Letter to the Editor

Prayer for better, brighter, hopeful America

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Dear Editor,

I would like to ask readers of the Gazette several brief and simple questions. 1. Does our nation need prayer at this hour? (It's a rhetorical question obviously!)

Are you praying for the United States of America? Would you join with like-minded people on the first Thursday of May (6th) to pray for our nation, its leaders and institutions? And if not could you check your cynical meter for high levels of apathy, passivity, pessimism or indifference?

I suggest that our government and country are in desperate need of our intercession and God's intervention now and for the foreseeable future. Our prayers do make a difference. I know this with certainty. Our needs are formidable yet none of the parties have adequate answers (or even the right questions) for the complexities we are facing: not the Republican Party, nor the Democrat Party, nor with all due respect, the Tea Party. The antidote to America's ills will not be found in a party but in a priority, which is prayer.

It is an oversimplification to think that the following issues are at the crux of the crisis:

A disastrous and monstrous deficit and deficit spending

Distasteful earmarks

Out-of-control entitlements

"Out-of-touch career politicians"

Back-room political deal-making

Corrupt Corporate Culture

High Unemployment Rate

Greedy Wall Street Bankers

Increased taxation and overregulation

Illegal immigration, etc. etc.

Or even a president who redefines the family, redistributes wealth, reinterprets the Constitution, renounces the financial sector after accepting $994,795 from Goldman Sachs for his political ambitions, and reproaches the common man who clings to his religion, guns, and hostility toward illegal aliens. I have my own opinions on these issues but they are merely symptoms of a deeper pathology.

Our problem as a whole is that as Americans we have lost our identity, spurned our heritage, and forgotten or ignored the four simple words on all of our currency ... In God We Trust." As a result, we have forfeited our moral authority, embraced relativism and made the pursuit of happiness supreme to the pursuit of virtue. What America needs and many voices are crying out for is still "change" but not the type or hype of change recently heard from political parlance or campaign sloganeering. It's much deeper than that. It is called "repentance" which in theological terms means a change of thinking, a change of heart and attitude, a change of course and action, a change of direction and life. It is a remembrance and recognition that we are one nation "under God" as our pledge declares and our Judeo-Christian heritage affirms. The Creator who granted us these inalienable rights and his word are transcendent over history, culture, civil government, and my personal preferences and presumptions.

It was Dwight Eisenhower addressing the American Legion in 1955 who said that "recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic expression of Americanism. Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life."

President Truman stated in a speech in Columbus, Ohio a decade earlier in 1946, "no problem on this earth was tough enough to withstand the flame of a genuine renewal of religious faith." Without it, he insisted, "we are lost."

It is impossible to contemplate traditional Western values without reference to the God of the Bible. The ideals that elevated the West above ancient paganism and eastern mysticism had their deepest source and support in the self-revealed God who was and is for Christians the I summum bonum or supreme good.

As one observer has noted, "It is not the economics of capitalism but the ethos of capitalism that is in gross disrepair."

The moral outcomes of the West hinge both in the past and in the present hour upon our recognition and response to the truth of God as found in the Bible and in our submission to its ethical imperatives and realities. Decisive repentance and reformation is the vehicle of revitalization of American life, including both its ideals and institutions and it begins on our knees.

I am indebted to Carl F.H. Henry, Os Guinness, and Ravi Zacharias for their writings for many conclusions but not mistakes --they are my own.

I do dedicate this article to my first grandchild, Evangeline (Eva) Grace and toward a better, brighter and hopeful America.

Chris A. Atkins, Ph.D.

McCook

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  • Wont you get in trouble if you pray for the government?????:^)!!!!

    -- Posted by kaygee on Sat, May 1, 2010, at 8:17 PM
  • Appparently it's alright to pray against the government.I don't know about for it. I'm guessing that none of this applied before Jan. 20, 2009.

    -- Posted by davis_x_machina on Mon, May 3, 2010, at 9:22 AM
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