When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 on the platform of Constitutional integrity and federalism, and was re-elected four years later on those same principles, he had this to say during one of his famous speeches: “I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers…Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

He went on to explain, “You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down-up to a man’s age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order-or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.”

President Reagan knew what many others don’t seem to understand. While the cause of freedom was successful in the founding of our nation, the struggle to maintain it must persist, the baton must be carried on, and the banner lifted high if we and our posterity are to experience the blessings of liberty that was so hardly fought and won.

This program will address this topic and if you consider yourself a patriot-a lover of freedom and a follower of Jesus Christ, I trust you’ll stay tuned for this very pertinent episode of Stand in the Gap Weekend.