So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. John 13:34 NLT
February is known for three things, Valentine’s Day, Abraham Lincoln’s and George Washington’s Birthdays. Athough Lincoln’s birthday is on the 12th, his life so beautifully encompasses the love and integrity and country of Valentine’s Day and WAshington’s birthday.
There is some conjecture as to whether Lincoln was a Believer before he entered the Whitehouse. There is no doubt he had Christian beliefs before, but it became undoubtedly clear that He was a Believer during the Civil War. How else could he have made the decisions and wrote words in his speeches and letters that always directed men towards God and His Word. The brewing of civil war was happening before he ever took office, but he made it clear in his Inaugural Address that he was a man of deep conviction founded on Scriptures. He stated: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.” Yes, he was a man of character and integrity.
He also was a man of perseverance. To get to the Presidency he held to 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. 9 We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. He met disappointment after disappointment in his career and politics and he pressed through all this while having bouts of depression and melencholy. His victory didn’t come by his own strength, but through the power of God working through him.
One of the attributes of God that readiate through him was God’s love, that he believed would overcome anything this country was going through. He had to believe the power of the love of God to write in his second Inaugural Address “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…. ”. Those words are as true today as when he spoke them himself. Let us learn from the month of February the importance of love, character, integrity and the work of Holy Spirit in our lives, to create the kind of world we all long to live in.
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