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".........A slogan of the American Revolution, which was
so distressing to the emissaries of the King of England
that it was found in correspondence sent back to England,
was the line, 'We have no king but Jesus.'
Tax collectors came asking for that
which belonged to the king, and colonists frequently said,
'We have no king but Jesus.' It found its way into the
fundamental documents of this great country.
You could quote the Declaration (of
Independence) with me: 'We hold these truths to be
self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by
their creator with certain inalienable rights.'
Unique among the nations, America
recognized the source of our character as being godly and
eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have
understood that our source is eternal, America has been
different.
We have no king but Jesus. My mind,
thinking about that once, raced back a couple of thousand
years when Pilate stepped before the people in Jerusalem
and said, 'Who would you have that I release unto you,
Barabbas or Jesus, which is called the Christ.' And when
they said, 'Barabbas,' he said, 'What about Jesus, the
king of the Jews?' The outcry was, 'We have no king but
Caesar.'(Matthew
Chap. 27)
There's a difference between a culture that has no king
but Caesar, no standard but the civil authority, and a
culture that has no king but Jesus, no standard but the
eternal authority.
When you have no king but Caesar, you
release Barabbas, criminality, destruction, thievery, the
lowest and the least. When you have no king but Jesus, you
release the eternal, you release the highest and the best,
you release virtue, you release potential. It is not
accidental that America has been the home of the brave and
the land of the free, the place where mankind has had the
greatest of all opportunities to approach the potential
that God has placed within us. It has been because we knew
that we were endowed, not by the king, but by the creator,
with certain inalienable rights.
If America is to be great in the future,
it will be if we understand that our source is not civic
and temporal, but our source is godly and eternal, endowed
by the creator with rights of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.........."
The Honorable John Ashcroft,
Senator, Attorney General, United States
Of America |
