June 19, 2013

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Our Faith

Jun 15   -  Samuel Rodriguez

Image: something-to-think-about.com
Image: something-to-think-about.com

Our faith is transparent, transcendent and transformational. Our faith teaches us to cross over obstacles, shout down walls, break through crowds, and walk on the impossible, even in the midst of storms. Our faith enables us to survive the fires of life, overcome the den of lions, silence the serpents, and outwit the fox.  Our faith teaches us to see the invisible, embrace the impossible, and hope for the incredible.

Our faith prepares us for the flood and rewards us with a rainbow. Our faith provides the stones—some to speak to, others to throw, others to roll, and, above all, the living one to stand upon.

Our faith is the faith that first the Pilgrims and then the Puritans brought to the shores of New England.   This may not be the only faith practiced in our nation, but it is the faith so secure in itself that it invites other faiths to compete in the free market of religious ideas. This extraordinary faith provided the moral and spiritual foundation for what we call the American experience.

Accordingly, it is critical to understand that faith via the conduit of religious freedom is the womb from which our fundamental rights stem. The rights of American citizens are bestowed “by their Creator,” and they are thus “unalienable.”  The state cannot take them away.

Although the U.S. Constitution is more legalistic than the Declaration, its preamble notes that  one of its purposes is “to secure the Blessings of Liberty.” This reinforces the notion in the Declaration that our rights are a blessing bestowed by God.

Then, too, the very first dictate of the Constitution’s very first amendment reads as follows, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  The founders understood how utterly essential the free practice of our corresponding faiths was to the success of our national enterprise.

Correspondingly, the Obama administration HHS mandate requiring faith organizations to provide coverage of certain “preventive services”, which include abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraceptive medication, stands as a de facto requirement to sacrifice conscience and faith on the altar of political expediency. This egregious violation of our most fundamental right attempts to contextualize a new narrative where our rights no longer stand endowed by our Creator, but rather from ideologues on Capitol Hill.

Hence, accommodations and modifications cannot redeem this direct violation of our most sacred right. Only a complete repeal of the aforementioned mandate can begin to reconcile the damage created by the violation of our most cherished trust, a trust where Caesar will never demand from us what only belongs to God.

For at the end of the day, via the optics of my Christian faith, I stand convinced and convicted that the cause to protect conscience stems not from the agenda of the donkey or the elephant but rather from the agenda of the Lamb.

Prayer Points

1.  Pray for the hearts of political leaders to shift and back down from their intent to violate religious freedoms.  (Proverbs 21:1)
2.  Pray for the body of Christ to be bold and unified in their resolve to obey the laws of God above all others.  (Acts 4:19; 5:29)
3.  Pray for the lie that masks the sanctity of life as a women’s health issue and preventive service to be exposed and brought down. (2 Corinthians 10:4,5) 

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Author

Samuel Rodriguez

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez is the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Hispanic Evangelical Association, the largest Hispanic Christian organization in the United States, with more than 34,000 member churches.  He is an ordained Assemblies of God minister and recipient of the 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the Congress of Racial Equality.