2010 Prayer for the National Day of Prayer

We are thankful for the abundant blessings You have bestowed on America. Our forefathers looked to You as Protector, Provider, and the Promise of hope. But we have wandered far from that firm foundation. May we repent for turning our backs on Your faithfulness...

By Franklin Graham – 2010 Honorary Chairman

Lord,

We pray that this great nation will be restored by Your forgiveness.

From bondage, You grant freedom.

Through Your own sacrifice, You offer salvation.

From the state of despair, You offer peace.

From the bounties of Heaven, You have blessed – not because of our goodness – but by Your grace.

You have given us freedom to worship You in spirit and in truth as Your holy Word instructs. May our lives honor You in word and deed. May our nation acknowledge that all good things come from the Father above.

President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that our nation should set apart a day for national prayer to confess our sins and transgressions in sorrow, “yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon… announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”

“We have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our own hearts, that all these blessing were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own… we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God Who made us! It behooves us then… to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

Help us to pray earnestly for our president and leaders who govern, that they will humble themselves and seek Your guidance so that everything we do will shine the light of Your glory in a darkened world.

May our prayers as a people and a nation be heard and blessed for such a time as this. We make this plea in faith, believing in the mighty name of Jesus our Lord.

Amen

Due to the controversy, this is an interesting prayer

Republican Rep. Anthony Powell invited Pastor Joe Wright, Senior Pastor of the 2,500-member Central Christian Church in Wichita, to deliver the opening prayer at the 1996 session of the Kansas House of Representatives. On that occasion, Pastor Wright offered the following "Prayer of Repentance". The prayer appears as a version of a prayer written in 1995 by Bob Russell, who had offered it at the Kentucky Governor's Prayer Breakfast in Frankfort.

On January 23 when Minister Joe Wright opened the new session on everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:

"Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance.
We know your word says "Woe to those who call evil good", but that is exactly what we have done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We confess that.
We have ridiculed the absolute truth of your word and call it Pluralism.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem.
We have abused power and called it politics.
We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and call it enlightenment.
Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen.

Prayer to Kansas Senate

Pastor Wright delivered the prayer and departed. Only when his church secretary reached him on his car phone did he learn of the ruckus his prayer had caused.

Reportedly, one Democrat walked out in protest, three other Democrats gave speeches critical of Wright's prayer, and another blasted Wright's "message of intolerance." House Minority Leader Democrat Tom Sawyer asserted that the prayer "reflects the extreme, radical views that continue to dominate the House Republican agenda since right-wing extremists seized control of the House Republican caucus last year." Rep. Jim Long, a Democrat from Kansas City, said that Wright "made everyone mad." Rep. Powell, who had invited Wright in the first place, claimed that House Democrats were only trying to make political points with their criticism and affirmed that he supported the theme of the prayer.

Rev. Wright said afterwards; "I certainly did not mean to be offensive to individuals, but I don't apologize for the truth." His staff stopped counting the telephone calls that came from every state and many foreign countries after the first 6,500. Wright appeared on dozens of radio shows and was the subject of numerous TV and print news reports. His prayer stirred up controversy all over again when read by the chaplain coordinator in the Nebraska legislature the following month. Wright later explained, "I thought I might get a call from an angry congressman or two, but I was talking to God, not them. The whole point was to say that we all have sins that we need to repent -- all of us. The problem, I guess, is that you're not supposed to get too specific when you're talking about sin."

What to make of all the fuss? Syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly probably explained it best when he wrote; "The easy answer is that he read a prayer about sin. The complicated answer is that Wright jumped into America's tense debate about whether some things are always right and some things are always wrong."

Some people get upset when politics intrude into religion; others are irritated when religion intrudes into politics. As in war, the "intruder" is always the guy on the other side.

In error, some attribute the prayer to Billy Graham. Paul Harvey aired the prayer as "The Rest of the Story" and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired.

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