The Importance of Remembering God’s Hand in our History - Pastor Greg Addison - July 5, 2026

Sermon from Pastor Greg Addison on Sunday morning, July 5, 2026.

Ministering to the heart of the Western Arkansas River Valley for over 165 years. Welcome to Chapter and First- the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith First Baptist Church, you'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg Addison, our ministry staff, and guest speakers. Thank you for listening!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church. You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers. Thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

And Noah's a chance to say thank you again. And we have had this theme of remembering. And so today, what I want to talk to you in the few minutes that I have is the importance of remembering God's hand in our history. In our history, because it is inextricably linked with the formation and growth of our country. There are so many people who believe in the Word of God. They even, many of them came to this country looking for the freedom to worship in a way that did not exist anywhere else. And through all of that, through the Great Awakening and all of that, God worked through people to bring together what we now are enjoying, the freedom to worship freely and to preach the gospel. And so it's important for us to remember that because in our culture today, many have forgotten that, and many others are trying to eradicate that from our memory. And it's important that we remember it. I want to give you this statement. I mentioned it briefly before I read the Declaration of Independence, but I want you to understand this: the significance of God's hand in who we are. There would not be any place on the planet endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights without a thought, strong theological belief in the God of the Bible. That did not exist prior to the formation of America. It was in some places in political thought or being presented, but it was also being challenged dramatically by other political thinkers. But it was here on the shores of America with many who came in order to worship freely, a right they did not have where they came from, and others with the free flow of the gospel here in the 13 colonies through times like the Great Awakening, who gave their lives to Jesus and who became saved as they began the discourse of what our relationship would be with Great Britain, and do we need to separate from Great Britain? And if we do, what would we make? Inherent in that entire process was a belief theologically in the God of the Bible and the truth of Scripture. In fact, one of the most quoted pieces of literature, if I can say that for a moment, is from Exodus and Deuteronomy in our Bibles. In fact, as they were trying to determine what would our nation look like, they began to study and look to all models from history about how to put that together. And the model that became most prominent in the minds of our founders and those who were designing where we would go as a people rested in the Jewish people after they had come out of Egypt. Because there you have, in essence, a revolution and a separating of people from where they had been and who had been governing them. And they followed the Lord towards the land of Canaan that had been promised with them. And there, as they are preparing to go into the land of Canaan, God gave the design of what a nation would look like. What are the rights? Who are the individuals? How is it structured? And all of those things that we depend on: right to trial by jury, freedom of speech, all these things that we rest on, separation of powers, the protection of life through the command, thou shalt not kill or murder. All of those things were wrapped right there in how to establish a country, and that became the most prominent fodder for political thought and building our nation. And so we need to remember that as Christians, and we need to participate in our nation in a way that we understand that so that we can restore our culture through the advance of the gospel. Now we're in Psalm 78 because this is a psalm that was a teaching psalm given by the Lord to the children of Israel, and it is all about building the culture of their nation and maintaining the culture of the nation that God explained to them that they needed to have when they came out of Egypt. And so here you have a beautiful lesson and picture on how a people group or a nation can build and maintain its culture. Look what the Bible says in Psalm 78, verse 1. My people, hear my instruction, listen to what I say. This is God speaking. I will declare wise sayings, and I will speak mysteries from the past, things that we have heard and known, and that our fathers passed down to us. Does that make sense? Can you relate? We must not hide them from our children, but we must tell a future generation the praises of the Lord, his might, and the wonderful works he has performed. That is how we continue to take the same belief, the same trust in God, the same theological underpinning of how we function as a society, how we continue moving it forward by teaching generation after generation, by remembering what he has done and what he has taught us and the works that he has performed, by praising him for what he's done as we've done today. Verse 5, he established a testimony in Jacob and set up a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach their children. Why do we do this? So that a future generation, children yet to be born, might know. They might know the foundation of our government and structure. They might know why we could come freely today and say the name of Jesus while around the world people are being persecuted, martyred, and put in jail for trying to worship Jehovah God and Jesus our Savior. We need to teach them so they understand why we have this freedom. We need to teach them so that they teach their children and we can maintain this freedom of being salt and light in the way we are in our nation. This freedom of religion did not exist around the world, and it was built and thought through the process of those who have built our country and created in a unique and powerful way. And we will lose that right. We will lose that ability to advance the gospel as freely as we do if we don't remember and teach. So that a future generation, children yet to be born, might know that they were to rise and to tell their children, so that those children might put their confidence in God and not forget his works, but keep his commands. Then that future generation would not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not loyal and whose spirit was not faithful to God. And so what I want to show you is that there are five things that are illustrated in this psalm. And as you continue to read through all the other verses, what it does is it creates a history of the nation of Israel as it was created. It literally is rehearsing the things we have been reading as a church as we've gone through the chronological Bible. And he explains those things that we've talked about. Now, here are five principles that we need to learn as the people of God in our country in order to build the culture that was given to us from the past. First, we must build continually. Look at what he says. You are to teach them, and you're to teach those generations to come. You are not to stop. We are looking to future generations to understand where we came from and why we have the rights that we do. We are to teach that and build that and consistently repeat that. It's amazing that in our culture today, George Barna, who studies churches, came out with a study last week where he indicated that 50% of evangelical pastors thought it was inappropriate to do what we're doing today. Not trying to be critical and have to lead their church how they go, but how are we going to build that if the church doesn't speak into it? How's it going to be built? It's not going to be built in the public schools. In fact, the more that we don't teach our children to go into those public schools and interact with their teachers, and the more we don't encourage Christians to be elected to positions of power, the more we back out of that, the more that the public school education process will be against what we know is history, not for. We must remember accurately the testimony. The Bible says that God established a testimony and a law in Israel. Now, this is not written to Americans, but it is written to Christians through every epoch of time and every place where they live. And so he says, listen, if you are here and you are worshiping and you believe in the Lord, he has established a testimony, and the law is speaking of Scripture, and He has put that in place. And in our country, we are blessed that our laws and the founding of our country literally reflect the law that he's talking about. And we need to remember that testimony. That's the whole point what he's teaching here. Remember and teach your children and your children's children so that they will know the Lord and know his mighty works and they will praise him. Then he gives the process teach your children and your grandchildren. He says in verse 5, he commanded our fathers to teach their children so that a future generation, children yet to be born, might know. You are supposed to teach your children in such a way that they have knowledge and ownership and passion and pass it on to your grandchildren. Janet and I had an opportunity to go see Young Washington yesterday. Incredible movie. I highly recommend it to you. But here's what we noticed as we were leaving. It was all people our age and older. Eventually, we saw a few teenagers and a few people in their 30s. How many people know the faith of George Washington? And the things that went through that in a way that you can pass that down. If you visit my office in the conference room outside of my office, you'll see a picture there of George Washington next to a horse that was painted to reflect his prayers praying his army through the winter at Valley Forge. We need to teach our children these things. They need to know that. How many of your children know the Great Awakening or the Second Great Awakening and the impact on that? How many of you then know that our belief in Scripture flourished from the first Great Awakening or that the Second Great Awakening created missions organizations that went into all the frontiers leading people to Christ? How many of your children know that in Arkansas we have churches because of missions organizations from the East who came down through Missouri and began establishing Baptist churches in the state of Arkansas before we were even a state? How many of your children know the impact that the Second Great Awakening had on stirring the heart of the nation and so many people who gave their lives and their treasure to fight to end the sin of slavery and the impact of the second great awakening on that movement? Four, the pursuit, purpose is the pursuit of Jesus Christ. I'm not a history professor. Now, some days I would love to be a history professor, and some days the staff will tell you I act like a history professor. But I'm a pastor and we're church and we're preaching the gospel. But listen, that's what he's saying. You have to teach this history and this testimony, and you have to remember that so that they will praise the Lord. Then they will not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not loyal and whose spirit was not faithful to God. The reason that we have a freedom of worship here is not to be able to come when we want to and relax and make it easy. We have a freedom of worship in our nation because we are to proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ as loudly as we possibly can with every effort that we can muster. Do we want to be Saudi Arabia or China? Or Iran? Now listen, the gospel is not dependent on America, and it's not dependent for us to be able to meet freely. The gospel is still going to flow, and the Great Commission is still in place, and Christians in places like that all over the world are leading people to Christ, and then they are dying for their faith in doing that. So we are not absolved from the responsibility of the Great Commission just because we may lose some of our freedoms in America, but it sure makes it easier for us to reach more people and send more missionaries around the world. And it is the testimony that God has established, and it is what people who came over here in the northern part of the colonies and settled it for that purpose. And finally, we need to accurately teach both the good and the bad facts of our history. You cannot whitewash the bad stuff and you cannot eliminate the good stuff. Life is complicated, and two things can be true at once. And life moves, and change happens through lurches and movements, and two-step forward and one step back, and all of that happens, and we need to pay attention. As you read Psalm 78, he gives times when they're obedient and how God blessed. And just as he warns here, this father's a stubborn, rebellious generation, he gives multiple times when they walked away from God and they offended him, and God judged them and brought judgment on them for that. And so you have to accurately do that. You cannot look at this from a political perspective of because I think I'm conservative or I'm libertarian or I'm liberal or I'm progressive or whatever it is. We as Christians have to understand what our purpose in advancing the gospel is, and we have to understand the foundation in the culture in which we have to do that, obey that command, and we need to teach it clearly. You cannot eradicate the stain and sin of slavery from American culture. But you also cannot eliminate the truth of what we read this morning and the aspiration that was created to move our society forward in pursuit of those ideals. They work hand in hand. And in our world today, people trying to argue their thing, try to get these false binary deals where none of it can be true and it was all bogus because this guy owns slaves or whatever. And so we got all this kind of mess, and what we need to do as believers is do exactly what we're taught, and we need to warn about sin and we need to build on what is accurate. If we ignore the sins of our past, then we allow the sins of our present to find their way in our midst. If we don't understand what we talked about a few weeks ago in Proverbs, that righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. If we don't learn the lessons of the negative events of our past, we won't fix them and move forward properly. And so those are the principles of building a culture. It's not rocket science. I didn't make those up. First of all, they're in Scripture. And any amount of stuff that you might read today about what we need to do, they basically come to this conclusion, which tells us that God knew better than anybody else how this works. So, what I want to do for just a couple of minutes, I'm not going to give you a history lesson, but I want to just point out in the Declaration of Independence that it is a textbook that helps us remember the cultural things that were going on. The foundational truths on which that document rests have their roots in theology and in political philosophy that flows from an admiration and acknowledgement of the truth of Scripture. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on either on all these, but I want to point them out to you so that in the future you are motivated to move forward. First of all, God as creator. We heard four different references as we read the Declaration of Independence to God as creator and God the one who judges our motives and God the one who protects us, and our rights come from Him and not from somewhere else. And it was a clear, deeply majority belief in the colonies of the United States that God was the creator, and they had a young earth description of creation, and they believed that science indicated there was an intelligent design and creator. Now here's what I get tired of. Everything we believe and everything we talk about somehow is wrong because Thomas Jefferson was a deist. Like, I'm sorry that you're ignorant of what that means. The word deist has its root in the word deity. If you're a deist, you believe there's a deity. Duh. And in all of his writings, there are very strong issues about whether he was a Christian and all that. I don't want to get dogged down on that. But in his writings, repeatedly, it is very clear that he believed that there was an intelligent design and creator. Now, a deist may believe that God is the creator and he winds up the earth like a watch and he sets it there and then he steps back and folds his arms to look. That is the nature of a deist. But it still presumes that there is a creator and created God. But by a wide margin, more of them were not deists than were. And theologically they believed in God, and theologically they believed in the gospel. How do you have a great awakening with men like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield preaching the gospel clearly that man is a sinner and man has fallen in his sin and that God must judge that sin. But in his grace, Jesus stepped out of heaven and he put on the body and form of a man. He lived a sinless life to show us that he loves us and to point out that we are sinners and we can't reach his standard. And then he voluntarily went to the cross, and there he died in our place to pay the price for our sins, and he rose again, conquering death and sin. They believed that in our nation. By the hundreds of thousands, people came to faith in Christ during the Great Awake. And so they believed that he was the creator scientifically and theologically. They believed in the dignity of man. Because God had created him and created him in his image, there was a dignity to man. How do you get to endowed by our creators unless there is a dignity to man? He understands that dignity, and he understands that man that do not kill, and all of those things matter, and they mean things. Evidence of due process and other things that are in like the cities of refuge, all of that matters, and it's all built into the theology and the structure. Of the way we've constructed laws. The theology and political philosophy of rights. You have a lot of ways that happens in the world. You have communism and its weak cousin socialism that is built on the non-existence of God. And our culture, when we have so many people moving towards socialism, it tells us that we are in desperate need of revival because they do not recognize that there is a God, that there is a God who judges their sin, and there is a God who loves them so much. He stepped down to this earth and died in their place and rose again so they could be saved. And when we have such a rampant move to socialism, it tells us that we as the church are not doing enough. We cry about our country going to hell in a handbasket, but we're not worried enough about people on their way to hell. And we need to advance the gospel. Their theological and political philosophy of rights, you had at that time humanism and the Enlightenment in France, and you had Rousseau and all of that, and eventually in the 1780s, the French Revolution. And listen, don't let anyone ever tell you that Rousseau or the French Revolution is in any way, shape, or form like ours. They need to read books. They are not the same, they are not founded the same because they have elevated humankind, and the reason of man is all that is needed, and man is the highest end of things, and within just a short period of time, the French Revolution reverts into murdering everyone who was not like them and the destruction of life and everything else because it was not underpinned with the theological and political philosophy of Scripture. And what they build into Scripture is they understand that man is creating God's image, but man has also sinned, and it is necessary to have the construct of government in order to protect man from his worst devices and his sin nature. Scripture was the language of the culture. You couldn't explain an argument or win an argument without quoting Scripture. That is how prolific and ubiquitous it was about our country. In fact, how many of you have heard of the pamphlet Common Sense? We've all heard of that, right? Written by Thomas Paine, right? If you read that, I mean, it reads like a sermon. I mean, it's got scripture all over it and justifies everything. Thomas Paine was an atheist. Later in his life, he actually wrote a book trying to disavow scripture as true. And there's correspondence between men like John Adams and others with Thomas Paine. The country is excited. They are flowing. He is stirring their hearts to maintain this revolution and to pursue the ideals that were declared in the Declaration of Independence, and they're asking, man, you're a hypocrite. Why are you putting on that scripture in there when you don't even believe it? And the answer is, you couldn't win an argument if you couldn't quote Scripture or justify it there because of the strong solidarity and belief in Scripture as God's word. Let me give you another couple. The majority of our founders, our culture, people involved actively believe that God was actively involved in human affairs. Again, four times you get a reference to God actively paying attention and being a part of what's happening. What you may not know is in writing the Constitution, I mean writing the Declaration of Independence, they directed a committee of five men. And Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin were a part of that. And they tasked Jefferson to do the draft, and then they edited into that, and then they brought it to the body for the entire Continental Congress to vote on it, to argue about, to edit it, and everything else. Later in his life, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, one of our presidents, that he was not intending to come up with anything that was new or novel in the Declaration of Independence, that instead he was trying to reflect the American mind of that time. Which means this activity of God in our lives, him being intervened in lives, was the majority thought process of people. His draft did not include a number of those statements. But here's what happens actually. Let me find my quote if I can. It's really good. I hope I can find it for you. His draft said, We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, and that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. As a result of Franklin or Adam's suggestions pushing back on him, the draft of the declaration that the Committee of Five presented to the Continental Congress did actually come back and add in rights endowed by the creators. It also did not, in the conclusion, have any reference to God. This historian reports this passage went through several revisions, and the most important were made by the members of the Congress. The men assembled at what would become Independence Hall. They said, they added in these phrases. They added, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions. They also added, in the whole, against Jefferson's objections, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence. A historian reflects that these edits captured the very feelings of the American populace. Congress, she writes, added two references to God, which were conspicuously missing in Jefferson's draft, where God appeared only as the author of nature's laws and the endower of natural rights, and honor alone was sacred. At the start of the final paragraph, Congress inserted an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world to affirm the rectitude of our intentions. In other words, judge our intents in this, which echoed similar provisions in several state and local resolutions on independence. And nearer the end of the document, it also referred to the delegates' firm reliance on the protection of divine providence. Americans held strong religious beliefs in 1776, and the declaration was meant to state the convictions of the country's people. The delegates retained, however, Jefferson's concluding sentences, adding on the lives, fortunes, and our sacred honor. What we understand is the majority of them believed a God was active in human affairs. Then how do we get government? If you remember, it said that governments are established to protect the rights of men. Romans 13 describes that God has ordained government in the Exodus, following the Exodus, in the creation of the laws of the first form of the nation of Israel, which is God telling them the standard of how it should be. It's clear that God creates government and he creates it for a specific purpose to secure the rights that are endowed with us by our Creator. It is not to be, as Franklin Dell and Roosevelt said, good government to provide for people and do all of that. The primary function of government is to protect people and their rights. And that's what they believed in that time. And number seven, the theology of covenant. Now, this you need to study. I've given you a reference to a book by Oz Guinness, who is a believer and a great thinker about these things. And he has a book entitled The Magna Carta of Humanity. And it's how the Jewish law was foundational to the structure of our government. If you'll remember the Great Reformation in a nutshell spiritually in Europe, the Catholic Church had run amok and was way off track, and Martin Luther nails his thing to the door, and all these priests start coming. And the essence of that was the gospel is for individuals. It's not residing in the hand of some Pope or somebody else that God gave Scripture so that people would know how to be saved. Martin Luther is a pastor. His favorite book is Galatians, an incredible gospel book on the salvation of Jesus that comes through his grace. And so all of that began to move, and that's now why you had Protestant religions. They're all over Europe and they're being run around and they're being run out of town and they're being persecuted and all of that by the Catholic Church and then the Church of England because they are not buying into the structure and all of that. They are working towards God loves us as individuals, and He and salvation comes to individuals. God's word is written to us. And then as they began to study and rediscover things like the Old Testament and the story of the Israelites being developed, they remembered and learned again the language of covenant. And if you read the early founders and you read all of their stuff and all that, you find out that what they thought was that that was built on a covenant between God and man. And then it was a covenant between those people. And if God is the one who endows our rights because he created him, if God is the one who structures government, then it is built not on the divine right of kings or some authority or whatever, but it is built on the idea of covenant. That we have a belief where we covenant together. Sometimes you'll hear people talk about society and all that kind of stuff. What we're talking about is the theology of covenant. And they built a government that is based on the consent of the governed. And what does that mean? That we covenant together to join in this process and to pursue those ideals. That's a biblical principle on which our nation is built and the consent of the governed. And finally, freedom of worship. It is an existential fundamental right. As we quote that phrase from the Declaration of Independence, it says we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and it says, such as. It is not delineating that those are the only three rights we have. He is saying such as. And fundamental to everyone in that time period was the freedom of worship. It is the most fundamental version of liberty, and it was the most important to our founders. If you read their writings, they say all the time that America will fail if we are not good. And the only way to establish reality or I'm sorry, morality is by having a free flow of worship, and everyone can pursue faith and they can worship of their own accord, and they're not forced by someone else, they're not prevented by someone else. And as we are pursuing that, then we are going to be changed and a moral people, and we can live to the covenant that we've established as citizens. Freedom of worship is vital. Freedom of worship was in every single constitution that was created because they threw off the throes of England. For example, in the colony of Virginia, Virginia was not founded by pilgrims or Quakers or Puritans coming for religious freedom. It was a royal colony. And as such, they were under the thumb of the Church of England. And they would beat Methodists and Baptists and others who came to preach the gospel. They would throw them in jail. Sometimes they killed them. They sent them back out. They were outlawing anything that wasn't outside the Church of England. And so when they threw off England and declared independence, they went to a man named George Mason and they said, We need you to lead a committee to write us a new constitution. And the first thing he wrote in June of 1776 was the Virginia Bill of Rights. And the Virginia Bill of Rights, written even before their Constitution, says this it is fundamental and it is first in their minds that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. And therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion. You wonder where that phrase comes from? It comes from right here. According to the dictates of conscience, and that is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance and charity towards each other. In other words, you are free to worship and you're supposed to support and allow the other person to worship free. When Alexis de Tocqueville, a French historian, came and he traveled to America after it was all over and all that, he's learning all that. He was amazed. And he said, Listen, that is the key. And America will be strong as long as America is good, and America's good when they worship Jesus. I hope that I give you a sense or remind you from your history class in high school why we're remembering. Why we're remembering. It is important that we understand and that we build culture as scripture teaches. I'll close with this. One of the teachers at the Colson Institute said this. When you're addressing culture, there's only three things you can do. You can renew it, you can reform it, or you can replace it. We live in a world where people are trying to replace our culture. We live in a world where liberal minds are trying to use revisionist history to reform our culture. There is nothing wrong with the culture that we were handed that was founded on these biblical beliefs. The question is, what will we do with it? Because as God said, our purpose in building culture is the advance of the gospel. We're working on some discipleship materials to begin to teach that as a church. It's important that we begin to step into those things and we begin to remember and we begin to teach our children and our children's children. We're going to close with a prayer for our church. In fact, it's a prayer that you know is a prayer that was written a number of years ago. It's a song entitled, God Bless America. There's a little verse that leads into the chorus that we all know that explains that it's a prayer. But if you have never been saved and you've heard the gospel repeated so many times, if you would like to trust Jesus as your Savior, I will be out in the lobby after the service is over. You come find me. I would love to talk to you, pray with you, give you scripture to stand on if you'd like to be saved. But at this time, what we want to do, Jacob, is we want to close our service with this prayer that God will bless America.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea, let us wear allegiance to a land that's free. Let us be grateful for some miracle.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you. Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can. Thank you for listening to chapter and first, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith at First Baptist Church.