Separation Anxiety

SCRIPTURE:  Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint (or are discouraged). Proverbs 29:18 ESV

QUOTE: Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action. – Prime Minister William Pitt to William Wilberforce, 1897

THOUGHT: Just like a child gets anxious when separated from its mother, so a people and nation separated from the nurture and sustenance of God gets anxious.

We live in a very anxious nation and world. Go look at the stats on rising levels of anxiety, suicide, drug abuse, violence. You likely don’t need me to tell you.

When William Wilberforce considered leaving parliament to pastor, his friends John Newton and William Pitt urged him to serve Christ in his role in government, and how I thank God they did and he listened. It was a time in history when England, the U.S., and the world needed his prophetic voice, preaching God’s truth that slavery was a scourge on humanity and needed to be outlawed.

A century and a quarter later, we are suffering widely from separation anxiety. We’ve choked down the current brand of separation of church and state long enough. We don’t need separation from God’s truth in government, politics, institutions, marketplace, schools, homes – or in the human heart – and that is not what the founders intended! We need unity of thought and purpose. Like a child, frightened and lonely, we need strong arms around us. We’re casting off restraint for lack of a vision.

It was fair of our forefathers to talk about the separation of church and state in a way that it is not for us. They were harbingers of a new, free country, not forced to serve or obey the changing whims of a pope or state religion or king, but free under the authority of Creator God. The founders knew there was a correlation between private virtue and good government, and hence their goal was to encode a freedom that encouraged private virtue, which in turn would ensure that good government (and politicians and the people who elected them) would endure. We’ve come to day that they would have rued.

Good government is collapsing in our country because good citizens have taken a hands’ off approach to government. Separation anxiety and lack of a prophetic vision and voice, and as the KJV puts it, “the people perish.”

PRAYER: Rise up, O saints of God! Have done with lesser things; give heart and soul and mind and strength to serve the King of kings. Rise up O saints of God! The kingdom tarries long. Bring in the day of Christlike love and end the night of wrong.