Liderazgo para la justicia social: una caracterización general

Now, here’s the second thing I want you to learn. Reproach is the humiliation of a nation. Reproach is the humiliation of a nation. God says, “Sin is a reproach to any people.” America today is living in reproach. Now the American dream has begun to, dissolve. What happened is this. We came through an agonizing Civil War. We got ourselves back together and turned to God and then we had WWI and God gave us victory in WWI. But rather than giving God the praise we began to live. We wanted liberty without responsibility. The flapper rage came. The Roaring Twenties came. The Great Depression came. We had failed to understand that earlier blessings had come from Almighty God and when the Great Depression came, it came as a result of our debauchery; as a result of our loss of character. Then we began to turn to the

government—to ask the government to help us out and great social programs began to come in America—government programs and everybody said this is wonderful. Look what the government is going to give us. But the government can’t give us anything that doesn’t take from us. And so what the government began to do was to begin to grow and redistribute the wealth and take theirs off the top.

You know the government always assumes more and more authority when the people lose more and more character. And as character goes down control goes up and government begins to grow. And the government began to provide for people but when the government provides the government must, as night follows day, must control.

I’ve told you before about a man who had some wild pigs that were rooting up his farm and he tried to capture them and he couldn’t. And a man said, “I can capture those pigs for you” and he went out and he put some food on the ground and withdrew and the pigs came out of the woods and ate the food. He did that several days and then he put a fence post up and the pigs came and ate the food. That fence post didn’t bother them. And then he put another and another and another. The pigs didn’t like it

necessarily, but no harm done, they were getting fat and sleek being fed by someone else. No longer did they root in the woods for their own acorns. Somebody would feed them. And then after awhile a corral was built and the wire was strung and only a narrow gate and the pigs learned to go in and out that gate to get their food. And then the bar was dropped, the trap set; the pigs captured. And the man said, “That’s simple, anything that depends upon me for its food, I can control.”

Now when the government gets people to depend upon them, the government says I will be a subsidy. It follows as night follows day when we lose character at the same time we lose freedom. And we have watched in America as one fence post after another has been set around us and were still eating out of the government trough. And yet the government is only giving to us what it has first taken from us. And now, folks we’ve turned into a welfare state. Now, not only does the government then begin to provide and the government begins to control but if you’re not careful the government can begin to oppress. You see government grows as strong as the weak character people will allow it to grow. And that’s what has happened in America today. Remember what Alexander Hamilton said, “People get the kind of government they deserve.”

Now you say, but Pastor Rogers, we still have a lot of freedoms in America, that’s true. But be we’re living in the shadow of a constitutional government that was founded by our fathers and forefathers. And that shadow is quickly receding over the horizon.

Now, if we don’t do something, if we don’t have a spiritual awakening in America, if there’s not a return to the first principles, which is really a return to the God that made us a nation, if we don’t return—here’s what’s gonna happen. There will be a

disappearance of the middle class and you’ll have two classes in America; the very rich and the very poor. Travel around, go to third world countries and you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll have the very rich and the very poor. The very rich will be by-and-large those who are in government or those who have governmental connections. And the rest will make up the masses that keep it all going.

In 1930, there was one governmental worker for every 205 people. Today, the ratio

is more like 1 out of 5. What has happened—as character diminishes, government grows. Today, there is one dependent and one bureaucrat for every three working people. As this continues, the middle class goes. There are the very rich and the very poor. What is the purpose of government? Read Romans 13; government is here for protection to punish evil doers to defend the land. He beareth not the sword in vain. But when you get the idea that the government is not here to protect but to provide, then you’re in difficulties. Our founding fathers knew this. Our founding fathers said that government is to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare. Not provide the general welfare, provide the common defense. You and I can’t raise an army. We shouldn’t become vigilantes. We’re here to protect one another. That’s what the purpose is—to provide the common defense, to promote the general welfare.

The Bible says, if a man will not work neither should he eat. We’re not talking about people that cannot work or people who are temporarily out of work—they ought to be helped, indeed they should. But when we had a welfare type of state, a form of

socialism, then we have gotten away from the teachings, I believe, of the Word of God.

One person has wisely said, we are in deep trouble when we look upon our

government as a cow to be milked rather than a watchdog to be fed. Our government is here to protect us. Now, once the government begins to provide, then the government begins to control and they say if you’re getting government subsidy your gonna do as we do. Then the government wants to begin to oppress. Sometimes the government wants the minds of its adherents—to keep the rank and file; to do what big daddy government wants it to do. And so now the government has to control the minds and a how do you start with the minds? Well you start with the children. So, what do you do? You get a National Education Association and a Department of Education and you begin to take little children; you take the Ten Commandments out and your values clarification in. And say remember there are no fixed rules of right and wrong, we can’t say there’s a fixed rule of right and wrong—that’s mixing religion and politics. And so we take that down we put values clarification in and then we begin to talk about the glories of the welfare state and then we begin to talk about a one-world government and a new world order. And the little children grow up in a nation that our founding fathers did not know.

Adolf Hitler said in 1920, “Give me the minds of the children and in one generation I will give you the fascist super state.” And he did it. Stalin in Soviet Russia did the same thing. You see out of our education system there with compulsory education the Bible is out, prayer is out, Ten Commandments out, creation out, humanism and its x-rated textbooks is in.

Here’s an excerpt from an address given at a childhood educational seminar by a professor of educational psychiatry at Harvard University. Listen to this, every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill. Because he comes to school with

certain allegiances toward our founding fathers toward our elected offices, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. Little children are sick, because they believe in America first, because they believe in God, because they have an allegiance to their parents, that’s sick. And then this professor from Harvard went on to say, “It’s up to you teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.” Now, the humanist organization’s very small, but very active and very powerful in the United States.

Here is an excerpt from an article taken from a magazine called The Humanist , January/February issue, 1983, on page 26: “the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith” let me read that over again: “the battle for

humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. The classroom must, and will become the arena of conflict between the old and the new. The rotting corpse of Christianity and the faith of humanism.”

They say we’ve got our Sunday school classes five days a week. And what we’re going to do is to we’re going to bring in a new society. The government provides, the government controls, the government oppresses. Why? Because of a lack of character on the part of people. “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” Now the truth of the matter is that God holds us as individuals, as parents responsible to teach our children. We need to teach our children our heritage; we need to teach them our history. And as we talked in this series on The Ten Commandments, it is to go from God to grandfather to father to children or grandfather; to be passed down that way.