What will President Obama do this Thursday? What would Abraham Lincoln do?

This Thursday is the annual National Day of Prayer.
 
The new administration will issue a NDOP proclamation, which every president has done since 1952 in accordance with a bill President Harry Truman signed into law.
 
But, for the first time in many years, our current president has decided not to host a prayer event at the White House or to personally participate in any National Day of Prayer scheduled activities. He is not the only president who has refused to engage with the solidly Christian (mostly evangelical) events scheduled in our nation's capital. However, most presidents have chosen to participate.
 
While President Obama was in Turkey, he made the point that America is not a Christian nation. But now he is on the verge of proclaiming a National Day of Prayer.
 
Contradiction? Not really.
 
President Obama has made it clear that he believes America should not elevate one religion over another, or religion over no religion, for that matter. He has stated that we can unify and rally behind a higher cause: our nation's values.

Thus all can pray on the National Day of Prayer, including Buddhists, Hindus, and even unbelievers. By the way, this Thursday is also being promoted as a National Day of Reason, so the atheists are not being left out.
 
President Obama has been an avid student of President Lincoln. So my question is . . .

What would Abraham Lincoln do?

I personally don't believe President Lincoln would promote a National Day of Prayer. If he were alive and witness to the events happening in our nation today, I believe he would go beyond and re-issue the speech he delivered on March 30,1863, which accompanied the call for a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer.
 
His was a proclamation which leaves no room for pluralistic thinking. Nor does it leave room for appeal to any god except the One true God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Following is a key excerpt. Don't race through it because you may have heard it previously; reflect deeply on it. After all, "It is the duty both of nations and of men."

And whereas 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 only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

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.

President Lincoln had it right. It takes more than just prayer; it takes a heart that is honest, humble, broken, repentant, and dependent on God for deliverance. My heart resonates with what A. W. Tozer declared: "Revival will come, when even prayer is no longer used as a substitute for obedience."

The great need for the 2009 National Day of Prayer, as we gather together to seek the Lord, is not to intercede for the nation as much as it is to intercede for the church, that we would repent. "The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working" (James 5:16).