God’s gift of Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving Day we express our gratitude to the Lord for all His blessings to us, but what goes along with that is that it also a day for us to repent of the times we have been thankless. If we are honest with ourselves, sometimes we are like Bart Simpson in one episode of the Simpsons, when he said this dinner time “prayer”: “Dear Lord, we bought this food with our own money; so thanks for nothing.” It is easy for us sinners to slip into thinking that we are self-sufficient, and to forget that everything we have is God’s gracious gift to us. Or, when things are not going as well as we would like, sometimes we even grumble about what God has given us to endure; “Thanks for nothing, God,” we think. For this we must repent, this also is why we need to pray, “Lord, give me the gift of thanksgiving.” When we confess, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” this means that there is nothing in this entire cosmos that is not created by God, and therefore we have nothing of ourselves. We are entirely dependent on Him for everything. Everything we have is from God, as a free gift we have not earned, and because of that, giving thanks to Him constantly is our duty, our obligation— giving thanks is not optional, and it is a wretched sin to omit it.