Essays
Lincoln's Proclamation
LINCOLN'S PROCLAMATION
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 for clemency and forgiveness.
With today being the 245th birthday of our nation, it would do us well to ponder President Lincoln's exhortation.
This proclamation declared a national day of fasting, humiliation and prayer, on April 30th, 1863.
At that time our beloved country was two years into a deadly civil war that would span four long years.
Thankfully, the war came to an end with General Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th, 1865.
Ever so sadly, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated five days later, on April 14th, 1865.
While we are not a nation at war, we are nonetheless a deeply divided country in need of God's help.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord...”
(Psalm 33:12)
Terry Siverd / Cortland Church of Christ
