Bible Lesson 117

AMERICA’S GREAT NEED (1ST Samuel 7:3-5)

“..If you return to the Lord with all your hearts
..and prepare your hearts for the Lord, and serve Him only..”

“America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good,
America will cease to be great”

Alexis de Tocqueville

America, seems to have lost its bearings, and today wanders about after having lost its anchor, it’s grandeur and its place within the nations of the world. America’s greatest need is to find its anchor and it cannot be found anywhere except in the Bible. America’s anchor, from the beginning of this great country, when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, has been Jehovah God, the God of the Bible.

Slowly at first, America began to withdraw from the English crown, and finally in 1776, won her freedom and has been free since that time. Those who came to the shores of America in the beginning, for the most part, were fleeing some sort of oppression, and they found in America a place where they set down roots and began to live a very different, though difficult life. In just a little over 200 years, America set the pace for growth and advancement.

They started from zero materially, but with faith in an Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent God, the God that revealed Himself to us in His Holy inerrant Word, the Bible, they overcame all kinds of hardships. William Bradford who was the governor of Plymouth, realized that there had to be ordered in this small society and so He wrote and I have brought the old English language into our vernacular to be better understood ‘Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these present solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politick; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.’

Notice now, they still had respect for the English King. They were in the process of establishing a colony for England but they knew that they needed laws to guide them so they could live together. So America began as a Nation that served God and wanted to be a viable society. The Constitution of this great country still stands as a light on a hill because it reflects the moral values of our Great God.

America was and is a nation whose laws were lifted almost verbatim from the Holy Bible. These laws served us well through thick and thin until we became a nation with too much time on our hands. This occurred after the industrial revolution when machines replaced men, and manufactured goods became easy to buy. That’s when men who had a good bit of leisure time, slowly but surely began to chaff when the Word of God got too close to their precious sin. It is always a problem when people have nothing constructive to do to occupy their minds and their hands. My mother always said to us children growing up ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.’ That could either be an encouragement for the people of this great country called America to wake up and come back to our God and His Word or it can be an appropriate epitaph for our gravestone.

It is my sincere desire that all of us as Americans will look around us and ask ourselves if we are people whose lives glorify the Creator, or have we cast our moral and civil concerns aside and become pagans’ Our problem is not so much being destroyed and conquered by some power outside our country, it is more that we are being destroyed by the termites that call themselves American but who have no interest in the betterment of this country. Our politicians over the years have learned that if we teach people to depend on them for things, that they will continue to vote for us to hold office. What our politicians have forgotten is that America was built on the backs of those who wanted nothing more than the opportunity to work and build their own lives. It is now to the point that little groups of people want nothing more than a free hand-out and all of the benefits of living in a country with freedom, but for the most part, they care nothing about maintaining the country itself.

America from the beginning has been symbolized by the Eagle, but in its present state, it would better be a portrait of a vulture. Wake up America and Americans, and take a good look at yourselves. Not just your condition, but the welfare of America. Most of us seem to be concerned only when the wolf is at the door, and we should know by this time that when the wolf is at the door it is often too late to do anything to keep him out. For one thing, we have too many comedians, and nothing against comedians; however there is a time for everything and now is not the time for laughing. Serious matters require that we stop laughing at least until we repair the problem. You may ask what is the problem with America’

The answer is that there are many problems with our great country, but the most important problem and the one that will require our first attention is the lack of a moral center. We have no anchor to hold us to a path of respectability and resolve. That problem is the one that will affect not only our country but our children and our people as a whole. Notice what the lack of moral principles has done to us, first we have become people who can overlook serious character deficiencies in the people we elect to office. We will elect people who promise us things over people who will work to straighten the country out.

We will and have elected and reelected people who are according to their statements and the dictionary, reprobate, sodomites, and little gods in their minds and hearts. We are today spiritually sick, we are dying and know it, and yet we cling to those who use us and are the cause of our sickness. We are a nation of paupers, living in the land of plenty, as we starve amid abundance. We like to call ourselves Christians and our country a Christian nation, but most of us would not recognize Christ if we stumbled over Him and we would probably do the same thing to Him as those who crucified Him over 2000 years ago. We who live in this 21st century are the benefactors of the hard work, sweat and tears, and even the wars that our forefathers have fought, yet we live like beggars who do not care if the sun rises tomorrow or the country we live in remains great.

John W. Gardner, the author of ‘No Easy Victors’, wrote this in his book, ‘Back of every great civilization, back of all the power and wealth, is something as powerful,’.a set of ideas, attitudes, convictions and the confidence that those ideas and convictions are viable. No nation can achieve greatness unless it believes in something, and unless that something has the moral dimension to sustain a great civilization.’ I hope you will read and reread that statement by Gardner; because what he says there is, unless, we have faith, first in God and then in ourselves, and unless we are energized to move forward toward our goal, we will not succeed. We no longer keep the main thing, the main thing; because we have gotten soft and tolerant of any and everything.

We have a president that has openly challenged the founding principles which birthed our country, that functions with a representative type of government, which sets forth, that every man should have the liberty to be what God made him be without hindrance. What our government seems to believe in is that every man must be level with every other man, not only in freedom but in finance, education, in possessions and on and on. Contrary to the liberal mindset in America, there is no way that every man can have the same station, position, or opportunities. That is a dream that cannot be realized because some will work and get through school, and some of them will not back up and refuse to work and I mean to do anything that they are asked to do. Some will make and manage their money, and not waste it on alcohol or drugs, others will not.

What these people have trouble understanding is that what the Constitution offers Americans is the opportunity to be anything that they can raise themselves to attain. The Lord does not consider everyone due or deserving of the same things in life, and we find Jesus Christ at the house of Simon the leper, where a woman brought a flash of costly fragrant oil and broke it to anoint the head of Jesus. When His disciples saw it they became indignant saying, ‘Why waste this instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor” Jesus told them not to trouble the woman, that they have the poor with them always. Jesus expects us to help the poor who are not poor by their own choice. The Apostle Paul says to us in 2nd Thessalonians 3:10b, ‘If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.’ That does not mean that we should not feed the hungry’..unless they can work, and refuse to work.

That’s the great need for America in our time and that is to come back to the place where we take time to read the Bible for ourselves and draw near to the God of that Bible. God who is Omnipotent, Omniscience, and Omnipresent, Created the heavens and the earth and has an eternal plan for mankind, which He had written down for us in the form that we call the Bible. Why then won’t we study that plan and find what God has given us to lead us into a happy, prosperous life as we spend this short time here on the earth, and then spend eternity in heaven in His blessed presence. We have listened to the siren song that has been sung by those who want to know the prestige of belonging to the church, but just don’t have the determination to live and obey Christ as we follow Him.

We have become weak and shallow with brains that have been made mush by cheap grace preaching, and we don’t have the backbone that is required to confront those who preach to itching ears. We seem to shut our ears to the shouts of Paul the Apostle, as he speaks to us under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and says to us, ‘Fight the good fight of faith, and to lay hold on eternal life.'(1st Timothy 6:12). People in our time run from the kind of fight that Paul was speaking about there. The only kind of fight we want to have is one of running our mouths, without saying anything, on some blog or comment section of the internet. We are not the rock hard, moral centered, and ethical people that came out of the hard times of the 1930’s depression.

I am old enough that I remember what it was like to have times that people had no way to eat and live except to scratch it out of the ground, and many did not have the animals or equipment to do that very well. One thing that did was to bring us to a point that we realized the if God did not smile on us and enable us to do what we could, we were lost. People came forth out of the depression era with determination, and humbleness and a proper view of who they were. We were not ‘sissies’ as so many are today. We could speak the truth as we look into the eyes of anyone and stand our ground without backing up. In case you are interested, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, was not a sissy or a wimp either.

He was a man’s man, and although He did not act aggressively toward others, He would always tell the truth regardless of the consequences. People today will side with these unholy organizations that reject the truth and resist God; because they don’t dare to make a stand. You cannot create a better, more loving climate for human growth and enjoyment than that which God has laid the blueprint down for in His Word the Bible. It does take some work and that work always generates heat, so my solution is, that we are ‘man-up’ and obey God, and stand for His truths. Think about that . . .

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob