How are you feeling after this recent political campaign season? Exhausted? Mentally, physically, even spiritually drained? Ready to turn your thoughts and hopes to other things? Well, so am I!

Therefore, this is the perfect time to be renewed by a grateful heart to God as America celebrates its annual Thanksgiving Day!

Whether the elections turned out the way you wanted them to or not, there is still so much about our country for which all of us can be thankful—beginning with our freedom, our democracy, and those who serve us: doctors, teachers, first responders, pastors, mayors, music makers, armed forces, builders, farmers, etc. We can also thank God for the bounty of our land. As the Economist magazine put it just a few days ago on their front cover, “America’s economy has become the envy of the world.”

However, as is true of our children, it is true for our nation. With our children, because they are among the most precious gifts to be thankful for, we always want, at the same time, so much more for them because of how we love them.

In the same way, this should be true for how we think about America—we should never cease to combine our “thanksgiving” for America with what I call “thanks-seeking” for America.

Thanks-seeking comes about when our nation (or our church, or our own lives) becomes so precious to us that we want to receive all God has for all of us—when we become convinced there’s so much more God wants us to want from him!

When Paul speaks of God’s Son—our Lord Jesus Christ, Savior of the world and hope of our nation—he describes him as a gift “too wonderful for words” (2 Corinthians 9) in whom are “inexhaustible riches” (Ephesians 3), and in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2).

What is clearly implied is that while keeping an attitude of gratitude for all of Christ we know and experience right now, we should remain determined to seek our Father for more of Christ and the impact of his risen, reigning work among us. The amazing truth is that God desires to shower on us, without ceasing, “one more grace upon another” out of the fullness of his Son (John 1).

Thanks-seeking means we’re so thankful for what we have that we want more. It defines the focus so desperately needed across America right now. It’s the heart cry for more of Christ—in us and through us and upon us—that must once again rise among God’s people until the fire in our hearts for Jesus spreads with a fury throughout our land.

Even if the recent election produced all the outcomes for America you wished for, still, as Christians, we have to be honest with one another: A great deal of God’s purposes in our nation awaits the time when (to paraphrase the Lord’s prayer) God’s Kingdom comes, and his will is done in fresh ways “on earth [in America] the way it is carried out so gloriously in heavenly places.”

And that greater outcome still ahead of us is what we here at CHRIST NOW define as an “American CHRIST Awakening.”

Christians often quote these familiar and encouraging words from Jeremiah 29:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

But unfortunately, too often we fail to read the following three sentences. Look:

“Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity” (emphasis added).

Applied to our generation, the passage means one thing: No matter how many of God’s life-giving plans may be unfolding in our personal experiences, our churches, or our nation—STILL, in Jesus Christ, there is always so much more! More to seek. More to be found. More from which to be delivered. More of his promises for the future ready to fulfill.

So, this Thanksgiving 2024, I invite you to join me in a prayer of “Thanks-seeking.”

Let me make this easy for both of us. I want to introduce you to an unfamiliar hymn that expresses a powerful prayer for revival—one that is as relevant for America today as it was for England in 1901.

It was composed by a British Christian leader for his country that’s equally needed for America. It’s a prayer for the nation. It’s a prayer for revival in the nation. It’s a prayer that seeks a greater work of God in Christ Jesus than we have yet experienced. It’s a prayer from and for all of us—as individuals, as congregations, and as a whole nation.It’s a prayer for an American CHRIST Awakening—now.

I suggest you read it out loud, either in a personal prayer time on Thanksgiving Day or at the beginning of your Thanksgiving feast with family and friends.

Without a doubt, the answers to each portion of this prayer are what our country needs to receive right now—what no government leader, from the President on down, can ever do for us. Many Christians believe that God’s answers to prayers like this must happen and happen soon!

Finally, before you pray it, note the lines of the third portion of the prayer I’ve highlighted. For me, those words contain the essence of revival—from personal to national. They define the chief characteristics of any genuine Christ awakening. Let these three lines help shape your prayers long after Thanksgiving Day is past. They contain two grand “Thanks-seeking” requests:

• That the King of the ages, our sovereign Savior, who is already at work for his Kingdom’s advance, would “crown” all his endeavors in our land—that he would accelerate, intensify, expand, deepen, and fulfill his redeeming work among us.
• That by doing so, the Holy Spirit would wash away all that makes our churches and our nation dirty—all our sin, our corruption, our division, our greed, our ungodliness, our prejudices, our callousness, our anger, our bitterness, and our fears—by the cleansing power of a mighty revelation of the “glory of the Lord” manifested in the Lord of all, to awaken and transform our people as a result.

Focus on “thanks-seeking” in your daily walk with Jesus. In fact, why not begin giving thanks ahead of time for the answers you seek in Jesus’ name before they actually appear!

————————————————————————

Judge eternal, throned in splendor,
Lord of lords and King of kings,
with thy living fire of judgment
purge this realm of bitter things:
solace all its wide dominion
with the healing of thy wings.

Still, the weary folk are pining
for the hour that brings release:
and the city’s crowded clangor
cries aloud for sin to cease;
and the homesteads and the woodlands
plead in silence for their peace.

Crown, O Christ, thine own endeavor;
cleave our darkness with thy sword;
cheer the faint and feed the hungry
with the richness of thy word.
Cleanse the body of this nation
through the glory of the Lord.

————————————————————————

Author: Henry Scott Holland

Holland, Henry Scott, D.D., son of G. H. Holland of Gayton Lodge, Wimbledon Common, was born Jan. 27, 1847, at Ledbury, Hereford, and educated at Eton and at Balliol Coll., Oxford (B.A. 1870, M.A. 1873, D.D. Aberdeen 1903). He became Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1870, was ordained D. 1872, P. 1874, and has been Canon of St. Paul’s, London, since 1884. His hymn, “Judge eternal, throned in splendor” (Prayer for the Nation), appeared in the Commonwealth for July 1902 and is in The English Hymnal.