American Values and Principles Part Five

Part Five: American Values and Principles
“Today we have become a nation based on a society of rule by man. The Constitution, once held in high esteem, is now often ignored, changed to meet the opinion of a judge, or considered outdated; whereas our Founders revered it and considered it a document written for the ages. In spite of the blessing accrued to the average American, many hate this nation’s form of government and are dedicated to destroying it, while others are indifferent, apathetic, and could care less about its rapidly deteriorating condition. They seem to be materialistic and hedonistic with the attitude of letting the government do it.”
“The choice before us is plain, Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration. I am rather tired of hearing about our rights, and privileges as American citizens. The time is come, it now is, when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship.” (Peter Marshall, The Rebirth of America, page 205, 1986, Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation.)
I am here to say that “the Constitution is not out of date. It is no more out of date than the desire for peace, freedom, and prosperity is out of date. The Founders were not custom-building the Constitution for any particular age or economy. They were structuring a framework of government to fit the requirements of human nature. These do not change. What protected the freedom of George Washington will protect freedom for you and me.” (The Five Thousand Year Leap)
Now let us consider more in-depth , as a reminder for us and as a history lesson for others, what makes The United States the greatest nation that has ever existed.
“It was in A.D. 1607 that another…attempt was made to lay the foundation for man’s most modern civilization. Undoubtedly the annals of humankind will ultimately show that this one turned out to be different. The settlement was called Jamestown.
The settlers of Jamestown had come in a boat no larger and no more commodious than those of the ancient sea kings. Their tools still consisted of shovel, axe, hoe, and a stick plow which were only slightly improved over those of China, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. They harvested their grain and hay-grass with the same primitive scythes…Their transportation was by cart and oxen…Most of them died young.” (The Five Thousand Year Leap).
Now let us move ahead almost two hundred years. By this time, God had placed together some of the most moral and intelligent men that ever existed all in one place, in this land called America and with God’s guidance produced a document that would change the world. Now move ahead another two hundred years. “By 1976, the “noble experiment” of American independence and free-enterprise economics had produced some phenomenal results.
The spirit of freedom which moved out across the world in the 1800’s was primarily inspired by the fruits of freedom in the United States. The climate of free-market economics allowed science to thrive in an explosion of inventions and technical discoveries which, in merely 200 years, gave the world the gigantic new power resources of harnessed electricity, the internal combustion engine, jet propulsion, exotic space vehicles, and all the wonders of nuclear energy.
Communications were revolutionized, first by the telegraph, then the telephone, followed by radio and television.
The whole earth was explored from pole to pole-even the depths of the sea.
Then men left the earth in rocket ships and actually walked on the moon. They sent up a space plane that could be maneuvered and landed back on the earth.
The average length of life was doubled; the quality of life was tremendously enhanced. Homes, food, textiles, communications, world travel, millions of books, a high literacy rate, schools for everybody, surgical miracles, medical cures for age-old diseases, entertainment at the touch of a switch, and instant news, twenty-four hours a day. That was the story.
Of course, all of this did not happen just in America, but it did flow out primarily from the swift current of freedom and prosperity which the American Founders turned loose into the spillways of human progress all over the world.” (The Five Thousand Year Leap)
Yet we have become a complacent people forgetting those precious principles of our founding. Paraphrasing a quote from above, I am rather tired of people talking about their rights as Americans. The time has come that we start asking ourselves what our duties and responsibilities are to preserve and protect the principles that have allowed America to become the greatest nation on earth?