The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 34 - Yes, Thoughts And Prayers Could Save Us

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

Thoughts and prayers really could save this country. If we all had our thoughts on God and we prayed unceasingly, many problems would be fixed. But we have rejected Him. And this is the result instead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

10 dead at Santa Fe High School, another 13 injured. The shooter is reported to have walked into the classroom and shouted woo-hoo as he sprayed bullets. Although after the shooting, the police say that he showed no emotion at all, which is the same story that we have heard many times before. People who knew him say that they're shocked. There were no red flags. seemed like a normal guy. And then this.

There have been two mass shootings in our schools in the past four months, leaving 27 kids dead, another 30 injured. Now, CNN claims that there have been 22 school shootings in 2018. And that's not true. But what is true is still very, very bad. You have two mass shootings, 27 kids killed by mass shootings. in public school in four months. See, that's the whole problem with the gun control advocates

when they make up or exaggerate mass shooting statistics, school shooting statistics. The first problem is that it's dishonest. The second problem is it's completely unnecessary. The actual statistics are bad enough. You know, people are not imagining things when they say that mass shootings seem to be happening with a much greater frequency these days.

That's not our imagination. Now, people in my generation, we remember, you know, if you're around my age, then, of course, you have a distinct memory of Columbine. I was in middle school when that happened. And Columbine happened, and it was like unlike anything that we'd ever seen before. And then nothing like it happened again for several years. But now you have a school shooting and you say, oh, another one. the top five deadliest mass shootings in America have all happened in the previous five years. The top five deadliest mass shootings in America have happened in the last five years.

Two of the top five were committed in the last 12 months. Fourteen of the top 22 have occurred in the past 10 years. The deadliest mass shooting in American history was in 2016, and then a new deadliest mass shooting in America happened in 2017. So yes, it's bad. It's really, really bad. Whenever this happens, people say, well, this isn't normal. This isn't normal. But it is normal, is the point.

Destruction and misery have been, well, they've been the norm since the fall of man, but especially they've been the norm since the last century. Close to 100 million people were killed by communism alone, and then there was the Holocaust, many other genocides, not to mention two world wars, two nuclear bombs. That was all in one century. Now, we're told that that was the previous century, that was the 20th century, 21st century is different.

And what we're told is that we've entered into the most peaceful time in human history. But the people who are making those declarations as optimistic and pleasing as they sound are simply ignoring the fact that 50 million human beings are killed by abortion. worldwide every year. And that's still going on. The world's been on a pace of approximately 50 million abortions a year since 1990, since at least 1990, which means that we've killed 1.4 billion people in less than 30 years. That's 20% of the world's population.

20% of the world's population has been murdered in less than three decades. So most peaceful time, not even close. This is what we're living in right now is by far the most violent and destructive and deadliest time in human history. And it's not even close. Things are not getting better. That's what I'm trying to say. Things are not getting better. They have not been getting better.

They're not getting better now. They won't get better. I'm sorry to tell you this. But it's just the fact. Things are getting worse in a hurry. We've simply gotten better at ignoring how bad they are. We've gotten so good at it that we've got this entire chunk of 50 million humans killed every year. And we could just completely put that to the side.

Like it's not even happening. We can just discount that and then go around talking about, oh, it's a peaceful time. It's such a peaceful time. I mean, even the Santa Fe shooting, which just happened on Friday, by the way, seems to already be forgotten by a lot of people. It seems like the next morning we forgot about it. I know the royal wedding had a lot to do with that. The royal wedding, which was, I mean, it's such an amazing romantic story, right, of a woman ditching her husband, leaving him in the dust and then going to marry someone who's richer. It's such an amazing romantic story, right?

It's so great. We should all be happily ever after, right? Destroy your marriage and go marry somebody else. Fantastic. So we've moved on to that. We're good at that. We're good at moving on quickly. And I think we call that resilience. That's what we try to call that. We like to pretend, oh, we're resilient. Americans are so resilient. There's a mass shooting and we just move on. It's not resilience. It's indifference. And there is a difference between those two things. Now, it should be noted that there's one other conspicuous global trend that's been happening across the world, along with all the bloodshed and the death and destruction and murder. Over the last 100 years, along with that, there's been another trend, and that other trend is secularism, godlessness. Most countries in the world have become increasingly godless as the years have progressed. The West is seeing historic levels of atheism and secularism, to the point now

where there are some countries in Europe that are predominantly majority populated by unbelievers. And these two things are not a coincidence. The nightmare that we've lived since the turn of the previous century has been the direct result of this. It's been the direct result of the world rejecting God. We have fled from God and we have fled out into the wilderness and what we found out here in wilderness in our freedom is evil and despair and death on an unprecedented scale. We have become an empty country, an empty people, an empty world. Emptiness is the thing that kind of ties all this together. The war, the shootings,

the genocide, everything, abortion ties it all together. Because there's this void that's left behind when you push God out. And as a world, as a world, we have pushed God out. And we've left this giant gaping hole. And now we're struggling and fumbling to fill it with something. These school shooters on an individual level, you know, they, they have this emptiness, this hole inside them. They try to fill it with something. Usually they turn to media and video games. This is yet another school shooter. It was an avid video game player, but I know we're not going to talk about it. that. It's completely, totally, absolutely unrelated. It's got two things of nothing to do with one another at all, of course, because as part of our emptiness, we are so desperate to justify

all of our entertainment choices. It's the only thing we care about is just making sure that nobody questions our entertainment. So if anyone mentions, oh, no, we can't talk about that. That's my entertainment. How dare you? Now, that's going to make me angry. If you question my entertainment, the school shootings, they don't really make me that angry. But if you question my entertainment, that'll make me angry, Matt. So these school shooters, they look for something to fill the void. And what they find is not satisfying enough. Usually it exasperates the problem. And so finally, they explode. After they get tired of wallowing in their numbness and their indifference, they explode in this ball of rage and destruction. And as I've said now many times, I think the main thing that they're

doing why they do this. And there might be other individual motivations we hear about with this kid. He apparently had a grudge against at least one of the girls in the school. He was rejected by her. Every high school in America is filled with boys that are rejected by girls. It's like the main thing that happens to high school boys, yet most of them don't go down that path. So why did he choose that path? And I think mainly it's because of that emptiness inside him. And what he was really doing, what these school shooters, mass shooters, what they're all really trying to do is they're trying to feel something. They're trying to feel control. You know, they want control over life, over just this mysterious, empty thing.

And that's the trajectory that the entire human race has basically been following. And it can't lead anywhere except ruination. You know, we really need a Jeremiah. You know, we need an Old Testament-like prophet type of person in this day and age. Because in the Old Testament times, they had guys like Jeremiah, they had the prophets to come and say to them, listen, you idiots, do you understand why this is happening? Do you understand why all these bad things are happening? Because you've rejected God.

And oftentimes, they would put it just. like that, pretty much, using their own language, but just smacking people upside the head. Pay attention. Look around you. Don't act so surprised. You reject God. You want to live your lives of sin and you're surprised when this stuff happens. Don't be surprised. We need something like that in our day because what we really need, the only solution is a mass spiritual revival and a collective return to faith. No other solution will solve anything. Everything else is just kind of reshuffling the problem, rebranding it.

And that has been our solution for the last 100 years or so, is to take a problem and just rebrand it and call it something else. So we took the genocides of the 20th century, and we rebranded them, we put them in a clinic, and we called them abortion now. And now we say, oh, there's no more genocides. We solve the problem. Hooray! So what's going to be our rebranding solution for school shootings? I don't know.

There is no solution other than returning to God, all of us. You know, stupid, arrogant people, stupid, arrogant, foolish people like to laugh at the idea of thoughts and prayers in the wake of tragedy. But thoughts and prayers really could save us. they could. If we really had our thoughts on God, and if we really had our knees on the ground and on ceasing prayer, things would not be like this. A pious, prayerful country does not kill its own kids, whether in the classroom or the womb. So yes, thoughts and prayers could change everything. And please don't come in and say, well, yes, Matt, we need to be. thoughts and prayers, but also action. If you say that, that I'm going to have to suspect that you've

never prayed, because you don't understand. It's not necessary to stipulate thoughts and prayers and action. If you have a deep prayer life and your mind is focused on God, then of course you're acting. Action is a natural conclusion that flows from that foundation. It's almost impossible for a prayerful, spiritual, humble man or woman not to act. It's almost impossible because a person like that has so much grace pouring into them as a result of their connection with God that to resist it and not to act would require much more effort than to simply act. So those who do not act, do not pray.

It's just like in your own family, you know, if you're praying every day for the spiritual and physical protection of your own children, which I certainly hope that we all are. But if you do, of course you're also taking practical steps to protect them because that's part of the result of the prayer. And you're taking the right steps because God is showing you the right steps and you're doing the right thing. Rather than not praying about it and just trying to randomly arbitrarily do things to protect your kids. When you pray first, and that's the beginning and the foundation, then the actions follow that, and they're the correct actions, not just random arbitrary actions. So the problem is not that people are relying too much on prayer and not enough on practical steps. The problem is the opposite. We rely entirely on so-called practical steps, and we don't rely at all on God. We don't even factor him in.

So what I'm saying, what I'll say again is that if everyone in the nation had their thoughts on God and their knees on the ground in prayer, things would get better. Guaranteed absolutely. I know that for certain. Our affliction is spiritual. We are a nation that is falling more and more into the clutches of evil and Satan and away from God. And we are still too stubborn to cry out to God to save us. So instead we cry out to the government and doctors and psychologists and the law and policy and pills and the media and Hollywood and ourselves. We cry out to all of them to save us and none of them can.

And we look everywhere but up where the answer actually lies. The key is to pray to God unceasingly to seek his help and to act in accordance with him. Not to trust in our actions alone, but to trust in God and to act in faith and to go. to God and say, what are we supposed to do? What do you want us to do? And then whatever his answer is, you do it. People who don't understand prayer and don't have faith in it, it's because they don't do it. But if you actually pray, and people who actually pray unceasingly pray, they have a deep prayer life, they know, they know. They know that if they pray consistently over a certain problem, answers will perverse.

present themselves. And if they go to God consistently and say, God, what do you want me to do about this or that problem? An answer will come to them. It will. Will. 100% will. God works miracles, but we have to pray. You know, think about the story of Dunkirk, the part of the story that the movie Dunkirk, which is a movie that I really liked, but the movie Dunkirk leaves this out. but we know about the movie shows us how the citizen navy was mobilized to rescue the allied forces from the beach what they leave out is that a day of prayer was called across the country and the british people poured into churches and they prayed together in mass they prayed for a miracle and they received it mysteriously hitler ordered his troops to halt

when he could have easily destroyed the allies then there was bad weather that grounded German plains, but then the weather, miraculously, was good when the British needed it to be. So they'd get their men off the beach. The people prayed and they acted and a miracle occurred. And it's very possible that that miracle not only saved those men, but saved Western civilization. God works miracles. He's been doing it since the dawn of time. The dawn of time itself was a miracle, a supernatural act that made possible all things. So God works miracles, but we have to ask for them, and we have to come to him,

and we have to humble ourselves and pray. All of us. Can God stop mass shootings? Yes, he can. He stopped Hitler. He's healed the blind, cured the lame, raised the dead. He parted the seas. He brought forth water from Iraq.

He brought manna down from heaven. He brought himself down from heaven. rescued us from sins. So yes, he can stop mass shootings. He can do anything. We have to pray and have faith. And I'm speaking now, I'm speaking now specifically to those who believe, to those who believe or at least claim to believe, and that's what, 80% of the country or more claims to believe in God. I know this message to people who don't believe in God, to people who are atheists, to a completely secular, who reject God, they hear this conversation and they laugh and they snicker about it. I'm not talking to them, okay? They, they, they are, I'm tuning them out for right now.

It's not possible for me to talk about the power of prayer to, to atheists on the internet, because they will just laugh like children about it. And so right now I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to people who actually pretend to believe. Okay, you and I, those who are left, we say we believe. So why aren't we turning to God? It's only through his grace that we we do believe in the first place. So what do you think God's going to say to us in the end if we took all this grace that he gave us and we wasted it? He gives us this grace for a reason.

So why are we acknowledging his presence through his grace and then just leaving it at that? Like, okay, there you are, God. And then just continuing about our days. In a way where that fact has no bearing whatsoever on our lives, on how we operate, on what we do, on how we think. We are in for a rude awakening. If everything that's been happening around the world for the last 100 or more years,

if that isn't enough to wake us up and to make us turn back to God, even though we claim to already believe in him, if this isn't enough to make us cling to him desperately, and to turn to him and have faith in him and to seek his help, If this isn't enough, then I think when we die, we're in for a rough time. Put it like that. So that's the solution. It's just that.

A mass spiritual revival. You know, it's as simple as that. Which I know is probably not going to happen. But it's the only solution. Anywhere else we look, any other solution will be a failure. So this is it. So let's start praying for that. Let's start there.

Thanks for watching, everybody. Godspeed.