ONE NATION UNDER GOD

Isaiah 66:8

Who has heard such a thing?

Who has seen such things?

Shall the earth be made to give birth in one day?

Or shall a nation be born at once?

For as soon as Zion was in labor,

She gave birth to her children.

Our country has lost its identity not realizing that we exist for the purposes and plans of God. It was persecution, religious persecution that brought the first European settlers to North America. All they wanted was a place where they could worship the Lord and serve him as the scriptures teach and have the freedom to pursue happiness and prosperity in this new land. Three generations after those first permanent settlers arrived in America they had lost the sense of God’s destiny on their lives. What had started as an experiment in religious freedom had deteriorated into 13 unrelated and rebellious colonies just struggling for survival in this new land. In 1734 the first ray of awakening happened in a church pastored by Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts. Several years after that George Whitefield, a young English preacher arrived in the colonies. The Great Awakening was about to take place. Whitefield spent three decades preaching in the colonies and these thirteen colonies became one nation under God. Here is how Peter Marshall describes the ministry of George Whitefield.

“The Lord, through the preaching of this covenanted man, was uniting the thirteen colonies – on a level so deep that few people even realized at first what was happening. But wherever Whitefield went, he was preaching the same Gospel. The same Holy Spirit was quickening his message in people’s hearts, and Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Quakers, Moravians – all were accepting the same Christ in the same way. In so doing, as Pollock points out, Whitefield “was the first man to cut across denominational barriers. He rejected the solution of earlier reformers, who encouraged followers to drop previous loyalties and form a ‘purer’ sect – and thus increase the barriers that divide. In Charleston, people were discovering that Jesus died for their sins, that He could and would forgive sin and that they need not continue any longer under the bondage of sin. And in New Haven, and Providence, and Peekskill, and Baltimore, they were making the exact same joyous discovery. And because this was so important – indeed, because it was so much more important than anything else in their lives – geographical barriers became no more significant than denominational ones. They were still there, but they were inconsequential alongside the magnitude of their shared experience.”

So the birthing of the United States was not an accident, it was intentional, it was the unveiling of the plan of God. It was the results of thousands of young colonials being converted and beginning to have a sense of destiny as they were awakened to God and awakened to a new national identity. Our country was the direct plan of God intervening in the affairs of man. America became the breeding ground for the evangelical church, hopefully we can regain our sense of purpose as a nation in the days ahead. Another Great Awakening can remind us of what it means to be one nation under God.