Two Hundred Fifty Years

A Word Before the Word

On July 4, 1776, thirteen colonies declared themselves free. Two hundred and fifty years later we stand at a milestone, and the Church of Jesus Christ must decide what kind of word to speak over this hour. There is a false prophecy that only flatters. It calls a nation righteous because it is old, and blesses a flag as if it were an altar. That is not the prophetic tradition of Scripture. When God set Jeremiah over the nations, He set him "to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant" (Jeremiah 1:10). The building comes after the breaking. The comfort comes after the confrontation.

So this is not a birthday card. This is a summons. I love this country and I intercede for it, but I will not confuse the Republic with the Kingdom. America is not the New Israel, and no clause of the Constitution ever entered the covenant that was sealed by the blood of the Lamb.

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.Proverbs 14:34

That verse cuts every nation, and it cuts this one. What follows is written to bless by telling the truth.

I · The Wound and the Image

Race Across 250 Years

Begin where honesty demands. The same season that produced the words "all men are created equal" also protected the buying and selling of human beings, and that contradiction was not resolved on paper until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and not resolved in practice for a century more. Frederick Douglass named the wound to America's face on July 5, 1852, in the speech now titled "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" He asked the nation how it could celebrate liberty while holding others in chains. The Church cannot preach a whole gospel and keep a selective memory.

Scripture will not let us racialize the human family.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.Genesis 1:27

Every person carries that image before they carry any other label. "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). We are one blood. The line that runs through humanity is not the color line. It is the cross.

Here the confrontation must go both directions, or it is not prophetic. The American Church has a mixed record. Some pulpits defended slavery with Scripture twisted out of its meaning. Other believers, the Black church and the abolitionists among them, spent their lives resisting that evil in the name of Christ. The Book was read from both sides of the same wound, and only one reading was faithful to the God who made every person in His image.

The gospel answer is not to forget the wound and it is not to replace the gospel with an ideology. Reconciliation is not first a political program. It is a finished work.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.Galatians 3:28

The end of the story is not a monochrome nation. It is a multitude "from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9). The Church is called to be the first fruits of that scene now, not later. If we cannot sit at one table, we have not yet believed one gospel.

II · The Sojourner at the Gate

Immigration, Compassion, and Law

I speak here as a pastor of a bilingual and largely Hispanic congregation, and I refuse to let this subject be captured by either party. Scripture holds two truths at once, and the temptation is always to keep one and drop the other.

The first truth is that God commands love for the stranger, and He does not treat it as optional.

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.Leviticus 19:34

This is not sentiment. It is law backed by the character of God, who "executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing" (Deuteronomy 10:18). A church that despises the migrant has stopped reading its own Bible.

The second truth is that God ordains lawful order and the just governance of nations. "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God" (Romans 13:1). Even the sojourner in ancient Israel lived under the law of the land he entered. Order is not the enemy of mercy. Lawlessness is not the same thing as love, and a nation may set and enforce just laws for its borders without sinning against heaven.

So the biblical position is not a slogan. It is a both/and. Welcome the stranger as Christ commands, and honor lawful process as Christ's apostle commands. Reject the hardness of heart that would criminalize compassion, and reject the disorder that treats law as nothing. The Church's specific calling is not to write the statute. It is to love the actual human being in front of us, legal or undocumented, citizen or sojourner, because every one of them bears the image of God and is a soul for whom Christ died. On the day of judgment no one is admitted for having the right paperwork, and no one is turned away at the cross for having the wrong nationality.

III · What We Preached, What We Forgot

The Church's 250 Years and the Return to the Gospel

For two hundred and fifty years the Church in this land has preached on almost everything. It has preached revival in the Great Awakenings that swept the colonies and the young nation. It has preached abolition and missions and temperance and civil rights. Much of that was holy and necessary, and the movement for justice that came out of the Black church is a debt this whole nation owes. But somewhere in the noise, many pulpits traded the center for the edges.

We have preached politics until the gospel sounded like a party platform. We have preached prosperity until Jesus sounded like a strategy for a bigger house. We have preached self until the sermon became a coaching session with a worship set. And the central message, the one thing of first importance, has been assumed rather than proclaimed. Paul refused that drift: "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2).

Hear the message we cannot afford to forget:

Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.1 Corinthians 15:3–4

That is the gospel. It is not a footnote to our activism. It is the power itself: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16). We had 250 years to talk about many good things. Now is the time to come home to the one necessary thing.

Hear this rightly. When God said, "if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14), He spoke it to Solomon over the covenant nation of Israel. It is not a national promise stamped with an American seal. But the God who said it has not changed, and what it reveals about Him holds in every age: He answers humility, prayer, and repentance. So we do not stand as Israel and claim Israel's promise. We stand as the Church, on our knees, and we plead for mercy on the land where God has placed us.

The Great Commission has not been amended: "you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8). The next 250 years of this Church will be measured by whether we proclaimed Christ or merely commented on the culture.

IV · The Altar of the Home

Family and the God Who Restores

The family is not a policy. It is a design. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). The home is the first church, the first school, and the first government a child ever knows, and when it collapses, no institution can fully replace it. Over these 250 years the American household has been reshaped again and again, and every honest pastor knows the weight of what has been lost: fathers absent, covenants broken, children raised in the wreckage.

God has never been indifferent to this. Marriage matters to Him. Whatever the exact rendering of the words, the burden of Malachi's warning is unmistakable: God stands against the tearing apart of the marriage covenant, and He calls His people to faithfulness (Malachi 2:15–16). He hates what breaks the home, because He loves the ones it breaks.

And the great promise for the family is generational return. The Old Testament closes on it:

And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.Malachi 4:6

That is the miracle this nation needs, and it does not come from Washington. It comes from an altar. The Lord is a restorer of families, and He begins with repentant fathers and mothers who will build a home on the fear of God rather than the mood of the culture. Households are the smallest and strongest unit of revival. Rebuild them, and you rebuild the land.

V · One Lord

The End of Syncretism and the Fellowship of Christ

Syncretism is the sin of mixture. It is the attempt to keep Jesus while marrying Him to other gods: the god of the flag, the god of the market, the god of the party, the god of the self, the god of a vague spirituality that will bless anything. The very first commandment forbids it: "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3). Elijah stood on Carmel and refused to let Israel keep both altars: "How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him" (1 Kings 18:21). The Church in America has been limping for a long time.

Come off the fence. "Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?" (2 Corinthians 6:14). We do not need a Christianity blended with the spirit of the age. We need the undiluted Lordship of Jesus Christ, in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9), for "by him all things were created" and "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:16–17). He is not one voice in the American conversation. He is Lord.

And under that one Lord, the divided family of God must come home to each other. Jesus prayed "that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you... so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:21). Our unity is not optional decoration. It is evangelism. There is "one body and one Spirit... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all" (Ephesians 4:4–6).

At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.Philippians 2:10–11

So I call the Church across its tribes and its colors and its buildings back under one banner, the banner of Christ, His gospel, His deity, His Lordship, until the day the whole earth confesses what we already know.

VI · The Intercession

250 Prophetic Declarations Over the United States of America

We do not declare America a chosen nation, and we do not bargain for blessing without repentance. We stand as the Church and we lift our voices in agreement with the Word of God over this land. Some of what follows is blessing. Much of it is repentance. All of it is spoken in the name of Jesus Christ, the only Lord who can save a nation. Say them aloud. Let them be more than words on a page.