Before Thanksgiving Comes Repentance

J. Michael Sharman

The Thanksgiving Proclamations of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln recognized the truth that real repentance should precede true thanksgiving. Now is a good time for us to prepare for the upcoming Thanksgiving season with our own repentance:

Lord, you gave us the perfection of Your laws at Exodus 20, and then You revealed to us in I Timothy 3 what we would look like in these last days as we totally ignore those commands of Yours.

You told us to have no other gods but You. But we are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. We like sex but we don’t want any lasting commitment or the fruit of our unions. We believe we can be gods ourselves and choose which babies should live and which should die.

“No false idols,” You told us, yet here we are with a form of godliness but denying Your power. We have elevated our comfort and convenience to the highest place of worship. Frankly, You can see by the choices we make in our lives that there are many things we’d rather serve than You.

We were told to not take Your name in vain. We do, though, take Your name in vain when we say our national motto is “In God We Trust” but we no longer trust You in our children’s schools or in our government buildings.

We should be keeping Your Sabbath, but we don’t rest in You nor do we want Your day of rest if it interferes with our shopping, sports or yard work.

You clearly told us to honor our mothers and fathers, but we rebel against them in our youth; we expect them to clean up our messes when we are young adults; and during our middle years we push them into the position of unpaid childcare workers rather than embrace them as respected elders. We consider our work, time, and wants to be more valuable than theirs. When they are of no real value to us anymore, we simply ignore them.

It should be simple to obey Your command to not murder, but we are so swayed by our evil desires that we will harvest the stem cells of the smallest of Your human creations to alleviate our discomfort or to extend our own lives.

“No adultery” You said. You placed one man to be with one woman for life and You called it very good. We have sequential marriages or live with someone for a few months or years and call it good enough. We commit adultery many times each day when we look, and long, and lust, without bothering to even turn our heads away. We have an insatiable desire to see nudity yet we have no appreciation of the real beauty of our bodies or the reproductive purpose for which You made them.

In violation of Your command “Do not steal” we steal Your glory when we claim for ourselves our nation’s greatness, when it was only by Your grace that we survived and prospered.

You told us that You created us male and female. We bear false witness against You and make a lie of the people You made us to be when we say a man can be a woman or a woman a man.

We covet Your position, Father. Like Lucifer, we have forgotten that You are God and we are not.

Forgive us, Lord, for You are the dispenser of all good. You are our provider, protector and judge.

You provided Your Son to protect us from the eternal consequence of our sins against You so that we can avoid the judgment that was rightfully ours.

You loved us when we broke every one of Your perfect commands, and You lifted us up out of the filth caused by our repeated violations. We can not fathom why You did that because we know for certain that if we had been in Your place, we would not have done the same.

So, meekly we come, in the name and at the invitation of Your Son, Jesus Christ, and all we can say when confronted with the reality of such magnificent generosity is:

Thank you, Lord. We love You.

By J. Michael Sharman Click here for bio and archived articles