Message 9

Matt. 28:18-20; Jn. 8:32. Down through the ages Jesus has been with his church and wheI1 we find free men, we find men who were willing to make great sacrifices for the truth's sake. Our history as a nation, The United States of America, has much in it that has never been taught to our children. The reason for this is many do not like to admit that this nation started out practicing religious oppression. We have an amendment to our constitution because John Leland, a Baptist preacher, lobbied long and hard to see religious freedom became a reality in this nation.

Let our story go to New England, the Pilgrims, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These people came to this country from England and made the same mistakes of their oppressors in England. They brought the idea of state religion; when you have the idea of state religion you have no religious freedom. During this time the Congregationalists believed in religious liberty for the Congregationalists, the same thing was true of the other religious systems of the day with the exception of the Ana Baptists. Listen to this quote from the Trail of Blood, "Before the Massachusetts Bay Colony is 20 years old with the Congregationalist Church as the State Church, they passed laws against the Baptists and others. Following is a sample of one of the, laws passed by Governor Endicott and his Congregationalists friends in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and here is the law. "It is ordered and agreed that if any person or persons within this jurisdiction shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptizing. of infants, to go about secretly to seduce others from the congregation during the administration of the ordinance, after due time and means of conviction, every such person or persons shall be sentenced to banishment ."

Banishment in those days was the equivalent of capital punishment now. It meant to go beyond the borders of the colony and live with the savage Indians. Thus we see a law was passed which made it very hard on the Baptists.

Listen to a voice within the colony, that of Roger Williams, a voice for religious freedom. Several generations of people have been told that Roger Williams was the founder of the first Baptist church in America this is absolutely untrue. He did stand for religious freedom but the congregation he started crumbled in four months and wasn't a Baptist church. Roger Williams renounced his baptism later and because of his stand on issues of religious freedom was banished to live with the Indians. A history records a church was established in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1638 by John Clark, who was an ordained Baptist Minister from England.

We do owe much to Roger Williams in the interest or religious freedom but not as a Baptist. Williams was an ordained Episcopal minister who came to see immersion for baptism and opposed infant baptism, believed in a regenerate church membership, and opposed tax supported churches. These were the things the Baptists had been contending for, for centuries and anyone who would eventually be upset by the things Williams preached blamed the Baptists and labelled him an Ana Baptist. At the time Roger Williams was preaching these things there was no record that he had ever heard of the Baptists or knew anything about them.

Roger Williams had no connection with the Baptists, he was a Congregationalist preacher who saw errors in his own church and believed it inconsistent to compel men to worship when they were unregenerate, and to tax those who were unbelievers to pay for the maintenance of a state church. Williams preached these things before he was ever immersed. He finally had Ezekiel Holliman, who had never been immersed himself, to baptize him and based on this he started a church in protest against the Congregationalists. The church he started in Rhode Island disbanded in four months, this church was no more than any other church started under protest and has no true claim to the Baptist name. We do owe Roger Williams a great deal in the struggle for religious freedom but not as a Baptist.

John Clark established a Baptist Church in Newport one year before Roger Williams ever had his religious experiment in Providence. Roger Williams later repudiated his baptism and decided no one had the authority to baptize but the apostles and no one should be baptized until Christ set up his kingdom on earth and the apostles rule with him. Williams and Clark later became acquainted and laboured together (12 or 14 years) in an effort to obtain a charter from the Parliament of England for the colonization of a people where religious liberty would be granted to all people. It was in 1664 that Clark, who had remained in England to wrestle with the British Parliament, had succeeded in obtaining from those hostile British authorities the charter for the Rhode Island colony. John Clark brought back the first document of its kind to American soil. Roger Williams was not the founder of religious liberty in America, nor was he necessarily the author of religious liberty. Williams had personal convictions about religious liberty and did have much to do with the opinions of men of his day but didn't bring the ideas by himself.

In the struggle of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Governor Endicott and the Congregationalists, with the rebellion they had at the hand of Roger Williams and his banishment from the colony, brought to pass another saying written in the book of God, "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God." The hand of God was making the wrath of man to praise him in order to provide religious freedom for those who had written their history in their own blood.

Another great field of battle in the new world was Virginia. Let us move in time to June 4th, 1768, Spotsylvania County, Virginia, to the county seat. The scene is three men arrested by the sheriff, brought before three magistrates, who stood in the meeting house yard and bound them with the penalty of one thousand pounds, to appear in court two days after .On their trial they were arraigned as disturbers of the peace, the lawyer said, "May it please your Worships, these men are great disturbers of the peace, they cannot meet a man upon the road but they must ram a text of scripture down his throat." These men were John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs. Mr. Waller made his defence of all three, they were offered release if they would not preach for a year and a day, they refused and were taken from the courthouse to the Fredericksburg prison. As they were moving through the streets they sang the hymn, "Broad is the road that leads to death."

Through the years a story about Patrick Henry defending these men has gotten in the history books. Lewis Peyton Little's Book, Religious Liberty in Virginia, says Patrick Henry did not defend these men and Semple's History of Baptists in Virginia agrees with this position. The supposed speech seems to have come from someone who purposed what Patrick Henry would have said if he had been present. The actual court records show that John Waller defended them.

Patrick Henry was not a Baptist but was a friend of Baptist and religious freedom, some record that he even wanted the Baptist to have the position of favour in Virginia by be one of four state churches. Patrick Henry said he would make Baptists respectable and accepted if they would let him.

We must ever be people of conviction and leave our standing in the world up to the Lord. This is not an excuse for us to not study and know our history and what the word of God says.

Let us go to Culpeper County and take a sketch of James Ireland and briefly see the kind of life he had in the ministry. He was jailed for preaching, enemies tried to blow him up with gun powder, suffocate him with smoke, poison him and injured him for life, drunken men were put in his cell, he was threatened with public whipping, had vulgar incidents toward him by other men, hearers were redden over by horsemen, he suffered opposition everywhere and was jailed for five months for preaching.

The state of Virginia also has the distinction of have Elder John Leland as on of its citizens. John Leland helped elect James Madison to the Virginia House because he believed Madison understood the principles of religious freedom. The Colony of Virginia was the deciding vote in the ratification of the constitution and finally the 1st amendment which states," Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, ore prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, ant to petition the government for a redress of grievances." To this point the Constitution had nothing but the guarantee that no one would be barred from public office because of religion. In Virginia in 1792 the Baptists had great weight in civil society and were more numerous than any other Christian sect, yet the secured religious liberty for all.

Reflections After 1600 or more years of persecution in back of them, Baptists came out of it with a smile on their faces and still secured religious liberty for all in this country.

Lord Baltimore petitioned and obtained a charter for Maryland Colony to provide a haven for Catholics who were barred from 11 of the 13 original colonies, his charter did not guarantee religious freedom but religious toleration.

Thomas Jefferson attended a small Baptist Church about eight or ten years before the Revolutionary War and observed the way it conducted its business and was impressed that a government could best operate when it represented the people it was composed of. The mighty hand of God brought that mighty statesman away from a small Baptist Church to be used in this great land to help establish religious freedom.

What if our Baptist forefathers would have considered it too much trouble to attend two services on Sunday and one service on Wednesday night, where would we be today, perhaps under religious oppression of the tyranny of Rome itself? May God help his people today to be revived and appreciative in our interest and service to the Lord. Eph. 3:21.

Go To Message 10