Sermon Summary

God’s Stamp On America

Today’s sermon is more of a history lesson that I hope provokes thought as to the thought process in the founding of our country and the direction we are going today. This is not meant to be any kind of political statement. Everything said here today is based on History.

The U.S. Constitution never explicitly mentions God or the divine, but the same cannot be said of the nation’s state constitutions. In fact, God or the divine is mentioned at least once in each of the 50 state constitutions

There are currently 8 states that requires by their State constitution that in order to hold public office you must believe in God or a supreme being. That means that a self-proclaimed atheist cannot hold office.

Arkansas

Article 19, section 1: “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any Court.”

Maryland

Article 37: “That no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God; nor shall the Legislature prescribe any other oath of office than the oath prescribed by this Constitution.”

Mississippi

Article 14, section 265: “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this State.”

North Carolina

Article VI, section 8: “The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.”

Pennsylvania

Article 1, section 4: “No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.”

Note: Pennsylvania differs from the other states in that it says believers cannot be disqualified from holding office for his or her religious sentiments, but that is not extended to atheists.

South Carolina

Article XVII, section 4: “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution.”

Tennessee

Article IX, section 2: “No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishment, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.”

Note: Ministers are also barred from holding office, because they “ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their functions; therefore, no minister of the Gospel, or priest of any denomination whatever, shall be eligible to a seat in either House of the Legislature,” according to article IX, section 1.

**Texas

Article 1, section 4: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall anyone be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.”

But This requirement that is not being enforced today because in 1961 the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. The Court considered these requirements as a religious test.

• As a society we are at a crossroads. We are living in a time of confusion and a time of misinformation. If you have been following the news, you have to be concerned about what is happening around you today in the United States of America.

• What is happening to America?

How many of you recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each school day?

• WE can spend all day talking about the bad things that are happening, but until we get at the root of the problem all the talk in the world will not change anything because we will be dealing with symptoms and not the real problem.

• What has caused America to slide down a dangerous path?

• It is because we are confused about where and if God belongs in our nation. As time goes by, we are pushing God further and further out of our society. Has it always been that way?

• What did our founding fathers fight and die for? What did they lay their lives on the line for?

• It is easy for us to look back on history and say that it was easy for these people to do what they did because we see that they won the war. But remember they took on the strongest nation in the world at the time; victory was not a sure thing. It was considered a very slim chance of victory. Each of our founding fathers risk everything, their wealth, their property, prison and even their lives

• Is it important to see what our founding fathers believed and fought for?

• Yes, it is. These men had a vision for the nation that they shed their blood for, it was a vision that was so strong they were willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds to make it happen.

• Today we are going to see if our Founding Father’s intended for God to place his stamp on various aspects of our great Nation!

• Because of time I will only be scratching the surface in each area we will examine.

• The founding fathers wrote volumes and volumes of things, it is sad to see supposed educators making accusations without looking at primary source documents.

• If you want more information I would encourage you to go to www.wallbuilders.com.

• Much of the historical information for this message comes from the work of David Barton the founder of Wall builders. We have just shown his video “America’s Godly Heritage.” It is available to check out in our library.

• By the way, this information is not FICTION, it is all facts of history anyone can research what I am going to share with you this morning. LITTLE DIFFERENT THAN USUAL MESSAGE.

• I want to read Deuteronomy 11:13-25 with you this morning because this has application to God and His dealings. In the context this is written to the Israelites concerning the Promised Land.

¹³ ‘And it shall be that if you earnestly obey My commandments which I command you today, to love the Lord your God and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul,

¹⁴ then I will give you the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, your new wine, and your oil.

¹⁵ And I will send grass in your fields for your livestock, that you may eat and be filled.’

¹⁶ Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them,

¹⁷ lest the Lord’s anger be aroused against you, and He shut up the heavens so that there be no rain, and the land yield no produce, and you perish quickly from the good land which the Lord is giving you.

¹⁸ “Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

¹⁹ You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.

²⁰ And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates,

²¹ that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, like the days of the heavens above the earth.

²² “For if you carefully keep all these commandments which I command you to do—to love the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to hold fast to Him—

²³ then the Lord will drive out all these nations from before you, and you will dispossess greater and mightier nations than yourselves.

²⁴ Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the River Euphrates, even to the Western Sea, shall be your territory.

²⁵ No man shall be able to stand against you; the Lord your God will put the dread of you and the fear of you upon all the land where you tread, just as He has said to you.

• God has either put His stamp on America or He has not, let us see what our Founder’s thought concerning this important issue as we celebrate Independence Day!

I. GOD’S STAMP ON AMERICA’S HERITAGE.

• There is much confusion over our nation’s heritage. There is much confusion over the beliefs of the founding fathers.

• Today it is popular for uninformed people to say that the founders were not Christians. They say that Thomas Jefferson wrote a bible that had no references to miracles.

• This is not true; he wrote two books that were written to the Indians so that they could learn something about Jesus. Thomas Jefferson would not have liked these books being called bibles.

• Jefferson called HIMSELF a Christian in his own writings. He would even preach Sunday service in the Capital Building when he was President of the United States

• One of the first acts of the United States Congress was to authorize the printing of 20,000 Bibles for the Indians.

• Further, "When our first President, under the new Constitution, received the request of both Houses of Congress concerning a national declaration of a public day of Thanksgiving and Prayer, ’George Washington...issued a National Thanksgiving Proclamation without any apparent concern that he might be mixing government and religion."

• The men who founded our country clearly tied it to Christian principles. "By today’s standards," "the founding fathers were the religious right."

• Tim LaHaye says that "This Christian consensus is easily verified by the fact that prior to 1789 (the year that eleven of the thirteen states ratified the Constitution), many of the states still had constitutional requirements that a man must be a Christian in order to hold public office."

• This Christian consensus was understood by leaders long after the American Revolution, as well. Abraham Lincoln, in 1863, called for a "National Fast Day," citing the fact that "We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven ...But we have forgotten God."

• 52 of the 55 Founding Fathers who worked on the constitution were members of orthodox churches.

• In a report delivered by the House and Senate Judiciary committees on March 27, 1854, they said that if the founders would have known that there would be an attack against Christianity, they would have strangled the revolution in the cradle.

• In 1779 after the First Amendment (The Establishment clause)was written, the Supreme Court stated the following:

• By our form the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed on the same equal footing.

• John Quincy Adams said The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. –

• John Adams stated: The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.

II. GOD’S STAMP ON AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT.

• Does God have a place in our government? If you listen to people today they will tell you no. Just read and listen to the news. In Canada the government authorities are arresting preachers for have Church service. Pastor Tim Stevens was holding service in a field and the authorities found him by helicopter and arrested him. He was later released due to international pressure.

• I am going to make a statement and if you think it is in the constitution, I want you to raise your hand. THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE.

• This is NO WHERE in the constitution that states there will be a separation of church and state. Read it, you will not find it.

• What you find is the 1st Amendment, which we call the Establishment clause. It says,” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

• The statement, “Separation of Church and state does not appear in ANY of the founding documents.

• So Where did this statement come from?

• When Thomas Jefferson was president in 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut had heard a rumor that the Congregationalist denomination was going to be made the national denomination.

• On January 1, 1802 Jefferson responded with a letter back to them explaining that the “First Amendment has erected a wall of separation between the church and state.”

• He went on to explain that the wall of the 1st Amendment would protect the church from interference from government control.

♣ The government would only interfere if the religious activities of a said church would involve activity that was a direct menace to the government. (Later the courts defined such activities- human sacrifice, bigamy etc.)

♣ Today we hear the phrase from Jefferson’s letter without reference to the context of the letter.

♣ In 1853 a group tried to use the statement out of context in a court case with no success.

♣ In 1947 for the first time in a case Everson v. Board of Education, the court did not cite the entire Jefferson letter, just the following statement:

♣ The 1st Amendment has erected ‘a wall of separation between the church and state.’ That wall must be kept high and impregnable.

♣ The court from that time forward continued to repeat the mantra from the 1947 case. In a 1958 case one of the justices was so tired of hearing the phrase and wrote a dissent warning that if the court did not stop talking about the “separation of church and state’” people were going to think it was part of the constitution. That was in 1958!

• In a 10 year study the Political Science Professors at the University of Houston researched over 15,000 writing of the founders, they isolated 3154 direct quotes in these writings, of these direct quotes, 34% of them come directly from the Bible, another 60% were quotes from people like John Locke (Famous philosopher) and Sir William Blackstone (Famous & influential Legal Mind) , who directly quoted the Bible. Over 94% of the quotes found in the writings of the founders came from the Bible.

• Let’s briefly look at a couple of statements from our founders pertaining to God in Government.

• John Adams stated the following:

♣ We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

• John Quincy Adams said:

♣ The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code... laws essential to the existence of men in society and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws."

• Notice this ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court Richmond Vs. Moore in 1883:

♣ "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian." 26

• In 1811 The Supreme Court stated in People V Ruggles:

♣ Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government

• The founding fathers based our system of government in the Bible.

♣ For example, the concept for three branches of government can be found in Isaiah 33:22 ²² (For the Lord is our Judge, The Lord is our Lawgiver, The Lord is our King; He will save us;

; the logic for the separation of powers was based on Jeremiah 17:9 ⁹ “The heart is deceitful above all things, And ^[a]desperately wicked; Who can know it?

the basis of tax exemptions for churches was found in

Ezra 7:24 ²⁴ Also we inform you that it shall not be lawful to impose tax, tribute, or custom on any of the priests, Levites, singers, gatekeepers, Nethinim, or servants of this house of God.

and there are many other examples.

III. GOD’S STAMP ON AMERICA’S EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM.

• Does God belong in the school? It does not seem so today.

• The New England Primer that was the standard textbook in schools for over 200 years beginning in Boston in 1690. It is FULL of Bible facts and teachings.

• Our educational institutions were founded with God as the center. Look at these statements of philosophy of our major colleges in the United States.

♣ Yale- Seeing God is the giver of all wisdom, every scholar, besides private or secret prayer... shall be present morning and evening at public prayer

♣ Princeton- Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.

♣ Harvard- Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. This was based on John 17:3 ³ And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

♣ Everyone shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein.

♣ John Quincy Adams went through this system of education and when he was 14, he received a Congressional diplomatic appointment overseas to the court of Catherine the Great in Russia.

♣ Just weeks after his 1st inauguration President George Washington signed his first federal bill, the Northwest Ordinance.

♣ The Northwest Ordinance, drafted concurrently with the creation of the First Amendment. That act stipulated that for a territory to become a State, the "schools and the means of education" in that territory must encourage the "religion, morality, and knowledge" that was "necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind."

♣ Each of the state constitutions mandated that Christian teachings would be included in a child’s education

• November 1, 1802 The Ohio State constitution said:

♣ Religion, morality, and knowledge, being essentially necessary to the good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of instruction shall forever be encouraged by legislative provision.

• 106 of the first 108 colleges formed in America and 123 of the first 126 were formed on Christian principles

• By 1900. It was extremely rare to find a university president who was not an ordained clergyman.

• Since the 1960’s when the systematic removal of God from the schools took place, things have gotten worse and worse.

CONCLUSION

Where does God fit into America? The founding Fathers who gave us this great nation made it clear. Jesus belongs front and center in our society.

Don’t be fooled by the so-called enlightened people. The founders knew that when you take God out of something, that something will fail. As Christians, educate yourself and let people know about our Godly heritage.

Christians should be the one who are carrying the truth to the world. Let’s work to get America back on track.

We can start by being Kingdom Builders, by being true Disciples of God by spreading his word to any and all that will listen. Always remember We do not fight a physical battle, but a spiritual one.

Let Us Pray

Lord… remind us today that You have shown us what is good in what You require of us; to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with you God. We ask that as a people, we may humble ourselves before You and seek Your will for our lives and for this great nation.

Thank you that in our nation today, we are free to worship. We are free to pray. We are free to read, speak and spread your Word.

For this, we are incredibly grateful. Yet, help us all understand how quickly these freedoms can be taken away.

Help us in our nation to work as never before to strengthen our families and to give our children hope and a moral foundation for the future. So may our desire be to serve You, and in so doing, serve one another. Give us an increased awareness of the spiritual battle we’re in. Help us to stand strong in you and for your purposes.

Thank you that as believers, we can be assured, you will never leave us, and are with us always

Thru Jesus Christ we Pray

AMEN

• Verse List “God’s Stamp On America”

Deuteronomy 11:13-25
Isaiah 33:22
Jeremiah 17:9
Ezra 7:24
John 17:3