Happy 4th of July 2022

This program that was shown today on Music and the Spoken Word got me in the mood for the 4th of July.  Enjoy!

You can also see the video by clicking here

My favorite song in this program is: "America, The Dream Goes On" starting at 10:00 minutes.  I felt that the pictures shown during this song are a good representation of America. 

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so of course this picture caught my attention.

I also enjoyed seeing the statue of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

Starting at 13:35, Lloyd Newell gave this timely message titled:  "Self-control, Liberty, and Law" taken from the patriotic hymn, "America the Beautiful":

Self-control, Liberty and Law

There is a line from a well-known patriotic hymn: “Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law."  These principles are basic to life, basic to the eternal plans and purposes of the Lord. But sometimes we seem more to have remembered freedom than self-control, liberty more than the law.

As we come together, live together … in a world where physically we come ever closer together, always we have to have self-control, always we have to live our lives with law as well as with liberty. Always we have to consider the rights, the privileges, the comfort, the convenience of others, with an awareness that we have no right to do anything we want, to take anything we want, or irresponsibly to say anything we want, or to befoul the moral atmosphere, or the water others use, the air where others are, the peace that others have, or their rightful privacy, or to live uninhibited lives. We have to be considerate of others always. Self-control, with law, is the only safeguard of liberty; and not the existence of law only, but respect for law, obeying the law—the laws of God, the laws of the land.

Acclaimed filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille said this of laws and liberty: "We are too inclined," he said "to think of law as something merely restrictive—something hemming us in. We sometimes think of law as the opposite of liberty. But that is a false conception. … God does not contradict Himself. He did not create [us] and then, as an afterthought, impose upon [us] a set of arbitrary, irritating, restrictive rules. He made [us] free—and then gave [us] the commandments to keep [us] free. …"

To this great utterance we would add: The greatest threat to liberty is lawlessness. And the greatest assurance of liberty is respect for law. "Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law."

The above narrative is from this webpage:   https://musicandthespokenword.com/spokenwordmessages/self-control-liberty-and-law-sunday-july-03-2022/