This month we will all pause and observe a day our nation sets aside as a holiday. It is “Thanksgiving Day.” Hopefully all Americans will pause to remember just how grateful they should be for the privileges and blessings afforded us. It is doubtful that will happen because of the decided turn toward secular humanism our government and society has taken.
It hasn’t always been that way. In 1863, a noble statesman from Kentucky wrote the following Thanksgiving Proclamation.
Abraham Lincoln wrote, “It is the duty of nations as well as of man to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.
“We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
“But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that God 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, a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” ~ A. Lincoln, 1863
What a pity that men who guide our government and men who greatly influence the morality of our society today do not have the sentiments expressed by one of the greatest leaders this nation ever produced.
Let us be thankful every day, and especially this season of the year. When we gather as families on Thanksgiving Day, let us be truly thankful for the benevolence God has lavishly poured out on us. ~ DRS ~ from www.vscoc.org/Bulletinfdr/bulletin_fodder.htm