Ten Commandments for Christian Citizens
1. Honor Your Citizenship
You and I do not deserve to be Americans, we are priveleged to be Americans. We have the right to see our faults, monitor our failures, speak out piece, debate our point, grumble if we choose, challenge the positions of elected officials, be angered by moral erosion, but it is not our right to dishonor our country.
It is to the extent that we cherish our priveleges and exercise our role in preserving national rudiments that we are responsible citizens. To love American is to honor all that is good about her, while seeking to protect her for all that would destroy her goodness.
2. Know Your Heritage
Among the world's nations the United States of America may be young, but our heritage is no less rich or distinctive. Unless we are watchful, however, there are those who will methodically make a totally secular country of us despite the great Judeo-Christian foundation underlying the birth of this nation. The revisionists, with their humanist-secular agenda, should be constantly impeded and challenged by those who know, and know they know, the American story.
3. Live Your Values
It is one thing to extol high moral values and to be hard on those who seek to lower them. It is another thing to prove your morality in the body and behavior of your flesh!
Live such good lives among the pagans that, that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us (1 Pet. 2:12).
4. Maintain Your Prayer Life
If you believe as I, in the divine inspiration of the entire Word of God, you must give as much reverence to 1 Tim 2 as to John 3. We are to pray for government officials. I believe we are to pray for their salvation. We are to pray for their wisdom, teachability, and sense of accountability. And for those with whom we disagree, we are to pray, avoiding a hostile and punitive spirit. Above all, we are to pray for God's intervention and protection from human error in matters of the nation's life or destiny.
The Key 16
Thursday is prayer day for national and local political leaders (SBCPray.net).
5. Voice Your Convictions
WE are to do so through every legitimate channel given us, with a courteous forthrightness. "For it is God's willthat by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men (1 Pet. 2:15).
6. Discipline Your Criticisms
Not everything about American is wrong. Not everything which takes place in Congress, the State House, or in City Council is in need of our protest. Public officials and wholesome legislation, as well as positive influences, need to be commended and encouraged by Christian citizens.
7. Annalyze Your Zeal
Needless to say, we cannot give equal time and effort to every noble crusade in which Christians can be involved. Hence, a certain amount of selectivity must be exercised. We must be honest, however, in about what motivates that selectivity. God forbid we would ever be selectively moral!
For us to be strong and vocal in our opposition to abortion, the homosexual agenda, pornography, and the gambling lobby, while appearantly suffering from lockjaw on matters of racial injustice, may reveal that we are more motivated by personal appeal that moral consistency!
8. Protect Your Family
There can be no question that at the bulls' eye of Satan's strategy to take America is our home and family life. Again we must stand against the revisionists that who seek to redefine the family to suit the corruptions they dare to call family values for an enlightened America.
9. Extend Your Compassion
Too often we assume our sole task is resisting social and moral evil is to publicly condemn it! If we expect to be hears when we say our Lord hate the sin but loves the sinner, we will have to be living proof texts with hands-on ministries to those victimized by their own sin.
10. Declare Your Hope
In all our strivings for tht which is right for America, we must not place the hope of it all in the lap of human response. As vital as our efforts may be, as crucial as the debates over moral issues may be, the hope of America belongs squarely in the hands of a soveriegn God, the Judge of earth, who will always do right! His side wins!
Careless seems the great Avenger;
history's pages but record,
One deathgrapple in the darkness
'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet the scaffold sways the future,
and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above his own.
James Russell Lowell. "The Present Crisis," Masterpieces of Religious Verse (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1948).
In God we must trust!
Source: Charles G. Fuller. "Ten Commandments for Christian Citizens" in Christians in the Public Square: Faith in Practice? eds. Richard D. Land & Lee Holloway (Nashville, TN: ERLC Publications, 1996).
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