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I like to say on my podcast that politics matter because policy matters because people matter. God works through process in his power. He loves order, which is the exact opposite of what we see in culture today. It's time for people to be courageous for you to be that one person to share courage with other people. Stand up for that, which you know is good and right and true. Okay. So I crowdsourced the topic of my speech tonight. I don't know if you heard that first part. I crowdsourced the topic of my speech tonight. And I heard that you want to hear good news. There's been a lot. There's been a lot. The past few months, even the past few hours. So let me just start with this really good news. That Jesus is coming back. That we already know what the end result is. We already know what the future looks like. One day Jesus will return and he won't come as a baby as he did at that first Christmas, but he will come back as a warrior. Sometimes it feels like evil is winning. Like those who do wrong are getting the last word, but we are promised that in the end Jesus will rule in perfect peace forever and ever. And there will be no more sin. There will be no more sadness. There will be no more sickness. There will be no more assassination. There will be no more injustice. And we will rule united in Christ with him forever and ever. And so we look forward to that day. Right now we're living in this shadow of Charlie's assassination when we are reminded more than ever that while we look forward to that day and we have hope in that day, we are not there yet. That is where our joy comes from. That is what our hope hangs on, but we're not there yet. We were placed on this tiny spot of the earth on this small speck of eternity by a God who does nothing by accident, who does nothing arbitrarily. Nothing surprises him. Nothing takes him aback. Nothing throws him off. He's never looking down and thinking, how do I clean up this mess? But he's actually sovereign over all of it. Psalm 139 reminds us that all of our days were written out by God before any of them came to be, and that includes your life. So what is the purpose that you are here on earth to suffer and to feel pain and to struggle with sin and to go through all of these difficult things that many of us don't want to go through even amidst the beauty of our life? Our purpose, of course, is to glorify God and love our neighbor. It's really simple. Our purpose in life is to glorify God and love our neighbor. And if you listen to my show relatable, you've heard me say this saying a lot. What that looks like is doing the next right thing in faith with excellence and for the glory of God. When we don't know what to do, that is our mantra. That is our motto. But let me tell you as a Christian something that a lot of people don't want to talk about, but I know everyone in this room wants to hear and agrees with. One way that Christians can glorify God, one way that Christians can love our neighbor as we await the perfect and sure victory of Jesus Christ is through politics. It's through politics. See, politics matter because policy matters, because people matter. Politics affects policy. Policy affects people. People are made in the image of God. People matter to God, and therefore they matter to us. And so, Christians don't have an option, nor should we want the option not to be political. That doesn't mean that politics is the primary way or the only way that we love our neighbor, but it is a way to love our neighbor, because our most vulnerable neighbors are affected by politics, which affect policy. Our unborn neighbor is affected by our politics. The child who is confused about their gender is affected by our politics. And so, I know there's been a lot of talk lately. Should we even care about the midterms? We've got these other things going on. Let me tell you, I care about the midterms. I care a lot about the midterms. But let me also encourage you, because I don't want to come up here and say, oh, let's just forget about our disagreements. Let's just unite and move forward so we can win the midterms and win 2028. While I do think it's important to find unity, I actually think that truth is more important than that. I think truth is more important than that. And it's important to remember this analogy. If you're discouraged by the disagreements and the division and the debates, I understand it can feel demoralizing. But let me tell you why this happens so much on the right, seemingly more than it happens on the left. It's not just because we're dumb over here. There's a reason for it. There is a difference in the nature of progressivism versus conservatism. Progressivism sets out to destroy. And if you're destroying something, destroying Western civilization, destroying the church, destroying the family, it does not matter how you do it. It doesn't matter what tool you hold or what material you use, as long as you're destroying whatever institution or edifice it is, that's fine. You don't really have to agree on much. But on the right, on the conservative side, we are trying to build something. And when you're building something, you have to agree on a lot. You have to agree on the materials used, the tools being used to build. And most importantly, you have to agree on a foundation. And if we cannot agree on a foundation, then it's going to be very hard to build something together. But the debates and working out what that edifice looks like of what the future of America should be, there's going to be some discomfort and division within that. Truth divides. It's not always a bad thing. But let me tell you as Christians, what we cannot waver on, what we cannot compromise on, and not everyone is going to agree with us on the right about this, but our job is to pull them over in our direction, not to compromise in their direction, even if people call us divisive for doing so. The foundation must be for all of our politics this very basic idea that we were made by a creator in his image whose power transcends that of the government. And therefore, this creator and this creator alone is the giver and the determinant of our rights, the arbiter of what is right, what is wrong, what is true, what is false. Because without that foundation, what are we doing? Without that foundation, the idea of limited government or the sovereignty of the individual or the legitimacy of borders, none of that makes a whole lot of sense beyond, this is just how I feel. But if Genesis 1.1 is correct, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, that changes everything, including our politics. Because if God is the creator of all of it, then he is the authority over all of it. He alone gets to say what is and what isn't, what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad, what a woman is and what she's not. And the reality of there being this transcendent creator who is also our moral authority, our giver of rights, if we can agree on that, then other things must also be true. There are other things that must be true for the Christian that flow from that reality. One of them that Christians cannot waver on is that all human beings have innate value from the moment of conception and that does not, and that does not only mean that they should not be aborted, aborted, but they also shouldn't be tested, frozen and discarded as embryos. If God is creator and God is in charge and God is the giver of rights, then how we treat our unborn neighbors, both personally and politically, matters. And it is not something that we can compromise on because compromising on that wouldn't be compromising to win an election, it would be compromising to lose biblical truth. Number two, something, it's really a twofer, two and one. Another thing that we cannot compromise on if these things are true, if we just believe the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis one, that we are created irreplaceably, inexchangeably male and female. And now most of the right, most of the right agrees with that, that doesn't even get in applause anymore because it is so obviously true. You even have people like Gavin Newsom acknowledging that men shouldn't be in women's sports. However, for the Christian, it's not just that men can't be women, it is also that husbands can't be wives. Just as men and women are not interchangeable, husbands and wives aren't interchangeable. A mom cannot become a dad and a dad cannot become a mom and children need both. For the Christian, when we talk about things like overturning Obergefell, we're not trying to be offensive, we're not trying even to be political, we're not trying to be divisive, we're just trying to be biblical. Charlie and I in our last face-to-face conversation, we talked about this phenomenon of many pastors and many Christians believing that they're nicer than God. And he said, that has to be the title of your next book, I'm really good at this. And he is, so it probably will be. But there is this feeling among many of us that we are nicer than God. And even though God says one thing about marriage or gender or anything else, we shouldn't say it because that's too mean, as if we need to let the creator of the universe off the hook. But the good news is, is that God is love, 1 John 4-8, and because he is love, he gets to define it. And he tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 that love, among other things, never rejoices in wrongdoing, so never celebrates sin, but rejoices with the truth. So the most loving thing that we can do, both personally and politically, is agree with God. Because if Jesus is king, then the king of kings cannot be compartmentalized. We don't get to say, sure Jesus, you get this part of my life, but my politics and my cultural views and my social views, they're off limits. It's not how it works. It also means, if God is creator and he is authority, the protection of borders and the punishment of crime, because God created borders, they were his idea. He created governments and laws and nations for our good. And he instituted the government, as Romans 13 tells us, to punish the wrongdoer and to reward those who do good. It also means, because I think the foundation of any good future that we have in America is the belief that all people are made in God's image by a God who gives us our rights. It means that Islam is incompatible with Western civilization. And that does not mean hating people. That doesn't mean being rude to people. It means loving people. And it means telling the truth. It means loving our neighbor enough to protect them from the predation of Islam. See, Charlie talked about this red-green alliance, the red-Marxist aligning with the Islamists, the Muslims, and it seems like such a strange alliance superficially until you realize two very important commonalities in these ideologies. One, a hatred of Christianity, the faith, of course, responsible for the founding of this country, and two, a denial that all people are made with inherent rights, with equal value by a God who loves them. And so, because this red-green alliance is a threat to everything Christians hold dear, it is also a threat to everything that America is. And so, if we love our neighbor, we will speak these truths, knowing that the most loving thing that we can do with our politics, with our personal lives, with our words, is agree with God. And look, we get to look forward to a day where we will not have political conferences anymore because we won't have politics and we won't have elections and we won't have divisions and we won't have disagreements. That day is coming when we truly will be unified by the best news ever, which is the gospel. But because we're not there yet, we have to figure it out enough to defeat evil. We have to be able to unite enough to push back against the darkness, but there can be no true unity without the acknowledgement of truth. Truth of the gospel, and fundamentally, especially for all of us in this room, the truth that we were made by a creator who gives us our rights, who gives us our value, no movement, right or left, that is built on anything other than that will ever survive. Thank you.
