It’s nearly Thanksgiving week .  No doubt you already have made plans for some sort of outing, right?  You are either hunkering down with a few family members and friends, or hosting a huge event in your home, or hitting the road to see family.  Sunday kicks off Thanksgiving week, and it’s also the official beginning of the Christmas madness.

Thanksgiving has its beginnings as a cultural event both in the stories of our Founding Fathers and in a shockingly religious document written by Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation during the Civil War has blatantly religious references.  There was no thought of separation of church and state!  The Union was thankful to someone -  to an Almighty God who had delivered the nation from peril.  There is also a consciousness of the sins of the people in the proclamation, vastly unlike anything a modern-day President would proclaim.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21)

For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy (2 Timothy 3:2)

Praise the LORD! I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart, in the company of the upright, in the congregation. (Psalm 111:1)

Evidently ingratitude to God is a terrible sin.  In Romans, Paul indicts the unbelieving world for their lack of the praise of God for His care over their everyday lives. In 2 Timothy, he warns of a coming age when people turn away from God en masse, and ingratitude is one of the major qualities.  Psalm 111:1 is a sample of many passages in the Bible that instruct us to praise God and give him thanks.  Thanksgiving is a good thing for all year round.

Now here is the reality I face in my own heart.  I am a follower of Jesus Christ, yet I am often ungrateful.  For me, praying to let God know what is messed up around me is not a hard thing.  I’m desperate for a touch from Him, and keenly feel the need for him to intervene in various circumstances.  I want him to act faster and more decisively.  I pass over gratefulness in prayer out of several forms of unbelief.  One is a failure to trust Him more fully, that whatever is troubling me has neither escaped his attention or is beyond his reach.  There is also a blindness to the hundreds of ways God has blessed me on my most distracted and troubled day.  Am I alone in this frequent neglect of the praise of our Father?  If you are with me, take some time to repent and believe the gospel.  Here is some good news for the ungrateful:

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. (Luke 6:35)

I find that I can easily have an “evil and ungrateful” heart.  The good news is that my Father in heaven is kind to me.  He doesn’t wipe me out those days.  He is bringing my lack of gratitude to mind and inviting my repentance.  I pray and hope His work of inner renewal will allow me to “give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart.”  Does anybody else need the same work in your heart?

We were made for Him, and when we see Him clearly, thanksgiving is a logical response, and a heartfelt one.  Lincoln was clear-eyed enough to see the hand of God in the horrors of the American Civil War.  I close with the (partial) lyrics of an Andrew Peterson song:

“Don’t You Want to Thank Someone?”

Can't you feel it in your bones
Something isn't right here
Something that you've always known
But you don't know why

'Cause every time the sun goes down
We face another night here
Waiting for the world to spin around
Just to survive

But when you see the morning sun
Burning through a silver mist
Don't you want to thank someone?
Don't you want to thank someone for this?

(Andrew Peterson, from Light for the Lost Boy)

In Him,

Pastor Don

Here are those iconic words by President Lincoln, for your reflection:

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

William H. Seward,
Secretary of State