FREEDOM

It was an awesome privilege to be a featured communicator at Kenosha's True Freedom annual event at Lake Michigan tonight.  


Our forefathers and we have been shaped as a nation by Godly standards and principles and we should be grateful to God for giving those to us.  I’m not suggesting all the founding fathers were awesome Christians with spot-on theology, I'm just saying there was at one point in American history a deep sense of personal and National accountability to a holy God that shaped our country's understanding of right and wrong.

Here’s what we learned in grade school from the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident' (that means we don’t need to have a big debate on it - it’s just ‘DUH’) 'that all men are created equal - that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ... ’

The Declaration of Independence invokes the presence of God.  And down thru the early years of our nation’s history there was never an argument about whether or not we were accountable to God’s standards - it was just ‘DUH.’  It was part of the National conscience.  

In Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, given in 1863 at the height of the Civil War, President Lincoln introduced a new phrase.  He said: ‘We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation - under God - shall have a new birth of freedom.’

Under God.  Abraham Lincoln viewed our nation as under the authority and accountability of God and the nation agreed when he wrote that.  Here we were having a Civil War, but neither side was fighting over whether or not we were a nation under God.  Both sides believed that part.

Our National ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ have been tied to God since the earliest days and the further we distance ourselves from Him as a nation - the further we distance ourselves from Him in our marriages and families - the further we get from expressing gratitude to a Creator God who set all this up in the first place - the further we get from being accountable to Him - the more we realize something else has to take His place.  It’s inevitable.  And if we remove the Creator God from the picture, what then is the foundation for what we do going forward?  Because there has to be something.  Our Declaration says it’s God, but we’ve removed Him -- so what’s the new foundation? 

I believe the new foundation --- is ourselves --- our own ideas, our own beliefs, our own morality.  And -- Christ-follower-in-2012-America -- it's critical that our foundation remains in Jesus Christ and that there be some still willing to pay the personal price to keep it that way.

May we never distance ourselves from a sovereign and holy God and begin to rely on ourselves instead of Him.  May we never become a nation of families who begin to say, 'Who is the Lord?'

And be blessed.