“God’s First Step Towards Fixing Us”

Posted on August 12, 2026 by Heritage Ministries of Kentucky

When I was ten years old, three ladies in the community where I grew up in Pike County, Kentucky came faithfully to our school each week to teach us the Bible. They taught us Who God was, who we were, and what His plan was for our lives. One of the things they taught us was to memorize the Ten Commandments. Then they told us God wanted us to obey those Commandments. So I decided I would obey the Ten Commandments. I committed myself to “Have no other gods” before God, my Creator. I committed to not steal or lie or desire what belonged to somebody else. I committed to always obey my parents. Was I in for an awakening! I found out that, try as I might, sooner or later, I would break one of those Ten Commands. And you see, our Bible teachers knew that’s exactly what would happen: Because that’s the very reason God gave those Commands.

Perhaps you’re thinking: “Don, I don’t understand. Why would God give us a command that we couldn’t keep?” He does so because He’s wiser than we are. You see, He knows that when we refused to let His life indwell us in the Garden of Eden, we received instead “darkness” to indwell us. That is: We lost our understanding of why we were alive. From then on, satan planted different ideas in our mind about Who God was and why we were alive. As we believed his lies, we plunged into darkness about the reason for our existence. Selfishness replaced purpose. This would cause all of the hurt we, as mankind, would ever experience. But we wouldn’t be able to identify what was causing the hurt because we were deceived: In other words our understanding was darkened. This is exactly what Jeremiah 17:9 says:

“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; [but] who can know it?”

Thus, God gave the Ten Commandments through Moses. He wants us to try to keep those Commands so that we will find out there’s something bad wrong inside us—something that needs to be changed. That something is the selfishness that darkens our mind and causes us to consistently see everything through a “lens” of selfishness. When we try to obey the Ten Commandments we discover that, even though we’re made in the image of God, and thus, should be able to obey His commands—we can’t. This, in turn, causes us to look for a Deliverer: Someone who can deliver us from our inbred selfishness and Who can enable us to live as God created us to originally live. This is why the New Testament teaches that:

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“The Most Important Government”

Posted on August 5, 2026 by Heritage Ministries of Kentucky

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about government and the money it takes to operate it. And all this has produced is just more debt, more tax, and more destruction of our nation—While the government gets larger and larger. And if we don’t quickly return to the Founding principle of America we will shortly live under a dictator.

Our Founders taught a principle to their children which summed up all the Biblical teaching about government. It was this:

“The more internal self-government you have, the less external civil government you need. But the less internal self-government you have, the more external civil government you need.”

America was built on this principle. The Pilgrims learned to walk in the internal self-government which the Holy Spirit produces when a life is surrendered to Christ. This started when they received Christ as their Lord and Deliverer and thus, were born again. But the earliest among them had learned something about this internal self-government that would profoundly affect the birthing and the growth of America. In the mid-1500s they had gone to Geneva, Switzerland to learn from a scholar by the name of John Calvin. Calvin taught a simple principle which would change the course of the Western world. He called it “renovation”. The word renovation means to make new. This is what Christ does when He enters a life that has just surrendered to Him as Master. He changes that life by flowing with His life from that person’s spirit, into his soul, and out through the actions of his body. That is what the Bible means when it says,

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“Why America Declared Independence”

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Heritage Ministries of Kentucky

In declaring our Independence from England, were our Founders rebels, pushing against God-ordered government? Or were they revolutionaries, re-establishing God-ordered civil government? It’s way past time we again considered the twenty-seven reasons they listed for declaring Independence. They stated:

Why America Declared Independence 1 — King George III

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

“He has refused his Assent to Laws…wholesome and necessary for the public good.

“He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance…

“He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature…

“He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual…for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

“He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

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