Sermon for Jan 15, 2012
January 22, 2012
Announcements for April 10, 2011
April 10, 2011
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Honest Abe・ and Our Christian Heritage
March 31, 2011
This is the second in our series of five articles that illustrates how our founding fathers and national leaders believed that God is responsible for our nation. The words below are as appropriate today as they were when they were originally written.. . . We have been 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 forgot-ten 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. In-toxicated 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.
Abraham Lincoln, anguished by the ravages of the civil war, declared a ―Proclamation of a National Fast Day‖on March 30, 1863:
Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men 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 and proven by all history, that those nations are only blessed whose God is the Lord.
