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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 is 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.
It is wonderful that we celebrate Thanksgiving Day annually as a nation, but every day should be a day of thanksgiving for each of us. That is why God’s Word teaches us prayers of thanksgiving and for thanksgiving: so that we will remember that we are completely dependent on God for everything, and so that we will be moved to thankfulness as we remember His gifts to us.
Giving thanks to God each day helps prevent us from slipping into self-reliance and self-righteousness in our prayers. Perhaps we are not so crassly thankless as Bart Simpson was, but we definitely sometimes are like Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie Shenandoah, Charlie Anderson, who said this prayer as his family’s dinner time blessing: “Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvested it. We took the harvest. It wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be eating it if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you Lord just the same for the food we’re about to eat. Amen.”
I think this “prayer” hits closer to the heart of how we all tend to look sometimes at our day to day provisions: we view them as things we earned, rather than completely as gifts from God. Ask yourself a few diagnostic questions to test your attitude. When you ate breakfast this morning, did you eat your food from your pantry, purchased with your money, or did you eat food that the Lord gave you, from the pantry the Lord gave you, purchased with money that the Lord gave you?
Repent of thinking that anything you have is really yours. It’s all God’s generous gift to you. But what’s amazing is that God is kind and merciful to us even though we are ungrateful to Him. Indeed, Jesus said that God the Father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” Matthew 5:45. And when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we can be confident that God will provide.
On Thanksgiving Day we give thanks to the Lord for all His blessings to us, but most of all for the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, the Savior of the world, who gave His body up to the cross and shed His blood to win forgiveness of sins, the greatest gift of all, which is received by faith in Him. And every day becomes a day of thanksgiving when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, so that we are moved to thankfulness for the eternal blessings of God’s Kingdom, even as we continue beg that the Lord would give us this Bread of Life always— and we know that He will answer with a “Yes!” because He has promised always to give Christ’s forgiveness, life, and salvation to us. So what else is left to be said except for that glorious Word of God: “Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever!” Amen.
