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What you will read below is a rough draft of a presentation that I am making to the Exchange Club in Waynesboro, Georgia. I would love comments and suggestions to make this stronger. Thanks a bunch.

These words are written in Psalm 33:12 [+/-]Psalm 33:12 [12]Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!
, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom He has chosen as His heritage. There are at least three things that we need to know about this text in order to understand it. First, it occurs in a context that affirms the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, acknowledging that since God is the creator of all things He is the only one who has the right to control all things. And He does. So that secondly the nation that is blessed is the nation that recognizes this reality as the premise upon which we pursue our work and live our lives. Thirdly, the word blessed does not have monetary and material associations. It simply means that God gives to those people who acknowledge Him as Creator and Sovereign all that we need to function in the world so as to fulfill His purposes. Thus, this text has to do with any people at any place during any time who by acknowledging God as Creator and Sovereign are given by this God His blessing as they are used by Him to fulfill His purpose upon the earth. So, the blessing of God upon a people is tied to obedience to God by the people. Now in the light of what this text teaches I want to look briefly at our reality in our culture in the light of a historical recognition about our founders as a foundation for our reflection during this Thanksgiving week.

Let me begin with our reality. It is really simple: we are in serious trouble. Now I will leave it to others to address our economic woes and the health care crisis; I want to go to what is underneath all of that: the virtual moral collapse of our culture. Although there are all kinds of ways that we can come at this issue, I want to approach it by looking at the life of a child in our culture from birth into young adulthood and make clear what our culture is communicating. Let’s begin with birth and recognize that in our culture many births do not happen. We are the culture of choice who in the instance of killing babies in utero have not been influenced by the rest of the world but are influencing the rest of the world. We have killed more babies in America since Roe vs. Wade than Jewish people exterminated in the holocaust but would be aghast at any comparison of our culture to his. His was a culture of death for the development of the most fit; so is ours. And it is not only abortion that is the issue; many babies born in our culture are born to single moms without a husband or a father. Not to mention babies born to moms who were alcohol, drug, and nicotine users during pregnancy and would not stop because the centerpiece of our culture is radical individualism. I will be what I am going to be, think what I am going to think, and do what I am going to do because it is my right as an individual to do so.

But let’s get the baby here. And from day one in our culture our parenting is driven by the needs, wants, and desires of the child. The child is number one. And whatever the child wants the child gets. And we dare not discipline by way of corporal punishment lest we face the wrath of our peers who see that as abusive. So, we do not deprive so that the child can thrive. By the time the child is two, there are two things that are clear: he or she is surrounded by more stuff than is remotely necessary and the child has learned that he or she is the most important person in the universe. We call this in our culture the building of self-esteem; a psychological theory that did not even exist until the late sixties coming to full life during the seventies when Penelope Leach’s book Your Child’s Self Esteem replaced Spock and the theory to date has no data to demonstrate its viability. In fact, the pushing of the self-esteem agenda has produced frustrated parents, frustrated children, and frustrated teachers. And all of it because we tell lies to our children: you can be whatever you want to be. You can do whatever you want to do. You can do whatever you set your mind to. No child left behind. Every child deserves and education. I could go on. All of these fundamentally untrue and birthed by the self-esteem movement which in order to thrive requires a culture that is fully focused on the individual. Take Radical Individualism and marry it to Self-Esteem and the outcome is a culture of persons with rights who when those rights are violated become victims. And in our culture we have this in full force by the time the child hits school age.

Now let’s fast forward to adolescence where in our culture we are saying to children who cannot behave in school or at home that their problem is in the brain. They have a chemical imbalance. We are even treating young kids now for depressive episodes. So, we have a school population that is heavily medicated so as to be able to function but the message that they get every time they take the pill is that it is not their problem. It is in their brain. So when the boy gets to be fourteen and his brain sends signals of sexual attraction to the girl across the aisle, he just listens to his brain. Since the girl has been taught that she must feel good about herself and finds rejection so difficult, she just gives in. And what is the big deal? They are just doing what is natural and normal. So, sexual activity and sexual awareness starts earlier than ever. Unless of course in our culture you determine that you are genetically programmed toward male to male or female to female attraction, and that is just who you are. And by the time you get to middle school and high school you have learned that if this is who you are, you ought to express it: radical individualism plus self esteem leads to a plurality of ways of living and here is the real issue in our day: and the most backwoods, bigoted people are those who have not learned that the key to our life together is tolerance. We must tolerate all kinds of lifestyles. It could produce a culture in which we work hard to treat terrorists terrifically when they are at Guantanamo and show them the best in fine living when they come to New York City!

Let me very quickly now take our child turned teenager off to college or vocational school and into the work force. By the time they hit college they have learned that life is all about them and that they have a right to succeed. Early on in college they are indoctrinated deliberately with an overdose of evolution. It is made clear to them that only the ignorant believe in a world deliberately designed by God for His glory and brought into being by His word. It has always amazed me and still does and always will that a theory of origins that has increasingly less and less data to support it and has to keep stretching the time frame to make it work, even to the point of changing the dating procedures for fossils in order to make the procedures fit their practice; a theory that admits major flaws, gaps, and still cannot explain how one species becomes another is taught as intelligence by people to people who think themselves by believing it to be intelligent! It mystifies me. Yet, many of your children and mine who go to UGA or Georgia Southern or Georgia Tech or Mercer will be taught this theory as scientific fact. The result is an increase in self-centered, narcissistic living where life becomes increasingly about the person, about me; because in an evolutionary world the pinnacle point is the human and everything exists for him. Then finally you take this college grad and you send her into the work force and her focus is on how much and how often. How much am I going to make and how often do I get off? And the young adult enters the world of work driven by the promised fulfillment of their monetary and materialistic dreams that become the essence of human happiness. And when it doesn’t materialize instantaneously, frustration comes and brings with it a search for happiness wherever it can be found: alcohol, drugs, deception, sexual immorality, credit card abuse and increasingly self-inflicted death. What we are producing in our society is the inevitable outcome of lifestyles that are radically me-centered. A better economy is not going to change that. A better health care system is not going to change that. The finest of educational institutions are not going to change that. You would expect me to say what I believe with every fiber of my being will change that, but even our churches have become too consumed by the world and by the consumer mentality of the world.
Change will come in part I believe when we have some sense of recognition about our history as a country. Most of the founders of this country were not bible thumping conservative evangelicals. George Washington loved more than Mrs. Martha! Some of those guys whose names or on the Declaration were like some of us; they were scallywags! Some were very conservative in their Christian commitment; most were Deists who believed that God created the world and then handed over to us to run. That is why they were so careful at such an early stage in the establishment of the balance of powers in the operation of the government. But there was one thing that they all held dear and was the foundation for all that they said and did: the law of this land must be founded upon the law of God, and the law of God is given by God for the good of the people, plural. In other words, they believed that a country could not survive if it departed from adherence to the law of God. So, they established for example a pluralism that was to be expressed in the context of the affirmation of monotheism: there is one God and His Name is Yahweh; He is the Lord God Almighty the maker of heaven and of earth. Religious pluralism as understood by the Constitution was not the right to worship any God but the right to worship the one God in a variety of ways. Or, remember that our founders were committed to the sacred character of the Lord’s Day and feared violating that Day with any activity except the worship of God and the rest from labor. And even the penal system and the punitive laws of justice were rooted in the law of God. But they also believed that the law of God was for the good of the people and that the good of the people superseded in importance the rights of any one individual. You remember that Alexader de Tocqueville came to America to look at what made America great and his conclusion was that America is great because America is good, and America is good because the concerns of the individual are subservient to the concerns of the community. And it was DeTocqueville who would write prophetically in Democracy in America “the genius of America will be lost when she loses the focus on the concerns of the community and begins to focus on the rights of the individual.

We could see change even in our own community if those who lead our churches and our community and our schools and our law enforcement would recognize our rich history as Judaeo-Christian Country whose founders made it foundational that we acknowledge God by observing and obeying His Law both in our relationship to Him and in our relationship to one another. It would change the way we see life. It would change the way we live in relationship to one another. And it would be a great cause for giving thanks.

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