The Glory of God Yesterday, Today, and Forever
(This article was written for Thanksgiving 2025)
Today we arrive for our services with the smells of tasty food wafting in the air around us. The tables are prepared for another Thanksgiving service and meal which is usually one of our favorite times of the year. This year, I am conflicted with the holidays. It is the first time to be without my wife, and she always loved this service and helping with it when she felt well enough to take part. I have trouble with her absence and memory, but I do not let it dampen my enthusiasm for the blessed privilege we have of enjoying the company of God’s people.
I find this Thanksgiving more interesting because of our study of the 1689 London Confession of Faith. Although writing the Confession 56 years after the first Thanksgiving in America and adopting it 68 years after, the men who drafted and approved it were largely in solidarity of faith with the Pilgrims in America who came decades before them. When we were in school and play acting the meeting between the Wampanoag native Americans and their freshly arrived strange colonists, our history books and teachers said it was a time of religious refreshment and thanksgiving to God. Revisionist history books now assure us no prayer was involved but rather the food and fellowship marked a calculated political alliance between the two parties.
Among the group of Pilgrims on the Mayflower were Baptists scattered among the larger group of Reformed Christians. In drafting the 1689 Confession, the strategy was to emphasize every doctrine of orthodoxy in which they could align themselves with the Protestant Reformers but to also show that the places of disagreement were not outside the pale of orthodoxy. Disagreements stayed within the allowance for Christian liberty when they did not oppose sound biblical principles. Thus, the framers of the document carefully supported each dissent with scripture. With this measure, they also affirmed the only authority for faith and practice is the Word of God.
The Pilgrims who arrived in America in 1620 were largely under the duress of persecution. They were living in the Netherlands having escaped persecution in England more than a decade earlier. The men who signed the 1689 Confession experienced the same persecution for years under the Clarendon Code and only released the document after the English Parliament passed the Act of Toleration allowing for their freedom of worship.
I combine these two stories today to show the lifeblood of the Pilgrims and the Confessors of 1689, was their belief in the one true living God who is the author and finisher of our faith and the sustainer of our existence. To think they would meet without prayer and acknowledgement of their God who led them here is a deliberate attempt to eliminate God from the founding of this country.
Admittedly, among the Pilgrims were secular travelers but when they wrote the Mayflower Compact, they drew the language directly from the church covenants of the Puritan inspired Pilgrims. The Mayflower Compact declares the purpose of the voyage was “…for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith…” Be thankful today these are the true roots of the settlement of the North American continent.
Pastor V. Mark Smith