Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, all of you according to your ways, says the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions; otherwise iniquity will be your ruin.
(Ezekiel 18.30 NRSV)
We need repentance in our lives. King Ahab fasts in repentance before God after he and Jezebel steal Naboth's reputation, his life, and his property. The people of Nineveh fast in repentance to God after Jonah shouts his warning through the city streets. And fasting was even built into the regular rhythm of Israel's life as a nation. There was the annual Day of Atonement. The whole nation fasted and prayed that day. There was a sense that we tend to flit through life too carelessly, without taking stock of the grit of sin that sticks to the soles of our feet, as the writer of Hebrews described it, and the tether of evil that snags our hearts at inopportune moments.

Remember how Abraham Lincoln put it? The year was 1863. The Civil War ripped the nation's belly. And Lincoln said this can't be! Who are we?! What have we become as a nation?! And so, he called the people of this great nation together on Thursday, April 30, to spend the entire day in fasting and prayer. This is what Lincoln said in his official proclamation. He said: 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 . . . The awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins . . . Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity, and too proud to pray to the God that made us. And the people humbled themselves before God in a day of fasting and of prayer.

Dear Jesus, I repent. Amen.

Ron Newhouse

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