I ask you: what is the price of Liberty? Not what have others payed that you might have it. What are you willing to pay to keep it.
I have asked myself this question countless times over the past months. What would I be willing to pay to protect my Liberty, and more importantly the Liberty of my family and my nation?
Now consider what is the cost of Liberty. What may be required of you in order to protect Liberty? The answer, if we know the first thing about history, is quite clear. All.
Now I ask you a third thing. How do these two compare? If one does not meet the high standard of the other, you are now depending upon the courage and the dedication of your compatriots as well as your fathers to protect your liberty. And you may be assured that when a country judges the cost of Liberty a price too high to pay, what liberty they have will not long be theirs.
This is not fear mongering, this is not melodrama, this is simple fact. Liberty comes at a price. I submit to you that our country has long since judged Liberty to costly a gem to maintain. We rather want the security of government backed loans, "guaranteed" health care, and guaranteed schooling. (I do not say guaranteed education) And also I say with Benjamin Franklin, "They that give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety."
WAKE UP! We sit in our living rooms and complain and argue to one another about the politicians up in Washington, or the goons running the local school board, and then go on our daily lives like there's nothing we can do to change it.
Decide now whether Liberty is worth the price which she demands. If so then stand up and fight for her. And if not, then I don't want to hear another word about what you think of the most recent boondoggle coming out of Washington. We must be involved. You do not change the course of a battle by sitting on the sidelines and shouting ridicule at the enemy. Gear up and get out there! You win the battle by controlling the tide, and right now the enemies of Liberty have stormed the field and the few voices still out there are fighting back to back, just trying to survive.
The first thing that I need to do is educate myself. I know far to little about far too many issues. Think of this as training. If you're going to win the war, there must be intensive, rigorous, demanding training. The second thing I'm going to do (and I say this with all trepidation, cause I know my own track record) is write. More my own benefit, than anything. I don't even know if anyone has read my previous post, or if anyone will read this one. But I find that putting my thoughts into writing, clarifies them in my own mind. The third thing I must do is to pray. Pray for opportunities to be involved. I have no idea what form that will take, but if the battle is to be won, we must all be involved. There can't be any hanging back and hoping to avoid the conflict.
I'll end there, ignoring everything I have ever learned about how to write as it pertains to a sound introduction and conclusion format. think of this as a To Be Continued...
Please bear with my prolific grammatical errors. I fix them as I see them, but confess I am far too lazy to do a real proof reading of my posts.
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2 comments:
I might as well comment on here, since it will be probably be more coherent.
I agree about the price of liberty - if we are not willing to strive for it, we will lose it. I also agree that much of what we do these days amounts to complaining in our living rooms.
However, I must ask: what should my goal in this life be? Is my goal to be free from oppression? Is my goal to live my life as I think is best? Is it to enjoy the fruit of my labor? I ask because Christ's goal was none of those things. Christ's goal, indeed, was to be oppressed that we might be free; to give up His life that others could live; to ceaselessly give up his claim to the fruit of his labor so that others could share with Him in His enjoyment of His Father.
It's not that my personal liberty is necessarily diametrically opposed to the magnification of God's name...but I am unable, in my own mind, to draw a direct and unambiguous line from the preservation of my own liberty (whether political, religious, or otherwise) to His glory based on what I read in His Word.
I may elaborate further in responses to your other posts. Please keep posting - I really appreciate the work you're putting into it, and I think it's incredibly important that we all continue to wrestle with these issues, instead of (as you so aptly note) simply going on with our daily lives as if there is nothing we should be doing in response to what is going on around us.
this is another question I have struggled with, and have yet to reach a conclusion in my mind which is satisfactory, so I won't attempt to compose a complete answer now.
I would note, however, that what I'm suggesting is actually far more akin to what Christ did than to just looking out for our own Liberty. What I'm suggesting is that the easy course is to simply accept that state of government as it is given to us, and not go to the effort of changing it. Cause honestly, most of the time those that actually do the changing don't reap a whole lot of the benefits. Rather the difficult course is to give up our comfortable life styles (or at least be willing to) in order to fight for a heritage of Liberty which we may hand down to our children and to our countrymen, regardless of whether we ever see the benefits ourselves.
I am hoping to find some good writings from the Scottish Covenanters, who I believe wrote a fair amount on this issue.
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