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Friday, March 29, 2024 - 06:38 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

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Let’s begin this essay by examining a well known Bible passage—Matthew 5:13-16, with two versions--one from my favorite 1599 Geneva Bible and one from the New International Version, super titled and subtitled together:

Verse 13

“Ye are the salt of the world; but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?

“You are the salt of the earth.  But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?

It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

Verse 14

Ye are the light of the world.  A city that is set on a hill, cannot be hid.

You are the light of the world.  A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.

Verse 15

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.  Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.

Verse 16

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father which is in Heaven.”

In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your

good deeds and praise your Father in Heaven.”

It’s reassuring that though the translations are almost 400 years apart, they say essentially the same thing.  The first question to arise in my mind is just who was our LORD referring to as “salt” and “light”?  Could He have been referring to his “children”—those of us who call ourselves Christians?  I believe so.  But therein lies my concern, and more than a touch of ‘self guilt’.  Are all of us who call ourselves “Christians” really the salt and light of our country, as Christians have struggled to be through history, or are we in the process of being “trampled” (figuratively for some of us—literally for many Christians throughout the world) by men—by “spiritual wickedness in high places” because we have lost our “saltiness”, our determination to do good deeds and resist the evil one?  More disturbingly, are we letting ourselves be “trampled” by the enemies of God and by those whose agendas include destroying this great but imperfect Constitutional Republic bequeathed to us by our Founders because we’ve lost our spirit of resistance—our resolve to battle the forces of evil?

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Does our “light” of service to our Heavenly Father shine brightly, or have we purposely hidden it under our “security bowl” out of fear or indifference?  As I have written previously, and still believe, it appears that for far too long we as Christians have withdrawn into the familiar security of our churches and into our own “Christian sub-culture” (yes, Christians are now a ‘sub-culture’ in the United States) and have left our society and our country—which were once at least God-fearing if not totally Christian—adrift to fend for themselves.  Reading Matthew 5:13-16, it seems clear that abandoning the fight to Satan and his minions is not what our LORD called us to do.  So, why have we Christians allowed this to happen?  Why haven’t we been doing that which our LORD and Savior expects us to do? Why do we stand condemned by our timidity?  Why, as the late, great servant of God, Rev. D. James Kennedy once noted, is “the greatest sin of the Christian church today the sin of doing NOTHING?” 

I’ve long espoused the values of our historic Christian, Western civilization.  We in the western world have never been perfect and never will be, for there are not now nor ever have been “perfect” people except for One—and we crucified Him.  But Western civilization, with its Christian underpinnings and beliefs is the high mark of mankind’s epic journey out of the darkness of tyranny and the rule by tribal leaders, despotic kings, and assorted brutal warlords and vicious tyrants that characterized our species right from our beginnings.  It is unarguable that without Christianity mankind would already have degenerated into various tribal entities with the blood feuds, warfare, brutality, and fanaticism common to those kinds of societies, and which we see causing misery and death in various parts of our world this very day.  Even with the influence of traditional Christian values in our country since its founding we can see the obvious degeneration of our society, from its relatively slow pace in our post-colonial beginnings to its rapid pace in today’s world. 

Some of the deliberately ignorant and morally ambivalent among us believe that this societal change is good for us, since it frees us from those “outdated” moral absolutes of the past, and from the “superstitious” teachings of Christianity and “opens our minds” to a host of non-Biblical and non-Christian mendacities and Satanic “theories” regarding human relations and mankind’s origins.  (Should our increasingly post-Christian society succumb once again to violence and chaos and the rule of tyrants, I predict that those anti-Christian “scoffers”, to their great surprise,  will be the first ones to be shot by their masters in “The New World Order”!)

I have long contended that the degeneration of our cultural underpinnings and the rapid disintegration of our society is the DIRECT RESULT  of the indifferent attitudes  of increasing numbers of Christians and their pastors in recent years toward the unchecked growth of all  government, the unconstitutional power grab by the unelected oligarchy of our federal judiciary, and our corresponding loss of freedom a little slice at a time.  I plead guilty to having been in this camp for many years.  Without any doubt, many Christians and their pastors and priests have surrendered the high ground of our admittedly always imperfect Christian civilization to our Satanic enemies, and have concentrated in our churches, for the most part over the past century or so, in meeting, eating, and retreating, and believing, probably unwisely, that the “walls” of our churches will protect us from the results of our indifference.  As history has amply proved, THEY WON’T!

I ask the question of my fellow Christians:  Does your pastor preach Christ FIRST, and Him crucified and risen, and of the need for individual repentance and salvation, and then the regeneration of our society and the preservation of our precious heritage of freedom for which our forefathers and mothers sacrificed so much to pass down the long corridors of time to us?  If your pastor doesn’t preach this concept of “God (first) and Country (second)”, why not?  If those of us who are

“called by His name” have so callously surrendered our heritage to the ungodly, and much of the Christian world appears to be willingly doing so, then who is to blame for this sad state?  Are not both our Christian leaders AND the Christian laity responsible for having capitulated to fear, political correctness, indifference, and lack of knowledge?  Are we to blame Satan’s minions for doing what “their father”, the evil one, commands them to do, while WE who call ourselves Christians let ourselves and our culture perish over our refusal to do what OUR Father commands us to do?

To change our society, and arrest its continued spiritual and cultural degradation, we must first change ourselves, must we not?  This is a process of a “one at a time” conversion to Christianity, or a rededication to the whole counsel of God’s Word.  A real Christian must be a good citizen who is concerned about the preservation of freedom in his society.  But our Christian responsibility goes beyond just knowledge and repentance---we must also be preservers (the “salt”) of what is good, and eliminators of what is bad, especially in our own lives and in our own families.  Unfortunately, in today’s America many Christians seem to believe that they are merely “pilgrims” in this world, and seemingly care little about what happens to our civilization and our precious Constitutional freedoms, and to the people who will come after us, since they are only “passing through” this world and prefer not to get their hands dirty or their minds distracted in trying to stand for righteousness and a humane society wherein Constitutional freedoms are valued and protected.  Incredibly, some who call themselves “Christians” seem to care little about whether they or their descendants live in the light of freedom or in the darkness of tyranny.  Regrettably, I think of them with many bad thoughts, summed up in one word:  COWARDS!

Sadly, the attitude of Christian “surrender” begins in the pulpits of our nation.  As Don Wildmon, of the American Family Association, reminded us many years ago, there is “a deafening silence” from most of those pulpits of America.  Our nation is coming apart  due to unbridled abortions, child pornography, human trafficking and prostitution, media mockery of Christians, increasing rates of suicides among our teenagers and our military veterans, drug addiction of all kinds, skyrocketing divorce rates, increasing rapes of our women, widespread pornography, gang violence in our cities, degenerate music, and the cultural suicide of our nation as we welcome into our midst hordes of ignorant and diseased illegals and the adherents of the false and Satanic pseudo-religion of Islam.  But despite all of this, the vast majority of the pulpits of America are SILENT about this slow death—this national suicide-- of our nation and our culture.  The vile and disgusting anti-Americans of The Klan of New Bolsheviks (i.e. Democrats) may be responsible for fomenting and encouraging much of this cultural ROT, but we—the Christians and conservatives of the nation—have stood silent, wringing our hands and telling each other that we’ll have to “pray about it”, as the vermin from the pit of Hell run rampant in our cities and on our streets, intimidating the defenseless and threatening all who will not “bend the knee” with their criminality and their Marxist/collectivist/Democrat inspired HATE SPEECH.

Why are  you silent, Mr. Pastor?  Why are you silent, you who sit in the pews?  Why?  Have you been rendered useless by your “lack of knowledge”?  Are you so paralyzed by fear that you refuse to act—refuse to resist the death of all that our ancestors struggled so long and so painfully to give to us?  That your own families—your own parents—worked so hard to accomplish in a free land that once promised endless opportunities to succeed?   Do you despise freedom so much—do you resist responsibility so desperately—have you concentrated on ‘going along to get along’ so long—that you have nothing left in your hearts and souls regarding the preservation of the freedoms that our ancestors, and those Americans who came before us—struggled, and bled, and sacrificed, and died to send down the corridors of time to  us? 

One organization in today’s America that is dedicated to encouraging our pastors, and all Christians, to inform themselves, stand up and speak out is called VISION AMERICA, based in Houston, Texas (visionamerica.org).  They believe that if even a minority of the pastors and their churches in a community would boldly step forward—would remove their light from under the bowl—we could really change our culture for the better.  Isn’t it time for Americans who love our country as it once was and might be again, to stand together and proclaim:  ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?  Yes, it is.  Now is NOT the time to surrender to  our fear of “offending” our fellow citizens, or our fear of instigating their violent reactions against us.  NOW is the time to boldly proclaim and stand for truth, to resist—peacefully if possible—but in all cases to resist the attacks against Christians and Patriots that are becoming increasingly apparent in our society.

Long ago, a great Christian patriot named Patrick Henry, one of my heroes, said it well:  “Bad men cannot make good citizens.  It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of free men.  It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains.  A vitiated (corrupted or debased) state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”  These words are as true today as when Henry first spoke them.  Will we, the Christians and Christian Patriots of today, AND our pastors, burn Henry’s words into our minds and determine to break the chains that our own home-grown progressive “masters” have been fastening onto Americans for over a century?  To remain “a nation of free men” we must, because the alternative is, as Patrick Henry proclaimed, “incompatible with freedom”.

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A native of Cleveland, Ohio, W. H. (Bill) Lamb is a graduate of Cleveland State University (Ohio); being graduated in 1960, he moved to South Carolina in 1964.  For many years he was an Industrial engineer, Chief Industrial engineer, and plant manager in the steel, electronics, and apparel industries in Ohio, South Carolina, and Alabama.  In his younger days, he was an avid hiker in the Southern mountains, a target shooter, and is still an avid student of both American history and ancient Egyptian history.

He is an avid and long-time writer, concentrating on political and cultural issues of concern to America's Christian Patriot community.  He was published in the Lancaster, S.C. "News" during the mid-to-late 1960's, and has been a Local Columnist published in the Greenville, SC The Times Examiner since 1999.  The late and great Christian Patriot, Col. Bobby Dill, was his first Editor. During those years he has had several hundred articles published in The Times Examiner, which he always refers to as "a great journal of truth"!  

He has had one book published, a 120-page novel set in our future, titled "The History of Our Future", and two unpublished  750-page sequels "Waiting in the Wings" to be published "someday".  Bill has been married to Barbara for 65 years, has two adult  (and aging) kids,  five grandkids, six great-grandkids, and a "feisty and opinionated" 80 lb. Pit Lab named Hayley, who admittedly runs the entire house.

A very long-time member, with Barbara, of The patriotic John Birch Society, he believes that it is the duty of ALL Christians to also be dedicated patriots and do everything possible to both resist the evil of collectivism that is smothering Western Civilization and to do his best to educate and motivate his fellow Americans in the preservation of our unique Constitutional Republic, and most importantly, to share the love of his Savior with others.