“America’s Christian Heritage”
Thanksgiving 2009

As we sit at the table with loved ones, let us all say a prayer for those who are struggling in these tough economic times and for those who have nothing. Let us also say a prayer for those brave men and women who are serving this country and will be far away from home and pay a high price for our freedom. But, let us not forget the One who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our eternal freedom---Christ Jesus. 
      
Let us heed the words of David in Psalm 100:4 and 5:
      
“Enter His gates with Thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures forever.”
      
We give all thanks to our precious Lord Jesus for His salvation, grace, mercy, provision and care throughout this past year.
      
In less than 2 months we will be on the verge of starting yet another year. And what better way to draw toward the end of the year than with a very important Christian holiday—Thanksgiving! 
      
Unfortunately, America’s Christian heritage is under attack, and it is well established that America is in a moral decline. Many in America have opted for “feel good” politics and have placed their faith in government with the false hope that man can provide for them. That is what we see today…from government bailouts to so-called “free universal health care.”

Let us do something so simple, yet so powerful. Let us proclaim this week of Thanksgiving for Christ in celebration of God’s blessings to this country and let us fervently pray so that we can send a powerful spiritual wave across this great land of ours.  Remember, our war is not with flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities of darkness. And it is in the book of James where it is proclaimed that “The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”  
      
We must remind ourselves of our Christian history, lest we be guided by the secular doctrine of the day.  And we must also celebrate our Christian heritage to serve as salt and light to those around us.  
      
Since 1992, the week of Thanksgiving has been declared “America’s Christian Heritage Week,” by Congress, several Governors, hundreds of mayors and city councils and clergy.  This year is no different. 

Society today (and unfortunately many of our fellow clergymen) is fooled by the myth that Christianity had no part in the founding of America and therefore the role of religion should be restricted to merely the four walls of the church.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Those early English settlers, the Pilgrims, left the land of tyrannical kings who used the Divine Right of Kings to religiously persecute the minority. The power of Christianity was a threat to the King but never too weak for a people to escape persecution and bless a land--later to become America.

In their deliberations in forming this great country of ours, our founding fathers never forsook the Lord Jesus Christ or the role of Christianity in their duties, and in fact, they used it as their basis for America’s founding.
      
The Pilgrims were given a charter to build a colony at Cape Henry, Virginia. However, they were blown off course by a storm to the north, 500 miles, and ended up at Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts. It was because of this storm that they did not have a title deed to the land at Plymouth Bay that they wrote--what can be recognized as America’s first Constitution, the Mayflower Compact.

In its opening paragraph, these four key phrases were penned by them in solid proclamation…

“Praise be to God!”

“We’re on these shores to give glory to God.”

“Furthermore to spread the glorious Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“We now, the undersigned, declare that we are the body politic, “the church.’”
  
  
During the Constitutional Convention’s deliberations those founding fathers used 3,154 quotes, 34 % of which were directly from the Bible.  For instance:
     
* Isaiah 33:22 was used to justify our three branches of government
* Jeremiah 17:9 was used to support the separation of powers
* Ezra 7:24 was used to exempt churches from taxes—such exemption exists today.
        
It was Benjamin Franklin who got the Convention to open its meeting with prayer.  At the Convention in 1787 he said:

“I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of
Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in the Assembly every morning.”

In 1781, it was Thomas Jefferson; the one many falsely claim urged the separation of the Church from the state, who proclaimed:

“God who gave us life, gave us liberty.  And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”

All of the state constitutions written by our founding fathers called for godly men to occupy the offices of the land.   The Pennsylvania State Constitution, written by Benjamin Rush, declares:

“Each member of the legislature . . . shall make and subscribe the following declaration:

‘I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the Universe, the rewarder of good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine Inspiration.”

Similarly, the Delaware State Constitution, home to Vice President Joe Biden, reads:

“Every person appointed to public office shall say, ‘I do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His Holy Son and in the Holy Ghost.  One God blessed for evermore . . .’”

And in his proclamation instituting the first Thanksgiving Day, President Abraham Lincoln said:
      
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.”
      
“I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens…it is announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord…”
      
By their words and their actions, our founders intended for America to be a nation reflective of Christianity.  They understood the proclamation in the book of Acts that, “In Him we live and move and have our being.”  For it is not merely our actions on Sundays in the walls of our churches that define our faith, but the manner in which we live our lives, and with it the manner in which we choose to regulate ourselves and the standards we set through government.

Make no mistake about it—America does have a deep Christian heritage!  But America is facing a crisis—a moral crisis that is more severe than the economic crisis we face.  And we can see evidence of moral decay all around us.

It was in 1878 that the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. United States that it was permissible to maintain Christian values, principles and practices in official policy.  But secular humanists in 1962 got control of the Court, distorted the words of Thomas Jefferson, and began to strip this country of its Christian bedrock by ruling school prayer unconstitutional through their perverted doctrine of “separation of church and state.”  And there has been a moral decline ever since.

We used to be able to count on our culture to protect our children from sexual exploitation.  But today we see forced teachings in schools promoting the homosexual lifestyle as normal. And we see groups like the North American Man/Boy Love Association prey upon our children as young as 8 for sexual encounters.

We saw in Littleton, Colorado, 12 high school students and a teacher gunned down in cold blood by teenagers in trench coats who laughed as they committed their mayhem.

Over the past several years, the news has been filled with accounts of unspeakable crimes by children against other children.  Here are just a few:

Two young boys, ages 11 and 13, in April 1998 unleashed a hail of gunfire on schoolmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  Four girls and a teacher were murdered.

Four teens in Dallas, Texas, claiming to be vampires, in March 1998, burned down a church and went on a drug-crazed rampage, vandalizing dozens of cars and homes, burning down an office and spray-painting racial slurs.

A 16-year-old boy in Pearl, Mississippi in October 1997 murdered his mother and shot nine of his schoolmates, killing two of them.

A teenage girl in November 1996 delivered a child in a motel in Delaware.  She and her boyfriend put the baby in a plastic bag, suffocated it and then tossed it in a dumpster.

Another teenage girl in New Jersey, in June 1997, gave birth to a baby at her prom in a bathroom stall.  She threw the baby in the trash and went back to the dance floor.

More unborn children have fallen victim to abortion than all the deaths of our nation’s wars combined.  Each day 4,000 are slaughtered all in the name of “a woman’s right to choose.”

This is a picture of a culture in moral chaos.  Where did we go wrong?  American went wrong when it began to stray away from the very thing that founded it—God, and the powerful effects of Christianity.

Liberal judges have not only banned prayer from our schools, they have made it illegal to post the Ten Commandments.  Judges strike down laws protecting children from the most hard-core pornography on the Internet.  Children are being suspended from school for saying grace over their lunch.  Today, it is harder to escape from a car lease agreement than to get a divorce.  The federal government spends billions of dollars promoting “safe sex” ideology in our schools and handing our birth control devices to children without any parental knowledge. They even remove young girls from schools to get secret abortions without a parent even knowing. And now we have members of Congress and the White House even promoting abortion as part of so-called “health care reform.”

Meanwhile, Christian speech is just about the only form of speech banned in America today. Congress has even passed legislation that would classify a pastor’s sermon against the sin of homosexuality as a “hate crime.”

 We have even witnessed just 6 years ago the United State Supreme Court rule that consensual sodomy is a protected right of privacy. In 2005 a federal judge ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because it contains the phrase “Under God” in it. There was even an attempt to have all schools in those states that are under the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stop saying the pledge after this ruling was handed down.

 Further, the California Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that marriages solely between one man and one woman were unconstitutional. The court agreed with a prior judge that, “It appears that no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners.” It took the people of California rising up to qualify a constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s decision and restore the definition of marriage to that of one man and one woman only. Thankfully, the people in Florida and Arizona did the same in 2008.

How ironic that our nation would ban the very principles of its foundation!  George Washington said it best:

“Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail
in exclusion of religious principles.”

Despite all the efforts of those on the left to chip away at our Christian heritage, we have very effective tools they can’t take away, and they are prayer and proclamation.

This Thanksgiving week, I urge you to join me, and countless others nationwide, in celebrating our nation’s Christian founding. Let us be bold in the confidence we have in Christ Jesus in proclaiming our Biblical heritage all around us. Let us sincerely pray for a revival of insight, discernment and courage to proclaim our Biblical and moral heritage.  If God be for us, who can be against us?!

I pray that you, your family, and church have a blessed Thanksgiving week and holiday.  God, indeed, has blessed this land and all of us who call Him Father.

For God and Country,
       
Rev. Louis P. Sheldon
Chairman & Founder