In 1863, President Lincoln designated April 30th as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. Here's a portion of his proclamation on that occasion:
“It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, who owe 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 and proven by a history that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. The awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people. 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. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has grown, but we have forgotten God.”
Could the same not be said about our nation today? And have those same attitudes of affluence and independence not impacted 21st-century churches in America? Even further, do our own lives not far-too-often resemble the country that President Lincoln was describing?
As you fast during this season of prayer & fasting, think beyond your own life and your own church to envision how far God wants to reach through a people completely dependent upon Him. Might He be able to use us to change a nation?
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