Some thoughts on optimism:  I heard a woman at the store, telling the cashier, “You might say that I take the worst possible view of everybody.”  The cashier responded, “It sounds like you are a real pessimist!”  “No,” replied the woman, “I take drivers’ license pictures.”

An optimist sees an opportunity is every calamity; a pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity.

An optimist fell off of a tall building.  On his way down, he was heard to say, “So far, so good; so far, so good.”

Add to these sayings about optimism the words of the Apostle Paul as the King James version phrases it, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”  Come on, Paul!  Certainly you can’t mean all things!  Earthquakes, famines, floods, tornados, death, tragedy…  All things?

If those words had been written by someone who had lived a charmed life, one who had never known hardships, we could dismiss them as shallow and simplistic.  But they weren’t.  They were written by a man who had known imprisonment, torture, floggings, insults, shipwreck, and public stoning.  Therefore, because they were uttered by a man who knew hardships, we can rest assured that he knows what he is talking about.  We can take comfort and encouragement from these words, and if we believe in the God who inspired them, we can find reasons for hope and optimism in the bleakest events of life.

How can all things work out for our good?  It cannot be due to any magic or coincidence.  There is certainly nothing in the construction of the universe that guarantees that “everything will come out in the wash,” and by that I mean that the universe is not innately just.  Without God, the bad things that come upon us would remain just that – bad things.  Without faith in God, bad things make us bitter, not better.

Anyway, Paul doesn’t say that all things work together for good.  Rather he says, “all things work together for good to them that love God.”  A modern translation more accurately translates the Greek text this way, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.”  God works in all things.

Now, please note that it does not say that God causes all things.  Rather, Paul says that God works in all things in such a way as to make sure that it will ultimately work out for our good.  God takes evil and turns it inside out, making good come out of it.

My father used to tell my sister and me about a time when he was lost in the woods.  He was walking along a narrow path that eventually came to a narrow log that went over a river.  Halfway across he came face to face with a big bear that was going in the opposite direction.  Neither of them could turn around and so they stood face to face with each other.  The huge bear stood up on its hind legs, preparing to attack my Daddy.  “What did you do?” we would ask him.  Daddy said that just when that bear lunged at him, he reached his hand inside the bear’s mouth, all the way down the bear’s throat until his hand could touch the inside of the bear’s tail.  Then he pulled hard and turned the bear inside out and then they both walked to the same side of the river together.  God is able to take evil and tragedy and turn it inside out so that it will become a source of good to those who love and trust Him.

There are some wonderful examples of this in the Bible.  Last Sunday, I briefly mentioned the Old Testament story of Joseph, but it deserves mention again today because of this theme.  Joseph was an aspiring politician.  He even dreamed of being the chief of his family clan.  He said he dreamed that the family was binding sheaves of grain when suddenly his sheaf rose and stood upright and his brothers’ sheaves bowed down to it.  Then he dreamed that the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to him.  His brothers decided that they would find a way to keep this from happening, but rather than killing him, they decided to sell his as a slave to their distant relatives, the Ishmaelites, who in turn sold him to an Egyptian named Potiphar.  Just as  Joseph was beginning to climb out of this mess by becoming his owner’s assistant, Potiphar’s wife lied about him, saying that Joseph had tried to get fresh with her (when the opposite had been true), and so Potiphar had Joseph jailed.  From his jail cell, Joseph was elevated to second in command of all Egypt after he had successfully helped Pharaoh understand the significance of a dream, thereby saving Egypt from a lengthy famine.  Through it all, Joseph kept his faith in God who works in all things for the good of His children.  Don’t you know that it was tough for Joseph to believe that God had not forsaken him?  In the end it was clear to Joseph that what his brothers had meant for evil had been used by God for good.  That is the same idea Peter had in mind when he said, “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

So the fact that all things work together for good is no coincidence nor the result of a just universe.  All things work together for good because God is at work in all things for our good.  Our part is to love and trust God.  The last part of Romans 8:28 deals with our relationship with God: “those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  Without going into a lengthy explanation of what all those terms mean, I want you to see that Paul is talking about how we belong to God.  We are His dear children.  We can love and trust Him to always be like our wise and loving parent.  When we know whose we are, and when we love God, then the difficulties of life can make us stronger.  Someone said it quite eloquently, “The secret of deliverance from the painfully general preoccupation with our own misfortunes is the discovery that, since we belong to God and can trust Him to be loving toward us, they can be a source of blessing.”  Our trouble is that we don’t relax and believe that God can be trusted.  I wonder how our lives would be richer if we didn’t ask so many “whys” or complain or blame God but instead loved Him and trusted Him to be at work in all things for our good?

Several years ago I heard a lecture by Dr. James Fleming, a biblical archeologist.  He pointed to all the places in the ancient world where life was easy.  “No lasting religions or philosophies came from those places,” he said.  Then he pointed to the Middle East.  In that tiny, poor, desolate part of the world, three lasting world religions were born – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Dr. Fleming then said, “Don’t worry too much when your children are going through a tough time.  This will probably produce character and faith in them.  Worry about your children when life is too easy on them!”

Frank Holder, a farmer from Rocky Ford, Colorado, was the first major producer of the little white pearl onions.  He said that when he first started growing pearl onions, he had a great deal of difficulty separating the onions from the dirt that would cling to the onions during harvest.  He tried a shaker, a drum, a vibrating screen, but nothing worked.  Then one day one of the field trucks turned over and dumped its load of onions into an irrigation ditch.  Frank Holder was upset over the loss of all those onions, but then he noticed that little white objects were floating on top of the water.  One by one, little pearl onions started popping up on top of the water in the ditch.  He said, “Through adversity God had given us the answer to our problem.  The water had separated the onions from the dirt.”  Then he added, “I’ve learned that when I turn things over to God and plant my seeds of faith, He handles the situations a lot better than I can and in bigger ways than I ever dreamed possible.”

When I was in seminary I heard about an elevator operator in New York City back in the 1920′s.  He was fired when it was discovered that he couldn’t read.  “We cannot have an illiterate man working for us,” the building supervisor said.  The man began walking home, wondering how he was going to take care of his family now that he had lost his job.  Back in those days before we learned about the dangers, many people smoked cigarettes, and this man decided that he wanted to smoke as he walked home, but he couldn’t find a place to buy a pack.  He couldn’t find a newspaper stand either.  So he decided to open a little store that would sell newspapers and cigarettes.  It was such a huge success that he decided to open a second store, then a third.  Soon he had stores all over town.  When he retired, he was a millionaire.  A reporter heard about his success in business and decided to interview him, and after he had written his story, he asked the retired millionaire to proofread his story.  The former elevator operator replied, “I can’t read.”  The reporter was flabbergasted!  “You are a very successful business man and yet you cannot read?  I wonder what you could have been if you had been able to read!”  The retired millionaire replied, “Oh, I would have been an elevator operator.”

God works on behalf of His children in all things to make good come to us ultimately.  Our part is to trust Him.  May we believe!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Today I will answer every question you have ever had about evil and why bad things happen to good people!  Every question!  And if you believe that, you might be interested in some swamp land I own in Nevada.  People of faith have tried in vain to answer that question over many centuries, and so I doubt that I will find a satisfactory answer for us today.

Evil inflicts itself upon us in many ways.  A tornado rips through a community, destroying lives and property.  An automobile wreck or cancer takes away the life of someone we love.  A mean or crazy person breaks into a house or a school and kills innocent people.  Some terrorists fly jet planes into the Twin Towers.  Some folks seem able to remain steadfast in their faith during these crises and we admire them for so doing.  But others of us, sincere Christians, find our faith in God battered.  “Why, God?  If you exist and are loving, how could you allow this to happen?”

In Jesus’ Parable of the Wheat and Tares, the servants express the despair of thinkers of every generation: “Where did the weeds come from?  You planted only good seeds.  Where did this evil come from?”  People without faith in God have little trouble with the concept of evil because they don’t assume the existence of a kind, beneficent, orderly Creator.  But we do!  As we look at our world, orderly and beautiful, with mountains and beaches, stars that are in their usual places night after night, we see the work of an orderly and loving God.  Then we meet evil head on, irrational, disorderly evil, and we cannot understand it.  Someone has said, “The problem of evil is a riddle we cannot escape.  Explain that and you explain everything.”

Since the dawn of civilization, people have tried to answer that riddle.  Perhaps the most primitive answer, perhaps even primally instinctive to us, is the idea that somehow we are responsible for the evil that befalls us.  If tragedy occurs, then it must be my sin that caused it.  What did we do wrong that caused this drought?  It was this understanding of the cause of evil that led to the elaborate sacrificial system in ancient religions.  These sacrifices were attempts to placate an angry god.  There were human sacrifices even in ancient Judea.  Job’s comforters believed that Job brought all his troubles upon himself, but Job never believed this.  Jesus often encountered this idea also.  “Jesus, is this man blind because of his parents’ sins or his own sins? And the Galileans killed by Pilate, they must have been worse sinners than most people.”  This primitive thinking is still with us today.  As a pastor, I have often found that people often feel sinful and cut off from God following some tragedy.  We think that there has to be a cause for every effect.

To be sure, we do make some mistakes and bring troubles upon ourselves.  Sin pays very poor wages!  But Jesus rejected the idea that evil could always be explained in terms of payment for sins.  Jesus never agreed with this primitive understanding of evil that it was always traceable to someone’s sins, and this ought to be good news to anyone who suffers guilt during a crisis.

Jesus gave us his understanding of evil in the parable we read today, but it was different from the answer people expected.  People thought that the Messiah would purge away all evil from the world.  Instead, Jesus indicates that we must learn to live with evil in our midst because it will be here until the end of world.  Jesus’ wise answer seems to be saying to us that we waste our time in trying to understand evil.  It exists.  That is a fact.  Understanding evil really won’t help much.  We just have to cope with its reality.

Jesus tells about a farmer, symbolizing God, who sowed only good seed in his garden.  The fact that God sowed only good seed means that God is not the author of the evil that befalls us.  He sows good seed into our lives.  He is for us, not against us.  Then Jesus introduces a mystery to us.  There is some enemy of the Farmer-God who is the author of evil, and that Evil One is the one who sowed the bad seed in God’s garden.  Jesus doesn’t enlighten us as to the origin of this Evil One; He just acknowledges that evil is a reality.  In some ways He is reiterating what Genesis teaches.  In the Garden of Eden, there is a serpent who tempts Adam and Eve.  Where did the serpent come from?  We aren’t ever told.  Genesis teaches that prior to creation, there was a force of evil and chaos at work.  Evil predated us, and so from the beginning of creation there has been a force of evil in our midst.  Evil was sown upon the earth at the same time good was, and so it bears fruit occasionally.

If this is true, then why not destroy the evil now? The servants in Jesus’ story asked the farmer if he wanted them to gather up the weeds now.  The farmer replied that if they did this, then the good wheat might also be destroyed.  The roots of the wheat and the tares become interlaced.  If you pull up one, you get both.  Why does evil remain?  Because God loves us and doesn’t want to damage us, the good crop.  Even in our own lives, good and evil are so interlaced that we would be destroyed if we were suddenly changed and that is why God changes us slowly over time.  Why does the evil remain around us and within us?  Perhaps it serves a function for good in our lives right now, causing us to learn perseverance, exercising our free will.  But there will be a final day, the harvest day when the wheat and the weeds are harvested and separated.  Evil will be destroyed on that day.  But until then we must live with the reality that evil can and will come our way.

How then do we cope with evil as we await the final harvest?  First, we must get beyond the little faith that blames ourselves or God for all evil.  Yes, we are sinners, but we didn’t bring this evil upon us.  Yes, God is on our side always, but still evil comes our way.  When we blame God, we are like the man who wrote, “Someone in heaven pulled a lever, and I came down with scarlet fever.”  We must start believing, really believing, that God is good and that He is for us, not against us.  Secondly, we can celebrate that God is a redeemer who works in all things for the good of those who love Him, and this gives us hope.  God doesn’t cause all things, but He works in all things for our good.  He can even take evil and use it for our good.  God took a cross that was intended for evil, to kill the Son of God, and turned it into the means of our salvation.  God was with Joseph in the Old Testament when he was sold by his brothers into slavery, causing slavery and jail to be the road to political power for Joseph.  That which was meant for evil resulted in the rescue of Joseph’s family during a famine.

Someone has said, “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”  With God’s help, that is very possible.  Today we are remembering the passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord as we partake of the sacrament of Holy Communion.  As we do so, I invite you to remember that God took something that the devil and humans meant as the ultimate evil and turned it into the ultimate good for you and for me.  They killed Jesus, but God made His death to be the source of life for us, now and for all eternity!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Being one who likes to tell jokes, I know I have botched the telling if I have to stop and explain it.  What if all of my sermons had to be explained?  Maybe they do!  Perhaps you folks go home after worship and ask each other, “What was that sermon about, anyway?”  Some of the best sermons I have ever heard were those that took some time to digest, those whose meanings came to me when I thought more about them in the hours following the sermon delivery.

Jesus’ sermons were always having to be explained because he spoke in parables.  He liked to tell stories but they were not immediately understood.  When Jesus told them, “Beware of the yeast of Pharisees and Sadducees,” the Disciples said, “He means that we should have brought more bread with us.”  Another time Jesus said, “If you tear down this temple, I will rebuild it in three days.”  He meant the temple of His body.  On another occasion Jesus said, “It isn’t what goes into your mouth that makes you unclean.  Rather it is what comes out of it.”  Later He explained to His Disciples that food has no power to make us clean or unclean in God’s eyes; words that we use to bless or curse each other can make us clean or unclean.

Most often His parables aren’t given explanation.  The parable of the sower is a notable exception. But even then it isn’t clear in its application.  Generally speaking, how are parables to be interpreted?  Since antiquity (that’s a long time, for you Clemson people)… Since antiquity until about 75 years ago, the usual method to interpret the parables was to consider them allegories.  In an allegory, every part of the story was given symbolic meaning.  For example if we interpret the parable of the Good Samaritan as an allegory, the wounded man would symbolize all of us human beings who were beaten and robbed by the power of sin. The priest and the Levite who refused to help the wounded man would stand for the failure of Old Covenant, the Good Samaritan who did stop to help the wounded man would equal Jesus, the Inn that the Good Samaritan carried the injured man to symbolizes the church, the Innkeeper stands for Christian pastors.  But such a detailed allegorical interpretation tends to over-complicate the message in the parable.  I can almost hear Jesus say, “Doesn’t anybody remember that I told that story in order to explain what it means to be a good neighbor?”

Since the early 1900′s, scholars have led us to remember that a parable most often has only one simple point rather than a complex allegory.  So today I want to apply this simple principle to the parable of the sower.  Preachers love the allegorical approach to the sower because it gives them a chance to vent their frustration toward members of their congregation that are well represented by the path, the rocks, and thorns.  But such tirades miss the real message here. What is that one simple message?  Let me tell it my way.

“How will My Kingdom come?” asked Jesus.  “It won’t come thru armies marching but rather it will come from you sowers who go out and scatter the seeds of the Gospel everywhere. You just scatter them all over.  But don’t expect that everyone will become My follower.  Some won’t even give your message a second look.  Some will respond enthusiastically at first, but when the going gets tough, they will stop going.  Some will receive your message but pressing concerns in their daily lives will choke out your message. They will allow the eternal to be choked by the temporal. But some will receive the message and it will take deep root in their lives!  The seed of the Gospel will sprout in their lives and be dynamite!  Their lives will be totally transformed by the Gospel, and they will produce a great harvest!  So, don’t get discouraged by the unproductive responses. You just keep sowing those seeds!”

You see, the soils are minor characters in this story.  And soil can change with proper cultivation and fertilizing.  So we dare not write someone off because we think that they are paths or rocks.  In fact, Helmut Thielicke says that the four soils are not four kinds of people but rather each of us at some time in our lives.  Sometimes we are beaten down by life into hard path‑like characters that keep everybody out. Other times we are like the rocky soil; there is no depth to our commitment.  Other times we are choked by the pressures of daily life. We just can’t hear the message because  we are worried about the pot roast burning while the preacher goes on and on or because we are excited about a ball game.  That makes the scattering of Gospel seeds a matter of good timing.  A good sower doesn’t expect seeds to grow until conditions are right.

But isn’t it interesting that Jesus wants seeds to be on the ground ‑ all ground ‑ so that when conditions are right the gospel plants may grow?  Could it also be the reason that Jesus wants seeds everywhere is that God loves everyone, even the rotten soils?         So our job is to scatter the seeds and not to worry about the harvest!  The real stars of this story are the seeds and the sower,  and this is where we should concentrate our attention. The emphasis of the parable is on the seeds and the sower. We are to sow Gospel seeds and keep sowing them.

Farming is hard work.  My father found this out the hard way!  When he was a teenager, he became discouraged with his progress in high school and decided to drop out and stay home with my Grandfather to become a full-time farmer.  But after one season, Daddy decided to go back to high school.  He said there just had to be an easier way to earn a living!  Planting seeds can be very tiring!

We get tired of planting Gospel seeds also.  Evidence of this is the difficulty of getting Sunday School teachers and nursery workers.  Some of you older sowers are tired and deserve to retire. But there are some little patches of fertile soil here just begging to be planted with seeds. You got to keep sowing.

Plus it isn’t easy to keep sowing when you can’t see any results! So often our seeds fall on unfertile soil.  It is tough to be a pastor and visit members who don’t attend  and won’t, no matter what I do.  But Jesus says to visit anyway.

When I was a youth director in Irmo, my adult leaders knew that I was getting discouraged from time to time and they did their best to keep me encouraged.  One of them sent me a poster with an acorn lying at the trunk of a huge tree.  The poster also contained this poem:  “Don’t fret, through your tasks are many and your results are few.  Remember the mighty oak was once a nut like you.”

Jesus’ parable of the sower was His way of encouraging us in time of seeming failure.  He is trying to prepare us by telling us that only about one-fourth of the time we will be successful. When I sold insurance ‑ or rather when I starved when I was supposed to be selling insurance – they told me that success in sales depended on my telling the insurance story enough times to enough people.  My trainer and I would leave a family after failing to sell a policy and he would say, “I just made 20% of a sale because I sell one policy every time I talk with five people.”  He didn’t get discouraged from apparent failure because he knew that he had to keep scattering those seeds!

We are to be like God, who makes the sun shine on the good and evil and sends rain upon the just and the unjust. We are to keep loving and sowing gospel seeds. Look at the seeds.  They are little miracles.  They hold life within them that is just waiting for the chance to sprout.  We just have to give them water, soil, and a chance.  Jesus knew that the message of the Gospel had life in itself, too, just waiting for the chance to sprout.  In fact, the Gospel was extraordinary seed.  The usual harvest was 10‑fold.  Jesus said that the Gospel was seed capable of producing 100‑fold.  He was saying something here about the dynamic power of the Gospel, capable of growing in our lives, growing into more and more hidden nooks and crannies in our lives, transforming us into Kingdom People.

The promise in this parable is that if we keep sowing, we will eventually hit a hungry heart that will allow the gospel to take root and the take over their lives. And the promise to you is that if you will receive Christ as your Savior and Lord, He will transform your very being and make you a new person!  He will turn your life around and make it meaningful and joyful.

Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is like a sower scattering seed everywhere because God’s love is for everyone, and even though some seed will not produce lasting results, other seed will, and the harvest will be 10 times greater than expected.” Be a sowing machine!  Scatter those seeds!  They will grow!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Our freedom is an accident, a responsibility, and an obligation.  To be born a free person is an accident; to live as a free person is a responsibility; to die as a free person is an obligation.

The fact that most of us were here in America was an accident or a coincidence or a gift.  You might not like my choice of word “accident” because we do believe that God’s hand determines when and where we are born.  But I am using the word accident in the sense that you and I had nothing to do with our being born here.  We didn’t choose to come to America; that decision was made for us by our parents and God. Somewhere back in the 1700′s, my Scotch-Irish and English ancestors made a decision to leave the country of their birth to seek liberty in the New World.  Some of them made the truly wise decision to come south so that they could learn to speak proper southern English!  Spartanburg County has been home for at least five generations of my family, no matter which limb of the family tree you investigate.  But nobody asked me where I wanted to be born; that was decided for me.

The fact that our freedom is accidental should color our patriotism with thanksgiving.  We aren’t patriotic because we are better than other people and are proud of that fact; we are patriotic because “there, but for the grace of God, go I,” as the saying goes.  Just as easily I could have been born in postwar Germany or behind the Iron Curtain in Russia.  The freedom I enjoy and sometimes take for granted was hard-fought freedom, given to me by brave travelers who crossed the Atlantic, won by brave soldiers who fought the British for my freedom and defended my freedom when it was threatened by enemies.  My reaction to all this should be gratitude to God and gratitude to previous generations of Americans.  We live in the freedom that they built and defended.

While I am grateful to previous generations, I am also thankful to God for my freedom.  The Judea-Christian heritage has always been the foundation of American freedom, especially the understanding of human nature that comes to us from that religious tradition.  Our faith has taught us that our human nature is fallen nature, flawed by sin.  Because of this, it is dangerous to place too much power in the hands of any one human being.  There can be no infallible human king or leader.  As Lord Acton expressed it in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  It was decided that the cure to government abuses of power was to spread out the power among a huge number of people so that through elections the power would ultimately rest upon our shoulders.  As a further check against human fallibility, our forefathers diluted the power between three branches of federal government.

Early 20^th Century comic Will Rogers said that “It takes a great country to stand a thing like an election hitting it every four years.”  He also wondered why folks got so excited about electing a President.  “Why, we got people that are really taking the whole thing serious.  They think a President has got something to do with running the country.”  He is right, you know.  Our founding fathers framed our constitution in such a way as to so limit our President’s powers that he cannot do much without Congress’ backing.  It really is unfair to give a President too much credit or blame when the entire government is responsible.

Another influence of our faith on our country’s foundation, especially the influence of our Protestant heritage, was to recognize the danger of an established religion in America.  Too many wars have been fought in the name of religion.  States run by a religion have often been harsh, oppressive governments; religions run by the state has no moral integrity.  Imagine having to be Lutheran or Baptist or Catholic or Methodist just because our leader was a member of that church!  We would not be free if we couldn’t choose how, where, or even Who we worship.

Being born in a free country is an accident.  We ought to be grateful for this gift.  Secondly, to live as a free person is a responsibility.  It certainly was easier to be a child than to be an adult!  Somebody made all of my decisions then.  I had no responsibility other than to blindly obey.  But as an adult, I have had the constraints of parental law lifted off of me!  I am responsible for how I live and for earning a living.  I was told where I had to go to elementary school when I was a child; I had to decide for myself where I would live and how I what vocation I would choose as an adult.  That is still true for those who believe that God chose their vocation for them; I still had the free will to agree with that choice.

With freedom comes responsibility.  This fact is obvious in some other languages.  For instance, in German the word for “gift” is “gabe” and the word for “task” is “aufgabe.”  With every gift there comes a task or a responsibility.  Early Christians were so happy to be free from the legalistic religion of their heritage, but Paul was quick to remind them that their freedom was not to be misused as an opportunity to sin. “Do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.”  In other words, live responsibly.

Freedom of speech is a great freedom, but someone has questioned whether or not it is O.K. to yell “movie” in a crowded fire station, or something like that.  I heard about a parrot that was abusing its freedom of speech.  It had a bad habit of cursing.  Finally its owner told the parrot, “If you say one more bad word, I’ll put you in the freezer.”  Well, it did, and so into the freezer it went!  After being on ice for about five minutes, the bird was paroled.  He was meek and quiet for a while, and then he asked, “May I ask one question?  Inside that freezer, there was this turkey.  What bad word did he say?”  Some people, like that parrot, misuse our freedom of speech.

I read a story recently that told of one man who used his freedom responsibly and another who used his freedom selfishly.  A woman and her children were in danger of drowning when a riptide pulled them out beyond the breakers.  A soldier saw the danger and, after throwing his wallet down on the ground, jumped into the water to save them.  Bystanders assembled to watch the rescue, and one of them stole the soldier’s wallet with $300 in it.  An act of responsible bravery by one man was matched by an act of irresponsible, selfish, cowardice by another.  To live in freedom requires responsibility.

As Christians freed from the power of sin and death, we are to live in this freedom in such a way as to introduce others to Jesus’ way of living.  Even Americans are slaves if they are in bondage to sin.  If the Son sets them free, then they will be free, indeed.

To be born in America was an accident in the sense that it was beyond our control.  To live in freedom requires our responsibility.  To die as a free person is our obligation to the next generations.  Because we have been blessed with the gift of freedom, we are obligated to pass this gift on to other generations of Americans, our children’s children.  Too many have died for our freedom for us to let anyone ever live without it.  While I want to avoid warfare unless there are no other options, I believe that we must remain free at any cost. America has long been the launching pad for missionaries and other helpers sent into the world.  What hope of freedom do people in Russia or China have if something happens to ours?  What hope does the world have to learn about the ways of Christ without us?

Someone has said that when Khrushchev came to America and said, “We will bury you,” that one of his assistants said to him, “Comrade, if we bury them, who will feed us?”  Our continuing existence inspires others to dream of freedom in their countries.

After World War II, the German people began to question how they could have ever allowed something as evil as Naziism to grow up in their midst, unchallenged.  Why hadn’t some group opposed and exposed them for the madmen that they were?  This question was summed up by German pastor Martin Niemöller whose poem is at the Holocaust Memorial on a plaque:

They came first for the Communists,

And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists,

And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews,

And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . .

And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Someone has rightly said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  So that our children’s children can enjoy the freedoms that we enjoy, we must join those in the lookout tower who are always keeping watch over our freedoms.

To be born a free person is an accident; to live as a free person is a responsibility; to die as a free person is an obligation.  May we be thankful for the accident, responsible in our actions, and obligated to see that freedom lives in the future!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt