This is the text of a speech I have delivered on many occasions to many groups, usually around Independence Day.  I know this is a bit long for a blog post, but I hope you will enjoy it and pass the message along.
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“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world…

We shall shame the faces of many… and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.”

The words of the Pilgrim John Winthrop.

The image of the “city on a hill,” of course, comes from the Gospel of Matthew — the words of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount.

The “work [the Pilgrims] had undertaken” was a new life in a new world, free from persecution.

And the “present help” he referred to was the chance to reach the destination toward which his people were sailing when he delivered that sermon aboard the ship Arbella in the Spring of 1630, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean en route to the New World.

This is not Christian revisionism — this is American history. 

From the earliest days of American civilization, the inhabitants of this continent have understood that the abundant wealth of resources and opportunity found in the New World is not man-made nor an accident of nature — but the generosity of our Heavenly Father.

In other words, not only was America a shining city on a hill, but Americans knew from the first that they were not the ones who screwed in the light bulb.

America is not an accident.


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