Chapel speaker, attorney tells students persecution awaits in U.S. legal realm

By Tammi Reed Ledbetter
September 10, 2006
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FORT WORTH?Attorney Shelby Sharpe watched as dozens stood in a Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary chapel audience, responding to his question of how many were training for ministry in a country where Christians are criminally and civilly prosecuted.

“I take it that the rest of you have no intention of ministering in the United States, because we’re only decades away from this happening.” Encouraging his audience to look at the trends in American culture, he cited legal cases in which:

?using Scripture is prosecuted as a hate crime,

?churches are sued for revoking a minister’s ordination, and

?the government decides the curricula for theological schools.

Findings of George Barna and the Nehemiah Institute, after polling teenagers, reveal the nation is only a decade or two away from a complete loss of a Christian consensus, Sharpe warned.

“When the World War II generation is gone and the generation coming right behind it … the Christian influence is hugely lacking. You will quickly have a country that doesn’t even hardly know about God,” he said, forecasting the future U.S. as a pagan nation that Christians should regard as a foreign mission field.

Such dire predictions will come true if Christians continue to give away the foundation on which the United States was established, Sharpe said. “If you’re going to be in ministry in 10 or 20 years, you will see this. It does not necessarily have to happen.As we conceded it and gave it away, we can with God’s help take it back,” he argued.

While commending Southern Baptists for effectiveness in evangelism, Sharpe said there remains an indictment for all Christians who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture when they fail to carry out the balance of Christ’s command to be salt to the earth. “If you look at our culture as it exists today, where is the salt?”

After reading the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20, Sharpe turned to Matthew 4:4 to note Jesus’ response when he was tempted to turn stones into bread after 40 days of fasting.

He said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” Observing that the word “man is used in a generic sense in reference to all people, Sharpe said the instruction is not limited to believers. “We are to have this culture live in obedience to every command of God,” he stated.

Answering skeptics who charge that the Supreme Court finds such behavior unlawful, Sharpe remarked, “So what? When did they get above God?”

Using early sources from American history to describe the founding of an intentionally Christian nation, Sharpe reminded that the first colonial grant was given to Sir Walter Raleigh in order to deliver the Christian faith to people who lived in darkness.That reference was cited in a Supreme Court opinion in 1892, describing a continent founded on a commitment to spreading the gospel through laws and charters written to advance the kingdom of God and convert the heathen.

“Here was an intellectually honest Supreme Court of the United States that looked at our history and determined this is a Christian nation.” In contrast to such clear statements, Sharpe said, “We have people today who say this has never been a Christian nation.