Contributor:
Chad Roberts
While all that remains of this Thanksgiving weekend is more football, leftovers and the deals that are to good to pass up, I am thinking deeply tonight (again, while my wife is shopping) about the Pilgrims and why they celebrated Thanksgiving.
I doubt any of us could have survived in the world of settlements and colonies. Life was grueling, food was scarce and death was always near. In 1623, two years after the first Thanksgiving, the colony was devastated by a severe drought. William Bradford was the governor of Plymouth and a great spiritual leader. He wrote in 1623, “They set apart a solemn day of humiliation, to seek the Lord by humble and fervent prayer, in this great distress.” As the Pilgrims humbled themselves and called upon the Lord to intervene, Bradford tells us what happened on the evening of the same day in which they prayed. He wrote that it began, “to rain with such sweet and gentle showers as gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God…for which mercy, in time convenient, they also set apart a day of thanksgiving.”
So tonight, I am asking myself…what if we prepared our hearts for humility and repentance the way we prepare for Black Friday shopping? What if we prepared our prayer life the way we prepare for Thanksgiving meals? Our world would be different. Our families would be different.
There is another link to Thanksgiving and Repentance I am thinking about tonight. Most people know that President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863. He did this to help heal the country after the Civil War. However, did you know that in the Spring of the same year, he also declared a national day of prayer and repentance. Read the resolution signed by him on March 30, 1863. As you read this, think how different America would be if our Senate, the White House and Washington DC looked like this today…
A Proclamation.
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.
And whereas 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 Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
And, insomuch as 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 but 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 behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward, Secretary of State.
As you’re shopping this Black Friday, think deeply on preparing your heart more so for prayer and humility rather than great deals and leftover turkey.
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