Gtcotr/ws112322
2 Chronicles 7:14 If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
These words were spoken from heaven by God and recorded at the dedication of the Temple during the reign of King Solomon in Jerusalem in about 956BC. God wanted His children to know they could turn to Him at any time and that He would listen, forgive, and heal them from their seasons of trouble. Specifically the trouble which they brought on themselves as a result of their own wickedness.
God appeared to King Solomon in the night and encouraged him to look beyond the drought, beyond the famine, beyond the pestilence, and look to Him. God wanted Solomon, in all his wisdom, to tell the whole world to look beyond the problem and see the promise.
2 Chronicles 7
15 “Now My eyes will be open
and My ears attentive to prayer made in this place.
16 “For now I have chosen and sanctified this house, that My name may be there forever; and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually.”
The house God was referring to in that passage was the physical Temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem, which of course no longer exists. King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon destroyed the Temple King Solomon built for the Lord to house the Ark of the Covenant in the year 586BC, some 2608 years ago. Even though heaven and earth shall pass away, God’s Word endures forever.
Seeing we can’t go to the Temple to pray, how can this word apply to our lives today?
Corinthians 3:16 ¶ Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
God hears our prayers today as much as He ever has. And you are His Temple, and He has sanctified you by Jesus Christ. (John 17:17) You have been made to be the righteousness God in Christ Jesus. (1 Corinthians 1:30)
1 Peter 3:12 For the eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, And His ears are open to their prayers; But the face of the LORD is against those who do evil.
I believe this is what saved our nation in one of the most critical times in America. Since we are celebrating Thanksgiving Day in United States tomorrow, allow me to read the Thanksgiving Proclamation written by President Abraham Lincoln during the middle of the war between the States. Listen to what this great man, who was a professed believer in Jesus Christ and the Word of God, had to say to a nation and indeed a world in great need. These words of truth still ring loud today.
Abraham Lincoln's
1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation
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 are blessed whose God is the
Lord.
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 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 has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently
and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole
American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every
part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are
sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of
November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father Who
dwelleth in the heavens.
A. Lincoln
October 3, 1863
The hardest part is not the praying we all need to do … it’s turning from our wicked ways that must accompany any petition to God for salvation.
Let
us pray a prayer of thanksgiving and petition to God trusting that He will
hear, forgive, and heal our land this Thanksgiving season.
