Leading The Way

Guest (Male): Dr. Michael Youssef beginning this episode of Leading The Way.

Dr. Michael Youssef: Hello my friends, blessed 4th of July and happy 250th anniversary America. I came here legally, I love this country, I am so grateful to this country for what it's done for me and what it's done for so many millions of people around the world. This is the most generous country on the face of the Earth.

It grieves me when I see people come into this country and then they are disloyal. In fact, some are straight out invading this country to change it and take it to the 7th century Arabia. That is the burden of my heart. I want to wake America up on this 250th anniversary. Rise up and be the great nation that the founders envisaged us to be.

And that is why I preached this message at one of the most prestigious churches in America, Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas and Pastor Jack Graham. I am so grateful for the opportunity and I pray to God that He will use it not just to bless you but to challenge you that you would pray for the country in a way you have never done before.

History repeats itself. History repeats itself. Perhaps there is no place where this statement is more true than in all of our biblical history. History repeats itself is not a cliché. Please listen to me. It's not a cliché. It's a profound historical occurrence.

We see this again and again in the scripture. We see it in the repetitive history in the word of God from the Garden of Eden and the man's fall to the 21st century. It's the same thing. It just keeps repeating itself. We see how disobedience and compromise of the Gospel of Jesus Christ brings about disasters.

We see this cyclical history very vividly in the Book of Judges. How many times were the people of God abandoned the faith, compromise their faith on Yahweh, and God, as a consequence, pulls His hand of protection? And then they get delivered to the Canaanites and the Amorites and the Moabites and the mosquitobites.

Then they repent and God, merciful God, hears them from heaven and He sends them a deliverer. Again and again, they keep going. But the problem with each cycle, people of God sunk deeper into sin and idolatry and rebellion. And this pattern continued into the 6th century BC as you know from the scripture, the Old Testament writers. They're telling us how God basically, here's a Youssef translation, basically came to the point of saying enough is enough and He permitted them to go into exile in Babylon.

Now, the Islamists and the Islamic terrorists are really the equivalent of the Babylonians of that time. Today, the Babylonian terrorists of our day, not taking us into exile in foreign land as they did with Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and many of the Israelites. No, they are taking us hostage. They're literally taking into exile in our own lands as they invade those lands with vengeance.

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar demanded tributes from the people of Judah. And today, our Babylonians call the jizya. There is a name for it and it's a penalty tax that you pay if you want to stay as a Christian or a Jew in the lands that they invaded, Christian lands. And it happens throughout history. When Judea refused to pay this tribute, the Babylonians laid siege on the city. And they're laying siege on your city and many other cities, just as in the time of the judges when God took away His hand of protection from the people of God.

God did so in the 6th century as the exile began. Terrorism in the West world today is our own exile. Terrorists are our Babylonians today. And just as God handed over His rebellious, unfaithful Israel, which is the apple of His eye, He has handed the rebellious, unfaithful Europe to the hands of the terrorists. You should see what is happening in England. Thirteen of the 14 big cities in England now have Muslim mayors. And not just Muslim, Islamists.

There are so many naive souls who confuse kindness with foolishness. Even the Pope of Rome has dedicated a chapel for Islamic prayer that they can come into the Vatican and do their prayers to Allah. And you see denomination after denomination say that we need to reason with the terrorists, that what we need to do is improve their economic conditions, or what we need to do is have better diplomacy, what we need to do is have better communication.

Then we could end their invasion and determination and drive to impose their caliphate, which means a worldwide Islamic successor to the prophet. And the prophet was not just a religious leader. He was the political leader, he was the military leader, and therefore, there are no separation of religion and Islam. And once they take over, as they've done so many parts of the world, it's over. Freedom of religion will be over.

And just as wanting to be absolutely truthful with you, I need to make the distinction between the Islamists and the Muslims. The Islamists are different from the rest of the Muslims. Islamists compose about 20% of Muslims. Now that is over 400 million people. But they are the very people, these Islamists, that are outlawed in many Arabic Middle East countries. They're outlawed in Egypt, they're outlawed in Syria, they're outlawed in United Arab Emirates, they even outlawed in Saudi Arabia.

So what do they do? They come here to the naive West and say, "Oh, we love Jesus." No, they don't love the same Jesus that we know. Islamist jihadists are invading the West with a vengeance. Let that sink in your mind. They're outlawed in many Arab countries. I want to make it very clear that the Muslims and the Islamists are not the same. You must understand the difference.

But I also want to make it clear that I love the Muslim people. I love the Muslim people. We started a television station, Kingdom Sat, 260 million homes in the Muslim world and preaching the Gospel 24/7. And I am absolutely humbled beyond measure to tell you that there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims that are coming to Christ at a huge sacrifice. These dear people, when they discover the truth in Christ, they literally do not count the life to be valuable because they say if we die, we go to Jesus.

But the problem is that the folks that we're dealing with here in the West, they have made a pact with the Marxists and the socialists and the trust fund kids in America and the anarchists. And they made a pact that both because they hate Western civilization and they want to destroy Western civilization, they made a pact with each other and you see them all over the news. Translation: we'll make a pact with the devil if we have to, if it helps us destroy Western civilization as we know it.

And make no mistake about it, Western civilization, and I've done this academically, Western civilization is the result and the fruit of the Reformation. It was the Reformation when God raised these reformers 500 years ago. They went back to the scripture. They went back to the word of God, which was forbidden back then in the Dark Ages. They used to chain the Bibles to the lectern and the lay people not allowed to read it.

But with the translation of the Bible, some people paid with their lives so that we can have that Bible that we take lightly. And the liberty, the freedom, and the prosperity and the individual freedom and the respect of an individual, all that is the fruit of the Reformation. Here's another fact that I need to tell you before I get to the heart of the message.

The unfaithful Israelites who caused the Babylonian exile did not abandon Hebrew religion altogether any more than the church buildings of today in the West and Europe and even in the United States who have all the trappings of Christianity and yet they raise a rainbow flag and the transgender flag above the cross.

These compromising Israelites still made the ritual sacrifices in the temple, but they added to their religion. They added Baal and they added Asherah and they added all these gods to Yahweh. Today, there are so many churches across America and across the world, they are absolutely departed from the faith. They call it universalism. Sixty percent supposedly of all Christians in America are universalists, which says that in the end God is so merciful, He's going to let everybody into His heaven because He's a merciful God and you don't have to believe in Jesus.

That's preached from many megachurches. They call it emerging church, which is the rewriting of the Gospel. They call it insider movement, which says that the Hindu can be a Hindu and the Buddhist can be a Buddhist and the Muslim can stay a Muslim as long as they take Jesus along the way.

They call it hyper-grace that says because we're saved by grace alone and therefore we don't have to live righteously before God, that we can sin to our heart's content and grace will cover it. They call it unhitching ourselves from the Old Testament. They call it Chrislam, which is a blend of some Christian stuff with Islamic stuff and they say that's the only way that we can ease the tension between the two groups.

Oh, my beloved friends, please listen to me. The faith we defend is a set of bedrock truth, that Jesus and only Jesus is God incarnate, that Jesus and only Jesus is the only sacrifice for our sin, that Jesus and only Jesus is the begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth, that Jesus is the heart of Christianity, and if you take the heart out, you're going to end up with a dead corpse. Give God glory, amen.

Sadly in the 7th century, the Christianity that the prophet of Islam was exposed to was riddled with heresies. Unlike the ones that we're experiencing in churches today, heresies such as Nestorianism and Ebionism, and these were corpses without the beating heart of the truth.

Today, in large part, the so-called Christian church in the West is riddled with heresies and weakened by false teachings from many a pulpit across the land. But what breaks my heart truly is that these Christian heresies dominate many churches and denominations today, and thus they have created a spiritual vacuum. Created a spiritual vacuum.

And who fills that spiritual vacuum? The Islamists. And trust me, they did this in the 7th century and they're doing it in the 21st century. The only way forward is for God to send us a spiritual awakening to this land. Awakening that causes apathetic Christians to repent and turn back to the truth of the Gospel. An awakening that will bring the lost to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

An awakening that causes believers to stop compromising and placing one foot in the world and one foot in the church. You see political Islam always grows in history, I can prove it to you, political Islam always grows stronger when Christianity is weak and compromised and in retreat.

Believe it or not, I read the writings all the time. I read the writings and they know that. They know when the church is weakened that they can take advantage of that. It's their golden opportunity to invade. They will openly tell you that in the first two jihads, the one in the 7th century, and they got all the way to France and then they got stopped.

And the second jihad in the 15th century, they came all the way and occupied Vienna. And they say well, those first two jihads, we did it with the sword. But this third jihad in which we're going to take over Europe and we're going to take over the Vatican, we're going to take over the West, is not going to happen just with the sword, but it's going to be birth rate. Just a few years ago, there were 5 million Muslims in Europe, there are 50 million now.

The first 600 years of Christianity, the Christian faith dominated the Middle East and North Africa from Syria to Egypt and Lebanon, all these were Christian lands. Within 200 years of Christianity, the population of all the Middle East countries and North Africa was between 85 to 90% Christians. Did you get that?

In fact, Saint Augustine of Hippo and Cyprian of Carthage, they all came from the church in North Africa. Alexandria, Egypt, became the center of Christian thinking and Christian theology. The first seminary in the world was in Alexandria first 350 years before Rome was ever on the scene.

Modern-day Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algiers, North Africa, there are estimates between 40 to 50,000 churches at that time by the middle of the 600s. And the Christians had tens of thousands of churches, embraced false teaching in North Africa. It's a teaching called the Montanists or the Montanist movement was rapid in that part of the world.

And simply put, the Montanists believed that the canon of the scripture is not closed, that God can still speak authoritatively today and be equal to the writers of the scripture. Well, so when the Arab Islamists came invading in 647 and 648, declaring that God has spoke to a man in Arabia by the name of Muhammad, Christian leaders said well let's hear about it. We're open-minded, right? We're not narrow-minded. We accept all the ways lead to God, tell us about it.

Within between 30 to 35 years, all of these tens of thousands of churches turned into mosques. Could it not happen here? Hmm, I think if I told this story or this historical incident 70 years ago, people would say it would never happen in the West, that could never happen in America. Could never happen in Europe. That could never happen in Canada. It could never happen in Australia. But beloved, it's happening. We're seeing it with our own eyes now.

Everywhere you look, there is a takeover. They're buying churches and burning some of them in Europe with vengeance and turning them into mosques. This is their idea of their superiority and they have the final word from Allah. Now I can go on as I said I talk about Islamic conquest of the Byzantinian church and the Christian church in the 1400s in Europe and all the way to Vienna.

But again, I did not really come here to give you a history lesson. I came here to show you that history repeats itself. And that is why you can lead the nation. This church can lead the nation in rejecting falsehood, in rejecting false teaching, and you take a stand and that you proclaim the Gospel unashamedly and invade even Satan's territory with the Gospel of Christ alone is the Savior of the world.

Now I came here to pour my heart out to you and tell you that I came with a prayer in my heart. Please God, You will raise up heroes who would help rewrite the future. May God do it. May God do it. Now I want to tell you as I conclude, I want to tell you a story that really tugged on my heart the first time I read that story and I know it's an incident in history that always makes me say God do it again. Do it again.

And it is an acclaimed historian by the name of Catherine Drinker Bowen, that's where I was introduced to this incident. She wrote a best-selling book called John Adams and the American Revolution. And in that book, she tells of a lesser-known event. It's an amazing story that took place in 1746, that's 30 years before the American Revolution.

France was at war with the British Empire, and the French government decided to send 64 ships and 11,000 men soldiers. Their orders were that simple: consign Boston to the flames and ravage New England. News came of the French invasion and there was spread panic all over New England.

It was the largest naval armada that ever approached American shores. Even young John Adams was only 11 years of age who stood watching from a Boston top hill. The colonies had few coastal defenses, if any. The colonial militiamen were no match to this highly trained French army.

Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts knew that his people have only one defense. And so he issued proclamation calling people to assemble in churches and to pray. And they assembled not for battle but for fasting and for praying. All across Massachusetts colony, people were thronging into the church, praying and crying out to God.

One of those churches in Boston was Old South Meeting House. The Reverend Thomas Prince cried out to God in the middle of the congregation. He said, "Lord, deliver us from our enemies. Send Thy tempest, Lord, upon the waters of the eastward. Rise the right hand and scatter the ships, sink these proud frigates beneath the power of Thy wind."

And as history record, that as the Reverend Prince prayed, the sky darkened, clouds rolled in, wind arose around the church. No one was at the steeple, the bells began to ring. And the Reverend Prince shouted, "We hear Thy voice, O God." As the storm raged across Boston Harbor, words of this bold prayer spread throughout New England colonies.

And Governor William Shirley sent a sloop called the Rising Sun. And when the sloop returned, they brought back astonishing news. Much of the French fleet including two mighty frigates sunk as a result of the storm into the waters. The remaining ships retreated to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

There would be no invasion of New England and no burning of Boston. The invaders have been defeated by the storm and by a sickness that swept throughout the French soldiers and sailors. Historian Catherine Drinker Bowen concluded her account by these words, listen carefully: "A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed from every pulpit. Good news rang. There was no end to the joyful quotations, If God be for us, who can be against us?"

Oh my beloved friends, my beloved friends, what happened once in 1746 can happen again today. The same God who had answered the prayers of God's people and stirred up the storm against the invading forces still answers prayer today.

Guest (Male): Join with Dr. Youssef in praying for the next great awakening today. LTW.org, LTW.org. You can connect with a ministry representative to order products, to stand in generosity with Dr. Youssef, to get any kind of resources you need, just call us. We are at 866-626-4356. That's 866-626-4356.

Until next time, we thank you for listening to Leading The Way. This program is brought to you by Leading The Way with Dr. Michael Youssef.