Merry Christmas From The ACLJ

Hey, this is Jim Graham from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explore a relationship instead of religion every week. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network.

My voice is weak, friends, but I couldn't pass on the opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. In the presence of one of my heroes, I'm in his office in Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, Jay Sekulow. This is not the office you expected, was it? This is not the—Jay, what is going on here, man? This is the cool office.

This is what my daughter-in-law calls it. This is the office that—don't make it look like your office in Washington, which it doesn't. So you got the tour. I mean, there's a lot of music memorabilia. I'm a big Beatles fan. I got part of Ringo's drum kit up there and his signature and Emerson Lake and Palmer and all kinds of stuff.

And a John Lennon lithograph and a couple of Donald Trump memorabilia, too. He's a Jay Sekulow that's argued how many cases in front of the Supreme Court? Twenty now.

Twenty cases. But many of you are listening to my voice today, which is very weak, because— Better than it was yesterday. A lot better than it was yesterday.

A lot better. This man of God has fought valiantly for decades for religious freedom, for pro-life. Jay, tell everyone, for those that haven't met you yet and heard you, because I don't know that there's very many, but what is ACLJ?

And tell everyone your passion. So we started a long time. We've been doing this for 40 years. I mean, we started in the 80s.

And I thought about this the other day. Someone said, well, how long have we been arguing cases before the Supreme Court? I said by arguing them the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s.

So a long time. And it started—American Center for Law and Justice originally started out before the actual ACLJ formation. ACLJ technically formed in 1991. It started out as a group called CASE, and it was an acronym for Christian Advocate Serving Evangelism. We did evangelism access cases in the 1980s. My first case at the Supreme Court was the Board of Airport Commissioners versus Jews for Jesus.

We did a Bible Club case for Bible studies in the schools. And that's kind of how it started. And then in about 1991, Pat Robertson, Paul Crouch, and some others got together and said, hey, let's start a national, a really national program.

And then I have to say, your dad and your uncle came to me five years later. We had just really gotten going and said we were in Atlanta, Georgia, for an NRB, I think. Or maybe it was in Nashville.

It may have been Nashville. And said, we need to get you on air. And that launched our radio broadcast, which was 1997, and here we are in 2023. I mean, we've been doing it a long time. And that changed by light years, our ability to communicate, but also just getting people to know who we do. So we still do. You'd be surprised how many straight religious liberty cases you still have.

I just talked to one of our lawyers upstairs. She was in depositions in Utah this week where, because of some of the woke culture stuff, we had a parent that complained, with good reason, that her 15-year-old daughter was required to read a monologue. That was, and I'm not a prude, but it was pornographic.

I mean, it was obscene. So what she did was she went to the school board meeting, and they made her read this. And she said, no, I'm not going to read it. And they, you know, give her an F and all the stuff that goes with this.

We filed suit. But she, before we filed suit, she went to the school board meeting, you know, the open community section. She gets to speak for two minutes. So she gets up and goes, my name is so-and-so. And this is what my daughter was required to read in Ms. So-and-so's class. And she starts reading it. Within 15 seconds, they say, stop. You cannot use obscenity and pornography and profanity in this room.

She goes, well, that's great. But that's what my 15-year-old daughter was required to read in the classroom. So we filed a lawsuit. So they just did depositions.

I think they finished Friday. So you got those kind of cases. And then we've got all these election cases right now where they're trying to get Trump off the ballot or this one off the ballot. So we've got those. We've got a big case. There's a big abortion case at the Supreme Court this term we're involved in.

But you know what? For most of the cases, it's people you never heard of. And those are the people that I make the statement now that the clients of the American Center for Law and Justice are able to access the same lawyers that represented the President of the United States. But that's because of our donors. And we're faith-led and faith-supported ministry.

We've been around for a long, long time. And we're expanding. We're about to do a big project in New York City.

We bought a building. We're going to have our ACLJ mission to the UN. You go where it's dangerous. And the UN can be kind of a dangerous place. But you've got to be there. We're doing a lot of work for Israel right now. Of course, with the tragedies going on in the war. And this is the busiest December stew that I can remember in my 40-year career doing this. It's that busy right now. Well, we're recording a special Christmas edition.

We may play it at New Year's and other times. But J-Seculo, J-Seculo Live, amazing program. Your sons, Logan and Jordan, are involved. Well, you know, it's a family affair in that sense. And Jordan is a lawyer. And he's kind of running the day-to-day operations of the legal side. Logan is a media guy, was since he was a kid.

He's running a whole media operation. And we're on, of course, your network and many others. And we're on social media.

You go to ACLJ.org, you can get all the information. And we give you a tour of our studios here in Nashville. This is our media center, really.

There's eight lawyers operating out of here. But mostly it's media. And the end result of it is that, by God's grace, we've been able to accomplish a lot.

I think the best years are ahead. But I think the challenge is for real right now. That's for sure. Talk about faith. You do so much to protect the faith and to protect religious freedom.

I mean, you have fought. I mean, in these cases, it swings all ways. We want everyone to come to America and speak freely. You know, the marketplace of ideas.

You know, I used to make the joke. I represented Jews for Jesus, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, Lamb's Chapel Church, and the next month I represented the Democratic National Policy Committee. Because the issue is free speech. And if they lose their free speech, you know. So they came to us and I said, well, this is kind of risky taking these cases as a Christian group. But our donors understood it.

They understood the importance of defending free speech. And that's still the bulk work of what we do. Talk about your faith, Jay, and how this is personal to you. This is a mission for you.

You guys are trying to change lives. Yeah, well, I came from a Jewish background. So I was right. My parents are Jewish. I was raised Jewish. I am Jewish. I believe Jesus is Messiah.

I don't think that's inconsistent. I don't think there's an inconsistency between being Jewish and believing that Jesus is the Messiah. So during the Jesus revolution, we just had the Greg Laurie's movie and all that was going on. Well, in 1975, that movement hit college campuses in the south.

It kind of moved from the west coast and moved east. And you see a little bit of that in the movie. And I came to faith in Christ in college through the ministry of Jews for Jesus and friends on campus, including my then friend, but now wife, Pam. So that ministered to me and witnessed to me. And I never saw the inconsistency of being Jewish and a Christian.

And to this day, I don't. So when I got to represent Israel the first time before the International Criminal Court in 2008, I said, look at the irony of this. Here's this Messianic Jew from Brooklyn representing the state of Israel in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. So what I've learned is don't get in the way of God's plan because you can't even figure out what it is. So, you know, to me, the proclamation, bottom line at the end of the day, it's all about the proclamation of the gospel. Because with all the stuff going on, the only hope is Jesus.

I mean, that's it. And when it comes to Christians have rights, we are obviously citizens of heaven. But we're dual citizens.

We're here. Would you give a word, I mean, you know, the Marxism, socialism, I mean, people complain about how bad things are. Things in our country are really good based on Marxist standards. They're driving that.

They're good based on the beginning of our country. People forget this. They say the elections are so contentious now. We don't have duels. Okay? Okay? I mean, you know, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, they shot each other in a duel over politics.

So if you read the pamphlets from Madison versus Jefferson, you cannot believe what they wrote. So now it's just amplified because we have 24-hour media. But listen, I try cases all over the world. We have offices in Strasbourg, France.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, we had a big operation in Moscow. We have offices in Africa. We have an office in Jerusalem.

If I had a try case anywhere in the world, even today, right here in the United States of America. Jay Sekulow, host of Jay Sekulow Live. He's an author. He's a speaker. He's sought after.

You see him on news. Drummer, tell us about your passion for music as we get out here. Christmas time is the time of music.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, if you're listening on New Year's Eve or Christmas Day, we are having a concert on the 31st of December. If you go to Jay Sekulow on Facebook or Rumble or YouTube or ACLJ, you'll see it fed there.

It's two hours. And the lead singers, one of them is the former music director for DCTalk, Mark Townsend. John Schlitt from, of course, Petra and the rock band Head East. John Elefante from Kansas, who also produced Petra. Keyboardist is the keyboardist from Petra, so it's a great, we have about eight players and we have a great time. This guy's a renaissance man. He plays the drums.

He plays these instruments and he speaks on the air. I want to find something else out you do here in a second when we hang up. I don't play basketball that well. I made a free throw. I got to put that on my social.

That was pretty awesome. This was a gym and we kept one aspect of it. Although the floor is still the basketball floor. I like the floor.

Yeah, good wood floors. You still got a hoop back there and I had to drop a free throw, didn't I? You did and you got it well and you did it. The charity strike. Nothing but net. How can our people pray for you? ACLJ.org is the best way to stay in touch. Of course, any of the social media apps were everywhere there. Pray for, you know what we need right now?

Stamina. This is a really busy time and I could tell going into January, now with January around the corner, January's going to be very busy for us. Usually January kind of quiet in the courts, not this year. And the Peace of Israel, that's a big one. Listen, I represent the families of the hostages.

And it's tough stuff because a couple of them, a couple of the ones that were here in the United States, family members are now dead. And we were just watching a video about this a few minutes ago. I was putting a documentary together and I just shelved the documentary.

I said, we can't do it right now. So, you know, a little town of Bethlehem. We talk about a way in a manger. Where it all got started, you know, with the baby Jesus is on fire.

On fire. I mean, yeah. I mean, I think, listen, pray for the Middle East. Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem. Yeah. And pray for Jay Sekulow, a man who's reaching many with the good news of Christ. And this whole thing, you know, what I like to say is, I like to say, you're a missionary disguised as a lawyer.

Yeah. You know, there's a lot of truth to that. Or a lawyer disguised as a missionary. So, but, you know, look, I think at the end of the day, we're all sinners saved by grace, right? I mean, none of us are worthy. And Lord knows we all make a lot of mistakes. But it's the cross of Christ that's the answer to the problem.

That cradle is connected to the cross and the crown and the great redeemer, the great lawyer. Our wonderful counselor is coming back, right? Exactly right.

Exactly right. Your voice is back. I'm glad to see it. All right.

Jay Sekulow is contagious. There you go. All right. Thanks, Stu.

ACLJ.org. Give a good Merry Christmas greeting, everybody. Merry Christmas to all our friends on the truth. We love you. This is the Truth Network.