Many, in fact most, people in this world have no idea how true that statement is. So many people today see Christianity as one of the many world religions who’s participants are weak people, needing some kind of crutch to get them through life.

If the otherwise admirable civilized pagans of Greece and Rome had had the sense to laugh Judaism into oblivion, we would have been spared the 2000 year sickness of Christianity. Charles Markmann (who wrote a book on the history of the ACLU )

The reality is that that Christ and Christianity have literally been at the very roots of the development of civilizations as this world knows it. If Jesus Christ had not come into this world; our world would be a very, very different place. Those people who openly degrade Christianity in general, and Christians in particular, are not speaking from a head full of knowledge…. They are showing how completely empty they are of understanding the part Christianity has played in forming the civilization they now enjoy!

1) High regard for human life

2) Worldwide impact on moral values…civilizing the uncivilized

3) Impact on health and medicine…hospital construction

4) Contribution toward freedom for all and civil liberties

5) Contributions to the poor and needy in our world

6) Impact on science

7) Impact on economics

8) Establishment of sexual values and family formation

9) Contribution to education and the formation of schools and universities

10) Impact on arts and music

11) Representative government the separation of political powers

12) The codifying and writing of languages

13) Elevated value for the common person

14) Elevated value of women

15) Millions of changed lives from societal liabilities to assets

We looked long and achingly at a history of child killing and abortion and killing of the elderly, and killing for sport, and cannibalism and the dramatic changes that took place when any society came to know Jesus.

If only the secularists in our society could understand that if they manage to remove God from our society’s foundations; our nation will return to a value-less view of human life…we have already begun down that slide…

The moral base of any society can be judged by it’s view of human life!

I pondered whether to read from this book; Eyes of the Tailless Animals and decided that particularly our young people needed to hear this. Soon Ok Lee, the author was a communist woman, in North Korea, who was arrested for not quickly supplying what her superiors wanted from her and sent to a concentration camp. This book is her eyewitness account of what happened there and her eventual conversion to Christianity. This book was printed in 1999, just 5 years ago. This concentration camp is existing today and these things are going on right now in North Korea.

Six pregnant women were lying on the cold cement floor which was not even covered with a mat. I thought, even animals receive better treatment outside this prison. The women were giving birth to their babies. The babies were supposed to be stillborn. Because Kim Il Sung had ordered that all anti-communist be eliminated within three generations, prison policy said that the prisoners could not have babies in prison. …Poison was injected into the babies…after the injection the women suffered tremendous pain until the babies were stillborn… Medical officers walked around the pregnant women and kicked their swollen bellies if they screamed or moaned. Miraculously some babies were born alive….When a live baby was born a medical officer said to the medical prisoners, “Kill it, these criminals don’t have any right to have babies.” The mothers of the newborns sobbed helplessly while shaking hands twisted the babies neck. Some of the women screamed and were beaten. Male prisoners wrapped the babies in rags and dumped them in a basket….

Stop it, I can’t stand hearing that stuff…The reason it sounds so hideous to you is because, and only because, your mind has been enlightened by the principles of God truth.

Killing unwanted members of society has always been an “all in a days activity” in Godless societies…… I know this is tough to listen to but I want to read one more section about the treatment of Christians:

I saw eight Christian prisoners carrying a big metal kettle holding molten iron. An officer called to them using vile words. “Tomorrow is the day of re-education training. “As you know, it is held because of your stubbornness.” Tomorrow is “cleaning the mind day”.

Tomorrow you will go out and tell everyone that there is nothing in heaven to believe in; there is no God!…or you will be killed. Do you understand? There was silence… Not one of the prisoners responded to the officer. He didn’t like being ignored… Why are you so quiet?…answer me now! No one said a word.

The officer became furious and began to curse at the men. Come here and put your faces down to the ground. They sat on their knees and bent there heads down. The officer called over other male prisoners… We cannot let these men live! Bring boiling iron from the furnace and pour it on them. The iron was 1200 degrees. The prisoners were full of fear. They hesitated… Do you want to die with them??? The frightened prisoners poured the boiling metal on top of the people of God.

The smell of burning flesh assailed my nostrils.. Their bodies began to shrivel from the intense heat as the liquid metal burned right through them. The impact on me was so tremendous that I screamed as if I were crazy. Other prisoners screamed as the eight Christians died. I looked at the shrunken bodies and wondered in my heart, What do they believe? What do they see in the empty sky? I didn’t understand what made them not fear death. Their unbelievable faith brought a big question into my heart. What did they see…what am I missing?

Need I say more?…..

Where did the idea of mass educating the next generation come from? In virtually all past cultures, an elite few have been chosen out and educated to carry on the traditions and values of their culture; but in ancient cultures, the masses remained uneducated. It shouldn’t surprise you that it was God, Himself, who commanded the educating of more than just an elite few:

(Deuteronomy 6:6-7) "And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. "You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. (NKJV)

Every school you see, where the general population is entering it’s doors to gain insight into life should be a direct reminders of the impact of Jesus Christ on this world. Many of our institutions of higher education today promote a secular philosophy of life designed to relieve “enlightened” mankind of the ball-and-chain that Christianity has hung around our nation’s neck. Students coming out of Princeton and Harvard, and Yale, and Oxford, and Cambridge today have no idea that if Jesus had never been born; their beloved universities would never have existed and the majority of them would have remained entirely uneducated.

1) During the pre-Reformation years there were feeble attempts made to bring education to the masses but they all died out.

2) During the Dark ages, it was the Christian priests and monks who laboriously copied, by hand, many of the ancient classics that we have available today.

3) Most of the languages that have been codified have been done so by Christians seeking to bring the word of God to illiterate tribes, much like Wycliffe is still doing today. (During the atheistic Communist regime the alphabet they used every day was developed by a missionary to translate Christian writings.)

4) The movable type printing press that made the mass production of books possible was developed by Johann Gutenburg for the sole reason of mass printing the Gutenburg Bible. (The same technology is now used to discredit Christianity)

5) After the Reformation, in pagan countries like China and India the literacy rate was an average 10%. In countries where the reading of God’s Word was promoted literacy ranged from 94-99%

1) The Puritans immediately passed a law requiring all children to be educated.

“Old Deluder satan Act”- 1647- It being one chief project of that old deluder, satan, to keep man from the knowledge of the Scripture, …it is therefore ordered by the court.. that every township within this jurisdiction shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children to read and write, whose wages shall be paid…

2) The Origin of public education was to teach God’s truth. There curriculum?

The Bible; The New England Primer:

A- In Adam’s fall…we sinned all

B- Heaven to find.. The Bible mind

C- Christ crucified…for sinner died

D- the Deluge drowned… the Earth around

E- Elijah hid…by raven fed

H- The Book and my Heart…must never part

P- Peter denied…his Lord and cried

For the first 217 years, all education was Christian at its roots… John Quincy Adams in early 1800’s said that only 4 people out of 1000 were illiterate.

And it was the pursuit of a deeper understanding of Biblical truth that led to the founding of the great western Universities. Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, Brown, Princeton, New York University, Northwestern and others were all founded by churches as Biblical training centers.

1) Harvard started with money and books from Rev, John Harvard

2) Dartmouth was founded to train missionaries to the Indians

3) William and Mary was created to “that the Christian faith might by propagated”

4) Columbia University- “to teach children to know God in Christ Jesus”

5) Princeton- “Cursed be all learning that is contrary to the cross of Jesus Christ!”

In 1837 Horace Mann became the “Father of modern public education.” You have to understand church history to pick up the two ’Great Awakenings” and the revivals that were sweeping our nation but countering all of that was the rise of the Universalist and Unitarian churches who did not believe in the Trinity or the diety of Christ, and who rejected the inspiration of Scripture. Mann was a Unitarian! The fact that the entire educational system in America was in the hand of Christians drove him nuts! His answer was to promote an educational system operated, paid for, and run by the government.

In was in the 20^{th century that John Dewey’s “progressive education” philosophy began to take hold in America. Dewey was the first president of the “American Humanist Association“. Dr Hodge of Princeton University predicted, then, that:}

(Proverbs 9:10) "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (NIV)

Interesting, estimates today put the illiteracy rate in America at 40 million with another 30 million being “functionally illiterate.” Our illiteracy rate is now, almost tied with that of Zambia, Africa. Any politician who tells you that we simply need more money for education and all of our woes will fade away…simply has no idea what he is talking about.

In the same time frame this slide has been going on in our country, the rest of the world has been enjoying the fruit of the “great century of missions“. American missionaries have been building schools and training the next generation in “third world” countries at such a successful rate that their literacy problems are quickly reversing.

This last week secularists went crazy when Texas lawmakers described the United Stated as a “Christian nation.” There are so many in America today who seethe with anger at the thought of anyone believing this nation has Christian roots. The truth is; the only way anybody could believe that our nation does not have a Christian foundation is either to completely ignore our early history as a nation or to so rewrite our history so that it doesn’t reflect what actually took place.

I wonder to what degree you young people understand the overwhelming role Christianity played in the beginning of this country. I wonder if what some of you have been taught has all but obliterated the reality of what really happed in our countries early years.

Take away Christianity, and there would be no America as we know it!

In 1954, a leading American said:

“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of our Savior have from the beginning been our guiding genius… Earl Warren- Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

In 1620, before the Pilgrims landed they sat in the captain’s quarters of the ship and wrote the “birth certificate of America” - “The Mayflower Compact:

We, who’s names are undersigned…having undertaken for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith and the honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another covenant… The Mayflower Compact

Wave after wave of Pilgrims and Puritans came and after 150 years in 1643 they formed a single covenant called the New England Confederation and here is what the agreed on:

We all came into these parts of America, with one and the same end and aim, namely to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ!

We showed you last week the preamble to the Constitution. It clearly states that our nation is founded on the one sovereign God. Experts estimate that 50 or 52 of the 56 signers of the Constitution were Christian. That’s not surprising since 98% of Americans were Protestant, 1.6% were Catholic. So 99.8% of our country were professed Christians.

James Madison, the chief framer of the Constitution said:

Our wise forefathers came up with a “separation of political powers that has served us well…where did they come up with that brilliant idea?

(Isaiah 33:22) For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; it is he who will save us. (NIV)

In 1892, the Supreme Court set out to examine every document that had anything to do with the formation of our country…every Compact…every State Constitution. They passed what was known as the Trinity Decision: