Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is an I Heart podcast. One of the interesting things that I've noticed in the pantheon of great leaders such as Churchill we're going to talk about is that for people of faith, you wonder, well, what's going on during history when you don't see God conspicuously at work? Well, there's a book in the Bible called the Book of Esther. Interesting book. It almost was thrown out of the canon of Scripture because God's name isn't mentioned once. The name of Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not mentioned. But years after the wise scholars that included it in the, you know, in the canon of Scripture years later, they started utilizing some techniques with looking at the analysis of the Hebrew documents that formed the Book of Esther. And they found that hidden within the first letters, as often happens in certain Bible, like some, like Psalm 119 in the Bible, that there are words that spell something out. And they found the name of, of God, Yahweh, written hidden in the code of the book. And front and backwards, different parts of the book revealed God's name, communicated God in Providence, God moves his invisible hand, comes down and is seen by visible events. As with Churchill, there were many great Christians and believers who were evangelicals. Reese Howells, the intercessor, Smith Wigglesworth. That's from my, you know, charismatic and evangelical perspective. These were historic figures in Britain that were praying as they watched Hitlerizing and stomping through Europe. And their prayers were answered by the hand of Providence in the same way that I will say and as I predicted in 2015, and stand behind now. Donald Trump is such a hand of Providence vessel. God raises up and God raises up these unique characters that are forged in a different arena than the political arena or than the theological arena, but yet they come into a period of time where they were built in secret for the work they have to do. I've showed that hopefully to some degree with Lincoln, when we talked about him earlier and with Churchill. My first recollection of him being a unique character in history was from a quote from John Kennedy when I was younger. Never quite forgot what he said. He said in the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone and most men, save the Englishman, despaired of England's life. Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. And it's true, his speeches and his perspective was what clarified, in a sense, prophetically inspired and infused the will to fight. And if you ever see any of the great Movies that are out, that have come out in the last couple of years with Gary Olden particularly, it shows that Churchill almost wasn't in office and that the leaders that were there from Neville Chamberlain on down, that they would have caved, they did not have what it took. They were willing to negotiate with the Nazis for some form of peaceful coexistence, even if it meant that they would have to surrender their sovereignty. But not Churchill. He was unique in history in the same way that I think Donald Trump is unique in history. The one man for that moment who could stand against the tide. Now, what makes an individual like that important? When history goes dark, God raises up a voice to defy fear, to expose the lies, and to rally the weary to a renewed sense of warfare and overcoming. So let me go down into Hitler and Hitler. Yes, let's talk about Hitler. One of my favorite leaders of the last hundred years. Now, Churchill had a family dynamic I want to talk about, and I had to dig this one up because I thought psychologically, like I look for what's different. There's a lot of material on Churchill I'm interested in. What's different that I can share with you that you haven't really thought about. Well, here's what I want you to think about. What's the role your parents play in your formation as a child? I say it's pretty significant. In Lincoln's case, we never talked about this, but it was his mother who loved him and saw something. His dad was a real. Evidently a real jerk. He didn't like him that much, not very close to his father, not real nice. His mom, I think, died and the man remarried, I guess, and the second wife was the one who particularly was fond of Abe. And so it was his mother that encouraged him and gave him the nurture that the gruff, cold, distant and detached father didn't give his gifted young son. Churchill had a similar experience. I want you to think about your own family of origin. He had a difficult relationship with his father, Lord Randolph, a nobility and a figure of great renown. And Lord Randolph regarded young Winston as a disappointment. And worse yet, he articulated the fact that he figured his kid was going to be a failure. Churchill once wrote, he told me that I would never amount to anything and that I should be a disgrace to him and to my family. You'll never amount to anything and be a disgrace to all of us. I'd like to have that, but you want to have a victim narrative over your head. My father told me I'd never amount to anything despite this, he longed for his father's approval. Here's the quote I want you to get. I don't know if I've got those quotes here, but he died at. He said he wrote of his father, he died at 45, and I've always felt that I was robbed of a great companion. His father died at 45, and guess what? He never saw his son step into what he was ultimately what he could ultimately be proud of. Kind of a tragedy, isn't it? In contrast, his mother, Jenny, who was American and quite an attractive lady at that, believed deeply in young Winston's potential, and she poured confidence into him at a young age. Oh, Winston, you're so gifted. Winston, you're so smart. Winston, you're so funny. She shone for me like the evening star, he wrote. I loved her beauty. I loved her dearly, but I did it at a distance. She was like a fairy princess, a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. Kind of idolized Mommy, and Mommy thought he was great, but I guess back then they kind of sent you away to Edinburgh and all the schools and the prep schools and all that stuff, so you didn't really have a chance to have those family vacations where you all got to know each other like we do in America. But her encouragement shaped the boldness and persistence that ended up defining his public Persona. The point being, and I'm laboring to make it, is you don't need anyone's approval to succeed. But it's helpful to have just one voice that believes enough in you to light your fire. Typically, if it isn't a mom, it's a dad. If it's not a dad, it's a mom. If it's not, then it's a sibling, it's a brother or sister if it's not that. Teachers are the great vehicle that can speak to a child's potential. So, like Lincoln, Churchill dealt with depression. He called it the black dog. He privately described his reoccurring depression as the black Dog. He experienced deep emotional lows. Sometimes suicidal thoughts raced through his brain, especially during periods of isolation and public failure. Remember his dad's voice? You're going to be a disgrace. But he never gave in. Instead, he developed the mental discipline to manage the pressure at Chartwell, which was his home, his special location that he retreated to. He found therapy during his period of being rejected and abandoned by his own country before the Second World War by painting and by building stone walls by hand, himself, and not always perfectly straight. And by laying bricks. He found there was a therapy in physical exertion of doing something. Now, what triggered the depression? He was raised to a very high, prestigious role in the first World war as first Lord of the Admiralty, Kind of like Pete Hegseth type role with the Department of Defense. And since England is a maritime power, projecting its strength through the oceans rather than land, primarily being in charge of the admiralty was a big deal. But Churchill had come up with an idea for a military maneuver in the first World war in a place called the Dardanelles that. That failed. There's much going back and forth as to whether it was his failure or failure of execution on someone else's part, but it was a catastrophe militarily, and it caused the death of tens of thousands of British in Tripoli. As a result, he had to step out of his role and, frankly, deal with the voice of his father, who said, you'll be an embarrassment to us. And that's what he felt. After the first world War, he ended up retiring to a great degree from public life. His party bounced back and forth from his party to the competing party. And he had great debts, financial pressure. So he had to take to writing, writing history and writing for papers. And it helped to sharpen his brain and his mind and his understanding as he began writing. But as Hitler rose to power, he had a unique realization that he alone understood the threat of Nazi Germany better than others. And he rallied together what he called his shadow cabinet of experts in munitions, in war manufacturing. And they engaged in a kind of spying, statecraft. They were like a wholesome, deep state. And they brought back to him reports of how the armaments were going in Germany and what the British response was and how much they were spending and how far behind they were. So he became armed to the teeth and ready to lead. And the nation would turn to him and say, we need Winston. We'll be back in a moment. We'll talk about that. Well, his enemies, Halifax, Neville, Chamberlain, the Lords of the Admiralty, all of them knew that in the desperation of watching Hitler's blitzkrieg roll across Europe in 1940, they needed Churchill because he was the one who had predicted what was coming. And so they turned to him, and here he was. And he began in a grim moment because, you know, they had. He had to endure the fact that they had no military preparation to face their opposition. But I'll tell you some quotes of Hitler, Hitler quotes of Churchill that prepared him to deal with Hitler. In fact, I want to say something. What's interesting to me is that Adolf Hitler would refer to Churchill, who was out of power, out of office over at Chartwell, kind of on the backside of the desert, like, you know, John the Baptist waiting for the time of his showing unto Israel. And Hitler didn't talk about Halifax, and Hitler didn't talk about Chamberlain. Hitler didn't talk about King George. Hitler had this demonic sense that his real enemy was Winston Churchill. It's like the demons in him knew Churchill. He was right. Churchill's great quote was, okay, if you're going through hell, just keep going. Last thing you want to do is stop halfway through hell. Now, watch the quotes here, because they reveal a lot of the man. The man is a quotable man. To each of us, there comes a time in their life, a special moment when they are tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared. Man, think about that. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about what incentivizes you. There's a concept in martial arts and in various sciences that's called the plateau. See, a lot of people love a breakthrough, a high, but then they don't like the plateau. But you see, it's the plateau where you keep practicing, practicing certain moves and certain disciplines over and over again. It's kind of like in the Karate Kid. Wax on, wax off. Daniel, you know, he had to learn that even this mundane repetition on the plateau, practicing certain things. When it came time for combat, boom, boom, boom. It suddenly became muscle memory. The plateau is, frankly, your prayer life. You're reading scriptures. This is what me as a Christian, I think about this. To do what I do here many times, like on a day like this, I literally have to go into the granary of hours that have I spent in reading history or studying something, and boom, bring it out. Because I have deadlines and I don't have the time to now go do preparation. I have to be prepared and draw out of the well what's already in there. So what Churchill is saying is, what a tragedy if the moment finds you. And because you weren't stimulated by the moment, you miss your moment of preparation. But that whole thing about preparation matches another thing, which is I really do believe that there's a sense of destiny, a sense of purpose. You got a prophetic call in your life whether. Whether you know what it is or not, it's there. You can ask God to reveal it to you. But this is a great quote from Churchill. I felt all my past life has been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. What a great quote. This guy's not even an evangelical, and he's got more faith for history working out in his life. He's saying, everything I've gone through, it was the First World War was my turn. I didn't even give you the guy's history in Africa, in the Boers War, and when he was a prisoner and he was a journalist, and he broke out and escaped and came back as a kind of a celebrity journalist and talking about his experience in the Boer War and his. And his battles. I mean, he was a bit like Teddy Roosevelt, you know, with a sense of aggressive masculine drive and wanting to be where the action is and do something historic and significant and risk his life. And. Well, he said all of that was a preparation, including the Depression, including the failure of the Dardanelles, including dealing with, you know, his obscurity. It prepared me for this trial. Those are great quotes. And that's where we go to. I'll fight. I'm going to fight. It's like Donald Trump, fight, fight, fight. I'm going to fight them on the land. I'm going to fight them on the beach. We're not giving up. We're not giving. And the other guys didn't have that attitude. Halifax didn't have it. Lord knows, Neville Chamberlain, peace in our time, didn't have it. So, though not overtly evangelical, he had a sense of destiny. In fact, one of the quotes I wish I had prepared here, but I didn't give us. Maybe we'll bring it up here in Post. When he saw the Second World War forming, he met with Roosevelt and he framed, almost as a theologian, the conflict of the. Of Germany versus the rest of the world, Nazism versus Western civilization. And what he said was, upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. And then with the kind of prescient prophetic gift that a leader like that has, he almost spoke to AI right now, what's coming next? I mean, I shudder when I think of what happens as an amoral or a technocratic state takes over the power to control all speech, all image, all communication, then monarchs you in the process. Because he said this haunting phrase. The real threat of Nazi ideology, of fascist dictatorship is made all the more menacing by the lights of perversions of science, perverted science or technology in the hands of a terror state controlling what you think and say and do. He believed England had a moral destiny to stand against tyranny. And that's why, boy, you would have a Christian nationalist meltdown pan Attack Tourette's assault. If you were to be with Churchill today, because you know what he wanted to have played when he met on the Missouri with Franklin Roosevelt in order to discuss their plans for partnership against the Nazis. He insisted that they play Onward Christian Soldiers Marching as to war with the cross of Jesus. He insisted that they have Onward Christian Soldiers. He. He understood in his own way, under the Anglican influence of his faith, that there was an ultimate moral issue and a spiritual battle that was being fought against the sinister forces of Hitler and Nazism. So let me, In a few minutes, we have. I got to give you the human side of Churchill. Not that there's any particular great takeaway other than I hate the fact that you might not know these things. The devil did try to kill him. He was in New York, New York, after meeting with FDR and forming their alliance and speaking to Congress and bringing the Americans up to date on the moral crusade and the toughness of what they were able to do and the hope for what they could accomplish together against Japan and Germany and Italy. And because they drive on a different part of the street over there in England, he gets out in New York and gets run over by a cab, almost killed while he's in Washington. He goes to New York in 1931 to get hit by a car. The great quote is, it's well known that a New York taxi driver has the right of way. Right of way over everybody except for a truck. And so he was run over in a great moment in the White House meeting with fdr. And Roosevelt loved Georgia because Roosevelt himself was a bit of a bon vivant. He loved a bit of repartee. He was a cocktail guy and a conversationalist and, well, Winston regale him. And the two of these guys be drinking and, you know, and talking late at night and kind of developed a kind of a friendship between the two of them, which was very helpful because they had a relationship that backed up the war. But Roosevelt, who of course was invalid. He. He wheeled up to Churchill's door and kind of like knocked on it. And Churchill didn't hear him. He just kind of opened it and wheeled himself in. And Churchill was in the bathtub. And so Churchill stands up dripping wet, fully naked, and says to Franklin Roosevelt, the Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States. Of course, this was met by gales of laughter and stories that would be told over and over again as Franklin couldn't wait to say. Then I was pulled. I go into church and there is butt naked in the bathtub and stands up. But these stories you might as well know. The great classic one is when Lady Astor, very refined British aristocrat, finds Winston at dinner. All these dinners they'd have a bit boring and boorish. And she said, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea. To which Churchill replied, madam, if I was your husband, I'd actually drink it. But this was in all of his public life. He dealt with his critics and he dealt with his enemies with the skill of one who is a combatant. And he was never actually bested by any of them. There's a terrible story about Bessie Braddock. She said, winston, you are drunk. And Churchill said, my dear, you're our labor. Tomorrow I'll be sober. Which you can't get away with that. You couldn't even get away with saying that nowadays. But the reality is, Churchill had that kind of a personality. Now, when the war was over, you would think that the nation would reward the man that had saved them by re electing him as prime minister. But no, he was sadly drubbed out of office. They were tired of Winston. He was kind of like the guy they wanted in war, but not the guy they wanted in peace. And so he had to deal with that. He would eventually, later on, an old, old man, you know, be reelected. But the truth is, Churchill had to deal with the fact that destiny required him for those critical five years that would determine the survival of Christian civilization in Europe and around the world. And when nobody else was there, he had the grit to stand in the gap because God formed him for that moment. And the prayers of people deployed the right tool at the right time. And I would suggest to you that that same thing happens today and that we should be looking carefully to see not who agrees with our theology, but who actually has the principles and the ideas and the character to handle tough times. Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking with it. We'll see you again in our next episode. So years ago, I remember asking the question, is there any strategy in history that can correspond to the United States of America? This once more Christian nation recovering from its collapse? I mean, its moral like spiral. And the answer was given to me. There's only one that could really one period of history that could really be instrumental in teaching us. And that would be the period of England at the time of the French Revolution. The whole nation would have been anarchy. The fires of revolution were spreading. But they hit, you know, they hit a water wall in Britain. And how could it Be possible that the same, you know, Covid goes around the world. Why wouldn't that same moral contagion of frustration with the elites? Certainly Britain had their elites, they had their royalty, they had their poverty. Something in France, you know, discombobulated. But over in Britain, it didn't take hold. And what was it? Well, it was the work of the first and second great. It was the great awakening that happened with Whitefield, the Methodist church. It was the power of an evangelical sensibility that came into the nation. It was the strength of Wilberforce and the reformation that he had brought. I've got the name here, William Wilberforce, for a reason, because Wilberforce shows us a model of not only how to overcome the threats of socialist, progressive, left wing, communist revolution, but what the structure and the strategies are that can save a nation. Remember, old England is where we came from. New England is where I used to preach in the United States. New England, I mean, we're an offshoot of the British colonies and a fairly young nation, as nations go, that have been around, like Italy and the Roman conquests at the time of Christ. We're a young country compared to them. So there's something to learn about what did Wilberforce, what did Whitfield, what did Wesley, what did these guys do in Great Britain? And maybe what do they need to do now, now that they're in the spiral they're in? Well, here's where I want to go. Wilberforce rises up as a unique feature because he. At the same time that our country had slaves, Britain had been massively in the slave trade from the Caribbean and various parts of the world, Africa, where they would literally have the sugar plantations and be going and taking the slaves and bringing them to England and creating their whole system of their empire run off of this slavery market. Well, Wilberforce is the one who could be said to be credited with breaking that in history. How did Wilberforce do that? When we failed to deal with it, as I said in an earlier episode, we ended up going through a civil war because Christianity wasn't able to penetrate government and shift the conscience of the nation and move people to reject slavery in the south, we ended up having an armed conflict. Wilberforce's way is a lot better than civil war. So what did he do? Massive figure in history. When he died, I'll tease this out. In his 80s, they found him. He was a shriveled up kind of guy because he had scoliosis, spine bent over. And they were horrified to discover that all Those years, he. He had this back brace, almost like an iron claw, that went up his back, around his waist and wrapped around the collar of his neck, which he kept concealed, and they kept him from completely tipping over. And so he was held up in this painful iron brace his whole life, but nobody saw it, nor did he complain about it. The one quote that I remember is a man in Parliament. Let me see if I can find his quote here, because I thought it was so interesting that he said. I listened to Wilberforce speak. Name is Boswell. He said he would come into Parliament. And he approached it frail and small, bent over, but the shrimp became a whale. And I was carried away by his eloquence and forgot that he was even small. He seemed to fill Parliament with the strength of what he had to say. Well, what was it that Wilberforce had to say? He says that God visited him. He visited him as a young man. His aunt and his uncle. His father died. Notice how these patterns in family history affect and shape you. His father died. He had to go live with his aunt and his uncle. But his aunt and his uncle were affected by the Whitefield Wesley revivals. Whitefield. The great evangelist George Whitefield preached in their house and had meetings on their property. The place was packed. The family was so impacted by Whitefield. They were ardent believers that by the time that young Wilberforce went to stay with auntie, they really evangelized the heck out of that kid. You say pray, you need Jesus. Well, the kid evidently has an encounter with God, and it's. And he hasn't yet submitted himself, but he knows it's real. His mother thinks he's fallen into a cult and immediately reels him back home and tries to get him back with his old buddies, his old friends, and get back to normal, get away from the religious fanaticism, huh? Well, the thought didn't leave him because God began to wrestle with him. He goes on to Cambridge, becomes best friends with William Pitt, aristocratic, wealthy, young future prime minister. And the two of them were buddies in college. Best friends. And commiserated about what they were going to do with their political careers. And they both decided Pitt will be prime minister. He'll serve two terms, and he's going to set it up for William so William Wilberforce, he can have his turn. And the two of them are actually going to go kind of play politics together and champion each other as buddies. Well, this is when Wilberforce gets dealt with by God and God starts to convict him, and he gives his life to Jesus, he says, man, I wanted to do politics. That was my ambition. But I realized God set before me not one, but two. Folks, listen to me. Not since Moses has there ever been a mandate this audacious given to an individual regarding a nation. Wilberforce was told by the Lord two things, son, not just one. I want you to abolish slavery completely. Get rid of it. Now imagine this. Back then, 10% of the GDP of the nation, a tenth of the economy is off of this industry. And in the weird psychology of Europe, they thought they were helping people become more civilized by coming into Europe. So Wilberforce is going to eradicate slavery. Look at how we did it in the United States. See how big a job that was? And then the Lord adds this to him, and I want a complete reformation of morality, complete overhaul on the morals of the nation. If the morals were right, then the slavery wouldn't be an issue. So it's not just like, let's say, ending abortion. But I want you to take care, deal with gay marriage and get everything back on our Christian foundation. That would be like God giving you that call right now. End abortion and gay marriage. Just do it. Oh, my gosh. God has set before me two great objectives. The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of matters. Matters in that period of time meant morality, how people behaved. Do I have any more on him here? He says, you may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you didn't know his. He had a real conviction about conscience. He says, once God speaks to you, once the word of God shows you what the truth is, you cannot turn away from it. You're held to that standard. And so he practiced that vigilantly. Now I want to talk to you about the strategy that was employed because it didn't happen easily. Wesley was in his older years when young Whitefield wrote to him and said, hey, man, I think God wants me to overturn slavery. And Wesley said, basically, listen, I'm a man of faith, but I'm telling you, if God's not in it, it's not going to be happening in your lifetime. But if God's in can happen, it'd have to be God. So you need to know this about Wilberforce. And that is the fact that God raised him up as a vessel to completely shift the nation. And the way that he would do it would be he would be working with the transformation of culture through the conviction of the conscience. He gathered together with other Christians in Parliament and they joined forces together. They were Derisively called the saints by the rest of parliament. But those Christians made the decision that they were going to do something that would affect the direction of the nation. It wouldn't happen overnight. Wesley was virtually almost right because it was somewhat 40, 50 years later, Wilberforce is near his deathbed and he gets handed a piece of paper saying essentially, slavery will be eradicated. What you've given your life to accomplishing at the end of your life, you can see it's like Moses looking at the promised land out there in the horizon. But what. What William Wilberforce had done was in order to create a conscience in the nation, he began assailing every single ghastly, immoral practice they had. Young kids would be getting drunk. They were able to drink at the age of seven. He said, you got to raise the workforce age. You can't have kids working 14 hours a day in the mines drinking gin when they come out. And so he started to create laws and push for moral reform and continuously pinpricked the nation in a hundred places. The society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. You know where that came from. Wilberforce watched a man beat his horse over the head with a club. He said, this is ghastly. Laws should be against the cruel treatment of animals. And so he basically made a conscience formed in the nation by legislation and constant public persuasion on the habits that they had. Welcome back in a minute. I want you to hear the rest of this in terms of the battle. He had. He went on for 20, 30 years, just shot down, failure after failure after failure. But he persisted. He persisted in building a conscience in the culture. Now, this is something to think about. We don't do this very well, but we ought to learn something from Wilberforce. Slavery was only one expression of the reformation of morality, reformation of manners. Remember Wilberforce's quote, here is a true Christianity is a new principle of action within. That sounds a little vague, but to him, here's what it means. If you're really a Christian, you have a new heart, and it ought to spring out in manifesting new direction in your life. And what you put your hand to is an extension of a changed nature. If you really don't have any action out here that reflects a change of nature, you're probably not a true Christian. That's what he calls it, true Christianity. So he said, listen, true Christians would engage with social ills. The left does this all the time. I think we Christians are kind of like slow at this because we got a pietism, mysticism it's all about supernatural and getting saved and going to heaven and going to church. The left is like a counterfeit for the church. It's like they're into fighting this and fighting that freedom for this. All their courses and curriculum. It's about the oppressed, the suppressed, the victims, the this, the that. And it's a misguided evangelical zeal which is trying to, you know, get rid of save the whales and you know, and then the hoot owl and you know, global warming and climate change and redistribution of wealth and stop the police and defund the police. All of that is like what happens when you don't have a healthy conscience. Working in a nation doing proper reform. You got radical, crazy reform. Wilberforce said, let's harness this baby. And so what he did was he, he got whole kinds of groups, they call them societies. And it'd be a society for the prevention of the cruelty. Man of the society against drunk driving. Drunk driving drunk, you know, drunkenness with minors, like 8 years. I told you, like 11 year olds would go mining 14 hours a day and go with their dad and go get drunk on gin. So there were child labor laws. He said it used to be a public entertainment, you know, public entertainment in London was they'd have a public hanging, especially women. Women being hung in public was like, you know, you could be. And it was like a carnival and guys were selling stuff. I got your popcorn here. Three for 50. And it's like, here comes the hanging and there comes Katie out there. Ooh, what's your crime? I want to see you hang. And you see it go up there and you know, get the thing around it. And it was a public, almost entertainment. Wilberforce said, this has got to stop. And he preached in parliament, but he'd have his little societies. He's got his Methodist, he's got his evangelists, got his evangelicals. And they had lots of tracts, lots of tracts. They were all handing out tracts to the literate, talking about this. And they're moral reformers. And that little army of his, listen to what they did. They, I think they initiated something like 120 different laws and reforms. Child labor reform. Children as young as six were drunk gin soaked factories. That ended animal welfare. He founded the aspca. Prison reform, education reform. He started the Sierra Leone and India, started sending missionaries out with missionary work from the nation. He ended public hangings and all forms of cruelty. And what happened is it gradually built a conscience. But more than that, he started meeting in private at the clapham Estate. Now, this is a place where he met. And he said, let me see if I could draw this for you. This is kind of a powerful idea. What Wilberforce did was he basically took, like I talk about these seven mountains of culture. He said, we're going to deal with Great Britain and we're going to change the way it thinks. So he took the church influencers and he worked with his government people. Watch this. He worked with media people, he worked with the arts community, and he worked with business. Now check this out. What Wilberforce did with these four was amazing. He took them all and they met at the house of a businessman. And so this is the family mountain, actually. And so he basically had the families come to the business mountain over here where they had a property which was called the Clapham Estate or the Clapham Fellowship. And they would go from London all the way, all of. And he took the elite believers in media, in government from the prominent families of influence in Great Britain and preachers. And they met here at the home of a wealthy businessman. And they gathered together there and they fellowshipped over weekends. And during those weekends they had meals together and discussed who they were influencing. Now watch how this works. Who were they influencing at the top of the structures? Who were they talking to and how were. How's the. It was almost like evangelism. How's the conversation going? Because they all agreed that the slave trade was going to be the target they were going to take down. And in doing that, they would deal with all the other reforms, creating a conscience in culture till that big one came down. But you see how ingenious this is. The Clapham Estate, in my opinion, is one of the great unused strategies of Christianity. What it means is Christians that are the elites or the people of influence that have prominence, visibility, influence, should actually be meeting together and in humility and before Jesus praying about, what is it you're calling us to do, Lord, how can we use our agency in order to produce change and reform? This could be done in a city. This could be done in a region of the country. And in Great Britain, it was done in a nation by the time they were done. I mean, get this. I'm going to change the color here just to make a point. I'm going to go to purple. Do you know what they produced as a result of that? Victorian England. You ever hear the word Victorian and you think of some kind of a, you know, proper British. The Victorian England came out as a result of Wilberforce shifting the morality of the nation. And ending the slave trade. That little shrimp of a man that needed a neck brace to hold him up persisted for 20, 30, 40 years, being defeated, defeated, defeated. But gradually his reforms, and you know what he said was the secret. I want you to hear this language. A sustained pattern of public persuasion would to God. We had that, that, that all of the Glenn Becks and the war rooms and the Charlie Kirks, I mean, in a sense, it's happening without coordination by people hearing and sharing the same ideas and articulating them in their own ways. But a sustained pattern of public persuasion. If we were saying and thinking and believing and beating the drums at the same time with the same strategy, how much more influence would there be? Rather than a cacophony of different drum beats going and everybody's clashing cymbals and kind of like getting everybody pulling their direction. But if we can move together, this is what Wilberforce did. They had that the government mountain was where they went and voted, but their public persuasion was what the elites were all working on. At dinners in private, they did plays, they wrote books, the artists wrote award winning books and did award winning art projects that touched the high culture of the nation in order to put a conscience in them about the issue of slavery. All of them played their part. Listen, that's how homosexuality became like lgbtq, got written into so many scripts. Annabelle and I watch Netflix. It's so frustrating because it takes two years for you to get something out of your system because we're watching stuff that was put in during the Biden administration, so we're having to regurgitate all that. But it's always got a subplot with a trans this or two gay lovers, lesbian or something like that. It's like, hey, you're talking about 3 to 4% of the population. Forget about the Gen Zs. They all been propagandized. 3% of the population. Why is it 50% of the cast members? But that's what happens. Wilberforce would go into the arts world and say, up, up, up. We're going to have some cool Christians. We're going to make Christianity cool. We're going to make righteousness cool. Because that's what the reformation of manners was. Well, I'm sharing that with you because the lessons that we learned is 1807, the Slave Trade act was passed. 283 votes against it, 16 to keep it. Parliament wept. Parliament applauded. Wilberforce wept silently, head bowed in gratitude. Three days later, he went into glory, stood in front of Jesus. His death was on his deathbed, he received word that the Slavery Abolition act had passed. He finished his race the way he had fought, with perseverance, grit, grace. And he never complained about his personal price. All right, that's William Wilberforce, and I hope you've enjoyed the series thus far. This is an iHeart podcast.