life. faithful.

 Dear God, I know You were there at the founding of our nation. The founding fathers weren't perfect by any means, but they did their best to consult You at every step. They wanted to please You, to create a nation that would serve as Your light to the world. For generations, that was the case. Our nation sat as a beacon on the hill, a light in the dark, salt to preserve and help heal a broken world. We have been seen by the rest of the world as a Christian nation, and for the majority of the life of our nation, that's what we've tried to be. As a nation, we claimed Your promises for ourselves--we claimed the covenant. Like the founding fathers, we weren't perfect. We made wrong choices. We promoted attitudes and actions that went against Your plan, even when we knew better. We started moving further from Your plan, pushing You aside. We demanded that people should abandon their faith when they entered the public square--insisting that freedom of religion meant freedom

 Pastor Allen Jackson recently said, "I think when you accept your Christian identity card for the Kingdom, you forfeit your neutrality with evil." In my writing here, I haven't been very vocal when it comes to politics. A quick count based on the "politics" tag shows 37 of 409 posts, so 9% through the years. Of those, I've been pretty diplomatic in my writing--encouraging you to do the research and exercise your right and responsibility to vote, no matter who you vote for. I've basically remained neutral...but I don't think that is something we can do any longer. If you listen to the loudest voices in our society right now, we as Christians should keep our beliefs out of our politics. We are told to keep quiet, and if we do on occasion try to speak up for biblical truths we are told that our words are hateful and bigoted. As a result, most of us have listened. We've pretty much agreed to sit down and shut up. It's past time for us to stand u