Beseeching – True Spiritual Awakening

Unlike the spiritual and political leaders of Israel, a nation that is vigilant has Christians and leaders who are not blinded by their sin. People who have a Biblical understanding about the heart of mankind find joy in what the prophet Joel wrote, “Even now, declares the Lord, return to Me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning… Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.” (Joel 2:12-13)

The phrase, “Return to the Lord your God” was well known to Israel and is illuminated in the heart of the born again Christian.  This phrase testifies to covenantal relationship between God and mankind whom have come to God in Christ’s name in a heart of repentance.  True repentance leads a people and a nation to enjoying the graciousness and compassion of the Lord, which enables a vigilant nation to rest in the abounding love of God.

A vigilant nation has leaders like Abraham Lincoln who designated Thursday, April 30, 1863 as a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer.  He wrote, “It is the duty of nations 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 Holy Scriptures and proven in all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. The awful calamity of the Civil War that now desolates the land may be but punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to bring us to a needful national reformation as a whole people. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity to pray and too proud to pray to the God who made us.  It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves, before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and prayer for clemency and forgiveness.

Americans, become vigilant; pray for a spiritual awakening!