ETERNITY

[Ranb2khz]

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Thanksgiving Day is about uniting all of the American people in the same day annually - to stop what we are doing - and to give the Lord God praise and thanks for all that He has done for us. Secular society would have us believe that it is about the early pilgrims having a feast with the Native American peoples - but that is merely a distraction to attempt to turn our focus away from God, and His gracious mercy upon us as a nation and people.

Although the first President of the United States - George Washington - had the first Day of Thanksgiving, it was not established as an annual Day of Thanksgiving until the sixteenth President - Abraham Lincoln - proclaimed it as a national event. The following is President Lincoln's proclamation:

"It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe 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 Scripture and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord."

"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 as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."

It is worth noting that President Lincoln established the Day of Thanksgiving during the worst period (to date) of the United States of America - the Civil War in 1863. Let this also be a reminder to us - that no matter how dark or bleak our current situation would seem - we are to give God thanks for all that He has brought us through, and to trust Him to bring us through this day, and all future days that are ahead of us.






•