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11/15/14 Weekend Grif.Net – Preparing for the Thanksgiving Holiday

11/15/14 Weekend Grif.Net – Preparing for the Thanksgiving Holiday

It is the duty of nations as well as of men 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
Scripture 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 the observe the last Thursday of
November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who
dwelleth in the heavens.

President Abraham Lincoln
October 3, 1863

[Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, Roy P. Basler, ed. (New York:
The World Publishing Co., 1946), 761]

~~
Dr Bob Griffin
[email protected] www.grif.net
“Jesus Knows Me, This I Love!”