Give Thanks

In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.
I Thessalonians 5:18

Ah, Thanksgiving Day – the day when we in the United States stuff ourselves full of food of all kinds, whether it be turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, bread, biscuits, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, or anything else you care to name. It’s the day most of us (at least us men) stop to watch a couple football games from start to finish even if we don’t like either team. For many, it’s also a day to get together with a group –sometimes big and sometimes small – of family and friends, some of whom may have come a long way just for the occasion.
At its very heart, though, we partake of all of this joy on Thanksgiving Day for one basic reason – to give thanks. And to whom do we give thanks? We give thanks to God, who is ultimately the One who gives us all things to enjoy.
God is quite pleased when we thank Him, and as we see in the verse above, giving of thanks is one thing He desires His children to do. We certainly do have so much to be thankful for, and it is a good thing to set aside one day in the year to remember that fact. If we didn’t, we may run the risk of forgetting to be thankful. Still, that doesn’t give us an excuse to not be as thankful as we should be every day of the year.
What do we have to be thankful for? We need only to look around for a few seconds. My family has, upon several Thanksgivings, had a custom of going through the alphabet and naming things that we are thankful for that start with each letter. Of course, it’s a little hard to think of X and Q and Y and Z words, but without exception, we need more than one trip around the alphabet because just one is not enough to name everything we are thankful for.
We can be thankful for food, of which we have probably an overabundance on this day. We can be thankful for shelter and clothing, for family and friends around us to keep us company and to give us much love. We can be thankful that we live in a country that is still free and, compared to every other place in the world, prosperous and even relatively wealthy. We can be thankful for our jobs, our education, our abilities, our talents, and our health. Most of all, we must thank God that he graciously provided a way to be made righteous in His sight, by sending His Son to die for our sins and make us His children when we trust Him with all of our heart. We thank God for giving us His Word, the Bible, to instruct us in how He wants us to live here on earth.
As you can see, it takes just a little thought to come up with just a few of the things we have to be thankful for. All of us can take these general things and make them more specific, substituting in their place the name of a loved one or a specific blessing from the past year. God is so good to us, and if we all gave a little more frequent thought to this, we would probably smile a bit more often.
But what about the things we are not quite so thankful for? Each one of us surely has at least one thing that we can say we wish was not in our lives. And besides that, we often would like to be thankful for some thing or other that is not in our lives at the moment but which we wish was. Our verse tells us to be thankful “in everything”. You see, if we can thank God even in the midst of unpleasant things, we are showing the depth of our faith – and God is pleased by that. The book of Hebrews says that it is impossible to please God without faith. When we keep a thankful attitude even when parts of our lives are not going as we would like them to go, we are showing that we trust God and take Him at His Word when He says “all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
And so, as we enjoy today and all of its festive details, let us remember to give thanks to the One who richly gives us all things to enjoy. And let us remember that Thanksgiving is not just a holiday at the end of November – it’s also a frame of mind that we should keep with us all the year through. Thank you, Jesus!