There is perhaps no more important question to address
at this critical hour of American history than
"Who owns you and your property,
God or Caesar?"

If we do not settle this issue and settle it soon,
what is left of our estates, our families,
and our religious liberty will be confiscated by the humanist state.

Over the past 60 years,
we, the American people,
have been slowly boiled, so to speak, like an unwary frog,
in a pan of candy-coated historical and theological distortions.

Today we devote five months of every year
to work as servants of the statist bureaucracy.
That is how long it takes us to work off the tax burden at all levels.
The Roman Empire fell with a tax burden of just over 20%,
while we in America are facing well over a 40% tax burden.

Whoever determines how you use your property will become your lord.
The real question facing us today, is:
"Who is sovereign?"
Is it God, Satan, or Man?

For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent,
and infinitely wise Maker:
all the Servants of one Sovereign Master,
sent into the World by his Order,
and about his Business,
they are his Property,
whose Workmanship they are,
made to last during his,
not one another's Pleasure ...

Though the Earth and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men,
yet every Man has a Property in his own person:
This no Body has any right to but himself.
The Labor of his Body, and the Work of his Hands,
we may say, are properly his.
Whatever then he removes out of the State that Nature has provided,
and left it in, he has mixed his labor with,
and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

Property ...

In the former sense,
a man's land, or merchandise, or money, is called his property.
I
In the latter sense,
a man has a property in his opinions
and his free communication of them.

He has a property of particular value in his religious opinions,
and in the profession and practice dictated by them ...
He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties,
and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.

In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property,
he may be equally said to have a property in his rights ...
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort ...
Conscience is the most sacred of all property ....

Today, rather than protecting our property,
government expropriates it by punitive taxation.

Man has a property in his person.
Man has a property in the free use of his facilities
Conscience is the most sacred of all property

Old and New Testament and classic writers ...
and often 'the great Mr. Locke'
were cited in proof of the duty as well as the right to resist tyranny
and any attack upon the rights of men.
Every man that is born into the world is born to liberty
and every member of civil and religious society
has an inalienable title to and concern in it.

Among our natural rights are these:
First, a right to life;
Secondly, to liberty;
Thirdly, to property;
together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.

Liberty is a gift from God;
therefore, man can not voluntarily become a slave.

In short,
it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one,
or any number of men, at the entering into society,
to renounce their essential natural rights,
or the means of preserving those rights;
when the grand end of civil government ...
is for the support, protection, and defense of those very rights;
the principal of which ... are Life, Liberty, and Property.

These may be understood by reading and carefully studying
the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church,
which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.

Government has no right to absolute,
arbitrary power over the lives and fortunes of the people;
nor can mortals assume a prerogative not only too high for men,
but for angels, and therefore reserved for the exercise of the Deity alone.
nor can the government rule by "Extemporary arbitrary decrees."

On the contrary,
the rights of subjects are to be decided by
"standing and known laws."

The supreme power cannot justly take from any man any part of his property,
without his consent in person or by his representative.

Now what liberty can there be when property is taken away without consent?
Here he touched the vital connection between the individual's property and his liberty.
For his property not only sustains his life,
but is the bulwark of his liberty and his ability to support God's work.
If it can be taken away from him without his consent then he has lost his liberty.

Many today in totalitarian countries have learned
that you cannot lose political liberty without also losing economic liberty.
In the Communist countries those who stand up
against the state in accord with their conscience,
"the most sacred of all property,"
are often prohibited from working and are thus literally starved to death or into submission.

We cannot be happy, without being free ---
that we cannot be free, without being secure in our property ---
that we cannot be secure in our property,
if without our consent, other may, as by right, take it away ...

... as the words of the Declaration of Independence resound down the years,
we can remember that,  the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Because the American Revolution is a Christian revolution
for individual freedom - or salvation - it is never over.

Never let it be said that one man can do nothing significant to turn the tide of history!

We must confess that as government spending at every level is curtailed,
taxes are reduced, and budgets balanced - as they should be -
the needs of the poor, the handicapped, and the aged will become more pressing.

In Biblical law there is no such thing as a property tax.
(After all, the earth belonged to God, it was not for man to tax it!)
The immunity of land from taxation by the state meant liberty.
A man could not be dispossessed of his land;
every man had a basic security in his property.

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