“If you’re going to pray for potatoes, you should have a hoe in your hand.”
In that way we must be like those in Nehemiah’s time who “did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other” (Nehemiah 4:17).
As we enter into the last few days before what folks are calling the “most important election of our lifetime,” (Christianity Today, 07/26/2024, K. Schiess) I happen to come across what is considered one of the most important speeches given in the last century, spoken on October 27th, 1964 just ahead of the Presidential campaign of Goldwater and Johnson. It was given by actor turned public speaker and later our 40th President, Ronald Reagan. It is a very lengthy but highly effective speech now and when it was given 60 years ago. But it was the last bit that stood out to me as not only profound but extremely relevant in 2024.
The address touches on many things but the most important was about our freedoms. And our responsibilities in upholding those freedoms. When Reagan delivered this keynote there was a lot of fear and uncertainty surrounding the current US relations with the Soviet Union. But we can easily replace certain words and ideas to fit wholly into our current moral ideologies.
Thank you for your continued support for Next Step Pregnancy Services and its many clients, client families, and stories. Informed consent is freedom. Advocacy for the unborn is empowerment. Protecting those who are most vulnerable is our charge as Christians.
Here is an excerpt.
“Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the [bomb] (or imprisonment for daring to pray for and defend our fellow brothers and sisters in the womb) by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain,(or in the womb) “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.”
Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.”
Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then?
Someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. [He] believes this because from our side [he’s] heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world?
The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.
” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
He (our Lord) has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny. Thank you very much.”
