Nearly a century ago, a series of calamities hit the Armstrong family. A dog bit Loma Armstrong. Before the bite healed, she developed tonsillitis, which developed into quinsy. She contracted blood poisoning from a rose thorn. Her throat swelled shut; her jaw locked. The doctor told Herbert Armstrong that his wife would die in less than 24 hours.

A neighbor then visited the stricken family. She told Mr. Armstrong about a man who anointed and prayed for the sick, and asked if he could pray for Mrs. Armstrong. Though skeptical, Mr. Armstrong agreed to let the man come. When he arrived, he explained to Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong that the Bible contains numerous passages in which God promises to heal. Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong recognized that these passages are indeed promises. The stranger then anointed Mrs. Armstrong with oil, a symbol used in the Old and New Testaments, and prayed.

“Never had I heard anyone talk like that to God,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in his autobiography. “It was not a long prayer—perhaps a minute or two. But as he spoke, I knew that as sure as there is a God in heaven, my wife had to be healed! Any other result would have made God out a liar. Any other result would have nullified the authority of the Scriptures. Complete assurance seized me—and also my wife.”

This man did not simply ask God to heal Mrs. Armstrong; he quoted scripture to God. Then, he humbly yet boldly called on God to keep His promises and heal this dying woman with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Mrs. Armstrong slept soundly until 11 a.m. the next day, then arose as if she had never been ill. She had been healed, miraculously, of everything. The doctor was dumbfounded.

Grateful, Mr. Armstrong began studying the topic of divine healing.

Yet the supernatural healing of Loma Armstrong was not the end of this important story. Mr. Armstrong had been studying the existence of God, the authority of the Bible and then the seventh-day Sabbath. He had written a paper titled “Foundation for Sunday Sacredness Crumbles,” which he shared with the man God had used to save his wife’s life. This man studied this paper line by line with his own pastor. They could find nothing wrong with it.

Yet even though the man recognized the biblical accuracy of Mr. Armstrong’s argument, he refused to keep the Saturday Sabbath. “All the churches observe Sunday,” he said. “We can’t start to fight all the churches. Now we are saved by grace, not of works. We think there are more important things in salvation than which day Christ rose on, or which day we keep. This could just get you all mixed up. It could be dangerous.”

Weeks later, Mr. Armstrong encountered the man again, and now he was downcast. He told Mr. Armstrong something terrible had happened. “God has left me,” he said. “He doesn’t answer my prayers anymore.”

The man did not understand what had happened, but Mr. Armstrong did. “Evidently, until God used me to test him by bringing to him a new truth, he had not deliberately rejected truth nor disobeyed God’s commands knowingly. God looks on the heart, and until this man followed his preacher in deliberately rejecting light and truth from God which he acknowledged to be truth and which led to willful disobedience, his heart was honest and sincere in his simple way” (ibid).

As long as this man had a humble and repentant attitude, God had answered his prayers (Isaiah 66:2). But after learning that the biblical Sabbath is on the seventh day, continuing to go to church on Sundays meant doing so with a rebellious attitude, rationalizing that disobedience was irrelevant because “we are saved by grace, not of works.” He no longer trembled at God’s Word.

We should learn an important lesson from this man. His story is a sad one—one that parallels 400 years of American Christianity from the pilgrims to today! Americans have forgotten the importance of repentance!

Religious Founding

False Christianity has plagued the world almost since the inception of true Christianity. But Christians today are facing an existential crisis. Only 11 percent of Americans read the Bible daily, and only 14 percent can accurately list the Ten Commandments. Most Christians do not understand Scripture, especially scriptures about Satan, sin and repentance. This is a dramatic change from the way America started.

In 1999, historian Paul Johnson wrote, “Both in Virginia and in New England to the north, the colonists were determined, God-fearing men often in search of a religious toleration denied them at home [Britain], who brought their families and were anxious to farm and establish permanent settlements. They put political and religious freedom before riches …. Thus, took shape the economic dynamo that eventually became the United States—an experiment designed to establish the rule of God on Earth” (Sunday Telegraph, Dec. 26, 1999; emphasis added).

That is quite the goal! To establish “the rule of God on Earth” requires creating a culture where each person dedicates his or her life not only to believing that God exists but also to keeping the Ten Commandments, which are the basis of all righteous law. It requires a culture where each person repents when they break God’s Ten Commandments and strives to obey them better, even when no one is looking.

Most European nations forbade commoners from owning Bibles until after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517. Shortly after the Bible was translated into English, colonists started bringing the Holy Scriptures with them to America. They read them and did their best to establish a new society built on the Ten Commandments and the beatitudes. The vast majority were not part of the one true Church of God, which Jesus said would be small and persecuted compared to multiple larger false versions of “Christianity.” Like the man God used to heal Mrs. Armstrong before he disobeyed, the majority of these colonists did not keep the Sabbath. Yet unlike this man, most colonists knew that God’s inexorable law had not been done away with.

On a basic level, most 17th-century Puritans knew that God wanted them to repent of their sins.

Thomas Manton, a 17th-century Puritan clergyman, said, “In choosing the ways of God, the heart must come to a firm resolution rather to suffer the greatest inconvenience than to commit the least sin.” Not long afterward, English philosopher John Locke noted, “Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to usurp the name of Christian without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit.”

Both of these English Puritans understood that no one could be saved by his or her own works, that only the blood of Jesus Christ has the power to blot out sins. But these 17th-century Puritans also understood the basic biblical teaching that a repentant attitude is required for salvation. We cannot make peace with sin.

The Puritans were inspired by the Bible in general and the history and writings of Moses in particular. Their preachers taught a message of repentance. Their politicians sought to build a nation, a city on a hill, that obeyed God’s law. The Puritans were by no means perfect, but their zeal against sin was admirable.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry drew attention to this fact in his article “The Bible and the Constitution.” “Christian leaders today teach that the law has been done away,” he wrote. “That is almost the extreme opposite of what our forefathers believed! Our spiritual leaders, both from the right and the left, have led us into lawlessness and grave danger. Even the politicians who established our republic were more spiritual than most of our religious leaders today! … Christians are supposedly people who follow Christ, the Lawgiver” (Trumpet, March 2011).

This is a highly incriminating statement. America’s founders knew the Christian life was not only a general belief in Jesus but also a war on vices and lust. But it all went terribly wrong in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution gained acceptance, parts of the Bible such as the Genesis creation narrative were called into question. Liberal Christians increasingly rejected the belief that the Bible is without error and began to reinterpret many of its doctrines. The doctrine of repentance was one of the first to go as modernism took hold.

Liberal Christianity

At first, liberal Christianity was defined by its acceptance of Darwinian evolution, its use of scholarly reasoning to explain the Bible without appealing to miracles or the supernatural, and its belief that the Second Coming of Christ would not occur until after humanity had rid itself of crime, poverty, racism and other social evils by human effort. Once the idea became widespread that Christians could decide what was right and wrong apart from the Bible, they began to reject other doctrines like that of repentance. Today, the American Worldview Inventory Survey finds that only 44 percent of “born-again Christians” believe the Bible when it says that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life while on Earth (1 Peter 2:22). So why should they strive to repent of their own sins if God’s Word cannot be trusted about Jesus’s sinless life?

The infamous Fundamentalist-Modernist schism occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. It led to two broad factions emerging within Protestantism. The fundamentalists insisted on the timeless validity of each doctrine espoused in the Bible. The modernists called for a reinterpretation of Christianity in response to new scientific discoveries and cultural pressures. In other words, the modernists compromised and adopted the spirit of the age.

The liberals more or less won the debate. By the end of the 1930s, they controlled all of the mainline Protestant seminaries, publishing houses and denominational hierarchies in the United States. This is why that man told Mr. Armstrong that he did not have to keep the Sabbath because he was “saved by grace, not of works.” He knew God’s promises to heal—but not about his own responsibility to repent.

Of course, America’s Founding Fathers were also Sunday keepers, accepting a doctrine whose authority lies in Catholic tradition rather than the actual Old and New Testaments. Cardinal James Gibbons admitted as much in his 1876 book The Faith of Our Fathers, where he noted that not a single line in God’s Bible authorizes the sanctification of Sunday, yet he still recommended that Christians observe Sunday based on Catholic tradition.

Yet the Americans of 1725 and 1825 kept Sunday with a different attitude than the Americans of 2025. Preachers like Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) convinced millions of Americans that the authority for changing the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first day was God Himself. This assertion is disproved in Mr. Armstrong’s book Which Day Is the Christian Sabbath? Yet when the founders kept a first-day sabbath (from sunset to sunset, notably), they did so largely believing they were obeying the Fourth Commandment. It was not until much more recently that modernists began breaking the Sabbath with a different excuse: a rebellious assertion that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice did away with God’s law.

This difference in attitude is all-important. God answered the prayer of the Founding Fathers when they called on His aid in the Revolutionary War, at the Constitutional Convention and in other national crises. God also answered the prayers of the man who called on His aid in healing Mrs. Armstrong. But God stopped answering this man’s prayers when he deliberately rejected God’s truth, using grace as an excuse (Hosea 4:6).

It is undeniable that God is also not answering the prayers of many Christians today. This is because modern Christianity has shifted from “avoiding sin” to “focusing on love”—a nonsensical shift since sin is the transgression of God’s law of love (Romans 13:8; 1 John 3:4). The Bible plainly states that God does not hear unrepentant sinners (e.g. Proverbs 15:29; 28:9; Isaiah 1:15; 59:1-2; Micah 3:4).

Many churches today accept unrepentant homosexuals and transgenders to show how tolerant and loving they are. Some even put out rainbow pride flags to signal their support of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer community. Such behavior has dismayed more-traditional Christians—yet the spirit behind churches covered with rainbow flags is the same spirit telling us it doesn’t matter which day we go to church because “we are saved by grace, not of works.”

If America wants to prosper, it needs to remember Thomas Manton’s admonition: “In choosing the ways of God, the heart must come to a firm resolution rather to suffer the greatest inconvenience than to commit the least sin.” Jesus Christ paid the penalty for our sins so that we can turn away from those sins, not so that we could wallow in them indefinitely.

The Rise of Lawlessness

The Apostle Paul warned the Romans about doctrinal heresies concerning the law and grace. During the last 10 to 20 years of Paul’s ministry, many false teachers began creeping into Christian congregations. These teachers locked in on the person of Jesus Christ, while ignoring what Christ taught. One of their most popular false doctrines was the idea that people did not need to repent of breaking God’s law because they were under grace.

In his epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote: “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein” (Romans 6:1-2).

The Roman congregation had undoubtedly fallen under the influence of one of the gnostic disciples of Simon Magus (Acts 8), a false teacher who taught that the God of the Old Testament was evil and that Jesus came to abolish the law of God rather than magnify it. In his book The Incredible Human Potential, Mr. Armstrong noted that Simon “replaced the message Jesus brought from God with a ‘gospel’ about the person of Christ—proclaiming the Messenger but suppressing the entire missing dimension from His message.”

In other words, Simon Magus preached the same idea uttered by the man Mr. Armstrong encountered in 1927. Namely, that Christians don’t have to try to keep God’s law because it’s a burdensome thing and we are now “under grace” instead. So let sin abound.

Paul also encountered this fallacy in the Corinthian congregation, where a man was fornicating with his stepmother. The whole congregation knew what he was doing but would not expel the man from their midst. They gloried in their tolerance until Paul instructed them to excommunicate this man until he repented (1 Corinthians 5:5).

Paul was able to put both the Roman and Corinthian congregations back on track, but the doctrine of lawlessness that Simon established never went away. It has ebbed and flowed throughout the ages, becoming weaker in the days of the Founding Fathers and becoming stronger in modern-day America. Christians must be on guard against this false teaching.

Paul taught that lawlessness would become more common in the days preceding Christ’s return, even among those professing godliness. In 2 Timothy 3:1-5, he wrote, “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.”

Many have been seduced by the idea that Jesus’s love for them while they were yet sinners means they can remain sinners (Romans 5:8). This modernist doctrine, which is really an ancient fallacy, has greatly damaged America. It is of utmost importance that Christians develop a hatred for sin that far exceeds what men like Thomas Manton had.

In his book The True History of God’s True Church, Mr. Flurry writes that lawlessness “is what Satan is all about! He is bitter, hateful against God, and perfectly lawless. His false religion preaches that doctrine of lawlessness—though he does a remarkable job of masking it as righteousness. That is a fundamental teaching of the Babylonian mystery religion that emerged from Simon [Magus]: that the law is done away. You see that teaching in the mother church as well as in her Protestant daughters. … Satan has deceived an enormous number of religious people—including Catholics, Protestants and, in far too many cases, even those in God’s true Church—into turning that spectacular grace into a license to disobey.”

Many Christians were worried about Barack Obama’s attempts to lead America into radical liberal ideas and overall lawlessness. They prayed for a Trump victory like the man Mr. Armstrong encountered prayed for Loma Armstrong to be healed. God is now empowering President Trump to lead a national resurgence. Yet now that God has blessed America’s faith, He will test its obedience.

If Americans fail this obedience test, the day will come when they find themselves saying, “Brother, something terrible has come over me. God has left me. He doesn’t answer my prayers anymore. I don’t understand what has happened.” Americans—including Christians—must repent before it is too late.