Acts 4:19 "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God."

“Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God.” (Acts 4:19) Those were the words that Peter used to justify his defiance of the Sanhedrin. The Jewish religious leaders had ordered Peter and the apostles to stop preaching about Jesus the Christ, the apostles declined to obey them. As Christians, we have an obligation to obey the laws of the land that we live in, EXCEPT when those laws are clearly in defiance of the clear will of God. Preaching the Gospel in defiance of the law? Not only the right choice, the only choice. Not paying taxes because we don’t like the way the government spends our money? Sorry, can’t go with you on that one, the whole “give unto Caesar” thing. Here in America we don’t have to make hard choices between our conscience and the law very often, but it wasn’t always the case. Example: the Jim Crowe laws in the South. Christians had the right to disobey them, and certainly should never have supported them. The Civil Rights Movement’s use of non-violent protest was both effective and Christ-like.
In other parts of the world the choices faced by believers are much more difficult than in America. Throughout the Islamic world Christians face death if they try to spread the Gospel, they know that their governments support radicalism and even terrorism, and many have no voice in their government. Compared to them, we have easy choices to make. As Americans we can work through the political process, we can protest, we have freedom of speech and the press. With all that freedom the primary danger is complacency, because we live in a “Christian” country it can be easy to go with the flow, to assume that we don’t need to face the tough choices that the Apostles faced when the Church was young. Well, the Church may be middle-aged now, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to seek what is right in God’s sight.