Recently I’ve heard more and more people comment on the state of our country. Violent crimes seem to be at record high; there are shootings at schools, theaters, even churches. While we can go back and forth about the causes, one thing everyone agrees about is that it seems like it is getting worse every day. It’s impossible to turn on the news without coming away from the experience defeated and depressed. Many well-meaning Christians will say that the problem is that God is not allowed in schools. They site statistics showing a rise in crime corresponding to the time after we removed prayer from our schools. My goal here is not to dispute those statistics only the hypothesis that our world is in a mess because our kid can no longer pray in school.
I do not think our country is in a mess because kids can no longer pray in school. Removing God and prayer from our schools has helped the problem along but I believe the problem is that families had removed God from their home. A tree does not rot from the top down but, from the roots up. The root of our society is the family. When God became less important to people than “living the American dream”, the tree was rotting. When the church became nothing more than a nice place to go, the tree was decaying. When families put God on a shelf and only took him out on Sunday, the tree was eroding. When God was not prominent in the home, it became easy to shove him in a corner at school, and any place else that we wanted. If God were in the home, the children would have taken him to school with them. They would have been praying to God, even if the school teachers said “no.” Schools removed prayer and Bible reading from the classroom, they may have been doing the job of the parents and guardians, teaching morality to our children. So, they were not being trained at home, AND they were not getting any teaching at school either.
Even now, many years after the Supreme Court ruling stating that prayer and Bible reading was illegal, God is still at school. The psalmist David says:
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
There is no place we can go and get away from God. The problem is that many are not listening to God. He is anywhere we are, urging us to do right, to follow him.
So If God is not in your job, your school, look to see if he is in your home. Do you talk about God with your family? Does your life say, “I’m a follower of God? If God is in your home, then God will be in your school, your workplace because you are there. We can't help it because he LIVES in us, and the government can do nothing to stop it because our God is greater than the government.
If we want God to have a prominence in our schools, our work, and in our society, let’s give him prominence in our family and our life. Then people will say about us, what they said of the early church, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” That’s what I want. I want people to say that I’ve turned the world upside down because I follow the awesome, amazing, all-powerful God of the universe. If we live that, we will be unstoppable Christians.
