As it happens, today, the Lord’s Day is also the Fourth of July, a national holiday. The fact that it is not a part of the church calendar should not prevent us from taking note of it, and resolving on several things as Christians who are also part of a nation that has been surpassingly blessed.
First is the responsibility of gratitude. Gratitude does not mean that we are neglecting to confess and forsake our sins, because lack of gratitude has been one of our greatest sins as a people. God has poured enormous blessings over us, and the only appropriate response should be one of deep, profound, and humbled gratitude.
Second, we have a responsibility to learn more about our own history—we can’t be grateful for deliverances we have forgotten about. In Scripture, forgetting is not an excuse for having sinned, but is rather an additional sin.
Third, we must reject the false accusations of those who want
Fourth, if we want to know how our nation has sinned, we must turn back to the law and to the testimony. What sin is should not be a great mystery. God wrote a book, and in that book He tells us what the sins of great nations are. He also tells us what the gospel is. The fundamental sin we have drifted into is the sin of thinking that we can make our way without Jesus Christ. We cannot.
Over two centuries ago, we declared our independence from the House of Hanover. That was a real blessing purchased at a great cost by that founding generation, who knew what liberty was. About a century ago, we declared our independence from Jesus Christ and we have descended to a pitiable condition. Like the prodigal son, it took us a while to run out of all our capital, moral and otherwise, but we have managed to do it. We are now facing the hard consequences.
And so we should meditate on this.