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With the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus we naturally think of Christ’s redemption for us personally:  How His shed blood washes away our sin and guilt, and how His resurrected life makes possible that we can actually be what He created us to be.  The wonder of this cannot be fully described, but it can be fully experienced!

However, as we mature in Christ once we’ve received Him as our Lord, His life within us desires to flow in an outwardly direction.  And if we allow Him to do that to its farthest extent, His resurrected life will shape the institutions of the culture so that those institutions will become vessels through which His truth can flow to the next generation.  The institution of civil government will then protect, by law, the right of the truth of Christ’s kingdom to flow to the next generation.  America’s Founders understood that this was civil government’s responsibility.  They never envisioned the government being hostile to the church.  Any honest individual who researches their writings will reach that conclusion.

Founding Father and Sixth President, John Quincy Adams, made plain the connection between Christianity and our nation’s liberties when he stated:

“Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the Progress of the Gospel…?

“Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized [civil government] on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth?  That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.”

(Adams, John Quincy. July 4, 1837, in his work entitled, An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport at their Request on the Sixty-First Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (Newburyport: Charles Whipple, 1837), pp. 5-6.  Foster and Swanson, The American Covenant – The Untold Story (Roseburg, OR: Foundation for Christian Self-Government, 1981; Thousand Oaks, CA: The Mayflower Institute, 1983, 1992), pp. 18-19)

Early Supreme Court Judge, Joseph Story, wrote a set of commentaries on the U.S. Constitution.  Since he lived during the Founder’s time, he well understood what their aim was in creating our national government.  Concerning the relationship of the civil government to the church’s mission of taking the Gospel to the next generation, he wrote these words in his Exposition of the Constitution of the United States, in 1840:

“Probably, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution…the general…sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State, [in] so far as was…compatible with the private rights of conscience…

“The real object of the First Amendment was not… to advance [other religions] by prostrating Christianity…but to prevent any national [church]…”

(Story, Joseph. 1833. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833 (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833; pp. 259-261, p. 314, Sec. 441, p. 316, Sec.. Gary DeMar, America’s Christian History: The Untold Story (Atlanta, GA: American Vision Publishers, Inc., 1993), p. 113.)

This statement makes clear that America’s Founders intended their governments to support, what they called, “general Christianity.”  “General Christianity” meant the belief that the Creator was the trinitarian God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and the belief in the Bible’s view of man and all of life.  Our Founders knew that those beliefs were the foundation of all civil liberty.  They knew if those truths were not taught to each generation that this Republic could not long endure.  Liberty, and the Republic which protected it, would be lost.

This explains why we are in the mess in which we now find ourselves.  The phony idea that “separation of church and state” means the government should block the Christian message from all schools and public places, is destroying the very foundation on which this nation’s liberties rest.

Shouldn’t we be insisting our governments protect the flow of the Christian message to our children in public places?

Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you—and for your children!  And you won’t like what that brings to you.  I’m Don Pinson; this has been Think About It.