We have been blessed with many good leaders in the history of the United States of America. From our Founding Fathers who sought God’s guidance in the very beginning, through the next 200 plus years. Men and women who have looked to God for guidance and wisdom in leading our country through many different challenging times. May we continue to elect godly men and women to lead us today.

From a letter from George Washington to Samuel Langdon written September 28, 1789

“The man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the American Revolution without feeling the warmest gratitude towards the great Author of the Universe whose divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf—And it is my earnest prayer that we may so conduct ourselves as to merit a continuance of those blessings with which we have hitherto been favoured.”

George Washington, the Father of our country, looked to God for guidance and thanked Him for His kind providence in bringing us through the American Revolutionary War successfully. A rag tag bunch of colonists with little to no military experience defeated

Great Britain, the most powerful country on earth at that time.

Washington also wrote a letter to the Hebrew congregation of Savannah, Georgia:

“May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose Providential Agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent Nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.”

 

Here are some other notable quotes from our leaders over the years:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 

– John Adams, 1798 – Address to the Military

 

“That wise Men have in all Ages thought Government necessary for the Good of Mankind; and, that wise Governments have always thought Religion necessary for the well ordering and well-being of Society, and accordingly have been ever careful to encourage and protect the Ministers of it, paying them the highest publick Honours, that their Doctrines might thereby meet with the greater Respect among the common People.”

– Benjamin Franklin

 

“The most effectual means of securing the continuance of our civil and religious liberties, is always to remember with reverence and gratitude the source from which they flow.”

– John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

 

When a group of African-Americans presented him with the gift of a Bible, President Abraham Lincoln stated the following: “I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man. All the good from the Saviour of the world is communicated through this Book.”

 

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God? That they are not to violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

– Thomas Jefferson

 

“I have one great political idea. . . . That idea is an old one. It is widely and generally assented to; nevertheless, it is very generally trampled upon and disregarded. The best expression of it, I have found in the Bible. It is in substance, “Righteousness exalteth a nation; sin is a reproach to any people” [Proverbs 14:34]. This constitutes my politics – the negative and positive of my politics, and the whole of my politics” 

– Frederick Douglass

 

“Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.”

– James Madison

 

“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia, or to the Charter of New England, or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”

– Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

 

“We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Where we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

“I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”

– John F. Kennedy