INTRODUCTION
• SLIDE #1
• Freedom has always come to us at a price. There are always forces in the world who want to take away the God ordained freedom that every person on this planet should be able to enjoy.
• We enjoy freedoms that a lot of the world can only look upon with envy.
• We live in a great nation. There are many folks who live here that do not seem to appreciate what we have.
• People have fought and died for what we enjoy today. What did those who died fight for?
• We owe it to those who have sacrificed and died for our freedom to keep the nation strong.
• As a nation, we are traveling down a road that can lead to the loss of what God has blessed us with and what people have fought and died for.
• In his book “The Decline and Fall of The Athenian Republic.” Author Alexander Fraser Tyler who lived from 1748-1813 stated:
• The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years, we read, and those nations progressed through this sequence:
From Bondage to Spiritual Faith -- From Spiritual Faith to Great Courage
From Courage to Liberty -- From Liberty to Abundance
From Abundance to Selfishness -- From Selfishness to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy -- From Apathy to Dependency
From Dependency back again into bondage.
• In the book of Judges in the Old Testament, you will find a similar cycle with the nation of Israel. They would go from prosperity to sin to slavery to repentance and the cycle continued though out the life of the nation.
• This nation is 231 years old. The above cycle is not inevitable -- it depends on every one of us and on our children and their children, to see that we do not follow that cycle.
• When this country cherished the Godly standards upon which it was founded, the nation prospered, but as we turn our backs as a nation on God, we see that we are not so prosperous with mounting debts, lowering moral standards, more crime, among other things.
• I believe we owe it to those who sacrificed their lives for our freedom to make sure we do all we can to help keep this nation strong and on the right track.
• I love my country. In my thinking God and country are to go hand in hand, and our founders felt the same way.
• Of the founding fathers, 52 of the 55 men who formed the constitution were active members of their churches, Noah Webster who wrote the first dictionary could literally quote the bible chapter and verse.
• Without God, this nation will not achieve the greatness that our founders wanted.
• Leaving God out of our institutions is bad for America, and I fear that unless we start educating people about the roots of the nation, and also making the church is a positive loving influence on society again, we could suffer the fate of all of the other great nations of history, this nation could self destruct.
• I want us to understand that our country was designed to be a Christian nation, and that it is God that makes or breaks nations.
• SLIDE #2
• Founding father Patrick Henry said, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!
• There are three pillars that make the nations strong, the civil government, the family, and the church. Each of these pillars needs to be built on the foundation of Jesus.
• If we build these pillars on any other foundation, we will be in trouble.
• SLIDE #3
SERMON
I. JESUS MUST BE THE LORD OF OUR GOVERNMENT.
• An Indiana farmer took his family to the nation’s capital to see how their government worked. After visiting the House of Representatives, they went to the Senate gallery, where the chaplain of the Senate was speaking.
• "Daddy," asked the farmer’s ten-year-old daughter, "does the chaplain pray for the Senate?" "No," said the farmer. "He comes in, looks at the Senators, and then prays for the country."
• SLIDE #4
• John Quincy Adams, in his speech on July 4th, 1837, at Newburyport, asked the crowd: "Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on the fourth of July.
• Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation?
• Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’ mission upon earth?
• That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity."
• Romans 13:1 - 7 (NASB) 1Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. 2Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. 3For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority?
• Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; 4for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. 5Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’ sake. 6For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. 7Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.
• SLIDE #6
1. Government is ordained by God!
o We are to be in subjection to the ruling authorities as long as they are fulfilling their mission from God. The mission is to punish the evil doers and protect the righteous.
o We need to remember that when Romans 13 was written, the government was not too friendly to Christians.
o Our founding fathers had a good understanding of what Governments role was to be.
• Government is not to be the giver of liberty, but the protector of liberty. Since Government receives its authority from God, it should govern within the framework God establishes.
• It used to be that public officials had to take and oath before they took political office which said,
• ”I do profess faith in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost…one God blessed forevermore; and I do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration” Delaware Constitution, 1776
• George Mason, the father of the Bill of Rights explained in reference to a nations accountability to God: "As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects. Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.
• SLIDE #7
2. Our system of laws is built on the Bible.
o Supreme Court 1892: "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian."
o Supreme Court 1811: "Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government." From David Barton’s Video America’s Godly Heritage we find the following information.
o Blackstone’s Commentary on the Law, introduced in 1758, became the law textbook for lawyers for 160 years, and the Supreme Court quoted from it to settle cases.
o It gave Bible verse references to the law. For instance the three branches of government are based on Isaiah 33:22, the separation of powers is based on Jeremiah 17, and the tax exemption for Churches on Ezra 7:24.
o Political Science professors at the University of Houston wondered if there was something unique about the government of the U.S. They gathered 15,000 quotes from the Founders and located where all of them came from.
o They then boiled that down to 3,154 quotes that had significant impact on the founding of America. It took them 10 years to finish the project, but they found that the three men most quoted by the Founding fathers were Blackstone, Montesquieu, and John Locke.
o They also found that the Bible was quoted: 4 times more often than Montesquieu, 12 times more often than Blackstone, and 16 times more often than Locke.
o Additionally, 34% of all quotes were from the Bible, and another 60% of the quotes were from men who were using the Bible to arrive at their conclusions.
o SLIDE #7
o Added together, 94% of all the quotes of the Founders had their origin in the Bible, which shows the importance of God’s word in their lives and of this Nation’s founding. David Barton.
o SLIDE #8
3. Jesus must be the Lord of our public school system.
o Education is where is begins for the next generation.
o SLIDE #9
o Abe Lincoln said: The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."
o If are going to stay strong, we need to keep teaching our children the truth.
o Since we have allowed people to throw God out of the public schools in the 60’s crime, and most anything else bad you can think of has gone up.
o Things like pregnancies for 10-14 year olds had gone up over 533% since 1963. This is after the strong sex education push that has been going on in this country.
o Noah Webster said in 1828: The Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed....No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.."
o George Washington said,” Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
o SLIDE #10
II. JESUS MUST BE THE LORD OF OUR HOMES.
• Deuteronomy 11:16 - 21 (NASB) 16“Beware that your hearts are not deceived, and that you do not turn away and serve other gods and worship them. 17“Or the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you, and He will shut up the heavens so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its fruit; and you will perish quickly from the good land which the LORD is giving you. 18“You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. 19“You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. 20“You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, 21so that your days and the days of your sons may be multiplied on the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens remain above the earth.
• SLIDE #11
1. The family is one of the pillars of our nation.
• It is popular to pick on the schools for the social and educational problems of our country. The problem begins at home.
• Parents are the first teachers of our youth. What are we teaching them, are we stressing the importance of a good education?
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• Are we teaching our children about Jesus or are we turning it over to the church and expect the church to do all the education in the 1-2 hours per week we have them?
• SLIDE #12
• EPHESIANS 6:4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
• The church is here to support the teaching you are giving at home. There are too many children who are receiving nothing at home concerning their training in righteousness.
• The family needs to be under the lordship of Jesus
• SLIDE #13.
• James Madison, the Chief Architect of the Constitution: "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves...according to the Ten Commandments of God."
• Who is going to teach these things?
• The family will crumb when it is not built on the foundation of Jesus.
SLIDE #14
III. JESUS MUST BE LORD OF OUR CHURCH.
• SLIDE #15
• COLOSSIANS 1:18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything.
• We need to remember that First Christian Church is not my church or your church, this church belongs to Jesus. Jesus is the head of the church. We are just stewards or managers of what belongs to God.
• SLIDE #16
1. The church is an important pillar of a strong nation.
o The church needs to be a force in society. In order for that to happen, the church needs to allow for the Lordship of Jesus. The church is each person who is a part of it, so we all need to allow Jesus to be the lord of our lives.
o We have been sucked into the lie of the separation of Church and state. The only wall of separation there is constitutionally concerning the church and the state is the one way wall that keeps the government out of the church.
o In the 1958 Supreme Court case Bear vs. Colmorgan, one of the Justices said in a stinging dissent, “If this court doesn’t stop talking about separation of church and state, someone will think it is part of the Constitution.
o Dr. William James, the father of modern Psychology said,” There is nothing so absurd but if you repeat it often enough people will believe it.”
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o The church needs to be strong and the only way for the church to be strong is for the church to quit following man, or societies views on what we teach and stick to God and His Word.
o IF 99% of the country thinks something is right and God said it is wrong, then it is wrong!
o The church will gain respect as we allow God to guide us and as we submit to His lordship in our lives.
CONCLUSION
o For America to be great, Jesus must be the God of our government.
o For America to be great, Jesus must be the God of our homes
o For America to be great, Jesus must be the God of our churches.
o But for this to happen we must first allow Him to be the Lord of our lives!
o This country was designed to work only if the people could govern themselves.
o We owe to those who selflessly sacrificed their lives over the past 231 plus years to do all we can to help keep America strong and the land of the free and the home of the brave!
