Memorial Day - Our Faith, Our Freedom, Our Future

[0:00] It is that phrase that we intend to use for a launching pad for the message that is going to follow, and it has to do with the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

[0:14] Our message today for this Memorial Day Sunday is entitled, Our Faith, Our Freedom, Our Future. And if I may beg your indulgence, I am going to once again share some things with you that I have written.

[0:31] I am not willing in my advancing age to trust the memory as much as I used to, so I feel compelled to write down these propositions that we are going to consider, and we will build on that as we go.

[0:50] We will briefly address these three areas, our faith, our freedoms, and our future. So bear with me while I read this to you.

[1:01] Everything that is worth anything begins with faith. Faith merely means what you believe to be true. It is what one believes to be true that prompts us to action.

[1:17] We act on the basis of what we understand to be true. That allows us to establish our agenda, to set goals, etc., and it is all predicated upon your belief system, what you accept as valid and true.

[1:33] From that you launch out into action. Faith is a wonderful and curious dynamic. It was instituted by God from the very beginning of the human race.

[1:45] Faith is the justifying principle and the divine modus operandi. It is the only way of access to God. Think of that.

[1:57] Faith is the only way of access to God. Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, Paul tells us in Romans 5.1.

[2:12] Justifying faith is that which has the proper object. It is not faith in anything, but faith, confidence, trust, reliance in the only right object.

[2:27] God the Father sent Christ the Son to be that justifying object in whom men are to believe. We are reminded in John 20 and verse 31, where John the Divine said, And many other signs or miracles did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through believing, you might have life in his name.

[3:02] Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is the faith once for all delivered to the saints of which Jude spoke. And let me quote that verse again.

[3:14] I'm reading from 1.3. Actually, Jude only has one chapter, so it is verse 3, wherein he says, breaking into the middle of the verse, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith.

[3:31] That means stand up for it. Defend it. Prize it. Don't be willing to surrender it. That you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

[3:48] Now, we've talked a lot about faith over the last 40 years here, but some things justify repetition, and this is one of them. We are not saved by faith in faith.

[4:01] When you talk to most people about faith, it is some nebulous kind of fuzzy thing that is really hard to get one's brain around. It's just kind of floating around out there.

[4:12] And they say things like, well, just have faith and everything will turn out all right. Well, that's not the way the Bible uses the word at all. When it talks about faith, it takes an object.

[4:24] And it isn't faith in faith. It is faith in the person of Jesus Christ. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

[4:36] And that is the faith. It is the Christian faith. It is that faith which has been garnered from the contents of the Old and the New Testament.

[4:46] And they are handed down to us for us. And this is the representation of the faith. This is the faith. Once for all delivered faith.

[4:57] That means it has an air of finality to it. This faith is not being added to as generations come along. It is solid and fixed and certain.

[5:10] It is the faith once for all delivered. Entirety, completeness, coherence. It is all there. It is not to be detracted from. It is not to be added to.

[5:21] It is the faith. That's that which is set forth in our Old and New Testaments. And many of our founding fathers possessed this faith of which we are speaking.

[5:37] It is true. Some were deists. We would not call them Christian at all. They would not call themselves Christians. I suspect probably the most well-known deist believed by many to have been Benjamin Franklin.

[5:53] He was a man of great gift and great ability. But he did not embrace the biblical concept of faith through our Lord Jesus Christ.

[6:03] Even though he was a personal friend of men like George Whitefield. And Franklin was fascinated by George Whitefield, an English preacher who came to the colonies seven times during his preaching career.

[6:19] And because Franklin was given to science like he was and numbers and figures and math and inventiveness and all the rest, he used to thrill at the crowds that George Whitefield would preach to.

[6:32] And Whitefield would stand on the back on the deck of a wagon in an empty open field and preach to 15,000 people without any amplification, no microphones, no electronics, just the human voice.

[6:53] And it was said that everyone on the outer perimeter could hear every word that George Whitefield uttered. One of the more famous Shakespearean actors that was in bloom at the time Whitefield was at the height of his ministry said, I would give anything if I could say, oh, like George Whitefield can say it.

[7:19] He must have had a purely melodic voice. And Franklin and George Whitefield were good friends. And Whitefield tried on many occasions to bring him to the Savior, but Franklin always resisted.

[7:31] But he never missed a meeting with George Whitefield. And he would pace around the crowd, the perimeter of the crowd, pace all the way around it, as Whitefield stood there on a wagon preaching to this huge throng, thousands of people.

[7:48] And he really, I guess you would say, got his kicks out of pacing off the areas surrounding the crowd and calculating how many people to each square foot and devising by that the number of people who were there.

[8:05] And he conservatively estimated time and again 15,000 to 20,000 people. It's amazing. Those who heard him, for the most part, believed him, accepted his message.

[8:22] We had an enormous percentage of people in our early colonial days who were full-flowered believers in our Lord Jesus Christ, certainly a much greater percentage than what we are experiencing today.

[8:35] So some of our founding fathers, great as they were, were not convinced of our positions regarding Christianity. And Franklin was another. Thomas Jefferson, who gave us the Declaration of Independence, was not what we would consider an evangelical Christian at all.

[8:55] I don't know if you're familiar with the Jefferson Bible or not. But he took it upon himself being the, I guess you would say, the naturalist that he was. And Thomas Jefferson was a great naturalist.

[9:07] And he was a great mind. He was a genius, I think, by every stretch of the imagination. But he had a commitment to naturalism that would not accommodate the supernatural at all.

[9:21] And he believed that all of the supposed miracles that Christ performed really had a naturalistic explanation, if you only knew what it was.

[9:32] So he compiled what is to this day known as the Jefferson Bible. I have a copy of it, in fact. And what he did was, he went through the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and painstakingly, with his penknife, cut out all of the portions that referred to the miracles, because he did not accept them.

[9:54] However, he was completely convinced that Christ was one of the most gifted teachers and communicators who ever lived. And he admired him on that basis.

[10:06] But he was not a committed believer. So we can dismiss him as being one of the founding fathers of faith, because he was not, even though he made an enormous contribution to our nation with the Declaration of Independence.

[10:21] And those who were deists, a deist is simply a deist is someone who believes there is a creator God. And what he did was, he created everything.

[10:33] And then he just abandoned it, walked off from it. And the illustration is given that a deist is like somebody who makes a clock and he winds the clock up, sets it aside, then has nothing to do with it.

[10:49] Just walks away and the clock ticks. And some believe, deists believe, that that's what happened when God created everything. So what they are saying is that God does not intervene in any way in the affairs of men.

[11:02] He is completely detached from all creation. That's the definition of a deist. Thomas Paine was another keen mind.

[11:14] A man of great intellect, a great intellectual. He was very gifted in writing. Thomas Paine was a full-flowered atheist, committed completely to the concept that there is no God.

[11:31] Yet, he made a contribution that ought to be recognized. And my feeling is credit should be given where credit is due. It was Thomas Paine who wrote Common Sense.

[11:44] And it was Thomas Paine, along with John Adams, that His Majesty King George issued a death warrant for. And those two men, John Adams and Thomas Paine, were on the crown's hit list.

[12:02] And they were constantly being searched for by the king's henchmen to literally do away with them. So Thomas Paine contributed greatly to the Revolutionary War that broke out.

[12:16] His writings enlivened a lot of people and educated a lot of people as to the inequities of the crown and the tyranny that was underway and the taxes and all of the unfairness.

[12:30] And he helped to light the fire that started with the Revolution. Many founding fathers wrote a great deal, and their writings left no doubt as to where their beliefs were.

[12:46] You can go to any public library today, and you can find the writings of many of our founding fathers. And when I'm talking about our founding fathers, I'm not talking about a handful.

[12:57] I'm talking about thousands, thousands of men and women who lived in these revolutionary days, who embraced the concept of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and who accepted, without reservation, the Bible as the Word of God.

[13:17] And most of these people, most of the founding fathers were committed believers in Jesus Christ, and they made no bones about it.

[13:28] Speaking of the Lord and of worship and of the Bible and of prayer and all of those things was far, far more common and anticipated and expected by those in government positions then, as opposed to today.

[13:45] And those who speak too much of divine things today may very well get a threatening letter from the ACLU threatening to sue them for this or that or something else. That would have been unheard of in the day of our founding fathers.

[13:59] And what they did, and this is really, really important, I hope you get this. Our founding fathers committed to the documents that birthed this nation, Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

[14:21] They committed to those documents items from their own personal belief system, their own relationship and connection with God through Jesus Christ.

[14:32] And as I've said, you can go to any public library and research the actual writings of these men that numbered in the hundreds, and you can see what their convictions were, what they believed and why they believed it.

[14:45] And when it came time to draft these documents that would determine the course of this nation, they put into those documents their own belief system, where they were coming from.

[14:59] They had a worldview, and they wrote that worldview into these documents, and that is very important to understand. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

[15:13] These have been revered by the U.S. population, placed second only to the Bible. And they closed out the Declaration of Independence.

[15:25] It was, they signed it, and they said, to this document, we pledge our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor.

[15:36] And most of those who signed that Declaration of Independence, most of them died without what we would consider the kind of income or the kind of benefits that might accrue to someone who had such a strategic position in the birthing of this nation.

[15:58] Some of them died bankrupt. Some of them died penniless. Some of them had their lives taken from them and were persecuted in different ways. And what the majority of the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution believed was reflected in their drafting of these documents and chiseled in stone on many of the buildings of government in Washington.

[16:23] These included, among many others, the Ten Commandments. That's so controversial today. The Bible, as the Word of God, was recognized by the vast majority of our founding fathers and the population in general.

[16:38] And they were accepted to be mankind's supreme authority, the Word of God itself. And very few people, very few people, other than some of those that I mentioned in their ilk, ever rejected the authority of the Scriptures.

[16:52] It was believed and accepted wholesale throughout the colonies, and for that matter, in Great Britain as well. The Bible was recognized as the supreme authority.

[17:03] It is not so today. It has not been so for quite some time. This included what the Bible says about human nature.

[17:14] This very reality they adopted caused them to institute three equal authorities in governance, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.

[17:28] No one segment of government can be trusted with possessing all the power. They wisely understood what the Bible sets forth as the nature and character of the human heart.

[17:42] You cannot allow power to reside in one source only. The temptation for the abuse of power is too great, and too many are unable to resist it.

[17:58] And they had the wisdom to build into our government those three equal branches, each of which is accountable to the others, all of which are accountable to the public.

[18:09] And that kind of wisdom was not theirs. They got it from the Scriptures. They understood the nature and the character of humanity. And this, by the way, is one of the things that misleads so many of our lawmakers today on the state and national level, and it is this.

[18:28] They do not understand the human heart. And they make legislation that is geared to people whom they regard as perfectible. And do you know where that comes from?

[18:41] That comes from Darwinism. That comes from buying into the concept that all of humanity is on an upward climb. And every generation, we are getting better and better, more sophisticated, more responsible, more everything, as time goes on.

[19:00] And when you write laws to govern people that way, you're going to be sorely misled, because that's not the way it is. I told you before that the 20th century, 20th century that we just left, was responsible for the deaths through conflict and war, more deaths in that hundred years of that 20th century than man has ever been responsible for for 19 centuries before.

[19:39] We reached a culmination. We succeeded in killing more of our own kind in the 20th century than the previous 19 centuries put together.

[19:49] You call that progress? You call that developing man, growing man, maturing man, developing man? No. It's a downward thing.

[20:01] That's the true direction in which it is headed. And when you pass legislation and make it effective upon people whom, oh, all people are basically honest, give me a break.

[20:16] I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night. We are not that way. We need to be reined in.

[20:27] The individual needs to be reined in. We need to be held accountable because we are not completely trustworthy. And when you do not take that into consideration and you pass legislation that overlooks that, then you know what you're going to get?

[20:43] You're going to get what we've got. That's what you're going to get. And it's predictable. No one segment of government can be trusted with possessing all the power.

[21:02] And do you know why our founding fathers were so convinced of that? They were living it. All the power, all authority was vested in King George.

[21:15] And what came down from the king was imposed upon the people. And you either obeyed or you suffered the consequences. That was the centralization of power. It all resided in the crown.

[21:29] But the crown cannot be trusted any more than the president cannot be trusted. Or the senator cannot be trusted. Or the representative cannot be trusted.

[21:40] So we've got to have a way of checking and balancing even them. And part of that is what elections are all about. Because elections are designed to hold people accountable.

[21:51] It is the American way. The crown worn by the King George of England, he gradually became more and more tyrannical with his demands upon the colonies.

[22:03] And they became unbearable, resulting in the Declaration of Independence. After the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation were drafted and were soon found to be unsatisfactory, leading to the United States Constitution drafted by the pen of James Madison, who was later to become our fourth president.

[22:28] These documents were all about establishing the independence from Britain by the 13 colonies and the establishing of the principles by which those 13 colonies would be governed after independence was gained.

[22:44] So, let's just take a brief look at something that appeared in the Constitution as Article I. This is called the First Amendment.

[22:56] And when you consider this as Article I, it ought to give us a clue that these who were drafting this document, called the Constitution, they were accustomed to being under the boot of King George.

[23:18] And whatever tax or requirement he imposed upon them, they had no alternative to it but to comply or suffer the consequences. And this is a whole host of offenses like that is what ultimately drove us to the Declaration of Independence and just telling King George in England, we don't want to be part of you anymore.

[23:39] We want to be separate from you. We want to create our own destiny. We don't want to be under the crown. We don't want to be under England. We want to be separate and apart. And that's what the Declaration of Independence was all about.

[23:53] And here in the Constitution, which was later drafted, they began, I think, out of their own personal conviction, and they began on the basis of what they were accustomed to suffering and wanted relief from.

[24:07] So I can just see these men. Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall? These men got together to draft this Constitution. They knew one thing for sure.

[24:19] They knew they didn't want to create a government and a Constitution that would in any way, shape, or form be like that of England.

[24:30] They didn't want to be under the crown. Do you know who they really wanted to be? The boss? Completely weird, unheard of concept. Do you know who they wanted to be?

[24:42] The boss? The people. The people. That's why it begins, we, the people. And that's what it's still supposed to be.

[24:53] It's not about government. There are those today who would have us believe the government is the be-all, end-all of everything. It isn't. It's the people. It is the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

[25:08] And boy, have we ever forgotten that. So, stinging under the laws and the requirements of King George and his stroke of the pen, making it law, without the need of anything else, they're going to deal with the issues that they felt were most critical.

[25:30] Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. That means, in simple terms, no state church.

[25:42] That's what it means. It doesn't mean that government is in any way to be completely separate from religion. That was never their intent. But, spiritual things and religion was part and parcel of the colonists and their practices and their daily routine, and nobody thought anything of it.

[26:04] In fact, they encouraged it. They approved it. They contributed to it. So, there's no state church. There is a Church of England. That was the official church.

[26:17] And the vicars, the pastors in the Church of England, were on the payroll of the king. They got their salaries from the treasury. And our founding father said, we're not going to do that.

[26:30] We're not going to have a state church. Because when you have a state church, then that's the only accepted legal church. And everything else is considered reactionary. So, they started with, Congress shall not be able to establish a state church.

[26:47] That would be the Church of the United States. There is no such thing. There is a Church of England. But there wouldn't be any United States. Or, prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

[26:58] That means, if you want to be a Jehovah's Witness, you can be. If you want to be a Mormon, you can be. If you want to be a New Ager, you can be. Because this Congress and this nation is going to recognize the freedom of the individual to make their own choices.

[27:19] Whether you agree with them or not. That's one of the great things about this country. There are other faiths and religions that I completely disagree with. But I will fight to the death for their right to believe it, even though I think they're wrong.

[27:34] We have to allow people the freedom of conscience and the freedom of choice. And the reason we do is because every person was given a volition by God. And every individual is responsible to God for the use of it.

[27:48] The government is not responsible for your volition to God. You are. That means that salvation and religion and faith is not institutional. It's personal.

[28:01] God deals with each of us as individuals. Freedom of speech or abridging the freedom of speech. That means if you want to rail against the government, you can.

[28:14] And you won't go to jail for it. You can say, I think those people in Congress are a bunch of flunkies and I wouldn't go across the street to meet any of them. And I think they're dead.

[28:25] You can do that. And you don't have to worry about going to jail. You can. You can write a letter of disapproval to the president of the United States.

[28:36] And as long as you don't contain any threat in that letter to his personal well-being or safety, you can tell him off. You can tell him you think he's wrong about the health care law.

[28:49] You can tell him you think he's wrong about everything. You can tell him you resent the way he treats Air Force One like a kid in a candy store. You can tell him all kinds of things. As long as you don't threaten him, you won't be visited by the FBI.

[29:03] But if you send a threatening letter, that's a different thing. You know, you can do that in this country. You can rail against the government. You can let off steam. And you won't go to jail. But there are places throughout the world today, and I'm thinking primarily of places like Red China, North Korea, Soviet Union, not as much now as it used to be.

[29:24] If you were going to talk to another person, you had to be really sure who you were talking to. Because he might be a rat.

[29:35] And he would report you to the authorities, and you would be visited. That's not freedom of speech. We've got that here in the United States. And it's in the First Amendment.

[29:46] And you know why it's in the First Amendment? It's because religion and free speech are primary items. They are top-door items that our founding fathers saw as really important.

[29:58] And the things that you consider really important, you list them first. And that's where they started. First Amendment. Freedom of religion. Freedom of speech.

[30:09] Freedom of the press. You can write a newspaper. You can write an editorial item. It can scorch this senator or this president or this representative or whatever.

[30:20] And you have the freedom to do that. The newspaper can publish what they believe to be the truth. And they don't have to worry about recriminations from the government. They may make the government very unhappy.

[30:31] But freedom of the press says they can publish whatever they want. It's amazing. You realize how many countries in the world you can't do that without going to jail?

[30:44] These are things that we have come to take for granted, these wonderful freedoms. And to peaceably assemble. There are all kinds of places throughout the world where you cannot congregate more than ten people together without them suspecting that something is going on.

[31:02] And they will send a mole or a spy in to try to penetrate that and find out that's against the freedom of assembly and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

[31:15] These documents were all about establishing independence from Britain by the 13 colonies and the establishing of the principles by which these 13 colonies would be governed after the independence was gained.

[31:33] It, the Constitution, and its implementation gave America an enormous respect and appetite for the freedoms and liberties we came to enjoy.

[31:47] We have fought several wars with those who would take them from us. We long ago determined we would not go back under another King George or any other tyrant or despot.

[31:59] Why do these people exist? Why are there King Georges? Why are there despots? Why are there Joseph Stalins? Why are there Ho Chi Mens?

[32:11] Why are these people around? What's their thing? I'll tell you what their thing is. And it's very simple. They are all seeking to dominate, to control.

[32:24] They are egomaniacs who are persuaded of their superiority to the point they want all to be under them and their authority. And you'll thank me in the end.

[32:37] I'm only doing it for your own good. Problem is, you're just too stupid to realize what's for your own good. So I will decide what's for your own good.

[32:49] And in the end, you will thank me. This was Adolf Hitler's line. This was Joseph Stalin's line. And they were responsible for the death of untold millions.

[33:04] Do you realize there were 50 million? 50 million people killed in World War II. And most of them were civilians.

[33:18] They weren't military. They were civilians. Do you realize that Joseph Stalin selectively eliminated tens of millions of his own people by deliberate starvation?

[33:31] All for the glorious communist cause that in the end would triumph. Well, in World War I, there was Kaiser Wilhelm. Oh, by the way, look at this second one.

[33:43] Oh, second amendment. Hot potato item today. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

[34:02] Why in the world would people need to bear arms anyway? Are there that many people engaged in hunting anymore? Do you realize where the colonists would have been if they had not had the few arms that they had when confronted by King George and his troops?

[34:25] Do you know anything about the militia? Do you know anything about the minute men, the militia? They were a bunch of chief of officers and the militia, the militia? They were a bunch of farmers and cobblers and cattlemen and tradesmen, and they each had their weapon, And they each were able and willing to go against a well-armed, well-regulated, professional group of soldiers called the Redcoats.

[34:53] The British are coming. And without that arms. But you see, we say, well, we don't need an armed populace today because our government is on our side.

[35:11] I think the English could have probably used the same argument back then. There may have been a time when King George wasn't all that lacking in benevolence, but something changed, you know, and we ended up in this enormous conflict.

[35:30] These people exist to dominate. And you can just go down through history. And I'm just going back as far, well, maybe a little beyond my lifetime, but not very far. World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm.

[35:41] And Germany. And World War II, Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese, Stalin, communism. I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but when World War II was wrapping up and Germany was breathing its last gasp, it was George C. Patton that wanted to turn our armaments toward the Soviet Union.

[36:06] They were our allies. They were our allies. They were our allies. And Patton was convinced they were our enemies. And he was right.

[36:18] He was right. But, of course, it would not have been diplomatic. It would not have been seemly for the United States to have turned on an ally. And as a result, the Soviets moved in.

[36:31] They took Berlin. Germany ended up being partitioned into four quarters, one of which was the United States and Great Britain and the Soviets and France.

[36:48] And immediately, Stalin closed down everything so that nothing could get through to Berlin. And it was George C. Marshall, the United States Secretary of State, that initiated the Berlin Airlift.

[37:06] Some of you, many of you are too young to know anything about this. But the Berlin Airlift simply flew over the barriers that the Russians had set and brought relief and food to the people of Berlin.

[37:19] And eventually, eventually, after the war ended, the Cold War began. See, we ended a hot war.

[37:30] Then we started the Cold War. And we had all kinds of threats. The United States people were building bomb shelters in their backyards and in their basements because we thought the possibility of a nuclear attack from Russia was very possible.

[37:45] And in the 1950s, I was a young soldier boy stationed in Alaska, Fort Richardson. And they called it the DEW line.

[37:57] The DEW stood for Distant Early Warning Line. And our government was convinced that if Soviet bombers were going to come to the United States and drop an atomic bomb, they would come over Alaska.

[38:11] That would be the most direct route. And we had very distinct fear of that. And children were being told how to crouch under their desk at school if the alarms went off and we were under a nuclear attack.

[38:26] A fat lot of good that would do to get under your desk in a nuclear attack. But that was all we knew at the time. That was what we taught our children. The Cold War. And the Cold War was on and the Soviets began gobbling up nations all around them.

[38:39] And this became the impetus for the domino theory. Some of you might remember that. But the domino theory was if communism isn't stopped here with taking over this country, then it will be just like a row of dominoes.

[38:55] When one falls, they will all fall after it. And philosophers and strategists argued and argued over whether the domino theory was valid or not.

[39:06] But when Germany was divided, then the Soviets took Poland. They gobbled up Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Albania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania.

[39:20] The Soviet bloc and the Iron Curtain were well underway. And what were they? These were separate entity countries that one after another were just gobbled up by the Soviet Union.

[39:33] They just moved in and said, we're taking over. You will become part of the communist bloc. And they had no means to withstand them. And eventually what Winston Churchill labeled as the Iron Curtain was set up.

[39:49] And the Berlin Wall was built not to keep people from getting in, to keep people from getting out.

[39:59] And what was it all about? It was all about freedom and liberty and those who would take it from you. There are always those who want to take our freedoms and liberties from us.

[40:12] And we go to war and we shed blood and treasure to maintain our freedom and our liberty. We don't want somebody else telling us how to live or what to do.

[40:26] Today we've got a new threat. It's radical Islam. Theirs is not political so much as it is religious. But if you understand Islam, you will know that there is no division between the religious and the political in Islam.

[40:42] The church is the state. The state is the church. That's the way Islam is run. There is no separation. And they have said repeatedly, they will not be content until you are Muslim or a slave or dead.

[41:01] That's it. Those are the choices. Which one would you take? It's just another form of tyranny. That's all. And we've got in motion everything that is needed to preserve and protect us from that.

[41:16] All we need is the implementation of it. We, the United States, we do not seek to dominate. If we wanted to dominate, if we were guilty of the imperialism that some would accuse us of, we would be running the government of Germany.

[41:34] We would be running the government of Japan. We would be running the government of every nation that we've conquered. But we haven't. We have defeated them.

[41:45] Then we have gone in and rebuilt them with American taxpayer money. Rebuilt their nations. Rebuilt their economies. Rebuilt their countries. And occupied them for as long as we thought we had to.

[41:59] And then we left. And considered no longer a threat. If we wanted to dominate and rule the world. And there are those who assign that motive to the United States.

[42:11] All we want to do is rule. That's nonsense. All we want to do is maintain our freedom and our liberty. And anybody else who has the gumption to strive for it, we want to help them obtain theirs.

[42:24] Man needs to be a free moral agent. Not under the domination or control of those who would impose upon our conscience. We value our freedom so much, we would like the whole world to enjoy them.

[42:42] That's our faith and our freedoms. What is our future? I have no idea.

[42:58] There was a time when I wouldn't be able to say that. I'd be a lot more optimistic. But here's the problem. Our future is determined.

[43:12] By whether we maintain our freedom. And our freedoms are determined. By whether we maintain. Our faith. So, out of faith.

[43:25] Our freedoms are born. Our founding fathers saw to that. Out of their faith. They inscripturated the freedoms that we enjoy. It was their faith.

[43:37] That prompted them. To take the positions they did. And to incorporate the things that they did. In the declaration and the constitution. It was their faith that caused them to do that.

[43:48] Their faith. Was acted out. In freedoms. And preserving them for us. And we are the future.

[43:59] That they were looking forward to. Now, our future. Our future. Is in the next generation. And the generation after that. And it will not be.

[44:10] A future. Worth. Talking about. If it is not. Preceded. By our faith. And our freedoms. I don't know what will become of our future.

[44:23] We may be reduced. To something. No more. Than what most other countries are. Our prosperity. Our blessedness. Our richness.

[44:35] Has all. Been. Determined. By the freedoms. And the liberties. That we enjoy. We are. An incredibly. Unique nation.

[44:46] And so many Americans. Have so. Wearied hearing of that. It doesn't even register anymore. They think that somebody's just bragging. About the country. I'll tell you what we're bragging about. What is worth bragging about.

[44:58] Is that faith. Which was once for all. Delivered to the saints. Because out of that faith. Issue forth. The freedoms we enjoy. But you can't have those freedoms.

[45:10] Without that faith. That's the root. And if you don't have that. You're going to lose. Your freedoms. And I ask you. Where are we now?

[45:23] Our freedoms. Are eroding. They are slipping. Away from us. One. By one. And that does not.

[45:37] Portend a very good future. I don't like saying this. But I have to tell you. The way it is. And in your heart of hearts. You know this.

[45:49] You know this. I'm not telling you anything new. We've seen things take place. In our government. Over just the past few weeks. That one. Ask. Is this.

[46:01] Still. America. Is it? Good question. What's the answer?

[46:12] If we want. The future. Bright. And fulfilling. And promising. You'd better see to it. That the freedoms and liberties.

[46:25] Are maintained. But you can't do that. Without the faith. That is their underpinning. That's where they come from. Let's pray.

[46:39] Father. Each of us. Is responsible. In one way or another. To one degree or another. To educate ourselves. And to see.

[46:51] What history. Has dealt. Over the past. Centuries. And even over. The past years. Of the lifetime. Of most of us. We see trends.

[47:01] That are troubling. We see attitudes. That are. Foreign. To anything. That this nation. Has ever embraced. And sometimes. We just don't know.

[47:12] What to make of it. We see our freedoms. And liberties. Jeopardized. There are those. Who would. Take them from us. And they claim.

[47:23] To be one of us. But we wonder. What worldview. They are embracing. What faith. They are acting out of. It certainly. Is not the faith.

[47:33] Of our fathers. It is a strange faith. It is different. It is a faith. That believes. The principles of old. Set forth in scripture. We're okay.

[47:46] For people. Who lived. Back then. But today. We've outgrown that. And we know better. We have a better idea. But we know.

[47:57] Our father. We know the futility. Of that. And we pray. That you will instill. Within us. A much needed wisdom. To not only see. What is happening.

[48:09] But to be able. To offer it. The only remedy. That has. Ever worked. The faith. Of our fathers. Thank you. For that.

[48:19] Faith. Which was. Once for all. Delivered to the saints. And we. As Jude. Tells us. We need to.

[48:31] Contend. For that faith. Is anything worth. Fighting for. Speaking out for. Supporting. We believe it is. And it's that faith.

[48:42] Once for all. Delivered. To the saints. Help us not to be. Complacent. But to be actively. Involved. In what's taking place.

[48:54] In our world today. Pray in Christ's name. Amen.