Long may our Land be Bright with Freedom's Holy Light

Officially, the Continental Congress declared its freedom from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, but after voting to approve it, a draft document was needed to explain it to the public. The proposed draft was made by a committee that included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It took two days for Congress to agree on the edits, and so the actual Declaration of Independence document was approved on July 4th.

In just two years from now, it will be exactly 250 years since the original Independence Day. We have come a long way since that time. Starting then as the smallest and youngest of the nations of the world, we have become the greatest and most powerful.

But today, God, as the ruler of all nations, is being at­tacked both internally and externally and it is having too much ef­fect for us to be complacent any longer. It is time that we should remind ourselves that we have a heritage of dependence on God, so well authenticated that it would be impossible to remove this from our history, even if we wanted to.

Our Declaration of Independence states that the right of mankind to enjoy freedom is a gift of God. Here are the words....

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Our coins state "In God We Trust." Our pledge of allegiance declares that we are "one nation under God." The president of the United States, when he takes the oath of office, places one hand on a Bible and raises the other toward heaven as he pledges to uphold the constitution.

The Bible says. "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord." If our nation needed God's help in overcoming its enemies when it was the tiniest infant nation in the world, and its leaders then said that it did, can we afford now to take the attitude that we have outgrown the need of Divine assistance?

When we take this attitude, we are on the road to disaster. Wouldn't it be far better to acknowledge now that we need the Lord and to ask Him to intervene in our affairs?

Abraham Lincoln said, "1 have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go." J. Edgar Hoover said, "The force of prayer is greater than any possible combination of man-controlled powers, because prayer is man's greatest means of tapping the infinite resources of God.

One of our favorite patriotic songs, "America," has a stanza, which is really a prayer....

"Our fathers' God to Thee
Author of liberty
To Thee we sing
Long may our land be bright
With freedom's holy light
Protect us by Thy might
Great God our King"


This Independence Day. let's pause our celebration long enough to pray this prayer.