This Fourth of July weekend, our nation marks 250 years since our nation’s Founding Fathers declared,
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.
Two hundred fifty years. That’s a long obedience in undertaking a fragile experiment called democracy, and it’s worth pausing to give thanks for it.
But here’s what I keep coming back to as I think about this milestone: the founders got the order right, even if we forget it sometimes. They didn’t say our rights come from government, or from a constitution, or from the goodwill of whoever holds power in a given season. They said those rights come from our Creator. Freedom, in other words, was never the first thing. God was the first thing. Freedom was the fruit.
That’s not just founding-era rhetoric, either. It’s the whole shape of the Gospel. Paul tells the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1), and the psalmist writes, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD” (Psalm 33:12). Our freedom, whether we’re talking about a soul released from sin or a nation released from tyranny, has always flowed downstream from God’s sovereignty, never the other way around. We are not free because we declared it. We are free because He reigns, and in His kindness He has allowed us, for a time, to live inside a nation that has tried, however imperfectly, to order itself around that truth.
No one understood that tension better than Abraham Lincoln. He gave his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, weeks before the Civil War finally ended, at a moment when the nation was as divided and as wounded as it has ever been. And instead of claiming victory or certainty, he pointed the country back to God saying:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Friends, that’s still the work in front of us. Not simply celebrating what was founded 250 years ago, but continuing to strive to carry forward this Great American Experiment, by binding up our nation’s wounds. May we, as disciples of Jesus Christ and citizens of this great nation, work toward that peace by loving God and neighbor in all we say and do.
So, here’s my invitation for the weekend. Come celebrate our God in whom true freedom is found and our nation’s 250th anniversary:
Join us for worship on Sunday, July 5, at 9 and 11 am, as we give thanks to the God who is sovereign over every nation, including this one, and who has been faithful to His people in every century.
Then come back at 3 pm for the Bulloch County Community Band Concert, and let’s celebrate 250 years of this remarkable, unfinished, still-becoming country together, right alongside our friends and neighbors.
Same day, same spirit: faith first, and freedom because of it.
God bless,
Jonathan Smith
For Jesus. For People. For Community.