You have probably heard someone say, “Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.” “It is the only one that cannot be commercialized.” While it may be true that Thanksgiving is not the most “profit taking” season of the year, there are those who post, at the top of their list of blessings, the capital gains from the sale of decorations, and preparations of Thanksgiving cuisine.
And then there are those for which the day has become only a gluttonous feast, often followed by a festival of folly. For them, there is no thought of blessing nor giving of thanks. What they have was earned by endless hours of toil and strain. They have only themselves to thank—or so they say.
Still others have taken the season seriously. They carefully categorize their bounty in order to offer a sincere “thank you” to those who were instrumental in helping them to achieve their personal goals. Their list of recipients is like the credits that roll up the screen at the end of a Hollywood feature film.
What’s my point? Simply this: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17)” Thanksgiving was instituted with God in mind as its Object. We have missed the mark!
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln reminded the country,“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 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.” Perhaps we should be reminded again.