9/11 What Have We Learned?

Jack L. Martin Praise Assembly of God

Sept 8, 2002

TITLE: 9/11 What have we learned?

Jeremiah 8:19-20

Listen to the cry of my people

from a land far away:

"Is the Lord not in Zion?

Is her King no longer there?"

"Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,

with their worthless foreign idols?"

"The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved."

Maybe the Question for America today would be this.

Is the Lord no longer in the United States, Is her King no longer there?

In the words of the song writer - Have the 3 that we admire most, The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost caught the last train for the coast.

This coming week in America will be a very traumatic one for sure.

And especially in citys like New York, and Washington DC as well as a small community in western Pennsylvania.

A lot has happend in the year since that day when 4 Commercial Airliners suddenly became implements of Osama Bin Laden and his Alquita Network of terrorists..

I wish this morning that I could stand in this pulpit, with only a good declaration concerning - Sept. 11 a year past.

I wish that it had borne only good fruit & that america had come to her senses and national revival had taken place because of it.. How great it would be to be able to say

• There is good fruit. Many that day got saved,

• Many got saved in all the funerals and all of the pauses to bring out another body.

• Many got saved all over the world because of the shock over 9/11

• Literally more money was donated by private means than at any time before in the history of the world.

• People lined up around blocks all over the world to donate blood.

• Politicians stopped there squabling and came together in defense of our nation.

• Other nations joined in our grief.

And I don’t mean to down play the good that has come from it.

But I have to be fully transparent this morning in saying that America has missed almost completly what God would have done in our nation had we continued in the spirit that

First took place in our nation and in the world for that matter.

God wanted it to serve as a wake up call as to how far we had moved from Him.

 How far out of his protective hands we had chosen to go.

He was wanting America to stop quoting II Chron. 7:14 and instead choose to obey it.

And for a time we did just that.

• For a time the congress worked feverishly as one.

• For a time people gave unselfishly

• People started back to church and praying.

• Kids prayed in school.

• For a time America was a nice place to live again.

For a time!

But thats the problem, TIME....

Time makes us forget what has happend

and brings us back to the same stupid place we were before the tragedy

George Sant ayana famous quote........

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Over the coarse of the year we have not only slid back to where we were before Sept 11, 2001 but we have fallen even further.

Thurdays cross fire... Man who has brought the suit to remove under God from the pledge of alliegance, has now filed to stop the Congress of the United States from opening in prayer, and has said he will challenge in God we trust next. At a time when we need the Lord more than ever.

Fridays Paper - A conservative Episcopal Priest was defrocked for complaining that the denomination had become to liberal.

Think of this past year with me.

• The Catholic church was rocked with the priest sex scandal

• People in trusted positions, people we have looked up to have failed in alarming ways. - Martha Stewart Enron MCI

• More Kids kidnapped an murdered, in more brutal ways than Id like to remember.

• Baseball Players and owners that only settled because they got the hint how mad the fans were at them. RIGHT IN THE SHADOW OF 9/11

• Congress both republican and democrat are back to doing business as usual.

• Steroid user has rocked the baseball world and Im sure other sports as well.

• Baseball legend Ted Williams had to have his last memory be one not of his baseball skills but the butt of jokes of being Teddy the Red Sox snowman.

• Dishonesty in the Olympics. Fixing outcomes.

• Judges actually entertained that foolish man in calif. Motion.

• Someone in the face of the disaster of 9/11 mailed anthrax all over the nation.