Have we ever seen a time when it was more important to count our blessings? Or - for Western people at any rate - when we were more likely to write God off as uncaring, absent or non-existent? This will probably the first of several posts that I hope may encourage us to do the first, not the second, of these.
A group of African Christian leaders who had recently suffered torture for confessing Jesus as Lord once said to me: “when you western people suffer it is unusual for you. You think you need to know why. This reveals your temptation to rationalism. When you can't find out why, you are tempted to question, doubt and then dismiss God. When we suffer, on the other hand, it is normal to us. We don't think we need to answer questions about why. It is common in a fallen world. So our instinct is to seek God, humble ourselves and worship.”
They were among the most vibrant, thankful disciples I have ever met. I wanted to bow to them.
Thankfulness is a huge theme in the Bible, and one of the clearest purposes God has for our lives:
Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Jesus Christ (1 Thess 5:18)
Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Col. 3:17)
God has all kinds of purposes for our lives, many of which we may never understand or even know about. But we do know that his will for us is thankfulness. Not only does it display our dependence on his goodness, thereby magnifying his glory, it is also how we are helped to be creatures who exist in right relation with him. It nourishes us as disciples and causes us to grow roots that are deep and strong. I would go so far as to say that it is impossible to be a disciple without thankfulness. Another verse that nails this is 2 Cor. 4:15:
Grace is reaching more and more people, and it causes thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God
Receiving the grace of God (which is the Gospel) causes thanksgiving to overflow. And God is glorified when thanksgiving overflows. If thanksgiving is not overflowing in us, it is a barometer of whether we are alive and attuned to the grace of God in Jesus.
There is, unsurprisingly therefore, a really close connection between thanksgiving and worship. We are redeemed by God to worship. As God says to Pharaoh through Moses: let my people go, that they may worship me. There are other passages that are almost identical but that substitute worship with thanksgiving:
Cry out, “Save us, God our Savior;
gather us and deliver us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name,
and glory in your praise.” (1 Chron. 16:35, repeated in Ps. 106:47)
Where Moses says we are redeemed to worship, the Chronicler and the Psalmist say we are redeemed to give thanks and to glorify. That’s the same thing. To worship is to glorify with thanksgiving:
I will praise God’s name in song
and glorify him with thanksgiving. (Ps.69:30)
Worship is giving thanks for God’s holiness, goodness and love, and glorying in his holy name. And that is also how to pursue happiness in God. When you read things like “come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song”, does that sound unhappy to you? Like something you want to avoid? If so, you aren’t a Christian yet.
There is a similarly close connection between thanksgiving and prayer. One of the chief Levites had the glorious job title of Director of Thanksgiving and Prayer, In Charge of the Songs of Thanksgiving. It makes mere “worship leader” sound a bit passe!
And there was a similarly close connection between thanksgiving and sacrifice. The fellowship or peace offering of thanksgiving gave outward expression to delighted thankfulness of heart (Lev. 7). And the Psalmist makes it clear that the thankfulness is more pleasing than the sacrifice (eg. Ps. 69:31). The one should be the expression of the other, or it is just empty and pointless deeds, which is what went wrong with Cain - sacrifice without thanksgiving.
We find thankfulness in times of victory, such as Nehemiah’s choirs of thankfulness at the completion of the wall “Rejoicing because God had given them great joy” (Neh. 12). Or when the new temple was finished with a great shout of praise in Ezra 3. But we also find it before God has given victories in much less certain and more difficult situations as a means of exhorting faith by thanking for past grace. A personal favourite was when Jehoshaphat faced a hard and by no means certain battle. He exhorted faith by putting people at the front of the army to praise God for the splendour of his holiness with these words: “give thanks to the Lord, his love endures forever”.
We can picture an army being drawn forwards behind a bow-wave of thankfulness. And isn’t that what we want and hope our job as Christian leaders is all about? I wonder how much gospel advance happens with that kind of up-swell of thankfulness. And how many apparently good initiatives bear little spiritual fruit because they are just well-managed human effort, lacking the sense of glorifying God with thanksgiving?
One things is for sure, which is Jehoshaphat knew that the people loudly giving thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love was a pretty good way to face uncertainty and fear. Maybe that is something we need to hear especially in these uncertain and troubling times.