I can think of no greater Thanksgiving message, nor a greater warning to the USA on this day: Without radical repentance and correction on the part of God’s people, the Church, we may have to learn to be thankful for our greatest riches by losing them, and realizing at last—when they are gone—what we have taken for granted and failed to keep alive.
“Oh come, let us sing to the Lord!
us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving;
Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.
For the Lord is the great God,
And the great King above all gods.
In His hand are the deep places of the earth;
The heights of the hills are His also.
The sea is His, for He made it;
And His hands formed the dry land.
Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For He is God,
And we are the sheep of His hand.
Today, if you will hear His voice;
Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion
As in the day of trial in the wilderness,
When your fathers tested Me,
Though they saw My work.
For forty years I was grieved with that generation,
And said, ‘It is a people who go astray in their hearts,
And they do not know My ways,’
So I swore in My wrath,
They shall not enter My rest.” Psalm 95
This is where America is today. Having persistently resisted His grace, we have been abandoned to the folly of our own ways (Zec 11:6). Yet in the midst of judgment there is mercy, for those who will “Seek the Lord while He may be found, Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon” (Isa 55:6–7). Even in the Exodus generation, which did not enter into His rest (Heb 3:7–11), there was a Joshua and a Caleb. Perhaps our God will raise up for us in these times such heroes of the faith.
Therefore, let us give thanks on this day for His infinite mercy, and be sure that we each examine our lives in the light of His countenance; and humble ourselves under His mighty hand, that we might rest under the shadow of His wings (Psa 91:1) in the dark and difficult days ahead. For the message rings down through the ages, in all times of peril and uncertainty, “Behold the proud, his soul is not upright in him; but the just shall live by his faith” (Hab 2:4).
May your thanksgiving be true!
By grace alone,
Gene