I am mindful as the Thanksgiving weekend draws to a close of just how far we have drifted from its founding intention. And as a result the drifting of our nation from her moral mooring and bountiful blessings. Thanksgiving became a regularly celebrated national holiday only during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day of national Thanksgiving in 1863. The holiday became fixed to the fourth Thursday in November by an act of the United States Congress in 1941. Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was the driving force behind having Thanksgiving declared a National Holiday as it had been a haphazard affair since the time of the Pilgrims. She best expressed this with the poem: “All the blessings of the fields, All the stores the garden yields, All the plenty summer pours, Autumn’s rich, o’erflowing stores, Peace, prosperity, and health, Private bliss and public wealth, Knowledge with its gladdening streams, Pure religion’s holier beams— Lord, for these our souls shall raise Grateful vows and solemn praise.” And therefore part of Lincolns proclamation was as follows: Abraham Lincoln, Thanksgiving Proclamation No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they 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 next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union. To these lofty ideals Lincoln affixed the seal of our great nation and then in 1941 Congress affixed to the last Thursday of November in perpetuity. This year we witnessed the erosion of that most sacred dedication of purpose to God by the merchants in this country choosing to encroach upon one of the very few days sit aside for family and praise in Thanksgiving by offering idiotic exercise in commerce and profit over humility and praise. By opening their stores for commerce they insult every true believer of God and upholding our proclamation of Thanksgiving as a people and the horrible and costly ashes from which it was raised. God himself has warned us of this folly: Col 3:5-6 (Jer) That is why you must kill everything in you that belongs only to earthly life: fornication, impurity, guilty passion, evil desires and especially greed, which is the same thing as worshiping a false god. All this sort of behavior makes God angry. (Eph 5:5) And would you not agree encroaching upon Thanksgiving for the purposes of conducting commerce is not itself the highest form of Greed? I ask you this, look around you at the condition of our once great nation, at our youth knocking out women and the elderly in a Game without any understanding from where these actions derive. Not realizing that their hands are under the power of Satan and their souls are at risk of damnation. People making huge incomes and still living on the edge of destruction because they have no direction of spirit. I could list numerous examples of our fall from grace, but you already know this, what you are disinclined to do is stand up against it. My friend acknowledging it is but a first feeble step, we must raise our voices and in this case our dollars and refuse to participate in the direct affront to God by the forces of darkness. For this year marks the first in many long years that we were not allowed to enjoy our holiday without the encroachment of greed! Our men of God must Stand and denounce these things that strike and the heart of our nation and insult our God. We must turn back to God or we will surely perish as a nation and with us the only chance of peace and personal freedom the world has ever known. We must humble ourselves and kneel before God and pray for deliverance from this evil, and then Stand O people of God and Deliver out of the hands of Darkness for God will empower us to do so!
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 14:58:02 +0000
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