While this week’s message is coming to you a day after Independence Day, it was recorded on the 4th, and the message is still clear: We should be very grateful for the sacrifices made by our founders. We should also be grateful that most of the politicians who are serving today were not among the founders. God only knows where we would be then.

We should also realize that the sacrifices made by not only the founders but many generations before us required more risk than we are put in today. None of us are actually putting our “lives, fortunes, and sacred honors” on the line. None of us are on a literal battlefield giving our lives to defend freedom. We are among those privileged to fight tyranny in a land that affords us the freedoms to do so largely unhindered, compared to most of the human civilization.

While our state has many pitfalls, and the cultural rot that we are tolerating would cause any founder to roll over in their grave, we should recognize that each of us could sacrifice more for freedom—and I hope that over the next year, we will.