This weekend is the 4^th of July and in the United States of America it is our Independence Day.  This is the day that we celebrate our freedom from England and religious persecution.  John Adams, our second President, wrote the following in a letter to his wife about the day of independence:  

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.  It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Did you catch that?  It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  We should show devotion to God for our independence.    

Isaiah 12:5-6 "Sing praise-songs to God.  He's done it all!  Let the whole earth know what he's done!  Raise the roof!  Sing your hearts out, O Zion!  The Greatest lives among you: The Holy of Israel."

So we live in a country that is considered free, but does that gives us the right to live any way we want?  Is that true freedom?

Romans 6:15-18 tells us this: So, since we're out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want?  Since we're free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind?  Hardly.  You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom.  Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it's your last free act.  But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits.  All your lives you've let sin tell you what to do.  But thank God you've started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

So to say we can live how we want is wrong if we live a sin filled life.  It would be an oxymoron to say we are free to sin, since sinning is a form of slavery.  So we are: Freed from Sin, but not Freed to Sin.  

What about the motto of the United States?  IN GOD WE TRUST.  Do you trust God or someone else to guide you?  

Psalm 108:8-9 Far better to take refuge in God than trust in people; Far better to take refuge in God than trust in celebrities. 

Did you know that President Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time" and asked ‘Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are of God?’" 

Even our National Anthem tells us to put our trust in God.  In the last stanza: 

O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand, 
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!  
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land 
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!  
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, 
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust" 
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave 
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

You can say all you want about God and trying to remove any reference to Him in the US, but the fact remains that this country was and is still firmly in the hand of God!  

But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living.  But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”  Joshua 24:15