March 8, 2010

Abe Lincoln's Change of Heart
Frank Allnutt

“May Day: a Cry to God for Our Nation in Distress” will take place May 1, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Christian and Jewish organizers are inviting Americans to join them to pray and repent for how the nation has turned from God.

The Lincoln Memorial is a fit setting because it was Abraham Lincoln who, by Presidential Proclamation, designated our first national day of prayer—“A Day Of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer in The United States Of America on April 30, 1863.”

Some people might question the site selection because of so much confusion over the years about Lincoln’s religious beliefs. While many people consider Lincoln was a Christian, others contend he was a deist or a universalist or even an atheist!

Lincoln’s own writings speak for him on the matter. His National Day of Prayer Proclamation states in part:

And, in so much as we know that, by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this 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.

As I ponder this, I am moved by Lincoln’s spiritual insights and grasp of biblical doctrine. His words and concepts ring true and clear—humility, fasting, brokenness, deceitfulness of the heart, self-sufficiency, reformation, repentance, redemption, grace, pride, forgiveness, and that sins are ultimately offences against God.

Those are words not commonly uttered by politicians and lawyers. And Lincoln was both. But, rather, more like the approach of a Christian counselor with a wayward individual, Lincoln searched the heart of a nation and revealed his assessment.

Read again these quotes from his Proclamation:

“Nations, like individuals are subject to [brokenness], to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People....”

“We have forgotten God.”

“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 by 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 pointed to the “deceitfulness of our hearts,” and he believed the heart of the nation could be changed...because he experienced a change of heart in his own life.

James A. Reed, a contemporary of Lincoln, cited the revealing comment by Phineas Gurley that Lincoln “believed his heart was changed, and that he loved the Saviour.”(1) Reed also wrote that Francis Bicknell Carpenter told him that he “believed Mr. Lincoln to be a sincere Christian” and reported that Lincoln had told a woman from Brooklyn in the United States Christian Commission that he had had “a change of heart.”(2)

It appears that Abe Lincoln regarded “a change of heart” as much more than the common euphemism for “a change of mind.”

There is remarkable affinity in that, for I sense that my Christian walk has brought me heart-to-heart with a man who long before me walked the same spiritual path.

On May 1, at the Lincoln Memorial, Americans from across the country will gather to unite their hearts in prayer. More than another event to call on God to bless America, it will call on Americans to bless God.

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(1) James A. Reed (July 1873). “The Later Life and Religious Sentiments of Abraham Lincoln.” Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 6, no. 3, p. 339. Retrieved 2010-02-20, quoting Phineas Gurley. Wikipedia.

(2) Francis Bicknell Carpenter (July 18973), the author of Six Months in the White House, as quoted in “The Later Life and Religious Sentiments of Abraham Lincoln,” by James A. Reed (July 1873). Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 6, no. 3, p. 340. Retrieved 2010-02-20. Wikipedia.

For more information:

May Day 2010

The New Creature

The Whole-Hearted Christian