(2) The following is the second of two posts recognizing Thanksgiving. I hope that you had a chance to read yesterday's post (1) on remembering the legacy of the Pilgrims.
PRAYER REQUEST: Though a cease fire has been arranged between Israel and Hamas, it only refers to the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel. Just hours before the agreement was announced, there was a Hamas attack on a bus in Israel. Therefore, pleasse continue to pray for the people of Israel being protected from ANY kind of attack and that Hamas will be rightly cited for their aggression by the world press and the nations of the world.
DECLARE YOUR SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL: I encourage you to go to the site below and consider signing the petition to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring your support for Israel especially as it again faces a threat to its very survival. The petition is presented by the Christian group Liberty Counsel. http://www.libertyaction.org/370/petition.asp?Ref_ID=18588&CID=370&RID=37375064
The Object of Our Thanks |
 The Thanksgiving SolutionOh give thanks to the LORD; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples! Psalm 105:1...it is the will of God for those who are in Christ Jesus to give thanks in every situation and all circumstances. Even when our circumstances are extremely favorable, therefore, our giving of thanks must reach beyond them, beyond any experience of blessing, to acknowledge and applaud the One Who orders all our circumstances according to His wise, good, and perfect will. At their best the circumstances of our lives should serve above all to remind us of God, Who grtants us His blessings in His way and time. At their most disagreeable, our circumstances should do precisely the same. As giving thanks achieves this focus, without regard for the specific nature of our circumstances, feeling thanks will grow in us more and more. The gratitude we feel, in other words, will be the upshot of the thanks we give. If we try to base thanksgiving the other way around, we will not fulfill the will of God for us. |
What this means is that we need at all times to have a clear and unshakable sense of God – Who He is, how He relates to us, the place our lives occupy within His economy, and so forth. For when our focus is on God, and we are growing in the knowledge of Him, nothing in our circumstances will be able to deter or distract us from wanting to celebrate His eternal goodness, wisdom, power, and love. Allow me to make a few observations concerning God which it will be good for us to bear in mind at all times, if we are to succeed in practicing thanksgiving as He intends.
First, God is our Creator. Apart from Him neither we nor anything in the vast cosmos would exist. God was not required to create us. He does not need us and He gains no glory from us, save that of His own which we refract back to Him. God made us because of love, because of a free desire within Himself to express His love into a creation that includes us and all the people in our lives. Our very being, therefore, is a platform for the manifestation of the eternal and pure love of God.
Second, not only is God our Creator, but He is also sovereign. That is, nothing that exists continues to exist apart from His intimate and personal attention to every single detail of all that is. Jesus Christ, the Word of God, upholds the world and all things in it by His powerful Word (Heb. 1:3). While we can understand this to be so, we cannot understand the mechanics of it, except to realize that, if God the Word should ever cease speaking His power toward us – whatever that means – we would certainly cease to exist. We and the cosmos we inhabit are not the products of eternal matter randomly colliding, expanding, and morphing over vast eons of time. Nor is our continued existence merely the result of impersonal “laws” of chemistry or physics. We are here because of God, and we continue to be here because He upholds and provides for every aspect of our being.
Finally, God’s essential disposition toward all His creatures is love. He loves the vast cosmos which He created and sustains (Jn. 3:16). He loves even His enemies, who ignore or deny Him, or even mount attacks against His holy name and Law (Matt. 5:43-48; cf. Ps. 52:1). And He loves those He has redeemed through Jesus Christ our Lord. In His love for us He thinks good thoughts toward us and bears good gifts to us – all the innumerable blessings by which we survive and thrive each day. These are all the good gifts of our loving God, Who made us and sustains us solely because He is love.
Does such a God deserve the thanks of His creatures? Assuredly, He does. What ingrates we are who take for granted our blessings, our lives, our very existence, and fail to give thanks to God in every situation and all circumstances. We give thanks to God, not because of the circumstances of our lives, but because of the unfathomable goodness and steadfast grace of our life-giving and life-sustaining God.
[Action Point] Write out a brief prayer of thanks to God, based on Who you understand Him to be. Today, use that prayer for giving thanks to the Lord, just because of Who He is. Share your prayer with some Christian friends, and urge them to write a prayer of their own to use and share with others.
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