Humble ourselves before God

 

Psalm 33:12 “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He chose for His inheritance.

At physical therapy for my recent broken leg and wrist, my Therapist, who graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) was talking about seeing the historic basketball coach John Wooden there. It reminded me of when my employer hired Coach Wooden as an inspirational speaker at one of their annual management conferences and he kept reverencing quotes from the most influential person in his life – Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States was, arguably, the greatest president we have ever had. Lincoln was very humble and forgiving. He reminds us of our need as a nation to humble ourselves before God. During the dark days of the Civil War, he declared national days of fasting and prayer.

He wrote; This thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, 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 only are blessed whose God is the Lord. … 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.

James 4:10 “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”

In our day, with terrible rises in crime, violence and immorality of every kind, we would do well to heed Lincoln’s words today and humble ourselves before God and pray for His mercy on this nation and the world.

In Christ, Brian