Heritage of the Founding Fathers
Heritage of the Founding Fathers



Ruling Actions
Josh Pittman


"[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams

Those words ring true in America.  Today, the government institutes laws trying to control a person’s actions instead of changing the heart of a person.  When a person’s heart is changed, his/her actions will change as well.  Instituting laws will not change a person’s heart.

Take for instance the issue of gun control.  People think that if citizens were not allowed to own a gun, there would be less crime.  The problem is, if a bad guy wants to shoot someone but does not have a gun, he is going to obtain a gun someway.  This gun control law takes away a gun and a freedom from a good citizen, gives it to the government and bad people, and makes the good citizen defenseless.  This is one way rights are taken away.  This is not to say that anyone, anytime, anywhere, should own a gun but that the government should not take away the right for all citizens, regardless,
to own a gun.

Jesus worked from the heart-out instead of the outside-in.  He said if you hate someone, you have committed murder.  This stops a person from brooding and continually thinking about murder – it changes a person’s heart.  This does not mean the government should seek to control and rule the heart of someone; simply people should try to change the heart, the inside, of a person by showing them the love of God and pointing them to Jesus.

Benjamin Rush declared it well, "In contemplating the political institutions of the U.S., if we were to remove the Bible from schools, I lament that we would be wasting so much time and money punishing crimes and would be taking so little pains to prevent them."

Instead of inventing laws aimed to controlling the actions of a person, all the while abridging the American people’s freedoms, let’s change the heart of a person.