| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Biblical Foundations of Freedom
00:04:37
|
|
| When you get the understanding of the history, there's a whole history thread that is, I think, incredibly compelling when you go like, oh my gosh, you know, they didn't just sail over from England. | |
| They took a stop in the Netherlands, and yeah, they were looking for religious freedom, but they also realized if it's just freedom in the imposition of our opinions on each other, there's no freedom there. | |
| It's like they discovered foundations of what would allow freedom for everybody and for people to disagree. | |
| I mean, if we return to some of those foundations, we could solve a lot of the culture wars that are going on in our society today. | |
| Because it starts with a sense of dignity and respect that, you know what, God's the creator and the father of us all. | |
| And the supremacy of the individual conscience and the need to educate that. | |
| They believed in the practice of self-government, not just the idea of it. | |
| And so it covers economics, it covers tax policy, it covers issues of abortion. | |
| He thinks that somehow that's a new issue in the last 50 years. | |
| It's like they had writings from the 1500s that's some of the most compelling arguments of the fact that, you know what, God is the creator. | |
| It's not just parents' rights. | |
| It's not like I get to just decide. | |
| God is authored a life. | |
| And I just sort of felt like, wow, I had no idea that the founders had such a rich repertoire of subjects that they covered. | |
| Why did you call it the Founders' Bible, David? | |
| What we did was, you know, the founders were not a perfect group by any means. | |
| Were they godly? | |
| Did they love God? | |
| Let me start this way in the sense that anything we look at in history, our filter is all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. | |
| And so when I look at the founders, you're going to have people like the Apostle Paul. | |
| They had it together. | |
| You know, once they got converted, they had it all together. | |
| You got people like King David who generally had it together, but there were failures along the way. | |
| And you got people like Samson who really never had it together, but he loved his country and did a whole lot for them. | |
| And so the founders are kind of like that, but they had more of a biblical worldview as a culture. | |
| Even the non-Christians among them thought more biblically than most Christians I know today. | |
| And I know that from their writings. | |
| And so what I saw, and I've been one who, I believe you should read the Bible as a Christian at least once a year, go through it cover to cover once a year. | |
| I've done that for years and years. | |
| I got white hair. | |
| I've been doing this a long time. | |
| So I also believe in memorizing God's word have I hidden my heart that I might not sin against him. | |
| Psalm 119. | |
| So in memorizing scripture, I got to where that when I was going through and reading the founders' letters and writings, all these things we possess, I was seeing them quote verse after verse after verse, but they didn't put the chapter and verse down because everybody knew the Bible back then. | |
| And so I thought, no, wait a minute. | |
| I just saw you quote this verse right here on how to do the Sunday's accepted clause in the Constitution. | |
| Now, I bet most Christians don't even know that's a Bible verse. | |
| And so what we did was we found that all these things they did that were successful, they quoted Bible verses. | |
| So what we did, we call it the Founders Bible because these are the ways that you apply the Bible to practical issues of life. | |
| Immigration, abortion, I mean, that is not a new issue. | |
| We know that because back in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Moses said, hey, don't kill unborn children. | |
| So we know an abortion was an issue back then as well. | |
| Bible says there's nothing new under the sun. | |
| We know homosexuals in the military, the founding fathers dealt with. | |
| We know that they dealt with in 1792 whether the federal government should bail out private businesses that were too big to fail. | |
| Big debate we had 15 years ago. | |
| I mean, I kept seeing all these things we debate today. | |
| They've already debated, but they had Bible verses for what they were doing. | |
| And so that's really, I mean, these were guys who lived all aspects of life. | |
| Some good, some bad. | |
| You know, that's just, that's the nature of people. | |
| But by and large, you asked Jim, were they mostly godly Christians? | |
| I will tell you, of the 56 who signed the Declaration, 29 of them held seminary and Bible school degrees. | |
| Now, so you had 20, more than half the signers of the Declaration were Bible school-trained. | |
| And in addition to that, the other majority of them were openly professing Christians. | |
| So probably about 95% have a Christian profession of some sort. | |
| But a lot of people have Christian professions today, and that doesn't mean they live the word. | |
| But generally, they were Christian-professing people, and generally they applied the Bible better than we do in many areas. | |
| They had failures, slavery, and other things as well. | |