SCRIPTURE: Why are you so angry?” the LORD asked Cain. “Why do you look so dejected? You will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master.” Genesis 4:6-7, NLT
QUOTE: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams, Founding Father, 2nd President of the United States
THOUGHT: I remember the day my little girl came home from school and told me she couldn’t take her Bible to school again. She had put it in her locker for an after-school kids’ club. I told her it wasn’t true, but the damage was done and I don’t think she ever put it in her backpack again.
That was maybe 15 years ago. At my elementary school just three decades before that, we had a morning prayer and Scripture, followed by everyone standing and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Faith and freedom coexisted, and we were rich in understanding what it meant to be a citizen of the greatest country in the world, even if the kids (or teachers, or administration) didn’t understand or live out what they heard perfectly. By contrast, my children were taught the Bible was forbidden in elementary school and by high school and college, to hate their country.
Forces have been at work training us that all things are relative, even virtues like honesty, integrity, and charity. Increasingly, we have been schooled in the separation of church and state. It has come to mean something different than the Founding Father’s such as John Adams had in mind. He said moral and spiritual life were absolutely necessary for the Constitution to operate as it should, not divorced from public life as if somehow the state is virtuous on its own accord. The state is a reflection of the will of the people, not the other way around. You literally can’t separate them, you can only train a people not to live them. Adams’ belief is as old as the Bible: if we don’t personally do what is right, sin is crouching at the door with a desire to control us.
Its 2021, and I think there’s a whale going through our net.
PRAYER: Oh God, we are a people with breaking nets. Could you, the God who loves a free people who love him, come and strengthen our hands for mending and our hearts for holding up both truth and justice?
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