the time he was preaching he was a partner with francis asbury now francis bassberg if you know him that's a huge name for american history for america with spiritual history massive revivals all over the united states put 300 000 miles horseback riding from revival to revival which is amazing that's 12 times around the world on horseback that he did so you look at francis asbury ashbury had huge crowds he said harry hoosier draws larger crowds than i do harry's got bigger crowds than i do benjamin rush the guy i mentioned earlier benjamin russell i've heard harry preach he said harry is the greatest orator i've ever heard oh my gosh you're with patrick henry and all the great orders no no harry is the greatest orator i've ever heard now what's interesting about harry harry likes preaching to kind of the blue-collar people of the country the the workers and and particularly guys that were frontiersmen and woodsmen and trappers and hunters and the mountain men if you would and so he really had a ministry among blue-collar folks and as america expanded and moved to the west and now harry when he preached preached over in the eastern part of the united states and in jerusalem and pennsylvania et cetera but as america started growing west by the early 1800s these these blue-collar guys were going west with america especially the mountain guys and frontier guys trappers etc and so a lot of these guys ended up out in what was then called the indiana territory that was about as far west as you could go back then and interestingly enough they were known as hoosiers because people would look at them and say you're so different from all the other mountain men what's up with you and they say oh he's one of those hoosiers it was meant to be dismissive because he's one of the crazy guys he's a religious guy who fall but how many people live in indiana know that they were named after black evangelists probably very few know that the hoosier state was named after a black evangelist so here's a preacher's had huge impact and most folks today have no clue they've heard the name hoosier but they would never associate indiana the hoosier state with a black evangelist and yet that's what history shows us so there's a lot of influence that we lived with today and didn't recognize where it came from so when you look at harry hoosier let me take you into john adams why would he point to preachers and say these are the guys responsible for what we have in america today well if i take you to the declaration of independence and just point to that historians tell us that every single right set forth in the declaration of independence had been preached from the american pulpit prior to 1763. so if you want to fund homework design try reading the declaration of independence as a list of sermon topics and see how many sermons you've heard on the things that are in the declaration of independence because back in the founding era that was the kind of stuff we preached from the pulpit we helped shape the view of government we helped shape the view of education of culture of business of whatever else because the bible deals with those issues so once you look at the american founding and you look at how even the declaration was shaped let me take you to more documents as well if you get to the founding fathers who did the declaration of independence i speak at a lot of universities and colleges and so i'll put this slide up and i'll say all right who do you guys recognize up there and invariably everybody can find jefferson and everybody can find franklin and i've only had one college one time where a kid found a third founding father and it's interesting to me that we can recognize jefferson franklin if i start over here on the left the guys sitted down the guy at the brown jacket and the yellow vest that's benjamin harrison going from there you've got richard henry lee beside him and sam adams beside him is george clinton the guy looking backwards the opposite direction on the front was charles carroll the guy in light brown jackets robert morris beside him has been from rush above him with the hat of stephen hopkins to the right of him is william williams i just keep going through the other four 54. and i said never heard those names before it's interesting to me that we have been trained in america to recognize our two least religious founding fathers we can find franklin and jefferson we know nothing well all the others were like franklin jefferson there they're atheist agnostics deists really out of the guys who signed the declaration of independence not only were many of them involved in church ministry but 29 of them graduated from what we call seminary and bible schools that's not a bunch of atheists that went to bible school i mean it might happen today it doesn't happen back then and so you have a bunch of guys with ministry training and ministry involvement and it's it's amazing to see what they did and as you move from there and you look at what these guys did with our documents because we get to the constitutional convention some 11 years later and you look at the declaration you look at the constitution they produce a set of ideas that have caused us to be unlike any other nation in the world hands down we just look at the stats you know for our creativity our our prosperity our longevity you name it we're unlike any other nation so where the world did those ideas come from political science professors at the university of houston said well we think that if we can go back and read the writings that was done back then read the writings of the founding era if we see who they quote we'll know where they got their ideas which is a brilliant thing if i followed you around all day with a smart device and at the end of the day just listen to who you quoted i would know who's important to you by who you quote so they did that they collected 15 000 writings from the founding era they went through all the writings and in doing so this is the report that they put out but in looking at those writings they found out of fifteen thousand they found three thousand one hundred fifty four direct quotes they said okay these are the guys they quoted let's take it back to original sources it took them 10 years at the end of 10 years they had documented the original source of all of those 3154 quotes it's interesting the single most cited individual was a guy named baron charles montesquiou he's a french philosopher wrote the two volume set in 1750 called spirit of the laws it's a great book it's what we use to help get separation of powers in our concept of government the second most cited individual was judge william blackstone he's an english judge did a four-volume commentary on the laws great stuff the third most cited individual was john locke john locke in 1690 wrote the two treatises of government and by the way here's an interesting little tidbit the two treatises of the government richard henry lee one of the guys i just pointed to up there signed her declaration said that they copied the declaration of independence from the two treatises of government in other words that's where they went for their so many of their ideas that two treatises government published in 1690 we have a copy of it it's less than an inch thick it's less than 400 pages long john locke references the bible more than 1500 times to show how civil government should operate now if i asked you to start naming me the verses you know about civil government you ain't going to get 1500. you know you might get 5 or 10 i've done this with pastors from time to time i get 5 10 maybe 12. no he has 1500 references to the bible and how civil government should operate so those are the three most cited individuals those guys there what these researchers found that was really surprising was the single most cited source was the bible 34 of all of the quotes came out of the bible they used the bible more than any other source any other influence to create our founding documents so that's what we have with the founding there's a strong reliance of that we don't understand that today but once the constitution is written now you have to have it ratified so we have to send it off to the 13 states and we're going to have to see if they want to adopt this document or not and so we had ratification conventions and so ratification conventions in each state and if you're going to send the document like here we are in texas we send the government document taxes to be ratified where are you going to send it we're going to send it to austin to the state capitol yeah but not so much back then it's interesting that the ratification conventions to ratify the constitution back in early america many were held in churches for example in massachusetts the ratification convention was held in church as it was in north carolina as it was in connecticut now wow we're going to churches to ratify government documents yeah and then for your ratification conventions to ratify the constitution you had to elect special delegates to represent the entire state to come be at that ratification convention so the people elected their delegates and strikingly 44 of the delegates chosen to ratify the constitution were preachers of the gospel some ministers are very involved with civic affairs that's probably not who we would vote for today because we don't think preachers know much about civil government that's not the way it's always been in america it's been very different so after we get the constitution done and it's in place it's been ratified we now do the bill of rights and bill of rights gives us these inalienable rights that god gave us 16 to 19 in the bill of rights but these 10 amendments and they tell us these are the things government can't touch this is what god wants you to enjoy as an individual government can't mess with it it's interesting that when you look at the bottom of the bill of rights there's only two signatures there one is john adams vice president of the united states the other is frederick augustus muhlenberg who is actually the reverend frederick augustus muellenberg he was pastor of a church in new york city he was heavily involved in politics he helped write the original constitution of pennsylvania back in 1776 and so he's the speaker of the house of representatives the founding fathers chose a preacher as a speaker of the house yeah and that's not unusual because a whole lot of those who served in the first congress who helped write the bill of rights were also ministers as well not unusual for ministers serving congress now it's kind of interesting today because we're often told well the the bill of rights contains the first amendment first amendment guarantees separation church and state no it doesn't first amendment says you can't limit the free exercise or religion these guys got involved to make sure government couldn't stop religious activities to make sure government couldn't say churches were non-essential to make government make sure government couldn't do all those things that's been happening recently and that's why so many preachers were involved they weren't trying to cut god out of anything they're trying to make sure the government couldn't cut god out of anything and so it's a whole different viewpoint so when you look at what we have historically and what we have at that point in time it's just real easy to say that if the church had not been involved we wouldn't have the united states as we come to know it now the church has backed away from that responsibility but this is why john adams could could point to so many preachers and say these are the guys responsible and that's why nobody back in that era when they're writing textbooks even blinked an eye at that because they knew that to be true now today we're in a different situation romans 12 12 1-2 king james did not conform this world be transformed by the renewing of your mind i love the way this appears in the phillips translation philips translation romans 12 2 says don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold and what's happened over the last several generations is oh christians shouldn't be involved in that area of public affairs christians shouldn't get involved in politics no two things you never talk about one of them's is politics religion politics what are we thinking i mean we have bought into stuff we don't even know our own history and by the way this is part of the problem we have with america today the only reason we believe untruths about america is we don't know the truth about america if we knew the truth about america be a whole different debate going on just throughout 1619 from a historical standpoint 1619 we're told by the 1619 project that's when slavery started in america then what do you do with slaves that came to america with spanish brought to america when they founded colonies in north carolina south carolina in 1526. what do you do with all the slaves that were brought to florida in 1560 when they founded the city of saint augustine what do you do with all the other and well i guess okay so it wasn't 16 19 celebrities started earlier no no they say 16 19 is where it started but 16 19 is not even where it started in jamestown in 1619 there was a portuguese ship a slave ship that was sailing by there was some english privateers that attacked that ship and the stuff back then was english privateer it's kind of like pirates except they do it for the the government so they attacked that ship they take everything off that portuguese ship they divided it among the english ships and there were slaves on that portuguese ship and they said well we divide the slaves and they had 19 to 20 slaves on this english shepherd the english ship said we don't want slaves we're going to do this so they brought the slaves to jamestown they brought them ashore jamestown in 1619. yeah but slavery was illegal in jamestown in 16 19. so what they do there's 16 19 there's 19 or 20 people it's debated whether it's 19 or 20. there's 19 or 20 people that said look we don't have slaves and we're not going to have slaves here's what we'll do we'll make you indentured servants which is what everybody else in the colony is whether you were white or black the way you got there it's real simple you say hey i want to go to the moon with spacex i want you along i want to go to the moon it's going to cost me a million dollars well i think my income is worth 150 000 a year so what i'll do is i'll work seven years for you if you'll send me the moon i'll just whatever you want me to do elon for seven years i work for you and that's how i would pay off the loan so they want to come to america they say well you got the ship passage and then you're going to have food and lodging place to stay we think we'll loan you the money to do that but it's going to take you about seven years to pay it back so an indentured servant is paying off a loan within seven years is what it amounts to and what's interesting is in virginia once they put in those seven years they not only freed them they all gave them land they were all free land owners in the seven years now that doesn't sound like slavery well they were slaves for seven years no they weren't but let's just say they were let's say they were slaves for seven years what if they had ended up going to where they were headed which is to cuba and to brazil and that area they'd probably be dead at seven years because slavery was so brutal in those areas they'd probably be dead so all right so those guys didn't end up being slaves well one of those 19 or 20 was a guy named anthony johnson anthony johnson became very prosperous became a very large landowner and as as he was growing and his estate was growing and his property was growing he sponsored a lot of people to come to america's indentured service i will pay for your fair to come to america you can be here you can be a freeland owner like i am work for me seven years and you you get it and so that was going on that's what he was doing and one of the guys that he sponsored to come here was a guy named john kaser and john kasia was another black man anthony was a black man and john kasir apparently wasn't a very good worker apparently had a big streak of laziness in him and so what happened was anthony johnson went to the virginia courts and said hey this guy is worthless i'm going to lose all my investment because he's not working worth anything would you just let me own this guy for the rest of his life if he works for the rest of his life i think maybe he'll pay off what i loaned him and they said sure you can own the guy for the rest the first case of slavery of chattel slavery in america was in 15 it was in 1653 it wasn't jamestown but it was when a black man sued on another black man and that's part not part of the 1619 narrative we may not like that but that is the story and i'm not saying that slavery was a black issue i'm saying slaver is a human issue it occurs with all people all everywhere and only say that it's well it's white versus black what do you do with the fact that in the 16th century there were more white slaves in the world than there were black slaves what do you do with the world with the fact that the 1830 census is documented by the father of black history carter woodson who did black history month he documented that in south carolina in 1830 43 percent of free black households owned black slaves as did 40 percent in louisiana on through the others that's a high percentage yeah black on black was common white on black was common red on black actually the largest percentage slave over slaves in the united states by percentage was native american tribes the five largest tribes 12 of the tribes were black slaves so slavery is a human problem so the 16 19 if we actually knew american history 16 19 we would laugh at them and say you got to be kidding and by the way we're all the american history heroes you forgot to talk about like in the american revolution you cannot find a battle of the revolution where there was not a black genuine hero in there and on average the in the american revolution let me back up the american revolution every battle was an integrated battle blacks and whites fighting side by side and on average is all volunteer army you enlisted for six months on average the average black american served nine times longer than the average white american did well i never heard that before and if i take you through the battle of bunker hill and show you the black heroes there if i go through all these other battles the battle of newport and battle of yorktown and the battle of great bridge and all these other we don't even know those guys anymore we don't know that blacks were elected office in america in 1641 as matthias sousa was or that in the founding era you had wentworth chaser a black patriot elected in 1768 reelected for the next 49 years we know nothing about that and so we we hear about how divided america is today it's going to stay divided if we don't know what truth is if we don't know something about who we are as a people and see that that's what happens with this today if we don't know something about our church history our religious history then we're going to stay non-involved in politics so let me show you the kind of stuff that used to come out of the pulpit the pulpit was very influential let me take you back to the day we own thousands of sermons from that founding era here's one this sermon is preached this is by the reverend dr jonathan mayhew one of those guys that john adams says so significant this is a sermon on earthquakes because they don't have earthquakes in massachusetts they did in 1755. see the belief was whatever is in the headline of the news we need to cover from the biblical viewpoint you need to understand how to interpret the news through a biblical filter so if it's a disaster like an earthquake or five years later reverend dr samuel cooper the other guy that john adams mentioned from massachusetts you have the great fire in boston anything that's in the headline we're going to show you the biblical application how to apply biblical principles to that situation so whether it was natural disasters didn't matter if it was something like this the cry of sodom entered into this is a sermon about lgbtq issues in other words this was a case of homosexuality and it was in the papers and said all right let's just talk about that so the pulpit certainly covered all these lgbtq issues which today that's just nearly never covered we do a lot of polling work particularly with george barna and talking to pastors 384 000 pastors in america senior pastors and churches and you start asking them what kind of topics are they willing to talk about what will they talk about choose 14 specific topics that we gave them to see do you talk about things like immigration you talk about things like education or sexuality or marriage or finances or economics and go through there and it turns out only 2.8 percent of america's pastors talk about those issues even though those are all issues addressed by the bible so that's not a good percentage for the church to be silent in helping shape the way people think about an issue another sermon here this is a sermon on discovery of a new planet this is 1847 with uranus we have also this sermon it's actually two sermons occasioned by the late blazing star sermons on comets there's comments in the bible you have the solar eclipse of 1806 so we talked about solar eclipse we also talked about a lot of other topics that related to astronomy and god's into astronomy as a matter of fact you go to the bible even in job you see all these constellations called by name you have pleiades and you have orion you have other things called so god is into astronomy because he's the one who created the heavens so we believe we should be studying the heavens and see what god says about it see what new discoveries we make in the heavens so we were into science as well this is a sermon on the infirmities and conference of old age probably not the most popular topic in the world today this is how the early church occupied and was relevant to what was happening with the people so what about today so like the colonial church how do we occupy until jesus returns liberal theology tries to tell christians how to stay in our box and what the role of the church is but we're not supposed to listen to the world so by looking at what actually happened in our nation's history we can get ideas on what worked and what we need to do again faith is all about an action remember the apostle paul said in first timothy 2 1 therefore i exhort you first of all that supplications prayers intercessions and giving of thanks be made for all men for kings and all who are in authority that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence so the church needs a peaceful environment to operate at its best well god created america as a place for the church to have the freedom to operate in peace and without hindrance from a state church or a king that would stop the spreading of the gospel and this is exactly what the reformation was all about once the church threw off the chains from an oppressive state church it changed the government and especially here in america god created a place founded on biblical principles today unfortunately the church has forgotten the godly roots and purpose for america as jesus said in the sermon on the mount and john winthrop drew from that america is the city shining on a hill we'll see you next time right here on revival radio tv you

Channel: Revival RadioTV

Views: 1,143

Rating: 4.9555554 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: zXo30LoG2qY

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021