Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

January 27, 2008

John Leland – Ultimate Authority

Matthew 22:15-22

There are thousands of places of worship in this country meeting today. If you could somehow be magically transported through hundreds, or even a smaller number of them, and listen to people who are gathered to pray at some point in the morning—it might be a men’s prayer breakfast early in the morning where they have gathered to eat sausage and biscuits and pray for certain concerns. It could be a Sunday school assembly. It might be a group of leaders who have gathered sometime in the morning to pray for worship before a worship service begins. It could be any number of prayers that take place in the worship service itself.

If you were to list the things that people pray in thanksgiving to God for, there are several things that we would probably hear again and again, some of them very common and very predictable. One would probably be family. One would probably be forgiveness of sins. “We thank you that you have forgiven us of our sins in Jesus Christ.” We would thank God for blessings. We always just kind of lump them together. “Thank you for our many blessings.” One of the things that I think you would hear most often, quite regularly, would be a prayer of thankfulness that we live in a nation where we are free to worship as we please.

If you have ever prayed in public, there is a chance that maybe you included that in your prayer. I have. If you have not prayed in public, there is probably a good chance that in your prayers in church or in your private prayers at home that you have indeed prayed that prayer of thanksgiving together. We pray out of thanksgiving that each of us can worship as we do, as we choose, as we feel led. We can worship where we want. We can worship how we want, and we can worship with whom we want.

I remember as a child there was what they called a Public Service Announcement on television. There would be a little graphic, it would be a picture, a drawing, of a family dressed up, headed toward a building with a steeple, and it would say, “Worship this week together in the church of your choice.” Those of you old enough, can you remember that? “Worship this week in the church of your choice.” The idea is that we worship where we want, we worship how we want, and we worship with whom we want simply out of our conscience and out of our conviction.

There is a phrase that is sometimes thrown around in which, I think, in less than meaningful circumstances. A lot of times when people are having a lot of fun or they are living it up in luxury or they are really enjoying themselves, they will say, “Is this a great country or what?” A lot of times that line is thrown away, but when you come to the moment when we think about the freedom to worship, only guided by the dictates of our conscience as led by the spirit of God, that is a time when we should say, “Is this a great country or what?”

In the Constitution, not in the Tenth Amendment, not in the Fifteenth or the Twenty-First, but in the very First Amendment, leading off the Bill of Rights, there is the promise stated that we have the right to worship and no government can erect its own church and no government can hinder us from worshiping as we please.

This has been a month when we have looked at Baptist Heritage. We have looked at it by examining through the lens of different people who have been important in that heritage. Almost every Sunday, I have poked fun or been self-deprecating about our faith. The purpose of that is to let people who are not Baptists know that we don’t take ourselves so seriously that we don’t know that we have our faults, just like any faith tradition has its faults. We know that there are stereotypes of who we are, what we do, and what we believe, and sometimes it is easy to fall prey to only thinking about yourself in those stereotypes, but it is important today, it is vitally important, to understand and remember that no single faith tradition in this country had more to do with the establishment of freedom of religion than did Baptists. I am not saying that we are the only ones. I am not saying that nobody else did this, but there was no single faith tradition that had more of an impact in Colonial and the early part of the nation in influencing government and documents for freedom of religion than did Baptists.

It shouldn’t be a surprise after some of the characters that we have looked at this month. All of them were victims of their conscience, victims of church and state, wielding power together because of what they believe. Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich. When the state and the church wielded power together, they drowned him because he dared baptize people.

We talked about Smyth and Helwys. Smyth fled. Helwys was in prison because the Crown and Canterbury got together and wielded power and didn’t like anybody worshiping contrary to the Church of England.

Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped in the streets of Boston, whipped by a magistrate because the Puritan Church of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the government wielded power together and they would compel people to do what they both agreed they wanted people to do. These early Baptists and ancestors of Baptists paid dearly for trying to follow God as they felt God within their own hearts.

So we come to the Colonial Period, the Revolution and after, and there is more than one. There is not just one person. Each of these are examples, and when we come to today, there are others than John Leland that we could talk about. Isaac Backus of New England, John Weatherford, who also a Baptist in Virginia. He was arrested and imprisoned, and people would come and gather outside the prison window, outside the barred window to listen to him preach. The officials were so upset that they erected a wall higher than his window so that people couldn’t see him. So the people, being ingenuous, would take a long stick, put a white flag on the end of it, and come up and wave it over the top of the wall. When Weatherford would see that there were people outside, he would start preaching. He was so compelling that people would climb the wall and try to get up on top of the wall to look down into his cell. So the government imbedded glass on top of the wall so that nobody could see him preach. He was in prison for being a Baptist.

But the one person that we think about today is John Leland. Leland was from New England, but during the Revolutionary War lived in Virginia, and he lived in the same county as Thomas Jefferson. He influenced Jefferson greatly.

At the end of Jefferson’s life, when he listed what he thought were his greatest achievements—now this is a man who primarily drafted the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States—when he listed his primary achievements in life, he listed “beginning UVA and writing the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty.” He wrote that influenced by John Leland. I have it hanging behind my desk. For over 20 years, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom from 1786 hangs behind my desk. I almost brought it with me this morning to hold up and show you, Jefferson, thinking that to be one of his two greatest achievements in life. If you read the language of it and read much of John Leland, you will see parallels and you will see exactly how Jefferson was influenced by Leland to put religious freedom into a state code.

But not only Jefferson, the person who most people give the majority of credit to for the penning of the Constitution is James Madison. James Madison of Virginia was in Philadelphia drafting the Constitution when Leland began to run against him for the convention in Virginia that would ratify or not the U. S. Constitution. Leland was running against Madison on the premise that he would vote against the Constitution because it did not have a full guarantee of religious liberty. Madison had to come home from Philadelphia and have a conference with Leland and finally promise that he would add a Bill of Rights, the first of which would include, among others, freedom of religion if Leland would just step down and not stop Madison from participating in that convention. With that guarantee, you know candidates who run for office and they are not always sure they are going to get it but they are trying to influence the platform, well I think Leland really wanted it but he was primarily trying to influence the platform. He got what he wanted. Madison was elected, the Bill of Rights was added, and the Constitution was passed.

This is because of a Baptist, John Leland. In his own writings, he says, “Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has to do with the principles of mathematics. Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God or twenty Gods, and let government protect him, and in so doing see that he meets with no personal abuse or loss of property for his religious opinions. Instead of discouraging with prescriptions, fines, confiscation or death, let him be encouraged as a free man to bring forth his arguments and maintain his points with all boldness. Then, if his doctrine is false, it will be confuting. If it is true, let others credit it. When every man has his liberty, what can he wish for more?”

Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution, but before that, it was commanded by the Gospel. Most people want to argue what it means for now. There is a lot to be said about defining and understanding that clearly, but for our purposes here today, the real key is to understand why do we believe that there is a difference between state and church and keeping those two separate when we worship.

The passage of scripture that we read earlier is so wonderful. If you don’t understand that they are coming to try to trick Jesus, you have really not been awake while you have been reading. Listen to how clear this is that they are trying to catch him on something.

“Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him with his words. They sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians. ‘Teacher,’ they flattered him saying, ‘We know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by men because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’”

Here is the dilemma. If Jesus says “Yes, it is OK,” the people will quit following him because nobody liked paying taxes. If he says, “No,” they hand him over to the Romans and they say, “This man is telling people that they shouldn’t pay their taxes. He is opposed to Caesar.” So Jesus looks to be caught in a “no win” situation. If he says, “Yes,” he is condemned by the people. If he says, “No,” he is condemned by Rome. So it is inspired. He says, “Show me the coin.” It is interesting that even though the Pharisees would have thought that the coin was unclean, one of them had one. So they bring it and hold it up. I can almost see Jesus holding it next to the face of the person who has brought it to him and asking the question, “Whose image is on that coin?”

“Caesar’s.”

“Then render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.”

I think he doesn’t have to state it. The implied message is very clear. “Whose image is on that coin right there and whose image is on you? Whose image are you created in? What image do you bear? God’s image. Each and every one of us, male and female, created in the image of God. So, therefore, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. You can pay your taxes, but the heart of your soul, the fullness of your life, your ultimate devotion, reserve that for God.”

There is a difference. Render that which needs to be given duly, justly, to the civil realm. That is written in Scripture in several different places, but the ultimate authority in our lives whether the government allows it, promotes it, or denies it, the ultimate authority in our life is the living Lord, Jesus Christ, leading each of us, compelling each of us, according to the dictates of our conscience. The ultimate authority is only in Christ.

So today, I am thankful that I have freedom of choice to worship as I please. I am thankful that if I worship as a Baptist nobody hauls me out of here, ties me up in the street, and whips me like they did Obadiah Holmes. Nobody drowns me like they did Felix Manz. I am thankful for a country and a document like the Constitution that guarantees these freedoms. I am thankful for Baptists who have influenced history so powerfully, so wonderfully, so much for the benefit of others, so much that we can come and enjoy this freedom today and, hopefully, never take for granted what others died to achieve. But most of all, I am thankful for Jesus Christ who died to set me free. I am thankful for Jesus Christ whose death on the cross buys me more than freedom of worship but freedom of my soul to worship God, freedom to have peace with God, be forgiven by God, to be at one with God.

So today, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, unto God that which is God’s, and I pray that each of us would always know the difference.

Copyright 2008. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

Back to top

2007© First Baptist Church of Rome Georgia