Embracing a Holy Rebellion: Standing Firm in Faith

SPEAKER 04 : 0:00

Well, hello, everyone. I’m James Dobson, and you’re listening to Family Talk, a listener-supported ministry. In fact, thank you so much for being part of that support for James Dobson Family Institute.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:19

Welcome, everybody, to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, a production of the broadcast division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President for Public Policy here at JDFI. Well, it’s no secret, or at least I hope it’s not any secret, that America was founded on Christian principles. In fact, if you take a look at the American Revolution, the most revolutionary thing about the American Revolution was the central idea that the founders had about where our liberty came from. They put it right in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. They said liberty came from our creator. Not from government, not from a president you like or a Congress that’s your political party, but that our liberty came from God, not from government. That was truly a revolutionary thought, a revolutionary idea. And it’s one of the reasons people talk about American exceptionalism. But alas, over the years, as we have talked about many times and that Dr. Dobson’s devoted a good bit of his life to, America has not only drifted away from the idea that liberty comes from God, we’ve drifted away even from the idea that only immoral people can be free. And that is perhaps the biggest threat to what some say is our democracy, but what is really to our constitutional republic. And so there’s a big battle raging. What should Christians do in the middle of this battle? Should we be pacifists and just watch it while we sit in our churches? Or should we go into the public square and be bold and holding up the cross together? of Jesus Christ. Well, we’ve got two guests today that have some very clear opinions about that. Todd and Kelly Hudnall, co-pastors of a major church in Colorado Springs, are with us today. And welcome to the show. Dr. Dobson and Shirley send their best. It’s really a pleasure to spend some time with you. I think we have folks at the James Dobson Family Institute that attend your church? Yeah, it’s Radiant Church. Let’s start because around the country, maybe people don’t know you very well or haven’t been fortunate enough to be in a city where you have had your ministry. So let’s begin by telling us a little bit about your background and how you answered the call of Christ, where you first met. Act like we’re on a first date and tell us all about yourselves.

SPEAKER 04 : 3:00

Well, I came to Christ in my 20s when I was attending a University of Kansas. Shortly after that, I did some study and became a pastor and helped plant a church in Topeka, Kansas, and then met my wife Kelly there at that church and then went to Texas. And we were there for 12 years. And we had a ministry in what’s called East Texas or Deep East Texas, they actually called it. And we were in San Diego a short time, and then we’ve been here in Colorado Springs for 19 years. Wow.

SPEAKER 01 : 3:33

I was 20 years old and in college when I committed my life to Christ. Honestly, I had not been diagnosed as an alcoholic, but I was on the road to becoming an alcoholic. I was in the whole party scene and just caught up in just a lot of darkness. And I had an encounter with Jesus one morning as I was recovering from a hangover. and surrendered my life completely to Jesus Christ and was radically changed by His goodness and His grace and His love. And I have been passionately following Him for the last 37 years. and just so grateful and thankful for God’s grace. Met Todd in the church, as he mentioned, and I was just so passionate for God. I wasn’t looking for a mate. I was just in love with Jesus, could not get enough of Jesus and was pursuing Him. And just so happened that Todd and I were on that same path of chasing passionately after our Lord and Savior. And the Lord brought us together. So that together we could better glorify God and fulfill his kingdom purpose for our lives. So we’ve been doing that together for 34 years.

SPEAKER 02 : 4:53

Fantastic. That’s wonderful. Todd and Kelly, you’ve written a lot and you’ve written in a way and you’ve preached in a way that I love it. But I mean, it raises some eyebrows, right? Because there’s… There are all these preconceptions about what a Christian ought to be like and what words are used to describe Christians, gentle and loving and all that. And you guys are that. But you’ve used a particular word that jumped out at me, the word rebel. In fact, in one of your books, I think it’s your most recent book, you advance this idea of calling the church to live as holy rebels. Could you expound on that exactly before what you mean before everybody heads for the door?

SPEAKER 01 : 5:39

Absolutely. Well, Gary, you know, time, as time passes, the timeline gets cloudy and a little bit cloudy in my brain. But I would guess it was, what, Todd, six or seven years ago when I was in my prayer closet, my favorite place on planet Earth. And I can hardly talk about my prayer closet without getting emotional. Because it’s a secret place where I shut myself up to be alone with the Lord. And my heart and my prayer is that every follower of Jesus Christ will have a secret place, a place where you shut the rest of the world and everything else out. And you just shut yourself up with him. And I begin to pray and intercede once again for the youth of our nation. And we have two kids, two teenagers, a boy and a girl. Our daughter is 19 and our son is 17. And at the time, of course, they were much younger. And they’ve grown up in the knowledge of the Lord. And we have taught them that it is everyone in the word every day, not out of religious obligation, but out of a love for Jesus and a desire to know God and to walk in freedom. And so they’ve just grown up, Gary, saturated in the word of God. And I was crying out to God for all of the kids in our nation that have grown up in gross darkness that seems to be becoming more vulnerable. more wicked and more corrupt by the day. And I just began to cry out for them. And the Lord spoke to me in that still small voice. You know what I’m talking about? When suddenly you become still and it’s like the Lord just drops something in your spirit that you know is from Him. But this is what I heard. I heard the Lord say, “‘Pray for a holy rebellion.'” And it stunned me. First of all, the word rebellion was like, what, what, what, Lord? What a holy rebellion. And I began to ask the Lord, Lord, what do you mean? What does a holy rebellion look like? And the Lord took me to Luke 22, verse 37. And in the NLT, it says that Jesus was counted among the rebels. And the Lord began to just download this passion in me, this holy passion, this holy fire to pray that God’s people would not be complacent and not be compliant. And even this generation of youth and children and kids would that they, even though they have not grown up in the knowledge of the truth, to pray that there would be a holy rebellion stirred up on the inside of them so that they will rebel against hell’s agenda, not with swords and guns and with nasty words, but with righteousness, holiness, and truth.

SPEAKER 02 : 8:35

Well, Kelly, that’s beautiful and very profound. Dr. Dobson wrote a book years ago called Children at Risk. I was co-author with him. And the full title was Children at Risk, the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Children. And what Dr. Dobson argued was that there’s this great clash of values going on. In some ways, it’s a battle between people who believe God is and other people who believe God isn’t. But however you want to describe it, the winner gets our kids and gets to teach them what to believe about life and death, love and sex, freedom and slavery. And we’ve certainly seen a number of lost generations. So, Todd, how do you find in your own church? Are you—because I can see this being a very inspirational message for young Christians today. that they’re being called for something really big and really important and a little edgy, quite frankly. You’re not calling them to go along to get along. You’re calling on them to boldly take on some big odds. And young people, particularly young boys, tend to really respond to that.

SPEAKER 04 : 9:48

We have seen that. We have seen particularly young people, and by that I mean 20-somethings, but even some of our teens, that have really embraced this idea of going against the demonic culture, the culture that’s contrary to the Scripture, contrary to the Bible, and to stand up for biblical values and truly make a difference in their schools simply by standing on what God says versus what the culture is saying, and maybe even sometimes what their teachers are saying. And to do it in a winsome way, in a loving way, in a kind and gracious way, but in a way that is bold and stands on biblical truth.

SPEAKER 02 : 10:28

Has this message, because of its boldness, caused any backlash for you and your church in the secular world? Colorado ain’t what it used to be, I can tell you that from my experience. It absolutely isn’t. What kind of pushback or dangers have you had to deal with because you’ve been bold in preaching the gospel?

SPEAKER 04 : 10:50

We actually, I think it was mainly following the COVID epidemic and coming out of that. You know, it was a very unusual and strange time. And suddenly this progressive agenda was being pushed so hard. And so we had to come back and say, let’s go back to the Bible. And what does the Bible say about gender? What does the Bible say about marriage? What does the Bible say about all of these issues that were being denigrated in our society? Some people simply didn’t want to be part of that and they didn’t want to make a stand. And we saw an exodus of quite a few people out of our church when we began to take a stand and not just teach it in a way that you would keep it within your home, but where you were willing to be salt and light out in the culture and willing to make a strong stand. We’ve also had just challenged our people, get involved in your workplace, get involved in school boards, get involved in places of influence in our community where where we can uphold biblical values because biblical values are best for a society. We don’t want to control anybody. We don’t want to dominate the culture necessarily. But what we want are biblical values to have a seat at the table. And we want to be able to see the flourishing of our society. And we believe it happens best when biblical values are upheld. And so I feel like many pastors are… living as if we’re in the 1990s and we’re simply not anymore. You can’t be silent. If you’re silent, then you are saying, okay, we’re just not going to uphold certain things the Bible has always taught.

SPEAKER 02 : 12:32

You’re absolutely right. As they keep redefining what is political, if we don’t push back, then what is left to be moral or left to be something the church can deal with gets smaller and smaller. We end up going into not a prayer closet, but just going into a closet period where we’re supposed to keep our faith rather than in the public square.

SPEAKER 04 : 12:57

And we feel like that’s kind of the agenda a lot of times. Kelly has mentioned before, even in our involvement with the school board and that sort of thing. And again, our intention isn’t to be political at all. We just want to be biblical. We just want to be the church. And we want to be able to have a voice at the table and be able to say, hey, here’s what we believe is best for society. And these are the values that are going to cause our society to do the very best. And people… But we feel like many times they try to intimidate us so that they can eliminate us so that then they can dominate in the culture and dominate on these issues and dominate in what’s happening in our society and in our city.

SPEAKER 02 : 13:40

Kelly, there was a story in the book, the way you described it kind of caught my attention. If I said beer cans, beards and beer bellies, would you know which story I’m referring to?

SPEAKER 01 : 13:52

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER 02 : 13:52

If you do, would you mind sharing that with us?

SPEAKER 01 : 13:55

Sure. That would be the chapter on evangelism. But we know where to live like we are in the last days. And that means Jesus said, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And so if you’re going to follow Jesus, you’re going to be a fisher of men. It doesn’t matter what your personality type is. It doesn’t really matter what our schedule is like and whether it’s convenient or not. As followers of Jesus, we know we are to have a heart like his and we’re to fish for men. And so in that particular story, I was sharing about an incident where we were going door to door and just, I can’t even remember what, I think maybe we were giving bottles of water and we were giving tracks and it wasn’t anything in your face. We certainly weren’t saying, you know, screaming at people and telling them to turn or burn. We were simply going door to door and just telling people that Jesus loves them. And we went to one particular house and it was so intimidating. It was a trailer house. It was a trailer park. And there were beer cans, beer bottles and a big motorcycle, a lot of junk, a lot of trash in the yard. And I was there with another lady who’s very petite. intimidated, and took a deep breath and just walked up to that door, trusting in the Holy Spirit to lead us. And when the guy came to the door, he didn’t have a shirt on. He had a big, hairy belly, a big, bushy beard. And I’m even more intimidated. I’m feeling, you know, like, is this how David felt when he came up against Goliath? And so, you know, I timidly reach out to hand him the gift and the track and said, Sir, the Lord just had us come here today to tell you that he loves you and he wants a relationship with you. And this big old burly guy broke down and started weeping. And we were able to lead him to the Lord right then and there. And, you know, I think the enemy wants to trap all of us in cowardice and fear, like he did the children of Israel when Goliath was taunting them day after day. And then David showed up in courage. And when God is with us. All things are possible. And apart from Him, we can do nothing. But through Christ, we can go into the scariest situation, the most intimidating situation with the love of God and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. And like Jesus, be fishers of men. So that was that story, basically, in a nutshell.

SPEAKER 02 : 16:52

I think I know that guy. What a wonderful story. And the fact that his appearance hid to the eyes of most that he had his own crosses he was carrying. And all he needed was somebody to tell him that God loved him, right? And you did that. There’ll be another soul in heaven.

SPEAKER 01 : 17:14

He needed someone who would fearlessly… tell him the truth or push beyond their fears. And if I may, Gary, if I can just share, like the biggest thing on my heart and the crisis that we’re in today, and I do believe we’re seeing the beginnings of a great awakening. We love David Barton and all that he has brought to the body of Christ and to our country. I believe we’re seeing the beginnings of it. But it is absolutely essential that the body of Christ wakes up and understands, as you said, the time we’re living in. And that every one of us, I believe it was A.W. Tozer who said, as soon as we realize that we’re in a real battle, we will drop our toys and pick up our weapons. And of course, he’s speaking of spiritual weapons. And, you know, something you asked Todd earlier is just burning in my heart about backlash and the response to this message that the Lord has given us on a holy rebellion. And I want to stress again, when we say that it is a rebellion against the kingdom of hell. The most heartbreaking thing to me has been the complacency in the church in America. Yeah. And the Americanized Christian Church has become something. I’m going to step out there like I did with the beer bellies and the beer bottles. I’m going to just step out and say what I believe needs to be said. We have had people in the church rise up and say, we know there’s a battle and we know that we need to fight in it, but we don’t want to. We want to live our best life now. And we want to live a life where we can just be happy and blessed and insulated from the spiritual warfare. I mean, we’ve literally had people that we loved so dearly who said, we know you’re right. We know there’s a battle, but we don’t want to fight in it. We don’t want to do what God is calling us to do right now. We want to go back to the 90s and we want to go back to church as it was then. And my prayer, my constant prayer is that the body of Christ will wake up. And understand this is not a time for the church to be complacent, to be selfish, to be self-centered, to just think about ourselves and our own lives and our own well-being that we are called to follow Jesus. And he said, that means deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. And yes, that requires self-denial. It requires a crucifying of our flesh daily, but it is our best life now. That’s when you experience the presence of God, the power of God working with you and through you to make a difference in the world. And so my constant prayer is, is that God will stir up a holy rebellion in the hearts of his people, that we will partner more deeply with him in a holy rebellion against the agenda of hell that wants to come in to steal, kill, and destroy.

SPEAKER 02 : 20:24

Kelly, your heart is so evident in your voice and on your face when you speak about the moment we’re in. And Todd, it’s evident how strongly you are committed to standing up for the truth of Jesus Christ, no matter what our culture throws at us. God was not surprised when any of us were born in America. He knew exactly where we were going to be born. And by being born here, he gave us an incredible blessing. He did. And being in a country where there’s so much liberty and there’s so much opportunity. But when you’re given a gift, you have a responsibility to take care of it. So the church in America should take care of the gift that God has granted them by allowing us to have religious freedom for all this history. And it’s just now that it’s coming under control. such terrible attack. Well, I could talk to you guys for a day, let alone for a show. Todd, tell us again the name of the book and where people can get it. And, you know, I saw the other day that Eric Metaxas said every Christian in America should read this book. Eric Metaxas is a great friend of Dr. Dobson’s ministry and speaks at many of our events. And I love the message. But When somebody like Eric loves it, too, I think it’s a real endorsement for people to go out and get the book and pray about the message of the book and what that message says about not only our own personal lives, but what our churches ought to be doing at a moment like this.

SPEAKER 04 : 22:07

Yeah. And in the book, we give examples of a couple of other churches that we partner with that, like us, have made a real stand and are making a difference. But the book is called Holy Rebel. Now, I think the best place to get it probably is Amazon and the online outlets that are out there. We also have an audio book version of it as well.

SPEAKER 02 : 22:28

Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, it is fantastic to spend time with you both. I get to Colorado and Colorado Springs quite a bit. My work is mostly in Washington, D.C. I’ve got a couple of questions about I want to ask God when I get there about why I was assigned this job. particular ministry, but I’d much rather be looking out my window at the mountains in Colorado Springs. But the next time I’m out there, I would love to come by and spend some time with you personally. Oh, we would love that, Gary. That would be an honor. Visit your church. We’ll treat you. Well, that sounds great. Again, Dr. Dobson and Shirley are sorry that they couldn’t be here today, but they send you their best, and they were excited about the fact that you were going to be on the show that bears their name. So we’ll look forward to working together in the months ahead. God bless you both, and God bless your wonderful church. Well, folks, you’ve been listening to Family Talk, and Be sure to be with us each day as we bring you another message about faith, family and freedom.

SPEAKER 03 : 23:42

Well, you’ve been listening to a special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and a challenging conversation featuring Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Policy Center, and also his special guests Todd and Kelly Hudnall about embracing our calling as holy rebels in an increasingly dark culture. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you’d like to share it with someone who needs this message, visit drjamesdobson.org. There you’ll also find information about Todd and Kelly’s book, Holy Rebel. That’s drjamesdobson.org. And then click on the Family Talk tab. Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we exist to preserve and promote biblical principles that strengthen families and communities. When you partner with us, you are supporting broadcasts like the one you heard today that challenge believers to stand courageously for God’s truth. Your gifts help us continue to reach millions of families all across America with messages that inspire faithful living in challenging times. To make a secure donation online, go to drjamesdobson.org. That’s drjamesdobson.org. Or keep in mind, you can also give a gift over the phone. Our ministry phone number is 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. And keep in mind, this Friday is July 4th, and with Independence Day approaching, now is the perfect time to rediscover the Christian roots of our nation. Sign up for our free Faith of Our Founders email series at DrJamesDobson.org and learn how God’s hand guided America’s founding and continues to be our only hope for the future. Again, for the free Faith of Our Founders email series, go to DrJamesDobson.org. I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of Dr. James Dobson and all of us here at the JDFI, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.