Parson to Person - Electing righteous leaders

?Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.? Proverbs 14:34

Did you know that from the beginning of the United States of America up until the 1950s, election sermons were given? At the beginning of each legislative session, civil leaders ? the governor, lieutenant governor, and members of the House and Senate would gather with religious leaders from across the state, and a minister would address the assembly of civil servants newly-elected and preach to them from the Bible. It was called an election sermon. It would cover Biblical principles of fundamental law, inalienable rights given by God, even a republican form of government based on representation, which is spoken of in scripture.

They would preach what the Bible taught on education, economics, criminal justice, immigration or any other subject with which civil servants would deal. Civil officials frequently ordered the election sermon to be printed (at government expense) and distributed across the state.

Why did they do this? Because our national birth certificate warranted it. Here?s what they said, ?We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments were instituted among men.?

They knew rights came from God and belonged to everyone, not just the privileged. These rights were entitled to them by the ?law of nature and nature?s God.? They recognized that without these laws they would not rule or govern justly. So they wanted to be knowledgeable about God and His law to help civil servants rule well.

Just as Proverbs 14:34 reveals, ?Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.? The very first act of Congress in 1782 was to commission a publishing of the scriptures in America so that the people had free access to them.

As President Harry Truman would say almost three centuries later, ?The fundamental basis of this nation?s law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don?t think we emphasize that enough these days.? No wonder President Andrew Jackson said, ?It (the Bible) is the rock on which our Republic rests.?

Yet, in just the last 60 years, we have endeavored to remove all Biblical influence from civil government in the name of separation of Church and State. This phrase is not in any of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, or Constitution. It was a phrase President Thomas Jefferson used when he wrote to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut who were concerned Jefferson was going to establish the Anglican Church as the state religion in the United States. But Jefferson assured them this would not happen, even though approval for using the Capitol as a church had been given by both the House and the Senate on Dec. 4, 1800. He assured them, ?There is a wall of separation between church and state,? that would prevent civil government from intruding into religious matters, or establishing a state religion. But never would it stop religious freedom from influencing civil government. In the last 60 years, that has drastically changed.

More than ever before in our history as a nation, we desperately need preachers to declare the Word of God to civil/ government servants, that ?righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.?

It should be our responsibility then to elect those people who we believe will govern our land in righteousness and in respect to God and His laws. For ?When the righteous are in authority the people rejoice, but when the wicked bear rule, the people mourn.? (Proverbs 29:2)