The Cost of Salvation

We place so low an estimate on what we owe the Lord and our obligations to the Church. We never stop to cavil at the high cost of other things, but when the matter of divine obligation is placed upon us, we complain, and too often fall down and miss the mark altogether. The following from an exchange is proof of this fact:

In central Texas, a rich drover, whose son had committed murder, engaged the best criminal lawyer that money could procure to defend his boy. He was acquitted. The lawyer presented his bill. It was staggering. The attorney said, "I hope you do not think it too large?" "Oh, no, not at all," he responded. "You have saved my boy. I would gladly have paid you twice the amount."

That winter a faithful pastor won that boy to Christ, and thus saved him from a continuance in drunkenness and sin. When the pastor asked the drover for a contribution toward the kingdom of God, his thank offering was one dollar!

How much should we give to Him who saved us?

By William Moses Tidwell, "Effective Illustrations 

This is part 9 of a number of facts associated with THANKSGIVING. This is an all American holiday. Although the US and Canada celebrate the day on different dates, the purpose is the same.

Establishing The Date:

President Washington again proclaimed a National Thanksgiving in 1795. John Adams declared Thanksgivings in 1798 and 1799, while James Madison declared the holiday twice in 1815; none of these were celebrated in the autumn. After 1815, there were no further national Thanksgivings until the Civil War.

The New England states continued to declare annual Thanksgivings (usually in November, although not always on the same day), and eventually most of the other states also had independent observations of the holiday. New Englanders during the great westward migration took 'their' holiday with them everywhere they settled. Thanksgiving was adopted first in the Northeast and in the Northwest Territory, then by the middle and western states. In 1817 New York State adopted Thanksgiving Day as an annual custom. By the middle of the 19th century many other states, including the southern states, had done the same.

Lincoln declared the first of our modern series of annual Thanksgiving holidays for the last Thursday in November, 1863. Lincoln had previously declared national Thanksgivings for April, 1862, and again for August 6, 1863. The southern states had independently declared a Thanksgivings of their own.  His declaration appears below.

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God 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 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 as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

--Abraham Lincoln - October 3, 1863

Thanksgiving Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln October 3, 1863