Thanksgiving Day—celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November, and on other days in other nations—can be a good time to reflect on our blessings, our purpose and our future. How thankful are we? Have we used the blessings God has given us to fulfill our national purpose and mission? Or do we even know our mission?
In 1863, the year when Thanksgiving became a national holiday in the U.S., President Abraham Lincoln stated that “it is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God… 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.”
Today, while most Americans profess to be religious, many are living very secular lives. We have forgotten our heritage! We have neglected the foundation of truth and divine instruction, the Bible. As long as we were a Biblereading society, we reflected to some degree the morality of God. Consider this statement from Green’s Short History of the English People: “No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England in the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. England became the people of a book and that book was the Bible. It was read by every class of people. And the effect was amazing. The whole moral tone of the nation was changed” (Halley’s Bible Handbook, p. 817).
The word of God should influence our behavior and our character. Whatever course our nations may take, we individually must get back to reading the Bible. We need to be living by the Bible. As Jesus said in Luke 4:4: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’” Are we indeed living that way of life?
If we are truly thankful people, the Creator God expects that we will fulfill the mission He has given us. Jesus instructed the Apostles to have the attitude of giving: “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). Jesus told the Apostles to “make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). He told them to “preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (Matthew 10:7). ‘The Living Church of God continues to fulfill the mission Christ gave. We in this Work are striving to give the good news of the coming Kingdom of God to the world. As Christ opens the doors, we walk through them in faith.
The world desperately needs the truth of God. It needs the gospel Jesus of Nazareth preached, the gospel of the Kingdom of God. You can pray that the gospel will go out in greater power around the world. As Jesus said, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). Individually and nationally, we need to fulfill our God-given mission. As truly thankful people, we all need to be involved in the Work Jesus Christ is doing!