Mar 1, 2006

From One Nation Under God to One Nation Without God

United States of America.

When you think of this country, what is one word that you think of?

FREEDOM.

Freedom of speech, of press, to vote, to own property, of worship, etc. We take these things for granted, but many people do not have these freedoms that we have.

Our country has been blessed.

In Search of Freedom

Why did the pilgrims come to America? Why did they risk their lives traveling across the ocean? Why did they leave all that was familiar to them to go to a strange land?

Why?

Because where they were living, they did not have freedom.

Why did our forefathers risk their lives signing the Declaration of Independence. Why were they willing to give up their lives fighting for this country? Because they wanted freedom.



They were tired of being oppressed by those in higher power. But instead of just complaining about it, they decided to do something to change it. That’s why the pilgrims crossed the ocean and why those men signed the Declaration of Independence.



The Foundation of Freedom.

Our country’s foundation is God. It was built upon His principles and His law.

To have freedom you have to have laws.


Many people today are beginning to look at Christianity as an impediment to the continuation of their “freedom”—to sin. But they have transformed liberty into license, and in the worst form of licentiousness, they don’t want anybody speaking against that or in any way restraining them. Hence, the modern hedonist views Christianity as repressive and not liberating.

Setting out to set themselves free—to fulfill all of their lusts—the hedonists find themselves ultimately in bondage to tyranny. As Edmund Burke said, “There must be some restraining influence upon the wills and passions of men, and the less there is from within, the more there must be from without.

What If Jesus Had Never Been Born by D. James Kennedy, chapter 6, page 89


Our foundation: It’s being removed piece by piece

Our country is trying to push God out. Out of our lives, out of the schools, out of the government, and out of our country.

If they succeed in removing the foundation of our country, who is God, it will collapse, just like a building without its foundation.


Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who traveled throughout America in 1830, was astonished to see that though the American people were quite religious, they were also most free. He wrote: “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” And in another passage, he observed:

There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation on earth.

What If Jesus Had Never Been Born by D. James Kennedy, chapter 6, pages 87-88

What’s happened? Why are the “notions of Christianity and of liberty” no longer “intimately combined in our minds?” Listen to what Abe Lincoln said:


We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.

We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

We have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

American Government by William R. Bowen, George T. Thompson, Michael R. Lowman, and George C. Cochran, chapter 6, page 100

This country was built upon God as the foundation, upon His Word. But now that we have prospered, we say we don’t need God, we do not see the need for God. We have forgotten that He is the One who helped us to prosper. We have forgotten that He is the One who gave us freedom. So now we are removing our foundation piece by piece. The firm base of our freedom is crumbling.


Retaining Freedom

If we want to keep our freedom, then we need to keep God in the US. He wants us to have freedom because He is the One who gives us freedom. In His Word it tells how he liberated the Israelites from their enemies. And also it tells how he liberated all of us, the whole world, from our greatest enemy, Satan. So clearly He wants us to have freedom. He is our Great Liberator. Not oppressor.

To close I’ll let you read what some of our Presidents have said about God’s Word the Bible.

That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests.

-Andrew Jackson

Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties. Write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this Book are we indebted for all the progress made in true civilization, and to this we must look as our guide in the future. “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”

-Ulysses S. Grant

The more profoundly we study this wonderful book, and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation.

-William McKinley


Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally—I do not mean figuratively, but literally—impossible for us to figure what that loss would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards towards which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves.

-Theodore Roosevelt

There is no other book so varied as the Bible, nor one so full of concentrated wisdom. Whether it be of law, business, morals, or that vision which leads the imagination in the creation of constructive enterprise for the happiness of mankind, he who seeks for guidance in any of these things may look inside its covers and find illumination. The study of this Book in your Bible classes is a post-graduate course in the richest library of human experience. As a nation we are indebted to the Book of books for our national ideas and representative institutions. Their preservation rests in
adhearing to its principles.

-Herbert Hoover

American Government by William R. Bowen, George T. Thompson, Michael R. Lowman, and George C. Cochran, chapter 6, page 111

Pictures from FreeFoto.com

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