Sean Spicer - Liberty University Convocation

thank you so much worship collective great job you guys are awesome and we so proud to honor our veterans and and anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated we have a double hitter for you today we I'll tell you later how it how it happened but you can go ahead and have a seat our first speaker I got to know several years ago when he was at the RNC and he was working hard he came to Liberty at least twice and his he wanted he was working hard to get a presidential debate here at Liberty and it didn't work out that's this time but maybe next time we'll see but he he's former White House press secretary 2016-2017 he was communications director at the RNC in 1999 he joined the u.s. Navy Reserve as a public affairs officer and currently currently holds the rank of commander as of December 2016 he was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Naval Reserve contingent and in 2018 he released his New York Times bestseller book entitled the briefing politics the press and the president and it was about his tenure with the Trump administration we were all together all the speaker's today last week at the White House Watson the election returns but I want you to welcome to Liberty University first Sean Spicer but we have a video before he comes to speak [Music] for the first six months of the presidency Sean Spicer was the face of the Trump administration in the press room doing battle with the press core the cast of Saturday Night Live and everything in between and that brings us to the president's former White House press secretary Sean Spicer he was reaction although the brand new book it's out this week the briefing politics the press and the president former White House press secretary Sean Spicer part of the reason that I wanted to write this book Sean with some to make people understand the headwinds that we faced every day hold on hold on lend me and I am trying to answer your question Jonathan if you can calm down you guys continue to fall back on these anonymous sources and competitive thoughts narrative the press should go after politicians and government officials it should slip like 90% of the time doesn't make sense [Music] thank you very much it's uh it's great to be back at Liberty University Thank You president Falwell thank you Pastor David for having me I promised my wife I gave up podiums at Lent so I'm gonna step aside from the podium for a moment the question I get most asked most often is how did how did you end up where you did and so I kind of want to take you through that journey a little bit today of where how I started and how I ended up in some of the bumps and highlights along the way I grew up as a working-class kid in a small town in Rhode Island there's the other person and my father sold boats for a living my mother was the CEO of the household stayed home raised three kids we had dinner every night between 5:30 and 6 o'clock the TV got turned off and we sat down and talked about how our day went it was never about politics it was about what had happened that day some of the issues of the day but we didn't really ever get into politics my parents were involved in the community but they were hardly I they were registered to vote but there was no partisanship and so as I started to grow up and think about what was going on for high school my grandmother would always regale me with these stories and say all the smart kids go to Portsmouth Priory which is the prior name of Portsmouth Abbey which is a Benedictine school in Portsmouth Rhode Island and I thought okay well I'm smart I'm gonna go there I just didn't realize that it costs money and so I sent away for the brochures and went to the open houses and finally around seventh grade my parents realized the kids serious so we applied for financial aid and scholarships and my mother took her first job and they figured out a way somehow to pay for me to go to Portsmouth Abbey and it was there that I began not just what I think was my professional trajectory but my spiritual trajectory a relationship and understanding greater the role that God would play in my life the foundation for a lot of the decisions that I would make going forward around my junior senior year a professor had taken and let me just pause for a moment and I said you know I had been that kid growing up I sold greeting cards you name it whatever would make me a buck I knew the value of a dollar my parents had told me all the time you want something you go out and earn the money to pay for it so when I got to Portsmouth Abbey I was a day student I lived in Barrington I would walk about a mile down to a public bus and take Rhode Island public transportation forty minutes to the top of Corey's Lane in Portsmouth Rhode Island and the older I get the longer and steeper the hill goes between where the bus dropped me off in Portsmouth but I would walk to school every day and amongst the other students were some of the richest and most elite families in the country in the world and I realized one thing really early most of their parents would never be with their kids on their birthday so I wrote a letter to every single parent and I said it's a shame you can't be with your son on their birthday so for $50 I will hand deliver that my birthday cake and then I walked down to the local Baker in Portsmouth rota and Portsmouth and said will you sell me these cakes for 12 bucks and I realized real early the power of entrepreneurship so this one teacher had taken a liking to me and said I know how much the financial impact of this school and and your family has had on you and I have an idea for you when you go to college and this is back in the 80s you should study Japanese language and get a degree in economics and you'll write your own ticket financially and I thought okay how hard can that be so I went just a state away to Connecticut College I was a competitive sailor at the time they had a one of the top sailing programs in the country but they also had this emerging robust East Asian language program so I enrolled in it and every morning I would get up and for two hours go to intensive Japanese language and then I would have a couple other classes and go back to the language lab and practice my hiragana and my cattigan Oh somewhere around the middle of the second semester I got a note in my mailbox from the Dean of academics that said please come see me and the Dean explained very very clearly to me that a d-minus in Japanese translates to a d-minus in English perfectly and that I might want to pursue a new major so I abandoned my dreams of being a Japanese language major and took a class in government and it was it's so inspiring I realized I was the Japanese language had been transactional I learned this I memorized this I wrote it I've said it it was easy in the sense that it was a very transactional learning process but in government Connecticut College like many other institutions of higher learning is fairly left-wing and I felt myself challenged wait I don't think this is the role of government I think that they should be doing this I started volunteering I found this call to service this passion I love this idea of being involved in politics so I was volunteering on campaigns I was volunteering at the Connecticut State House in Hartford I love the idea of getting involved in something where there was a fight if you will you knew on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in election years whether you won or lost whether you brought your candidate over the top whether your issue had garnered more interest in more votes I loved it I also found a calling that I felt like Connecticut College didn't have fraternities sororities we didn't even have a football team and I felt like there was a sense of wanting to belong to something bigger and I started to go to recruiting offices and say hey I'd love to sign up for the Navy of the Coast Guard Rhode Island is a very ocean centric state my father had been in the boat business I grew up competitively sailing there's a big Navy presence in Rhode Island my great-grandfather William was a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor I wanted to serve in some way but it never worked out so I kind of put that on the side for a moment and I started pursuing this passion in politics and one of my first Jobs was to come back to Connecticut and to work on a congressional race there in the Connecticut second District we were outspent unbelievably we raised a total of $80,000 against a multi-term incumbent the Sunday before the sunday of the election the New London day the local paper there had us down 12 points on election night we lost by two votes I learned very clearly that night and we see it today down in Florida the power of every single vote so I started meeting with folks trying to figure out what I wanted to do one of the sailing teams that I had coached there was a young woman on the team and she said my father is this very powerful important lobbyist in DC it would be great if you could meet him when you go back down to Washington and try to find a job down there because I knew that that was my next stop I wanted to go down and get a job on Capitol Hill or get involved in politics so I sit down with this guy Ted crowd a vote in Washington DC we meet at this nice restaurant I get on my best pair of khaki pants and the only blazer I own and we go to lunch and he looks at me and he says Sean what do you want to do and I said well sir I'll do anything and he looked at me and he goes there are no jobs for anything and it was then that I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life which is all of these folks that are willing to help you along the way so many people in my career have been mentors to me and I've tried to be mentors to them but it's hard when someone doesn't have any idea what they want to do so Ted looks at me and says go figure out what you're gonna do and call me back and I looked around I talked to some other focuses of these my interests and I finally put a list together - these are the kind of jobs it's the kind of thing and he said great now I can help you so I started off working on Capitol Hill bouncing in between jobs I've got a job the first job that I got was answering phones on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee but just as I had found this passion in politics I started to realize I really loved this idea of working with the media you know you don't have to wait till the Election Day you know every day whether or not your story is getting out there did you kill the story did the narrative get in did your quote get in did you shape it the way you wanted it did you pitch a story that came but either at the end of the day the story came out the way you wanted to or didn't maybe you helped it maybe you quashed it maybe you didn't succeed but you know almost instantaneously the problem was as I was going around from office to office these folks would say hey love the enthusiasm love the energy you have no experience so the pollster on that campaign that I had first done called me and said hey I got an idea are you still interested in the managing a campaign and getting press experience and I said yeah she says I got this thing and there's a candidate in western Pennsylvania it's a primary he's probably going to lose the primary and if he wins the primaries gonna get crushed in the general are you interested in I said yes I packed everything I own into my mother's astro van and drove to western Pennsylvania where I knew absolutely no one ten weeks later he dropped out but on my resume it said campaign manager and press secretary a couple weeks later a congressman from New Jersey calls up and says I'm looking for a campaign manager and press secretary I'm gonna hit all the states don't worry and he says hey I'm looking for a campaign manager and press secretary with experience I'm like well I got that now and it was that one experience that had given me that little boost that I never expected to quote unquote have the experience necessary so we went off to New Jersey moved there won that race drove to New York one day just through Maryland and I realized I now had that experience and for the next couple years I would bounce back and forth between the official side and the campaign side and odd and even years I got a call one day from a buddy of mine who had been a roommate and he said hey you and I used to always talk about joining the Navy are you still interested said of course I am but I'd never fit in when I was 18 19 and 20 how would it ever fit in now I have a job he said there's a program that they're running that they need Public Affairs officers for go down to Pensacola you get trained up it's pretty brief in Florida I'm gonna and I went down I got admitted to this program after a series of application processes and the next thing you know I joined the United States Navy at age 27 years old which began a rather long and enjoyable career for me that allowed me to fulfill this sense of duty and service that politics just wasn't scratching I love public service I loved fighting for conservative values and ideas and standing up for values that I believed in but there was some greater sense that I felt that by joining the Navy and that there was it was bigger than a cause it was for our country it was for liberty it was for all of those things that we cherished as Americans and I was able to you know do it on the reserve side so for two weeks a year and 24 other days weekends and and that I got to serve my country so I continued through this trajectory politically and in two thousand and two thousand election came along and I had the opportunity to go down to Florida Broward miami-dade in Palm Beach County there was a congressman named clay Shaw who was seeking re-election for the almost twentieth time he hadn't had a tough race and forever they sent me down and said hey look we need everything you know that you got to see if you can pull this guy through we tried everything that we could we spent every day hitting the pavement Election Day comes along and his scheduler sends me this proposed schedule and says clay and Emily are going to buy a car I was like what do you think on election day they're going to buy a car they go yeah they need a new car and they figure and I said so we wrote down every diner in the Fort Lauderdale area and I faxed his schedule over to him and I get this call ten seconds later he says what are you doing said clay we're gonna go meet voters the you know this is it you wouldn't buy a car any other day you want so we we go to the first diner and he's like no one likes to be disturbed during their dinner this isn't how I do it Sean I was elected before you were born now technically I was one and I didn't think that it was worth the fight to remind him that he was wrong on this because I had won the battle on this one we started going to these diners and he looks over he's like what is the next one when's the next one and I'm like holy smokes like I won this battle on election night I start getting calls from Washington they said hey man thanks for everything you've done let's catch up when you get back said you know we're gonna win this they're gonna listen we've seen the polls we know what's gonna happen on election night we won by 386 votes same philosophy you run through the tape every time we didn't stop campaigning until the polls closed that night the lessons of 1994 still haunted me which was until you know that it's closed don't stop running so at that point I got brought up to the party level I worked for the NRCC the National Republican Congressional Committee overseeing all the reelection for members of Congress from 2000 2002 that brought me to the Budget Committee under a guy named Jim Nussle from Iowa for three years running all the communications there then I went to the House Republican Conference often spent three years in the last three years of the Bush administration as the assistant US trade rep promoting President Bush's trade agenda which if you know anything about the first six months of the Trump trade agenda you realize there's a bit of irony about what I had to undo and after that after Bush I get mobilized in the Navy I spent 18 months on active duty and I'm getting off active duty and I got a call from a mentor of mine he says hey there's this new guy that got elected to chair the RNC would you be interested in talking to him I said look my wife and I are ready to start our family i-i've had my fill of politics and I don't know that I want to do this anyways just meet with the guy my wife and I sat down we did this plan and lo and behold I get the job at the RNC and she said what's the harm it's two years go enjoy it I know this is where your passion is I said great I'll do it for two years I had created this plan during the interview process just like I do every time I sit down with someone here's what I think we should do and here's who we should hire here's how we should restructure they were like this is amazing we love it I walk in the first day and I said okay so here's how I want to implement the plan the chief of staff the honesty looks means to show them we're 25 million dollars in debt so okay but what about my plan so we love the plan we have no money so for the two 2012 election cycle we were behind the 8-ball the entire time we didn't have the resources necessarily - frankly compete in a competitive way and after the election Romney had lost we sat down and did some part thinking and writes previous the chairman said I want to run one more time I think that what we need to do is transition all of our money instead of buying ads and doing all that what we need to do is invest all of our money in people in data so we did it and 2014 rolls around and we win big in the midterms take the house to its highest level since 1928 and pick up seats in the Senate as opposed to losing them which is what all the pundits predicted so two years have become four and then rights looks at me and says hey the formula worked I think we should try it again in a general election so I look at my wife and I said what do you think about two more years she'd already bought off the first two the second two and I promised her I swear two more and I'm out I just didn't tell her out to go where so we set up on all of these reforms at the RNC we've got the data we've got the ground game we got 17 amazing candidates and you look around and you got Ted Cruz with his data operation Jeb Bush he's got this fundraising operation Scott Walker had been reaching out to Union voters and all of a sudden you got this guy with like 10 people in a Twitter account in New York you know whatever and they're getting big rallies tons of retweets january/february know hi oh excuse me Iowa sorry Ohio Iowa New Hampshire he's racking up delegates this is real so then come May Indiana primary happens Donald Trump becomes the presumptive nominee we sit down we have this meeting and we realize we've got all this data all these people and Trump's got you know a bunch of really hard committed folks but there's twenty thirty folks and they say hey can we partner up suddenly the RNC which had normally played this back seat role during elections became a partner to a campaign in a way that's never happened before if you ever go back and Google the Reese's peanut butter commercials from back in the day used to show the chocolate just falling into the peanut butter and so long like wow that tastes good it works together and that's frankly how it worked the RNC used to be the JV to the campaign they would walk in and say we need you you you and work on this project and keep your mouth shut suddenly they had this real partner in 2012 I convinced myself that Mitt Romney knew my name or at least he shook his head when I walked near him it was just that's the relationship but in 16 here I was flying around with hurricane nominee in an amazing way that I never thought was possible as this working kid from Rhode Island here I was on the plane with this world-renowned real estate developer TV person we go through all the ups and downs December 22nd comes around and my phone rings just after noon sitting in Trump Tower and the president says to me all right let's do this and I'm like dude do what he's like put out the release you're my guy and that day my life changed forever in a lot of ways prior to December 22nd the most I had ever been recognized was in the sweater section of Joseph a bank and it was literally this guy going hey aren't you that Republican suddenly I'm walking down the street and people are yelling nice things at me making these hand gestures and it J they're all they all weren't nice just and it was the most unbelievable transformation for me I went into the White House and we started to recognize the the biggest thing that I realized and the biggest takeaway that I had was there was this press corps 49 seats in the press corps decided on by the White House Correspondents Association who sat where and how things were traditionally supposed to work I made a decision at the very beginning normally the way it works is that you call on the front couple rows all the mainstream media Washington Post CNN ABC CNN CBS etc I made a decision that day that that's not how I was gonna work every outlet deserved an answer Christian media conservative talk radio spanish-language media business foreign they all had constituencies to serve an answer and that's what I wanted to do is bring additional voices into the briefing room so that the American people weren't strangle held by the narrative of the front couple rows seven months in six months and a day or whatever I stepped down from that position I walked away from the White House in September first and for the first time my life my adult life I wasn't speaking for anybody I spent 19 years in the Navy I had as a public affairs officer I'd worked for countless candidates government officials etc and suddenly I could talk about myself what I believed and what I cared in and the beauty was is that I was able to also align myself with the lots of groups I joined the board of the yellow ribbon fund which provides a lot of care to the folks and caregivers at Walter Reed I joined the independence fund which gives out tract chairs to severely wounded soldiers and sailors airmen and Marines who want to have the independence that they used to be able to go to hunt and fish to row and a bike and I joined Operation renewed hope an organization that provides housing to homeless veterans and for me it's finally been able to be those with that one way that I've been able to tie a big bow around everything I've been doing to give back in my little way and I think that's what sort of made all of this enjoyable for me is to know that there are these small ways that I've been able to be involved not just in public service and party service but now giving back in other ways to those who I think served the most it was one thing for me to spend my time in the Navy but now to walk around and to help others who have served and been injured or giving care to those who are with those who have lost their homes or need a place to stay the idea of being able to give back and recognize how so many people in this country are selflessly serving this country is so crucial at this time in our in our society so on this Veterans Day weekend week I thank you for having me I thank you for all you're doing and I urge you to stay involved and do what you can to continue to make this country such a great place to live thank you very much perfect McAllister good Thank You Shawn I hope that's an inspiration to you for what up for what you can accomplish no matter where you start in life and never never ever give up always strived and I hope you noticed that the thing that he's despite of everything Shawn's accomplished the one thing that he is most proud of is that he was a veteran who served our country and I'd like for you guys I forgot to mention we have a large group of veterans up in the Box today if you guys would give them a hand of appreciation [Music] while Sean was speaking a student named Sarah tweeted can we to meet can we sing the national anthem every day and combo so David that was that was a request but we Shawn's book is down here for so it's usually 30 bucks which he saw on that for five dollars just for liberty university students today so if anybody is interested in having that for Christmas gift or or whatever we have another Navy man on campus this week at liberty we want you to learn to be the salt of the earth in the light of the world which means you we want to impact culture in as many ways as we can we had a president former President Jimmy Carter was here in my office working on some projects he really is concerned about the fact that the younger generation hasn't learned American history like like the older generations did and we were working on ways to correct that and we had a great four or five hour meeting with Scott Lam and others and we made a lot of progress and it's just an honor to you all that national leaders are attracted to Liberty University and regularly make make the trip here we earlier this week Turning Point USA chapter The Turning Point chapter on campus invited charlie kirk and candice owings to to speak and they they both are young very close to your age they've accomplished so much so quickly both have about a million Twitter followers and it's fun to go to their events because it's kind of like going to a hockey game you never know when a fights gonna break out and so I heard one broke out the other night and so I'm I'm gonna be looking at hoping for win today but anyway I am first Candace you've already met her she spoke to you earlier this year but she's guest hosted on Fox News has appeared on all the major outlets she and that she travels the country with turning-point they have about 75 staff members more than that now Charlie told me this morning he's the founder and executive director of turning-point USA its largest and fastest-growing youth organization in America he built it into a network for the presence of thirteen hundred plus high schools and college campuses high school and college campuses nationwide and he's also a frequent guest on all the news channels but he was the youngest speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention and he said the most except the one thing he was most excited about coming to Liberty for was to see our worship collective and because he'd heard such good things about the music here and so we we're proud to welcome Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens to Liberty University hello Liberty University already back because I had such a great time and this time I brought my partner and good friend charlie kirk so obviously we never have anything planned and we're on stage together we like to just talk and last night over dinner with the amazing pastor we were discussing obviously Veterans Day we were talking about war and I asked myself this question when we think about war what is the first thing that comes to mind if you'd asked me this question a couple of years ago I would have said things that were much more tangible it would have said things like guns and bayonets and bombs you might think of nuclear warfare you might think of trench warfare think of everything that you learned in terms of World War one and World War two and of course the Civil War you think of two sides fighting but there's something that Charlie and I believe and we believe that in this moment in time we are in the midst of a second Civil War in America and the warfare type is ideological so Charlie do you want to talk a little bit about that yeah and it's it's not this type of civil war that people would think but it's ideological its political its spiritual and we've never been more divided and how as a country we should address some of these problems and it's quite simple are you thankful that you live in America are you angry that you live in America if you are if you are Amen right if you are angry that you live in this country that was taught to you probably by somebody who's angry themselves because there is no good reason to be angry that you live in the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world and as Christians we must recognize that the blessing of living in this country at this time with the freedoms that we have and the opportunity in front of us is one of the greatest blessings that God has ever given humanity and the anger that you see from the left today is manufactured and it's by a group of people that they themselves are broken and angry and so as we address what we like to call the second American Civil War it's not going to be fought like with Candace said with bombs and bayonets and missiles and guns but instead with arguments and words and being able to persuade other people lot of feelings if you're on the left so one of the things that I've noticed and we talk about a manufactured war it literally is like we're living in two separate realities when I speak to former friends that are liberals and I look at their Facebook postings it's almost like they have stepped into a reality that I'm simply not living in and when they come across me because they've a sign that this reality must exist they don't know how to approach me so we go to these events and we were on these college campuses and I will have a person stand up and they are telling me that because they have accepted a reality where black people can only resist as victims and as oppressed people I don't make sense to them I'm an alien because in the lefts reality there is only the oppressed and the oppressor there is white versus black there is rich versus poor there's tall versus short so basically charlie represents I am the worst thing you could possibly be in modern society I'm white male heterosexual Christian you know all the all the worst things you could be and and I say this kiddingly but not really because the left they say I'm not allowed to say certain things Candice is only allowed to say other things look truth transcends color if I cannot say something that Candice cannot say and my argument is somehow less valid because of how I look and what and and where I come from then that in itself is not truth that is that is the new leftist view of some post modernist structure that is so tribal and rooted in cancerous and corrosive identity politics and so we go to these college campuses and by the way Liberty is not like most college campuses I just got to say you've done a great job here we love this place this is a blessing usually when I say you know Jesus Christ - the savior of the world I have people booing and protesting so I'm gonna say it again Jesus Christ as the savior of the world so quite quite rare and refreshing to be able to say that usually I meet more atheists than Christians so this is rather an outlier but Candice gets called the most amazing things the other day they called her a white supremacist the other day that's every day I get called the white supremacist and and that's what that's the price you pay because in this war that we exist in this ideological cultural civil war that we are having in America were the soldiers we are the soldiers there are soldiers sitting in front of us today people that want to stand up for what they believe in that want to stand up and shout out I am NOT a victim I do not want to be a victim and that's become a controversial viewpoint in America it's become a controversial viewpoint on the left believing in yourself has become a controversial viewpoint in this country and in Candice's you point out all the time there's two ways to address conflict or suffering in life you could be a victim or a victor and now why the left wants to create a society of victims because when you create victims a lot easier to control those people because you believe you're entitled to something now make no mistake as Christians we should be unbelievably concerned that the left first and foremost they want to turn government into God that they are threatened by the idea that Christians can come voluntarily like here and worship peacefully and governments not the most important thing in our life that God is the most important that we're Christians first and then were then were Americans then were conservatives the most important thing is our identity with a relationship with God the left does not want that the left wants the most important thing to be the relationship with government because all the left wants to do is to control people and so as being Victor's is saying maybe I don't need government programs maybe I don't need you know a beer a bureaucrat that tell me how to live or what to do or the choices that I make all of a sudden they become less important the left needs people to need them that's correct and that's the only way that you can grow government is if you shrink the individual and it's remarkable to me that when I have these conversations with some former friends and some friends that consider themselves more moderate but are certainly liberal it's remarkable to me that they can't come up with a solution outside of government no matter what happens in their lives they believe that we need more government solutions to conquer it oh if there's poverty we need more welfare programs even though if you look objectively 22 trillion dollars have been has been paid into the welfare system and black Americans are poorer today than we were when it began and when you combat their solutions with these facts when you show them look at the background look at the data more government there is literally not a single government program that I think runs efficiently do you well definitely not the post office or the IRS EPA or the Department of Education I mean nothing and I mean if you want something to be running efficiently and wasteful have the government do it and and you know it's very it's very interesting Candice the point that you know we continue to make was just the deification of government and and this is so important that we as Christians realize that that the parties could not be more different today and there's only one political party that bood got at their convention by the way and it was not the Republicans that's a fact there's only one political party that booed God when it was mentioned at their convention and that's the Democrats but you know I I do want to talk about a conversation that I had with the professor a historical text professor a couple years ago I wish I had this on film and I asked him what books he teaches in historic his historical class in text class and he talked about Plato's Republic he talked about all these different you know they're very important books I said well do you teach the Bible no I don't really teach that he said why well because the separation and you know state and there's this ridiculous answer that they always give I said okay but even from a secular perspective wouldn't you admit that the the Bible is a pretty amazing book that it even exists you know 65 books thirty-three authors five thousand years of history the most important person ever to walk the face of the earth my entire calendars based around it more wisdom in those pages than any other book you could possibly teach he said yeah I guess you have a point there he said but there's another reason why I don't teach the Bible so what's that said I'm afraid people will start to believe it and of course he was an atheist I said so you don't teach the Bible because you don't want people to become Christians and you don't want people to actually have a connection with God he said yes he said as soon as people start to believe that dogmatic drivel they become worse people and at that moment it hit me that the civil war that we are fighting is it is of course cultural it is of course political but at the very root its spiritual is that we're fighting in this country and that there's a group of people that are predominantly sectoral atheists that take evangelizing towards their own perspective a lot more seriously than even some Christians do and it's really amazing to see that our generation and our country is embracing some of these secular atheist ideas even more than you know a lot of us would be comfortable with so our charge to everyone in this room is that we're in a spiritual war for the soul of this country and and we're no longer afforded the luxury of remaining idle every single person in this room is going to be impacted by this cultural war deciding what direction this country is going to go to is it going to head towards the socialist leftist viewpoint the Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's everything is going to be free but then somehow that means all of us are going to get poorer and the government is going to get bigger are we going to make America Venezuela or are we going to embrace what this country was founded upon every single person in this room you have to be active you have to be paying attention because the casualties of this war will be our futures if we don't all consider ourselves soldiers in doing something maybe you don't want to be like me maybe you don't want to stand on college campuses and get protested by an Tifa and get things thrown at you and have black lives matter playing beyonce music too round out your voice maybe that's not you but there's always something that you can do especially when God is first and foremost in your life like everybody that attends this university and you are directly called within this conflict right now to not just vote and to get engaged and involved because we as Christians we know how this will all end there there we understand that we are saved by grace and that you know the Jesus Christ is a savior of the world but in this conflict today our rights and freedoms and liberties that allow us the opportunity to bring more people to Christ are directly under attack by people that want to prevent that from happening at all whatsoever and make no mistake the world is a better more peaceful place because of a strong America America has been a force for good in the world despite what the culture might you know begin to tell you and as America weakens the world will turn into absolute turmoil and and you see this time and time again we saw that for eight years under the previous administration and now we see the Korean War coming to an end we see Isis completely on the run the American economy back roaring stronger than ever before and and so I get commonly the question they say Charlie but you know what what what how do you reconcile as a Christian you know getting involved with politics I say it's not just an option it is a necessity you are you are mandated to get involved and everything you possibly can because if you truly believe in advancing the gospel to as many people as possible you're gonna sit idly by as you know the people that hate our entire worldview will do damage to our country then then there's something terribly wrong with that right I think that's how we both feel at the bottom of our heart if you if you love this country then we have to make sure that the people that hate this country aren't given control of it and that's really what it comes down to and we feel that impact every single day the push and pull you know when you see the war and the battles between our president who obviously you know we both love very much we think that he is returning this country to its glory and giving an opportunity for people to make something of themselves if they're willing to work hard because that is what America was founded upon the principles of hard work rewarding people for being willing to work hard not giving handouts to people because they figured out how they're oppressed well I'm oppressed because I'm a woman I'm oppressed because I'm black I'm oppressed because I'm short everybody lining up because they want some sort of a handout from the government for their oppression we all know that life is a series of overcoming sin a series of obstacles and that's what makes us stronger that's what makes us deserving of the rewards that we get our ability to overcome and that's the message that we preach on college campuses that has become so controversial that you are the author of your destiny and and and the reason why in these college campuses you find more atheists than Christians because as soon as someone might have to believe in God as soon as someone might have to believe that there's a higher power they're no longer the most important person in the room and the most important question you can ask an atheist is do you hope you're wrong think about that do you hope you're wrong because if you hope you are correct then you don't hope for what is good an atheist does not hope for what is good no afterlife no ultimate justice no mercy no forgiveness no reconciliation but if an atheist hopes that they're wrong they just believe that they're correct then there is an opening and I always like to poke some fun at atheist I always like to say without God there would be no atheists which kind of drives them a little nuts but go thinking think without God there would be no atheists and you know it's it's interesting religion in America is atheist sucker ilysm based in a religious following of the state that's correct and we're running out of time here but I do want to say I always like to leave somebody with a feeling of optimism to leave the room with optimism because we're tremendously optimistic we get up every day and we fight for what we believe in and if we leave every room and we inspire everyone to do the same then the future of this country looks pretty bright so decide what it is what you can do to make sure that we save this country because it is make no mistake America is the greatest country on the face of the planet thank you guys so much depend fun being here thank you hey real quickly thanks again they did a fantastic job real quickly guys we we are going to take an offering for Isaiah let me let me be clear on your way out there'll be some buckets also just to bless Isaiah with some eye contact and some words of affirmation we're also going to have a bucket that he's gonna have so if you are around him here and you just want to come if you can't give you just want to thank him and say you're praying for him he's going to be right here in the front tonight we'll announce the amount again we'll be a campus come tonight with our entire team and those graduates that are returning we love you and you're dismissed thanks guys bless you

Channel: Liberty University

Views: 1,823

Rating: 4.3513513 out of 5

Keywords: Liberty University, LibertyU, Liberty, Jerry Falwell

Id: 0QzNdRrah6c

Length: 44min 12sec (2652 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018