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This past Wednesday was the birthday of perhaps the greatest of American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln. One hundred and sixty-four years ago, on February 11, 1861, Lincoln left Springfield, Illinois for Washington to be inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States. In his farewell address that day, he shared these words with his colleagues and friends in Springfield: “All the strange, chequered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. To-day I leave you; I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington. Unless the great God who assisted him, shall be with and aid me, I must fail. But if the same omniscient mind, and Almighty arm that directed and protected him, shall guide and support me, I shall not fail, I shall succeed.”1
It is clear that Lincoln had the greatest hope of Divine help as he assumed the Presidency of this deeply troubled and divided nation. But he did not have the temerity to assume that blessing of Providence. He asked those assembled on that Springfield day to pray for him, and for the Lord’s wisdom and guidance.
Contrast that with the Good Lord’s place in today’s news stories. Just last month, an army veteran drove a pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more in the name of Allah because he wanted news headlines to focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers,” He had joined the terrorist group known as ISIS that has left a brutal legacy of death and destruction across the world. Though the group has continued to launch terror attacks around the world and inspire believers of its extreme ideology to carry out atrocities of their own while someone yells, “Allahu akbah” (Our God is great).
The distance between Lincoln’s hope for divine assistance and the religious cry of a fanatic convinced he is doing Allah’s will is a giant leap.
One of the great blessings of being human is also perhaps our most tormenting curse. We are creatures of immense passion. As any Star Trek devotee knows, the excesses of our emotional resolve are consistently enough to make Mister Spock raise an eyebrow in disbelief. But the worst of it is that we can’t seem to unleash our passions without invoking the Lord Almighty as the architect of our thoughts and warrior for our cause. It’s a disease of the heart. Valentine’s Day pledges notwithstanding, our hearts are often suspect. The prophet Jeremiah put it this way, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse – who can understand it?”
The thing that gums up our coronary arteries isn’t cholesterol and saturated fat so much as it is idolatry. We have a perverse tendency to put our passions and convictions on the throne. We don’t bow down before the golden calf of money and power nearly as much as we prostrate ourselves before the idol of our own fancies and furies.
It has always been one of the great temptations and weaknesses of religion. Eugene Peterson put it succinctly. In the introduction to the book of Amos in his paraphrase of the Bible titled The Message he writes, “Religion is the most dangerous energy source known to humankind. The moment a person (or government or religion or organization) is convinced that God is either ordering or sanctioning a cause or project, anything goes. The history, worldwide, of religion-fueled hate, killing, and oppression is staggering.” 2
You know this yourself. You’ve not only read about the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the burning of witches up in Salem, you’ve seen it on television – God supposedly ordering planes to slam into the World Trade Center, or suicide bombers to blow up busses on the streets of Jerusalem.
But it’s not just religious fanatics who are stricken with this disease. You and I are subject to it all the time in lesser but perhaps more pernicious ways. We simply assume that because something makes such absolute and undeniable sense to us, it must be what’s in the mind of the Almighty. I know I do it, and I’ve got my suspicions about you.
Presidents and potentates do it too. These days, it’s not uncommon for politicians to invoke religion and campaign on the virtue of their sincere faith and regular church attendance. All too often, however, they simply cough and wheeze with the same coronary malady as you and me. They pronounce the Lord’s rubber stamp on their own platforms and political agendas.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to lift up President Lincoln on this February morning. He was the exception to the rule. William Lee Miller, author of Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, points out that Presidents often extol Lincoln for many traits that he didn’t really have. Among them is the assurance that Lincoln could be so “optimistic” about his cause because of his belief in the Almighty. Miller points out that, to the contrary, one of Lincoln’s moral virtues was that he “explicitly set God’s controlling Providence over against, even in contrast to, the purposes of the contending parties, including his own.”3 In other words, Lincoln was one of those rare members of the human species who could dethrone his own passions and purposes, and regard them as falling under the judgement of the Lord.
There’s a clue for us here. And it points toward a cure for the disease that infects our hearts. It’s put forward eloquently by the same doctor who diagnosed our condition, Jeremiah. He put a curse on everyone who trusted in themselves and in their own strength of character, and he conveyed a blessing on those who figured out that the Divine will is not something to use, but something to trust. Trusting that Divine will does not mean having confidence that our plans will be realized, but trusting that, in the end, those Divine plans will. According to Jeremiah, the Lord doesn’t just coronate our ideas and paste gold stars on our homework, but actually “tests” our minds and “searches” our hearts.
You can’t come to terms with that truth without being humbled. And therein lies the cure. A teaspoon of humility and a few milligrams of trust taken regularly can dissipate the passions you set up on the throne of your heart and leave it vacant for the Lord of Hosts to move in. And that’s nothing less than a life redeemed – brought back from the pit of self-absorption and idolatry.
But there’s another medicinal benefit. When we finally boot our own ideas and preconceptions out of that throne, and spend our time honestly seeking a divine truth that’s larger than we know, there is an amazing strength of spirit that can overcome us. That strength comes from getting the world and ourselves back to their right sizes. You see, when we get caught up in worshiping our own ideas, our own cultural biases, our own standards and norms, the arteries of our faith become tiny and constricted. Before we know it, our whole world is no larger than the biggest thought we can think. And believe me, that’s pretty small. When that Lord of Hosts is back in charge, we are released from the enormous stress of having to be omniscient and omnipotent (and let’s face it, somewhere deep down inside we know we’re really not). We can let go of being right or wrong, winning or losing, succeeding or failing, and just do our very best to understand and follow, and trust that the Lord of All is smart enough to figure out a way to make it all come out OK. Do you know what that does for you and your cardiac condition? In the words of Dr. Jeremiah, it can make you “like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”
On March 5, 1861, a month after his farewell speech in Springfield and just one month before rebels fired on Fort Sumter igniting the civil war, Lincoln was visited at the white House by a delegation from the state of Pennsylvania. They had apparently expressed some concern about the status of the union and the Presidency. Pennsylvania was at that time, like many states, torn over the question of secession. The outcome of all this was still up in the air. In a brief appearance with this group of emissaries from the Keystone State, Lincoln offered these words: “Allusion has been made to the hope that you entertain that you have a President and a Government. In respect to that I wish to say to you, that in the position I have assumed I wish to do no more than I have ever given reason to believe I would do. I do not wish you to believe that I assume to be any better than others who have gone before me. I prefer rather to have it understood that if we ever have a Government on the principles we prefer, we should remember while we exercise our opinion, that others have also rights to the exercise of their opinions, and we should endeavor to allow these rights, and act in such a manner as to create no bad feeling. I hope we have a Government and a President. I hope and wish it to be understood that there may be allusion to no unpleasant differences.
“We must remember,” he continues, “that the people of all the States are entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the several States. We should bear this in mind, and act in such a way as to say nothing insulting or irritating. I would inculcate this idea, so that we may not, like Pharisees, set ourselves up to be better than other people.”4 Of all of Lincoln’s strengths, I believe his greatest was theological. He had the wisdom and humility to shoo his own beliefs and objectives off the throne, and the strength of spirit that was born of trusting the Lord to manage the future.
What a surpassing gift! To leave the Lord in charge of the universe, and to know one’s self as flawed and subject to weakness and error, is to unload a tremendous burden and to be profoundly connected to your brothers and sisters, because when each of us stands equally in need of mercy, we cannot separate ourselves from one another through judgment.
Has the world got you down? Are you angry that others don’t seem to see things as clearly as you do, or hold the right values – your values? Are you heart sick? Here’s a prescription for you: like a tree planted by water and nourished by the stream, pray for the wisdom to know that Divine truth is too big to fit inside your own opinions. Then, in quiet confidence you can send out your roots. Do not fear when heat comes; in the year of drought do not be anxious, and do not cease to bear fruit.
1 Illinois State Journal, February 12, 1861.
2 Eugene Peterson, The Message, NavPress.
3 William Lee Miller, Boston Globe, February 8, 2004.
4 Philadelphia Inquirer, March 6, 1861.
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