Biblical Citizenship In Modern America Course – Part 3 Of Week 1 With Kirk Cameron: What is the foundation of good law? Are the secrets of a successful nation hidden in the National Monument to the Forefathers? What did our Founders believe about the education of our children? How is tyranny overthrown? Tune in to hear Kirk Cameron reveal the essential recipe for a healthy nation.

Air Date: 06/08/2022

Guest: Kirk Cameron

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live, where we’re talking about today’s hottest topics on policy, faith and the culture always from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. And today, we are in day three, part three of our five part series this week.

So all throughout this week, Monday through Friday, every WallBuilders Live program is bringing you Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. Now that is actually an eight week course that you host in your home or at your church. It’s filled with fantastic videos where I take you into Independence Hall and teach the Constitution there.

We take you out to Thousands Oaks, California at Rob McCoy’s church at Godspeed Calvary Chapel, and there we have Rob McCoy sharing, we have Kirk Cameron sharing, we got Tim Barton David Barton, Jack Hibbs, Mat Staver, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Carol Swain, Michelle Bachman, David here, see I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

And we’re bringing it to you right here on WallBuilders Live so you get just enough of a taste. We’re actually sharing the first two weeks throughout this week and we’ll give you just enough a taste that you want to do the full eight week course, actually, be able to watch the videos, get access to the digital workbook and get your friends and family together. It is a fantastic tool where you can help restore biblical values and constitutional principles right there in your community.

Let’s dive right back into where we left off yesterday. This is Biblical Citizenship in Modern America.

Morality

Kirk:

Morality is a woman seated in a chair, her eyes happened to be closed. Some of the other figures have their eyes open, they’re looking out, but morality is looking inward, because morality is an internal quality. She’s holding the Ten Commandments in her left hand, she’s holding the scroll of Revelation in her right hand. They didn’t believe that morality was a moral standard imposed by a king through external rules.

They believe that morality was an internal quality that began with a transformation of your heart. How do I know that? Look to her left under her chair, it says evangelist. Why would it say evangelist in this statue that is on a hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, all about civil liberty?

Well, it’s because they understood that civil liberty, and religious liberty must begin with a transformation of the heart by the Spirit of God through the preaching of the gospel. That’s what the evangelists does. And there’s a picture of a preacher preaching the gospel to the lost. Once your heart has been transformed, once you’ve been born again, or born from above by the Spirit of God, now you begin to love what God loves, you’re a new creature in Christ, you hate what God hates, and your morality is naturally going to line up with God’s morality.

And there’s your external standard from God’s word. You have the Ten Commandments and the scroll of Revelation representing both the Old and the New Testament. And you begin to love what God loves and hate what he hates in the Scriptures, because your heart is lining up with the heart of God because of the gospel.

Once you’ve got true and good morality, or virtue, you have the two most important things that our Founding Fathers also said were essential: faith and morality. They told us that our government is not sufficient for any other than a religious and moral people. Faith and morality are absolutely essential.

Biblical Worldview

Once you’ve got good morality, once you’ve got a solid biblical worldview because you have faith in His Word, it’s important then to establish laws in your country. That morality is the basis for good laws.

And notice, here’s the man of law, he’s sitting in the Judge’s chair, he’s holding the book of law in his hand. And notice that this book of law is directly beneath the book in faith’s hand, indicating that man’s laws must always line up under God’s laws, or they’re not good laws.

If you look at his side, you’ll see justice on his right, and mercy on his left. And justice is depicted as a woman who is holding a sword and a set of scales, representing that the government does not bear the sword in vain, and the scales are representing justice. On his left, it’s mercy.

There’s a balance in good and godly laws based on the Bible between justice and mercy and the man of law is able to extend either one: justice or mercy because he has a biblical worldview and his laws are based on biblical morality.

Once you have civility, and your laws are nourishing the good and punishing the evil, you no longer have chaos, you no longer have anarchy, you’ve got civility, now you can begin the all-important task of education. We must educate our children, they said. We must train them up in the way that they should go.

And if you look, this is a woman, probably a mom who is leading her children in their educational journey. She has a laurel wreath around her forehead representing victory. She’s holding the books of knowledge in her hand.

The Education of Our Children

And on her right, it says youth. And if you look at the relief here, here is this mother training her children, and then the child’s there with a notebook and a pen and a pad; and she’s training her child in the way that he or she should go so that when they are old, they’ll not depart from it.

And what’s on her left? Is an old man with a long white beard. He’s holding a globe and a Bible indicating that he has a biblical worldview.

They believe that if we would educate our children to the second and third generation, we would get these principles deep into their heart and into their mind, and it would result in what everybody wants. Liberty. Freedom.

Freedom, both internally from the power of sin because we’ve been set free from the power of Satan through the gospel and a transformed heart and set free externally from the power of tyrants and bad governments. Remember, they just came from England, that was tyranny on steroids.

And this is the liberty man. Look at this guy. I mean, he is swole. He is jacked. This guy is strong, and he is ready to fight. He is a warrior dressed in the full armor of God that you find in Ephesians chapter 6 in the Bible. He’s wearing the breastplate of righteousness. He’s got the belt of truth.

He’s got the helmet of salvation. He’s holding the sword of the Spirit. He’s wearing the sandals of the gospel of peace. And the chains on his wrist and his ankles are hanging there broken because tyranny has been overthrown. Right?

If you look at his shoulder, there’s a big claw of a lion that’s there. And if you look across the back, you’ll see there is the head of the slain lion, and the hide draped across his shoulders. Because the lion represented England, that was the tyrant that they had escaped from.

Liberty Man

He has defeated tyranny. And if you look down below, here it says tyranny and it’s an image of the liberty man with his foot on the chest of the beast, and the sword at the beast’s throat. Tyranny has been overthrown.

And here on his left is his wife, her name is Peace. And she’s holding a basket full of gifts for her friends and her family. And he is looking out over the Atlantic Ocean back toward where the tyranny came from. And he is ready to defend his faith, his Bible, his biblical morality, the gospel that changed his heart, the laws and the ability to self-govern, and also select leaders to govern in our nation, and defend his right to train up his children in a biblical worldview.

Got to take a quick break, friends, we’ll be right back. You’ve been listening to Biblical Citizenship in Modern America right here on WallBuilders Live.

The American Story

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called The American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that’s just not known or not told today.

And we would say very providentially in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project that say America is evil and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not out of statement, Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we’re against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There’s so many things attacking America.

Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story. Starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln, we tell the story of America, not as the story of a perfect nation or a perfect people, but the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It’s a story you want to check out wallbuilder.com, The American Story.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. We’ve been listening to Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. That is an eight week course that you actually do in your home and do it in your living room, just invite friends and family over, you do it at your church, you get people together. And it’s a great time of fellowship. The videos are fantastic.

We have great guests. So you can share this with as many people as you want. Just go to biblicalcitizens.com, get signed up, it’s entirely free. And we would love for you to be a part of that. Let’s jump in where we left off before the break. Biblical Citizenship in Modern America.

Back to Faith

Kirk:

The last thing liberty man ever would have stood for was to hand his children over to a power loving government who would undermine everything that he and his wife were trying to teach their children. Education was a parental blessing and responsibility and he was ready to defend it. And he’s ready to defend his liberty. How many of you think that we need to ditch the political correctness and kowtowing to tyranny and get back to these values in the USA?

Now, listen. This is priceless for us to have because we know what to do. The only person who can follow this strategy, the only people who are the kind of people who can actually do something with this is a person who also takes this strategy and personalizes it. So here’s the example.

I personally, not just my nation, my nation doesn’t need to get back to Faith, my nation will become a nation that reflects these principles when each individual citizen reflects these principles. So I personally, you personally need to ask God to help us to fear Him, to love Him, to repent of our sins, and be men and women of biblical faith; men and women who reason with the wisdom God’s given us to every aspect of our life, and have a personal private morality that lines up with the things that God loves and the things that God hates.

Listen, if I have got skeletons in the closet, if I am hiding sinful activity in the darkness, I’m not going to prosper. And I’m not going to be used by God as effectively as I could as if I would just humbly repent of my own sin and get a morality that washes my heart clean, that begins with a transformation of my heart with a real faith in God so that I begin to do the things God wants me to do and I begin to fight against the things that God hates. I need to be a man of morality, and so do you.

Liberty-Driven Citizens

And I need to be a person who is involved in the duties of the government. I need to be participating in the laws that are created in our country. And so do you. If we want to have civility, and you and I need to be individuals who care about the education of our children, and not just hand our kids over to be discipled by others.

A pastor once said this, and I’ll never forget it. He said, “If we hand our children over to Caesar to be educated, we shouldn’t be surprised if they come back Romans.” We have been given the sacred task of training up our children, educating them in the way that they should go.

And I need to be educating myself in history, in theology, in the principles of our country, so that I can be the liberty man, so that you can be the liberty-driven citizen and enjoy the fruits of peace and have tyranny overthrown in your life personally. That’s the kind of people we need to be.

And the last thing I would like to point out about this monument is that if you’re trying to destroy a free nation, this is also the strategy on how to do that. You can hijack the strategy for building a good nation, and you can use it for evil and here’s all you have to do. I’m not revealing something that the enemy doesn’t already know because he’s well on his way to unraveling the good things we have in the nation. All you have to do is start here toward the end of the strategy with education.

If you can capture the education of our youth, and teach them a whole new value system, and you can teach them a whole new way of thinking through the textbooks in a public government school system, you can begin to unravel this whole thing. Because if you capture education, you can change the way people think and you can then begin to change the laws in our country.

What Produces Liberty?

Have you noticed that our education is becoming corrupt? Have you noticed that the laws that are being made in our nation are going against the things that God says that our laws should before?

Well, once you do that, you’re going to say, well, where did these old laws come from anyway? Well, it’s this archaic morality that we need to get rid of. And that morality is all tied in with this Christianity’s stuff and it’s tied in with the Bible, the Ten Commandments.

Let’s get those out of our courthouses. Let’s get those out of our schools. And by the way, all of this stuff really comes from the roots of this biblical faith.

And if you can hijack faith, and you don’t need to actually take faith and get rid of faith, all you need to do is give people a reason to put their faith in something other than the book in her hand. Take away the Bible and let’s give people the Communist manifesto, let’s give people a different religious book, like the Quran, or some other book, or let’s give people the idea that we can write our own book that we are our own God, the masters of our own destiny, and then they will reason from that faith and create a new morality, a new set of laws, a new re-education of our children.

And the problem is, what people don’t realize is that that produces not liberty. At the end of the strategy, what you see is tyranny instead with the lion seated on this chair and liberty man’s leg hanging out of his mouth. We’re headed that way, if we do not recapture education, if we do not reinstitute a courageous faith, a church with a backbone that is preaching the Bible, and using wisdom to reason to every aspect of life.

And that’s what this course on Biblical Citizenship in Modern America is all about. So stay tuned, buckle your seat belt, we’re just about to get started.

Constitution Alive!

Rick:

We’re going to take a quick break, what you’re listening to is Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. It is a free course. It’s an eight week course you can get it at biblicalcitizens.com today. You can become a coach. You can host it at your church, in your living room.

We’re bringing it to you all throughout this week, actually, so five separate programs this week on Wallbuilders Live, and we’ll be able to squeeze in week one and week two. There are eight weeks total, but you’re going to hear some fantastic presentations, even just during these first two weeks. So let’s take a quick break, we’ll be right back on Wallbuilders Live.

Have you ever wanted to learn more about the United States Constitution but just felt like, man, the classes are boring or it’s just that old language from 200 years ago or I don’t know where to start? People want to know but it gets frustrating because they don’t know where to look for truth about the Constitution either.

Well, we’ve got a special program for you available now called Constitution Alive! with David Barton and Rick Green. And it’s actually a teaching done on the Constitution at Independence Hall in the very room where the Constitution was framed. We take you both to Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty and Independence Hall and to the WallBuilders library, where David Barton brings the history to life to teach the original intent of our Founding Fathers.

We call it the Quickstart Guide to the Constitution, because in just a few hours through these videos, you will learn the citizen’s guide to America’s Constitution, you’ll learn what you need to do to help save our constitutional republic. It’s fun, it’s entertaining and it’s going to inspire you to do your part to preserve freedom for future generations. It’s called Constitution Alive! with David Barton and Rick Green. You can find out more information on our website now and wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. We are listening to Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. We’re going to dive right back in where we left off before the break.

The National Monument to the Forefathers

Rick:

I got to ask you a couple of questions because I’m literally sitting over here in tears because as people are experiencing tyranny, they’re asking why, what has happened? And there’s just this feeling of being lost right now and not knowing where to turn. And you just gave us the foundation. This is truth.

We’re seeing truth right here. People are so lost right now, because we haven’t been willing to speak truth, and Kirk, you just laid out everything we need. We stopped at faith in the church and we stopped doing education and law, and we started saying those things don’t apply. You just gave us the formula.

Kirk:

And get this. This monument was established in 1889. Check this out, it took them 50 years to actually complete the building of this. And one of the first contributors to the funding of this monument was Abraham Lincoln. Okay. So the Pilgrims actually planted the seeds of these principles into the hearts and minds of their children and their children’s children. And it was then built by their descendants.

And it was actually interrupted by something called the Civil War. It was then resumed, it was finished in 1889. And when you think about it, the people of Massachusetts understood these principles so well, and felt they were so important that they created the largest granite monuments so we would never forget, and that was only 150 years ago.

We have lost this in only 150 years. But it’s right under the skin in our nation. It’s in our Christian conscience. It’s there. It’s still in the soil. And we need to tell it up, we need to repent and get the stones of idolatry and pride and fear out of the way and get back to watering these seeds and then we get back to the fruit of liberty.

Education

Rick:

Oh, man, this is it, brother. Yeah, this is so good, bro. So good. So this is what we’re going to do over the next few weeks. We’re literally going to take our faith, we’re going to take the Word of God, we’re going to take those Ten Commandments, and we’re going to see how that applies to the law, how do we create good laws that reflect that. That’s why we’re going to dive into the Constitution and into the Declaration.

And then we’re going to talk about education and how to educate ourselves better and how to educate our children, and what John Jay called the rising generation, that is the formula we’re going to be applying it and you’re going to help us apply it. But then we’re going to ask you to be force multipliers: that after you apply it to your own life, that you start teaching this course to your friends and family, and we get as many Americans as possible to understand this truth and fight for this truth. That’s how we’re going to restore America. That was amazing, Kirk. Fantastic. So good. So good.

Rick:

You’re hearing it everywhere. It’s around us at a depth and velocity like we’ve never seen in our lifetime. It’s literally taking people down a spiral of destruction. And it’s what we call deception. Just take a look around, look at the young people in your life, look at the people all around you where deception is after them with a vengeance.

And we have a responsibility as parents, grandparents, pastors, educators, mentors, and coaches, we can feel the urgency now more than ever. It’s an urgency to inoculate this next generation against those same old ideas that have led to bondage throughout the course of history every time they’ve been tried. And we got to ask ourselves, do our sons and daughters know how to detect the lies in the culture?

Do they know how to apply timeless life giving standards of truth rooted in the Gospel to the problems of today? Are they ready to step out in courage when it’s their turn, their chance to influence and lead a generation away from bad ideas with dangerous consequences? Real question is has their education prepared them for this reality?

The Fight Has Come to You

Look, if you’re between the ages of 16 and 25, and you’re within the sound of my voice, this message is for you. No matter your personality, what your passions are, or the station of life or career you find yourselves in, the fight has come to you. The preparation you need does not happen by accident. It takes purposeful sharpening, roleplay, and intentionality to train for battle. And that’s where Patriot Academy comes in. It’s not a summer camp. It’s a boot camp.

Patriot academies take place in state capitals across the nation throughout the summer, and we teach you essential communication skills and how to assess the ideas around you, but through a lens we call the Lift Principles, that’s limited government, individual liberties, the free enterprise market system that rejects dangerous ideas like socialism and communism, and then lastly, it’s timeless principles of truth.

Our three day boot camp is just the beginning of a lifelong journey of learning on how to influence and take action to advance freedom no matter where God leads you. Because of the connections you’ll make, you’re going to have full access to a network of leaders who stand ready to engage the culture and stand with courage with you. Make the decision today. Be the influencer that God has destined you to be. Be that one person who’s equipped, strategically place and takes action.

Alright, so that’s the clothes on Week One, is the first week of Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. Each week, we’ll start right here in the classroom, and then head out to talk to those experts in all these different areas so that we can apply God’s Word to our lives even in how we form our societies and our culture.

Biblical Citizenship In Modern America Course – Part 3 Of Week 1, With Kirk Cameron

Now, next week, we’re going to be diving into the “Seeds of Liberty.” And we’re really going to answer this question, is America worth saving? Is our value system, are our founding documents worth saving? And if so, how do we do it? Be back next week for Biblical citizenship.

Rick:

Okay, friends out of time for today, we have got to pick up where we left off today. We’ll do that tomorrow. Make sure you join us tomorrow we’re going to be doing Week Two of Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. It’s an eight week course available to you right now, at biblicalcitizens.com entirely free.

We’re giving this away for free. You can sign up as a coach for free, hosted at your church for free. I mean, this is just a way to get people educated on the biblical foundations and what it means to be a good citizen, a biblical citizen in modern America. Thanks so much for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.