How to Be Real Americans

Fight Laugh Feast 2024

Introduction

Repentance means “turning around.” Repentance means putting off sin and putting on righteousness. It means to stop lying and tell the truth. It means to stop stealing, get a job, work hard, pay your bills, and be so diligent that you have some extra to give to those in need (Eph. 4). 

This repentance is a change of mind and a change of heart that has concrete expression in this material world, resulting in a change of life. Repentance means putting off the old man and putting on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him (Col. 3:10). Sin deforms and destroys nature. But God’s grace heals and restores nature – and in particular, human nature.

This means that human beings deformed by sin, but saved by God’s grace and repenting of their sins, are beginning to become real human beings. When a thief becomes a faithful businessman, this is a man becoming whole – this is a human being become truly human, more fully the man he was created to be. Sin is falling short of the glory of God, but repentance is a restoration of that glory, being changed from glory to glory into that heavenly image. 

This includes our sexuality. A Christian man who repents and believes begins a lifelong path of becoming more fully masculine, more manly, more virtuous as a man, and usually a husband and father. Likewise, a Christian woman who repents and believes begins a lifelong path of becoming more fully feminine, more womanly, more fruitful and lovely as a woman, and usually a wife and mother. By the power of the Holy Spirit, impotent creatures deformed and sterilized by sin are growing up into what Lewis calls “gods and goddesses,” creatures if you saw now, you would be tempted to worship (e.g. Rev. 22:8-9).  

In other words, the “new man” is not gender neutral or asexual; the new man is more fully male and more fully female than anything we can imagine. But what about nationality? What about citizenship? The thesis of this talk is that yes, repentance includes renewing our earthly citizenship and nationality. God is not merely healing a generic humanity, or merely our sexuality; God is also healing our nationalities. 

We preach not only that individuals must repent and believe and so become true men and women; but that they must also become true husbands and fathers and family members and true church members, and to our point here: they must also repent and believe and so become true citizens of their respective nations. The Great Commission is to preach the gospel and disciple the nations, teaching them to obey Christ in everything, which means in part, learning to obey Christ in your national context, as an Ethiopian, as a Pakistani, as a Canadian, as an American. Unlike male and female, which are permanent assignments from God, nationality may change. Ruth the Moabitess swore an oath to Naomi and so joined the Israelite nation. But so may other earthly assignments: a man gets married and becomes a husband, and now by the process of repentance, he must grow into a a real husband, and when a child is born and he becomes a father, he must repent of his fleshly instincts and become a real father. So repentance means not only becoming real men and women, real husbands and wives, real fathers and mothers, but also true citizens of our respective nations. Therefore, the gospel for us in this land is the good news that through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, we can become real Americans. 

True Citizens & True Romans

This point is illustrated well by Paul and Silas in Philippi in Acts 16: When Paul was arrested in Philippi, which was a significant Roman colony, he was accused of teaching customs that were not lawful for Romans to receive and observe (Acts 16:21). In other words, the question posed in this episode is: what is a true Roman, a real Roman?

What was Paul’s so-called “crime”? Casting a demon out of slave girl used to tell fortunes. For this false accusation, a mob formed and the city magistrates had Paul and Silas beaten and imprisoned without a trial. That night, while Paul and Silas were teaching the prisoners some of their favorite psalms and hymns, an earthquake broke their chains and opened the doors to the prison, and somehow Paul and Silas convinced the prisoners not to escape (Acts 16:28). This whole thing rattled the jailor in all the right ways, and he immediately demanded to know how he could be saved. The jailor believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and there was a midnight baptism service for his whole family. The next day, the magistrates of the city ordered Paul and Silas to leave quietly, but Paul objected, since they had been beaten without a trial as Roman citizens. Notice that: the episode begins and ends with this reference to being Romans. The accusation was that Paul was teaching customs that were contrary to being Roman, but the episode closes with Paul arguing that it was the Roman magistrates who had not acted as true Romans. Paul and Silas are the real Romans in the story and the magistrates are forced to acknowledge that: hearing that they were Roman citizens caused the magistrates to fear and so Paul and Silas were granted a very respectful and apologetic escort out of the city (Acts 16:38-39). 

But part of what this story illustrates is that Paul and Silas were the true and virtuous Romans. The slave masters who abused a demon possessed slave girl were false Romans. They were ironically actually acting in ways contrary to justice. The vigilante mob that formed fomenting revolution and chaos were also false Romans. The magistrates intimidated by the mob, who had Paul and Silas beaten without a trial, were unjust and corrupt Romans. But part of the point of this story is that the gospel ministry of Paul and Silas was bringing the true form of Roman piety to Philippi. As Paul later wrote to the Philippians: “Only live as citizens in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27).

Philippi was not only a Roman colony, it was a famous Roman colony. In 42 B.C. in the fields of Philippi in Macedonia, Greece, the armies of Brutus and Cassius collided with the armies of Mark Anthony and Octavian, and the latter soundly defeated the former. Octavian would become the emperor of the Roman Empire, taking the name Caesar Augustus and eventually lavish a great deal of prominence on the colony of Philippi as the site of that historic battle. In fact, many of the generals from that war were given lands and retired there. And the city of Philippi became known as a “little Rome.” The colonial status of Philippi was prestigious and famous. But left to their fallen natures, little Rome was quickly becoming as beastly as their Mother Rome. 

But the gospel did not come to Philippi to destroy Philippi but to heal it. The gospel does not come to destroy nature, but to heal it. The gospel did not come to destroy Roman culture; the gospel of Jesus Christ came to restore Roman culture. As Augustine labored to show centuries later in his great work City of God, it was paganism that cursed ancient cultures and kingdoms – and the Roman Empire in particular: immorality and false gods and demons constantly twisted true Roman virtue and piety. It was Christ who brought the true end, the true purpose of human beings and their nations and kingdoms. It was Christ who brought the true way of being Roman through His death and resurrection.

We see this in Acts 16: The gospel did not come to end the Philippian economy. It came to cast the demons out of the Philippian economy. It came to set abused slave girls free. It came to set abusive businessmen free to work hard and be truly productive. The gospel did not come to destroy Roman justice; it came to restore Roman justice in society and in courtrooms and prisons. It came to teach Romans to repudiate vigilante mobs; it came to insist on due process of law, the necessity of two or three witnesses, and just criminal penalties. It came to teach Romans to live as a Roman citizens worthy of the gospel of Christ (Phil. 1:27). Why did God create Romans? God created Romans to glorify and enjoy Him forever. God created Romans so that they might display His glory in the earth through their particular customs and traditions and culture, not for their selfish aims, not so that they would crush the weak and poor. No, He created Romans so that they might be honorable and dignified and protect life and take dominion in all wisdom.

The gospel came to Philippi so that sinful, disfigured Romans might become true Romans, real Romans like Lydia who believed in Jesus, perhaps like the slave girl who was delivered from bondage to the demon, and certainly like the jailor and his family. And by the same token, the gospel was an invitation to the cruel businessmen, to the bloodthirsty mob, and the corrupt magistrates to become true Romans, real Romans, holy Romans, heavenly Romans. And so this is the message for every nation: God not only sent His Son so that fallen men and women might become real men and women, He sent His Son so that sinful Chinese might become real Chinese, so that Ethiopians deformed by sin might become true and virtuous Ethiopians. God sent His Son so that the Kingdoms of this world might become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Christ died so that the nations of this world might walk in the glory of the Lamb, that the kings of the earth might bring their particular national glories and honor into the City of God.

True Americans

And so this is true for us here in America. God made this land, and God made the people who have cultivated this land. From the first indigenous people down to the present, God has providentially orchestrated our story, our culture, our peoples, our families, our constitution, our states. This is not to say that everything we have done is good and right. This is not to say that we are some kind of special, chosen nation. No, the Christian Church is the New Israel scattered among the nations of men. The Christian Church is God’s chosen nation and holy priesthood. But what is the task of that Christian Church scattered among the nations? The churches are colonies. Every Christian is a colonist commissioned by the High King to disciple our nations. Instead of being colonists of Rome, we are colonists of heaven. Again, in Philippians 3 it says, “For our citizenship is in heaven; from whence we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself” (Phil. 3:20-21). Colonists are not preparing to leave. Colonists are the advance team, establishing the ways of the Motherland.

We pray in the Lord’s Prayer “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We are not citizens of heaven because we are planning to leave. We are citizens of heaven because we have been assigned the task of establishing the ways of heaven on earth. The assignment of the colonists of Philippi was initially to make Philippi a little Rome. And so it is that the colonists of heaven are assigned the task of making our cities and nations little heavens. The fact that our citizenship is in heaven means that the true form of our citizenship is there. We are here to bring that true form of citizenship to earth. 

But we can take this one step further: What is the form of our true citizenship? What is the shape of that Kingdom that is coming? What is God’s will to be done on earth in our particular nations? Well, let’s start with our humanity. Are we praying for gender-neutral heavenly humanity to descend upon us? Some moderns have taken verses out of context to conclude that since there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Gal. 3:28), that must mean all distinctions are being blended together in Christ. But that’s not what that verse means. Elsewhere, Scripture makes it clear that men and women, husbands and wives, even slaves and masters still have particular duties to one another in Christ. The whole point of this verse is that all of these different callings and situations in life have the same inheritance in Christ, the same Holy Spirit, the same salvation. But what does that Holy Spirit do in those different situations? It doesn’t magically obliterate them. It heals them, restores them, and transfigures them into what God created them to be. Yes, that means some fairly radical transformations (like slavery), but not obliterations. The Holy Spirit comes to restore nature, heal nature, glorify nature. 

The gospel has come to restore Jews and Greeks, and therefore the gospel has come to restore Romans and Americans. We are colonists of heaven, but this does not mean that we are therefore stripped of our nationalities and cultures and ethnicities. We are not colonists of a humanistic multicultural globalism, not even a baptized one. When John glimpsed the glories of Heaven, it was not a Heavenly Babel, with everyone speaking the same language, nor was it a Babel of chaos and cacophony. It was “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues, [that] stood before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God, which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9-10). 

And so this is the thing you need to know and believe: among the nations assembled in Heaven is America. China is there. Russia is there. France is there. And we are there. George Washington is there. John Witherspoon is there. Adoniram Judson is there. Stonewall Jackson is there. R.L. Dabney is there. J. Gresham Machen is there. Jim Eliot is there. Millions of Americans are already there assembling before the throne, stripped of all their sins and clothed in the glory of Christ. And they are more fully human than ever. They are more fully male and more fully female than anything we can imagine. But they are also more fully American than anything we can imagine. Nothing good is ever lost. Everything good is growing into what it was always intended to be. And that includes our nationality and culture. That includes this land, our land, America the Beautiful.

Bu it is not merely that we are going there to heaven when we die – although that is quite wonderfully true. But we are currently assigned our stations here in this place, in this time in order to bring what our fathers and mothers are already enjoying there in Heaven to the here and now: “on earth as it is in Heaven.” We are not merely bringing the generic ways of Heaven to earth. We are bringing the ways of America in heaven to America on earth. Our citizenship is in Heaven from whence we await our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our vile bodies to be fashioned like unto His glorious body. Just as Jesus will return as a glorified Israelite and Jew, He will raise us up in new and glorified bodies, and that means in part that Americans will be raised as glorified Americans. 

Or another way to say this is that the true America, the real America is in Heaven, where our citizenship is, and therefore, we are called to be citizens here in a manner worthy of the Lord Jesus Christ.   

C.S. Lewis describes it this way in That Hideous Strength:

“Logres was our name for it – it will do as well as another. [Logres is another name for Camelot, the land of Arthur and the Knights of the roundtable, the land of St. George.] And then… gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting… How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries?… This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England – no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about… He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China – why, then it will be spring.”

This is what we’re talking about. Every country, every nation has its own haunting, the spirit or angel of its true glory: what God made it for. America is no different. And if I may be so bold, ours is the Spirit of Christian Liberty. So Christians are not only the ministers of true humanity in a general sense; we are ministers of a particular, true humanity. We are not gnostics. The gospel restores everything it touches. And it touches everything. The gospel restores our manhood and womanhood. The gospel restores families. The gospel restores business and economics. And the gospel restores nations. Just as the Philippians were called to be true Romans as citizens of heaven, so too American Christians are called by God to be true Americans, real Americans. Our assignment is to demonstrate what it means to be a real American. We are colonists of the true America, the heavenly form of America, the highest and truest version of America, which is in Christ Jesus. 

Conclusion: The Dignity of Guilt

So what does this mean? How do we bring the true America to America? By living as citizens worthy of Jesus Christ. This brings us full circle: repentance is the grace by which God restores individuals, families, and nations. Christ did not die merely to purchase individuals; He did not die merely to purchase families. Christ died to purchase the nations. 

“O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth” (Ps. 67:4). “Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him… His name shall endure forever: his name shall be continued as long as the sun: and men shall be blessed in him: all nations shall call him blessed” (Psa. 72:11, 17). “Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations” (Psa. 82:8). “All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name” (Psa. 86:9). “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it” (Is. 2:2).

And remember the promise to Abraham: in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed. But this blessing is not automatic. This blessing comes from turning to God in repentance. And God’s people are the ones who are to lead the way. Jesus said, you are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. And we often rightly emphasize the negative side of this: the church has failed to be salt and light. Too many Christians are indecipherable from the world. But the flip side of this is great hope and optimism for faithful Christians. For those who have determined to know Christ and Him crucified, for those determined to repent of sin and walk in the light, what a promise! If you walk in the light, having no unconfessed sin, you shine as a bright light in this world, as true men and women, as true families, and as true Americans. 

But I want to press this in two particular directions. First, America needs a great recovery of the dignity of guilt. Part of the insidiousness of the Marxist Darwinian virus is the progressive destruction of individual agency. Marxism and Darwinism are both ultimately deterministic false religions. They are both thoroughly materialistic, and therefore everything happens as a result of your environment, your chemicals, the climate, your class and income levels, ethnicity, your sex, genes, whatever. And so everyone is a victim. And intersectionality has been the attempt to rank victim points. I believe this is actually in the process of backfiring, but not because many Americans don’t want to play the victim game. But now everyone is trying to cash in on it: white people, males, Christians, and so on. And make no mistake: white male Christians have become one of the most hated classes.

But the end of this road is not freedom; it is slavery. The demand that nothing is your fault is the demand that nothing you do matters. All excuse making is an evasion of your own dignity, the power of your own choices, the potency of your own freedom and agency as a human being made in God’s image. When you insist that your choices don’t matter, you are ultimately saying that you do not matter.

But God dignifies His creatures with personal and covenantal guilt. Some of the most glorious words in the opening tragedy of our race in that Garden long ago, were the words, “What have you done?” And Adam and Eve made excuses like we often do: they blamed God, blamed one another, blamed the serpent, but God did not let them off the point, and He responded by saying, “Because you have done this…” What wonderfully terrible words. This is the dignity of guilt. The dignity of moral agency. Human choices matter. Your choices matter. And that means you matter. So the invitation to repentance is the invitation to become a person, to become fully human, to become fully male, fully female, and therefore, along with all that you are, fully American, a real American. 

We have been given the assignment of showing America its highest form, its truist form, American citizenship worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So what is that? In some ways, we are still a very young nation. So this like asking what is the true form of a 10 year old boy who has not yet reached full maturity, compared to England, France, and Greece, for example. But like a 10 year old boy, we can know something of what America is. We are a nation of explorers. We are a nation of entrepreneurs. We are a nation with a fierce independent spirit. We are that 10 year old boy, but we are also a 10 year old boy with advanced cancer. Our cancers are the sins of pride and arrogance and individualism and secularism. We were a special nation because in the beginning we knew that there was nothing special about us. We believed in limited government and separation of powers and decentralized power because we knew that men loved to get drunk on power. But this form of government only worked so long as everyone took responsibility for their own choices, their own failures, their own families and churches and communities. 

And so this the true American: take responsibility for everything you can. Do not make excuses. And do not merely do it for yourself. Do it for you family, your descendants, your church, but also for your neighbors, your city, and your nation. Stop blaming your parents, the economy, your church, your genes. Stop making excuses. Your choices matter. Your labors matter. Your repentance matters. When a man repents of his abdication and blaming his wife and kids and the economy and his parents, and humbles himself before the living God, God restores that man’s power. The excuses sterilize you, but taking responsibility, owning your personal failures, and owning the failed situation you find yourself in is the path to authority. As Pastor Wilson says, authority flows to those who take responsibility. 

At the same time, and this is the second point: this is only possible in Jesus Christ. We live in a land with a terrible weight of guilt, and the weight of that guilt would be crushing if it landed directly on us. And this is fundamentally why no one wants it. Deep down, everyone knows that the wages of sin is death. Deep down, America knows we have rebelled against the Father, and He has every reason to be angry with us. We have defied the living God in our streets, in our homes, in our hearts, in our courtrooms, and legislative halls. We have redefined liberty as our lusts, and we have dared God to destroy us. 

We are a filthy people. We have the blood of millions of innocent babies on our hands. We have the violence of porn, adultery, divorce, sodomy, trans surgeries on our hands. And the price we have paid for our lusts is slavery. We have sold ourselves into massive tax burdens: taxed on our incomes, taxed on our purchases, taxed on our sales, taxed on our land, taxed on our roads, taxed on our inheritances, mugged at every intersection by a bureaucratic state obese with corruption and disease. Our forefathers bucked at relatively miniscule taxes, that we don’t even blink at. We have grown so comfortable in our chains, we don’t even know what freedom is. We’ve grown so comfortable with the pigs, we think the pig food is real food. 

We have become a filthy, wicked people, but there is a great Savior for our people, for this people, for this nation. Prodigal America is not real America. It is what we have become, but it is not what God made us for. Christ did not merely die for a generic human mass of random individuals. He died to save His elect, and those elect are from every nation, so that the nations might stream to Him. He died so that the nations might be forgiven and cleansed, so that they might repent and bring their glories into the New Jerusalem and sing His praises. 

So this is the way back to the Father. And there is no other way. Our nation groans under its sins, aches with our cancers and corruption. And there must be atonement. We will either grasp at our own humanistic atonement, cutting ourselves, destroying ourselves, crushing our neighbors because there must be blood. Or else we will fall on our knees at the foot of the Cross. But this is the thing: just like Pilgrim in Pilgrims Progress: it is nothing for God to remove our guilt. Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Lamb of God, it is nothing for Him to take away the great burden from our backs. For as soon as you pass under the shadow of the Cross, the burden comes off and rolls away and disappears into an empty tomb – the tomb of the One who is risen from the dead. 

So this is a true American: a forgiven sinner who has become a citizen of Heaven, who has been given the mission of discipling this nation and teaching it to obey Christ in everything, so that it might shine with the glory for which it was made, that it might return the gifts and glories to the Father of Lights, from whom every good and perfect gift descends. 

One of those great gifts is America. It is a rugged land of mountains and rivers and plains and forests; it is a people of ingenuity, courage, sacrifice, and principles; it is a constitutional republic, a covenantal union of states, bound by a Protestant creed, a particular history of exploration and invention and adventure, and yes, heartache and failures and wars; it’s New England chowder and southern grits, Midwest casseroles and Wisconsin dairies, Texas BBQ and San Francisco Sour Dough, and northwest coffee and smooth, dark beer. It is baseball and football and farm boys and surfers and pioneers and cowboys and salesmen and truck drivers and preachers and academics. 

This is our land. It does not belong to the secularists. It does not belong to corrupt politicians. It belongs to Jesus Christ. He purchased it with His blood. 

Like our Lord and His first disciples, we preach repentance in Jesus Christ. We do not merely preach a spiritual experience. We preach Christ risen from the dead, and therefore, we preach sinners risen from the dead. We preach the dead alive. We preach to armies of dry bones, like the Prophet Ezekiel, and we summons them to live. We summons them to rise, to take on flesh, to become true men and women, real men and women. We preach the life-giving Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, and so we preach that same Spirit renewing every area of life. We preach Jesus risen from the dead so that Americans might rise from the dead as real Americans.

There is plenty going wrong, plenty that we might rightly object to. Christians are being mistreated in this land. But when Paul and Silas had been falsely accused, beaten and imprisoned without a trial, they were found singing at the top of their lungs in prison. We are the forgiven. We are the repentant. So may we be found at our posts singing praises to our King. Amen.