The
following sermon by Dr. B. R. Lakin entitled “America’s Greatest Need” was read
into the Congressional Record by the Honorable Congressman William Jennings
Bryan Dorn of South Carolina on October 3, 1968.
Many
distinguished political leaders, ministers and members of the Mission Board
were present to hear the following outstanding and timely address of Dr. B. R.
Lakin of Fort Gay, West Virginia.
“The Lord liveth, in truth, in judgment, and in
righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall
they glory.” Jer. 4:2
In
these days of national strife and international confusion, when the seeds of
hatred are being cultivated in the hotbeds of communism and radicalism, let us
throw back our shoulders, double up our fists, rough with the calluses of
honest toil, and stand up for true, fundamental, godly Americanism. The Bible
teaches patriotism, and patriotism was the light that burned in the hearts of
the faithful in the midnight gloom of the dark ages.
It
was the torch that lit the fires of the Reformation. It was the rock upon which
Western civilization survives the onslaught of the Red Scourge, it will be
Christian patriotism that will fuel the lamps of truth and provide morale for
the fight for freedom. America has many privileges, but it also has great
responsibilities. Our freedom was
obtained at a great price. Our first responsibility is to God, but we are duty
bound to our beloved country.
“Let
every soul be subject unto the higher powers.
For there is no power but of God:
the powers that be are ordained of God.” Rom. 13:1
Sir
Walter Scott struck a note of true Christian patriotism when he wrote—Breathes
there a man, with soul so dead, who never himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim—
Despite those titles, power and pelf,
The wretch, concerted all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d and unsung
With
manmade creeds forgotten, we find common ground in the sublime truth of the
“Old Book” and in the spirit of those brave men who crossed the seas in search
of a free land in which they could worship their God according to the dictates
of their hearts.
WE
enjoy the benefits of a land founded in faith, baptized in blood and dedicated
to the freedom of worship. I would
like, by the help of the Spirit, to revive within our hearts some of the great
ideals that have made America the “Hub,” the very center upon which the world
revolves. I would like to stir up our
souls with a renewed national zeal and a closer walk with God, without whom no
nation can succeed.
1.WE
NEED A SENSE OF GRATITUDE
One
day in every year we celebrate Thanksgiving, but one day out of 365 is not
enough. Americans should thank God every day that we live in “the land of the
four freedoms.” Every day we should
thank God for the sacrifice of blood, sweat, privation, even death, on the part
of the multiplied thousands of out heroic dead. Had it not been for their standing between us and the iron hand
of fascism and Nazism, we might not be commemorating their sacrifice. Instead, we might be goose-stepping at the
heels of storm troopers and taking our orders from them instead of the Bible
being read in our beloved homes. Mein
Kampf might now be our textbook.
Instead of blending our free voices in the singing of “My Country, ‘Tis
of Thee,” we might be “Heiling” and saluting the swastika. Let us bow our heads
in humility and our hearts in reverence and gratitude to a merciful God who has
brought us national deliverance.
A.
We should be grateful for the righteous birth of our native land. Other nations were born in
the blood of plundering conquest, but not America. Our nation was conceived in
the noble hearts of courageous, righteous men.
She was born in the throes of holy prayer at Plymouth Rock, cradled by
the strong hand of stalwart faith, nourished at the bosom of living, vital,
sincere religion, fed on the wholesome food of the highest ideals and developed
to her towering stature under the smiling approval of Almighty God. America
stands today a fortress of freedom, loved be all free men, respected by the
liberty-loving peoples of the earth, feared by the enemies of God and human
liberty. With the shadows of communism
deepening upon every continent, America holds high the torch of faith, light
and hope for the downtrodden peoples of the world.
B.
We should be grateful for our natural, industrial and scientific resources with
which we have been blessed. Because of our giving God His rightful place at the outset of our
national life, God smiled—and gold poured from the rocky crags of the Gold
West. God smiled—and wide acres of grain sprang from the soil of the Middle
West. God smiled—and the picturesque hills of the East yielded black gold in
ample abundance to warm our hearths and turn the wheels of industry.
God
smiled—and the automobile, the airplane and a thousand and one industrial
miracles took place before our eyes. God smiled—and has seen to it that Old
Glory has never dipped her colors to any atheistic, God-hating, man-enslaving
country. God smiled—and our scientists brought into being the atomic and
nuclear bombs, which are destined to be those paradoxical instruments of
destruction to save men from destruction.
Today,
we stand in a precarious position in regard to our national life. We as a
nation must do nothing to invoke the frown of Almighty God. Our course must be such as to keep Heaven’s
smile upon our beloved country.
We
stand at the crossroads. To the left
lie the bogs of extreme liberalism, socialism and the inevitable drift into
communism. To the right lie the
timeworn swamps if ultra-conservatism, which leads to monopolies of certain
groups at the expense of other groups. We must keep in the middle of the road
and prayerfully seek the guidance of God or our nation will go the way of all
their nations in past history—into oblivion. It is the approval of God that
makes a country great, not the genius of statesmen, not merely the form of government
not the energy of its people, but the level of the national morals and the
depth of national faith in God.
Not serried tanks with flags unfurled,
Not armored ships that gird the world,
Not hoarded wealth nor busy mills,
Not cattle on a thousand hills,
Nor sages wise, nor schools nor laws,
Not boasted deeds in Freedom’s cause—
All these may be, and yet the state
In the eye of God be far from great,
That Land is great which knows the Lord,
Whose songs are guided by His Word;
Where justice rules, ‘twixt man and man,
Where love controls in art and plan;
Where, breathing in His native air,
Each soul finds joy in praise and prayer—
Thus may our country, good and great,
Be God’s delight –man’s best estate.
C. We should be thankful for our homes. Though many of our citizens
have brought reproach on the American home by their selfish and loose living,
it still remains our greatest heritage.
The meaning of the word home is so foreign to some peoples of the world
that the equivalent of the word is not even in their language. The American traveler abroad, when he sees
the condition existing in some foreign families, comes into a new appreciation
of our home life in this country.
Henry
Van Dyke once wrote after a trip abroad, so it’s home again, and home again,
America for me! My heart is turning
home again, and there I long to be, In the land of youth and freedom beyond the
ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
Thank God for a part in guiding the American home in spiritual things! For years, every morning a radio poll showed
I spoke to 800,000 people over the Nation’s Family Prayer Period. People from all walks of life gathered
before their radios at the beginning of the new day to look into His face and
listen to His Word. We need a revival
of interest in spiritual matters today.
2.
We need a Greater Consciousness of Our
Responsibility
Our
greatest sin as a nation is the sin of complacency. Smugness is the forerunner of indifference, and indifference is
the predecessor of national deterioration.
As the old saying goes, “A chain is no stronger than its weakest
link.” It can be truthfully stated that
America is no stronger than her weakest citizen. This truth puts a tremendous
responsibility upon every of us. The forces of anti-Americanism and
anti-Christianity are at work in our beloved land. Most of their work is sinister and under cover; but like leaven,
they seek to eventually leaven the whole lump of our way of life and supplant
regimented, centralized totalitarianism for old-fashioned, red-blooded,
stalwart Americanism. This leaven of atheism is found in high places as well as
low. No nation ever survived a moral
collapse. When Rome was in the zenith
of her power and glory, sin started to eat like a canker at the heart of her
national morals. Her politicians became
weak, flabby and spineless. She became
morally weak and spiritually depraved. One night while the Roman politicians
were engaged in a shameful, drunken orgy in the resort town of Pompeii, the
fires of God’s judgment were raging not far distant in the bowels of famous old
Mt. Vesuvius, the volcanic mountain. As
the night wore on, the sin and debauchery became more pronounced in Pompeii. There came a weird, sickly rumbling from the
adjacent mountain. For years Vesuvius
had been quiet and asleep, but the hour of God’s judgment had arrived. As the revelers continued their sinful
indulgence, Vesuvius quivered with a mighty quake, and the top of the volcano
was blown completely away as a surging river of flaming, molten rock poured
down the mountain in a death-dealing torrent. There was no hope of escape. The door of God’s mercy was closed for these
Roman renegades. As the lava swiftly
overwhelmed the city, 25,000 people were buried beneath the flood of molten
rock. This was the beginning of Rome’s end as a nation. It all began when sin and lust supplanted
the love for God and when gratification of the lower appetites took the place
of noble character.
Egypt
was once the center of world culture, and their scientists were way ahead in
scientific knowledge and research. But
Egyptian civilization floundered upon the rocks of immorality and depravity,
and today she is leagues behind other nations which have striven to give God
His rightful place in their national development. One has only to walk the streets of Cairo and note the lust and
the sin on every hand, to see the reason for her utter lack of national
prosperity and integrity. A nation can
rise no higher than the moral level of her average individual. Every American, in these days of confusion
and moral crisis, has an individual responsibility to God and his country. Not
only do we have our own souls to save, but we have a great country to protect
from the fate which has overtaken other civilizations just as strong as ours.
3.
America Needs a Higher, Nobler and a More
Sincere Faith in God
“Righteousness
exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” Prov. 14:34
What
we are as a nation we owe to our underlying faith in God: the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock on their
knees; Washington at Valley Forge praying for guidance and strength in the
crisis of battle; Lincoln calling the country to national repentance in the
midst of civil conflict. These are
memorable portraits of our basic faith in God as a nation. If we have any success as a nation, we must
attribute the glory, the honor and the praise to a benevolent God who has
guided, with omnipotent hand, the course and destiny of our fair land. In most
of our wars, many of our greatest generals were professed Christians, and their
decisions and strategy were mingled with sincere prayer and dependence upon
Almighty God. It is significant that
our enemies, as far as I know, could not boast of one Christian general in
their military personnel. Japan with her warlords and Germany with her
atheistic Nazi leaders did not have one military commander who sought the
wisdom of God in their military endeavors.
Today, as far as I know, none of our enemies are Christians. Could any
fair individual say the prayers offered by devoted mothers and by the churches
all over America had nothing to do in bringing about victory for our armed
forces? Suffice it to say, the enemy
forces, which refused to honor God by seeking His wisdom through prayer, went
sown into bitter defeat and their systems vanished into oblivion as all
civilizations have which left God out of their program. Abraham Lincoln struck
a keynote when he said, “The important thing is not that we have God on our
side, but that we make sure we are on His side.”
Faith
in God often becomes the balance of power when two matched forces are joined in
combat; or, more often, the victory often goes to inferior forces when God’s
power and blessing are upon their efforts.
As Moses said,
“How
should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their
Rock had sold them, and the Lord had shut them up?” Deut. 32:30
When
as a lad David dared to face the giant Goliath, he trusted not in swords and
staves but in the Lord. He faced the
towering giant of the Philistines undaunted, unafraid and said,
“Thou
comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord
of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will the Lord deliver thee into
mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will
give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of
the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that
there is a God in Israel.” I Sam. 17:45.46.
We
need to know as a nation that adequate equipment is insufficient to win a
war. Germany had superior planes, tanks
and men, but they lost the last war. WE
must not become smug and complacent.
The atomic bomb, without the blessing of God upon our nation, could
never win a war. The most potent weapon in existence is the inward conviction
that we are on God’s side and that our cause is just and right. We not only need a greater faith in God as a
nation but we, as individuals, need to know God in a personal Christian
experience. Lieutenant Whitaker, speaking of his experience, said,
At
forty years of age, I had never been inside a church for any reason whatsoever;
but our there on a raft in the middle of the Pacific I met God. I heard Bill Cherry pray, and a rain cloud
that had passed us turned around and came back over us and drenched us with
water when we were about to die of thirst.
It was there I saw God and learned to say, “I believe.”
These
words are from a hardened military man who found God the hard way. Afterwards, he traveled throughout the land
telling the marvelous story of how he met God. Many of us will never have the
unique experience of meeting God under those unusual circumstances, but we can
know Him nevertheless.
We can prove His adequacy in the crucible of human
experience and know that He is the Christ of every crisis. We can learn to say with Paul,
“I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that
he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” II Tim.1: 12
I would rather the citizens of our beloved America
should know Christ personally than for America to have the greatest military
might in the world. I would rather have
it said that we are a people who love God and worship Him than for America to
have the security of the atomic bomb. I
would rather that Americans should be reverent and humble in their attitude
toward Jesus, the Son of God, than to have the rest of the world acclaim us as
the mightiest of the nations. I want to close in the spirit of that touching
little poem.
“I MET THE MASTER.”
I had walked life’s way with an easy tread,
Had followed where comforts and pleasure led;
And then one day in a quiet place,
I met the Master, face to face.
With station and rank and wealth for a goal;
Much thought for the body, but none for the soul;
I had thought to win in life’s mad race,
When I met the Master, face to face.
I met Him and knew Him and blushed to see
Those eyes full of sorrow were turned on me;
And I faltered and fell at His feet that day,
While all my castles melted away—
Melted and vanished, and in their place
I saw nought else but the Master’s face;
And I cried aloud, “Oh, make me meet
To follow the steps of the wounded feet.”
And now my thoughts are for the souls of men;
I've lost my life, to find it again,
E’er since that day in a quiet place
I met the Master, face to face.
--Author Unknown