Independence Day: Preserving Life and Liberty

Today, a nation will come together to celebrate one day, 233 years ago: July 4, 1776. On that day, the bold members of Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming their freedom from Britain. In essence, these courageous men, upholding principle, founded a new nation that would grow to be unlike any other. According to these great men who risked their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” for the sake of their country, this new nation was to be always built upon a certain, immovable foundation of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”

Moreover, behind this firm foundation, these brave men put, at the heart of their great experiment in liberty, the belief in God as the supreme creator of the universe who, in his good providence, had brought forth this new nation of life and liberty. Through the years, these precious principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been gallantly defended. However, the defense of America’s great freedoms has not come without great loss. Since that patriotic day 233 years ago, hundreds of thousands of American’s have given their very lives to preserve the principles that our founding fathers risked all that they had to preserve.

However, unlike almost any other time in the history of this great nation, this country, grounded in the principles of life and liberty, is falling away from its very foundation. Each and every day, the freedoms that our founding fathers established as the basis of this country, and the same freedoms that thousands have died to preserve is slipping away from our nation. Each day, as nearly 4,000 unborn children are denied the rights of life and of liberty that the founding fathers intended to extend to each and every American, the foundation upon which the founding fathers established our country is being uprooted. In fact, since 1973, through abortion, roughly 50 million unborn children have been denied the fundamental rights of life and of liberty that the founding fathers intended them to have.

Speaking to us, John Quincy Adams, son of the second President of the United States, former U.S. secretary of the state, and the sixth President of the U.S. once said this:

Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.

How will we, as the heirs of this priceless freedom, use what we have been given? Will we allow it to be undermined through injustices such as abortion that refuse to grant the “unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” to all Americans, or will we act to preserve the principles of this great country for the next generation? Will we act to remain true to those principles in such a manner that God returns to the center of our country? At the end of our lives, will we be able to sincerely say that we live in a nation that holds true to its foundation: “in God we trust”?

John Adams, the first ever Vice President of the U.S. and the second President of the U.S., once wrote:

Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.

According to the founding fathers who risked their very lives to preserve the freedoms that we have today, we, indeed, have a duty set before us. And that duty, whether we like it or not, is to act to uphold the foundations upon which this freedom is built. In the very document that we celebrate today, the Declaration of Independence, we indeed see what we are to uphold:

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.

With this in mind, I would urge you to take the first step in fulfilling the duty that all Americans are priveleged to have by praying for our country; we must pray that God would restore the worn principles of Life and Liberty for all, including the unborn, to the center of our country, and, also, we must earnestly pray that, along with that, God would establish himself once again as the centerpiece of our nation so that, at the end of the day, we may be able to truly proclaim “In God we Still Trust!”

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. ~Psalm 33:12