1 John 1:9:
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
“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 these 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 presumptuos 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 number, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.
“But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand that 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 virtue and wisdom 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 who made us.
“It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our nation sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
~ Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation appointing a National Day of Prayer, Fasting and Humiliation, 1863
~ photo by Andrew Loomis
