Practicing Thankfulness (eBook)

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The Rightness of Gratitude

Picture yourself in this situation: You’ve served a long time on death row in a dark and dank medieval dungeon, and your execution is imminent. You smell. No, you stink. It’s too dark to see. What must you look like? Your clothing long ago turned to filthy rags, and the slimy stone cell reeks of excrement. A day arrives (remember daylight?) when you hear the footsteps of a guard approaching. A key rattles in the lock, the door swings open, and the guard growls, “Somebody has paid your ransom. You’re free.”

What?

As you stumble up the steps out of the dungeon, you turn to ask him, “Ransom? What was the ransom price he paid?”

The guard mutters, “Your ransomer had to die in your place.”

“When will that happen?” you ask.

“It’s done.” He waves his hand to keep you climbing the stone stairs.

Stunned, you move toward the last doorway to the outside, where you ask one more question: “How did he die?”

“He died the way he knew he would,” the guard replies. “He was butchered alive.”

What a price to willingly pay! Wouldn’t a proper response be thankfulness multiplied exponentially by amazement? And in your freedom and amazement, wouldn’t you run to your friends—to everyone—and enthusiastically exclaim how grateful you are?

Christ pays the price, and is the price, as he himself told us: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28). He paid the debt he didn’t owe for captives who owed a debt they couldn’t pay. How fitting for thankfulness to erupt from prisoners thus freed!

Paul described his own salvation—his own “prison escape”—in the following words, where his worship of God begins specifically with thanksgiving:

I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. (1 Tim. 1:12–15)

We Are Always Recipients

Not only our salvation (which is of incalculable worth, and “deserving of full acceptance”), but all that everyone has is from the hand of God: “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). God brings us into existence and sustains us (with or without our awareness)—we are thus recipients twenty-four seven. In every aspect of our lives, we’re beneficiaries. How fitting, then, for beneficiaries to express flabbergasted appreciation to their benefactor. And how wrongheaded to fail to do so! Such appreciation or lack thereof is not benign, like whether you part your hair on the right or left. No. Like a continental divide determining whether adjacent raindrops flow to the Atlantic or the Pacific, gratitude and ingratitude are a dividing line, bringing vastly different outcomes, as we shall see later in this book.

Paul rhetorically asks the Corinthians (and us), “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7), the correct answer being obvious. If everything we have is received, then the giving of thanks for everything is fitting.

God has not only supplied everything we currently have, but in the future he’ll supply everything we will ever have. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). There will never be an end run around his provision. If God doesn’t supply something, we won’t have it. There will never be an occasion when we rightly think, “I don’t need to thank God for that, because it didn’t come from him.” The soul that is vibrant and aware will gratefully recognize God’s gifts more and more, as more and more of his grace arrives.

God owes us none of this. He never has. Not a thing. All that we have is by grace—undeserved, unearned, and even unsolicited. God has supplied each of us with a zillion things we never requested or had the good sense to order in advance. Did you request two kidneys? Two? Tear ducts that lubricate your eyeballs? An ozone layer around the planet? Synapses in your brain? No. He just gave them to us.

Such incalculable generosity calls for a response. How are we responding? The right response is gratitude—thankfulness. What is gratitude?

Gratitude is the divinely given spiritual ability to see grace, and the corresponding desire to affirm it and its giver as good.

In fact, the New Testament words we translate as “grace” and “gratitude” have the same Greek root.

God Wastes Nothing

God is always at work for his own glory as well as for our good—everywhere, all the time. And he wastes nothing he does; he’s working everything for our blessing and benefit: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28). Paul says we know this. Do we? Do we act like we know he’s working all things without exception for the good of those who love him? I’m sobered by the possibility that my grousing about this or that betrays the reality that maybe I don’t love him as much as I claim to. I’m acting like I don’t know what Paul says I know—namely, that God is working everything for my good.

The reason God works all things for the good of those who love him is that he himself is good. Therefore, underlying our true gratitude for God’s gifts is our amazement at God himself. As John Piper says, “If gratitude is not rooted in the beauty of God before the gift, it is probably disguised idolatry.”1

God is great. God is good. For his greatness we praise him. For his goodness we thank him. His greatness stands alone—he is great whether or not he displays that greatness through any actions we see him take. For his expansive power and wisdom we humbly praise him.

If God were great—awesome in power, mighty in deed—but not kind to us, he would be a monster. He could grind us into a powder and blow us away, and he would be totally just in doing so. He would still be worthy of praise for his terrible powers, but we wouldn’t be thankful. But we are thankful, because he applies his unstoppable ability toward accomplishing our everlasting joy in him, confident that even through our affliction he’s “preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). God is good, not just great. Believers fear him and like him! We praise him and thank him.

In fact, this is what marks the distinction between believers and demons. Demons know theology. They can recite Scripture. They know the claims of Christ, and they know his identity. Sooner or later they will bend the knee. But they don’t like him. Demons can praise him, and they fear him; they recognize his awesome power. But they take no pleasure in him, and they never thank him.

In contrast, believers enjoy God and they thank him. “The real difference between a Christian and a non-Christian,” Tremper Longman writes, “is that the former gives thanks to God.”2 I recently interviewed a Chinese woman through an interpreter. When she fled China and examined Western culture, trying to understand differences between Buddhism and Christianity, she made this generalization about Westerners: “They don’t practice thanksgiving, so they must not be Christians.” I use her generalization as a mirror; I look in there and wonder if I see myself.

More Every Moment

Because God is always and everywhere at work doing good, there’s never a time when God-honoring hearts are licensed to lapse from the soul-enriching practice of thankfulness. Every moment is another opportunity to observe, embrace, and appreciate with gratefulness the wondrous workings of God, who works wonders even in ordinary things—as in, for example, “the way of an eagle in the sky, / the way of a serpent on a rock, / the way of a ship on the high seas, / and the way of a man with a virgin” things which “are too wonderful” for us to fully comprehend (Prov. 30:18–19).

Since God is working all things together for the good of those who love him, it’s entirely fitting that we be “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20). Always and for everything—what a sweeping assertion! When it comes to the extent of our gratitude, many people cite only 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “give thanks in all circumstances,” pointing out that it says in everything, not for everything.

But 1 Thessalonians 5:18 isn’t the only verse in the Bible about giving thanks. The Bible has much more to say. Ephesians 5:20 does say “for everything.” Thankful for what? Everything. And when? Always.