Happy Thanksgiving!
As you enjoy time with family, eating lots of food, watching football, playing games, or whatever it is you do on Thanksgiving, remember to focus on what today is really about: giving thanks to God for all His blessings He showers upon us.
To help you do that, I want to direct you to one of my other websites: Scripture On.com, specifically, the page on Thanksgiving. If you want a few verses or devotional insights to encourage you about Thanksgiving, you might find some of the Scriptures on this page helpful.
One of my joys in life is studying and teaching Scripture, and while I have Grace Commentary.com for this, it requires too much study to write regular posts. So last week I launched Scripture On.com where I could write daily insights from Scripture on various topics and Bible passages. As I add more content, it will not only serve as a place for you to find Scriptures on these various topics, but I will also try to write daily posts which could serve as a daily devotional for you and your family.
So this week, I focused on Thanksgiving. Here is an excerpt from the post on Psalm 107:1:
When you feel like you have been abandoned in the wilderness, or have been exiled to a foreign land, read through this Psalm and give thanks to God for the ways He has delivered you in the past.
If you are facing tough decisions in life, read through this Psalm, asking Him for wisdom and discernment, remembering that He has provided direction for you in the past.
If life’s storms are howling about you, throwing the full force of their winds against you, remember that God has delivered you from storms in the past, and will calm this storm as well.
When you are in need of food and daily sustenance, trust God to provide for your needs as He has done in the past.
And when rich and the powerful people oppress and enslave, remember that God is on the side of the poor.
Give thanks to God, for He is good. His mercy endures forever!
Head on over to Scripture On.com to read the others.
Us in the west have a lot to be thankful for. We should be thankful for God calling out Abraham and the Jews who diligently recorded everything the good the bad and the very ugly things about themselves, we should be grateful for their honesty, it’s a great pity that the rest of the world did not take their lead and learn from their horrendous mistakes.
One of the many faults in the west is that of pride, our leaders tell us to be proud of all we have done, like how we have civilised the savage and the heathen and provided them with a better way of life?. We are also told to focus on the positive not the negative, forget about the failures and move on from The Crusades, The Americas, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.
We train our troops to be gung-ho which means an unthinking enthusiast, originally derived from another uncivilised country called China, their word gunghe, meaning ‘work together’, sounds very civilised to me, how easily we corrupt words as we corrupt ourselves. You know, in the past when we were happy people would say about us ” I like him because he is so Gay, not any more.
The west have systematically set out to conquer the world to rape and plunder, like the Vikings did to us. We still are stealing their raw materials and enslaving their people all over the world for our benefit, not theirs. We are now very upset because they apparently are very ungrateful to us for civilising them. How dare these foreigners fight back, it just isn’t British, it’s gone to far, they even beat us at cricket.
We are all arrogant mongrels who have got no sense of place or culture. The pride we have is self serving instead of outward looking towards our neighbor. The Bible tells us to prefer the other person. It makes me shudder that every time we talk about money in our Bible study group, one person says “ah but are we not told to favor kith and kin, it does not surprise me that saying comes from our Germanic blood, as can be seen from the German chancellor Angela Mercoles attitude to Europe, lets not go there.
So, what about all this celebration of being proud to be British, American, German, White South African etc have any of us anything to cause us to praise our past achievements, or our present attitudes to our neighbors. The man shouted at Jesus in a voice full of accusation, “WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR”.
Lets get on our knees to ask those we have sorely used to forgive us, and humbly ask what we can do to recompense them. That means to get off our High Horse and grovel in the dust, will we do it NO, why, because we always think we are right.
We are pleased to celebrate our victories by eating Turkey but none of us like the taste of Humble Pie as it would leave a sour taste in our mouth and give us chronic indigestion.
Where do we start to make amends, think of the people we have prejudices against and change our attitudes towards them, even when the Humble Pie sticks in our craw, that is another germanic word meaning throat.
A blessed Christmas to your kith and kin and maybe your neighbors. Clive. Just so you don’t get the impression I’m perfect I also need to look at my attitudes towards others on a regular basis and reach out to my neighbor.