Thanksgiving Day in the United States, I have always felt, is our nation’s most significant holiday.
It is the least commercial and the most focused on acknowledging God’s providence over our land by calling on His name as sovereign Lord and expressing gratitude to Him.
Don’t lose heart. God desires to bless not just individuals who love Him, but whole nations. He holds the destiny of nations in His hands and is bigger than any headlines or trends.
Bob and Mary Jane Wright
Today mom and I will go to the Veterans Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where my dad is in hospice care after serving his country for twenty years as a Naval officer and aviator.
He also nobly served the Kingdom of God most of his adult life – and understood there was no contradiction between those two roles.
I’m a generally conservative Republican, so it pains me to see presidential candidate Herman Cain stumble. But even more so, I am appalled at the blogs and comments supporting Mr. Cain from folks who, I suspect, were on President Clinton like white on rice when allegations first surfaced about him.
Herman Cain
As Christians, we must speak truth to power, but with integrity and without applying double standards!
I’ve seen this same phenomena in pastoral sex abuse cases that I’ve handled. Folks will defend a pastor who – under the Biblical standard of two or three witnesses like we now have with Mr. Cain – is a confirmed sexual predator, simply because they like him or he helped them in the past. The fact is, sexual predators of all stripes are the most charming, charismatic, and capable people I’ve ever met!
Let me repeat that: Sexual predators are the MOST CHARMING, CHARISMATIC AND CAPABLE PEOPLE you, too, will ever meet.
On the one hand, I reject the anti-capitalist goals of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, and their implicit “entitlement” message. But on the other hand, I agree that the government – Democrats and Republicans alike – bailed out the rich and the privileged at the expense of every one else.
When the powerful become too big to fail, it only consolidates even more economic and social disparities and thus fosters injustice.
I think we as a nation need to look seriously at the principles inherent in the Year of Jubilee which God instituted with Israel under the old covenant.
If we took the underlying principle of giving society and everyone a fresh start every 49 years, how would we do it?
I wonder what that would look like today?
Why is it that white, middle-class suburban Christians persist in acting as though God is white, middle-class suburban?
I have it on good authority that He’s not.
God just ain’t so tidy whitey.
Believe me, He transcends our comfort zones!
And He calls us to the do the same.
S&P downgraded the United States last night.
I hope and pray that this will serve as a wake-up call for the Church to realize that Biblical precepts can’t be mocked if any nation wants to survive. If God’s people don’t begin to understand, articulate and follow those precepts, then there is no hope.
One of those precepts is that God has ordained certain roles and responsibilities for civil government, and Scripture has lots to say about how individuals, families, the Church, the State and voluntary associations are to function.
However, there is not a single verse or example in all of Scripture which lends any credence to the view that God has given civil government the right or responsibility to re-distribute wealth or provide for our individual health or income. See The Growing Idolatry of Civil Government.
In return for a little less freedom, civil government ever seeks to solve problems we should be solving on our own through individual responsibility, family support, personal charity or voluntary associations. As we’ve continued to trade liberty for government “solutions” (which never in reality actually solve much, but often make things worse), little by little we’ve become increasingly enslaved.
Every American should watch this cartoon from 1948 and heed its warning about Utopian promises to fix all of our problems. It is more relevant today than ever before.
May we once again find the courage, and the common sense, to stand tall as free men and free women.
A fellow pilot, David Lytle, discovered a cassette tape in a small recorder he purchased for $3 at a flea market last week. It contained a recording made in 1978 of a few World War II bomber gunnery crew members who hadn’t seen each other in many years and were reminiscing about their experiences during the war. David mentioned the tape on a forum for other pilots that I frequent, and with everyone’s encouragement converted the recording to an MP3 file and posted it online.
“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
Some may think we’ve not yet sunk into the clutches of socialism — 
which happens when we have a state-run economy. But consider this: In 2009, federal and state governments will consume 40 percent of the United States’ TOTAL gross domestic product.
This means that nearly half of all the wealth generated in America this year will be taken by civil government to fund its ever expanding control over more and more of our lives and our economy. As a result, we have run out of money while undercutting the means for producing future wealth.
Yet the federal government seeks to expand its reach even more.
It’s the 4th of July weekend here in the United States, and I was thinking about the first time I truly fell in love with America.
It was during my first trip overseas on my own, at the ripe old age of 21, after a year of grad school at Westminster Theological Seminary. I was sitting in Trafalgar Square in London on Independence Day, after more than a month of backpacking through the British Isles. It had been a grand trip of personal discovery as I hitchhiked from town to town, ate my meals in open air markets, slept on church steps, and occasionally visited youth hostels to take a shower. During my stay in Scotland, someone had given me the book “When Free Men Shall Stand,” and I had been reading it off and on during my travels.
As my trip was coming to a close and I was hanging out in London waiting for a stand-by airline seat home, I finished the book while sitting in that park. For the first time, I started looking back at America through the filter of another culture and began thinking about what made America unique. Many, like me that day, never really discover America until they’ve had the opportunity to leave her.
At that time in the United Kingdom, Thatcher had not yet been elected Prime Minister and the Liberal Party was wrecking that nation with policies that destroyed personal responsibility and initiative. Even as a twenty-one year old, the culture and the people, by and large, struck me as bland, crass and dominated by attitudes of entitlement. As money was being sucked out of the economy to feed that sense of personal entitlement at the hand of big brother, hope and opportunity were dying.
As a result, the Brits had lost their spark and zest for life. It finally was dawning on me that those qualities are vital for any people. I also was beginning to realize that those qualities had persevered in America because of the ideals that sparked the revolution of 1776 and then the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Those ideals, in turn, were gleaned by our Founding Fathers from Biblical principles that gave birth to the first Constitutional Republic to grace the earth in nearly 3000 years (since dying out when Israel foolishly chose a King rather than continuing as a constitutional republic under the Decalogue through locally chosen representative leaders).
I very much had been a liberal activist until then, but started weeping that day as I suddenly realized how I had taken for granted – and been ignorant about – the principles in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I also began to appreciate how truly revolutionary the core value of our Founding Fathers had been: Mainly, that the liberty to pursue virtue requires limited civil government, and that the greatest danger to virtue and liberty is a government which assumes the prerogatives of individual responsibility under the guise of benevolence.
I came back a changed man.
Are there any other 4th of July stories out there, or tales about your own political and cultural epiphanies, as we celebrate Independence Day?
(c) Copyright 2009, Fulcrum Ministries. All Rights Reserved.
The following is an op-ed I wrote and the Baltimore Sun published on December 3, 1986. I was in my late twenties at that time and leading the main pro-life, pro-family organization in Maryland, which I started six years earlier and had over 15,000 active members with offices next to the General Assembly in Annapolis. I like to say I’m now a refugee from Maryland living the good life in Virginia. I no longer describe myself as “fundamentalist”, at least regarding my attitudes, even though I strongly adhere to the essentials of the faith.
I’m re-publishing the op-ed because it’s interesting to see how much has changed, yet how much remains the same!
Crossroad Junction 