RISE UP: ENGAGE
by Rich Farm
“Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.” – John Wayne
“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.” – Jim Hightower
Throughout the ages there have always been those that attempt to suppress and control another for monetary gain and control. Egypt did it with Israel, and Great Britain attempted to do it with the colonies. We see by the views and documents of our founders that we are created with inalienable rights only given by our Creator. If we look at the Scripture, we see that God’s intention for us is to live in freedom under His benevolent, loving, and kind kingship. Yet there have been many through the ages that attempt to claim that kingship out of the Creator’s hands and enslave people through fear, force, and monetary taxing. We have even seen this the past year with the Covid. They have attempted to control the American people and others throughout the world through fear. Early on it was with the number of deaths globally, then when it was exposed, they inflated numbers and it became the total number of cases.
They attempt to control our everyday lives from going to work, shopping, and even our places of worship. If you at all pay attention to what is going on in the world it is an all-out assault on Judea-Christian conservative values, the nuclear family, and the minds of our youth. As we talked about in the last article many are content with passivity and just letting things happen. However, if you want to save the values you hold true it will require action. It will require a fight. We are at a point in our history where we cannot idly stand by any more. If we do, we will lose everything we know to be true about America and her freedoms.
We need to remember it only takes a remnant to stir up the masses. We see this with the 12 spies that were sent out to scope out the land God promised to Israel. God used two of them to spark faith in the people to believe and trust in God to take the land. If you can take a stand for what God wants for us you will be the spark of a blazing fire of His Spirit and presence. It only takes a spark to start a fire. It only took a William Tyndale or a Martin Luther to stand against the corrupt Catholic church and their hunger for power and control. It only took a Dietrich Bonhoeffer to dissent against the Nazi movement. It took a Martin Luther King to stand for unity and against racism. If your stand is for Truth, you are an agent of liberty and justice.
Are you willing to put aside all comfortability for the fight? Are you willing to dissent in the face of a powerful enemy be it religious leaders or political tyrants? Will you fight even if it means losing your reputation or even your life? If you value everything our founders had done to establish this nation and its freedoms? If you value everything our military from then until now has done to keep them? If you value what Christ had done for us by giving up his position in heaven to come to earth and live a life like mortal men and die the death He died to set us free from bondage? Then the answer should be a resounding yes. We need to be willing to put everything on the line for the cause of Christ and our liberties afforded to us in this great nation.
General George S. Patton said, “Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.” The choice is yours. Will you stand for morality, truth, liberty, and justice? Will you show the courage necessary, or let it all slip away for a false sense of comfortability?
An Enemy of the Founding Beliefs
by Susan Snelling
The Founding Fathers were clear on where they stood, and the Framers expressed it succinctly in the Constitution. Some of those beliefs are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the First Amendment; the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment; limited national government, and the majority of power with the states in the Tenth Amendment. Basically, they limited the power of the government to interfere in the lives of the people. The founding principles, which are the foundation of the U.S. Constitution, are based on the belief in divine providence and the sovereignty of God.
Has America become an enemy of its founding principles? Turning our backs on those beliefs will not bode well for America. The principles in the Constitution hold the country together. To violate those freedoms and protections placed in this great document is to dismantle what has protected this nation from becoming like other failed nations of the earth. Nations where tyranny, despotism, and behaviors inconsistent with what makes for a free people lead to its downfall. The Constitution is a safeguard for freedom and from tyranny.
How can America become an enemy of its founding principles? In a statement that can apply to all evils but specifically addresses that of abortion, Archbishop Chaput wrote in a letter to his congregation in 2012:
Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.
Archbishop Chaput has it right when he talks about how evil works. People who violate America’s founding beliefs demand tolerance for every behavior they choose, yet they are in turn intolerant of those with opposing beliefs. When the factions are weak, they talk tolerance but when they gain power they follow the way of evil, which is death and destruction; whether it’s the death of freedom of others or of those innocent lives that have been robbed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People become suppressed through an oppressive and powerful state. Tyranny, which the Founding Fathers fought against and framed the Constitution to protect us from, becomes the kind of government we end up with.
As the Archbishop states, America is not immune to becoming an enemy of its founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God. Only by a virtuous people who educate themselves on the founding principles of this nation and become active in promoting those principles can America be protected from its demise. Adhering to its founding principles is how America can survive, but evil will not have it. Evil preaches tolerance and then turns on the people to destroy everything good, everything innocent, everything pure.
Understanding the original intent of the Framers and the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, and then getting involved in the duties of a citizen to hold elected officials accountable to those founding beliefs can help to secure America as it was intended. It will keep tyranny from turning it into something else. Right now, America is something other than the Constitutional Republic it was supposed to be. It is freedom and liberty for those in leadership and those who voted for them or serve their purposes, but not for the tens of millions of law-abiding American citizens with an opposing political view.
There is a concerted effort by the current administration and the Department of Justice and its under agencies to label conservatives and/or Trump supporters, although surreptitiously, as white supremacists and domestic terrorists, treating them differently under the law from their counterparts. “Equal Justice Under the Law” appears more distant all the time while hiding the truth of what is too often occurring.
Equal Justice? Well, it all depends. This weaponization of the government and its agencies against any American, in this case, a large number of them, is the result of America turning on its founding beliefs. May a virtuous people arise against the enemy of those principles, be it abortion or other evils. May they defend that which so many gave their all for. America is worth it.