The General Thanksgiving
The General Thanksgiving -Book of Common Prayer Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not...
read moreGratefulnesse
Gratefulnesse -George Herbert, The Temple (1633) Thou that hast giv’n so much to me, Give one thing more, a gratefull heart. See how thy beggar works on thee By art. He makes thy gifts occasion more, And sayes, If he in this be crost, All thou hast giv’n him heretofore Is lost. But thou didst reckon, when at first Thy word our hearts and hands did crave, What it would come to at the worst To save. Perpetuall knockings at thy doore, Tears sullying thy transparent rooms, Gift upon gift, much would have more, And comes. This notwithstanding, thou wentst on, And didst allow us...
read moreThe Thanksgiving Exchange
Our country’s original expression of “thankgiving” during this holiday season once led to to worshipful expressions such as these: Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. Now I, your magistrate, do...
read moreSin as Thanklessness
This is a great passage to ponder during Thanksgiving: Romans 1:22-23 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Luther said that the Apostle Paul wrote Romans to “magnify sin”. The more I read Romans and see Paul’s theology of sin unpacked layer after layer–idolatry, religion,...
read moreWhat is Sin? by David Powlison
What Is Sin? by David Powlison from The Journal of Biblical Counseling (Spring 2007; Vol. 25, No. 2) pp. 25-26 First, people tend to think of sins in the plural as consciously willed acts where one was aware of and chose not to do the righteous alternative. Sin, in this popular misunderstanding, refers to matters of conscious volitional awareness of wrongdoing and the ability to do otherwise. This instinctive view of sin infects many Christians and almost all non-Christians. It has a long legacy in the church under the label Pelagianism, one of the oldest and most instinctive heresies. The...
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