So again, happy Independence Day! Our call to worship comes from Second Chronicles. This is a verse in here that has been very popular in recent years, but it’s often separated out from the rest of it that gives it so much meaning.
Second Chronicles chapter 7, verses 13-15:
‘When I, the Lord, shut up the heavens so that there is no rain or command the locusts to devour the land or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears will be attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.’
And this place is wherever the people of God gather together to worship and sing Him songs of thanksgiving.
So please let us stand as we sing Hymn Number 799, America the Beautiful. [Music] You may be seated, and would the kids come on down with Miss Leslie down front, please?
The Pledge of Allegiance.
A red skeleton modified for context: Boys and girls, in a few minutes we are all going to recite the Pledge of Allegiance together. I do not want it to become boring or monotonous to you. I would like you to understand the meaning of each word. If I may, I would like to recite the pledge and give you a definition for each word.
I: Me, an individual, a committee of one.
Pledge: Dedicate all my worldly good to give without self-pity.
Allegiance: My love and my devotion to the flag.
Our standard, old glory, a symbol of freedom; and wherever she waves, there is respect because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts freedom is everybody’s job.
Of the United: That means we have all come together.
States: Individual communities that have united into 48 great states, 48 individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose, all divided by imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common cause, and that’s love of country—of America.
And to the Republic: A republic, a sovereign state in which power is invested into the representatives chosen by the people to govern, and the government is the people.
And it’s from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people for which it stands.
One Nation: Meaning so blessed by God.
Indivisible: Incapable of being divided.
With liberty: Which is freedom, the right of power for one to live his own life without fears, threats, or any sort of retaliation.
And justice: The principle and qualities of dealing fairly with others.
For all: For all that means, boys and girls, it’s as much your country as it is mine.
Since I was a small girl, two states have been added to our country, and two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance: ‘under God.’ Wouldn’t it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that will be eliminated from our schools too?
Now let me hear you recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone, please stand as we move into a time of prayer.
There is a passage that is our inspiration and meant for us to be meditating on as we consider these prayers, and this comes from Jeremiah chapter 29, verses 4 through 7:
‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters. They may multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.’
We as Christians live in this world as exiles, and the message that Jeremiah sent to the Israelites in Babylon holds true for us still today. We are to live in the world, and we are to pray for its well-being, and that’s why we’ve been given countries like this. But we’re not to be of the world; we are a people in exile until we reach our heavenly home. But for now, we need to pray for our country.
Thank you that we can come to you this morning for a day of celebration for our nation. We are so blessed, Lord, that you have given us a place where we can come freely and openly to worship you. Use us, Lord, to speak through us, that we will remember to reach out to others throughout this city, throughout this land, to remember to bring honor and glory to you first of all, because without you we have nothing and we are nothing.
You have given us freedom, you’ve given us a place to worship openly, you have given us joy. Let us spread that love, that mercy, that grace wherever we go because you are God. Turn our hearts and the leaders of our nation to you, for you are the one who delivers us and shows us the way to be what you want us to be.
May this church of Christ ever stand as a lighthouse among the nations of the Earth. We pray you to dispel the darkness that has grown very dense in the world and bring to us all a new hope of peace on Earth, good will to men.
In Jesus Christ we pray, amen.
Let us pray: Lord, we thank you for today. We thank you for this opportunity to recognize all those who are currently serving, and aside from the military, we pray for those in police, corrections, fire and rescue, emergency medical services, nursing and doctors.
Lord, we thank you for the individuals who have bravely and courageously said yes to the job. We know that their burden is overwhelming at times, Lord, but let them remember that you are with them always, everywhere that they go.
Lord, give them peace in their job, direction as they face different situations and scenarios day in and day out. Bring them home safely and be with their families as they worry, think, and care for those who are serving.
We thank you for these individuals and what their sacrifice means for our country.
In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
In the narthex, there is a lonely table set up by Sonja, which is the icon of those missing in action. It is one place setting, and the greeting is a setting for one, a table for all. The legend is there; please take time to read it if you wish.
This year, on December 7th, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The United States was thrown into World War II. We are here today to remember our Constitution and all who served in our armed forces and their families. Since this Christian nation was founded, the first reading of the Declaration of Independence was on July 8, 1776.
Later, a native of Ohio, Oisterkamp, a Korean War veteran, first uttered these famous words, ‘All gave some; some gave all.’
Let us pray: We thank you, Lord, for watching over our nation and for those who have served to protect our Constitution and the physical ground upon which we walk. Many of our armed service members no longer walk the ground we do. We know where some are buried and pray that they are with our Lord.
Those service members listed as POWs and missing in action may be with our Lord, but their families have not had the closure of burial. We pray for these souls and their families—over 83,000 servicemen and service women from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
We pray for our nation’s future and thank you for Christ, who gave all on the cross to bar pardon our sins and welcome us to heaven. May God continue to protect our people and the United States of America. Amen.
Thank you. I need help. You need to be about, you know, this high, and all to come help me—all five of y’all, please.
In a moment, Nate is going to play some music for us. This is a time for us to remember and recognize those who have served, whether it be in the armed forces or otherwise.
As Nate plays, when you hear your service branch’s anthem or the anthem for your spouse’s service branch, please stand and remain standing.
So I can have the kids come down, please—that’s what I meant when I said this high. [Music]
And would also anybody who has served or is serving in law enforcement, fire and rescue, any form of emergency services, or the medical field as a nurse, doctor, or assistant, please also stand to be recognized and spouses.
Thank you all for all that you have done. Most of us will never know or understand the sacrifices you have made. Thank you. God bless!
Thank you, kids.
Long ago, before the days of Murrow and Cronkite and Dan Rather, and these nameless people who are on TV today, when news was needed to be shared, it was brought and read in church. Because there was a time in the not-so-distant past where everybody was in church on Sunday morning. Some places it was law; some places it was because of their faith and their fervent desire to hear the word of God.
But the true first forms of mass communication were the pulpit, and with that in mind, I am going to read something that was and still is quite newsworthy.
There is a lot of history that goes along with the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution that concerns the church. It is said that King George III referred to our revolution as the ‘Presbyterian War,’ calling it such because of the pulpits of America.
It was not just the Presbyterians preaching, but it was the Congregationalists and the Lutherans and all those who recognized what is right from God’s law and what was not right in the treatment of the people, recognizing our need and our God-given call to stand up for what God says is right and to resist tyrants.
As such, there was a group of people unofficially referred to as the ‘Black Robed Regiment,’ which referred to the pastors of colonial days. Even so, I forget exactly how many signers there were to the Declaration of Independence, but there is one person in particular who comes to my mind.
His name is John Witherspoon. He was the president of the College of New Jersey, which we know today as Princeton, which was at the time specifically a seminary. He was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor who was brought over from Scotland to be the president of Princeton. He served as a delegate in the Continental Congress and he is the only ordained, practicing pastor to sign the Declaration of Independence. He later went on to serve in government, serving as a representative for the state of New Jersey.
So it is with that history in mind, and the history and practice that I will read to us the Declaration of Independence.
Got to get into a right state of mind, I suppose, and since many of y’all do appreciate my hats, hear this with the words you know, remembering and thinking it with an ear of history. Think how true these words still are today as well as in our faith.
In Congress, July 4th, 1776.
The unanimous declaration of the 13 united States of America:
‘When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
Prudence indeed will dictate that long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evil is sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right; it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having a direct object the establishment of the absolute tyranny over these states.
To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers incapable of annihilation have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose, obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislators.
He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us; for protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states; for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world; for imposing taxes on us without our consent; for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury; for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses; for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments; for suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms.
Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.
We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here.
We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.
They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity.
We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, friends in peace.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved, and that as free and independent states they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all the other acts and things which independent states may of right do.
And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Those are words of history, words of great import and impetus, driving a people to be divided until they came together, ultimately united. But underneath them, you can hear the same strains and calls for liberty. If we just replace the references to King George with Satan, the prince of the powers of the air, this is a declaration for Christians. It was written in large part by professing Christians. It was validated and accepted especially by Christian peoples in a land desiring to be free.
Thank you!
With that in mind, we’re going to stand and sing our final hymn. I would ask that you use your hymnals; it will be on the screen as well. We are going to stand and sing the Star-Spangled Banner, the first and what is traditionally the fourth verse. It is printed in our hymnals, but we’re going to stand and sing both, so please stand. [Music]
Lastly. [Music]
Is [Music] oh between their loved homes and the [Music] praise the power is [Music] oh amen.
Heavenly Father, thank you for our independence. We are a free nation, and we are free in Christ, by your grace, by your blood, and the power of the cross. We praise you and give you all glory and honor. Praise the Lord, amen.
And now, as you leave, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, rejoice!
Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
God bless! Go in peace.