Pathway to Victory

Speaker 1

Thank you so much. You may be seated.

A doctor said to his patient, "I have some bad news and some terrible news for you. Which do you want to hear first?" The patient said, "Well, tell me the bad news." The doctor replied, "Well, your test results came in and they said you're going to be dead in 24 hours." The patient was stunned. He said, "What could be worse news than that?" The doctor responded, "I was supposed to have told you yesterday."

Well, this morning, I have some good news and some bad news for you. Which do you want to hear first? I'm going to tell you the good news. I was just asking to be polite. The good news is President Donald Trump is the most pro-life, pro-religious liberty, pro-Israel president in the history of our union. That is without dispute. But here is the bad news: President Trump isn't going to be president forever, and he knows that. That's why he's working at a breakneck speed right now to fix what's wrong in our country and what's wrong in our world. He understands that his time is limited and he understands what his God-given mission is.

During this limited time, he is under no illusion that he is the Messiah. He gets accused of having a messiah complex, but that is not true. A few years ago, he spoke in our church at our church's Christmas service. When he stood up to speak, he said, "I heard Robert talk a lot about a savior. He's right. America needs a savior. America has a savior," President Trump said, "and it's not me. It's someone much higher than me." President Trump understands that his mission is not to come and save America from her sins; his job is to save America from her insanity. He understands his God-given purpose.

But here's the question: do you understand yours? If you're a Christian today, do you have an understanding of why Jesus has left you here on earth instead of taking you to heaven? In Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus used two powerful images to describe what we're to be doing before he returns. He said, "You are the salt of the earth." And then he said, "You are the light of the world."

Now, we understand the concept of light. In saying that we are light, we are to point people toward Jesus, the light of the world. The only way you're going to save America is by changing the hearts of Americans, and that's something only Jesus Christ can do. But what did Jesus mean when he said, "You are the salt of the earth?" Remember that in Jesus' day, salt was a preservative. Before refrigeration, salt was the way that you slowed the decay of meat. Now, salt couldn't prevent the decay of the meat, but it could delay the decay of the meat. It gave the meat a longer shelf life until it had to be thrown out.

What Jesus was saying to Christians is, "I'm leaving you in this world as a preservative, but to do your job as a preservative, you've got to get out of the church, you've got to get out of the salt shaker and penetrate every area of this world." He wants Christians to penetrate the world of business, the world of education, the world of entertainment, and, yes, the world of government. He called us to be involved in the government.

You know, many people don't understand that God created the government. He created it for two and only two reasons. First of all, to protect citizens against evildoers (Romans, chapter 13). The second purpose of government is to protect people's freedom to worship (1 Timothy, chapter 2). President Trump understands that assignment of government, and he has been dedicated from the first day of his first term to preserving religious freedom.

In July of 2017, during his first term, our church held a Celebrate Freedom rally right down the street at the Kennedy Center. President Trump spoke at that rally, and he said, in part, "We will not allow the government to censor sermons to restrict the free speech of our pastors and our preachers. That is why, just as I promised Pastor Jeffress, I have just signed an executive order following through on my campaign pledge to stop the Johnson Amendment from interfering with your First Amendment rights. As long as I am president, no one is going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what is in your heart."

President Trump was faithful to fulfill that promise during his first term to protect religious liberty. He did it well. But then came the dark days of the Biden administration, and once again, religious liberty was under attack. Let me just take a couple of minutes and share with you what happened to our First Baptist Church in Dallas during the Biden administration.

In June of 2020, while President Trump was still in office, we had our annual patriotic rally at our church. President Trump sent his vice president and one of his cabinet members to represent his administration at our church, and both men shared about their faith in Jesus Christ. We were very careful to follow every IRS regulation about not endorsing candidates in the church. Interestingly, other churches endorsed Democrat candidates all the time, left and right, without any pushback from the IRS. But we decided to play by the rules and not endorse candidates.

Immediately after our service in June of 2020, that godless organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service about our church service. The IRS did nothing until President Trump was out of office and Joe Biden became president. As soon as that happened, a year later, the IRS launched an examination, an investigation of our church over what we had done at the worship service. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending our tax-exempt status. Ultimately, when we signaled that we were willing to go to the Supreme Court over this, the IRS shut down the investigation and affirmed our tax-exempt status.

Now, we were a large church. We could afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, but most churches could not do that. The threat of losing their tax-exempt status has caused many churches, many pastors, to remain silent about moral and spiritual issues because of fear of what the IRS might do in revoking their tax-exempt status. You say, "That's a stretch, Pastor Jeffress. That would never happen." At the same time we were going through our examination, another organization in Texas, the Christians Engaged Organization, led by Bunny Pounds, was applying for tax-exempt status, and they had their tax-exempt status denied.

The IRS actually said in a letter to this organization, "When you encourage Christians to vote according to biblical principles such as being pro-life, pro-religious liberty, pro-Israel, those biblical values are Republican values, and therefore, you cannot speak out on them and have a tax-exempt status." Can you believe that? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going. You can see how the Johnson Amendment can be and will be politicized in the future to keep churches from speaking out on issues.

The Supreme Court, under the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said, "The power to tax is the power to destroy." Listen to me this morning: the IRS and every other government organization needs to stay the heck out of our churches. The government has absolutely no business interfering with what we do in our worship services and what we say from our pulpits. Interestingly, President Trump understands that he is doing everything he can right now to preserve religious liberty.

But we need to do our part in providing him with a majority of legislators who will once and for all eradicate or severely amend the Johnson Amendment so that it can no longer be used as a weapon against churches. Now, I realize some people consider religious liberty a minor issue. It's not like the economy or immigration. It is a minor issue. Ladies and gentlemen, the only people who consider religious liberty a minor issue are those people to whom religion is a minor issue in their life.

You know, I came across the words of one former president who eloquently described why our founding fathers believed religious liberty was so important. This president said, "The free exercise of religion has been called the first freedom, that which originally sparked the development of the full range of the Bill of Rights. Our founders cared a lot about religion, and one of the reasons they worked so hard to get the First Amendment into the Bill of Rights at the head of the class is that they understood what could happen to this country, how both religion and government could be perverted. And if there were not some space created and some protection provided, they knew that religion helps to give our people the character without which a democracy cannot survive."

Would you like to guess which president said that? Ronald Reagan? No. George Bush? No. Those words came from President Bill Clinton. You know, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump don't agree on a lot of things, but they agree on the free exercise of faith being the cornerstone of our great country. God has given us a great president in Donald Trump, who is a warrior for religious liberty. Let's give him the majority he needs in 2026 to once and for all eradicate the Johnson Amendment and protect our first freedom, the free exercise of faith.

God bless you. And may God bless America. God bless you.