Among the advantages of growing up in Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, was that February 12, Lincoln’s birthday, was a holiday.  One of my vivid childhood memories is watching an artist mold a bust of Lincoln out of clay as he talked about Lincoln. He had created a fine work, but then started making changes in it. He hollowed parts of his face showing the toll age and the Civil War took on him. 

In a sense the great president was America’s first martyr, but what was his religion? He never joined a church, never professed to be a Christian. Although raised in a Primitive Baptist family, he seems to have been a skeptic as a young man. He may have been a Deist in his thinking, one who believes in the existence of God, but not the beliefs of orthodox Christianity. There was, however, something powerfully spiritual in the man.

This is from his second inaugural address:

“Both [North and South] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

I wish everyone who claims that “God is on our side” (whatever that is) would give this speech some thought.

Read Isaiah 55:9-10 and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne