Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today I want to challenge you to be heartfelt thankful this season. My favorite national holiday is approaching, and that is Thanksgiving. It's our only genuinely Christian religious holiday that has been formally declared celebrated in America, and it has been neglected in the last few decades, but not here, not at New Geneva.

We still feel that a thankful heart is a graceful heart, and a thankless heart is a graceless heart. So we want to encourage you to be graceful, that is, full of grace to your brother and sister, Christian brother and sister. And one of the ways to have a heart full of grace is to have a heart full of thanks as well. Paul exhorts us to this in Philippians chapter 4, those classic verses where he says, Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, Rejoice.

Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Ah, yes, dear brother and sister, one of the ways indeed to have joy and rejoicing in the Lord and to have peace in one's heart is to give thanks. Have you given thanks recently for answered prayer, brother and sisters? The Lord always answers prayer, just not in ways we anticipate or expect or maybe hope in our flesh that he will answer them, but the Lord always hears our prayers and he always answers them too.

So just tune your heart today to give thanks to the Lord for having answered your prayers and your supplications, and also prepare your hearts for that great national holiday of Thanksgiving, which our founding fathers had established. Those pilgrim fathers of ours had, of course, their first Thanksgiving, and this was after a particularly tough previous winter where there was five kernels of corn as a daily ration during the really hard times, right? But they had come together, our pilgrim fathers, as they came to this land and settled in Plymouth Bay, landing on Plymouth Rock as they denominated it.

And immediately after disembarking, they created a compact, as they called it, the Mayflower Compact, which in many ways became the prototype of the United States Constitution. But let me just refresh your memories, if perhaps you haven't heard this in a while, the Mayflower Compact, that is that prototype of the United States Constitution, establishing a constitutional republic. Governor William Bradford, as they had disembarked from the Mayflower on November 11, 1620, had already prepared this compact by which they agreed to govern themselves.

And it goes like this, and I quote, "...in ye name of God, amen, we whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by ye grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, defender of ye faith, having undertaken for ye glory of God, and the advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid, and by virtue hereof, to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience, in witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names.

At the 11th day of November, in the year and reign of our sovereign Lord King James of England, France, Ireland, and, yes, by Scotland, in 1620. Unquote. Ah, yes, that grand and eloquent Mayflower Compact by which they agreed to govern themselves and became then, hence, the prototype of the United States Constitution. Well, they struggled, they suffered for years to make a goal of things, and after one particularly difficult winter, they had a relatively prosperous year, and decided indeed to gather together and give thanks to God for their abundant harvest, and called what has become known as the first Thanksgiving.

On November 29, 1623, three years after the pilgrims arrived, well, Governor William Bradford made this official proclamation for a day of Thanksgiving in this small, struggling colony that had nevertheless had a good year, good harvest, and I quote his declaration, to all pilgrims, inasmuch as the Great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetable, and has made the forest to abound with game, and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all pilgrims, with their wives and little ones, do gather at the meeting house on the hill between the hours of 9 and 12 in the daytime on Thursday, November 29 of the year of our Lord 1623, and the third year since the pilgrims landed on Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to the pastor and render Thanksgiving to Almighty God for his blessings. Signed, William Bradford, governor of this colony, unquote. The declaration of Thanksgiving, the very first Thanksgiving.

And of course, that was one of the signal moments in our history, when indeed they celebrated with the Indian tribes, the local Indian tribes, who brought in fresh game, that is venison and wild turkeys, which is where we get, of course, our tradition of having turkey at Thanksgiving, because of, but they had abundance of many, many other things as well, including fish and clams, and abundant produce, then from the fields. So what a great first Thanksgiving, and subsequent Thanksgivings have been in memory of that one as well, including those in my family.

I don't know about you, but I have some of my fondest extended family memories of celebrating Thanksgiving with my paternal side of the family, especially, and we would always just have a great classic Thanksgiving feast. And I still love reprising those every year with all the trimmings, right? Turkey and ham and all the trimmings that go with that. And we always had a worship service that has fallen by the wayside, has it not? But our local Reformed church always had a morning, just a very brief morning service, where we sang a few hymns and gave thanks to God and gave public testimony as to how God had been good to us over the past year.

And then we would repair to one of our homes where we would have Thanksgiving dinner and watch the Lions play football, too. Food, faith, and football. I was always the trilogy in the Bass family on Thanksgiving Day. And we always just had great family memories, times of getting together and renewing those relationships. And most importantly, giving thanks for a prosperous year previous.

And even growing up as a smart aleck teenager, I still always respected and attended those Thanksgiving dinners with my family and just have great memories. And I hope that you do as well. And it has always been in the American tradition to do so. And even George Washington made a proclamation right after the Revolutionary War that America should give thanks. And this was his proclamation for a national day of Thanksgiving, the proclamation which he promulgated on October 3rd of 1789, after the inauguration of the Constitution, new Constitution that had recently been ratified.

And this was his proclamation. I quote, whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these United States, that we then may all unite unto him our sincere and humble thanks for his kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation, for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of his providence in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and ruler of nations, and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to promote the knowledge and practice of the true religion and virtue, given under my hands at the city of New York, the 3rd of October, A.D. 1789, George Washington.

Unquote. What a great and elegant promulgation of a great day of Thanksgiving, instituted then, at the very beginning of our nation, under our great charter, the Constitution of the United States of America. And we are obliged, then, to give thanks as well as we promulgate the true religion and virtue, as George Washington has put it. So tune your hearts, I would ask you to do, as you go to church these next several weeks in preparation, and tune your hearts towards Thanksgiving. Fill your heart with Thanksgiving.

Are there things that perhaps you are angry at God about, that perhaps you are bitter, perhaps he hasn't answered your prayers in precisely the way that you would have wanted him to? And there may be a residue of thanklessness that lingers in your heart, and I would just encourage you to, indeed, clean house. Sweep that residue of thanklessness from the chambers of your heart, and fill it, rather, with goodness and thanksgiving and joy. And consequently, you will find your heart being full of grace as well. Once again, a thankless heart is a graceless heart.

How can grace, excuse me, how can grace dwell in a heart that is full of bitterness and thanklessness? They cannot coexist. Grace will not dwell in a heart that is thankless. So turn to the Lord your God, know that he loves you, and that all things will work towards your good and for his glory in your life. It may not seem that way right now, and your life circumstances may not be prime at this time, and I understand that as well.

Many are struggling economically in days like this, after the destruction, four-year destruction of our economy by the present administration. Hopefully that will change with the inauguration of a new administration, but many of us are struggling financially and physically, are we not? Some of us may not be in the best of health either. Others of us may find our family situations painful and tragic. Others of us may find our own personal lives, our emotional stability and state, our spiritual state, and so forth, not of the best quality that we would like to see transpiring in our lives.

Nevertheless, you have much to be thankful for. I would submit to you, brothers and sisters, just the fact that you are in the land of the living listening to this broadcast here today is something for which one might give thanks, and also knowing that God loves you and has his best for you in mind and in heart. He may be testing you with trials at this time in your life, but he will bring you through them. He will walk with you through them, and you will come out the other side rejoicing. So as, you know, Paul exhorts us, rejoice in the Lord always.

Again, I will say rejoice. So lift up your prayers and your supplications. Continue to do so, dear brother and sister. Continue to do so in faith with thanksgiving, thanking God for what he will do already, and use these next few weeks, these next few Sundays perhaps, to prepare your hearts for a day of thanksgiving as God will provide. And you might even think to join us at New Geneva on Sundays.

We worship at 10 a.m. on Sunday mornings at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And we always have hearts of thanks as well. And pray that you will too, and use these next few weeks to just prime your hearts, to fill it full of thanksgiving, and you will find grace flooding the chambers of your heart as well as you do so. Lift up your prayers in faith, giving thanks to God already for the answering of your prayers. And you will find that a thankful heart makes way for a graceful heart, brother and sister.

That's my prayer for you this day. I also want to heartily commend to you the listening to of our radio programs. And we are located at americastruths.org. That is where you will find the catalog of our podcasts and this radio program. In the past, you could subscribe to our podcast as well, so that you'll get that in your feed every week.

And there is also a rich catalog going all the way back to 2016. And you can find by category either the year or the series you might want to sample or selected topics as well. For example, you can find under the series, one of the ones that I think has been important to understanding what's going on in America today is America's unconscious slide into slavery. America's unconscious slide into slavery. I call it the new American slave.

There are many new American slaves out there. You thought slavery was abolished right after the Civil War. Oh, no, no, no, no. As Catherine Austin Fitz puts it, slavery was, is, and will always be the most profitable trade in human institutions. Slavery.

Yeah. Americans are, as you dialed this up, it's a two-part series. And you'll find that Americans are increasingly sliding into slavery due to government tyranny, impossible debt, worthless money, and a servile mentality that has been cultivated in our public schools and all through our culture. Slavery is the norm for most of history, too, as you'll discover. Liberty is always the exception.

So we are merely returning to the norm here in America under the new American slavery. And you'll find that series on our website, americastruths.org. And another series that you'll find, and one of my favorites, is the 28 Principles of the Constitution from the book, The 5,000 Year Leap. Oh, yes. You will find that series on our website, americastruths.org.

And this is one that has taken quite a long time to catalog with 28 Principles, of course, and then the introduction and so forth. But The 5,000 Year Leap, of course, is that landmark book published by the Center, the National Center for Constitutional Studies, its founder being, of course, the great Cleon Skousen. And he and his team assembled this book, The 5,000 Year Leap, and articulated very concisely 28 principles of our Constitution. And I cover those over a period of almost a year in broadcasting, covering those principles for you. And it's been one of my favorite series.

But that is one that you can go to and select. And we have other series as well, probably another one of the important ones that I would recommend for you is the doctrine of the lesser magistrate. We are looking for ways to take back our governance. And there is a way to resist the tyranny that we are presently under, a tried and true path to take in resisting tyranny. And that's been articulated for us by Christian students of government now for centuries.

And it's the little known now today in our own day, sadly, sadly, dear listener, the doctrine of the lesser magistrates. It's the biblical response to tyranny. And I have a three-part series on this, dear listener, that you must listen to if we are going to resist effectively. We're having some spurts under Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to be our savior, dear listener.

We are going to have to indeed resist tyranny to a man, all of us, ourselves. And although it's unfamiliar to most Christians today, the doctrine of the lesser magistrate is a well-established principle for God's people to resist tyranny, even to the point of armed resistance. We just don't go around shooting up the place. No, we must have a biblical approach to resisting tyranny. It means that if the supreme power is unjust and tyrannical, then the lesser power has the obligation and duty to resist the superior power and has God's blessing for doing so.

It is the doctrine of the lesser magistrates. And you will find that three-part series on our website, americastruths.org. And that's one a must listen to, as far as I'm concerned. We also have then probably another one that is an obsession of mine, and that is the just war theory and the war in Ukraine. That is a two-part series as well.

The just war theory, long established in the Christian church. Once again, a little known today, but there is a seven-principled theory of what a just war looks like so that the church can exhort the king and the magistrate to follow according to principle before opening a war. And of course, when you compare it with our war in Ukraine, now you will find, you might guess, what you will find. That is, you will find that we are not fighting a just war, but rather we are fighting an unjust war in Ukraine, our participation in it in America. Well, then, we also have other series, I think, that are valuable for understanding our culture today.

And one of those other series that I would highly recommend to you, I had an eye-opening time preparing this series. It's a two-part series called The Transgender Agenda is a Dead End for America. That's the name of that series. You'll find that in our broadcast archive. The Transgender Agenda is a Dead End for America.

You can subscribe to our podcast, too, and get all of these. You would have gotten all of these in your box as they came. But this series, two-part series, is The Transgender Agenda is a Dead End for America. I give you a perspective from history. This is nothing new.

People have, for centuries, had a history. We observe the destructive effects of androgyny. That's its real name, not transgenderism. It's androgyny. And it has a long history on societies that embrace it.

It always spells the extinction of that society as well. And we see that aggression is also a part of the transgender androgyny. And it's necessary, then, to predate and to groom the offspring of mothers and fathers, or breeders, as we are contemptuously referred to. Otherwise, of course, the transgender culture is incapable of reproducing the next generation of transgenders. They must predate upon us, the breeders, as they contemptuously call us.

Well, this series, The Transgender Agenda, is a Dead End for America. This is also on our website, americastruths.org. Many, many other topics and series as well, all relating to the Christian faith, too. That's one of my prime directives is to show you the interface between religion and politics. There is no such thing as a separation of church and state.

Every state has its God. And it's only a matter of which God it is and his laws they are following. So I urge you and encourage you to check out our website, americastruths.org. And there you will find these series and many, many more and many other topics as well, going all the way back to 2016. Well, this has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

And courtesy of our church, we do indeed have these broadcasts. And I hope that once again, that you have just a blessed Thanksgiving, dear brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have so much to be thankful for, even in the midst of the war, the cultural war that we are in. And I encourage you to take some time out to give thanks in the course of the week. And join us Sunday before, if you would, Sunday before Thanksgiving.

And we will help to prime your heart. Once again, a thankless heart is a graceless heart. A grateful heart is a graceful heart, a heart full of grace. That's what I pray for your heart this day. We need it in these days and times, don't we?

In a graceless age that we live, we need hearts full of grace. And only the Lord Jesus Christ can pour that grace into your heart that you might thrive and that you might be full of joy and that you might be full of thanksgiving as well. May your heart be full of thanksgiving this season. And just reminding you again, this is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We meet for Holy Worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard.

And you can call us for more information or feedback, 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.