It’s an incredible milestone we celebrate this week; at the same time, it must be confessed that 250 years is not a long time for a country.

Yet any observer of history could easily detect that a lot has changed in that relatively short amount of time, and I don’t just mean the obvious, material changes.

The very heart and soul of America have been fundamentally altered, morphed into something hardly recognizable to its founding.

The change has been slow and subtle, or we might rather say, that the forgetting has been gradual. It is only scarcely recognized now the undeniable influence that God, faith, and the Christian religion played in our beginning. Many simply don’t realize it on a historical level, and still others would deny it.

The idea of a Christian founding has both been not transmitted, and whitewashed by those who would prefer to do without it. But as we forget our founding, and as we forget God, we lose more than just a Christian bent of a population, which is good in its own right, but we lose the country we were meant to be, and miss out on the blessings God would give us.

Cut flowers look awfully pretty on your kitchen counter, but only for as long as they will last without roots. We may wish to have the fruit without the tree, but it’s an impossibility.

As we celebrate 250 years, rightly so, for it is a truly blessed nation we live in and enjoy, it is also a good time for reflection. In forgetting God, what have we lost? In unmooring ourselves from the Christian ethic, what unexpected changes have come as a result?

Our country, for the sake of its posterity, for our children, and our children’s children, must remember our founding principles and ideas, return to the God of all nations, and repent.

Because true liberty and freedom, as expressed by the scriptures and our founding fathers, is found only in God. May God bless America with a spirit of repentance, and true liberty.

Pastor Dan Meader

Grace St. Paul’s/Church of the Great Redeemer

Jim Thorpe