Bless the LORD, O My Soul!

This week Thursday, November 27, 2025, the faculty, students, and staff of the PRC Seminary will celebrate the annual day of Thanksgiving held here in the United States. We will take the day off from our normal labors and worship with our church families, and then gather with our families to enjoy the bounties of God's provision and thank Him for all His gifts and for His grace to us in Jesus Christ the Savior.

We pray that you will join us in rendering our God humble thanks for all His goodness and care--in times of plenty and in times of poverty, in seasons of joy and in seasons of grief, in days of hope and in days of despair. For the Lord remains the same to us His children--ever merciful, ever faithful, ever caring and providing. He is truly worthy of our praise and thanks!

To keep the proper idea of this season before our minds, we share with you these Thanksgiving thoughts from one of the founders of the PRC and one of her first professors in the seminary, Herman Hoeksema. He penned this meditation based on Psalm 103:1,2 for the December 15, 1928 issue of the Standard Bearer under the simple title "Thanksgiving." May his words inspire us to life up our hearts in true thanksgiving to our good and gracious God.

"O, my soul!

"Bless Him!

"Bless His holy name!

"Forget not all His benefits!

"These three constitute an unbreakable chain, link­ing my soul to the living God and inducing her to praise and adore the Lord Jehovah.

"Forget not all His benefits! A Hebrew way of say­ing: forget none of them, remember them all!

"God’s benefits are all His deeds, all His acts with respect to His children. The root-meaning of the orig­inal word is simply: deeds. Forget not all His deeds toward thee, O my soul! And, indeed, all His acts are benefits unto His children, whom He loved with un­fathomable compassion from before the world was. He never harms them. Whether the way is light or dark, bright or gloomy, whether it is smooth and level or rough and steep, whether it leads through dark ravines or over mountain heights bathing in the bright gold of cheering sunlight, whether He sends prosperity or adversity, health or sickness, joy or sorrow, our life in its entire course and in all its vicissitudes is His deed, and the various stretches and curves in the road are His acts.

"And because they are His acts with respect toward His children, they must be benefits.

For the great central deed is the benefit of all bene­fits: the gift of His only begotten Son. From that one gift flow all other gifts. That one deed is at once the source and the great sample of all His other deeds. For from it flows the benefit that He forgives all our transgressions, swallowed up as they are in His preci­ous blood; that He heals all our diseases, borne as they are by His stripes; that he delivers our life from de­struction, seeing that He entered into our deepest woe and brought life from death, heaven from hell; that He renews our youth like the eagles, for eternal youth and glory He carried from the grave with Him into heaven to bestow upon His people. These spiritual benefits are first, because they are basic. He who cannot rejoice in them, cannot rejoice in Jehovah, cannot praise Him and break forth into glad thanksgiving. For without these benefits nothing avails; with them all is good. For He who forgives all our iniquities and washes us in the blood of His Beloved, Who heals our diseases and delivers us to crown our lives with everlasting glory and blessedness, will surely make all things sub­servient to our salvation....

"Forget not all His deeds!

"Remember that all His deeds are benefits to thee, my soul!

"Then, thou wilt behold in all these His holy name, which surrounds thee, accompanies thee every step, is thy everlasting good and protection, holds thy hand and leads thee, through darkness and light, over moun­tains and through vales, when the way is steep and rough as well as over paved and level road§, in order to lead thee to glory . . . .

"Forget not all His benefits!

"Count them one by one!

"Exercise thyself to keep them constantly before thy mind, dwell on them, make them thy meditation, day and night, in cheer and in gloom, in joy and in sor­row, in the midst of the fat of the earth or with the dry crust between thy teeth. For in them thou beholdest His holy name, Jehovah, the faithful and un­changeable God of thy salvation!"