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May 12, 2021 - Jim Bakker Show
05:48
Understanding America's Holidays - Dr. David Barton & Tim Barton
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Providence's Role in American History 00:02:25
Why is it important, especially now, to teach our children and youth about these traditional American holidays and the reason behind presidents declaring days of prayer?
So much of that goes to the thinking of the time.
We had experience.
We understood.
We had seen God intervene in so many ways.
And we knew biblically that we needed to seek his face.
And so some of the stories that are just so amazing are when we call for national times of prayer and seek God, what we call his providential intervention.
What happened, for example, in the American Revolution at the Battle of Long Island?
Oh my gosh, without that, America doesn't exist.
Nobody studies that story today.
Specifically, without God's providence and helping save Washington, America wouldn't exist.
What you mean?
That's right.
So it's not the battle that America wouldn't exist.
No, no, no.
It's the fact that George Washington should have been defeated, captured, killed.
The American military should have been wiped out, except there was this providential fog that came in.
And almost like, think Moses, Israelites, they're fleeing.
Pharaoh's army's coming after them.
And all of a sudden, right, fire from heaven comes down, divides the armies, and Pharaoh can't get to Moses.
Well, it wasn't fire that divided Washington and his troops, but it was fog so thick that people just about couldn't see the hand in front of their face.
And so at that point, the British were like, okay, we don't want to advance in this because we don't know what we're getting into.
Let's just wait for a while.
While they're waiting, Washington and his troops are able to escape.
While they're escaping, the fog maintains, as soon as the last ship gets off this island, the fog lifts.
And the British go, where did they go?
Like, there's so many providential moments where if it was not for God's intervention, and we say God because man cannot control the fog.
That's right.
Right?
These are things beyond man's ability and control that were happening on behalf of the Americans to help the Americans and literally was saving the military, saving our leader, our commander-in-chief, George Washington.
So without these providential moments, this wouldn't have happened.
But because throughout the revolution, founding fathers, and this is just an example of the revolution, because if we talk about prayer proclamations, prayer proclamations go back to the pilgrims.
Prayer Proclamations: Then and Now 00:03:28
And all the way, I mean, really, even present day, there's still some governors who are doing prayer proclamations.
But in the founding era, the founding fathers recognized God's providence in so many of these encounters.
They said, we need to thank God for his intervention.
And what's fun to see is they would call for times of prayer, then things would happen.
And guys would write, like after the Battle of Long Island with the fog, some of the guys wrote, that is a God thing.
Nobody can do the fog except God.
We saw that in battle after battle, the Battle of Trenton, the Battle of Princeton, so many others.
And so people had a record of, we prayed, God answered prayer, let's pray again.
And I think today we are not aware of God's intervention in the same kind of way.
I think we pray now because that's what Christians do is we pray, but we don't record and acknowledge and see and look for that divine intervention.
And I think previous generations did.
So we really were a God-conscious nation.
Well, it's interesting, too, even looking at the proclamations, is that there were two primary kinds of prayer proclamations.
There was one for prayer, humiliation, and fasting.
And that's when they said, okay, we need God's help real bad.
And so what do you do?
Well, you humble yourselves.
You fast, you pray, you seek God's face, which is what the Bible talks about.
And so they would call for colony-wide or nationwide days of prayer, humiliation, and fasting, where we're not going to eat today.
We're going to humble ourselves.
We're seeking God's face.
And they would do this.
And then they would see maybe the next day or a week or a month later, God would intervene and solve the very problem they were praying about.
So after this prayer, humiliation, and fasting proclamation, they would then have a prayer and fasting, or excuse me, a prayer and thanksgiving proclamation to thank God for his intervention on what they've been praying for.
And so even during the American Revolution, you see this go back and forth from prayer and fasting to prayer and thanksgiving.
The Continental Congress, just during the American Revolution, had 15 congressional prayer proclamations.
And it would go prayer and fasting, prayer and thanksgiving, prayer and fasting, prayer and thanksgiving, because we would pray and fast to ask God for help.
And after God helped, we would pray and thank God for his help.
So they were very God-conscious, but they also recognized the impact, the value of prayer.
And if you look back in kind of the founding era of America, by 1815, there were more than 1,400 government prayer proclamations.
So that includes from governors, from presidents, from Congress, where they're literally saying, hey, people, we need to pray and either ask God for help.
So we're going to pray and fast, or we need to thank God for what he's done, prayer and thanksgiving.
But there were 1,400 prayer proclamations by 1815.
And this is also a great point when sometimes people, they don't think the founding fathers were really religious.
They didn't really believe in God, or maybe they were just atheists or agnostics or deists.
The one point that I would direct somebody to really raise a question of that doesn't make sense for an atheist, agnostic, and deist to do is why would they have 1,400 prayer proclamations if they didn't believe in God?
And this is where we can point to the fact the founding fathers did believe in God.
The vast majority of them self-identified as Christians.
I mean, this is just one of the things we don't really see today, but also this is part of where we go through in the series and we highlight in some of these moments, some of their stories where they cried out to God, God intervened, God helped.
Learning God's Character 00:00:24
So that definitely is part of the history of prayer proclamations, why people need to study history and know history.
And it's also why we didn't say we need to study and know the Bible.
We learned about the character of the nature of God through the Bible, but we also learn about how God moves and how God works in our life and how we can call out to God and God hears us when we cry out to him.
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