“I believe in the power of prayer,” President Bush told a California audience in January. “I have felt the prayers of the American people,” and been “comforted” by them, he said. Prayer, he added, can place a “spiritual shield” of God’s protection around our nation.
That’s a claim supported by American history. In 1746, for example, half the French navy headed toward America to retake a key fortress in Nova Scotia and to lay waste our eastern shore. While storms and disease struck the fleet enroute, a still formidable force appeared off New England’s coast and filled colonists with dread.
Anxious for their homes and families, New Englanders joined together on October 16, 1746, for a day of fasting and prayer for deliverance. “Never did the religion, for which the country was settled, appear more important, nor prayer more prevalent, than on this occasion,” wrote one New England minister. That very night, he reported, “God sent upon [the naval fleet] a more dreadful storm than either of the former, and completed their destruction.” It was a deliverance, “almost as extraordinary as the drowning of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea.”
Hallowed American Tradition
Days of prayer like that in 1746 are a hallowed American tradition dating to the Pilgrims, who launched their voyage to the New World after a day of prayer and fasting. Calls to prayer—and sometimes thanksgiving—were common during the Revolutionary War and have been employed by America’s leaders since in times of war and great conflict. Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in an 1863 National Fast Day proclamation to humble itself “before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
Most recently, President Bush urged a grieving nation to observe a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance on September 14 to remember the victims of 9/11 and to “pray for our land.” |
Congress established the annual National Day of Prayer in 1952. Since 1988, the National Day of Prayer has been observed on the first Thursday in May. Last year, some four million people convened across America on the National Day of Prayer to pray at thousands of events for our land and its leaders.
“Now more than ever, it’s imperative to pray for our leaders,” said Mrs. Shirley Dobson, Chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force. “We’re hoping the first Thursday in May will be a date when many recommit to regularly beseeching God to provide protection, peace, and direction for our country, our President and all those who must make crucial decisions.”
For Revival, Too
Prayer holds promise not just for national protection, but also for spiritual reawakening. Jonathan Edwards, early America’s greatest theologian and the minister whose preaching sparked the first Great Awakening, was a keen advocate of united prayer.
“I have often thought it would be a thing very desirable and very likely to be followed with a great blessing,” he said, “if there could be some contrivance that there should be an agreement of all God’s people in America … to keep a day of fasting and prayer to God, wherein we should all unite on the same day … to address the Father of mercies with prayers and supplications, and earnest cries, that He would guide and direct His own people, and that He would … bow the heavens and come down (II Samuel 22:10, Psalm 18:9) and erect His glorious Kingdom through the earth.”
For more information, please visit www.nationaldayofprayer.org
or call the National Day of Prayer Task Force at (719) 531-3379 for details about National Day of Prayer events in your community.
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