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Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

Religious Liberty Part 1

Father in heaven, Lord, thank you that we can come together and study your word.

And this is what brings us life, this is what brings us protection, this is what gives us direction.

And so we gather together to ask the Lord's blessing.

And he promised that where 2 or 3 are gathered in your name, you can be in the midst.

So join us whether we're on location here or online.

We thank you, we come in Christ's name, amen.

I wanna talk tonight about religious liberty and I want to talk tomorrow about religious liberty at 8 in the morning.

And then I'll talk about something else at 11.

But every year, just the Sabbath before Thanksgiving, For the last, I don't know, 25 years, I've talked about religious liberty.

So I'm keeping in that tradition of talking about an area of religious liberty.

Edmund Burke, have you ever heard of Edmund Burke?

He was a famous Irish statesman in the late 1700s, and he had this to say, men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their appetites.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

It is ordained in the internal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.

That the less self-control you have, the more external control you need.

And essentially that men who are intemperate really can't be free.

So a lot of People were talking at that time about whether or not, you know, people could actually be free.

And of course, America was coming up at that time and religious freedom was being talked about and was being discussed.

A little man, James Madison, actually named my son after this particular person, James Madison.

He said this as he was writing about the American experiment, because that's what those attorneys called it, those attorneys of the Revolution.

We have staked our future, he wrote, on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves.

We've staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves.

We've had some experiments here on our own campus about that.

Can people be trusted to follow the rules?

And we have some experiments going on right now on that.

But the framers view was that governance can flow up from the people if they're self-governing.

If they're freely obeying the dictates of inwardly possessed and commonly shared moral values, you can have a society that comes together in moral unity of conscience.

And to control willful human beings, there was an infinite capacity, with an infinite capacity to rationalize those moral values must rest on something independent of men's own free will, it must flow from a transcendent supreme being.

How many of you have ever heard discussions about natural law?

Somehow there's this natural law that can be thought about and discovered by rational thought and it transcends any positive law, any human law.

I think there's actually a supernatural law that's above that.

And that supernatural transcendent law from a transcendent supreme being is the law that frames freedom.

For the framers of the American experiment, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people, a people who recognized there was a transcendent moral order that was antecedent to both the state and man-made law, and who had the discipline to control themselves according to his enduring principles.

Essentially, they believed there was a God, the God of the sanctuary, and in the sanctuary there was a way to take care of what was done wrong in the sacrificial system, a way into holiness and the holy place through partaking of the light of the word and the bread of life and through the intercession of God on their behalf who lives to make intercession for them and then allowing him to do what only he can do, to write his law, his moral law on their hearts and their minds.

We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

If you wanna spend your time profitably, don't try and elect judges that will legislate morality from the bench and tell everybody what to do.

Ultimately, people's minds need to be changed through the power of God with God's law written on their hearts and their minds.

And that's the purpose of Christianity, isn't it not?

The job of the church is to promote liberty, freedom, and self-control through conversion, Not through political action.

So let's look at a chapter tonight that talks about this.

It's found in the epistle to the Galatians.

And in Galatians, we have a case study in liberty.

Galatians chapter 5 and verse 1, stand therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free.

Do not be untangled in the yoke of bondage.

In other words, for freedom that Christ Set us free.

So the ground of freedom, the ground of liberty, the ground of religious liberty, religious freedom, is found in Christ who has made us free.

In the Old Testament, we see the God of freedom setting people free from Egyptian slavery.

I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Bondage.

And then He shares what James would later call the law of liberty in James 2.12.

The 10 Commandments then are the definition of liberty and they're also the definition of love, Paul says in Romans chapter 13, love is the fulfilling of the law, and then he quotes the 10 Commandments.

So love and liberty and freedom are discovered in the Law of Liberty, the 10 Commandments.

And the New Covenant then, in the Old Testament, first articulated in the Old Testament by Jeremiah, and then re-articulated in the New Testament by the author of Hebrews in chapter 8 and 10, shows that this law of freedom has always been God's ideal.

I will write my law in your heart, in your mind.

And this is the foundation of freedom and the foundation of liberty.

His entire ministry is based on these ideals of freedom.

Indeed, in his very first sermon, you find it in Luke chapter 4, Luke chapter 4 and verse 18.

Here he's preaching his very first sermon.

A spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and to set free those who are oppressed and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

So Jesus in his very first sermon, he's talking about what?

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Religious Liberty Part 1

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