This evening my church gathered with three other churches in the area to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Here are the remarks I prepared to open the time of thanksgiving, prayer, and singing.

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We have gathered as Christians who are also American patriots. We have gathered to thank God for our nation, the United States of America. We love our country, and we want to express our gratitude to God and ask him to continue to be gracious to us. We beg for God’s mercy on a country that is squandering the riches of our inheritance.

A typical way to define patriotism is “having or expressing devotion to and vigorous support for one’s country.” As a Christian, should you feel guilty for being patriotic? No.

• I’m not talking about blind patriotism in which you can never criticize your nation or its leaders.
• Nor am I talking about an idolatrous patriotism in which you essentially worship your country rather than God.
• I’m talking about a wholesome patriotism in which you promote the good for your nation, which means that sometimes you should criticize your government authorities when they rebel against God’s design for government. A wholesome patriotism is full of gratitude to God. That’s my primary claim right now.

A wholesome patriotism rightly orders what you love. You love God supremely, but that doesn’t mean that you must hate everything else. I love my wife and my daughters and my church and my city and my state and my country. (I also love steak and Chipotle burrito bowls and Minnesota summers and Minnesota’s North Shore and music by Bach and Beethoven.) It’s okay to love more than one thing. You need wisdom to order what you love. And when you have a wholesome patriotism, you love your country in a way that is fitting. In short, you are full of gratitude to God for your country.

Dari Chevalier illustrates the opposite of patriotism. This past Tuesday Dari Chevalier won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District. She is a Muslim democratic socialist activist. In 2019, she posted this on Twitter: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me 😊 [smiley face emoji].” That mindset is like saying, “I couldn’t find napkins, so I just took the portrait of my mother off the wall and wiped my hands on it.” That’s so disrespectful!

God commands you to honor your father and your mother. You don’t get to choose your father and mother. You are responsible before God to honor the father and mother whom God gave you.

When I hear another person thank God for his father or mother, I love it because that is fitting. It’s good to honor your father and mother.

And when I hear another person thank God for his nation, I love it because that is fitting. It’s good to support your nation by thanking God for your nation.

In international sports competitions like the Olympics or the World Cup, it’s good for Americans to cheer for Americans. I loved it when the USA men’s hockey team recently beat Canada to win the gold medal (and I loved that the athletes weren’t woke). It doesn’t bother me when Germans cheer for the German soccer team or when Mexicans cheer for Mexico or when Brazilians cheer for Brazil. What bothers me is when Americans actively root against America.

Let’s not be like that. Let’s not be thankless, discontent, disrespectful, dishonorable, disloyal ingrates. Let’s be full of gratitude for all of God’s gifts. For example:

• Thank God for religious liberty—that four churches can gather in the open tonight to sing and pray in the name of King Jesus, with no fear of the state.
• Thank God for a Constitution that recognizes rights we did not invent and government did not grant—rights our founders said that our Creator endowed us with.
• Thank God for the rule of law—for just laws that are a terror to bad conduct and that approve what is good (Rom 13:3), for just authorities, courts, and police.
• Thank God for those who defended this freedom with their lives—and for the soldiers, officers, and first responders standing watch even now.
• Thank God for the freedom to speak, to worship, to assemble, and to raise our children in the fear of the Lord.
• Thank God for the freedom to work, to build, to own, and to give—for an economy that, for all its faults, could be so much worse.
• Thank God for self-government—that we can vote, disagree, and change our leaders without bloodshed.
• Thank God for a nation that has sent more missionaries to the ends of the earth than any other.
• Thank God for this land itself—its harvests and rivers, its mountains and canyons, its summers and its winters.
• Thank God that, in his good providence, he set us here, in this country, for such a time as this. Thank God that he wrote us into his story and that we get to be part of his story right here.

A wholesome patriotism is full of gratitude to God. So thank God for the United States of America.