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from the bottom of don rickles' heart. i'm sorry. the national prayer breakfast, maybe we should get serious and say something about prayer. nah. okay. seriously, though, what is prayer? the real question is, what is prayer? prayer is real faith in god. it is not phoney religiousity. it is not take this archaic verbiage and we believe we are a chronicy deity. we need something archaic in our wooden something language. that, my friends, is not prayer. that is a lot of pious srkpiou. pious baloney is not god, it is scripture. imagine if we talked to god that way. we don't try to fool god with phoney religiousity. this goes to the difference between religion and religiousity and a real faith in god. we know people who go to church but don't know religion. real faith and prayer is not religious. it's from the heart, it's honest, it's real. i had the privilege of writing about two men whose real lives illustrate the difference between what real religiousity and serving god is. let me tell you personally how i came to see the difference between these two utterly different things. first of all, i'm the son of european immigrants who met with the early class. i'm thankful my parents are here this morning. please don't get up. my dad is greek, hence, my surname mataxis. my mom is german, hence, my deep love for siegfried & roy. thank you. thank you. now, when you're raised greek -- when you have one greek parent, you're raised greek. forget about the german stuff. greek people believe being greek is the most important thing in the world. i'm 50% greek, and i've always tried to be more than 50% greek, but i've never been able to break the 50% barrier, a little like brother mitch. i thought you might like that. good. i grew up, of course, in the greek orthodox church. i was an altar boy. had a modicum of faith, mostly nominal cultural faith. i thought of myself as a christian, but then i went to yale university, of course, the dream come true of every working class european immigrants. yale is a very secular place, aggressively secular. what little modicum of faith i had was seriously challenged. the idea of god is really ignored or even sneered at by the time i graduated. i was quite sure that it was wrong to be serious about the bible or to take jesus seriously, that it was hopelessly parochial and deviseive. i was lost. i wanted to be a writer and then i flounderred, then i drifted and floundered together. things got so bad and i moved back in with my parents, which i don't recommend. i specifically don't recommend moving in with my parents. i joke, i joke, but it was, in fact, a very tough time for me. i -- i'm being serious now -- i suffered then during that period from real, you know, genuine depression. i still struggle with that. this was a really painful, soul-searching time in my life, very painful. i took a really depressing forc take, thank you very much, and while i was at this job, this miserable job -- thank you, mom and dad -- thank you -- yeah -- i met a man of some faith. and he begins to share his faith with me, the secular yale agnostic. i was in enough pain that i was willing to listen a little bit to what he had to say. he was an episcopalian. they don't really believe that stuff, anyway. please. please. so i said, yeah, you can keep talking, but he turned out to be one of those episcopalians who actually believed this stuff and knew the bible back and forth. i was really challenged, we would have a lot of conversations. i was not ready to accept what he was saying, pray, go to church or become a weird born-again christian like many of you. but i was in enough pain to keep listening. this friend of mine said to me that, you know, i should pray that god would reveal himself to me which seemed absurd because i thought, i don't know if he's there so i really don't want to pray to the oxygen in the room. to whom should i pray if he's not there? it was a conundrum, you see. sometimes i was in enough pain to do silly things, and i did pray, and i said, in my anguish -- and it was very real anguish -- i said, god, if you're there, reveal yourself to me, please. punch a hole in the sheetrock, wave to me, say hello, show yourself to me. i was desperate. every now and then, i would pray that prayer. god, help me, i need help. it was an honest prayer, and prayers come from a place of honesty, not religiousity. if you can say help me, lord, god, here's that prayer. then around my 15th birthday, i had a dream. we don't have time to go into it this morning, but it was an amazing dream. i'm not looking this up. if you want to hear the story of this amazing dream, and you can go to my web site, it's just my name. if you can't spell it, it's still eric metaxas. it's all true except the part about the ufo or the sasquatch. i made that up. watch that if you have time because it really happened, it's not made up. when god came into my life overnight and answered that prayer, i had to suffer her not knowing. i think part of the reason is that i had ejected a phoney, religious idea of god. not god as he really is, i knew that is what my pain is starting all my questions. he's real. he loves me despite what i've done. he's not some idiot. he knows my story, he knows your story, he knows the deepest fears. he knows the terrible, selfish things that you have done that hurt others. and he still loves you. and he knows the hurt that others have caused you. he knows us. he is the most wonderful capital p alive. in fact, his name is wonderful. who would reject that? i realized everything i rejected about god was not god. it was religion. it was phoniness, it was people who go to church and not show the love of people, people who don't practice what they preach, people who are indifferent to the poor and suffering, people who use religion as a way to exclude others from their group, people who use religion to judge others. i had rejected that, but guess what? jesus had also rejected that. he had railed against that and called people to real life and real faith. jesus was and is the enemy of dead religion. jesus came -- [ applause ] >> that's true. that is true. that's not a point of view. that is true. he came to deliver us from that. he railed against the religious leaders of his day because he knew it was all just a front, that in their hearts they were far from god, his father. when he was temtd pted in the desert, who was the one throwing bible versus at him? satan. that is a perfect picture of dead religion. using the words of god to do the opposite of what god does. it's grotesque when you think about it, it's demonic. ed tuttle gave me a copy of the "the discipleship" by bon hoffer. he asked if i had ever heard of him and i said no, and he said he was the man who stood up for the jewish people. >> my mother is jewish. why hadn't i heard about this vonhoffer before? i'm too self-centered to spend so much time focusing on somebody besides myself. i went on to have a strange career, children's books, i wrote humor for the "new york times." i worked for veggie tales -- oh, yeah, now you're listening. then i wanted to share my faith and wrote a ridiculous book called "everything you wanted to know about god but were afraid to ask." actually, it's a trilogy. i found myself interviewing on cnn and found myself answering tough questions like how can a good god allow suffering and evil? and the interviewer said, there's something about wilbur force. i had like two sentences in the wilbur force isr force. someone who took the book of god so seriously that he changed the world forever. i started talking about him briefly, and next thing i know, a publisher calls me and says, there is a movie coming out called "amazing grace" -- you know the song "amazing grace"? we'll sing it later. i didn't write the song, i just want to be clear. it was written by the amazing tony bennett. is he here? i wrote a book about wilbur force, and people would say to me, who are you going to write about next? some people say to me, about whom will you next write? as a yale major, i want to recommend the word "whom." if english is your first wo language, you might want to use the word whomitz. there is only one about whom i would write if i were to write a second biography, and, of course, bonehoffer. i did write that book than i, no one is more grateful to the lord for the people who are reading and talking about this book. i know that it was read. george w. bush when is insatiable pressure -- i just want to say, no pressure. i know you're very busy, mr. president, but sometimes you take plane rides and you have time to kill. no pressure. no pressure at all. who am i to pressure you? nonetheless, the lives of both of these men illustrates the difference between phoney religiousity and really believing in god in a way that is real, that changes your life, that must change your life and the lives of others. now, wilbur force, of course, is best known for leading the movement to end the slave trade. now, why did he take that on? do you know why? i'm here to tell you, it's not because he was just a churchgoer. because there were plenty of churchgoers in england in the day of wilbur force. and everybody in that day seemed to have no problem with the slave trade or slavery. people who went to church. the reason wilbur force fought so hard was because around ihis 26th birthday, he encountered jesus. really. england paid lip service to religion in those days. everybody said, oh, i'm a christian, i'm english, we're christians. but they really seemed to think, most of them, that the slave trade was a fine thing. so keep in mind when someone says, i am a christian, it might mean absolutely nothing. but for wilbur force it became real. it was not about christianity, it was about the living god and serving him. and wilbur force suddenly took the bible seriously and awful us were created in the image of god. he took this bible seriously and said, it is our job to care for these, and he said, god, i will obey. he fought politically, he fought hard -- really, all the people that were fighting with him were christians. the churchgoers were not really with him. the quakers, the methodists, they were in the trenches because they knew they had no choice but to regard the afterry cans as ma -- africans and made by god. all the people who went to church, like i say, they got it wrong. they had not seen jesus. wilbur force took these ideas, these foreign ideas, from the bible and brought them into culture, and you can read about it, not just in my book which the president may read, but you can read about it. this is historical fact. this is not my spin. wilburforce, because he believed what the bible said and because he obeyed what god told him to do, he changed the world. today -- think of this, my friends. today we argue about how to help the poor. some say, oh, the public sector, government is the answer. others say the private sector, free enterprise. but today we argue about how to help the poor, not weathhether help the poor. praise the lord. [ applause ] >> the idea to care for the poor, the idea that slavery swrois wrong, these are not imported times. they do not do the right thing in charge of god's ambition. we go with the flow. in wilburforce's day, going with the flow meant slavery, that raf cans are not fully human. in nazi germany, it meant supporting the view that jews are not fully human. so whom do we say is not fully human today? who is expendible to us? please discuss amongst yourselves. thank you. but back to nazi germany. folks, this was a moment ago. my mother lived through this, there are people in this room who lived through this. this is a moment ago. i was in germany last week. i met people who lived through this period. it was an extraordinary thing, sons meeting heroes. if you don't know who bonhoffer is, bonhoffer was born in 1906, actually on february 4. that's two days from now and two days after my wife's birthday. now, she begged me not to mention that her birthday was today, but honey, will you please stand up, please? sweetie, don't be shy, please. she's so shy she hates the public eye. i'm sorry. you sure you don't want to stand? sweetie pie, come up for me. on your birthday? all right. back to bonhoffer. i tried. bonhoffer was born into an amazing family. his father was a most famous psychiatrist in germany. this was a big, important, amazing family. at 14 he announces that he wants to be a theologian, a doctor at 21. anybody want to be a doctor at 21? bonhoeffer was a great theologian, but he decided he wanted be ordained as a lutheran pastor. in 1924 he went to study at union theological seminary. but one sunday, a fellow student named frank fisher, an african-american from alabama, invited dieterich bonhoeffer to harlem to a church called abyssinian baptist church. and bonhoeffer went with him and for the first time in his life in that church, he saw something that was clearly not mere phoney religion. he saw people worshipping a living god, he saw people who understood suffering and whose worship was real. bonhoeffer said that in new york and america, he did not hear the gospel pro claimed. think of this. he visited many, many churches. he did not hear the gospel proclaimed except in his words, in the negro churches. that was the only place he saw the true gospel, he saw true faith, living faith, people living it, preaching the gospel of jesus, living the gospel of jesus, he saw this among the suffering in harlem. and it changed his life. when he got back to germany, people could see that he was different. he wasn't intellectually different, but his heart had been changed. he began to speak publicly about the bible, about the living word of god through which god, if he was alive, was to speak to us. so in the black church in harlem, god was alive and wishes to speak to you. of course, it had a political component because now it's 1932. the nazis are rising. bonhoeffer begins to say things you would not hear in germany, even in the churches in those days. he spoke of jesus as the man for others. he said, whoever does not stand up for the jews does not have the right to sing gregorian chants. his whole life was about the idea that you must have a living relationship with god and it must lead you to action. that you must obey god, that you will look different. of course, dead religion demonizes others. i just said that. and apart from god's intervention, that is what we do, so don't think you would do that. you will do that. we're broken human beings apart from god. that's what we do. we don't think we're better than the germans. do you think you're better than the germans in that era? we're capable of the same horrible things. wilburforce somehow saw in the people what he didn't see, and we celebrate him for it. bonhoeffer saw what they didn't see and we celebrate him for it. what did he say that they saw? there's one answer, it was jesus. he opened our eyes to ideas which are different from our own, which are radical. personally, i would say the same thing about the unborn, that apart from god, we cannot see that they are persons as well. so those of us who know the unborn-to-be human beings, they are to love those who do not see that. [ applause ] >> we need to know that apart from god, we would be on the other side of that divide fighting for what we believe is right. we cannot demonize our enemies. today if you believe abortion is wrong, you must treat those on the other side with the love of jesus. today if you have a biblical view of sexuality, you will be demonized on the other side by those who will call you a b bigots. jesus wants us to show the love of jesus. if you want people to treat you with dignity, treat them with dignity. finally, jesus tells us we must love our enemies. that, my friends, is the real difference between dead, religion and a living faith in the god of the scriptures, whether we can love our enemies. wilb wilb wilburforce had political enemies, but he knew he had been saved by grace. he was not morally superior by the people on the other side of the aisle. martin luther king told people on the buses that you must not fight back, you must be willing to turn the other cheek or get off the bus. branch rickey told mickey robinson, if you want to win the battle your -- to stand behind you, that it's not just you. so puck see jesus with own. so can you love your enemy? if you cannot, that's a sheer sign that you've bought into the moral system but you have not forgiven the god given you. only god is part from the grace of god. we thank you is really well. it is the only thij, "the grace of a living god" that can bring left and price. we put him in a real prayer to show us that's when you fill out the asj. you ask him to help you, the amazing grace of god is there for everyone. jesus is not just for so-called christians. jesus is for everyone. for everyone and the grace of god is for everyone. i believe you believe that. when i was 21 years old, i worked at the boston opera house, and garrison kheiler showed up. he gave a talk, and at the end of his talk, he asked the audience if the audience wanted to sing. they didn't. but he made them, anyway. he led them in a song called "amazing grace." that a capella rendition has stayed with me ever since, and i thought, someday i'm going to have someone sing that for me. i thought, you know, if the president can get al green then maybe you can sing with him. so we're going to try this. if it goes well, i'll leave with my head up. ready? if you don't know the lyrics, pretend you do. i want to hear harmonieharmonie. ♪ amazing grace how sweet the sound ♪ ♪ that saved a wretch like me ♪ i once was lost ♪ but now i'm found ♪ was blind but now i see god really loves you. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> thank you, eric. you have indeed blessed us, you got our attention and gave us spiritual food. now it's my great honor to introduce the president of the united states. mr. president, we thank you for your 100% support you've given to this prayer breakfast, being here every single year. and when you were just a member of the senate with us. mr. president, i personally want to thank you for the way you strive for the betterment of all americans, you give your life to that. it was abraham lincoln who first used the phrase that we are a nation under god. if we are going to be a nation under god, then we have to recognize the precious worth of every single person. thank you for your leadership. ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states, barack obama. [ applause ] >> thank

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