Roger Marsh: Well, welcome back to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh. If you were with us on yesterday's program, you heard part one of a very powerful presentation given by Gary Bauer at a recent event here in Colorado Springs where the Family Talk headquarters are located. By the way, if you missed part one of his presentation, I encourage you to listen to it and you can do so easily when you visit us online at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk.
Gary Bauer is a longtime friend of Dr. James Dobson. He's the senior vice president of public policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. He's also the host of the podcast called Defending Faith, Family and Freedom, which you can find on our website as well. Gary and his wife, Carol, have three grown children. Now on today's program, we're going to hear Gary talk about how Christians in America are at the crossroads and what is at stake if we don't take a stand with our faith and Judeo-Christian values so let's join Gary Bauer right here, right now on Family Talk.
Gary Bauer: Lincoln at the age of 28 gave a speech in Illinois to a youth group. Most people have completely forgotten the speech. He's 28 years old. He's writing about America's future. He says this, "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, combined with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest with a Napoleon for a commander cannot by force take a drink from the Ohio River or leave a footprint on the Blue Ridge Mountains even in a thousand years. The greatest threat cannot come to us from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide."
That's where we are today, my friends. How did it come to this? How did we get here? How asleep were we? The founders knew, as been mentioned, that only a virtuous people could remain free, and now we're being told that unless we allow men dressed up like they're women to go into elementary schools and read to our children, we're bigots. Where did that come from? Who got up one morning and said, "Well, I think it's about time to push the good gambit of drag queens in the elementary schools."
When societies sink into this kind of demonic paganism, we are sinking into a set of events that inevitably almost always the cost is measured in butchered children one way or another, and that is already happening today. We're being buried in a blizzard of lies and our children more so than anybody else, lies like there is no God, that America was never great, that our founders were evil, that your son or daughter is trapped in the wrong body. This is why Dr. Dobson and I wrote Children at Risk so many years ago because we saw these things coming. This is why he started Focus on the Family. It's why he started the Family Research Council. It's why when he could have retired, he started the James Dobson Family Institute.
It's why I put some things aside that I could put aside to be alongside of him now at this moment. I suspect it's why you're here. You know what the moment is and you're desperately looking for answers and we are going to try to do everything we can to provide those answers to save this country for our children and our grandchildren. If we followed timid voices, some of those voices from our own pulpits and worse, some of those timid voices in our own hearts, I feel like I'm a pretty good fighter, every once in a while I'm getting ready to say something or do something and I think, "Really? I mean, we got grandkids now. Can't somebody else say it?"
Carol and I remember not that many years ago when we had to have a car parked in our driveway 24 hours a day with a couple of guys with guns in it because our kids were getting threats. We had a guy that used to call us and tell us where our kids were when he called. Dr. Dobson has experienced the same thing. If we dared to kneel or listen to those voices of timidity, we will have lost the constitutional republic that so many have died to give us. We would've trashed our own inheritance. We would've condemned our own children to lesser lives. We would've betrayed the founding fathers and we will have jeopardized our own souls. Your Revelations 28:8 helpfully lists which people it will be that will be thrown into the lake of brimstone and fire to die a second death, and most of the people on the list won't surprise you.
The polluted, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, liars that I didn't mention. The first group listed cowards. That's the first group that will go into the burning lake, cowards. We can't kneel, but we should not fool ourselves either. If we won't kneel, if we defend our faith, our country, our children, they intend to destroy you. Now see, when I say things like that, some of my friends, some of them even here say I'm a pessimist. It's got nothing to do with optimism or pessimism. I'm trying to describe the moment. Optimism or pessimism comes up when you say whether you think we can overcome this or not. I still think we can, but not if we don't understand what we're up against. They intend to destroy you. They will isolate and crush you. They will dehumanize you. They are already doing that with the words they use to describe us.
They will put you in jail. You don't think they'll put you in jail? They're already putting us in jail. There are grandmothers and grandfathers that didn't push any policemen on January 6th. People in their sixties and seventies in some cases on videotape being welcomed into the Capitol building. They have been put on trial. They've been found guilty and they have been given sentences worse than carjackers and drug pushers yet in Washington, D.C. Do you think that's because they thought those grandmas and granddads were a threat to the republic? No. They think you are a threat to the republic and they're trying to send you and us and anybody like us a message. Don't you dare think you can go into the streets, exercise your right of assembly and your right of free speech. We the left own the streets.
I know some of you will disagree. You can disagree. That's the great thing about America. This is where I am. Reason will not stop them. For reason to stop somebody, words have to have some meaning. These are relativists in every way. Moral relativists. They're relativists about words. Words are what they say they mean so reason's not going to work. Constitution's not going to stop them. Oh, if Donald Trump hadn't made the three Supreme Court appointments, if Hillary Clinton had made those, the court would've made up things in the Constitution to crush us. But now that we have a majority in the Constitution on the court, they're not going to let that document stand in their way. They'll do whatever they have to do.
I talked to some of you about this. I can't recall which conversation it was. Last night, outside the homes of the conservative Supreme Court justices, there were demonstrators. You don't hear about it in the media anymore. That was months ago, almost a year ago now. The demonstrations didn't stop because their purpose isn't publicity. Their purpose is to wear down the justices that we're counting on. Every night, their spouses, their children hear the chants outside. "Honey, I just can't take it anymore. I don't want to live like this." You've put your years in. You need to step down and move on. That's what they want. Or even worse, you see there's a federal law that prohibits demonstrations outside the homes of federal judges. The Biden Administration's Justice Department doesn't enforce that law. They're too busy putting grandmothers in the DC jail. What message is that sending?
Roger Marsh: You're listening to Family Talk and I'm Roger Marsh. Just jumping in here for a brief moment, reminding you that we're listening to a presentation given by our own Gary Bauer. Gary, of course is the senior vice president of public policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. He's also the host of the Defending Faith, Family and Freedom podcast here at the JDFI. Now let's rejoin Gary Bauer for the conclusion of his dynamic presentation right here on Family Talk.
Gary Bauer: You see, one of the reasons demonstrations aren't allowed is that demonstrations can be a cover for somebody that intends to kill a Supreme Court justice. And somebody tried to, flew from California to Washington, D.C. with that intention, but ended up being stopped. If they get the Senate back, we lose the House, they keep the presidency, they will stuff the Supreme Court. There'll be 12 justices on the Supreme Court. What are those Christian friends of ours going to say when all of what they cherish is gone? Before those three appointments, I talked to a Supreme Court justice a number of years ago and he said to me, "Gary, I've counted every which way I can count. I can't find five votes in the Supreme Court anymore to uphold the First Amendment, freedom of religion so I'm just praying we don't take any freedom of religion cases." Now we have a majority on the court, but we came close to losing that.
Now, this is a harder thing to swallow. They're not going to be stopped by our goodwill. Oh, look, you might have a friend or a relative that you want to be loving to and you want to talk to them, and even though they disagree with you on everything, you want to reach out to them when you're in trouble. You should do that and you might be able to win them over on a one-on-one basis. But this neo-Marxist movement that intends to rip us away from everything America was built on, they are not going to be moved by our kindness. Our impulse toward Christian charity won't do it. There aren't enough cheeks to turn. Hitler could not have been hugged out of it. It took blood and iron. It always takes ultimately blood and iron when you have an opponent that is as vicious and as dedicated as the opponent that we're facing.
A few weeks ago, we observed the, I guess it was the 22nd anniversary of the attack on 9/11. I was stuck in a traffic jam, as some of you know, in my car right next to the Pentagon that morning about 60 yards away from the Pentagon, when all of a sudden I heard the roar of a jet engine and that jet flew into the side of the Pentagon and the blast literally moved my car and the cars that were in that line. I was the last car to get across the bridge to get on into Washington D.C. to try to find our daughter. I think about that a lot, but even more than what I experienced that morning, I think about that flight that took off from Newark, New Jersey, that United Airlines flight. The passengers on that flight found themselves in the middle of a nightmare.
The plane had been hijacked. Several of the stewardesses had their throats cut. The pilot and copilot were dead. The passengers gathered in the back of the plane to talk about what do we do? By the way, there was a disagreement. Some said, "You know what? We need to get back in our seats. The plane's going to land. There'll be negotiations. That's the best chance we've got." Other passengers said, "No, no, no. There's something else going on here. We need to fight back." You have any idea of what they did, these Americans who disagreed on the morning that our enemies meant to take down our constitutional republic? They voted. "Everybody in favor of fighting back, raise your hand. Everybody who thinks we ought to take our seats, raise your hand." The ones that wanted to fight back won the vote.
Now, a lot of these passengers, it was actually a Jim Dobson moment if you think about it, they wanted to make a last phone call home. They called mothers and fathers, children, parents simply to say, one more time, I love you. Don't forget me. Tell the children every day what they meant to me. One of the men on the plane that made one of those calls was a guy, you'll recognize the name Todd Beamer, a Christian man, a graduate of Wheaton, as fate would have it, when he made his phone call home, the call was redirected by the federal government to the GTE headquarters in Chicago. They were in charge of the phone system on the plane, and our government wanted to hear from these calls as much information as they could get about what was happening on the plane. And so Todd Beamer didn't get to tell his wife again that he loved her. He was talking to a woman named Lisa Jefferson who worked for GTE, and he extracted from her a promise that she would call his wife and tell her about the phone call.
Lisa Jefferson and Todd Beamer talked for 13 minutes. During that time, and it's not clear how it happened, they started saying the Lord's Prayer together. Lisa Jefferson said she could hear other passengers joining in, deliver us from evil. Then a little later they recited together the 23rd Psalm. Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Shortly after that, Lisa Jefferson said I could tell that Todd was not talking to me anymore. I could hear other people's voices and I heard him say, "Are you ready? Are you ready to go?" And then the phrase that became iconic, let's roll, as he led the passengers running down the aisle into the teeth of men armed with box cutters. You can hear on the recording the brutal battle that ensues, the screams, the crashing plates and carts and yells. You can even hear at the beginning, one of the hijackers saying to his fellow murderers, they're coming.
Your fellow citizens broke into the cockpit. The struggle ensued. Nobody could get control of the plane. Witnesses on the ground said they saw it beginning to fly erratically and then go into a dive and it crashed into the ground. Everybody on board dead. Did God not hear that phone call? Did He not hear the prayers? Of course he heard them and he answered them. You see, the enemy that day meant for us to endure even more suffering than we did. That plane was on the way either to the Capitol or the White House or maybe a nuclear power plant. The experts differ, but the disaster would've been even larger than it was. And so God gave those passengers the strength to understand the time it was. They voted, they prayed and then they fought because that was the only option left. By doing so, they saved countless Americans in our country.
I believe in the years ahead, under the leadership of JDFI and many other wonderful organizations, and with men and women like you rising to the occasion, I believe that if we will all do that and with some grace from God and strength from God and some protection from God, that five years from now and 50 years from now and 100 years from now or until our Savior returns that the star of David will continue to fly over Jerusalem, the city of the free undivided nation of Israel, and that the stars and stripes will continue to fly over Washington, D.C., the capital of the free and undivided people of the United States of America. May it be so. God bless you all. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're too kind. God bless you.
Roger Marsh: Well, what a powerful presentation given by Gary Bauer at a recent event here in Colorado Springs presenting it to you here on Family Talk. I hope you'll keep our country in our prayers and that God gives us all the courage we need to stand up for our faith when we are called upon. By the way, if you missed any part of this two-day presentation, remember you can always listen again or share it with a friend or loved one very easily when you utilize our official JDFI Family Talk app right on your smartphone. Or if you prefer, go online at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk and you'll find the program there. I'm sure you've been inspired by what you've heard from Gary Bauer over the past couple of days here on Family Talk. Perhaps you'd like to learn more about what it means to be a Christian citizen in today's world.
Well, a good place to start by advancing your knowledge in this area is a three-disc CD presentation from our own Dr. James Dobson titled "What Does It Mean to Be a Christian Citizen?" Now, we'll be happy to send you a copy as our way of thanking you for your gift of any amount in support of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Remember, you can process the transaction online when you go to drjamesdobson.org/familytalk, and then click the link at the bottom of the program. Or give us a call at 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825. Whether you call or click today, we look forward to hearing from you.
I'm Roger Marsh and I want to thank you for listening today and making Family Talk a part of your day each and every day. May God continue to richly bless you and your family as you continue to grow deeper in your relationship with him. Be sure to join us again tomorrow for the beginning of our 2023 Best of Broadcast Collection series right here on Family Talk.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
Dr. James Dobson: When I was in college, I ran a long distance race that I will never forget. I didn't win it, but I did learn a valuable lesson about myself and about marriage,
Roger Marsh: Dr. James Dobson for Family Talk.
Dr. James Dobson: It was my freshman year and I really wanted to win my first race badly. Although I hadn't trained properly, I bounded onto the track full of energy and optimism. At the sound of the starting gun, I tore off as fast as I could run, and I left the pack far behind. By the second lap however, my side was splitting and the pack was closing in behind me. Somewhere near the halfway mark, I was sucking air frantically and my chest was heaving like a great gray whale. I soon collapsed on the infield grass in a sweating heap of failure, losing the race and my pride in one great disaster.
But I did learn a lesson that has stuck with me to this day. Marathons are very different from sprints, and you have to learn to pace yourself if you're going to endure to the finish line. Isn't that true of married life too? You have to set a pace that you can maintain through all the ups and downs of everyday living and make up your mind to let nothing knock you off the track. It's called lifelong marriage, and it sure beats an early collapse on the infield grass.
Roger Marsh: To get involved, go to drjamesdobson.org.
Hey everyone. Roger Marsh here for Family Talk. Where can you go to receive support and advice for you and your family? Family Talk interacts with millions of people every day with inspiring advice and tips from Dr. James Dobson on what matters to you the most. Whether it's marriage or parenting, you can be sure our Facebook page will keep you updated with how your family can succeed. Join us each day for the latest broadcast, resources and inspiration. Nowhere else can you hear a thought of the day from Dr. Dobson, as well as a special message before you say goodnight. Now you can be sure that every post on our page is created with you and your family in mind, so please take the time to visit us and become part of our online community at facebook.com/drjamesdobsonsfamilytalk. That's facebook.com/drjamesdobsonsfamilytalk.
Dr. James Dobson: I remember sitting one day in my car at a fast food restaurant eating a hamburger and french fries. When I looked in the rear-view mirror, I saw the most pitiful, scrawny, dirty little kitten on a ledge behind my car. I was so touched by how hungry he looked that I got out, tore off a piece of my hamburger and tossed it to him. But before this little kitten could reach it, a huge gray tomcat sprang out of the bushes, grabbed the morsel, and gobbled it down. I felt so sorry for the little guy who turned and ran back into the shadows, still hungry and frightened.
I was immediately reminded of my years as a junior high school teacher. I saw teenagers every day who were just as needy, just as deprived, just as lost as that little kitten. It wasn't food that they required. It was love and attention and respect that they needed, and they were desperate for it. Just when they opened up and revealed the pain inside, one of the more popular kids would abuse them and ridicule them and send them scurrying back into the shadows, frightened and alone. We as adults must never forget the pain of trying to grow up and of the competitive world in which many adolescents live today. To take a moment to listen, to care and to direct such a youngster may be the best investment of a lifetime.
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