There was an
odd sight once in a zoo.
Maybe you’ve
heard about the gorilla in a zoo holding a Bible in one hand & a book about
evolution in the other.
He was looking confused, so someone asked,
“What are you doing?”
The gorilla
answered, “Well, I’m trying to decide if I’m my brother’s keeper
or my keeper’s brother.”
That seems
insane doesn’t it – that a gorilla is somehow one of our ancestors that humans
have evolved from animals over millions of years.
But that is
the reigning paradigm of today’s world.
The reigning
worldview that controls much of today’s
educational system and public life is a system called Naturalistic Philosophy.
Naturalistic
Philosophy teaches that we can only describe things using stuff in the
box. Imagine the earth, planets and
everything are in a giant closed box.
We can only
describe this world by what is in that box.
How did life get here – the stuff in the box made it.
There is no
higher power – there is nothing outside the box to make the stuff inside.
You see when
you start with an insane notion like that – that stuff just comes from stuff –
you reach crazy conclusions.
For example,
you determine that man is just evolved and there is no higher purpose.
Today in
America the official religion is Secular Humanism – now there is no place in
law that this is stated but it is true.
Secular
Humanism is a philosophy driven by evolution and says that America is a secular
nation.
Now I am
going to tell you something that you probably already know- America was not
founded on Secular Humanism.
Our Country
was started on Christian principles – Some people say Judeo-Christian
principles – and that is true but that is sometimes ambiguous.
Let me be
clear our country was settled and founded by Christian people that wanted to
set up a Christian country where one had religious freedom.
This morning
as we look at the birthday of our country I want to look at some passages that
I think applies to our situation today.
1st
of all, Solomon gave some wisdom to his countrymen the Israelites a long time
ago that we should heed to today.
In Proverbs 22:28 Solomon said:
28Do not
move the ancient boundary Which your fathers have set.
In ancient
times, boundary stones or landmarks marked a person’s property. Anyone who
moved such a stone was, in effect, stealing land.
Boundaries
in Israel were sacred because God owned the land and he apportioned the
property to the tribes in the Book of Joshua.
To extend
one’s property illegally was a violation of covenant and oath.
Or, to pull
back a boundary previously held was to renege on commitment to God’s promise.
The
boundaries that were established by their forefathers were to be preserved.
Unfortunately,
moving a boundary stone was, and still is, a major problem.
It’s not so
much in the realm of property that we’re dealing with the moving of the
landmarks.
Some of the founding principles, the
landmarks, the ancient boundaries, on which America was founded need to be
maintained in this relativistic,
post-modern age when everything seems up for
grabs and everyone interprets things the way they personally see them.
You see the
moorings have been cut loose – America was a like a ship firmly anchored to
objective truth found in the Bible.
The Bible
gave us a firm foundation for truth because it comes from God.
Truth and
law cannot come from us – we are too finite – we need transcendent truth –
truth that comes from outside of us and truth that does not change.
The founders
of this country understood this truth –
The very
reason Jesus came to this world was to bring us truth – truth about our
condition and truth about God.
John 18: 37
Jesus
answered, "You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born,
and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who
is of the truth hears My voice."
The very
reason Jesus was born and came into this world was to bring truth.
We must as a
nation return to this truth and restore the boundary markers that the founders
of this country put into place.
We must
repudiate secular humanism and declare that there is a truth greater than human
wisdom and that is God’s truth.
Next:
Jesus
answered, "You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born,
and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who
is of the truth hears My voice."
Christ once
sent churches to the 7 churches of Asia Minor through the Apostle John.
John has
recorded these letters to these churches in the book of Revelation.
Today I want
to look at the church at Ephesus and the message Jesus sent to that church.
This is the
same Church that Paul had planted in the book of Acts and labored there for
some time.
He also met
with the elders of this church before he sailed to Jerusalem on his last
missionary journey.
This was
once a vibrant church but things had changed.
Revelation 2: 1-5
1"To
the angel of the church in Ephesus write : The One who holds the seven stars in
His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this
:2'I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot
tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles,
and they are not, and you found them to be false ;3and you have perseverance
and have endured for My name's sake, and have not grown weary.4'But I have this
against you, that you have left your first love.5'Therefore remember from where
you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first ; or else I am
coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place -unless you
repent
Today I want
to take this church as an example of our current condition.
Jesus tells
the church three things of admonition that we need to consider today.
1) Remember – think about their glorious
past of where they once were – they have fallen from a great height
2) Repent – change before it is too late
– turn back to God
3) Do the deeds that you did before –
RETURN
To make it
easy to remember I will just use three R’s this morning.
Remember,
Repent, Return
Now as we go
into this 4th of July Holiday I want us to apply this to our country
that we live in.
Remember:
First of all
I want to lay some ground work with you today about where our country came
from.
Why is it
important during this 4th of July season to remember where our
country came from?
Well,
we need to be educated about how our
country was founded as Christians.
First of all
– I am not deifying our country – God is Lord over all and we worship Christ.
Our first
responsibility is to God’s Kingdom – Seek His Kingdom First
But being
agents of God’s Kingdom we should look to bring about just and godly government
in this world.
Also, I am
not going to deify our founding fathers – they were men that were sinners like
me.
But we as
Christians should understand that the Bible talks a good bit about just
government and our responsibility before God.
God
established Government – and I have preached a sermon before on Romans 13 and
the responsibility of the state before God.
I cannot for
time’s sake reproach that sermon today I want to zero in- I want to look at 3
things Remember, Repent, Return
1) Let us this morning take a moment and
Remember where our country came from
1st
of all – the first university founded in this country was Harvard University
In 1636
Harvard Had founding Precepts and they said the following:
Let every
student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main
end of this life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal
life – therefore lay Christ at the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound
knowledge and learning.
So according
to Harvard’s founders the very purpose of education is salvation in Jesus and
any true education is founded in Christ.
Folks, have
things changed in our great country?
Do you think
Harvard University is based on those principles today?
Let us
remember and know where we came from.
Do you know
what was the second best selling book in the New England colonies?
It was the
New England Primer.
The New
England Primer was the standard textbook of our schools in America. Here is some of the things that the New
England Primer taught.
Here is how
kids learned the alphabet in colonial America:
1) A – in Adam’s Fall we Sinned All
2) B- Heaven defined the Bible Mind
3) C- Christ crucified for Sinners He died
In 1st
grade they learned words like sanctification, edification, gratification.
When I was
in 1st grade I was reading see Jane run and see Lad eat. Back then they were learning Scripture and
theological facts using reading and writing skills.
One of the
main purposes of education in American in the Colonial period until the late 19th
century was to educate people so they could read the Bible.
Every bit of
their educational process was wrapped in the Bible.
In 1892 the
National Education Association said that schools must teach Bible, Christianity
and worship must take place at public school.
Has it
changed?
John Dewey
came along and changed much of this – He called God a fable and the Bible
mythical.
There is no
God and no soul – no objective truth.
Dewey wanted
all Bible and Christianity out of the school because Dewey though atheism
should be promoted in our schools.
It is John
Dewey that has greatly influenced modern education.
Remember –
remember that the education of our children was wrapped up in the Bible.
Now
education from the education of your youngest ones to the college aged students
has been hijacked by secular humanism and rampant atheism.
But what
many don’t know is that the very political system of our country also came from
the Bible.
Early one –
Puritan civil authority was based on a passage from Isaiah 33
Isaiah 33:22
- 22 For the
LORD is our judge, The LORD is our lawgiver, The LORD is our king ; He will
save us-
Judge
Lawgiver
King
This where
the idea began to have a three branched government.
1) Our Judicial Branch of government
2) Our Legislative –the Lawmaking branch
3) The King – the executive branch
So all three
branches of our government today in America find their nexus in this passage
from the bible.
This was not
some new idea to our founders they found this in the source of truth the
Scripture.
If these
three roles describe God then how much better can you get than by patterning
your government to how God governs.
But the very
intention of our founders was to establish a Country based on Christianity and
the Bible.
Our Laws
were based On God’s truth.
George
Washington in his farewell speech as President of the U.S. stated that for
Political prosperity to endure in America it must be based on the pillars of
religion and morality.
Washington
was not talking about a general religion but Christianity.
His last
parting words were words of warning to Americans – we must maintain the
Christian religion and Christian Morality for this country to succeed.
It doesn’t
run right without either.
Imagine a
modern president giving that speech – could you imagine the outrage from the
media if a president today said that for America to succeed it has to be a
Christian country.
Charles
Carroll was one of the original signers of our Declaration of Independence that
we celebrate this coming week and he said that the very foundation of this
American Experiment is Christianity.
Our founders
– even the ones that were not believes –
understood that Christianity was the basis on which to put our government and
governing principles.
Alexis De
Toqueville came to America from France to observe our country in the early 19th
century. He made several observations
about America and they are important because he was an outsider.
He said this
about America:
“The
Americans combine the notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately in
their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive one without the other.”
Do your hear
what he is saying?
Americans at
that time could not separate our freedom as a country apart from our Christian
faith.
IN other
words to experience freedom as our founders intended it was to be a virtuous
Christian people.
But today we
know things have changed – How did this happen – where did the slide begin.
I have
already mentioned John Dewey and he and his movement took over the modern
public schools and started to corrupt the minds of our children.
His
influence was experienced in the early 20th century.
But where
did this start to shift in the political realm– when did America start to move
away from this idea of law coming from God?
Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expanded on this theme by declaring that
the law is
“simply an
embodiment of the ends and purposes of a society at a given point in its
history,”
thus
effectively granting to the state the power to establish society’s ethical
norms.
Holmes ruled
in the Supreme Court in the early 20th century around the change of
the century.
He shifted
our country away from Formalism – the law based on a set form to a type of
Realism – or law changes based on experience.
Do you see
the dangerous slip here at this point in our country some 112 years ago.
Law was no
longer set on a standard but could be changed or interpreted based on
experience.
What is
funny is that the same thing was going on in Biblical studies as was going on
in the interpretation of the Constitution.
For the
first time churches started to question the Bible’s basic teachings on very
simple subjects.
Homosexuality
and women’s roles in the Church were being reexamined based on experience.
Instead of
the Bible being transformative to society – society was transforming Bible
interpretation.
The same was
true of constitutional studies – now as America changed we would need to
reinterpret the law whenever we didn’t like what it had to say.
Why haven’t
you heard any of this?
Why does
some of this seem shocking to you today?
- well some people just don’t care about our past.
But not
knowing truth can lead to terrible results.
We must know
what really happened in our past or in world event to keep from making drastic
mistakes.
Paul Harvey
tells the following story of how lies in a newspaper or media can lead to
disastorous results.
4 newspaper
reporters in Denver, CO were having a slow news day and needed a story for the
Sunday paper.
They all
went to get a drink together and concocted a story that they thought would be a
good story but not cause too much uproar.
They decided
to report a story that the Great Wall of China had been torn down.
This was way
before mass media and the internet and China seemed as distant as the moon.
Who would
know that this story was made up and who would care?
All four
major Denver papers carried this story: All four of them. Front page.
In fact, the
Times headline that Sunday read:
GREAT
CHINESE WALL DOOMED! PEKING SEEKS WORLD TRADE!
Of course, the story was a phony, a ludicrous
fabrication concocted by four capricious newsmen in a hotel bar.
But their story was taken seriously, was
picked up and expanded by newspapers in the Eastern U.S. and then by newspapers
abroad.
When the Chinese themselves learned that the
Americans were sending a demolition crew to tear down their national monument,
most were indignant; some were enraged!
Particularly incensed were the members of a
secret society, a volatile group of Chinese patriots who were already wary of
foreign intervention.
They, inspired by the story, exploded,
rampaged against the foreign embassies in Peking, slaughtered hundreds of
missionaries.
In two months, 12,000 troops from six
countries joined forces, invaded China with the purpose of protecting their own
countrymen.
The bloodshed which followed, sparked by a
journalistic hoax invented in a barroom in Denver, became the white-hot
international conflagration known to every high school history student . . . as
the Boxer Rebellion.
So do you
think the people of that time were duped by a big lie?
They were so
duped it started a war.
Do you think
you have been lied to about what our country has been all about?
Now this
seems ludicrous but it goes to show that truth matters.
We as
Christians are people of truth. We are
truth telling people because the very reason that Jesus came into the world was
to Testify to the Truth.
2) From this we must take action – we
must Repent
Each of us
personally must undergo a personal conversion to Jesus –
Why was our
country so great and many of the founders so strong?
They were
believers in Christ – they were sold out for Jesus.
The Pilgrims
came here because of their faith –
We need to
take a personal inventory of our faith.
A culture is made up of individual people – and when individual people
are corrupt the culture becomes corrupt.
Do you want
to know why our schools are secular humanist today?
Because we
allow it to happen. We do have a say in
our children’s future and education and God will hold us accountable if we
abdicated that responsibility to someone that doesn’t share our values.
Do you know
why our country is so into terrible TV shows full of violence and obscene
language?
Because we
watch the stuff and subsidize it. We
watch things we should be watching and we spend our money going to movies that
keep the Hollywood movie making machine in business.
Why do we
have politicians that are corrupt and don’t hold to Christian values – because
we elect them to office, we send them and don’t hold them accountable.
Why is
American becoming more and more materialistic?
Because we
as the church have become materialistic – we love our things and comforts more
than we love God.
You see the
day of sticking your head in the sand and acting like there is no problem has
come and gone.
We as Christians
must change – we must turn back to God – we need to Repent and come running
back to Jesus –
We cant sit
and act like there is not a major crisis in our land and in our country.
1 Peter 4:17
tells us that God’s judgment begins with His Household.
In other
words it starts with us the Church – we are held to a higher standard because
we know the truth.
We need His
truth in our lives, in our families, in our schools, and in our
government.
And it
begins with this idea:
Transformation
– we must be transformed and see the world as God sees the world.
Romans 12: 1-2
1Therefore I
urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and
holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of
your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good
and acceptable and perfect.
Don’t be
duped by the lies of the evil one and the lies of this world - you must transform your mind in God’s word.
Don’t
believe the lies of secular humanism and radical atheism – but know what God
thinks about the matter.
Let us
return to the great height from which we have fallen.
Why do we
have to preach this sermon today – Men have forgotten God. It is that simple.
God gives
this ominous warning to Israel in the book of Hosea. And I am not saying we are a theocracy like
Israel but we can learn from their example.
Hosea 13: 4-6
4 Yet I have
been the LORD your God Since the land of Egypt ; And you were not to know any
god except Me, For there is no savior besides Me. 5 I cared for you in the
wilderness, In the land of drought. 6 As they had their pasture, they became
satisfied, And being satisfied, their heart became proud ; Therefore they
forgot Me.
God has
blessed us so much – He has satisfied us as a nation.
Have we
forgotten Him?
Have we
forgotten how free we are and what a blessing it is to worship here today?
Have we
forgotten those guys that died in warfare to give us the right to be here?
Have you
personally forgotten about God in your life?
This 4th
of July Holiday – contemplate these things – Is God calling you to live for Him
– are you living a life in Him.
Have you
been transformed – Everyone wants to change the world but no one wants to start
with themselves.
Today –
start with you – begin your walk with Christ.
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