Thanksgiving is not just an American holiday. It is that too, of course, and many of us anticipate celebrating it on Thursday. But the deliberate ritual of giving thanks is not just a national holiday. It is a spiritual discipline.
Biblical thanksgiving is historical, not conceptual. Thanksgiving in the Bible is never just gratitude in general for non-specific ideas. God’s people were taught to give thanks for specific things: God’s wonder, works, and word. The psalms teach us to thank God for who he is, what he has done, and what he has promised to do in the future. They recount specific stories from history. It may seem strange to sing-pray about creation (Psa. 104), the plagues on Egypt (Psa. 105), Israel’s persistent unfaithfulness (Psa. 106), or God killing Egyptian children and Canaanite kings (Psa. 135), but the point is that God has blessed us and cared for us at specific times, in specific places, and consistently throughout the centuries. We are not just to thank God in general. We are to recognize and recall specific instances of his grace and goodness, and give him thanks and praise for them.
Biblical thanksgiving is verbal, not merely emotional. On one occasion Jesus met ten lepers and directed them to go and show themselves to the priests (Luke 17:11-19). As they went, they discovered Jesus had healed them. Nine of them went on their way, but one immediately returned to Jesus “and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at His feet, giving [Jesus] thanks.” Do you suppose the other nine men were glad they had been healed? No doubt, they were. But they were not thankful, because thanksgiving is an act, not a thought, not a feeling. They might have felt grateful to the Lord, but they did not give thanks to him. Certainly our thanksgiving should be heartfelt, but biblical thanksgiving is more than a feeling of gratefulness. It is the communication of it.
Biblical thanksgiving is intentional, not haphazard. There is a specific ritual of thanksgiving. Scripture teaches us to “use our words” when thanking God. The psalms provide many different liturgies for thanksgiving. Consider Psalm 136, an antiphonal song in which the leader or choir sings the mighty acts of God and the congregation responds again and again: “For His mercy endures forever!” Thanksgiving is not merely something we are to do when we think of it or feel like it. There is a discipline to thanksgiving, a structure, a schedule for it. Biblical thanksgiving is a ritual. There may be many different ways to engage in it—Scripture does not provide only one but many models for giving thanks to God—but amid the varieties we see an overarching unity. We praise God for creation, his judgment of sin, his work of redemption, his forbearance, our ongoing sanctification, and for his promises of future glory. There is a gospel-logic to the Church’s thanksgiving. Not every element may be present in every instance, but the narrative of redemption ought to order our expressions of gratitude to God.
Biblical thanksgiving is continual, not occasional. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1Thess. 5:16-17). God’s people are to be “giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20). Every day, in every circumstance, at all times, we are to be giving thanks to God. We thank him for our pleasure and our pain, for our success and our sorrow, for our strength and our weakness. We know that he works “all things… together for good to those who love” him (Rom. 8:28). Not even evil can ultimately harm us, because God is using that evil to humble us and sanctify us. The things we imagine not even God could make us thankful for are reminders that we are not yet where we long to be, in the glorious presence of our resurrected Lord, so we can give thanks the Lord has not let us get too comfortable in our present state but ordered our lives so that we will fix our eyes on Jesus and “seek those things which are above” (Col. 3:1).
Every Lord’s Day is a day of thanksgiving. The Church has nothing of her own to offer God. The Divine Service is God’s service to us in renewing covenant and blessing his people through the means of grace. The service we offer is a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise (Heb. 13:15). So bring your bulls of blessing and goats of gratitude, and place them on the altar of God. Light the fire of faith beneath them, and our prayers will ascend like the smoke of incense before God’s throne in heaven. Come, and “let us give thanks to Yahweh, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever” (Psa. 138:1).
