"Those from among you shall build the old waste places; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in."
~ Isaiah 58:12
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"Those from among you shall build the old waste places; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in." ~ Isaiah 58:12
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THINK ABOUT IT RADIO PROGRAM #441 “Why the West Has More Liberty” by: Don Pinson aired on: 5/8/08
While in Russia a few years ago, I became very aware of the oppression in the atmosphere of that nation. There was a heaviness of fear that hung in the air and it captivated most of the people, making them afraid to smile at you on the street, or talk with you when standing next to you. And while this was several years after the wall of communism had come down, the people still were not free. Their freedom was only a form; it wasn’t a thing of the heart. The year was 1997. I remember telling the man who led our trip that these people could never maintain liberty. They would give their liberty over to a dictator before long, because they didn’t know the Biblical principles of civil liberty. Today, we see this very thing happening there. Why is there more liberty in the Western hemisphere than in the East? The reason can be traced back to the first century. The Apostle Paul was led by God to go west with the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ. In Acts 16 is recorded the story of Paul turning westward with the Gospel of the Kingdom as a result of a revelation from God. God would send others to the East, but somehow they didn’t communicate as well as Paul that the Gospel was good news about a kingdom that was to permeate all earthly kingdoms. The message of Christ in the East came to be applied to the individual and the family only, not to the institutions of the culture. Thus, even to this day, education and government in the East are tools in satan’s hands to communicate and enforce hatred against Christ and His liberty. On the other hand, in the West, people who turned to Christ were taught by the Apostles that the Gospel was good news about the kingdom of Christ. That kingdom would begin in the heart when one received Christ as Lord, but it must not be allowed to stop there. It must permeate the institutions of education, economy, and government, by believers working in those institutions and releasing the message there. As a result of this teaching, the Gospel influenced England early on and steadily grew there until finally a band of Englishmen, we know as the Pilgrims, came to America and (in the purest form thus far) planted the seed of a Christian Republic. America would grow from the early 1600’s through the 1800’s to be the freest and most prosperous nation on earth. Because the Spirit of God was allowed to freely communicate the truth of God, liberty grew. This was the natural result of sharing the truth of the Bible. Jesus had told us: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) That freedom produced not only internal freedom in the heart, but also external freedom in the civil realm as well. This is why Jedediah Morse, the Father of American geography, would say in 1799: “To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness which mankind now enjoys. In proportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminished in any nation…in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom, and [embrace] the miseries of complete [dictatorship]… Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.” (Morse, Jedediah. April 25, 1799, in Jedediah Morse's Election Sermon given at Charleston, Mass., taken from an original in the Evans collection compiled by the American Antiquarian Society. Verna M. Hall, Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America (San Francisco: Foundation for America Christian Education, 1975), pp. v, 145.)
Are you, by your Christian influence, increasing or diminishing the liberty in this nation? 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. |
