Tomorrow is the 4th of July, our national Independence Day, filled with celebrations of food, gatherings, and fireworks. While we enjoy this holiday, we must not forget the reason for it. Our thoughts are drawn to the remembrance of the birth of the nation. It is with this in mind that I want to dwell for a moment on this commemoration.
We all live in an exceptional country. Fraught with a history containing events for which we don’t take pride, and I won’t enumerate them because there are too many who relish the opportunity to do so, we still live in a nation which was founded on a Christian foundation, whether you fully understand the foundation or not. Most of the things we truly take for granted, things many of you have served or fought to extend and preserve, stem from that original foundation.
These concepts include individual value, human dignity, personal freedoms such as speech, religion, and public gatherings, equality before the law, and democratic institutions including the right to elect those who serve us in governing bodies. These often appear to us as immutable fixtures of our civilization because we have been blessed with them for 246 years. Of course, all of us can point to problems in the availability of some of these concepts to everyone during those 246 years. What all of us can also look at without shame is the progress within the country of perfecting the application to everyone.
Despite the flaws in our history, it is impossible to find a place on this planet, now or throughout history, where there has been a greater attainment of the most freedom, the most protection, the most affluence, for the most people. It is an exceptional history which was an extension of and improvement to the development of western civilization.
The fragility of this freedom should not be lost on any of us. First, our freedoms are not immutable; they can be lost, or given away, by any generation of Americans. Second, our freedoms find their existence in that Christian foundation from which this nation sprang. Finally, as generations of Americans have attested by blood, freedom is maintained by those willing to protect it.
This is our heritage and our responsibility. We are not solely grateful recipients of these blessings. We are among those who understand that vigilance, especially through education and self-control, ensure the ability to protect this nation and the values we cherish from all who despise freedom, or covet the blessings, seeking to extinguish the light of liberty, both now and throughout our history.
We are blessed. We are grateful. Let us also remain diligent in our commitment to defending freedom for ourselves and our children. We above all others must understand a free people must first be able to govern themselves by being a Godly people. When we love our God, when we fulfill his commands for our lives while also expecting the same from our leaders, when we educate ourselves, our children and those we meet, on the history of God in the creation of our nation, that our obedience to him is the only path forward for continued freedom and blessings, then we are daily a part of the defense of this most blessed of nations.
NOTE: Also posted to FB on 4 July 2022 with a brief introductory remark and minor changes.
“The following remarks, with a minor modification, were given at Ahava Community Church, Macon Georgia, on Sunday, 3 July 2022”
