This Thursday will mark the 58th annual National Day of Prayer observance. It is a time in which people in communities across the United States will pray for our local, state and national elected officials.

One need look only as far as our states and federal government to see what a predicament we are in as a nation. Many states are operating at a deficit. The national debt is spiraling hopelessly out of control.

Culturally, the foundations of our society are crumbling. The break-up of the family unit, callous disregard for human life as exemplified by abortion, a rapidly increasing prison population, lack of respect for authority and widespread drug abuse are indicative of a nation that has lost its moorings.

Can the ongoing, even accelerated, erosion of traditional values — of faith and morality — be stemmed? I believe the answer is "Yes" with some qualifiers.

The U.S. is in desperate need of two things at this critical juncture in history. First, a spiritual revival, whereby people who profess to be Christians are "revived," or made alive in their faith. Second, America needs a great spiritual awakening, similar to ones experienced in previous centuries, in which people who do not know God enter into a personal relationship with Him through His Son, Jesus Christ.

A proclamation making the rounds in some churches holds particular relevance for us today. During some of the darkest days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln responded to a resolution approved by the U.S. Senate. In his proclamation, our 16th president noted that the highest elected body in America recognized "the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations." In addition, Lincoln noted that the Senate had requested him to set apart a day for "National prayer and humiliation."

Wrote Lincoln: "And 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.

"And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in the 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 presumptuous 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 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."

Lincoln, through the proclamation he signed on March 30, 1863, set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of "national humiliation, fasting and prayer." Furthermore, he asked all the people to abstain from their ordinary activities and to unite, in their places of public worship and in their homes "in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion."

It was Lincoln's belief that if people sincerely humbled themselves before God, they could "rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace."

Today, as during the Civil War, America is a divided nation. The values of people in large cities are radically different from the beliefs held by those who live in predominantly rural areas of the United States. One can see by the "red" states and "blue" states on an electoral map, and the fact that a number of key races end in a virtual dead-heat, only to be decided weeks or months later in a court of law, that we essentially are two Americas, with markedly different beliefs.

If we really want to be one nation under God, we must not forget God, as Lincoln said was the case when our country was in the throes of a civil war.

One important way to remember Him is to ask Him to give knowledge and breadth of wisdom to our elected leaders, at all levels. Our county's residents will have such an opportunity this Thursday during a 7 a.m. prayer breakfast hosted by the Lampasas County Ministerial Alliance at First Baptist Church in Lampasas.

In the lead-up to that observance, it would do each of us well to reflect upon Lincoln's proclamation issued almost 150 years ago. The document has stood the test of time, because it was based upon truth - God's truth. It's as timely now for us as it was for our forebears.

But the hour is late.

It is time we acknowledge, as Lincoln urged, a truth from Scripture and proven by all history "that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."

--Jim Lowe, editor and publisher