Biography
Richard C. Halverson has been Chaplain of the United States Senate for seven years. He is the friend and counselor to countless pastors and others with special concerns. He is deeply involved in the International Prayer Breakfast movement and is a frequent speaker in these ecumenical events. He and his wife, Doris, have two sons, a daughter and 7 grandchildren. He is the author of many books and publications including, No Greater Power, a collection of his insights gained as Chaplain of the Senate. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"People Power: Where Does it Come from
in this Power-Conscious World of Ours?" 
I am sure many of you are familiar with Genesis 1:27-28. "So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he them. Male and female created he them and God blessed them and God said unto them. 'Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion ...'" (Have dominion over everything that God has created.) Dominion means to rule - it means to be sovereign. God created people to master their environment, to subdue it, to replenish it - but under God's authority. If people will not be under God's authority then they become victims rather than masters of their environment. This is a thesis of the remarks I'd like to make this evening.

Listen to these incredible words, they are very familiar: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, ensure the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and for our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America."

We celebrate the Bicentennial of the signing of that incredible instrument which has been the guidance and the law by which we live, here in the United States, now for two hundred years.
"We the people .... do ordain and establish this Constitution." Now, we're so used to that, that we hear it with a yawn, "Ho Hum." But imagine what those words must have sounded like at a time when Kings were sovereign and people were subjects, at a time when monarchs ruled by Divine Right and people had the rights that the sovereign was willing to give them - but only those rights. In the context of the days in which this Constitution was written it was as radical, as revolutionary, as any idea that man has ever conceived. That's precisely what God intended when He created the universe.

In the Declaration of Independence, which incidentally the Constitution was composed to follow through on, we have these two sentences so familiar, I'm sure, to all: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Now listen. "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the people." Do you hear that? In the system conceived in the minds and hearts and vision of our Founding Fathers the people were sovereign just as we are told in Genesis 1:28. The people are to have dominion and the government gets it's just authority or power from the people. And the purpose of government is to secure human rights because those rights are inalienable, they are sacrosanct, because they were endowed by a Creator-God.

Now if the people do not exercise their sovereignty our political system will not work as it was intended by the authors of the Constitution. If the people do not exercise their responsibility as a sovereign people then our political system breaks down as it is breaking down.

Take God out of the picture and the whole system breaks down - no human rights. And if you have trouble understanding this just remember any nation in the world today where atheism is in force, where atheism is the policy, and there is no human rights. Our Founding Fathers believed that those human rights were inalienable having been endowed by God and that our government was to secure those rights not give them. So take God out of the equation and the whole system falls apart. It simply won't work.

I've lived in Washington, D.C. for 31 years. I went there from Hollywood, California, to be associated with the Prayer Breakfast Movement. So I've been in that city where "Power" is the word and for the last seven years I've had the privilege of serving as the Chaplain of the Senate. I've become very aware of power, not only power with the Senators - perhaps the most powerful legislative body in the world - but power struggles with their staff, with the committee staffs. Washington is full of power and power struggles. So I'm very conscious of power.

I believe it was William Penn who said, "If we will not be governed by God we will be ruled by tyrants." That's the alternative. Governed by God or ruled by tyrants - that's Genesis 1:27-28 again. God created us, gave us inalienable rights and asked us to take charge of the earth and to subdue it, to have dominion over everything in it and on it and under it. That's the charge, assuming we are under the authority of God. Remove that authority and we become victims of the very environment over which we were to have dominion.

I'm really naive politically, but in the years I've been in Washington I have been aware of a growing, deepening concern. I've lived in that city where not only the nation but the world finds the expression of it's concerns in a protest or a demonstration at the rate of about three every day - sometimes just a few people, sometimes a million. But every day, living in that city, I have been more and more conscious of a kind of cynicism that is developing among the people of the United States as they become more and more critical of their government.

Now that I've been in the Senate I have become almost defensive when the Senate is criticized. Not because I am a Senator, but simply because I have grown to love these men and women who are in the Senate and the staffs there. I know they are human beings. I know that they are sinners like the rest of us. But the people have put them there. They didn't get in because they wrote a letter and said, "I'd like to be a Senator" and were accepted. They had to work at being elected. The people sent them there.

Now in the last election - '84 - less than 37% of those qualified to vote bothered to go to the polls. The United States has the lowest voting record of any nation in the western world with one exception - Switzerland. Why have the people of the United States abdicated their sovereign responsibility and made government - the Congress, the White House, etc.- the scapegoat?

I believe we have the answer in Deuteronomy 8 beginning with verse 11. Moses is preparing Israel to enter the Promised Land. He is instructing them and this is one of his instructions. He says, "Beware lest thou forget the Lord your God." Why is that dangerous? Because... "when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and live in them... and all that you have is multiplied, then you forget the Lord your God..." 3500 years ago, 1500 years before Christ, Moses understood the peril of prosperity.

Jesus said, "No one can serve two masters; either he will love the one and hate the other, or he will despise the one and serve the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon"- the Semitic word for money. Jesus said you cannot serve God and money; you have to choose. He wasn't saying money is wrong. Paul wrote to his son, Timothy, "The love of money is the root of all evil." He didn't say money, he said the love of money. I could add the love of money, the idolatry of money is the root of all evil. Or, to put it another way, materialism is the reason that people have abdicated their sovereignty because materialism, wealth, prosperity have replaced God.

In the Book of Revelation there is a message to the Seven Churches. The last is to the Church at Laodicea. The incitement of God on that church is "You are luke-warm." And God says, in effect, "I find luke-warmness intolerable. You are neither cold nor hot and because you are neither cold nor hot I will spew you out of my mouth." Luke-warm faith makes God want to vomit.

He is in Heaven now, but when he was alive he was president of Mutual of New York Insurance Company. His name was Roger Hull and he was a beloved friend. Many times from the platform I have heard Roger Hull say, "The greatest danger we face in the world today is the casual Christian, that is the luke-warm Christian." Luke-warmness was the disease. What were the symptoms? Here's what we read in Revelations 3:17 "For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing." Imagine, because of wealth, prosperity, we need nothing - not even God. I believe this is precisely where we are in our culture in the United States today. We do not need God. When we do not need God we become victims even of our prosperity. More and more we are governed by a kind of tyranny instead of a democracy.

What can we do about it? In that same passage in Revelations we have a wonderful word from the Lord - he is speaking to his church, mind you, not to the world. He is saying, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone will hear my voice and will open the door I will come in to him and sup with him, and he with me." Jesus says to those of luke-warm faith in the '80's in America, "I'm knocking at the door of your heart, I am begging for entrance. If you open, I will come in and fellowship with you." That's the great invitation.

As you walk into the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the right wall there are his verses from the Declaration of Independence. As you walk out of the Jefferson Memorial onto the tidal basin there is another long paragraph on the wall from Thomas Jefferson. It begins with two sentences. The first is a categorical declaration. Jefferson said, "God, who gave us life gave us liberty!" The second sentence is a provocative, penetrating question. Jefferson asks, "Can the liberties of the nation be secure if we have removed the belief that those liberties are the gift of God?"

In debate in the Senate again and again I hear the word "inherent" liberty or some synonym of that but I never hear anything about the statement in the Declaration of Independence and occasionally I remind the Senate in my opening prayer. Those liberties are inherent because they were endowed by a Creator-God. And if we desire our land to be healthy and restored to the strength that it once had - to justice, righteousness and faith, all of which are a part of God's law as we are reminded in the Ten Commandments - then we must answer Jefferson's question.

Dear friend, without being presumptuous, I want to suggest that we in America must answer that question. More personally, you must answer that question, because only you and all of us like you can give the answer. Have we removed the belief that our liberties are the gift of God? Do we think that they come from somewhere but we don't know where?

Let me close with a familiar verse: II Chronicles 7:14, God speaking to His people: "If my people will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from Heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land."

One point I want to make: What is the wickedness from which we want to turn? For God's sake and for our nation's sake and for our sake, it is the sin of materialism.