Today, Wednesday January 20 – Romans 4 – Do you have a firm foundation for your faith? If you come from Germany, you are a German. If you come from France, you are a Frenchman. Your birth, your ethnicity, your family heritage are all included in identifying you with the geography of the land of your birth. But if you come from America, and are called an American, it has nothing to do with your land of birth, your ethnicity or your family heritage. It is because you have identified with an ideal! And it was a radical ideal that our founding fathers had, based upon liberty and freedom for all. They wrote the U.S. Constitution based on the foundation that if individual people had virtue based on a personal faith, they could experience and enjoy freedom. Meaning if we had the discipline to self-govern we could corporately have a nation of laws that we would also obey. The three words, faith, virtue and freedom are called the triangle, the ideal that led to the founding of this great country.
Ben Franklin was ask by a woman after the Constitution was drafted in 1787, what the founders had given the American people. He responded, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Another founding father, John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
It is my belief, that the morality of a people is always based on some belief system. When a people has a belief system based on a creator God, as our founding fathers believed, those people would live out that faith with respect for God, for others, and for authority. And they would also take responsibility for their own lives. They would focus on their responsibilities and not their rights! But the more personally irresponsible we become, the more laws the government has to pass to try to control us so we don’t destroy ourselves and each other. The book of Romans gives us the basis for the foundation of a genuine faith that will set us free from the tyranny of selfish, immoral living. Today is good day to pray that Americans will realize that freedom is not free, but that it only can be experienced by a moral people that will live virtuous lives. God bless!