Twilight’s Last Gleaming

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.
—Proverbs 14:34

In 2010, Glenn Beck led a rally in Washington, DC, called “Restoring Honor.” It was held in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall. Some reports estimated that as many as 300,000 people attended that event. I happened to be in Washington, DC the weekend of that event, so I walked down to the National Mall to see the preparations being made for the rally. I was surprised that Friday evening to see people setting up tents to spend the night to make sure they had a prime seat for the next morning’s activities. One young father had his children with him. They had traveled hundreds of miles. Somebody asked the father why he had gone to such trouble to attend the event. And this is what he said: “I really don’t know why I came, but I realize something is not right in our country, and I want to do something about it.”

The sense that something is not right in our country is a pervasive feeling among Americans today. Many Americans, probably including you, believe our nation is on the wrong track, headed in the wrong direction. You have good reason to be upset about what is happening in our country. Perhaps you are deeply disturbed about the wholesale effort to remove any and all restrictions of same-sex marriages, abortion, and embryonic stem cell research. You’re upset about the failure to protect our borders against illegal immigration, threatening the physical and the fiscal health of our nation. Perhaps you’re upset about the runaway deficit that will enslave our children and our children’s children with trillions of dollars of debt. Or you’re upset about the hesitancy of government officials, shackled by political correctness, to recognize and verbalize that we are in a war against terror. You’re upset about the willingness to abrogate Americans’ First Amendment rights at home to prevent offending Islamic extremists abroad. You’re upset about the denial not only of secularists but of Christians themselves to affirm without stuttering that America was founded as a Christian nation. You wondered what you can do, what you should do to put the brakes on a country that is about to go over the cliff.

You have a great love for the United States of America. You have an even greater allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ. You wonder what kind of nation you’re going to leave to your children and to your grandchildren. As I left Washington, DC that Saturday morning, I looked out the airplane’s window and saw hundreds of thousands of people on the National Mall. And I began wondering what I could do to make a difference in my country.

Maybe you, too, are wondering what you can do to reverse the course of a nation that has lost its way. This week and in the weeks to follow, as the time draws closer to the next election, we will look at specific things we can do as Christians to make a difference in our nation.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2011.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.