Isaiah 1:25-27 “And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin: And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counselors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city. Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness.”
Samuel Langdon did not see his current situation as beyond hope. Nor should we. Langdon’s formula for retrenchment and recovery was a personal and national revival:
“Would it not be much superior wisdom and sounder policy for a distressed kingdom to retrench the vast unnecessary expenses continually incurred by its enormous vices? To stop the prodigious sums paid in pensions, and to numberless officers, without the least advantage to the public? To reduce the number of devouring servants in the great family? To turn their minds from the pursuit of pleasure and the boundless luxuries of life, to the important interests of their country and the salvation of the commonwealth? Would not a reverend regard to the authority of divine revelation, a hearty belief of the gospel of the grace of God, and a general reformation of all those vices which bring misery and ruin upon individuals, families, and kingdoms, and which have provoked heaven to bring the nation into such perplexed and dangerous circumstances, be the surest way to recover the sinking state, and make it again rich and flourishing? Millions might annually be saved, if the kingdom were generally and thoroughly reformed; and the public debt, great as it is, might in a few years be cancelled by a growing revenue, which now amounts to full ten millions per annum, without laying additional burdens on any of the subjects. But the demands of corruption are constantly increasing, and will forever exceed all the resources of wealth which the wit of man can invent or tyranny impose.”
Our nation, like Langdon’s, is sinking under the weight of its own onerous errors. The demands of corruption are constantly increasing, and increasingly unbearable. The surest way to return to our former glory is to cling to the source of our former glory. Our distressed kingdom demands reformation that returns us to righteousness and the righteous One.
PLEASE PRAY FOR A SWEEPING NATIONAL PERIOD OF REVIVAL AND REPENTENCE. It is not yet too late to recover and retrench. To flourish once again, we must do so immediately.
