Proclaiming Liberty In The Public Square

  Oklahoma is home to a spiritual culture with very specific values. Quite often the people have insisted on making laws which extent our common convictions into mandates.  But that shortcut has come back to bite us.

•  Blue laws don't lead to more sincere worship on Sundays.
•  Marriage restrictions haven't led to a low divorce rate.
•  Drug laws have led to record incarceration. City, county, and state budgets are untenable in providing the food, shelter, medical, and legal expenses.

  At the heart of the crisis we must acknowledge that our spiritual return to legalism has impacted our view of the role of government. We must face the reality that we relied way too much on legalism in our culture.  Now, political forces are gathered and empowered to enforce laws which are antithetical to our Oklahoma values. We have no philosophical argument against this so long as we maintain that we were correct in doing the same practice.

  In the debut message of Jesus' public ministry, he attended synagogue on the Sabbath. When called upon to address the attendees, Jesus read from the prophecy of Isaiah;

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,"

  You can continue your legalism in your church if you want, but I would urge our culture to rediscover the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles to the early church.

  It would be very effective to rediscover the Libertarian message of the Christian faith. The Apostle Paul spent much of his letter to the Romans, in a discourse about spiritual liberty. His letter to the Galatians was even more blunt about libertarian tenants of the gospel message. The Book of Acts was continually confronting spiritual bondage to either sin, or the law of Moses. Peter, James, Paul, and other church leaders were continually pressing the issue of Liberty from both sin and the laws which had been ineffective to rescue people from bondage to sin.

David Van Risseghem