The Gathering Storm: A 5-day DevotionalExemplo

God, truth, and liberty. We need to discipline ourselves to say these words together. We must teach them to our children and to our neighbors. We must cherish them in our schools and in our homes; and teach them in our churches. The great challenge to religious liberty in our times is no threat at all to liberal religion. Those churches and denominations have long ago surrendered to the moral revolutionaries and they simply do not believe anything sufficiently theological to get any of them into trouble. They can afford to put quotation marks around religious liberty.

We must defend the right to believe in enough theology to get us into trouble with anyone, anywhere, in a secular age. We must defend the right of Christians, along with all other believers, to be faithful in the public square as well as in the privacy of our own homes, hearts, and churches. We must defend the right to teach our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We must defend the rights of Christian schools to be Christian—and to order our institutions around the Word of God without fearing the crushing power of the state. We must defend the right of generations of those yet unborn, to know the liberties we have known and now defend.

Oddly enough, this will mean defending florists and cake bakers and fire chiefs, and pharmacists, and teachers, and preachers, and moms and dads who dare to resist the secular powers that be. 

These are days that will require courage, conviction, and clarity of vision. We are in a fight for the most basic liberties God has given humanity, every single one of us, made in His image. Religious liberty is being redefined as mere freedom of worship, but it will not long survive if it is reduced to a private sphere with no public voice. The very freedom to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake.