A Sermon from the Signers

The Gospel Truth Behind America's Declaration of Independence

A Devotional Tribute for the 250th Anniversary of American Independence

1776 – 2026

 

Foreword: Two Hundred Fifty Years Later

Two hundred and fifty years ago this Fourth of July, fifty-six men picked up their pens and, in doing so, signed what amounted to their own death warrants. They did not call it a business transaction. They did not call it a political maneuver. They called it, in their own words, an appeal "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions." [1]

Beloved, that is not the language of secular men. That is the language of the sanctuary.

I have spent a good portion of my life in the study of God's Word, and I have learned this: when men are about to die, they stop pretending. There is no room left for spin when your name on a piece of parchment might be the last thing you ever sign. So when fifty-six men, most of whom stood to lose their fortunes, their families, and their very lives, chose to invoke the Creator, the Supreme Judge, and divine Providence in the same breath as their declaration of independence — we ought to sit up and take notice.

This quarter-millennial anniversary is not simply a birthday party with fireworks and hot dogs, as wonderful as those things are. It is an invitation — for you and for me — to go back to the well. To ask what these men actually believed. To let their convictions preach to our generation the way the pulpits of colonial America once preached to theirs.

So turn with me, if you will, not to a single verse, but to a nation's testimony. This is A Sermon from the Signers.

Chapter One: A Fledgling Nation at the Crossroads

In the 1700s, a fledgling America of barely three million souls stood at a crossroads. [2] Having endured what they described as "repeated injuries and usurpations" from King George III, the colonists faced one question that would not go away: Do we fight merely to reclaim our rights as Englishmen, or do we fight to separate entirely — to become, in the fullest sense, a nation that answers to the sovereignty of God alone?

The road there was neither quick nor easy. It was paved, brick by brick, with grievance after grievance.

In 1765, the Stamp Act ignited a decade-long argument over whether Parliament had any right to tax men who had no voice in Parliament. [3] By 1770, that argument had turned to bloodshed in the Boston Massacre. By 1773, outrage over the Tea Act sent chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Britain answered with the Coercive Acts — acts so severe the colonists simply called them Intolerable.

Still, reconciliation, not revolution, remained the hope of most. Then, on October 27, 1775, King George III rose before Parliament and called the American cause a "desperate conspiracy," vowing to crush it by force. [4] Any lingering hope of a peaceable settlement began to die that day.

Patrick Henry felt it first. In March of 1775, before the Second Virginia Convention, he thundered the words that still echo in every American schoolroom: "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" [5]

Then, on January 9, 1776, a fiery Englishman-turned-American named Thomas Paine published a fifty-page pamphlet called Common Sense. Within months, it sold more than one hundred thousand copies — an almost unthinkable number for that era. [6] More than any other publication, it paved the road straight to Independence Hall.

On June 7, 1776, Virginia's Richard Henry Lee rose in Congress and formally moved that the colonies declare their independence. Fifty-six delegates from thirteen colonies — many of whom had never even met one another — gathered in Philadelphia to decide the fate of a nation not yet born.

What they did next tells you everything about who they really were.

Chapter Two: Two Hours Upon Their Knees

Before a single grievance was debated, before a single word of the Declaration was drafted, these fifty-six men began their days on their knees. Congress opened its sessions with as much as two hours of prayer. [7] Their mornings were given not to political strategy but to the study of Scripture — four chapters of the Psalms became their steady diet.

Write that down, friend. Two hours of prayer before a single vote was cast. We complain today if a meeting runs five minutes long.

During one of those Bible studies, the delegates found themselves reading Psalm 35 — David's cry for God to "fight against them that fight against me." Something moved in that room. The delegates came away convinced that the same God who fought for David would fight for them.

John Adams was so stirred that he wrote home to his beloved wife, Abigail, urging her, "I must beg you to read that Psalm... read the thirty-fifth Psalm to your friends. Read it to your father." [8] In essence, John was telling Abigail something history books rarely capture: for the first time, this ragged band of colonists believed, deep in their bones, that they could actually stand against the might of the British Empire — because they believed God Himself would stand with them.

That is not sentimentality. That is faith under fire. And it is faith our own generation would do well to recover.

Out of those prayer-soaked mornings, a committee was appointed to put their convictions into words. A thirty-three-year-old Virginian named Thomas Jefferson was handed the pen.

Chapter Three: Five Self-Evident Truths

On June 28, 1776, the committee laid its finished draft before Congress. Debate grew heated — most painfully over Jefferson's condemnation of the slave trade, a clause ultimately struck in the name of colonial unity, a compromise our nation would spend the next four score and seven years, and a Civil War, still working to make right.

On July 2, Congress voted for independence. Two days later, on July 4, 1776 — even as a British fleet of thirty-four thousand troops massed to invade New York — Congress adopted the final document. [9] It would be formally signed beginning August 2, with latecomers adding their names for weeks after.

The final draft ran just short of 1,400 words, and it fell naturally into three parts: a preamble, a list of twenty-seven grievances against the king, and the declaration itself. [10] But it is the preamble — barely a paragraph — that carries the theological weight of the entire document. Listen again to words you have likely heard a hundred times, and hear them, this time, as a confession of faith:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Strip that sentence down to its studs, and you find five convictions holding up the whole house:

1. All mankind is created equally. Not by government decree — by God's design.
2. Our rights come from God, not from kings, not from courts, not from the shifting winds of public opinion.
3. Every individual carries a God-given right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness.
4. The purpose of government is to protect those God-given rights — nothing more, nothing less.
5. When government fails that God-given trust, the people have both the right and the duty to replace it.

In their eyes, King George had trampled every one of those five convictions, acting the tyrant rather than the steward God had called him to be. Twenty-seven separate grievances — nearly a thousand of the document's fourteen hundred words — catalogue exactly how.

This is the part fake history so often leaves out: the Declaration is not simply a political grievance. It is a theological argument. Historian David Barton and the team at WallBuilders have spent decades documenting that virtually every right named in the Declaration had already been preached from American pulpits in the years before 1763 — meaning the Declaration was not invented in Philadelphia in 1776. It was preached in New England meetinghouses years before it was ever penned. [11] You can trace much of this scholarship yourself at wallbuilders.com.

Chapter Four: Sermons from the Signers

Don't take my word for any of this. Let's hear it from the men themselves. I call this next section Sermons from the Signers — because that is precisely what their own words amount to.

John Adams — A Man Who Believed the Scriptures

We have already met John Adams on his knees over Psalm 35. Years later, reflecting on what had actually carried the Revolution to victory, Adams wrote these unforgettable words: "The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity." [12] He went further still: "I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that these general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God Himself."

In other words — "I was there, from start to finish, and the reason we succeeded is because we built this nation on the Bible and the principles of Christianity." That is not a modern preacher's spin on history. That is a signer, an eyewitness, telling us so in his own hand.

Benjamin Rush — The Bible in Every Schoolhouse

Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia was a physician, a reformer, the founder of Dickinson College — and a signer of the Declaration. Above every other cause he championed, Rush contended for the Bible as the very textbook of the American classroom. To Rush, there could be no education worth the name that left the Scriptures out.

John Witherspoon — The Preacher Who Signed

John Witherspoon was no ordinary statesman. He was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey — what we know today as Princeton. He led its theological department and served as campus pastor even while shaping a nation. To advance both faith and freedom together, he published one of colonial America's first family Bibles, writing its introduction "To the Reader" himself. [13] In it, Witherspoon traced the history of the Scriptures and the hand of Providence in preserving God's Word for every generation, including ours.

Of Christ Himself, Witherspoon wrote: "It is very evident that both the prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New are at great pains to give us a view of the glory and dignity of the person of Christ." [14]

John Hancock — A Governor Who Called a Nation to Prayer

You know his signature — bold, sweeping, unmistakable, planted at the head of the document as if daring the king to find it. What fewer people know is that John Hancock, later Governor of Massachusetts, called the people of his state to fast and pray on twenty-two separate occasions during his governorship. [15] Listen to what he actually asked them to pray:

"Pray that the spiritual kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be continually increasing until the whole earth shall be filled with His glory."

That does not sound like agnosticism to me. That sounds like a revival prayer meeting.

Roger Sherman — The Necessity of the Gospel

Roger Sherman of Connecticut is the only man in American history to sign all four of our nation's founding documents. Of salvation, Sherman wrote with the clarity of a man who had settled the matter in his own soul: "God commands all men everywhere to repent. He also commands them to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and has assured us that all who do repent and believe shall be saved." [16]

Richard Stockton — Willing to Die for What He Believed

Richard Stockton of New Jersey paid a price few of us can imagine. Captured by the British for his role in the Declaration, he was imprisoned and treated so brutally that his health never fully recovered. [17] Jesus said it best, long before Stockton ever lived it: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Stockton was ready to lay his down for a nation not yet born.

Charles Carroll — A Legacy He Prayed Would Be Perpetual

Charles Carroll of Maryland outlived every other signer, and in his final years he reflected on what he had truly hoped to hand down. He wanted every American, in every generation to come, to enjoy the same civil and religious liberties he himself had enjoyed. [18] He did not merely want independence for his own day. He wanted it to be perpetual — passed down, unbroken, to a people he would never meet. To us.

Chapter Five: Their Own Death Warrants

We must never read the closing line of the Declaration too quickly: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." [19]

Understand what that pledge actually meant. In the eyes of the Crown, every signature on that parchment was an act of treason. Each of the fifty-six men who signed it was, from that moment forward, a hunted man. Some lost their homes. Some lost their fortunes. Some, like Richard Stockton, lost their health in British prisons. All of them knew, when they picked up the pen, exactly what they were risking.

And when Congress had to flee Philadelphia for Baltimore in the winter of 1776-77, it was a Baltimore printer named Mary Katherine Goddard who dared to be among the very first to typeset the Declaration — and the first to print every signer's name upon it, including her own, at the bottom, as her own personal declaration of support. [20] A single woman, in a time of war, willingly attaching her name to a document of treason. That is the caliber of conviction that built this nation.

Beloved, sacrifice like that does not come from men who are merely playing politics. It comes from men and women who believe, with everything in them, that they are answerable to a Judge higher than any king.

Chapter Six: Two Hundred Years — And the God Who Has Kept Us Past It

Here is a sobering pattern that students of history have long observed, one you have perhaps heard summarized this way: throughout recorded history, the average lifespan of a great nation or republic has hovered right around two hundred years. [21] Empires rise on courage and conviction. They are sustained for a season by industry and liberty. And then, generation after generation, they soften — trading self-governance for dependency, conviction for comfort, and gratitude for entitlement — until they collapse under their own weight, usually from within rather than from without.

Friend, do the math with me. 1776 to 1976 is two hundred years. By the pattern of nearly every republic before her, America's clock should have run out during the Bicentennial. And yet here we stand — 2026 — not simply past that two-hundred-year mark, but fifty years past it. A quarter of a millennium and still standing.

I do not believe that is an accident of geography or a fluke of economics. I believe it is grace.

This is not a nation that has never sinned — no nation has, and ours has grievous chapters of its own, chief among them the very institution of slavery those signers in 1776 could not yet bring themselves to abolish. But it is a nation whose founding document was signed with hands folded first in prayer, whose founders bound its future not to a king but to "the Supreme Judge of the world," and whose survival past the ordinary lifespan of nations bears the fingerprints of a God who, as the Psalmist says, "blesses the nation whose God is the LORD" (Psalm 33:12).

Two hundred and fifty years is not the achievement of clever statesmen alone. It is the mercy of a patient God, extended to a people who, however imperfectly, dared to found their house upon Him.

The question this anniversary puts to us is not, "Weren't our founders remarkable?" The question is, "Will this generation do what they did — get back down on our knees, and ask the same God to sustain what He alone has sustained this far?"

Chapter Seven: They Believed Salvation Was Necessary for All

Everything we have covered so far — the prayer, the Scripture, the conviction, the sacrifice — would be nothing more than interesting history if it stopped there. But it does not stop there. Because these men were not simply religious. They were, many of them, unmistakably evangelical — meaning they believed the gospel of Jesus Christ was the only hope for any soul, king or commoner alike.

Hear Benjamin Rush again, this time speaking not of schoolbooks but of his own soul's eternal condition: "My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the Cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it." [22]

Hear John Witherspoon, the Princeton pastor, pleading with his own congregation in words no less urgent for being two and a half centuries old: "I entreat you in the most earnest manner to believe in Jesus Christ, for there is no salvation in any other... If you are not reconciled to God through Jesus Christ... you must forever perish." [23]

That, friend, is not a deist talking about a distant, uninvolved "watchmaker God." That is a man who believed in a crucified and risen Savior, and who could not bear the thought of anyone — himself included — standing before the Supreme Judge of the world without the righteousness of Christ as their covering.

Chapter Eight: Have You Made a Declaration Today?

So here is where I must, as a preacher of the gospel, bring this all the way home to you.

Fifty-six men once stood together and declared their independence from an earthly king who had failed to govern justly. But there is a far greater bondage than the tyranny of King George III — the bondage of sin — and there is a far greater Declaration than the one signed at Philadelphia.

The apostle Paul wrote it this way to the church in Galatia:

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1).

And to the church in Rome, Paul made the invitation as simple and as available as any declaration in human history has ever been:

"Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Romans 10:13).

Do you see it? You do not need fifty-six signatures. You do not need a committee, or a congress, or a parchment, or a printing press. You need only one declaration — spoken from a heart that believes Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose again — and you will be free indeed (John 8:36).

The signers of 1776 pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to secure an earthly liberty that, however precious, will not outlast this present age. Jesus Christ pledged His own life — and gave it — to secure a liberty that will outlast every empire that has ever risen or fallen, including this one.

Have you made your declaration today?

Closing: A Charge for the 250th

As America crosses this remarkable threshold — two hundred fifty years from a July morning when fifty-six trembling, praying men staked everything on the conviction that liberty comes from God alone — let this generation not merely wave the flag. Let us get back down on our knees.

Let us recover the two hours of prayer before the two hundred and fifty years of freedom that followed it. Let us recover the Psalms our founders studied, the Christ their signers proclaimed, and the gospel that alone can secure a liberty no army and no anniversary can ever fully guarantee.

"Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD" (Psalm 33:12). May it be said of America, two hundred fifty years from her founding — and for as many generations as the Lord grants beyond it — that she remained that nation still.

Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.

 

The Signers of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Georgia:  Button Gwinnett · Lyman Hall · George Walton

North Carolina:  William Hooper · Joseph Hewes · John Penn

South Carolina:  Edward Rutledge · Thomas Heyward, Jr. · Thomas Lynch, Jr. · Arthur Middleton

Massachusetts:  John Hancock · Samuel Adams · John Adams · Robert Treat Paine · Elbridge Gerry

Maryland:  Samuel Chase · William Paca · Thomas Stone · Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:  George Wythe · Richard Henry Lee · Thomas Jefferson · Benjamin Harrison · Thomas Nelson, Jr. · Francis Lightfoot Lee · Carter Braxton

Pennsylvania:  Robert Morris · Benjamin Rush · Benjamin Franklin · John Morton · George Clymer · James Smith · George Taylor · James Wilson · George Ross

Delaware:  Caesar Rodney · George Read · Thomas McKean

New York:  William Floyd · Philip Livingston · Francis Lewis · Lewis Morris

New Jersey:  Richard Stockton · John Witherspoon · Francis Hopkinson · John Hart · Abraham Clark

New Hampshire:  Josiah Bartlett · William Whipple · Matthew Thornton

Rhode Island:  Stephen Hopkins · William Ellery

Connecticut:  Roger Sherman · Samuel Huntington · William Williams · Oliver Wolcott

Endnotes

1. The Declaration of Independence, In Congress, July 4, 1776, closing paragraph. National Archives, "Declaration of Independence: A Transcription," archives.gov.
2. Population estimate for the American colonies in 1776, commonly cited at approximately 2.5–3 million. See U.S. Census Bureau historical estimates.
3. Sarah Pruitt, "Why Was the Declaration of Independence Written?" History.com, updated Sept. 28, 2021, history.com/news/how-the-declaration-of-independence-came-to-be.
4. King George III's address to Parliament, October 27, 1775, describing the American rebellion; widely documented in colonial and parliamentary records of the period.
5. Patrick Henry, address to the Second Virginia Convention, St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775.
6. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, published January 9/10, 1776, Philadelphia. Sales figures widely cited across standard histories of the American Revolution.
7. Accounts of the Continental Congress's practice of opening sessions in prayer are documented in the Journals of the Continental Congress and discussed at length by WallBuilders, wallbuilders.com.
8. John Adams to Abigail Adams, letters of 1776, Massachusetts Historical Society, "Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive," masshist.org.
9. Pruitt, History.com, op. cit.; National Archives, "Declaration of Independence: A Transcription."
10. Word count and structural breakdown of the Declaration of Independence commonly cited by National Archives and constitutional history resources.
11. David Barton, WallBuilders, wallbuilders.com — research on colonial-era sermons and their relationship to the principles later enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
12. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon (University of North Carolina Press, 1959).
13. John Witherspoon, Introduction "To the Reader," Isaac Collins' 1791 Family Bible, Trenton, New Jersey.
14. John Witherspoon, Introduction "To the Reader," 1791, on the person of Christ.
15. John Hancock, Massachusetts proclamations for days of fasting and prayer during his governorship, Massachusetts State Archives.
16. Roger Sherman, personal statement of Christian belief, widely reproduced in period biographical collections of the Connecticut delegation.
17. Biographical accounts of Richard Stockton's capture and imprisonment by British forces in late 1776, standard sources on the New Jersey signers.
18. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, reflections in his final years as the last surviving signer of the Declaration, d. 1832.
19. The Declaration of Independence, closing pledge, July 4, 1776.
20. Mary Katherine Goddard's January 1777 Baltimore printing of the Declaration of Independence, the first to list all signers by name; Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
21. The observation that republics and great powers have historically endured for roughly two centuries is a widely repeated pattern in popular historical commentary rather than a precise, universally agreed-upon academic metric; it is offered here devotionally, as a reflection on providence, rather than as a rigid historical law.
22. Benjamin Rush, personal correspondence reflecting his Christian faith, collected in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Princeton University Press, 1951).
23. John Witherspoon, sermon addresses on salvation through Christ, referencing Acts 4:12, standard collections of Witherspoon's published sermons.