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SUPREME COURT RULES AGAINST PRAYER AGAIN The same Supreme Court that said voodoo practitioners in Florida could publicly sacrifice live chickens to their evil gods has ruled that Christians can’t pray in public.
That in essence was the ruling of the Supreme Court on June 19, 2000 when the Justices in a sweeping six to three decision ruled against prayer before high school baseball and football games. The majority decision written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, "The [prayer] policy is invalid on its face because it establishes an improper majoritarian election on religion, and unquestionably has the purpose and creates the perception of encouraging the delivery of prayer at a series of important school events." The case originated in Texas and Republican presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush was fast to react, saying that he was disappointed at the outcome. He had directed his attorney general to intervene in the case on behalf of prayer. Said Gov. Bush, "I thought that voluntary student-led prayer at extracurricular activities was right." Vice President Al Gore immediately praised the court for the decision against prayer before high school football games. Oddly, the Justices want the protection of God, although they will not allow high school students to seek His protection through prayer. When the Supreme Court assembles each day to hear cases, the marshal of the court declares, "God save the United States and this honorable court." Before an attorney can be admitted to argue a case before the Supreme Court he must swear an oath of "So help you God". The Majority Leader of the House, Congressman Dick Armey, made a blunt statement upon hearing the decision by the Supreme Court. "This decision is inconsistent with the plain language of the First Amendment, its history, and the views of our nation’s founders. This disregard for people of faith is unwarranted." Congressman Armey concluded, "Expressions of faith ought to be welcomed and encouraged in America, especially with our young people." Congressman Ernest Istook, Republican of Oklahoma, has been the foremost proponent of a Religious Freedom Amendment to the Constitution to protect public prayer. In 1998 the congressman worked with the Religious Freedom Coalition to bring about the first vote ever on the floor of the House on a "school prayer" amendment. Congressman Istook said, " This is the latest step of using the
First Amendment to oppose religion rather than to protect it.
Unfortunately, it won’t be the last step."
In 1998 in the 105th Congress, and again in the 106th Congress, Ernest Istook introduced the Religious Freedom Amendment to the Constitution. Although we have been unable to get a vote scheduled in the 106th Congress, the RFA did receive a majority vote in the 105th Congress in 1998. Unfortunately a Constitutional Amendment requires a two-thirds vote to pass. Under the RFC the Supreme Court could not have blocked prayer at football games as it has. The Religious Freedom Amendment reads as follows:
As a result of the Supreme Court decision, people of faith should once again realize they are under constant attack by those who would make this nation a totally secular state with no public acknowledgment of God whatsoever. The ACLU, which brought the case against prayer before football games, declared what they called a "complete victory". What will be their next target? Give them time and you will have to hide your Bible in the trunk of your car on the way to church. When you get to your church it will be a building with no external signs indicating it is a church, since no cross will be visible. That is the final goal of the ACLU; have no doubt about it. As chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, I can promise you that we will redouble our efforts to pass the Religious Freedom Amendment. Immediately our program to mail 20,000 school prayer petitions a month to potential RFA supporters will begin again. The Religious Freedom Coalition will coordinate with the offices of the leaders of Congress to once again bring the Religious Freedom Amendment to a vote. More social conservative congressmen are needed in Washington, DC. If the vote were held today, we would not prevail. We must plan and work to pass the Religious Freedom Amendment in the 107th Congress, which we must pray will contain a greater percentage of social conservatives who are in favor of the freedom of religious expression. (SPECIAL NOTE: A Values Action Team meeting consisting of leaders of social-conservative organizations and members of Congress was held on Friday June 23, 2000 to discuss a response to the Supreme Court banning of prayer before sporting events. The big decisions to be made is whether to hold another vote on the Religious Freedom Amendment this year. This would require enormous work and expense to the "outside groups" to muster support and lobby Congress. Because congress is taking the entire month of August off and then returning to work on the budget, getting a vote may not be possible. Before expending the time and money we must first secure a promise from leadership that a vote will occur.) LIFE RESOLUTION MOVES FORWARD When the Religious Freedom Coalition began the campaign to pass Dr. Coburn’s Presence of Life Resolution, I had no idea of the tremendous acceptance and response it would receive. Since the first mailing to supporters of the Religious Freedom Coalition about Dr. Coburn’s resolution, the office has been flooded with petitions and letters of support. More than one in five individuals whom we have informed about the Presence of Life Resolution have contacted their congressman by one means or another. The logistics of the response: My letter to Religious Freedom Coalition supporters had preprinted letters to sign and return. One letter was addressed directly to the individual’s congressman using special matching software. This software allowed us to place the name of the congressman in the actual letter to be signed. A second letter was addressed to the Majority Leader of Congress, Dick Armey. In the letter to Majority Leader Armey, the name of the supporter’s congressman was stated. The letter to Armey confirmed that a letter had been sent to an individual congressman. The letter also urged that the Majority Leader schedule a vote on the Resolution. The two letters were still attached to each other when they were returned to the Washington office of the Religious Freedom Coalition. The letters were then separated. One large bin was designated for the letters to the Majority Leader. Four hundred and fifty-five separate envelopes were then addressed by computer-- one envelope addressed to each congressman. The letters to the individual congressmen were separated by state, and then by district and placed in the large envelopes to be delivered! During the process of sorting the letters to the congressmen we discovered that the overwhelming majority of the supporters of the Religious Freedom Coalition lived in districts where there are Republican congressmen! Our single largest response was to congressman xxxxxxxxxx who has now signed up as a cosponsor of the Presence of Life Resolution. Majority Leader Dick Armey has now promised a vote on the Presence of Life Resolution as soon as it passes out of the Commerce Committee. Since Dr. Coburn is on the Commerce Committee, we are sure this will be before the August recess! RFC supporters have made a difference! In a letter to me dated June 21, 2000 Dr. Coburn said: "The thousands of cards and letters of support the Religious Freedom Coalition has generated on behalf of the Presence of Life Resolution will greatly help ensure that this proposal will come to the floor and be voted on. I am very grateful to you for your assistance on this project." THE MIGHTY GRACE OF GOD On the evening of June 11, 2000 I ran ten miles for the first time in my life. Earlier I had done a one mile 'warm-up' run.
But, this story is not about running, it is about the power of God. I was raised in a home in which I was taught that the most important things in life were booze, food and sex. God was not present in my home at any time when I was growing up. Even as a young teenager my mother and grandmother gave me wine at night. For my sixteenth birthday I got a six pack of beer. There was never a word about restraint in my home growing up. Every morning the breakfast was eggs, bacon and toast, except on Saturday morning when we ate pancakes and bacon. Every dinner ended with a dessert which was usually canned fruit. There were mounds of food on the table for every meal, most of it fried. The smell of the fried food was the only thing that ever over powered the smell of tobacco in the house. Although I was born with a very sound body, the eighteen years of smoke in the house and the fried food caught up to me. By the time I was in my late teens I was smoking as had my both my grandparents with whom we lived, and I was in ill health. At age twenty I drank alcohol daily, smoked two packs of cigarettes daily and ate like there was no tomorrow. I had played Little League baseball in my early teens, but by the time I was drafted into the Army at age twenty I could not even run a mile. I was overweight and my lungs had already been damaged by tobacco smoke. By the time I was thirty I had trouble walking a mile, much less running. So what happened that now at age fifty-four I can run ten miles at an average of nine minutes a mile? Why is a one mile run a warm up for me? The answer is God. Over the last twenty years God has changed me; He has simply changed my life. He has given me the ability to set goals and to follow through on those goals. My appetite is now more for spiritual food than for fried food. I can remember back twenty years ago when I was first saved, trying to exercise for the first time since serving in the Army, and trying to overcome the damage done by the alcohol and the cigarettes. It hurt, really hurt. But, God had given me a goal, a goal to be healthy enough to travel and to preach His Word of Salvation. It took years before I was able to run even one mile. I just could not breath. I was using only the top third or so of my lungs. When I tried to run I panted like a puppy, choked and gasped. My heart rate would sometimes hit 200 or even 230 and I would simply have to lie down on the gym floor to recover. But, I stayed the course, because I knew it was the course God had given me. It was almost ten years from the time I accepted Christ and put away the alcohol and cigarettes that I ran my first 5K, which is 3.2 miles. I came in nearly last, averaging about a twelve minute mile, which is really just walking fast. My wife, Nancy had joined me in running and we signed up for many other 5K races because I found that it forced me to train and helped me to continue running. Over the next ten years both Nancy and I became stronger and stronger in both our physical strength and in our spiritual strength. When we moved to Virginia, we joined the Fredericksburg Area Running Club and tried to enter as many of the races as we could despite my heavy travel schedule. On New Year’s Eve of 1999, when many had already begun to party, our entire family was running a 5K in Alexandria, Virginia as part of the Millennium celebration. So far this year, in the year 2000, Nancy and I have run a 10 K (6.2 miles), an 8K (4.96 miles), a four mile and a five mile race and it is only June. We have signed up for a ten mile race in August which is the greatest distance we have ever tried. I was training for that race on June 11th when I ran the ten miles on the treadmill. After that ten mile run on the treadmill I went into the men’s locker room and looked at myself in the mirror. I was soaked in perspiration. There was not a dry place on my shirt and my hair was soaked. But, what I saw in the mirror was not an athlete. I saw a changed man. I remembered twenty years ago to the man I was sitting on a bar stool with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I could almost smell the smoke and taste the acid of the beer. I looked again in the mirror and I realized exactly how much God had changed me. I realized He had saved my life to do His work. In 1980 at the age of thirty-three I was probably near death. By that time I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. I started drinking beer about noon and switched to Vodka for the night. Many days I finished a quart bottle of alcohol in one day. There are still scars on my liver from the alcohol I consumed. I can vividly remember the nights I awoke coughing up streams of black fluid from my lungs that smelled of tobacco. The day Christ saved me from my self inflicted wounds, I was perhaps in my last year on this Earth. I looked again in the locker room mirror. In the past twenty years God had done a complete overhaul. Everything about me, both physically and spiritually had changed. Suddenly I knew that one day I would be able to run a marathon, but more importantly, I knew I could be a marathon runner spiritually for my Lord. I knew all the change in my life was to His credit and none was to my own. "My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness" the Lord told Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9. The strength in my life today is the power of Christ, for when He took charge of my life there was nothing left but weakness. The image in the locker room mirror, the 54-year-old man that can run 10 miles, was not my image; it was the image of the power of Christ. (Available in tract form. Ask for "The Runner" tract.) Construction at RFC Headquarters Because of continued growth, remodeling and construction is on-going at the operations center of the Religious Freedom Coalition in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Why does RFC have an office in both Washington, DC and in Virginia? Because of the high cost of land and materials in Washington, DC, the RFC maintains only a small office at 717 2nd Street, NE, just seven blocks from the Capitol Building. This Washington office is used as a headquarters to work with Congress. The Washington office is our official mailing address and our main phone lines go there! Having an office seven blocks from the Capitol Building opens a lot of doors to us that would otherwise be closed! We are really blessed to have our operations center in historic Fredericksburg, Virginia which was founded in 1728. Our operations center at 906 Lafayette Boulevard is actually located on the site of a major Civil War battle. The building itself is a very large old home built sometime at the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps as early as 1910. When we moved into the Fredericksburg office three years ago we did no major work to it. We put our mail operations center on the second floor because there was a very large room that had been used as a law library by a legal firm. This requires all the books and mailing materials to be carried upstairs and then back down again after packing. Literally tons of materials go up and down the stairs each month. To move the mail center downstairs we must remove two walls on the ground floor to allow machines to fit. Then two walls must be built upstairs for offices. Improved lighting and heavy duty cable must also be installed for new equipment. This will cost several thousand dollars and must be completed by the end of July. Please be in prayer with us that the financial needs to meet the construction costs will be met. TWO GRADUATIONS IN MURRAY HOME
We are very proud to announce that two of our girls graduated in June of this year. Rachel graduated from Fredericksburg Christian High School and will be attending Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia this fall. Rachel looks forward to being a part of the Baptist Student Union at Longwood. Jade graduated from the Honors College at the University of Central Florida with a major in Archeology and a minor in Business. She plans on working toward a doctorate at a later date. I wrote The Church Is Not For Perfect People because most churches are geared up to save young people. As the "baby boom" generation aged and looked for spiritual guidance the church had a hard time fitting them into the church. Many "baby boomers" were being saved between the ages of thirty-five and fifty. Churches, particularly evangelical churches, would put these new baby Christians into Sunday School classes by physical age rather than by spiritual age. Adults on their second or third marriage were tossed in with Christians who had been studying the Bible together since they were toddlers.
I accepted Christ myself at age thirty-three. The culture shock for me was tremendous The folks at the first church I joined didn’t even speak the same language I spoke. They were constantly talking about "sharing" and "fellowship". They even had parties with no alcohol! I set out to write a book to help the "baby boomers" fit into the church and in the process I developed ten principles for those who accepted Christ as adults. The Church Is Not For Perfect People has become popular among pastors of all denominations and for others who deal with new adult converts. 176 Pages. Normally $10.00 plus shipping. JULY- AUGUST SPECIAL $10.00 INCLUDING SHIPPING AND HANDLING. Note offer 00N07 on your check and send $10.00 per book to William J. Murray Report, P.O. Box 77511, Washington, DC 20013. Credit card orders call (800) 650-7664. |
