TOPIC:"The Beauty of Giving Thanks"
"I will offer to Thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving" (116:17)
On October 3, 1789 George Washington, the first President of these United States, made this proclamation: "Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the People of this Country..."
Seventy-four years later in 1863 in order that our country might have a time to express its gratitude to God for all of His generous blessings and abundant gifts to this nation, Abraham Lincoln officially proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be a national day of Thanksgiving. Then on November 26, 1941, seventy eight years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the 4th Thursday in November as a national Thanksgiving holiday.
And will it be any surprise to you to be told that these Thanksgiving Proclamations were given at a time in 1863, when on the one hand our country had just gone through the ruins of war and on the other hand in 1941 after incredible brutalities and horrors were being carried out by militant countries of the world. To spell this thought out a bit, we get nowhere in the life of praise until we begin to realize that the giving of thanks is not so much a matter of outward conditions as it is of an inward commitment. Being thankful does not depend half as much on what we behold as the way we view what we behold. Like the two men in prison of whom we read -
"Two men looked out the prison bars,
The one saw the mud, the other the stars"
There you have two men who viewed things different ways. We have a vivid example of this truth in the Psalm before us: Whether it was written by someone unknown to us after the victorious return of Judah from the Babylonian captivity, or as some believe by King . . .