First Christian

By Bruce Humes

Pastor

Many U.S. Presidents have made proclamations calling for a day of national prayer. On July 20, 1775, the Continental Congress issued a proclamation calling for a day of public fasting and prayer. In 1795, George Washington proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving and prayer. On May 9, 1798, John Adams declared the day as a day of solemn humility, fasting and prayer.

I am sharing with you exerpts of one that was offered up by President Abraham Lincoln during the civil war. It resonated with me concerning the need for not only personal repentance, but national repentance as well.

“Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as me, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures as proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

“All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us rest humbly in the hope authorized by Divine teachings, that the United cry of the Nation will be heard on High, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our National sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.”

If you want to speak to someone or have a need, call the church office at (562) 431-8810.