Take a Stand for True Liberty, Part 5

So what makes liberty work is the disciplined, responsible exercise of freedom. Why is that so hard for us? It requires a Christian worldview for that kind of liberty to flourish. Without the proper worldview liberty will degenerate into the selfish, me centered licentiousness we are seeing in American society today.

We're having trouble maintaining liberty today and tottering on the brink of totalitarianism precisely because we, as a nation, have lost our moral compass. We've given up the biblical concept of human sinfulness that must be curbed with God-ordained laws because they seem to us to be restrictive to our desires, and we've exchanged it for a concept that says we're all moving toward becoming better and better people by virtue of some kind of biological and social evolution. The problem is that evolution has no basis for an objective ethic beyond what benefits the self. This reinforces a certain selfish tendency in our fallen human nature and feeds the further deterioration of the fabric of society. When that happens people begin to feel insecure, and history is replete with stories of whole nations selling themselves into servitude in exchange for security.

What has been called the "American Experiment" is on the verge of failure because our nation's political and intellectual leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cut us loose from the worldview that made that experiment viable. For the most part our churches are so compromised and infected with the worldview of our surrounding society that we're not even in a position to try to call the nation back. What is needed is a repentance in the churches on a massive scale. God's people must forsake every vestige of the prevailing worldview and live their lives before God and the world as a counter-cultural revolution of devotion to him and his will before we can even begin to think of calling the nation back. "Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Rom 12: 2, ESV). Forsake the selfish way of "me" first and embrace God's way as revealed in the Bible and take a stand for true liberty.