"The Privilege of Strangers" A Special Message on the 250th Birthday of America - Pastor Chad Stuart - July 4, 2026

25 years ago, on this day, I think it was a Wednesday, I was in one of my absolute favorite places in the entire world.

I was at Dodgers Stadium.

Christina and I were in the embryonic stages of our dating relationship.

The Dodgers beat the San Francisco Giants that day, uh, four to three.

The bombs were bursting in air, and the patriotic music was playing, and I had tears rolling down my face.

That was the 225th birthday of America, and today we're at the 250th place uh birthday of America.

And I'm glad to say that embryonic relationship grew into a marriage that I am still happy to be in, and I'm pretty sure I'll say for her, she's not here to refute it, but I think she's happy to be in too.

We survived the fact that the Dodgers beat the Giants that day.

She's a San Francisco Giants fan, so uh, and we've survived us beating them many other times since, so it's kind of a nice thing.

But uh we are we are uh but tonight tonight when the music plays and when the when the fireworks go off and the bombs burst in air, I would guess that I will probably have tears running down my cheeks again.

Even as we had those people stand up and you all applauded for all the people, the big-heartedness of America and this church brought me chills.

I appreciate that.

I love that about our country.

I have a very soft spot in my heart for this nation, and I have great love and appreciation for it.

And I think that is prophetically justified.

But I hold that love and appreciation loosely, and I hold it secondarily, which I think is also biblically justifying.

250 years ago today, a group of men shaped more by the enlightenment actually than by God, at least in their own thinking.

They used language of God and they they spoke of an almighty power, but but but they began that day, 250 years ago, to put their names to a document that would change, literally change the world.

Some modern pontificators try to present a revisionist history telling us that these men were devout Christians in the sense that we understand uh Christianity, a personal relationship with Jesus.

But many of them, probably in fact, most of them, were not.

They were not what we would call Christian in the sense of a personal relationship with Christ.

Benjamin Franklin, he was a great friend of George Whitfield.

Whitfield was uh uh a great preacher of yesteryear, an evangelist that could hold crowds of thousands without a microphone, with the the power of his voice and the and the testimony of his words.

Ben Franklin loved George Whitfield.

Whenever George Whitfield was in the States, Franklin would go to hear him preach.

They were friends, they they wrote letters back and forth.

But Franklin stated the following.

But never had he the satisfaction of seeing his prayers thus answered.

He took pride in the fact that he never became a true follower of Jesus.

Washington and Jefferson, like many of our other founders, were deists.

They believed in a God who set the world in motion, but they did not believe in a God who personally involved himself in the affairs of individuals.

That is what many of our founders were.

But they, the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, were convinced nearly to a man, in spite of their skepticism, they were convinced nearly to a man that what was happening on this continent was not accidental.

They saw that something larger than their own ambitions, even than their own enlightened minds could create, was at work.

They saw the hand of providence.

And so they built a government with that conviction, the conviction that founded this nation, baked into its foundation, that rights come not from governments, but from a creator God.

That conscience cannot be coerced, and that faith, however it takes its form and wherever it takes its form, must be freely chosen by the individual.

These men were not perfect men.

They were not even great in the fullest sense of the word.

The document wasn't a perfect or a great document.

The nation that was launched wasn't, hasn't been a perfect nation.

But on this Sabbath, on this particular birthday, I want to suggest that what God was doing, what God was doing with this country is more interesting and more theologically relevant than our founders understood, and probably than we oftentimes recognize.

More significant than the than the uncritical cheerleaders of America, and more significant than our cynics who want to just get rid of America ever have comprehended.

God raised up a nation for a greater significance than even man planned for.

Consider this just from my own theological perspective, and probably the theological perspective of many of you in here who are Seventh-day Aventists.

In 1831, just 55 years after this document was signed, and 48 years after the war ended that confirmed the liberties that were in this document, a man by the name of William Miller began to preach a message based upon his studies and understanding of Daniel chapter 8.

Daniel 8 · chapter mention

And the message was Jesus is coming soon.

The message wasn't popular, the message was not appreciated by everybody, the message was mocked, he was mocked, he was laughed at, he was ridiculed, but you know what he had?

The freedom to keep preaching because he was in this nation.

He preached a message that we still preach with a little bit further insight to this day.

To quote one of our Spencerville Church members, Dr.

Peter Landless, and I was driving as you shared this with me, so I didn't write it down, so forgive me if I don't sound as eloquent as you did.

But Dr.

Landless, we were talking on the phone the other day, and he he said to me, Chad, I speak as one born not of this country that holds several other passports, but I have been around the world and I'm convinced that it's clear that God planted our movement in America because there is no other country in the world where a fledgling group of teenagers, I'm adding this, Dr.

Landis, a fledgling group of teenagers and a seaboat captain could raise up a movement, a global movement for God, through this country.

And in fact, with all of its challenges, folks, with all of its struggles, it is still the country.

It is still the country that supports over 50% of this movement financially around the world.

Now, now I'm just gonna say this.

Some may say that is a bad thing.

We shouldn't be having to pay for everything else around the world.

I just want to give you this is my personal opinion.

They're wrong.

Just for so you know.

Here's my take on it.

If a tithe dollar of mine or an offering dollar of mine is used to make Jesus known across the street or across the sea, I don't care as long as Jesus is being made known to others.

That's all I care about.

So I say, praise God for this movement.

The movement, this movement, this adventist movement is the product of what God started in Philadelphia 250 years ago.

And that brings us to one of our two primary passages in our sermon today.

And so I invite you to open the Bibles, your Bibles.

We already heard it read by Jerry, but to Hebrews chapter 11, and we're going to begin in verse 13.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

Hebrews chapter 11, beginning in verse 13.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And it reads, Hebrews 11, verse 13.

Hebrews 11:13

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.

But as they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one, therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

The author of Hebrews, I believe to be the Apostle Paul, has just finished, or is in the midst of going through a group of people acknowledging their faith.

Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Sarah.

And at verse 13, he pauses to share one of the common links that they all had.

All of those individuals had, this common thread.

They all died, Paul wrote, without receiving the fullness of what God promised.

A new land, a better country.

And they were not speaking of the United States of America.

They were speaking of a heavenly country, a land that is not of this world.

They were strangers on the earth.

The word actually is xenos.

We have a word called xenosphobia, fear of foreigners.

They were foreigners in this land.

So if you feel like a foreigner here in this land, well, you're like the great people of faith.

And somehow, this is the remarkable thing, what Paul's describing here, that their out of placeness, feeling out of place, their out of placeness and their perseverance as strangers, as foreigners in this land was the evidence of their faith.

Then feeling like strangers and foreigners are out of places, and their perseverance through that was the evidence of their faith.

Had they been satisfied with where they were living, with the country they were living in, they could have built there, they could have made things happen there, and they would have stopped looking and they would have said, This home's good.

We're good where we're at.

Let's just keep trying to make this place better and better.

But they were looking for a better country, a heavenly one.

And take note of this.

God said, because of this, because their eyes weren't focused on what they could do in building up their own country they were in, but because their eyes were built on something bigger, something larger, God says he's not ashamed to call them his people.

Because he has a city prepared for them.

What does this have to do with the 4th of July?

Well, let me show you.

Our second passage, Revelation chapter 13 and verse 11.

Revelation 13 · chapter mention

Adventists have been reading this passage for a long time.

It is in just one verse, in 23 words in my English Standard Version, it is a summation of the history of America in just one verse.

I feel like I said that like Charles Barkley, America, uh, or from my southern days, in the history of America.

I know I'm in proper Spencerville right now.

I gotta not drop my A at the beginning there.

But just in the summation of this one thing, John writes this I beheld another beast coming out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke as a dragon.

We've done a whole sermon series last year on this.

Pastor Irwin and I, we spoke about this.

In fact, we've done a couple sermon series related to chapters 13 and 14, Revelation 12, 13, and 14.

If you want to hear those, you can go to our YouTube page and find those, or to our website and find those on there.

But I'm just gonna summarize through the words of Ellen White what we believe.

Ellen White wrote in great controversy: one nation and only one meets the specifications of this prophecy.

It points unmistakably to the United States of America.

This verse points unmistakably to the United States of America.

This prophecy in Revelation chapter 13 and verse 11 speaks to both what makes America great and what will ultimately bring about its demise.

Revelation 13 · chapter mention

Let me start with what made and what still makes America great.

This is what God designed this nation to be.

Ellen White said, those two horns, and other scholars have agreed with this throughout history, not just even Aventist scholars, but other scholars, those two horns were describing the greatness of this country.

The two horns like a lamb well represent the character of the United States government as expressed in its two fundamental principles.

Republicanism, not the country, I'll get there in just a moment.

I mean, not the political party, republicanism and Protestantism.

These principles are the secret of the power and prosperity as a nation.

The horns, the nation's two core founding principles, civil liberty, republicanism, and religious liberty, Protestantism, are what make this country great.

A government that does not lord itself over its citizens, and a faith does not lord itself over conscience.

Because of these two principles, Ellen G.

White felt free to say, God has done more for this country than for any other country upon which the sun shines.

Here, he provided an asylum for his people where they could worship him according to the dictates of the conscience.

Here, Christianity has progressed in its purity.

Here, the life-giving doctrine of the one mediator between God and man has been freely taught.

Here, God designed that this country should remain ever free for all people to worship him in accordance with the dictates of conscience.

He designed that its civil institutions in their expansive productions should represent the freedom of gospel privileges.

That's a remarkable claim.

Not that America is God's kingdom, not that the flag belongs on the altar, not God and country, but that God had a missional purpose in the design of this nation to create the conditions under which people could freely encounter Him.

And that this country, when it's working at its best, hear what I said, when it's working at its best, would be a glimpse into the true freedom we have in Jesus Christ.

This world and Satan will try to tell you that God is a tyrant, but God is the only freedom-giving master that you will ever have.

He says, Here's what I have to offer you.

You choose this day yes or no.

That's the gospel.

Your choice, not by coercion or force.

The founders, imperfect as their theology was, and as mixed up as it was, they seemed to grasp at least at the edges of this concept.

George Washington said that religion and morality are the essential pillars of a civil society.

Benjamin Franklin, again, no Orthodox believer, as we've already pointed out, put it plainly, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.

As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of a master.

Some people are out there searching for masters.

Well, if we get this political person in line, then we'll we'll be okay.

If we get this political person in line, we'll be okay.

James Madison argued that real faith must flow from a free mind, and that coerced faith is no faith at all.

And so the First Amendment wasn't just a political compromise.

Don't believe the revisionist histories we've seen on the news and even heard from pulpits who say religious liberty is not part of this nation's core.

And the Constitution was never intended to defend religious liberty.

The law, Congress, shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or bridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It wasn't just a political compromise, it was a conviction, I believe, inspired by God to establish the two things that make this nation great.

Civil liberty and religious liberty.

If people are going to come to God, they have to come freely and without coercion and without force.

That's the design.

That's why this nation was established, where a person can seek God or reject Him without the state or a church making that choice for them.

And Hebrews 11 to me calls people who understand this and who live by these principles strangers and foreigners to this land.

Strangers and foreigners in this land are people who are never confused, never confused, who never confuse, I should say, the earthly country with the heavenly one.

That's a stranger and a foreigner in this land.

A stranger and a foreigner in this land is someone who uses the freedom of the earthly country to create longing in their hearts to fix their eyes on the heavenly one.

Foreigners and strangers in this land, as even Eugene prayed, use the freedoms to present the gospel to other people so that they also can know Jesus and make him known.

That's what this nation at its best principles was meant to make possible.

Was meant to make possible.

There is another part of Revelation chapter 13 and verse 11, though.

Revelation 13 · chapter mention

The beast, which is a nation, the United States.

The Bible says it spoke like a dragon.

Who is the dragon?

And a child shall lead them.

The timidity, all the adults, but that child knows revelation.

Dragon is Satan.

In all of our greatness, we must recognize, acknowledge, humbly and honestly, that we have not always lived according to those beautiful principles I shared a moment ago.

I cannot stand here on the 250th birthday of this country and pretend otherwise.

The men who wrote, All men are created equal, some of those men owned other men.

The land this nation was built on was taken from people who had no say in the matter.

The freedom of conscience that protected one group was routinely denied to another group.

And that spirit still exists today in our country and even in our own country.

Hearts.

We can't pretend it doesn't.

We can't deceive ourselves into thinking that because we are part of a great country, then all that we do is great.

It doesn't matter if someone shouts it from the rooftops that we're great, or if someone hangs a banner that says we're great.

None of that matters.

What matters is we are only great into the extent that we live up to the principles that God designed us to live by.

As followers of Jesus, we must remember the words of Jeremiah chapter 17 and verse 9.

Jeremiah 17 · chapter mention

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.

Who can understand it?

Ellen White, writing after the Civil War, writing after emancipation in the early 1900s.

After all that, she wrote, The spirit of slavery still lives, and that it will live and increase in the last days.

She wasn't talking about a relic of the past.

She was talking about something that survived abolition.

She was talking about something that finds new expressions in the human heart that is that is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.

She was talking about something that outlaws, outlasts laws that are written to contain it.

And why is this so?

It's because the enemy of all righteousness has designs upon God's purpose for this country.

Worldliness, that means immorality, that means the the saying, well, this was once a sin, but now it's not a sin anymore.

Well, why?

Because I say so.

That's worldliness, that's that's ungodliness.

Worldliness and covetousness, which is idolatry, will prevail above, will prevail through the working of the arch deceiver till the law of God in all its bearings shall be made void.

And Revelation 13 says, that is when the dragon speaks again.

The same nation that was designed for freedom and conscience becomes something else.

The gentleness of the land gives way.

The design gets corrupted.

Those two horns that rep once represented the best of what human government could offer get turned towards something that looks nothing like what God intended it to look.

We should not read and think, well, that's the future.

That's some future problem.

No, that has been ever moving forward in our history.

But we shouldn't become discouraged of this.

There are so many people that see this trajectory moving in America and they just want to say, Well, I'm gonna just give up on all of it.

I'm just, I'm tired of everything.

They're spending all their time complaining about what we don't have.

Rather than doing what the Bible actually teaches us to do.

We see in the book of Hebrews, in Hebrews chapter 11, when the world in which they lived did not live up to their standards for how they desired to live, they didn't say, Oh, well, forget about it.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

All these all these dummies that don't know what they're doing.

No, they long, it created in them a longing for something better.

Allow the gap that exists in what is God's ideal and what is sometimes a reality.

Rather than making it a point to complain about it, make it a point to have your eyes turned upon Jesus and upon the heavenly land that he has for us.

America at its best points towards something.

Freedom of conscience points towards something.

The dignity of every person points towards something.

And what they point to is not a constitution or a history lesson.

What those things point to is that no matter how inspired a nation is, no matter how inspired a document of a nation is, it can never fully deliver on only what God can give, which is freedom in Jesus Christ.

The principles, hear what I'm gonna say here, folks.

The principles of America are not to be worshipped.

They are not to create in us a spirit of worship for this country or some national idealism.

They are to create a longing for a place where our true freedom in Jesus can be found.

That's why we're here.

The problem isn't just that we haven't lived up to our founding principles.

The problem is that we have not understood the deeper problem.

Those founding principles are never enough because only what is enough is life in Christ Jesus.

That's the gospel.

It's not by my works nor by my declaration of independence that I am saved, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

That's it.

That's it.

So, what does this mean for us?

On this Sabbath in this place, on the 250th birthday of this land that I love, that I think is so beautiful in so many ways.

It means we are, and we should recognize ourselves that we are strangers, we are exiles, we are foreigners.

And those are not in juxtaposition to loving this country and caring for this country.

But we do not belong to this country.

We belong to another kingdom.

We are looking for a better country, a heavenly one.

That doesn't mean that you check out of this land that I hope all of you love and that I love.

The people in Hebrews 11, they didn't check out, they didn't shut down.

What does the Bible teach us?

Abraham, he moved, he built, he planted, he raised a family, he fought oppression, he sought to set people free, he made covenants, he was present in this world and yet a stranger.

He was active and participating in the places where God put him, but he never pretended that this was his final destination.

I even think about Paul who wrote these words in Hebrews chapter 11 and somewhere else in the Bible, in Paul's writings, doesn't he say, doesn't he say, if I could save Israel, I would give up my own salvation?

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

He loved his country, he loved his nation.

That's perfectly fine.

But the call in the church is not to make this country great.

The call in the church is to live by the great principles that found this country and to be a place where the gospel can move freely.

We should be grateful for that, we should defend that, we should use it, but we should always be God's strangers on this earth and recognize that the principles of this nation are only worth something if they're used for the thing they were designed for, and that is to make Jesus known in this world.

That is to give people the opportunity to say yes or no to Jesus, however, their conscience dictates.

God strangers see America as a tool to give the gospel, to give people the opportunity to see the beauty of the gospel.

They do not see the gospel as a tool to build up America.

Do you understand that?

Foreigners in this land, true followers of Jesus, do not see the gospel as a tool to build up this nation.

They see this nation as a tool to point people to Jesus Christ, who is great.

Who is great.

So let me land this plane.

Because we know where this story ends, the dragon, the beast speaks like the dragon.

We know what's coming, we know the winds of strife that are coming.

As strangers living in this country, those things should not lead us to complaint, but it should lead us to urgency and longing for the kingdom of heaven.

If we are truly strangers, as God describes strangers living on faith in this land, that means we have to take advantage of the window that we have now to proclaim freedom to the captives, to set the captives free, to clothe the naked, to feed the poor, or to feed the hungry, to to give money to the poor, but most of all to make sure that people know that all things are only found in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

And then we allow people to make their own decisions.

So I want to encourage you to live out the privileges of being a foreigner for Jesus in the United States of America.

Build relationships, grow in Jesus, serve the world, and do it all with a heart of gratitude as people who are from somewhere else and who know where that somewhere else is.

One word, one prayer, one word, one act for you today.

My prayer that I hope you'll carry with you in your heart this week is Lord, give us the faith of the strangers, people who love what you've given us here, grieve where we've fallen short, but never stop looking for a city and a country whose maker and builder is God.

One word, stranger.

I hope this week you'll remember that you're a stranger in this land, in this world.

You are a citizen of heaven.

Live like it in the freest country in this world.

Live like you are a citizen of heaven.

Make sure people know that it is not God and country, but it is God over country, and it's country only as it is the support for the gospel freedom of Jesus Christ.

And then one act.

This week, use the freedom you have.

Use the freedom you have.

Come on.

Don't say, well, this politician's doing that, or that politician's doing that.

Use the freedom you have.

You got a neighbor?

Pray for him.

You got someone in your life that doesn't know Jesus?

Tell them about him.

Use the freedom that you have because that's what strangers in this land do when they live for Jesus.

Lord, we thank you.

We thank you for all the blessings that this country is.

We do, I agree, I affirm Ellen White's statements that in no nation has the sun shone so brightly as it has the United States of America.

But you've shone greatly upon this nation, not to make America great, but so that people will have the great opportunity of knowing and accepting the one who is truly great.

Jesus Christ, our Lord and our Savior.

Amen.