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I N F O R M E D . C H R I S T I A N . D I G E S T National Day of Prayer - Thurs., May 6
A Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer
"We can all pray. We all should pray. We should ask the fulfillment of God’s will. We should ask for courage, wisdom, for the quietness of soul which comes alone to them who place their lives in His hands." --President Harry Truman
"The National Day of Prayer is a simple yet very effective way to introduce Christians to the Holy Spirit's prayer movement. Everyone can 'Take 5' to pray -- at their office desk, at their school locker, at their kitchen sink. Every church building can be open for prayer throughout the day. Every community of churches can gather in the evening to praise and pray together (or pray with the televised National Concert of Prayer). Every pastor can invite nearby pastors to gather for an hour of prayer for our Nation. Every family can focus their mealtime prayers on the spiritual needs of our Nation." --Phil Miglioratti, National Pastors' Prayer Network
"Our praying, however, needs to be pressed and pursued with an energy that never tires, a persistency which will not be denied, and a courage which never fails." --EM Bounds
"If My people, which are called by My Name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land" (2 Chr. 7:14).
Intercessors for America Thirty Years Ago
National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer: April 30, 1974
The Birthing of First Friday Prayer & Fasting
"We have been living through days that try the soul of the Nation and test the resiliency of the Republic. We are all troubled by the continual erosion of the American people's faith and trust in their leadership in all parts of life….We witness a country torn apart with division and lacking the spiritual foundation that would restore its vision and purpose. We, as a people, through our own acquiescence to corruption and waste, have helped to create a moral abyss that produces a distain for honesty and humility in high levels of national leadership….We are in need of repentance…. Today our Nation has once again been torn apart by a crisis from which there appears little relief. Our refusal to acknowledge our dependence and need for a Power beyond ourselves has severely damaged our national soul. I believe that only a national confession of corporate guilt can save us from the worship of our own finite power and the tragedies that this worship creates." --Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, 1973
THE UNITED STATES entered the 1970s stunned from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights demonstrations and "Black Power" riots, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The infusion of drugs, Rock and Roll, Eastern "New Age" religions, environmentalism and militant feminism fueled anti-war protests and spawned a pluralistic neo-pagan counter culture.
THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION was struggling to end the Vietnam War while mired in an escalating Watergate scandal. The first Watergate trials began on January 8. They implicated President Nixon, and triggered impeachment hearings which led to his resignation. The Supreme Court legalized abortion on January 22, 1973. One day later, a Vietnam cease-fire was signed, marking one of the only humiliating "defeats" in US military history. The Vietnam War divided Christians and tore at the conscience and fabric of our Nation in ways that are impacting public opinion and policy over the reconstruction of Iraq at the present time.
THE ARAB NATIONS which had launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel initiated a retaliatory oil embargo against the US and other Western nations that had stood with Israel. On October 17 they announced that they would cut oil production by 5% each succeeding month until Israel withdrew from the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Days later Saudi Arabia announced even more dramatic cuts. Oil prices quadrupledGas was rationed and the price per gallon skyrocketed from thirty cents to over one dollar. Angry Americans lined up for gas and waited for hours as the first "energy crisis" gripped the US.
SEN. MARK O. HATFIELD stood on the floor of the US Senate on December 20, 1973 and delivered the historic speech calling the Nation to repentance which is reproduced below. At the close of his remarks he introduced a Joint Resolution calling for the observance of April 30, 1974 as a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer. Sen. Hatfield's Resolution was called up for immediate consideration and was adopted unanimously by the US Senate. It was introduced in the House of Representatives, but was blocked by one vote in the House Judiciary Committee. While not passed by both chambers of Congress and proclaimed by the President, Senator Hatfield's call to repentance, concerted prayer and fasting became a rallying cry among the newly formed ranks of Intercessors for America and among Christians across America. Thousands of believers from across the spectrum of the Church "trumpeted" the call, and multitudes of believers observed the day in their homes, churches and communities.
It was at the close of this historic April 30, 1974, National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer -- during a prayer service at Pastor Jack Hayford's Church On The Way in Van Nuys, California -- that the Lord indicated to Jimmy Owens, a founding Board member of Intercessors for America, that He desired such a day of united repentance, fasting and prayer be observed each month. As Jimmy and his wife, Carol, prayed about this they sensed the Lord was indicating the First Friday of each month. The Board of IFA adopted this observance and, at a "Chicago Summit" meeting of hundreds of pastors and Church leaders in the fall of 1974, Jimmy proposed that the First Friday be observed through the America's 1976 Bicentennial Year. It was adopted. The Board of IFA felt to continue on with First Friday concerted prayer and fasting, and has done so to the present time. Jimmy and Carol Owens composed and presented the powerful intercessory musicals, "If My People," "Come Together," and "Heal our Land" across the USA.
You and your church are invited to participate in First Friday prayer and fasting. A First Friday newsletter outlining prayer points will be provided upon request. Phone 1-800-USA-PRAY (800-872-7729), or download from the Web at www.ifapray.org.
"Fads in prayer come and go. What God is looking for is the kind of consistent, persistent prayer that is the hallmark of the First Friday call to united prayer and fasting. Only the Lord knows how many millions have both joined in or been effected by this strong call to concerted prayer and fasting from INTERCESSORS FOR AMERICA. Every church in America needs to join in calling their members to First Friday prayer and fasting." --Dave Butts, President, America's National Prayer Committee, www.nationalprayer.org
REMARKS ON US SENATE FLOOR BY SEN. MARK O. HATFIELD (R-OR), DECEMBER 20, 1973
We have been living through days that try the soul of the Nation and test the resiliency of the Republic. We are all troubled by the continual erosion of the American people's faith and trust in their leadership in all parts of life. The current fuel shortage has caused us to re-evaluate the legitimacy of our excessive use of the world's natural resources. We witness a country torn apart with division and lacking the spiritual foundation that would restore its vision and purpose. We, as a people, through our own acquiescence to corruption and waste, have helped to create a moral abyss that produces a distain for honesty and humility in high levels of national leadership.
Those of us who hold positions of leadership, and the people whom we represent, must confront these tragic affairs and learn their meaning for us as a Nation. These are not matters that can be covered up in the hope they will be forgotten, even though it is always easier to hide our wounds than to heal them.
It is more comfortable to believe in the spiritual symbols of righteousness than to acknowledge the reality and presence of evil, in ourselves and in our corporate life. So we become adroit at manipulation of religious impulses in our land to sanctify our national life.
We tend to put our country beyond the reach of God's judgment. The words on the back of our Great seal read, "God hath ordained our undertakings."' Our money is emblazoned with "In God We Trust." Our leaders solemnly invoke the name of God in their political speeches. We earnestly want to believe that ours is God's chosen land, that we are his chosen people, and that the leaders we have are divinely chosen and given special wisdom.
This impulse is born out of our own lives. We would rather believe that we merit God's blessing than admit that we stand under His judgment, and in need of His forgiveness. But however difficult it is to admit our sin, the evidence of it is all around us, in the personal dilemmas of our lives and in the crises that afflict our Nation. Saint John reminds us that "If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us" (I John 1:18). Continued belief in national self-righteousness, therefore, no matter what we as a Nation do, only leads us into greater peril.
We acknowledge that God requires justice, but we have tended to turn our corporate backs to the injustices of racism that continue to threaten the very fabric of our society. We condone by our inaction inhuman conditions in our cities and rural areas where millions are trapped in ever deepening ruts of poverty.
We have become gluttons of the world's resources at a time when much of the world does not know the source of its next meal. This Nation, composing only 6% of the world's population, last year consumed 40% of all energy used on this planet.
Many believe that our security comes through our materialism, our wealth, and our gross national productSo we despoil our environment and neglect the quality of man's spirit in order to expand our materialistic self-indulgence.
We are now capable of destroying most of the world's population in a few moments through the power of nuclear warfare. We operate on the assumption that human life is expendable, and rationalize this axiom on the sole basis that this is what our enemy believes, so this must be our belief also.
We are in need of repentance. Our claims of righteousness, as individuals, and as a Nation, deceive only ourselves. We should remember the words of the prophet Amos: "I hate, I despise your feasts, and your solemn assemblies, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take away from me the noise of your songs, for I will not hear the melody of your viols. But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:21-24).
President Abraham Lincoln had a profound sense of the sovereignty of God. He knew how the Nation stood accountable to God's judgment. In the midst of the Civil War, the US Senate requested, and Lincoln responded on three separate occasions to a resolution setting aside a day for national humiliation, fasting and prayer.
One such occasion was on April 30. 1863, three months after the Emancipation proclamation, and three months before the battle of Gettysburg. The resolution grew out of bitter disappointments and dark days of 1863, the crushing defeat at Fredericksburg only a few days past. The whole land was burdened with taxes, stricken with sorrow, and harrowed by treason. Public credit had reached the lowest point in our history as a result of an ever-increasing national debt. Many regiments in the army of the Potomac had gone without pay for six months. Its morale was lost and six hundred desertions were reported daily. Any hope for an early end to the hostilities had been virtually destroyed. Northern newspapers were demanding peace at any price. Horace Greeley reflected national sentiment when he sent the President a note: "I venture to remind you that the bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace."
Seeing the effects of a Nation torn apart, President Lincoln did not appeal to any pretentious image of national self-righteousness; rather, he called the Nation to repentance. He believed that only through the acknowledgement of our corporate guilt and confession of national sins that the country could regain its national purpose and unity. Lincoln recognized that though the Nation had prospered, "we have forgotten God." Because the Nation had begun to believe that it had flourished through its own superior wisdom and virtue, Lincoln stated, "It behooves us…to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and pray for clemency and forgiveness."
Today our Nation has once again been torn apart by a crisis from which there appears little relief. Our refusal to acknowledge our dependence and need for a Power beyond ourselves has severely damaged our national soul. I believe that only a national confession of corporate guilt can save us from the worship of our own finite power and the tragedies that this worship creates. Therefore, today I am introducing a Congressional Joint Resolution calling for a National Day for Humiliation, Fasting and prayer. This resolution is modeled after that declared by Abraham Lincoln on April 30, 1863, and incorporates much of his original wording.
I would suggest that April 30, 1974 be chosen for that day, which would coincide with the same date when President Lincoln issued his historic Proclamation. Our Government and the other institutions of our society would all cease business as usual, as I envision it, so that we all would be free to consider actions appropriate to a time that would symbolize national repentance.
It is my firm conviction that a genuine spirit of repentance, infecting the climate of our Nation at all levels, can heal the wounds that presently afflict us. Reconciliation of the divisions and animosities that exist among our people can occur once there is a mutual acknowledgement of this need for contrition, which allows human compassion to grow.
There is hope for a land and a people who have the capacity to recognize their sins and their faults and turn from them. Repentance means precisely thjs -- to turn the other way. In so doing, we recognize that past events and present conditions cannot be rationalized or justified; rather, they must be repented of, so a whole new way can be sought. This is how individuals and how our land as a whole can seek authentic renewal and transformation.
So it is with this hope that I commend to the senate this Resolution call for a Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer in our land.
Joint Resolution
To proclaim April 30, 1974 as a National Day for Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer
Whereas, it is the duty of nations, as well as of men to owe 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 are blessed whose God is the Lord; and
Whereas, we know that 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; and
Whereas, we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched 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; and
Whereas, 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; and Whereas, we have made such an idol out of our pursuit of "national security" that we have forgotten that only God can be the ultimate guardian of our true livelihood and safety; and
Whereas, we have failed to respond, personally and collectively, with sacrifice and uncompromised commitment to the unmet needs of our fellow man, both at home and abroad; as a people, we have become so absorbed with the selfish pursuits of pleasure and profit that we have blinded ourselves to God's standard of justice and righteousness for this society; and
Whereas, it therefore behooves us to humble ourselves before Almighty God, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness: Now, therefore be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United states of America in Congress Assembled, that the Congress hereby proclaims that April 30, 1974 be a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and prayer; and calls upon the people of our Nation to humble ourselves as we see fit, before our Creator to acknowledge our final dependence upon Him and to repent of our national sins.
ON WATCH IN WASHINGTON Editorial Team: Gary Bergel / Brian Miller / Sondra Johnson
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Center for Cultural Leadership
When the Power Departs
The High Cost of Powerlessness
And she [Delilah] said, "The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself. And he knew not that the LORD was departed from him" (Judges 16:20).
The power for godly cultural change is identical to the power for godly individual change -- the Holy Spirit (Zech. 4:6). It just so happens that the modern Church, by and large, has lost interest in the Holy Spirit -- or so grieved Him that, as in the case of Samson, He has withdrawn His holy presence, and we forge intrepidly ahead, so spiritually insensitive that we are not even aware of our bankruptcy (Rev. 3:15-17).
When the power departs, we become especially skilled at techniques, tactics, and strategy. Evangelism becomes a blueprint for gathering sinners' scalps, rather than a byproduct of holy submission to the Lordship of Christ. Church growth becomes a well-conceived strategy rather than a Spirit-empowered revival. Church Leadership becomes a facade of warmed-over secular psychology cooked up in the organizational ovens of cutthroat CEO's. Cultural Christianization is a slap-dap program of back-room business deals, glitzy demographic charts, and high-powered political consultants. (And yet we wonder why the Holy Spirit is barely within praying distance.)
When the power departs, we become increasingly clever and impressed with ourselves. We snicker at all-night prayer meetings as we devour our systematic theologies -- and everybody who doesn't agree with our Biblical interpretations. We imbibe the latest sociological data, assimilating it to the Lord's holy temple, and we scoff at the "old-timers" who had the temerity to think that obedience, holiness and faithfulness would suffice to fill the pews. We develop an ecclesiastical aesthetics, in love with the beauty of the Kirk -- and not the holiness of the King (Heb. 1:8-9). We criticize the "emotionalism" of the Pentecostals and revel in the error that intellect is more significant than emotion -- and less vulnerable to Satanic seduction. We fashion the Church as a well-oiled machine, a weekday bureaucracy and Sunday "worship service," in which the actions of all "participants" are carefully calibrated and choreographed. We don't need the Holy Spirit; we're pretty smart all by ourselves.
When the power departs, we love to master the Bible, but the Bible no longer masters us. We parse verbs and exegete verses, but on Sunday we hear -- and deliver -- dry-as-dust sermons so bereft of Holy Spirit power that they couldn't convict a serial pedophile. We are quite confident theologically that the days of New Testament Holy Spirit power were historically unique and that we cannot expect much more than a highly "rational" faith and Sunday worship.
And sure enough -- our experience mirrors our expectations: no holy, supernatural power; no dramatic conversions; no healings; nothing but a rational, aesthetic faith. And then, intuitively embarrassed, we draft theologies to justify our powerlessness in the eyes of the saints who read in the Bible a very different Faith than the one they observe in church every Sunday. This is the plight of a people who find clever substitutes for the power of the Holy Spirit. To be sure, getting that power is costly.
Lacking that power is costlier.
The cure for our ills? A new infusion of the power of the Spirit: "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall [your] Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?" (Lk. 11:13).
National Day of Prayer Task Force
National Day of Prayer Statement
Millions to "Let Freedom Ring"
President Bush and all 50 governors will proclaim 53rd annual National Day of Prayer
Colorado Springs - As American troops continue fighting for liberty in various countries, United States citizens are preparing to celebrate their freedom to gather, worship and pray. Millions will answer the call to prayer on May 6, the 53rd annual National Day of Prayer, by flocking to observances held in public venues to intercede for the Nation.
"Our leaders confront difficult challenges every day and our society faces a future of uncertainty," said National Day of Prayer Task Force Chairman Shirley Dobson. "We live in the land of the free where ‘we the people' can openly call upon God for wisdom, protection and blessing. In order to realize the potential outlined in the Declaration of Independence, we must continue seeking Divine Counsel, asking for His intervention and direction."
As in previous years, President George W. Bush, all 50 governors and the governors from the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are expected to sign proclamations setting aside the first Thursday in May as a day of prayer. Dobson's Task Force is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and its efforts are powered by a large grassroots network. An estimated 40,000 coordinators and volunteers will host events that take place at courthouses, state capitols, city halls, parks and around school flagpoles. Many churches, firehouses and schools will ring their bells at noon to invite their communities to unite on bended knee.
The theme for this year's event is "Let Freedom Ring" and is based on Leviticus 25:10, "…proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants." Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder and chairman Dr. James Dobson, said the opportunity to openly pray should not be missed.
"By uniting in the public arena, we will be a Nation filled with individuals of faith," she said. "Some countries do not allow its citizens to elect their leaders much less express their beliefs according to conscience. However, America was built by men and women of deep religious conviction and it is a privilege to approach the Lord with boldness and without fear of persecution."
Retired Marine colonel Oliver North is the 2004 Honorary Chairman and will provide the keynote address at the national event in Washington, DC. In addition to his appearance at the national observance, North has released, True Freedom: The Liberating Power of Prayer, which is this year's theme book.
The National Day of Prayer tradition predates the founding of the United States when the Continental Congress issued a proclamation setting aside a day of prayer in 1775. In 1952, Congress established an annual day of prayer and, in 1988, that law was amended, designating the National Day of Prayer as the first Thursday in May.
History of America's National Day of Prayer
1775: The first Continental Congress called for a National Day of Prayer.
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