I just celebrated my 71st birthday on Thanksgiving weekend. It is hard to comprehend. Seventy-one is something that I would expect my father to be…but he would be 105 on his next birthday…if he had not already ridden into the sunset.
I often wonder what he would think if he were alive today to see the world in which his great grandchildren were living. He was a child of the Great Depression, a time when most of his generation learned to make the most out of lack.
“The Greatest Generation,” the history books called them. A generation of Americans, as JFK said, “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans–born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage–and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
That generation conquered Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, and Mussolini and from the deep wounds of a foreign war, America forged the greatest economic explosion the world had ever seen immortalized by “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” For a brief time, America was that “shining city set on a hill” illuminating the known world with the “blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…” Until American men went soft.
But we ignored the warnings of the Scriptures which for 200 years had been the blueprint upon which the American miracle had been built. “A good man,” the Scriptures extolled us, “leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” A good man builds a future for his grandchildren…a legacy if you will…something to leave behind. A path to follow.
Psalm 78 says it this way, “For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children: That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children: That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments: And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation; a generation that set not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not stedfast with God.”
Somewhere along the journey we missed the boat. The inheritance we were supposed to leave was not money, but HERITAGE…the idea that it meant something to be an American…Christian…Daubenmire…a legacy of the footprints that our PERSONAL fore-fathers carved out. Goodness and mercy is supposed to FOLLOW us…as our virtue leaves breadcrumbs for those coming after us.
But we have blown the inheritance. America’s bank accounts have been drained, financially…morally…Spiritually. Our legacy is a quagmire of murky “freedoms” that masquerades as “rights.” Self-sacrifice is yesterday’s news. MY body…MY choice…MY rights. “Dying to self” was thrown out with the bath-water.
It is time all Americans took a PERSONAL inventory of what REALLY matters. Psalm 11:3 exhorts us “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” That IS the question, isn’t it? America is going to hell in a handbasket and what are THE RIGHTEOUS going to do about it?
We discussed this on my morning podcast today. Forgive the obvious self-promotion, but you would do well to give it a listen in your leisure… it is free. HERE.
As we often do on the show, we journeyed into www.webstersdictionary1828.com. The site is valuable in understanding the LANGUAGE in which our Founders spoke. Words have meaning, you know? We would do well to all speak the same language.
Our journey took us to three pillars which we need to rebuild. Without these foundations America will never survive. What are they teaching in your local schools? What are the professors puking into the minds of our college students? What is the media daily “programming” us with? How about we stand up and push back?
Noah Webster defined DUTY as “That which a person OWES to another; that which a person is bound, by any natural, moral or legal obligation, to pay, do or perform.”
The Declaration of Independence speaks of duty. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Heritage, my good men. Duty.
HONOR is “The esteem due or paid to worth; high estimation.” A man gets paid according to his value. What is the average Christian American worth? What are we teaching America’s children to value?
VIRTUE is “Moral goodness; the practice of moral duties and the abstaining from vice, or a conformity of life and conversation to the moral law.” Americans are good at fake virtue…virtue signaling is what they call it today. “A form of godliness “is how the Bible explains it.
John Adams, one of our nation’s founders warned us, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Is it any wonder why we are in the mess we are in?
President Teddy Roosevelt warned us “To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
Are our schools teaching this today? Is our government? Are our churches? Whatever happened to shame?
Alexis de Tocqueville is purported to have said “America is great because America is good. If America ever ceases to be good, she will cease also to be great.”
If we are to ever Make America Great Again we must first strive to make MEN great again.
Duty! Honor! Virtue! Let’s make individual AMERICANS MORAL AGAIN!
