“Love of Country”, when I was a boy, was woven into the fabric of everyday life. It was normal to view our country as a special place. In school, we would sing songs like “America the Beautiful.” “O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!” One little phrase in that verse gives us the reason we have freedom, liberty, and opportunity, howbeit they are being eroded at a rapid rate. “God shed His grace on thee.” Why did God show our country His grace? I think because the people that first landed on the shores of America brought something inside them that we desperately need to reclaim. The Judeo-Christian Ethic. Many people have heard the term, but don’t really know what it means. Its roots are found in the Old and New Testament, the Bible. Depending on the person you read or listen to, different items make up the list found in “The Ethic.” These are mine.

  1. The Dignity of Human Life. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence the first of the “unalienable rights” was life. It was God given. Exodus 20:13 states, “Thou shalt not kill.” Life should be precious beginning in the womb.
  2. The Traditional Monogamous Family. Monogamous isn’t a word we hear much about today, but it simply means one husband, one wife, and children, for life. The most basic fabric of a stable society is a monogamous family. I know circumstances happen and families break apart. The good Lord can and has taken broken lives and created beauty from chaos, but the original plan was found in Genesis 2:23-24. The terms “marriage” and “family” have come to mean many things in America today, but just because society and the Supreme Court changes definitions doesn’t mean God has.
  3. Work Ethic. How many of you remember “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?” The independent spirit has no desire to exist on the handouts of others or of government. Work is honorable in any form. No one owes you a handout. II Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” This doesn’t neglect the disabled or elderly, but every abled body person was expected to pull their own weight.
  4. A God-centered Education. The founders believed Proverb’s 1:7. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Early Americans used as a textbook The New England Primer. This book taught the ABC’s by using Bible verses for the alphabet. “A-In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. B-heaven to find, the Bible mind.” George Washington, our first President said this, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” We are a far cry from that thinking today.
  5. Common Decency. Matthew 22:39, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The blood of American’s has soaked into the soil of other nations seeking to give them liberation from tyrants and would be dictators. We spend untold numbers of dollars each year seeking to help the poor with food, clothing and medicine in foreign lands. When tragedy strikes anywhere in the world the United States is first on the scene. Whatever the motivation today, it began because of a biblical mindset many years ago.
  6. Personal Accountability to God. No greater restraint of evil is the understanding and knowledge that one day individuals and nations will give an account to a Sovereign God. Hebrews 9:27. “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after that the judgment.” Every one of us will stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ” (II Corinthians 5:10). In one of my Bible’s I have written, “Tom Foskey will stand at the Judgment Seat of Christ.” That’s sobering.

I pray for our nation and our leaders. The very fabric of our society is being attacked on a daily basis. The home, the church, and biblical values are constantly barraged as being antiquated ideas no longer viable in our enlightened age. These six points referencing the Judeo-Christian Ethic are mocked by the elitist, many educators, and enemies of our country both foreign and domestic. We have a fight for the soul of our country. We Americans have always been a strong people. We fought wars and defeated enemies considered stronger and mightier and my petition, “Lord help us to repent, return to thee and let us be victorious once more.”

This Independence Day let’s thank God for America, the “shining light on a hill” as President Reagan called it in 1989 in his farewell address and for those pilgrims and puritans who gave us the Judeo-Christian Ethic. May the “ethic” which our forefathers brought “in them” have a rebirth in our souls and the soul of our beloved nation.