00:00On this day, two and a half centuries ago, our forefathers gathered for the second time in as many years
00:06for a national day of fasting and prayer.
00:08The resolution of the Continental Congress called on the 13 colonies to humble themselves in preparation for the coming war,
00:15with true penitence of heart and the most reverent devotion publicly to acknowledge the overruling providence of God.
00:24In three and a half months' time, the colonists would be in open revolt against the most powerful empire in
00:29the history of the world.
00:31Many, on both sides of the Atlantic, thought their cause was a suicide mission.
00:36The founders were not naive men. They knew their lives were on the line.
00:41That was the premise of Benjamin Franklin's dark joke after signing the Declaration of Independence where he said,
00:46We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
00:51They had no guarantees of victory.
00:54They knew that what they were trying to do had never been done before in human history.
00:59But with the dark storm clouds of war looming on the horizon,
01:02they did what Christians have always done, across place and time for 2,000 years.
01:08They turned their eyes to heaven and placed their fate in the hands of God.
01:14It is no coincidence that America, from the very beginning, has occupied a unique and exceptional place in world history.
01:22Before the Christian West, most societies, and civilizations for that matter, thought in stagnant cycles.
01:28The flooding of the Nile, the return of the rains, the cycle of the harvest.
01:32History, for them, was a wheel to nowhere.
01:35It turned and turned only to end up back where it began.
01:40But our faith calls us outwards into the limitless darkness of the unknown.
01:46It tells us to go forth and preach the gospel to the world as a witness unto all nations, unto
01:52the ends of the earth.
01:54From that command came America.
01:58Our nation, more than any other in history, was shaped by this Christian idea.
02:03We saw it at work already in 1630, more than a century before the revolution,
02:07when John Winthrop stood on the deck of the Arabella in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
02:12and preached a sermon to his fellow Puritan colonists.
02:15We shall be as a city upon a hill, he told them.
02:19The eyes of all people are upon us.
02:21That same faith pushed America further to new frontiers.
02:25It was the engine of westward expansion.
02:26Who will respond to the call from beyond the Rocky Mountains,
02:30one reverend wrote in a public message to the American churches in 1833,
02:34calling for a wave of missionaries to leave the comforts of civilization
02:38and spread the gospel in the wilderness.
02:42Countless Americans answered that call.
02:45It was the same faith that was at work when Samuel Morse
02:48sent the first long-distance telegraph message in 1844.
02:52His message was a verse from the book of Numbers.
02:54What hath God wrought?
02:57And on Christmas Eve of 1968,
03:00three American astronauts orbited the moon.
03:03They were the first men in history to witness an Earth rise from lunar orbit,
03:09to look back at the blue marble of our home from a quarter million miles away.
03:14The world was watching.
03:16It was the largest television audience in the history of the world up to that point.
03:20And what did they say?
03:22They opened the book of Genesis.
03:24In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.
03:29This is who we are.
03:31It is who we have always been.
03:34America is still a young nation measured against a record of history.
03:37And from the beginning,
03:38we have carried the belief that our country represents something new in the world.
03:43But the soul of our nation has always been rooted in an ancient faith.
03:51America is still a young nation.
03:51America, our country is a young nation,
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