Breaking Chains Over America: The Radical Call to Guard Your Gates

Despite everything we see going on, the cream rises to the top.

If you are excellent, more will be expected of you, and if you are faithful with what has been given to you, you will have more opportunity than ever before. “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matthew 25:29 NIV). That sounds harsh, but in today’s language it’s saying, “If you are industrious with what you’ve been entrusted, you’ll be given more; but if you are not, what you have will be taken away.”

Excellence in all of those Nine Gates of Authority is still going to be rewarded. There is certainly a cancel culture out there, but ultimately excellence rises to the top. This is why they are trying to get rid of excellence. So your job as a gatekeeper is not just your own personal thing, but to excel in whatever gifts and talents that God has given you. You keep taking on more responsibility as you rise to the top, and you do your best to bring others up to your level for the glory of the Lord.

A gatekeeper is to set society’s cultural norms. We’re to set what’s right and what’s wrong because we’re doing it according to God’s word. We have had culture dictate and shove things down our throat. If we don’t stand up, we are just as guilty of killing America because we’re not doing anything.

Kenneth Copeland said this a long time ago and it was something that really stuck. He was talking about voting. “When you vote, your vote is your seed, and God doesn’t do anything without a seed. When you don’t sow it, you have sown to your enemy.” If you decide to not vote, you voted. You have a part in every evil thing the person does who is elected. We must understand the power of our vote as Americans and as believers. It’s our responsibility to vote.

Your Circle of Influence

Every person has a circle of influence. If you notice in the Nehemiah passage at the beginning of this chapter, there were gatekeepers, but there were also guards close to the homes and families. This is where most people live. Everybody has a circle of influence that God has given them. History is full of the ones who stood up.

Rosa Parks helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Rosa’s actions inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott lasted more than a year. It ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Look what the result was. That’s the power of the one.

Your circle of influence begins with where you are right now—on a bus, in a classroom, in a hospital room, at a ballgame, the grocery store, in your living room. We all have an opportunity to stand up, and we have been fed a lie that we don’t matter. If we don’t speak out, the balance of someone’s life is literally on the line.

Mom and dad feel like they’re out of touch because of the cultural differences. The truth is, we do matter. Grandmothers and grandpas matter too. In our own family, we have said that if their grandparents weren’t in heaven, some of the stupid things our children are doing, they wouldn’t have even considered. Mind you, not out of fear, but out of love for not disappointing them and letting them down. Why would it be so important in Scripture to leave an inheritance for your children’s children? Because we’re supposed to do that for our families.

Most revivals started with one person who said, “I’ll stand up. I just want to seek God more than anybody else. I want to be an example of His love for me.” We can say that in the secular world too. One person decided to stand up or stay seated, and she changed a nation.

We’ve been fed a lie that somehow we as individuals don’t matter and we should conform to group thinking. And the truth is we do matter as individuals. The wonderful thing about this country is our founding fathers took great pains to make sure we weren’t a democracy, which is basically mob rule.

The United States is not a mob-rule democracy. We’re a democratic republic. And most people don’t understand the difference. This nation is built on the importance of the individual, not the masses. Communism is based on the “greater good”; the individual gives up rights for the masses. This is not biblical, and it never works.

The belief that “I don’t really matter” is one of the biggest lies that we’ve bought in the Christian world. “Well, who am I? What does my $20 a month do? Who am I? I mean, my neighbor has a bigger car than mine, and their house looks better, and their kids look perfect. Why should I meet them? Who am I? What am I? I’m really not that important.” And the more the enemy of our souls beats us down with that false belief, the more we don’t do anything.

A lot of this thinking is because we get so caught up looking at ourselves and we believe that we don’t have anything to offer. And the truth is, we all absolutely do have something to offer, and everybody else will see that we do when we get up and do it. Go do it!

In the kid’s movie “Finding Nemo,” Nemo was caught in a net with a large school of fish. They were being brought up in a huge net for the kill. Then one of the fish got a brave idea, they all started swimming together toward the bottom of the net. The force of the “team” broke the net, almost took out the boat, and produced freedom for them all. Because they all worked together, they created a tsunami of light and goodness to produce their freedom.

Many of us don’t understand who we are and what we carry; we are supposed to be influencing people all the time for Christ. Let’s say you are a plumber and you’re at somebody’s house fixing a pipe. While there, you’re on your phone, you don’t greet the people other than an initial hello, you don’t talk to them, you don’t have eye contact, you’re not friendly. You just get in and get out. You just lost your opportunity to affect somebody for God. How do you climb a mountain? You start. You take one step at a time. We can be gatekeepers by taking one step and thinking continuously. You are a watchman like on Nehemiah’s wall. You protect, you know your purpose, your identity, and your authority. You are courageous, knowing you have generations to protect. You don’t give up your post or authority.

Take possession and control of your gate of authority. Together, we will turn back the tsunami of darkness and stop the killing of America.