THE SEARCH ENDS

Two years after Washington assumed the Presidency, a Southern Methodist preacher named Francis Aspinwall made a pilgrimage to New England, where the groundwork of God’s “New Israel” had first been laid.

I rode over rocks and hills, and came to Wilton. . . . My horse is very small, and my carriage inconvenient in such rocky, uneven, jolting ways. . . . We are now in Connecticut, and never out of sight of a house. . . . I do feel as if there had been religion in this country once, and I apprehend there a little form and theory left. There may have been a praying ministry and people there, but I fear they are now dead.1

“America, America, God shed His grace on thee.” From the very beginning God did abundantly answer this nineteenth-century prayer that we have sung so often. There is no way to measure how much the grace that God has poured out on this nation is a direct result of the obedience and sacrifice of those first Franciscan and Dominican missionaries, the Jesuit martyrs, and the earliest generations of nameless Americans who chose the Covenant Way.

Yet even as God’s grace continued, spiritual sloth began to encase our hearts, to the point where we took His grace so much for granted that we made a joke of it: “God looks after fools, drunks, and the United States.” In the face of such callous indifference, God could not go on blessing us indefinitely, and now the grace has begun to lift. Francis Aspinwall’s summation of Connecticut in 1791 could well apply to the nation today.

The opening pages of this book mentioned some social indicators of the lifting of God’s grace—the holocaust of abortion, the rapidly decaying moral fabric of our public and private lives, the attacks on traditional marriage, and the disintegration of the American family. The recent increase and intensity of natural disasters seem to bear further witness to it. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and raging forest fires—if one were to view them with the benefit of time-lapse photography, it would be difficult not to conclude that God had a controversy with all humankind, and especially America.

Since the first Christian settlers entered into covenant with Him, God has called the people of this country to be “a City set on a Hill.” Due to our repeated betrayal of this covenant, it should hardly come as a surprise that His dealings with America have now become more severe. Yet even in the midst of judgment, God shows His mercy. For while He does deal with His people more strictly than with others, He does not reject them. When He enters a covenant, it is forever. The promises that He made to the early comers to this “New Israel” remain intact and unmodified, though a far greater amendment of our lives is now required to fulfill our end of the bargain.

For a whole nation to return to the Covenant Way seems impossible. But it is not impossible; it has been done before. We have the Old Testament example of Nineveh to prove it. The biggest and most powerful city of its age had reached such a state of corruption that God was on the verge of destroying it, as He had Sodom and Gomorrah. But through His reluctant prophet Jonah, He gave the people of Nineveh one last chance. If they would repent, God would stay His hand. The Ninevehites believed Jonah and repented. The entire city, from its simplest inhabitants to its most sophisticated, left their old ways—and were spared.

We are not saying that America has arrived at the Nineveh point—yet. Indeed, our demise may be a more gradual, drawn-out affair, to allow us as much time as possible to repent. Or it may not. If God continues to lift His grace, it will not be long before we will be in a state of chaos very much of our own making. Whether the end comes with a bang or a whimper, we seem to be approaching a national point of no return, beyond which it will be too late for America to turn back.

Yet such is God’s mercy that He does not require the whole nation to repent. It is enough if only the Christians, those who truly know Him, will do this. Most of us are well familiar with His admonition in 2 Chronicles 7:14: “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.” We are so familiar, in fact, that we do not really hear its meaning. Many of us believe that we are already living according to its dictates. Yet do we take them to the deepest level? Are we battling pride, self, and ego, as the early Pilgrims and Puritans did when they strove to go the Covenant Way?

Consider this possible amplification from God’s perspective:

If my people—those in covenant with me—will humble themselves, then it will not be necessary for me to humble them.

If they will pray—from the depths of their heart, truly wanting to find me—then I will hear them.

If they will seek my face—not glory and rewards for themselves—then they shall find me.

If they will then turn from their wicked ways—the public ones and the hidden ones—then I will forgive their sin.

But I cannot forgive that which is not repented of, so each of you must allow me to search the darkest corners of your heart.

Only in this way will I heal your land.

Many had hoped that electing a Christian President would do the job. But as Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.”2 We are now well over 300 million, so Eisenhower’s point is even stronger. It is the most dangerous kind of corporate self-delusion to think that a President, regardless of how much he or she heeds God, can reverse the bent of the national will once it is set in a certain direction. And when it becomes apparent that a single person cannot do so, that person and that person’s faith will become the scapegoat.

All of which seems to put the responsibility squarely upon each of us who has a personal relationship with our Savior, even though we would prefer to blame the immorality of others for the precipitous rate of decline. The responsibility is ours, and it always has been. When Solomon Stoddard once challenged Increase Mather on this very point, pointing out that the covenanted Christians in seventeenth-century New England were only a fraction of the population, Mather retorted that, nonetheless, that fraction was sufficient to “stand for the entire land” and “redeem the whole.”3

There is a new move of the Spirit of God abroad in our land now, full of promise and encouragement and new life in Christ. In response to it, Christian roots of excitement and enthusiasm are shooting out laterally in all directions. Yet while these feeder roots are vital to rapid growth, what is now desperately needed is a simultaneous deepening of the taproot. For without it, the first great storms of tribulation are going to wreak a terrible destruction.

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). The Christian walk begins with the discovery that He is the way. Through Bible study and good teaching, the believer next learns that He is the truth. Yet our Lord does not intend us to stop there but to move on into the third phase of our walk, the daily experience of Him as our life. This third phase, which so many Christians are loath to enter into, is the one that develops the taproot.

Why do many Christians resist moving into a deeper relationship with Christ? Because deepening our life in Christ means going the Way of the Cross: the way of self-denial—of unconditional surrender of one’s own will to God’s will and of true covenant commitment to one another. This is the way to which He has called all serious Christians: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). From everything that our Christian experience teaches us, it is the only way to spiritual maturity.

It also is the only way that we Christians can yet fulfill our nation’s call. Individually—and corporately—we need to reenter the covenant relationship that our forebears had with God and one another.

As we have seen, the vertical aspect of the Covenant Way requires that we all consider ourselves to be soldiers in Christ’s army, to be deployed when and where He directs, for whatever purpose He might have.

Our ancestors, from the Pilgrims and Puritans to those who resisted the tyranny of George III, understood that the call on our nation was a call to both personal and corporate freedom in Christ. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). They also understood that this freedom was not license to do as they pleased but freedom to do as God pleased. In short, they chose to live by what we, their modern descendants, have tended to ignore—Paul’s strong warning to the Galatians a dozen verses further on: “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:13–14).

In other words, the true measure of our commitment to Christ is demonstrated in the horizontal aspect of our covenant: How willing are we Christians to be servants of one another? Enough to become deeply involved in others’ lives? To have them involved in ours? How much do we really care about our neighbors—at home, at work, or at church?

Sad to say, most of us do not care that much. Even where our fellow Christians are involved, we prize our personal independence too much to truly get involved with them. And yet, if we are ever to break out of our self-centeredness and become Christ-centered members of one body, this is what we must do. We must covenant with one another in a practical way—husband and wife, prayer partners, co-workers—to be open and honest with one another and to care enough for one another to help each other grow out of self and mature in Christ.

For in Christ, we are called to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers—to walk and live in openness and honesty with one another. As the Apostle John said, “If we say we have fellowship with Him, while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:6–7).

The Pilgrims knew the value of becoming one body. With the Mayflower Compact they chose to relinquish their individual independence. As a covenanted people, they not only survived but established our basic American spiritual and civil institutions. The first Puritans knew it, too; the very survival of their little towns depended upon the depth of their covenant relationship with one another. And surely this was what God was doing at Valley Forge when He forged an army out of a disintegrating band of independent individuals.

In our hearts we, too, know that God has called us Christians to a horizontal as well as vertical covenant. But the price—of turning from our independent ways, of being willing to hear God speak to us through the lips of others, of exposing the hidden sins of attitude or thought, of humbling ourselves by admitting where we are wrong—is more than most of us care to pay.

Thus it was for many of the second-generation Pilgrims, too, as they broke covenant and moved away—and deeply wounded Governor Bradford’s heart in the process. Later, many of the Half-Way Covenanted Puritans were forcibly reminded by King Philip’s War of how far they had strayed from their commitment. And a century later, the states’ refusal to relinquish their independence nearly aborted the birth of our national republic.

“United we stand” is one of our nation’s mottos, and “Out of many, one” is another. They ring with truth, only because the first Americans were willing to pay the price.

So we modern Christians must humble ourselves and renew the horizontal as well as the vertical aspect of our covenant with God. If we do this, He will hear, and forgive our sins, and heal our land.

It can still happen. Our forebears have broken trail for us and shown the way. Their call is our call. If just a fraction of us Americans choose to go the Covenant Way, it will suffice. Then each of our lives will be filled with the Light of Him who said, “I am the light of the world.” And if the candlepower of each covenanted Christian will be joined to the whole, the result will truly be the blaze of glory that John Adams foresaw.