Ps. 33:12 “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the
people he chose for his inheritance.”
On the currency of our great nation are the words, “In God
We Trust.” Is this true? Is this true for most of the American people? It is
one thing to say we trust God and then it is another thing to actually trust
Him.
Again, I refer to my Navy days. One of the key responsibilities
of a sailor is firefighting. A fire on a ship is a pretty bad thing. Yes, I
know, the ship is surrounded by water but can you imagine being out in the
middle of the ocean, and a fire breaks out on the ship. Onboard a ship there is
a lot of dangerous things that if they were to get hot or catch fire, life
would be really unpleasant. Bombs, fuel and oil to name a few…The metal encapsulated
vessel you call home is on fire, and you either fight or flee.
One of the first training classes you take in boot camp is
firefighting (One of the first training films you watch is the tragedy aboard
the USS Forrestal…or as we like to call it, The USS Forest-fire). One of the first things you look for when
fighting a fire is trust. If you are manning the fire house you have to trust
the guy behind you to keep you from catching fire. See, on a metal ship with
metal rooms, fire likes to radiate a lot of heat at you. The guy behind you is
holding a fire hose too, but it is designed like a shower head, he sprinkles
water over you so you don’t burn up from the heat.
The fire house is connected to a pump on the ship that pumps
water from the sea. The guy that maintains the pump, you have to trust him
to. You wear an Oxygen breathing apparatus
(OBA) because the air/fumes will kill you. The guy that maintains this
equipment, you have to trust him to. Oh yeah, in some of the rooms where the
more volatile combustible fluid, gas and material are? They are guarded from
fire with a system called Haylon. Haylon removes the oxygen from the air to help
put out the fire. Fire needs oxygen…so do people. You have to trust the guy
manning the Haylon system.
That’s a lot of trust. That’s a lot of trust put on some
imperfect things. That’s a lot of trust to put on someone that you have been living
next to for months, playing poker with and sharing meals with. That’s a lot of
trust to put on things based in a emotional and physical world.
Yet some of us fail to trust a father who has control over
these things and everything else as well. Fail to trust a father who is perfect;
not based on physical or emotional states. He has proven time and time again,
that if we trust him, he will not forsake us.
When a little boy named David was getting ready to go up and
fight someone who was really, really tall and really, really strong. He went
and chose five smooth little stones and he took his sling to go out and face
this giant. He took just one stone and struck him in the forehead and then cut
off his head to kill him. Boy, he had some superior trust, David trusted in
God.
You have Noah building a boat in the middle of the desert
without a drop of water in site. Nobody understood what he was doing, not even
his family, and not even Noah. He simply trusted in God and did what God had
given him to do. And because of his trust, he and his family were saved from
the flood. He put his trust based on a faith in God.
James 4:8-10 “Come near to God and he will come near to you.
Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.
Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”
It was Benjamin Franklin’s belief that our country would not
survive without the help of God (Smart man, wonder why they said he was a
atheist?). The leaders of our country in our father’s generation understood
this as well. So the phrase, “In God we trust” was chosen as our national motto
by an Act of Congress in 1956. It first appeared on paper currency in 1957.
If the phrase, “In God we Trust” is the national motto of
our country, declared so by nothing less than an Act of Congress, I want to
respectfully suggest that it’s a phrase we should use and display more often.
In recent years, people have been wearing a variety of ribbons to show their
support for various causes. I can’t
think of anything more patriotic than to wear the national motto as a ribbon.
I think our great Nation did well with this motto. I see a lot of people wearing different emblems and messages on their bodies these days. Save this, I care about this and don’t believe that...
It seems to me that to save time, money and get all the
messages across using buttons, ribbons and bumper sticker, you would only have
to display 3 words.
In God we trust!
Or better yet, IN GOD WE MUST!!!
