River Church NOLA
2026 July 5
  • I Am Free
  • You Never Let Go
  • The Way
  • Trust In God
  • Boudreaux and Thibodeaux were sittin’ out on the levee on the Fourth of July, waitin’ on the fireworks. Boudreaux says, “Thibodeaux, you know why dey call it Independence Day?” Thibodeaux says, “Non, why?” Boudreaux says, “Cause it’s de one day a year my wife lets me sit outside wit’ a cold drink and don’t ask me to fix nothin’.” Thibodeaux thinks on it a second and says, “Boudreaux, I t’ink dat’s just called Saturday at your house.”
    We laugh, but there’s something in that little joke worth noticing. Independence Day has a way of making us grateful for ordinary things — a cold drink, a porch, a family, a free evening. Today I want us to take that same instinct and point it somewhere bigger. Not gratitude for a day off, but gratitude for a story — the story of what God has done through this nation, and what He has done through this nation’s people, especially in carrying the gospel to the ends of the earth.
    America did not become the beacon of liberty by accident. Look at Psa 33:12
    Psalm 33:12 NLT
    12 What joy for the nation whose God is the Lord, whose people he has chosen as his inheritance.
    Today we celebrate what God has done with America — not because we are perfect, but because His faithful hand has been upon us. Today we thank God for the freedoms we enjoy. We honor those who sacrificed to secure them. And we celebrate one of the greatest nations in the history of the world.
    But today I want to do two things.
    I want us to remember why America has been such a blessing.
    I want us to remember that every great nation must continually return to God.
    Patriotism and Christianity are not the same thing, but we as Christians should be thankful for God’s blessings on our nation while remembering that our real citizenship in in heaven.
    So my goal today isn’t to worship these United States. My goal for us is to worship the God who has, and is and will continue to bless America.

    America was founded with a recognition of God.

    Our founders were not alike in their theology. Some were deeply evangelical Christians, while others belonged to different Christian traditions, and some held religious views we would not agree with at all.
    Patrick Henry and John Jay spoke openly of their faith in Christ, and Jay would later help found one of the country’s first Bible societies. Others held far less orthodox views. Thomas Jefferson was skeptical enough of the miraculous that he famously edited his own version of the Gospels, cutting out anything supernatural. Benjamin Franklin leaned deist for most of his life, believing in a Creator more than in Christ — though even Franklin, in a tense moment at the Constitutional Convention, stood and asked the delegates to open their sessions in prayer, on the conviction that God governs the affairs of men. George Washington spoke constantly of Providence and rarely, in public, of Christ by name — a faith more reverent than it was doctrinally precise.
    God didn’t need our nation to be founded by a group of men and women with uniform beliefs and doctrine. He put the mix of people in place that would allow the Gospel to run free and go further than anyone ever thought.
    One thing they all believed was that

    Our rights came from God, not from government.

    On July 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed a document that declared:

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

    They recognized that Government doesn’t create or give us freedom. God does. That idea changed history.
    George Washington repeatedly spoke of the importance of religion and morality for national success.

    It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.

    John Adams wrote that the constitution was made for a moral and religious people.
    America has never been perfect. We have some terrible sins… Slavery… Racism… Injustice… Greed…
    But one of our greatest strengths has been that reform movements often appealed to Biblical Truth. Christians helped led efforts to abolish slavery, expand education, care for the poor, and defend human dignity.
    Psalm 33:12 NLT
    12 What joy for the nation whose God is the Lord, whose people he has chosen as his inheritance.
    Nations don’t rise because they are rich; they rise they recognize God.
    Nations don’t rise because they are powerful; they rise because they recognize God.

    God sovereignly prepared and founded this land.

    Look at Acts 17:26
    Acts 17:26 NLT
    26 From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.
    God establishes the nations. Think about how how improbable the story of our nation was.

    The Pilgrims in 1620 fleeing persecution landed at Plymouth.

    They didn’t just land at Plymouth, they landed with a covenant to advance the Gospel. They Mayflower Compact begins: In the name of God, Amen.

    The Great Awakening 1730-s and 40s.

    Led by preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, stirred the colonies with revival. Hearts were prepared for the call of liberty.

    George Washington at Valley Forge

    During the battle, he knelt in the snow seeking divine guidance. He wrote that the hand of providence has been so conspicuous in all this that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith.
    Think of the Battle of Long Island in 1776. Washington’s army was trapped. A dense fog rolled in at exactly the right moment, allowing a miraculous nighttime evacuation. Historians still call it “the fog of divine providence.”
    God prepared this land, raised up leaders who feared Him, and birthed a nation upon the truth that rights come from our Creator — not from government.

    God embedded Biblical Principles of Liberty into America’s foundations.

    The genius of America in not in human wisdom alone - it is in it’s reflection of biblical truth.

    Human Dignity

    Genesis 1:27 NLT
    27 So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
    This is why the Declaration of Independence insist that we are all created equal.

    Liberty

    Galatians 5:1 NLT
    1 So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.
    The Founders understood that true freedom is God given, not government granted.

    Justice and the Rule of Law

    Micah 6:8 NIV84
    8 He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
    The Constitution’s separation of powers and checks and balances echo the biblical view of fallen human nature (Jeremiah 17:9
    Jeremiah 17:9 NLT
    9 “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?

    Religious Liberty

    The First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion because the Founders knew that
    2 Corinthians 3:17 NLT
    17 For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
    John Adams wrote

    Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

    God has blessed America because, in our founding, we sought to align with His principles. When we honor those principles, we flourish. When we drift, we suffer.

    God has used America to Bless the World.

    Jesus said in Matthew 5:14
    Matthew 5:14 NLT
    14 “You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden.
    God often belsses nations so that those nations can be a blessing to others. While America has certainly had our failures, we have been blessed to do extraordinary good.

    America has defended freedom.

    Twice in the 20th century America helped stop tyrannical regimes during global wars. Millions today live in freedom because Americans answered the call. Thousands of them never came home. Freedom has a price.

    America has led the world in humanitarian efforts.

    When disaster strikes, Americans give.
    When famine occurs, Americans send food.
    When earthquakes destroy cities, American churches and charities respond.
    Americans have built hospitals.
    Americans go out on medical missions.
    Americans do disaster relief all over the world.
    Americans drill wells for clean water where they have no clean water.
    Americans build schools, colleges and seminaries all over the world.
    A lot of good has come from American generosity.

    America has welcomed people from around the world.

    Millions have legally come to America seeking an opportunity to build a better life.
    Many came seeking religious liberty. In many countries around the world, you cannot worship like we do here.
    Millions came to build a better life than they could inn their homeland.
    America was called a “melting pot.”
    But maybe even more important than anything is that America has often been a refuge to those who are persecuted.

    America’s greatest gift to the world has been the Gospel.

    That may surprise you. America’s greatest export has not been technology, or movies, or business, or military equipment and training. America’s greatest export has been missionaries.
    America has sent more missionaries and resources for gospel work, disaster relief, and humanitarian aid than any other nation in history. From the “city on a hill” vision of John Winthrop to modern efforts, God has used this nation as a platform to bless the world (Genesis 12:2-3).
    In 1806, a handful of college students at Williams College in Massachusetts got caught in a thunderstorm and took shelter under a haystack. While they waited out the rain, they prayed — for the nations that had never heard the gospel. That prayer meeting under a haystack is often pointed to as the spark of the American foreign missions movement. Four years later it became an actual sending organization, and by 1812 the first company of American missionaries — Adoniram and Ann Judson among them — sailed for Asia. Judson would spend decades in Burma, buried in prison at one point, translating the entire Bible into Burmese before he was done.
    That trickle became a river. Through the 1800s and into the 1900s, wave after wave of American men and women — doctors, translators, teachers, church planters — left comfortable lives to carry the gospel into places that had never heard Christ’s name. By the late 1800s a generation of college students had adopted the audacious prayer that the gospel could reach the whole world in their lifetime. Bible translation work born out of that same missionary impulse — reaching remote language groups who had no Scripture in their own tongue — continued through the twentieth century and still continues today.
    The sending wasn’t only happening overseas, either. In the early 1940s, a fresh wave of youth evangelism broke out in American cities. In 1944, a group of young pastors and evangelists organized Youth for Christ, packing out Saturday night rallies with teenagers hungry for something real in the middle of a world at war. A young preacher named Billy Graham became its first full-time traveling evangelist, crisscrossing the country before Youth for Christ itself crossed the ocean — within just a few years it had planted branches on nearly every continent, training up a generation of young evangelists, some of whom became missionaries themselves. The same gospel urgency that sent Judson to Burma was still sending young people out over a century later.
    And missionaries didn’t just preach and move on — wherever they went, they built. Mission hospitals brought modern medicine into regions that had none, training local doctors and nurses who kept those hospitals running long after the missionaries themselves were gone. Missionary educators founded some of the oldest universities, colleges, and seminaries in the non-Western world — schools like the American University of Beirut, planted by American missionaries in the 1800s, or the hospital and university network in Korea that grew out of missionary medicine and still bears the name of the doctor who started it. Missionaries opened orphanages for children who had nowhere else to go, and started schools that taught whole regions to read — sometimes creating the first written alphabet a language had ever had, just so people could hold a Bible in their own tongue.
    Long after the tents came down and the sermons ended, the hospitals kept healing, the schools kept teaching, and the seminaries kept training pastors of their own.
    Why did they do all of this? Because Jesus said to go. Matt 28:19
    Matthew 28:19 NLT
    19 Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
    The modern missions movement has been funded and staffed by Americans then and now. One missionary may not become famous, but when we get to heaven, we may just see nations that were changed simply because someone… an American obey God’s call to missions.
    Imagine lighting a candle in a dark room. That candle light another and then another. Soo the whole room shines bright.
    That’s what missionaries have done. And America has helped to carry that light into places, not because Americans are better than anyone else, but because faithful Christians responded to Christ’s command to go and make disciples.

    Freedom comes with responsibility.

    Galatians 5:13 NLT
    13 For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love.

    Freedom is not a license, it is a stewardship.

    Our forefathers fought for political freedom. Jesus died to give us spiritual freedom. Both freedoms carry responsibility.
    Freedom without character becomes chaos.
    Freedom without truth becomes deception.
    Freedom without god destroys itself.
    Every great nation… every great civilization eventually declined… not simply because enemies attacked from the outside, but because moral decay weakened them from within.
    Rome wasn’t conquered until it first became corrupt and weak.
    The same principle is true for every nation and America will not escape that principle.
    Proverbs 14:34 NLT
    34 Godliness makes a nation great, but sin is a disgrace to any people.
    Notice what Solomon didn’t say.
    He didn’t say military strength makes a nation great.
    He didn’t say economic strength make a nation great.
    He didn’t say political parties make a nation great.
    He said, Godliness makes a nation great.
    Our greatest need today is not just a better economy, stronger borders and better politicians… although all fo those are good things.

    America’s greatest need is Spiritual Awakening.

    We have to wake up and turn back to the Lord.

    Every generation must choose.

    One of the mistakes we often make is the belief that because our grandparents loved God, that our grand children automatically will love God. That doesn’t work.

    Faith is never inherited.

    Every generation must choose.
    Joshua stood before the people of Israel and said, Joshua 24:15
    Joshua 24:15 NLT
    15 But if you refuse to serve the Lord, then choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.”
    That challenge is as relevant today as it was then.
    Will we continue to honor God?
    Will we teach our children His Word?
    Will we pray?
    Will we worship faithfully?
    Will we live differently from the culture around us?
    America’s future will not ultimately be determined by the people in Washington. It will be determined …
    in homes…
    in churches…
    In classrooms…
    and in hearts…
    Revival has never started in the White House or the Halls of Congress. It has always started in God’s House.

    America’s greatest days can still be ahead.

    It’s easy to become discouraged. When we look around we see
    Division
    Violence
    Confusion
    Declining morality
    Church attendance dropping in many places…
    Families struggling…
    Young people searching for purpose…
    But remember this…

    God specializes in restoring what seems beyond repair.

    Through the Bible, God repeatedly revived His people when they humbled themselves and sought Him.
    Nineveh -
    Judah under King Josiah -
    Great Awakenings in America -

    When God’s people prayed, God moved.

    When God’s people repented, God forgave.

    When God’s people obeyed, God blessed.

    The answer has never been despair and hopelessness. The answer has always been revival.

    God’s promise still stands.

    One of the best known promises in the Bible was originally spoken to Israel, but it reveals an enduring principle about God’s love for people who humble themselves before Him.
    2 Chronicles 7:14 NLT
    14 Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.
    Notice the progression.
    Humble ourselves… instead of pride. Choose humility
    Pray instead of complaining.
    Seek God… Seek His face… not just His blessings… not merely His protection. Seek Him.
    Turn from sin. Revival always begins with repentance.
    Then comes God’s promise.
    I will hear.
    I will forgive.
    I will restore.
    That is our hope still today.
    Years ago, a visitor walked through a beautiful cathedral in Europe. He noticed the beautiful stained glass windows depicting missionaries carrying the Gospel around the world.
    he asked his guide, “who paid for all of this?”
    The guide smiled and said, “Many churches represented here were built or sustained through the sacrificial giving of Christians from America.”
    The visitor stood quietly realizing something profound.
    The greatest influence of a nation is not measure by it’s wealth or it’s military, or it’s technology.

    The greatest influence of a nation is measured by how the eternal lives it helps to change.

    What an incredible privilege God has given American Christians. May we never take it for granted.

    Be grateful … but be faithful.

    Today as we celebrate 250 years as a nation.
    We thank God for liberty.
    We honor those who sacrificed for it.
    We remember the blessings God has poured out on our nation.
    But our celebration should also become a prayer. A prayer that America would once again be known…
    Not merely for our power, but for our character.
    Not merely for her prosperity, but for her holiness.
    Not merely for her freedom, but for her faith.
    As believers, our ultimate hope is not on a political party, a president, or even in America itself. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, the King of Kings.
    Because we love Jesus, we seek the good of our nation. We pray for our leaders. We serve our neighbors. We raise godly families. We support the worl of the Gospel at home and around the world.
    May God continue to bless America. And may American continue to seek the God who has so richly bless her.
    invitation
    Perhaps you are here and you feel far from God… maybe you have drifted or maybe you have never had that relationship.
    The greatest freedom is ot political freedom. It’s freedom fro sin.
    Jesus said,
    John 8:36 NLT
    36 So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free.
    Today God is calling us, not only as citizens, but as His people. Let’s recommit ourselves to Jesus. Let’s pray for our nation. Let’s support the spread of the Gospel. Let’s live in such a way that future generations will say:

    They loved their country, but they loved Jesus even more.

    May God bless America, and may America glorify God. Amen.

      • Psalm 33:12NIV

      • Psalm 33:12NIV

      • Acts 17:26NIV

      • Genesis 1:27NIV

      • Galatians 5:1NIV

      • Micah 6:8NIV

      • Jeremiah 17:9NIV

      • 2 Corinthians 3:17NIV

      • Matthew 5:14NIV

      • Matthew 28:19NIV

      • Galatians 5:13NIV

      • Proverbs 14:34NIV

      • Joshua 24:15NIV

      • 2 Chronicles 7:14NIV

      • John 8:36NIV

River Church NOLA
robert@riverchurchnola.com
504-578-8317
https://riverchurchnola.com
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