Trying Something Old

Almost six decades ago, former president Herbert Hoover wrote a warning that I fear America has not heeded. After calling attention to several new programs and concepts, including "New Freedom" and "New Religion," Hoover stated, "We have overworked the word "new"…. The practical thing we can do, if we want to make the world over, is to try out the word "Old" for a while. There are some "old" things that made this country…Some old things are slipping badly in American life and if they slip too far, the lights will go out of America. (What in the World is Going On? Dr. David Jeremiah)

I listened to our president talk the other day during a town meeting he held in Florida. He talked about the extreme hardship many were experiencing and I wondered if he really understood hardship. He talked about how much people wanted to work, and I wondered if he ever met the crowd that tried to work the system so they did not need to work. I heard him say that it was time to quit talking and start acting as he spent most of his day travelling and talking. I heard him talk about the arrogance of those corporate executives who took their corporate jets to meetings while he got to his massive corporate jet on a massive marine helicopter. I heard him talk about the insiders in Washington as if he did not live there. I heard him talk about "inheriting" a mess and wondered what his role as a US senator was during those years. I saw a lady mouth the words "we love you Barak" with tears streaming down her face and thought I was looking at a rock star rather than a president.

Needless to say all of these stay thoughts bothered me.

But what has bothered me the most is the fact that this president speaks as one person while living as another. There was a lady who told him that she was praying for him and he acknowledged that he needed those prayers and depended upon those prayers while opening the flood gates of human destruction to the unborn. The bill that he is endorsing is quite discriminatory against religious organizations in that it prohibits federal dollars for: "...modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities--used for sectarian instruction, religious worship...or a school or department of divinity; or in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission."

During these economic tough times is it not the Christian organizations that have risen to take care of the needy? Is it not the Christian groups that operate out of love and concern for the welfare of people regardless of available funding? Of course it is. Perhaps that is why they can be ignored. They will operate despite our government's ignorance of their importance.

While there is money being available to help stop STDs, there will be no money available for those who teach that the ways of Christ are the only real solution to our nation's problems. It won't matter to the faithful; we have served without government money for years.

I do not know how God could or would bless a nation that has decided to "fix" its problems without Him. There seems to be a clear historical record of what happens to nations whose god is not God.

When we destroy the foundational bricks on which the structure of our society has been resting we will surly teeter and fall for no culture can survive the tests of time without a secure footing.

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible….George Washington

The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of the truth- that God governs in the affairs of men. And, without His aid, we shall succeed in the in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. Benjamin Franklin

Remember ever, and always, that your country was founded, not by the most superficial, the lights, the most unreflective of all European races, but by the stern old Puritans who made the deck of the Mayflower an altar of the living god and whose first act on touching the soil of the new world was to offer on bended knees thanksgiving to Almighty God. Henry Wilson, Vice President under Ulysses S Grant.

The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and spiritual nature and needs of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in a way of peace and salvation. America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture. Woodrow Wilson

(Quotations from What in the World is Going On? by David Jeremiah. Pp. 127-8)

I am ready to try "old" for a while….