Thanksgiving Prayer

Thanksgiving Prayer

Robert A. Hall

Heavenly Father, Lord God of Hosts, we ask Your blessing on this food and on our family and friends about to partake of it. We thank You for a country where each person is allowed to seek You in his or her own way, free of a state-imposed theocracy which works to the benefit of the theocrats and against the people’s liberties. We thank You for Your bounty, ever aware that there are so many people throughout the world who live under systems of oligarchy, tyranny and statism who thus suffer from hunger, privation and a lack of freedom. We ask that You put charity in our hearts to help the less fortunate of our own volition, and not through coercion.

We thank You for the foresight of the founders of this great Republic, who gave us a free-market, capitalist system where property rights are protected, allowing the accumulation of wealth, which has given tens of millions of Your people Freedom from Want since it was established out of the smoke and suffering of battle. We ask Your protection and care for our free economy and our free society that future generations may share in Your bounty and blessings.

Father, we seek Your blessings on our troops and our veterans, those young people who give all, often even their lives, to protect the freedoms You have bestowed on us, from those who make a perversion of God, a catechism of power and a religion of the state. Return our guardians safe to their families, comfort the wounded and, when they must sacrifice all, take them into Your Grace for eternity. They are truly the one percent, who shame their contemporaries who want to receive without toil from the efforts of others. We thank You for sending them to protect us and to serve as an example of the better angels of our nature.

We know, Father, that our people and our country have not been perfect. Nor have we who petition you on this day of Thanksgiving been without sin and flaws. We ask Your blessing and guidance on those who would make our nation better and freer and more prosperous and to make us better people. We ask that You turn Your face against those who would destroy freedom and prosperity, whether they disguise their lust for power as being in Your name or the name of “social justice” and secular government. Put up Your hand as a shield against those who would enslave Your people to government to toil for those who traded power for unearned largess.

We ask, Father, that You preserve this great Republic and its free institutions, including the freedom for people to keep what they earn by their toil and by taking the risks that advance prosperity, free from the fear of confiscation by thugs on the street or thugs in government. We ask this in Your Name, not for ourselves, who have already enjoyed wonderful lives in this blessed country, but for our children, our grandchildren and all future children, that they may enjoy the blessings of liberty and Freedom from Want that we believe are gifts from You and thus the rightful inheritance of Your people.

Amen.