HAPPY THANKSGIVING - COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

What an awesome message delivered by this song. In this season where we are giving thanks for all the blessings that we have, it is important to understand and be grateful for the opportunity to deliver similar blessings to others.

God’s purpose is that his people should be the means of bringing blessing to the
world. As we receive his blessings into our lives, those blessings should also touch others.

When those that freely receive life's gifts also give freely and generously, then all mankind benefits and you are truly living life to its fullest.

Today, I am especially thankful for those special people who have blessed my life and motivate me to be a better person simply as a result of knowing them and having them as a part of my life:
My mom, Ledra and Erik. Thank you.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL.
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THE BLESSING - John Waller
Let it be said of us
while we walked among the living
let it be said of us
by the ones we leave behind
let it be said of us
that we lived to be a blessing for life
let it be said of us
that we gave to reach the dying
let it be said of us
by the fruit we leave behind
let it be said of us that our legacy is blessing for life
this day
you set life, you set death right before us, this day
every blessing and curse is a choice now
and we will
choose to be a blessing for life
let it be said of us
that our hearts belonged to Jesus
let it be said of us
that we spoke the words of life
let it be said of us
that our heritage is blessing for life
(chorus)
for your Kingdom
for our Children
for the sake of every nation
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FURTHER FOOD FOR THOUGHT THIS THANKSGIVING:

Thanksgiving and Marginal Utility by Gary North from the website LewRockwell.com

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north22.html

The first official Thanksgiving Day was celebrated on June 29, 1676 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. But Gov. Jonathan Belcher had issued similar proclamations in Massachusetts in 1730 and in New Jersey in 1749. George Washington proclaimed a day of thanksgiving on October 23, 1789, to be celebrated on Thursday, November 27. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln officially restored it as a wartime measure. The holiday then became an American tradition. It became law in 1941.

Lincoln was a strange contradiction religiously. He was a religious skeptic, yet he invoked the rhetoric of the King James Bible – accurately – on many occasions. His political rhetoric, which had been deeply influenced by his reading of the King James, was often masterful. For example, when he spoke of the cemetery of the Gettysburg battlefield as "this hallowed ground," using the King James word for holy, as in "hallowed be thy name," he was seeking to infuse the battle of Gettysburg with sacred meaning – a use of religious terminology that was as morally abhorrent as it was rhetorically successful. It is the sacraments that are sacred, not monuments to man’s bloody destructiveness. In that same year, 1863, he used biblical themes in his October 3 Thanksgiving Day proclamation.

"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 are blessed whose God is the Lord."

He went on, in the tradition of a Puritan Jeremiad sermon, to attribute the calamity of the Civil War to the nation’s sins, conveniently ignoring the biggest contributing sin of all in the coming of that war: his own steadfast determination to collect the national tariff in Southern ports.

In his proclamation, he made an important and accurate theological point.

"We have been the recipients of the choisest 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."

This observation leads to the same question that Moses raised long before Lincoln’s proclamation: Why is it that men become less thankful as their blessings increase?