Greetings all, many Americans have forgotten the reason that we celebrate Thanksgiving (although a week earlier than originally designated). The following was written by a man who read the Bible daily from childhood on. My apologies that I'm posting a day late, please share with others who do not understand the reason for the holiday!
I would like you to know that this man wrote every speech he gave, perhaps you've heard some of them as he was a great orator.
Thank you and God bless all, Matt

"Is the duty of nations as well as people to owe 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 Scripture and proven by all history , that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord!

We have been the recipients of the choicest of bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no 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 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 in November as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the heavens."

Abraham Lincoln, 1863
Thanksgiving Address