Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Thursday 7 May - National Day of Prayer

George Washington Praying at Valley Forge


Each year the first Thursday in May is the National Day of Prayer, a day that encourages Americans to pray for the United States, it’s people, and its leaders.

My fellow citizens, our nation desperately needs our prayers. We are surrounded by a host of domestic and international threats. The nation faces an epidemic of depression, violence and lawlessness springing from the spirit of the anti-Christ that is growing in our nation. We no longer have the benefit of two oceans to protect us in the age of ICBMs. Additionally, we need to pray that the next choice for the U.S. Supreme Court will be a Christian. This judge will play a crucial role in our nation’s future.

The tradition of a National Day of Prayer dates to 1775, when the Second Continental Congress set aside a day for Americans to pray to “be ever under the care and protection of a kind Providence” as they began the struggle for independence. In the following decades, Congress and the president set aside various days for prayer. In 1863, for example, Lincoln proclaimed “a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer” to help the country get through “the awful calamity of civil war” and for “the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.”

Likewise today our nation is engaged in a Global War against Terrorism. Today’s terrorists are both domestic and international and know no bounds of human decency. Our soldiers are spread around the world and need your prayers to uplift them in their difficult tasks. Pray for the returning combat veterans who have a difficult time coping with stress and re-adjusting to peacetime; pray for our wounded soldiers and the families of deceased soldiers who bear the awful burden of having lost a child; pray that we find American contractors, like Tim Bell, who is missing in Iraq.

In 1952 Congress and President Truman established a National Day of Prayer as a yearly event. President Truman called for a day “on which all of us in our churches, in our homes, and in our hearts, may beseech God to grant us wisdom to know the course which we should follow, and strength and patience to pursue that course steadfastly.”

In 1988 President Reagan designated the first Thursday in May as the National Day of Prayer, urging Americans to ask God for “His blessings, His peace, and the resting of His kind and holy hands on ourselves, our Nation, our friends in the defense of freedom, and all mankind, now and always.”

Some of our citizens have chosen to forget about God. We can restore this nation if we repent and turn to God again.

Finally, we need to get on our knees and thank the Lord for being born in the greatest country in the world. Our nation has been blessed with bounties beyond belief. Each of us could just as easily been born in some hellhole elsewhere in the world.

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