Allen Jackson - Lest We Forget - Part 1
It's an honor to be with you again. We're continuing our study on America and the chapters of our history and our faith that are shaping us today. In this session, I want to talk about "Lest We Forget". It's so important to understand our heritage. God has blessed us. We are a nation that began from a Christian worldview, and it has carried us right up until this point. That worldview is in question today, it's in debate, and whether it continues to the next generation or not isn't clear. It has a great deal to do with our responses and our choices and the values we hold. I've said to you over and over again that I don't think the problems plaguing us as a people are the result of the depravity of the wicked; I think the real root of the issue is the indifference of the faithful. Well, God is stirring his people, and if we will listen and apply ourselves, I believe we will see the Spirit of God move in an unprecedented way in the season immediately in front of us. Get your Bible and a notepad, but most of all, open your heart; let's say yes to God's invitations to us.
The Christian faith has been an inseparable part of this nation from our inception until today. That's the truth, and I refuse to relinquish that heritage because someone doesn't like it. In fact, it's inappropriate to ask us to diminish our heritage as a people, it's who we are. It's been a defining component of this nation from the time we began until today, and if it's diminished, it will be because you and I don't care enough about it to stand for the Christian faith. So we picked up this little series, not to ask you to be blindly nationalistic; our allegiance begins with the kingdom of God, because the freedoms and liberties and abundance we enjoy have come from the hand of God, not from the hand of government.
Governments don't bring freedoms to their people. We have a long history of governments, and if there is not a significant effort made by the general public, those who govern us will take the authority and the power and the resources for themselves. There is a broad expression of history to support that idea. The only thing that will maintain our liberties and freedoms is a dependence upon Almighty God. We don't want a government that's dominated, that says you have to worship in a particular way or with a particular denomination or with a particular church, but we definitely want a government that's influenced by a Christian worldview. The only thing to restrain the authoritarian, ungodly tendencies of the human heart is the cross of Jesus Christ.
So if we remove the cross from the story of the government and the influence of the government, I promise you it will become increasingly authoritarian. It was a Christian worldview that shaped our nation and I know that's easily lost but I wanna take you, just for a minute, maybe a couple of minutes, and walk you back through a bit of our history. We forget it easily, I forget it if I don't remind myself. But some people say, "Well, we're not a Christian nation," I've heard our leaders say that. Baloney, it's a Greek word, it means I disagree. In fact, it reflects one of two things, either a willful intent to deceive the people or an ignorance of our history, because it's simply an indisputable part of who we are as a nation.
Our first Supreme Court Justice was John Jay, and he stated that when we select our national leaders, if we are to preserve our nation, we should select Christians. I quote, "Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it's the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers". That's a Supreme Court Justice, the Chief Justice. John Quincy Adams, he was the son of John Adams, he was the sixth president of the United States. He was also the chairman of the American Bible Society. He said that was the highest and most important role of his life.
On July 4th, 1821, President Adams said this, I quote, "The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity". That's our history. Calvin Coolidge, our 30th President of the US, reaffirmed this when he wrote, "The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country".
In 1782, the United States Congress voted this resolution: The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools. Somebody voted those people into office. We should be a committed enough to our faith to find another group of leaders with that kind of courage. William Holmes McGuffey, he's the author of the "McGuffey Reader," you may not be familiar with it, but for more than 100 years it was used in our public schools. More than 125 million copies were sold.
It was stopped in 1963. President Lincoln called McGuffey the schoolmaster of the nation. Listen to the quote from McGuffey. "The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our notions on the character of God, on the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions. From no source has the author drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred Scriptures. From all these extracts from the Bible I make no apology".
Again, it's our heritage. Of the first 108 universities founded in America, 106 were distinctly Christian, including the first, Harvard University, was chartered in 1636. In the original Harvard Student Handbook, rule number one was that students seeking entrance must know Latin and Greek so that they could study the Scriptures. I quote from Harvard's Handbook. "Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdom, let everyone seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seek it of him".
Now we have a bit of an arrogant attitude that says, "Well, it was easier to be a Christ follower then". That is a very naive statement, to imagine that people 100 years ago or 200 years ago were fundamentally more godly than we are, that's simply not true. What those statements remind us of, and they could be doubled or tripled or quadrupled, is that over many decades and over centuries there have been consistently men and women who would stand for the Christian faith determined that it would continue to influence the culture in which we live. And I would submit to you, that's our assignment now. We're in the midst of a hot mess, it's a very technical term.
There's a there's a medical component, a science component, there's an economic component, there are legal components, just about any place you look we are struggling. We're more divided than we've ever been; the source of that division is not logic, it's demonic. The root problem of that is spiritual and the challenge is for those of us of the church to regain our heritage. If I had to put it in a phrase, I would say, "We've forgotten God". We've been blessed enough, when we've had enough abundance, we could vacation and our kids could go to schools and we had a healthcare available and the government was working on ways to make it more affordable, and we could afford to treat God as a luxury item like whether we wanted a GPS system in the car we were gonna drive or how many channels we wanted to watch on our television sets at home and what the provider for those should be.
And yeah, we probably would be okay with a little faith if the worship service was at a convenient time and the parking was easy enough for us to address and they did some things for our kids that we approved of, then yeah, we could probably work God into that. But the notion that he was Almighty or that Jesus was Lord, it escaped us, and in these last months God has begun to shake us to remind us of who watches over us. Now I have some good news in the midst of that, it's wrong of us to imagine we're the first generation to have lost our focus. In fact, it's a consistent problem, it's a consistent problem in Scripture, but it's a consistent problem through the history of the church.
Do you know who Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is? If you can spell his name, you're too smart to be here. He was a Russian author and a dissident, that means he complained about the government, he stood up to the government. Because of his writings he had enough international stature and status that he wasn't completely destroyed. He spent some time in the Gulags. But he made a speech sometime after the Soviet Union fell. He was awarded the Templeton Award, it's an award that Sir John Templeton set up for people who have made tremendous lifetime contributions to the expression of religion as a matter of freedom in the human condition.
And Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard when he received the Templeton Award, it was in 1983, but what he said resonates as if he'd said it today. He said, "Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God, that's why all this happened. Since then, I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed to eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by the upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed some 60 million of our people," Communism resulted in 60 million Russians being murdered, 60 million, "I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that is why all this happened".
If you haven't read that speech, I would commend to you, it's easily available online. But he went on to say this, I'll give you one more paragraph. "Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement towards something higher and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence.
When this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force. This we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour". Solzhenitsyn said it so plainly, "We have forgotten God". Now, again, this is not a new thing, I don't want us to live with the hubris that we're the first generation to wander off the path. This is somewhat expected, it is the pattern of people, it's why God's made provision, but that's not an excuse to continue with our sloppiness, with our ambivalence and indifference. It's a wake-up call. If we don't pay attention to the shaking that has begun, the judgment will become more severe.
God gave us warning after warning in Deuteronomy chapter 4 and verse 9. These are the instructions to the people that have been delivered from Egyptian slavery. God sent a leader, Moses, he provided his power to completely defeat the Egyptians so that they were driven out of Egypt with the gold and silver of that land. And he said, "Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you don't forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them". That's our assignment, we've gotta teach the generations who follow us, it doesn't take long to lose an idea. We've forgotten how to use a paper map.
Most of us haven't used a rotary phone in so long, the time it would take to wait for that dial to re-circle, we would lose the love of Jesus. We used to be a more patient people. Remember, you'd get six digits into that and you dial the wrong number, you have to start over? You'd miss your lunch appointment dialing the phone. We don't even remember what that's like, being tethered to your phone by a cord, how archaic. Doesn't take long to lose an idea, and if we don't teach our children and young people to fear the Lord and walk uprightly in holiness and righteousness, that idea will be lost to us as a people. The churches can't do that apart from the people, it's a collaborative effort.
In Deuteronomy 6, in verse 10, it says, "When the Lord God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you, a land with large, flourishing cities that you didn't build, houses filled with all kinds of good things that you didn't provide, wells that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves that you didn't plant, then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, and out of the land of slavery".
Do you know what happened to them? They forgot the Lord. It didn't take very long and they thought, "You know, we're doing really well, we're flourishing, we don't any longer have to be bothered by giving attention to the Lord. We have vineyards and crops and houses and cities". In fact, they came and said, "We want to be like all the other nations, give us a king, we don't want God to rule over us". Those aren't words from antiquity, folks. We work very diligently to blend in amongst the ungodly, we take our fashion cues from them, we allow them to dictate what we'll watch, what music will listen to, what restaurants are chic, what foods we should eat. We're almost indistinguishable from the ungodly.
Now, we're not unique, we're not some new generation, God has made provision for this, he's warning his people, God knows the ending at the beginning. And I could take you through the Scripture, time after time after time, God said, "Please don't walk that way. You're gonna be tempted to go that way, please don't do that". And I believe the Spirit of God is tugging on our hearts in this season, I see evidence of it every week, people coming from across the nation, saying, "We want to be with the people of God". That wasn't happening two or three years ago. God is stirring our hearts, but I'm most concerned about those of us that are together week after week after week. God said, "Don't forget me," be careful that you don't forget the Lord.
Our goal is not to blend in amongst the wicked. The distinguishing characteristic of our faith should not be a location that we visit on the weekends, it should be our character and how we conduct ourselves 24/7, the values that define our lives, the things we aspire to, the objectives of our life, the dreams we hold, the dreams we hold for our children. Amen. Well, God's instructions are very plain, they haven't been changed. I gave you the passage from Deuteronomy chapter 5. In verse 6, the Lord said, "I'm the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery".
And then he begins to list the decalogue, the 10 Commandments, and I won't read you all those verses but I did bring you the summary of the 10 Commandments. They're all spelled out in those verses with a little more detail, a little bit of commentary. It's worth your time to read at your leisure, but I just wanna walk you through those 10 Commandments. God has not changed his standard of holiness. When God got to the end of Malachi and the Holy Spirit started with Matthew, God didn't take a Prozac, chill out and say, "Let's just get along". He didn't redefine holiness, he didn't redefine purity, his character didn't change. In fact, I'm certain you know that the Bible says God said he does not change.
So just as a quick refresher, I suspect you know them, they used to be posted at our schools, they were posted in public monuments. Did you know the 10 Commandments are on the doors entering the Supreme Court, that they're carved in the wall of the building? That if you visit Washington DC, in fact, if you visit many of our state capitols, but certainly in Washington DC, verses of Scripture are carved in the stone of our most celebrated buildings? Again, it's our heritage, we've just drifted a bit. Not unusual, it's happened time and time again, it's happened through our own history as a people, we're gonna talk about that a bit more in the next session. But we have a choice as to what this generation will be known for, what will our legacy be?
It's got to be something more than fantasy sports, we gambled more than any generation in human history. I don't think we want that to be our legacy. The first commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me". I don't believe it's an accident that's where God began, he said he's a jealous God, he will tolerate no pretenders, he will not accept the place in the pantheon in a collection of gods. It's a very important principle. The Christian faith was very sorely challenged when it was just emerging in the 1st century.
The Romans were not exclusive, they had a whole collection of gods. Roman culture was adopted from Greek culture and the Greeks, I suspect you know a bit about that, but as the Romans conquered other peoples they would simply incorporate the gods of those people into the Roman collection. It came to be known as the pantheon. And when Christianity began to emerge from amongst Judaism, Christianity began as a sect within Judaism, a subset of Judaism, and as that happened it made its way into the awareness of the Roman leaders. The early Christians were given a choice, "This Jesus that you worship can be included in our pantheon," there would've been no persecution.
When they had the first church council and the leaders came from the various cities around the empire, when they showed up for the council, most of them showed up physically maimed. They'd either had their Achilles tendons cut or and eye put out, a common form of persecution if you said you were Christian. They could have avoided all of that, they could have avoided the martyrdom, they could've avoided their time in the Coliseum being eaten by wild animals, all they would've had to have done is said, "Yes, absolutely, just put Jesus in the group". But they understood if they had conceded to that request that we wouldn't be worshiping on weekends today. And they understood it because of that statement, "You can have no other gods before me". "I'm a jealous God". The second commandment, "You shall not make for yourself an idol. You shall not bow down to them and you shall not worship them".
Now most of us wouldn't think of bowing down to something carved out of wood or formed out of metal, but worship is about more than bending the knee to a physical statue. Worship is really about priority. I can tell you what you worship if you give me a little time with your calendar and your cash flow. It'll be very apparent what you worship. And God's very clear; he said you cannot make for yourself an idol, you can't worship anything before me. I've said to you many times, we're not hyphenated Christ followers, we don't put anything before that. We are Christ followers first and then every other distinction of our lives comes after that. The New Testament says, "In Christ, we're neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek," all those labels are secondary. We are in Christ first. I don't want to try to imagine Jesus in my image, I want to try to become more like him.
You know, we've spent some time with the Ten Commandments, and it's popular in the church these days to say that that attitude of God expressed in the Old Testament really isn't relevant any longer, that we're New Testament believers. Well, I agree with you that the redemptive work of Jesus is contained in the New Testament, but it makes absolutely no sense apart from the story of the Old Testament. God's character didn't change between Malachi and Matthew. In fact, God hasn't set apart the 10 Commandments. It says in Romans that Jesus was the end of the law as a means of righteousness. Our righteousness is not established by keeping rules, but God's standards of holiness and righteousness and purity haven't changed one bit, and I believe the Spirit of God is awakening us to that reality. Do you have the courage to ask the Holy Spirit to let you see any place in you that God would change? Let's pray:
Father, if there's anything in us separating us from your best, bring it to our awareness. In Jesus's name, amen.