The church cannot be silent today, for the church is the bearer of truth. We hold the hope of the world. How dare we be quiet? I want to talk to you about the moment we’re in, the hour that we face, and what I believe the church’s call is. In 2 Samuel 24 we see what I want to call to you tonight: the way of revival. King David, at the very center of his reign, has to make a choice about whether he’s going to confront a plague that is devastating the people of Israel. His response to that devastation determines the future of his nation. His response to God’s call to take action in the midst of danger and trial and tribulation determines the future of the nation. I believe we are in such a moment now. And what we do as believers in Jesus Christ in this moment, as our nation faces serious dangers and spiritual plague, will determine the future of this country.
A Time of Plague
Verse 15 of 2 Samuel 24 says, “So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel from the morning until the appointed time.” The Lord sent a pestilence, a plague. Would you agree with me that our nation is experiencing a spiritual plague?
In verse 18, David is given instruction: “So Gad came that day to David and he said to him, ‘Go up, raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.’ And so David went up at Gad’s word as the Lord commanded.”
Our nation is experiencing plague—in fact, there are many spiritual plagues today. Suicides among young people have never been higher in our nation’s history. In particular, suicides among young men have never been higher than they are in this moment. Addiction of all kinds—social media addiction, alcohol, drugs—have never been higher among men at this point in our country’s history. We see an addiction of anxiety. We see addictions of hopelessness. We see a surge in depression across all of these metrics at levels never experienced before in our country’s history. We see a breakdown in the family. We are experiencing spiritual plagues in so many ways. It is a moment of great peril for our nation and the church, too, has been under siege.
God Calls a Faithful Man—and He Goes
The question is, What are we going to do about this plague? We are like Israel in this story; we are at a turning point as a nation. We see in this story that God calls David. He calls a faithful man and he says, Go and do something about it. Remember what verse 18 said: “So Gad came that day to David and he said to him, ‘Go up, raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.’”
How does the way of revival begin for Israel in this story? How does it begin for the United States? The first thing we as believers have to do is to go up where the need is. We’ve got to go. For too long, the church has been afraid to go. We have been afraid to go out and confront the need. We’ve been told by culture that our job is to stay within our church doors, to keep our voices quiet, to say nothing that would disturb the public’s fear, to stay in our little places and leave the running of the country to the experts. Where has that gotten us? Danger and disaster. Since at least the 1960s, there has been this philosophy in this country that has been pushed by the secularists. It says that all of our public square—our entire public life and arena—needs to be neutral and should not reflect any particular religious belief.
Christians have been told that we need to stay within the walls of our churches. But it is time to reclaim the foundations of this nation. This nation was not founded on some set of neutral liberal principles. It was founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are a Christian nation in our history, in our ideals. The true founders of this nation were a group of hearty Puritans, believers in Jesus who in 1630 came to these shores with one purpose—to erect a godly commonwealth. They felt this was their errand into the wilderness: to set up there a commonwealth, a nation that will reflect the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, a nation of liberty, a nation where conscience is honored, a nation where the Lord can be openly worshiped, a nation where the church is free and secure, a nation where the scripture can be freely proclaimed, a godly commonwealth. That is our heritage.
So we should hear the words that the Lord spoke to David and take them as our own. It is time for us to go up where the need is. Let’s no longer listen to those who tell us we don’t have anything to say in the public sphere. That is not what our country is founded on and more importantly, it is not what the gospel says. The gospel says that Christ is Lord over every square inch of creation and it’s time we took the gospel truth to every square inch of this country. We need to go up. Go up to where the need is.
The Need for Altars Today
The second thing we see here is that David is instructed to raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor, and David did just that. In the world of the Bible, an altar was not only a place of worship for the Lord, it was a symbol of the Lord’s sovereignty over that area. It was a symbol of his kingship, claiming it as his own.
When God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans into the land of Canaan to give him the land that will become later the nation of Israel for Abraham’s family, what did he tell Abraham to do? He called Abraham to go and build an altar to God. Then, throughout chapter 12 and 13 and 14 of Genesis, everywhere that Abraham went, he set up altars to the Lord. He was claiming ground for the Lord. He was pushing forward the boundaries of the kingdom. God tells David to do the same thing. Go up where the need is and build an altar to me. Go where the need is and claim it for the Lord. Build an altar where the Lord’s presence will be welcome, where the Lord’s sovereignty will be proclaimed. Go build an altar where the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ will take root and stand there as a monument. He tells David and he tells us, Go up where the need is and build an altar there.
There are two or three places where we need to build altars today. Let me start with the defense of the most vulnerable people in our society—the innocent unborn.
We Need to Raise Up an Altar to Life
We need an altar to the defense of life today. Do you know that there are more abortions in the United States today than there were when Roe versus Wade was still law? Roe versus Wade was the most unjust Supreme Court opinion, at least since Dred Scott. Dred Scott, of course, said that slavery was not only okay under the Constitution, it was commanded by the Constitution. What a travesty. But Roe v. Wade said, of course, that the murder of innocent unborn babies was also commanded by the Constitution. What a travesty. It is an absolute intervention of the Lord that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.
I remember sitting in my Senate office listening to the audio stream of the Supreme Court that day, and tough questions were asked. Is there any foundation to Roe v. Wade? No. Is it justified by the Constitution? Not at all. Is it justified morally? Of course not. And I started counting votes and I thought to myself, Oh my goodness, I think they might just do it. And then they did.
But the travesty continues, and we must be honest about this: There are more abortions in this country today than when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. The reason? Despite state laws like yours here in Florida that protect life and other states that are protective of life—despite all that—the abortion industry found a great way to get around all those laws and anything that any voter might decide.
They manufactured a pill, a capsule that will induce an abortion just by taking it. The previous president, President Biden, removed all the safety restrictions that were on this drug. So today, this drug Mifepristone, can be mailed into every single state, every single city, every single household in the United States if they so desire, no matter what the state law is. It doesn’t matter what the case that overturned Roe v. Wade said. It doesn’t matter what you voted on in Florida or elsewhere. This drug is getting mailed into homes in every single state. Their goal is to turn every mailbox in America into a Planned Parenthood—and they’re succeeding. Seventy percent of the abortions that are performed today in the United States of America are performed with Mifepristone.
The drug was first approved in the year 2000. Since that time, seven and a half million women have taken Mifepristone for an abortion. It’s fatal to the baby almost every time. In some cases it can be reversed and pregnancy care centers are doing amazing work trying to help women who come to regret what they have done to themselves and to their baby. But here’s the other thing. It’s fatal to the child in almost 100% of cases and it’s also life-threatening to the mother in 11% of cases—more than one in 10. Here is something the abortion industry will never tell you: In more than one in 10 cases, a woman who takes the drug Mifepristone for an abortion will end up in the emergency room herself with a life-threatening condition.
I’m talking about internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, internal infections, sepsis—more than one in 10. Some of you might remember the old drug Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory drug that was taken off the market because it had an adverse health rate of 0.001. Mifepristone causes adverse health events, meaning life-threatening conditions, 11% of the time. And they’re lying to American women about it. And when I say “they,” I mean the offshore foreign corporations who make this drug incorporated in the Cayman Islands so that they don’t have to face American law. They are able to mail that drug into every state, into every home, and almost every safety restriction that once existed on the drug has been eliminated.
It is time for us to do something. Those of us who believe in the right to life, who know that every life is created in the image of Jesus Christ, who confess the fact that Christ went to a cross for every person, those who understand that that is the root of the dignity of life—I suggest to you it’s time to demand a ban on Mifepristone in the United States of America.
I firmly believe this is the fight for life in our generation. Those numbers on abortion will continue to rise in every state unless and until we take action against this drug. I have introduced legislation to do just that. I’m going to call on the United States Senate to vote on this bill to ban this drug. I’ve already gotten pushback. We’re told by the party establishment, the leaders in Congress, that we’re not supposed to talk about abortion. I’ve been told, Josh, this isn’t helpful. This is not helpful to talk about life. I said, Helpful to whom? To the baby, to the mothers who are being sent to emergency rooms by the hundreds of thousands, helpful to whom?
But what they meant was that it isn’t helpful to the politicians. Well, I don’t really care about that because I wasn’t sent up to Washington to feather my own nest or to make things comfortable for me. I was sent to do the will of the people. And most importantly, as a believer, I thought I was sent to be a light and a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’ve got to stand up and take action for life. This is a place where we need to build an altar to say we are not going to allow our society to drift into contempt for the unborn. We are not going to allow our society to slip away into a culture of death and destruction.
The name of the Lord deserves to be honored by building a culture of life in this country. We need to build an altar to life that honors the Lord. We need to fight and reclaim this ground. Life needs to be defended.
An Altar to the Lord in Defense of our Children
Another place we need to build an altar to the Lord is in defense of our children and the integrity of the way that God made them. There are a lot of people in Washington, DC who need to hear this: There are not 200 genders in the world. There are not forty; there are not twenty; there are two—male and female. That’s how God made us and when he looked on what he made, he called it good. The way that the Lord made you is good.
We need to say to every boy and girl in America, The way that God made you is good. He didn’t make a mistake. He didn’t regret it after he made you. He made you to call you into a loving relationship with him and how he made you is good. And we need to say to those who would push a corrupt and deathly agenda of trans ideology on our children, We will not stand for it. As Christians, we will oppose it.
We’ve got to insist that our children know the difference between male and female. We must insist that they know the way that God has made them is good. These people who want to push this ideology of death and destruction need to be kept away from our kids, kept out of our schools, kept away from federal money.
We also need to protect our kids from what woke corporations online are trying to push into their heads. A couple of weeks ago, the CEO of Netflix, the streaming platform, was in front of me. They wanted to buy some other company, so he was testifying about how this was going to be really great for America. I said, “Is that right? Will it be good for kids?” And he said, “Oh, it’ll be great for kids. We’ve got the best kids’ content in the country on Netflix, the best.” He knew that I had kids, and he said, “I bet your kids love it, Senator.” I said, “Well, just tell me this. Why is it that 40% of your kids’ content, 40% is full of trans ideology? 40% of what’s on the iPad under the Netflix rubric is full of trans characters, trans storylines saying that the heterosexual family is bad, that the nuclear family is corrupt.”
So I said to him, “Is this good for kids?” He said,” Oh, I think you’re mistaken.” He had the audacity to say to me, “Well, I don’t think this has been your experience with your kids.” I said, “Let me tell you my experience with my kids. My experience is my wife and I cannot allow my children, not one of them, to watch anything on Netflix unless we first watch every second ourselves. We just can’t do it.” I said, “Listen, I just think that your company is doing a great disservice to the children of this country. I think you have an agenda that you are pushing on the children of this country that is deathly. And I wish I could tell you that that was isolated, but you and I both know it’s not. It’s not just Netflix; it’s all the streaming companies. It’s not just one segment of the online world. It’s all of big tech, all of them.”
I was talking with a mother the other day from California who had a wonderful sixteen-year-old son. You’ll notice I’ve used the past tense because her son, Matthew, went to ChatGPT about a year ago to get help with homework. The chatbot, within a few sessions, asked him if he’d ever thought about hurting himself, cutting himself. They had a few sessions more and, as they’re talking, it suggests to him that maybe he’d want to take his own life. He did take his own life a few weeks after that and exactly in the way that the chatbot suggested.
I talked to another mother who was homeschooling her children. One of her sons went to a chatbot for homework help. Within a week or two, this chatbot got off of the subject of homework and was asking him about his scriptural beliefs. It suggested to him that the Bible is actually a series of fictions, and that the Bible is actually oppressive. It told him that his parents were really religious fanatics who didn’t have his best at heart. It suggested to him that he isolate himself, and then, that he commit suicide. Thankfully, he didn’t do it; he went to his mother instead. But you get my point.
What we are facing out there as parents, as grandparents, as aunts and uncles, is an onslaught from the corporate world that seeks to make profit by pushing their agenda that would destroy our children. I believe as Christians, this is a place where we need to raise an altar and say, We will not surrender our children to this ideology.
We will not surrender our children to the pursuit of profit by some corporation. I’ve said to Mark Zuckerberg to his face that no amount of profit justifies the destruction of our children, no amount of profit. As Christians, we need to raise an altar where we insist on this, where we write it into law. We’re going to protect our kids from this ideology. We’re going to put power back into the hands of parents. We’re not going to allow our children, an entire generation of them, to be destroyed by this technology, to be destroyed by this ideology of hate, and frankly, the atheism that underlies all of it. We need to raise up an altar. And another place we need to raise up an altar is the sanctity of the family.
An Altar in Defense of the Family
The same companies that are pushing this garbage on our children also have a vision of life in this country that is not compatible with the good of this nation or the good of the family. What am I talking about? They want to see a country where every family has to have both parents working all the time, round the clock. They want to see a country where in order to make ends meet, you’ve got to work sixty hours a week, Mom and Dad both, where the kids are raised in daycare with programming that the left wing corporations control. They want to take away power from family and shift it over either to the government or to the woke left corporations. That doesn’t sound to me like a Christian society.
That doesn’t sound to me like a Christian economy. We need to have an economy in this country where you’re able to raise a family on a good income where Mom can stay home with the kids if she so chooses and every family can raise their children themselves, not have them raised by some government somewhere, not raised by some program somewhere else, but where they have control of their own families. We need to raise up an altar and say, We want this country. We want to reclaim this country for the American family. We want to have a country where families are safe, where they are protected, where you can afford to get married, have children, buy a home where you could be in charge of your kids, where you can instruct them and bring them up in the way and the knowledge of the Lord and not be told what to do either by some government or by some corporation.
We need to raise up an altar for life, for children, for the family.
Personal Revival Precedes National Revival
The last thing that the Lord tells David to do in 2 Samuel 24 to bring revival to his nation is maybe the most significant. Araunah sees David coming and he says, “Let my Lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him.” Araunah offers David oxen and yokes for wood for the burnt offering. He says, “All this, oh king, Araunah gives to the king.” David turned down his offer, saying, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.”
You know what we owe this country more than anything? We owe this country an encounter with the living Jesus. We owe this country an encounter with the living Lord and in order to give them that encounter, we have to have encountered him ourselves. There can be no revival in this country if we are not ourselves revived, in our hearts.
George Whitefield, great preacher, was the man whose sermon set off the Great Awakening in this country in the early 1740s that then led on to our Revolutionary War. When Whitefield first came to America, he toured around, listened to some of the churches, and he said, “Oh my, they talk of an unknown Christ. They preach Jesus, but they don’t seem to know him.” He said, They don’t have any experiential knowledge of the Lord. They’re not burning with passion for the Lord. His whole mission to the United States was to light that fire. As he went around and preached the gospel of Christ, people were converted from the heart. It started with a passion, a commitment to Jesus Christ.
What’s the point from the story of David? David is called to go and to an erect an altar. What he’s saying is, I am going to give to the Lord something that costs me. I’m going to put onto the altar something that costs me—that’s what the Lord wants from us. I suggest to you the key, the ultimate key to revival is to put our lives on the altar. He wants us to lay our lives down. We will know the fire of the Lord. We will know the power of the Lord if we will surrender to the Lord.
One of my favorite people of all time is the great believer, scientist, and an adventurer, Blaise Pascal. My second son is named for him. Pascal died at a very early age—about 39 years old. He had to live with family his whole life because he was so ill for most of it. But he did extraordinary things and the fire that he lived his life with stemmed from an encounter with the Lord that he called his night of fire.
It was November 23rd, 1654. At about 10:30 in the evening, Pascal, who had been staying up late and reading his Bible, began to experience the presence of God. And here’s how he described it. I’m quoting now.
From about half past 10 at night until about half past midnight, fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the learned, certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ, forgetfulness of the world and of everything except God. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy, Jesus Christ.
That night was so powerful to him that he called it his night of fire. He tore that journal entry out of his notebook and he sewed it into the lining of his coat and wore it everywhere he went for the few years that he remained alive on earth.
What Can You Lay on the Altar Today?
Don’t you want to burn with that fire? I do. The principle that we see in 2 Samuel 24 is that fire falls on sacrifice. What are you willing to give to the Lord today? Can I just invite you to think, What can you lay on the altar for the Lord today? Where in your life do you need to say, Lord, I want you to have full control. I want you, Lord, to have total sovereignty. I want you, Lord, to have complete direction of my life. What are you willing to put on the altar for the Lord so that you can burn with a passion for the Lord? That’s what this country needs. It needs Christians who are on fire. Christians who have encountered the Lord Jesus and who can take the presence of the Lord with them every place they go.
What did the Lord say to Joshua? “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you.” He will do that for us and for our nation if we will lay our lives on the altar. The nation needs, above all, Christians who are burning for the Lord, churches that are burning for the Lord. If we burn for the Lord, we will light such a fire in this nation as shall never be put out. And that’s what we need. That’s what we’re called to. That’s the call for this generation.
I believe that this is a critical time in our country. In 2 Samuel 24, the significance of David’s sacrifice in that moment was this: The place where he went and built that altar became the place where his son Solomon built the temple. It became the place where God came to dwell among his people. At this moment in Israel’s history, it looked like a dark moment. It looked like a dangerous moment, with the nation beset by pestilence and plagues.
But in fact, it was an opportunity for Israel to step into the greater anointing to realize the greater purpose that God had for the nation. God had always meant Israel to be a place where the Lord would dwell and be honored. I think he’s meant the same for our country. We’re to be a place where the Lord is honored, where the Lord is worshipped, where the Lord is proclaimed. We are to be that godly commonwealth that our first forebearers built us to be. And just as that moment in Israel’s history was for David the time to step into that destiny, I believe for us tonight, this is the time to step into America’s destiny.
We know the Lord is sovereign. But in his sovereignty and perfect freedom, he chooses to use you and me. He chooses to call us, to invite us, to commission us for his purposes. Let’s step into his purposes today. Let’s step into his purposes for our lives. Let’s step into his purposes for our nation. Let’s step into his purposes for our future.
Make Us Worthy of This Hour
I grew up in the home of a believing mother who was a great one for singing hymns. In the last year or so, phrases from one of the hymns she would sing have begun to come back to me. One of them says: “God of love and God of power, you have called us to this hour.” I believe that is for me and for you today. God of love and God of power, he has called us to this hour. I seem to remember the hymn concluding with: “God of love and God of power, make us worthy of this hour.” May the Lord make us worthy of this hour of great significance in his kingdom. May the Lord make us worthy of the high calling to which he has called us. May the Lord make us hungry for what he might do in our lives and in our nation, that through us, his name might be glorified and his fame spread throughout all the earth.
