Kingdom thinking will focus to a great degree on building character and not necessarily on institutions. Institutions will be built, but to have the right foundation they must be built by men of character.
Oswald Chambers said, “The one thing that God is after is character.”
It would seem that in every one of our presidential campaigns, or even when some of our other politicians are running for election or re-election, that very little emphasis is given on character. I was surprised when many responded that character is not what counts. They say, “It is the issues that count.”
One would hope that it is only a few people that believe that character is not that important, but it seems that this is something that’s becoming more rampant in our public offices as well as in our religious establishments. How can we say that character is not important? Everything we do springs out of character. Real leadership comes out of character or from lack of it.
Chuck Colson in his magazine Break Point said this:
“There’s an issue that crops up in every major election campaign: Does a candidate’s private morality have anything to do with his public life? For years, liberals have said no – people can do anything they like in private and it doesn’t affect their ability to govern. And now a conservative leader John O’Sullivan, editor of National Review, has said the same thing, writing that he’d rather be governed by a competent sinner than by an incompetent saint. The assumption here is that governing requires only technical competence. But that’s a mistaken assumption. ln reality, governing involves a whole philosophy of life, and that in turn involves our personal choices and behavior.
“Let me give you just one example – a very important one. Nearly all forms of modern philosophy borrow from the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, an 18th century French writer. Rousseau’s political ideas are described in his book The Social Contract, where he says the ideal state is one that demands total allegiance. Rousseau wanted the state to take responsibility for raising children so it could indoctrinate them to devote their whole selves to its service.
“These were the ideas that fueled the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. They were adopted by Marx and Lenin and became part of communism. They even influenced Pol Pot and his cadre of Paris educated communists, who slaughtered a quarter of the Cambodian population in their pursuit of the totalitarian state.
“Where did Rousseau get such an awful view of the state?
“If we look at his life, the answer becomes clear. Rousseau was a drifter and a Bohemian. He had several affairs and lived most of his life with a mistress, a young washer woman, named Therese. When Therese gave birth to a baby, Rousseau faced a major challenge: Would he settle down and accept the responsibilities of family and fatherhood? The answer was a flat no. Children, Rousseau said, would cramp his lifestyle, would undercut his celebrity in the high society of the day.
“He persuaded Therese to give up the infant to an orphanage. (Today it would be an abortion). Over the years Rousseau had five children. Each one was deposited on the steps of the orphanage. When his friends criticized him, Rousseau tried to justify his actions. He hit upon the argument that giving up his children was actually the best thing for them – that the state could do a better job of raising and educating them; that the state was a better father.
“These ideas later became a key plank in Rousseau’s political philosophy. Having asked the State to be a father to his own children he devised a theory of the state as father to us all. The state should be responsible for forming our minds and our loyalties. In the words of historian Paul Johnson, Rousseau portrayed all citizens as ‘children of the paternal orphanage.’
“Rousseau might have been appalled if he had known that so much of the barbarism of the 20th century: the Concentration camps, the mock trial, the genocide, all resulted from his efforts to justify his own irresponsibility.”
Everything stems from character.