Please feel free, everybody, to request Thanksgiving hymns (or any hymns at all, really). This is the choir at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, singing Now Thank We All Our God. This classic Thanksgiving hymn goes back a ways: written in 1636, music composed and published in 1647.
We’re at the Royal Albert Hall in London (in spirit) to hear the choir, full orchestra, and a couple thousand people sing Holy, Holy, Holy; and then for a bonus they’ll go on to give us Now Thank We All Our God. Sometimes there’s nothing like the full treatment! Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
The combination of this beautiful Thanksgiving hymn, so wonderfully performed, and God’s handiwork in nature, so gloriously displayed, I find a very moving one. I don’t know, maybe I’m turning into a softy. But you have touched your finger to my heart, O Lord, and made it sing.
Even in this dark age of a fallen world, God gives us much to be thankful for.
In a spirit of thanksgiving to God, here’s the King’s College Choir at Cambridge, England, singing Now Thank We All Our God–first written in 1636 during the Thirty Years’ War by a man who, amid crime and desolation, still found it in his heart to be grateful to God.
This hymn of Thanksgiving came out of the horrors of the Thirty Years War. It was written by Pastor Martin Rickart in the town of Eilenburg, circa 1637. In that year the plague struck Eilenburg and the pastor had to conduct 4,000 funerals, including his wife’s.
And yet he found it in his soul to write a hymn thanking God for His many blessings.
This is mighty faith indeed.