National Day of Prayer

From American Values:

National Day Of Prayer

Today is the 75th annual National Day of Prayer. It began in 1952 when Reverend Billy Graham stood on the steps of the United States Capitol and challenged Congress to pass legislation creating a national day of prayer in America. Congress did so just two months after Graham’s challenge.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation designating the first Thursday of May as the National Day of Prayer.

For more than a decade, Vonette Bright organized the annual observances. In 1991, she handed the leadership of the National Day of Prayer Task Force to my friend, Shirley Dobson. Jim and Shirley Dobson worked diligently for 25 years expanding National Day of Prayer events across the country.

Today’s observance began this morning in Washington, D.C., with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner leading a service in Statuary Hall inside the Capitol Building.

Speaker Johnson said the Capitol Building is full of “reminders of the deep religious heritage of our country.” He noted that our national motto, In God We Trust, was engraved above the speaker’s chair in the House chamber “as a rebuke to the Soviets” and their godless philosophy of Marxist communism.

Pointing to the Declaration of Independence as proof of America’s religious heritage, Speaker Johnson said:

“We boldly proclaimed the self-evident truth that our rights do not come from government. They come from God Himself. That He is the one that has endowed us with our inalienable rights. That among those are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Right there in the second paragraph in the nation’s birth certificate, it summarizes our national statement of faith.”

Secretary Turner, a former pastor and one of the most articulate Christians in the administration, spoke about the faith of the Founding Fathers and God’s blessing on America. Turner said:

“Look at how many storms God has led us through over the last two and a half centuries. A war of Independence. We won against all odds. A destructive civil war. The Great Depression. Two world wars. A decades-long Cold War against communism and more. We survived and thrived despite all these trials because of the grace of our sovereign God and the same sovereign God the Founding Fathers believed in. . .

“The Founding Fathers could not have known everything the next two centuries would bring when they signed the Declaration that created our great nation. It would be hard for them to imagine that the newly born United States would one day become the most powerful country on earth. But they did know that they served a mighty God.”

Tonight at 8:00 p.m. ET, Kathy Branzell, Will Graham, Os Guinness and others will lead the National Day of Prayer Broadcast. You can watch it here.

President Trump issued a statement recognizing the 75th National Day of Prayer. The president declared:

“This National Day of Prayer, we proudly recommit to our magnificent birthright of faith. I encourage all Americans to come together today in prayer, reflecting on the many blessings God has given our Nation and asking for His continued protection, with ceremonies, events, and programs in their houses of worship and places of work, schools, and homes.

“Above all, we pledge that America will always, as it is written in Psalm 96, ‘Tell His glory among the nations’—and that we will never forget God’s role in creating, protecting, and sustaining the freest, strongest, most prosperous, and greatest country the world has ever known.”

The secular Left claims that today’s events are nothing more than Christian nationalists forcing our religion on the country. The Left ignores our history. Our best presidents regularly called for days of prayer.

In 1789, George Washington called for a day of prayer and thanksgiving. As America was ripped apart during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln called for a day of prayer in 1863 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.”

Lincoln was particularly concerned that too many Americans had abandoned their faith. In the same call to prayer, Lincoln wrote:

“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!”

Barack Obama forgot God whenever he quoted the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence. (Joe Biden just forgot the whole thing.) Obama infamously blocked Franklin Graham from speaking at a National Day of Prayer event at the Pentagon. Graham spoke anyway on a sidewalk outside the Pentagon.

Sadly, I believe many Christians still do not understand that there is an intentional effort to rip God out of America or to turn God into just another woke socialist. The Left will destroy the American Republic if it succeeds.

At a prayer breakfast in 1984, Ronald Reagan warned, “If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, we will be a nation gone under.”