SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

Last Saturday, June 5, 2004 at around 5:45pm, news agencies around the world began reporting that Ronald Wilson Reagan, our 40th president, was dead. Peggy Noonan wrote in her introduction to "What I Saw at the Revolution" that each generation gets its president. Our grandparents had FDR, our parents had JFK, and we had Ronald Reagan, and so for some of us it is a difficult passing.
I Timothy 2.2 tells us to pray for our leaders that we might live lives of quietness and dignity. Whether or not you agreed with his policies, President Reagan’s determination to end runaway inflation in America, and communism around the world (and his success on both counts) provided such blessings.

The son of an alcoholic shoe salesman, and a pious mother, Ronald Reagan grew up in the Christian Church believing in his responsibility to others, and his ability to transcend circumstance to achieve success. His favorite book, written by Harold Bell Wright (a Christian Church minister) was the novel That Printer of Udell’s. Advertised as “a Book of practical Christianity”, it is about a mid-western boy, Dick Falkner, with an alcoholic father and a pious mother who works hard, catches a few breaks, and ends up in congress. I know the book well because it was my grandfather’s favorite and I have his copy – the 1911 A. L. Burt edition with the illustrations by John Clitheroe Gilbert – the very edition President Reagan kept by his bedside. When you read the book, the thing that strikes you about Dick Falkner, is a quality he has that both my grandfather and our 40th president shared. Although he is firm in his beliefs, he is never nasty about them.

The Bible tells us that a soft answer turns away wrath (Proverbs 15.1). Peter tells us in I Peter 3.14 that we should be ready to defend our beliefs, but that our answers are to be given with “gentleness and reverence”. This is a gift that continually eludes me. Being right usually gives me an itchy trigger finger, not a warm feeling of kindness and benevolence. Ronald Reagan, for all his faults and limitations, had that quality of being determined and disarming, keen and kind. President Bush (41), speaking from his home in Kennebunkport, ME, said “He could disagree with you without being disagreeable about it”. Chris Matthews, in his book Now Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, remembers meeting the president at House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s office with “Welcome, Mr. President, to the place where we plot against you”. Reagan replied to his impudence with a smile and “Not after 6 pm, the speaker says we’re all friends after 6”. And he meant that. He and the speaker genuinely liked each other.

So did he and Gorbachev. Edvard Shevardnadze, in an interview on PBS’s “American Experience”, remembers the Geneva conference in 1983, when the two men sat down for the first time. Reagan put his arm around the boxy little Soviet and said “Mr. Gorbachev, let me explain why we fear you”. They were completely unprepared for the kindness and directness of the adversary who had called them the “evil empire”. Later, when the president stood before the Brandenburg gate in Berlin and said “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” it had a moral force made forceful by friendship. The gate opened, the wall came down, nuclear proliferation was halted – it all happened. Firmness coupled with friendship really works. You can call communism “evil” and still not demonize individual communists.

To say you “Hate the sin, but love the sinner” is not a meaningless cliché. It is a necessary, Biblical distinction. A Christian must be right without being self righteous, must be ready, and be gentle. We’ve been blessed by seeing it work in international relations – will we trust that God’s way will work day by day in our own lives?

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