04/27/2023
We seem proud to be independent, but our Dependence on GOD is very obvious. During the lowest days of our nation's history, Abraham Lincoln called for a "Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer" in 1863 (see below).
Now, 160 years later, this nation faces even greater challenges than a 'civil' war. Thankfully, all US presidents since Lincoln have signed proclamations for such a day of prayer for this nation.
Thursday, May 4 is the National Day of Prayer. Will you join in confessing our failures, thanking GOD for His mercy, and seeking His control over what we cannot?
In St. Clair County, AL a small gathering will take place at the Ashville Courthouse Assembly Area from noon to 1PM to pray. If you are able please join to help us pray over our families, communities, educators, care providers, first responders, businesses, military, media, governmental authorities, and His Body (churches).
If you are unable at that time or location, please take time to lift your own prayers to Almighty GOD for His direction and correction.
On March 30, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared:
"It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to 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 all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the LORD.
And, inasmuch as we know that by His Divine Law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that 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?
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 ever 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 to the GOD that made us.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer. And I do hereby request that all the people abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the LORD, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then 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 the pardon of our national sins, and restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington on the 30th day of March, in the year of our LORD 1863.
