SWORD OF THE SPIRIT                                                                                               1120

“Asked to Leave”

... The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region. – Matthew 8:28-34

Our nation was founded by Christians who fled religious persecution in Europe. Madison’s original proposal for a bill of rights provision concerning religion read: “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed.” – Annals of Congress 434 June 8, 1789

The House and Senate committee at the time, reduced the wording into its final form as the first clause in the United States Bill of Rights which states in part that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;’

The term, ‘Separation of Church and State’ is not found in our Constitution. The idea was originally stated by Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, who believed that any government involvement in the church would corrupt the church. The most famous use of the phrase was by Thomas Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. In it, Jefferson declared that when the American people adopted the establishment clause in the Second Amendment that they built a “wall of separation between the church and state.”

Over the last 200 plus years, America has steadily become a melting pot of religious belief systems. The resulting conflict has presented our judicial system with conundrums that they have ‘solved’ by increasingly moving our nation’s secularism to the point of infringement upon our individual free exercise of our faith.

As a nation we are asking Jesus to leave.

In 1962, we took prayer out of public schools. This has extrapolated into preventing any mention of personal beliefs in God or Jesus in student speech or on clothing as well as praying before a meal in the cafeteria. We have asked Jesus to leave.

In January 2019 the Democrat-controlled House Natural Resources Committee produced a draft rules document that removed “So help you God” from oaths required of witnesses before the committee. We have asked Jesus to leave.

Challenges abound resulting in the removal of the Ten Commandments as a moral compass from public places. Christian businesses from Chick-fil-A to small Christian-owned bakeries, photographers and the like are being sued and driven out of business because their ‘full and equal rights of conscience’ are being infringed upon by an amoral government ruling in favor of immoral entities who feel discriminated against by people governed by God’s moral code.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. – John 3:19

Our country has asked Jesus to leave. We need to invite Him back.