Thanksgiving: reflecting on gratitude
Thanksgiving is a season of remembrance, gratitude, and reflection. Families gather around tables heavy with food, stories, and tradition. We pause to “give thanks” for the blessings we have received over the year. But rarely do we stop to ask an important question: What makes true thanksgiving possible in the first place?
Scripture gives an uncomfortable but necessary answer — freedom.
It is impossible to fully thank God while remaining bound in lies. Gratitude requires truth. And truth, in turn, requires the breaking of chains — not only physical chains, but spiritual, intellectual, and moral ones as well.
In the history of America, Thanksgiving is often remembered alongside moments of expansion and settlement. Yet it is inseparable from a darker history of oppression and slavery. That tension is real — and it should not be ignored. But it also reveals the very heart of the message found in Scripture: God is a God who hears the cry of the enslaved. He is a God who delivers the captive. He is a God who does not merely observe suffering, but steps into history to undo it.
When Israel was enslaved in Egypt, God did not instruct His people to simply be “thankful anyway.” He moved in power to break their chains. The first song of thanksgiving in Scripture is not sung in a quiet field — it is sung on the far shore of the Red Sea, by a people who have just walked out of bondage.
True thanksgiving is born on the other side of oppression.
And this is where the lies about slavery and the Bible must finally be confronted. For centuries, Scripture was twisted to defend what God had already condemned. Passages were stripped from their context and used as shackles rather than keys. Whole systems of oppression were built not on biblical truth, but on biblical distortion. Lies sanctified with chapter and verse.
But God is not the author of such lies. He is their exposer.
The Bible does not offer a defense of slavery — it offers a trajectory of liberation. From Genesis, where all humanity is made in the image of God, to the prophets who cry out for justice, to Christ who announces freedom for the captives, the story of Scripture moves steadily in one direction: toward the restoration of human dignity.
That is why Thanksgiving is more than simply a cultural holiday. It is a theological declaration. Every time we give thanks, we are proclaiming that our lives, our breath, and our freedom are gifts — not entitlements owned by others. Gratitude becomes an act of worship. It becomes a protest against every system that seeks to dehumanize.
This season, as we bow our heads around our tables, may our thanksgiving not be shallow. May it not be forgetful. May it not be blind.
Instead, let it be informed by truth.
Let us thank God not only for what He has given us, but for what He has dismantled — chains broken, lies exposed, dignity restored. And let our gratitude move us to action, ensuring that the same freedom we celebrate is the freedom we defend for others.
Because true thanksgiving is not just found in abundance.
It is found in deliverance.
