What Returning to God Actually Means for America

What joy for the nation whose God is the LORD,
whose people he has chosen as his inheritance.

— Psalms 33:12

When you ask what returning to God would do for America, you’ll almost always hear about the issues it would fix.

What you rarely hear about is the joy it would bring. The joy that comes from giving your whole self to the One who gave us all this.

The narrative is usually: fix the culture, fix the laws, fix the country.

But the reality is that serving God with your whole heart, soul, and mind is the only thing that brings true joy and real change. (Matt 22:37).

Jesus didn’t die so that we could be on the “right” side of issues.

He died and rose again so that we could spend eternity with Him.

In joy.

In peace.

In love.

In patience.

In kindness.

In goodness.

In faithfulness.

These are the fruits of serving a God who orchestrates people and nations to bring true freedom (Gal 5:22).

Apart from Jesus, there is no freedom.

And there is no joy.

Our founding fathers built a nation on the conviction that our rights come from God, not from government. That liberty is something we are inherently given (endowed by our Creator), not something we earn or seize.

They also knew this republic would only hold if the people’s hearts belonged to God.

They fought for freedom from tyranny. But God had more in mind.

He gave America freedom and an assignment to go with it.

Use what you’ve been given to make Me known.

The liberty He so graciously bestowed on us was never meant to be an end in itself.

It was meant to free us for the joy of serving others.

But now we’ve flipped that order.

We chase the outcomes of freedom: the money, the status, and the independence to do what we want.

We treat those things as the measure of how free we are.

And we wonder why we’re struggling so much.

To some degree that’s fair, because that kind of success is what living in this constitutional republic affords you.

But freedom was given to us by God. Those things don’t give us freedom.

But like always, we’re quick to tap into the wrong thing, and look for the fruit in the wrong place.

When you’re tapped into the Vine, whose caretaker is God Himself, His joy fills you and overflows (John 15:11).

Everything else follows that first fruit of joy.

Peace follows.

Love follows.

Patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness all come behind the one choice to root yourself in Jesus first.

That is the return America actually needs.

A return to the One who gave us a freedom no government can grant and no government can take away.

He secured our eternal freedom on the cross.

But He is interested in our freedom here on earth, because a free people can carry His word to the ends of the earth.

That was always the point.

Freedom was never given so we could just be happy and have nice things.

It was given so we could make Him known to the world.

A nation whose God is the Lord is not free just to chase whatever makes it happy.

It is a nation that finds its joy in humility and service to God and others.

That doesn’t start with a movement or a cause.

It starts with one heart at a time choosing to return to the greatest love story ever told.