Welcome to Gateway Church's podcast. Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Well, Gateway Church, it is my pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much.

It is an honor to be in this house. Thank you.

I feel like I can be done now. I didn't even do anything yet. This is great.

Thank you guys so much. It's such an honor and a pleasure.

I'm excited to be with you on 4th of July weekend. As an American, I love celebrating 4th of July.

Hopefully, as we get into this, there'll be some stories you learn along the way that will help you enjoy celebrating the 4th even better.

And let me just start with the fact that most Americans sadly don't even know why we even celebrate the 4th of July.

And I say that without pun, literally, people don't even know about the American Revolution.

We don't know what the 4th of July is or even back up to 1776, what's going on.

And what's interesting is even if we talk about the Revolution, a lot of the knowledge we have today is not always the most historically accurate based on what actually happened.

For example, John Adams. When he was asked, when did the Revolution actually begin?

We might think of the shot her ground, the world, the Lexington green. There was a battle of Concord. There was a battle of Bunker Hill.

There's a lot of things that happened at the beginning.

John Adams says, no, actually the beginning was in 1770, the first blood that was shed in the American Revolution.

Actually, he says it was a Boston massacre because that's when the British first fired into these American Patriots.

What's interesting even about this thought is if you back up, if we understood that this is the first blood that was shed in the cause for liberty,

well, if you look back and see, well, who is the first person believed to have been killed in this cause for American liberty?

It was actually a Black Patriot by the name of Crispus addicts.

Now, let me just pause for a second and just throw a monkey wrench in a lot of the narrative happening today.

Did you know the American Revolution began with the death of Black Patriots? Let me go even further.

If you go to the last major battle of the American Revolution in 1781, one of the major players in that battle was the Marquit de Lafayette.

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