Soon both Thanksgiving and Christmas will be upon us. Does Thanksgiving seem to get the “short end of the stick”? Perhaps this is because our values are being revealed. Let’s think about the things that we commonly give thanks. We give a quick thanks to God for our food. We thank God for someone we know who has left the hospital feeling better. We may thank God when someone has become a child of God through the Gospel. But have you also noticed “giving thanks” is often tied to material things in our life, to possessions, rather than to the source: God.
In regards to possessions, I ran across this quote from the book, Discipline, the Glad Surrender: Here Elisabeth Elliot reveals four meaningful lessons to be learned from the discipline of our possessions: 'the first lesson is that all things are given by God...Because God gives us things indirectly by enabling us to make them with our own hands (out of things He has made, of course) or to earn the money to buy them...we are prone to forget that He gave them to us. We should be thankful. Thanksgiving requires the recognition of the Source. It implies contentment with what is given, not complaint...it excludes covetousness. The third lesson is that things can be material for sacrifice. The Father pours out His blessings on us; we, His creatures, receive them with open hands, give thanks, and lift them up as an offering back to Him...This lesson leads naturally to the fourth which is that things are given to us to enjoy for awhile...What is not at all fitting or proper is that we should set our hearts on them. Temporal things must be treated as temporal things' received, given thanks for, offered back but enjoyed.
Do we thank the Source? Do we express our thanks to God? Are we a thankful people? Are we thankful individuals? Explore these diagnostic questions to help probe the issue:
Am I prone to complaining?
Am I a bitter person?
Am I characterized by failing to recognize God’s good gifts in my life?
Am I anxious about the future?
Am I the center of the universe?
Do I look for signs of God’s grace in the lives of others and give thanks for them?
What we give thanks for and who we give thanks to reveals the values we bring to intercession and thanksgiving. Paul writes In Colossians 3:16, “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. Doug Moo makes the following observations from this verse:
“Gratitude in the heart must come to expression in actual, verbal giving thanks to the Father “through” Christ. Some interpreters think that Christ is the basis for the giving of thanks. But Paul’s choice of construction should be honored: the giving of thanks is not “because of” Christ (dia with accusative) but “through” Christ (dia with genitive). In keeping with the way in which Colossians persistently presents Christ as the Mediator of all that God is to the world and to the believer, so Christ mediates our thanksgiving to the Father.” (Douglas Moo in The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (PNTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) 291
With God as the source, let us expand our framework of the values we bring to thanksgiving based on Scripture’s teaching. Let the message of Christ dwell deeply among us. Let’s us not be characterized by ingratitude. Let us tie thanksgiving to God and tie it tight.