April 23, 2026 
Pastor Jack Graham 

I want to tell you something before we take a single step today. What you are about to see is not simply American history. It is the story of a nation that was, from its earliest hours, in a conversation with God, and the story of what happens when people take that conversation seriously.

The Ground Beneath Your Feet 
At Arlington National Cemetery, you will walk across a hillside covered in white marble, row after row after row of graves, each one a name, each name a life, each life a person who made a choice. The choice to serve. The choice to put on a uniform and stand between freedom and whatever threatened it. Row after row of young men and women who gave everything they had for something bigger than themselves. 

Stand there quietly for a moment and let it move you. Because these are not just American heroes. They are an example of the greatest love.  As Christ said in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” That is not a poetic sentiment. It is the standard Jesus set. And it is a standard that has been met, over and over again, by the men and women buried at Arlington. 

They died for an idea. And that idea was not invented in Philadelphia in 1776. It was written into the nature of human beings when God Himself breathed life into the first man and woman and declared them to bear His image. The idea that every person has unique value. The idea that freedom is not a government privilege but a God-given right. The idea that there are things worth dying for because there are things worth living for. 

 A General Who Knelt in the Snow 
When we visit Mount Vernon, we stand on ground that shaped a nation. George Washington was no saint. He was a sinner like every one of us, a man with flaws and failures on his record. But he was also a man who believed he was accountable to a God above him. And in the worst winter of the Revolutionary War, at Valley Forge, when the army was starving and barefoot and the cause seemed lost, a local farmer reported seeing the Commander in Chief alone in the snow, on his knees, praying. 

Washington wrote in his own hand, in his First Inaugural Address: “The propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained.” He understood what many of our leaders have forgotten, that no nation governs itself apart from God without eventually losing both justice and freedom. 

John Adams, our second president, was equally direct. He wrote in a letter to the Massachusetts militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He understood that self-government was not merely a political theory. It was a theological one. Only people who feared God could govern themselves. Only people accountable to a higher law could be trusted with freedom. 

These were not perfect men. But they were men who built on the right foundation. 

Where Washington Worshipped 
At Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, you will sit in a pew where George Washington worshipped. The early churches of this nation were not social clubs or community centers. They were the seedbed of the Republic. It was pastors, called the Black Robe Regiment by the British, who preached courage into frightened colonists, who read the Declaration of Independence from their pulpits, who thundered from Scripture about the tyranny of unjust government and the God-given dignity of free people. 

The Bible was the most widely read book in colonial America by an enormous margin. The Scriptures shaped the way the founders thought about government, justice, law, and human nature. They did not build a theocracy. But they built on a theology, the theology that God endows His creatures with unalienable rights and to whom every human authority is ultimately accountable. 

The Monuments Speak 
At the Washington Monument, the capstone at the very top, barely visible from the ground, bears two words engraved in Latin: “Laus Deo.” Praise be to God. The tallest structure in Washington, D.C., is topped with a prayer. Those who built it believed that the nation it represented stood under something higher than itself. 

And then there is the Lincoln Memorial. Sit in the presence of that great marble figure and read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address carved into the south wall. On the eve of the end of the Civil War, Lincoln did not gloat. He mourned. He prayed. He called his nation to humility before a God who judges nations as He judges men: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” And then came these words, words that should still stop us cold: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. The Almighty has His own purposes.” 

Lincoln understood something essential. America does not use God. God uses America, or sets it aside, according to His own sovereign purposes. 

The Warning We Must Hear 
These stones are crying out to us today. They are saying: look at what was built here. Look at the foundation it was built on. And look at what happens when a generation forgets. 

We live in a moment of deep confusion. Biblical illiteracy may be the single greatest threat to our nation. When God’s people do not know God’s Word, something always rushes in to fill that void. And what fills it is not wisdom. It is confusion, manipulation, and fear. The psalmist asked it plainly: “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do” (Psalm 11:3)? Proverbs 14:34 says it plainly: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” Every civilization that has stood on the foundation of God’s truth has been blessed, and every civilization that has turned from that foundation has paid the price. America is not exempt from this principle. She never has been. 

The Question These Grounds Ask 
As you walk through the monuments and memorials today, the question is What will you do with the nation God has entrusted to your generation? 

The men and women who are buried at Arlington made their answer. Lincoln made his. Washington made his on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge. The pastors of the Black Robe Regiment made theirs from their pulpits. 

Now it is your turn. 

Pray for this nation as you walk today. Pray as if something depends on it, because it does. Pray with humility, with honesty before God, and with the settled conviction that the God who built this nation has not forgotten it. 

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12). That has always been true. And it is still true today.