As the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary, Pastor Robert Jeffress says the nation needs to remember its roots as it looks toward the future.
In a message titled "America at the Crossroads,” the First Baptist Dallas senior pastor told his congregation that in 1787, just over a decade after America won its independence from Britain, the nation’s Founding Fathers gathered for the Constitutional Convention, where, said Jeffress, they had no shortage of disagreements.
Jeffress said, “Benjamin Franklin stood up in that room and he addressed the president of the convention, George Washington, with these words: ‘In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. Have we now forgotten this powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance?”
Drawing from John Adams' famous 1776 letter to his wife, Abigail, which erroneously predicted July 2nd — not July 4th — would be celebrated with "pomp and parade... bonfires, and illuminations," Jeffress celebrated America's Christian foundations, citing Franklin's call for prayer during the Constitutional Convention and Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving proclamation amid the bloody Battle of Chickamauga, where nearly 35,000 soldiers lost their lives or were seriously wounded or missing in what was called the river of death.
“And yet, in spite of those massive losses, just a few weeks later, on October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his first proclamation of thanksgiving, the first time America was called to offer thanks to God,” said Jeffress. “Why would you offer thanks to God in a time of such loss? He said we need to look heavenward and remember God's blessings.”
Despite America’s rich Christian heritage, however, he warned that Scripture offers no prominent role for the U.S. in End Times prophecy, unlike other nations. In what dispensationalists describe as a “seven-year tribulation” under the Antichrist, freedoms and democratic institutions would vanish, he said, as nations from Babylon to Rome rise and fall.
Jeffress said he sees three key factors that could accelerate America’s demise: moral disintegration, military confrontation and “Israeli isolation,” for which he cited a Gallup poll in July 2025 that found 59% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government — up from 51% just the year before that.
“It's not hard to see at all how America will ultimately desert Israel and other nations of the world will have,” he said. “The interesting thing is that desertion of Israel, that isolation of Israel will impact other nations like the United States and others. It will decimate those nations. But Israel has the promise of endurance because her defender is Almighty God.”
Despite those trends, Jeffress rejected fatalism and pointed to Moses' call to "choose life" by calling on Christians to take a stand for religious liberty, vote for leaders who fulfill government's biblical roles, such as protecting the nation from evildoers, pray for the nation's welfare and share the Gospel.
He called it “tragic” that U.S. Christians today are more comfortable talking politics than sharing Jesus. “Can I just tell you what I know to be true? Both political parties, Democrats and Republicans, both parties are intensely corrupt,” he said. “They cannot change anything. It is only the Gospel that can do that. We have the message that will change the world.
“And that's what we're trying to do here at First Baptist Dallas, sharing the truth of God's Word to transform the world.”
