I ended my last year’s Thanksgiving blog with the following challenge:
We have a choice this Thanksgiving. As our society becomes increasingly secular, the actual “giving of thanks to God” during our annual Thanksgiving holiday is being overlooked, leaving only the feasting. My choice is to love my God with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my mind and with all my strength and to be thankful. (Mark 12:28-30 paraphrased).
What is your choice and what is one of your great joys to celebrate and thank God for?
Sometimes God feels distant or silent, making you feel it just doesn’t seem like a season for gratitude and quite possibly it was difficult to thank God.
Let’s have a look at David in Psalm 13:
1How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? 3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, 4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. 5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. 6 I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.
In this Psalm, the phrase “how long” occurs four times in the first two verses, indicating the depth of David’s distress. He felt forgotten and invisible. David expressed his anxiety and sorrow to God and found strength. By the end of this prayer, he was able to profess hope and trust in God. He helps us regain the right perspective, and this gives us peace.
There are times that I feel like this, BUT my go to is Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:16-19. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
This year when we come together with family and friends, remember that the situation that you are in or the circumstances that surround you are not what defines you, God defines you! Like Paul said in his prayer, may each one of us be strengthened through his Spirit in our inner being. May we thank Jesus for the ultimate sacrifice he did for us, when he came to this earth and died on the cross, to forgive our sins, in order that we could someday, feast with Him in His home! Let us not only look to the present, but also the future and trust in His unfailing love and rejoice from the bottom of our hearts in our salvation and profess our thankfulness and love to Him!
May you be blessed with an abundance of God’s love this Thanksgiving.
Jan Kwasniewski
Chairman of the Board of Directors
Christian Virtual School
