Thanksgiving 2024 Sermon

New Covenant Community Church | Highlands Ranch

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful years and healthful
skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the Source from which they
come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and
soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence…
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign
states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been
maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the
theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of
the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have
not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines,
as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than theretofore.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the
gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless
remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully
acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-
citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign
lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our
beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions
justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our
national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows,
orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently
implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may
be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. ~
Abraham Lincoln (October 3, 1863, passed by an Act of Congress.)