The Thankful Christian

I want to start today with a familiar passage from Romans Chapter 1.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. – Romans 1:18-20

This passage came to me as I was thinking about a hike we took on Tuesday with Mimi’s family. We took the hike to Oconee Station Falls, off of Highway 11. It was an absolutely perfect day for a hike, with mild weather, hardly a cloud in the sky, and gorgeous fall scenery. There was a breeze, and at times, so many leaves would come down at once that you could make a game of trying to catch them as they fell. Although the water levels were low, the falls were still quite impressive. Oconee Station Falls have moderate height but impressive width, and even with the low water, the water fell at full width. 


The highlight, though, was at the foot of the falls when Jonathan climbed a high rock and prepared to jump down the side opposite that which he had climbed. I think he thought he would be jumping onto dry land, but the many fallen leaves hid the fact that it was in fact shallow water. I called out to him to stop, and he did, looking down at the place he had been planning to jump. He then called out to us that he saw something, some kind of animal in the water. We came, and it turned out to be a 6-inch long crayfish! We dangled a large leaf at it, and it grabbed it with its pinchers. We were then able to lift it out of the water an examine it. It was the first time I had ever seen a crayfish and I just marveled at it. To use a modern overused phrase, it was “cool.”

It is mind-blowing to look at creatures like this crayfish and think that one Mind, one Person, our Creator God, imagined and created everything. When you go to a zoo, or an aquarium, it is a universal experience to stare and marvel and be amazed at what you see. As Christians, we should stand amazed at the One who made it all. Surely Romans 1 is true: when you look at what has been made, what God has made, God’s eternal power and God’s divine nature are clearly seen.

As I have reflected on our encounter with that crayfish, I was struck by something else. As remarkable and “cool” as that crayfish was, how much more remarkable were the human beings that were gawking at it! We spend so much time looking at other people, the amazement has long since worn out. It probably wore out in our first few months of life, but I wonder what a baby thinks! Perhaps she thinks, “Wow, that is cool!”

We are remarkable creations! We blow the crayfish, and the seahorse, and the octopus, and the elephant, and even the triceratops away. We are made in the image of our Creator. Not just our physical form is remarkable, but what God has made us able to do. We speak, and sing, and create, and build, and invent. We feel, and marvel, and love. And yet, we are able to degrade and belittle and even destroy ourselves, reshaping us into something that is far removed from the image of God. Romans continues with this:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. – Romans 1:21-23

The message today is entitled, “The Thankful Christian.” I am fascinated by what Romans says here, that people can know God – quite a bit – through observing His creation, and yet, they choose for whatever reason to neither glorify Him nor give Him thanks. At their core, unbelievers choose to be unthankful. This choice has vast repercussions. To choose not to thank God and to choose not to give Him glory is to commit treachery against your own soul. It creates a tension in your life, because deep down you know the truth that you have been made by God and that you therefore are not your own keeper. To choose to ignore this truth, to push it back down and bury it, naturally leads to fear. Maybe not conscious fear, but it is there. Deep down you know that you have done and are doing something wrong, and the Creator might punish you for it. To deal with the fear, Romans says that you become fools. Instead of listening to what the whole universe is telling you, that you have a Creator who has eternal power and divine nature, you choose to deaden the fear by worshiping something else, something safer, something that you know deep down is a cheap imitation of the real thing. In the days of the Bible these things were most often idols, images made of wood and stone to look like superheroes or half-human half-animal monsters or simply elements of God’s creation – birds, animals, and reptiles. Today around the world this still goes on, but we have added other kinds of idols – things more abstract, such as a successful career, or financial wealth, or power, or prestige. To deal with the deep-down fear you either invent a defender who can protect you or you try to make yourself somehow able to defend yourself against your Creator. Is this not the definition of foolishness?

Now as believers, we are not in this camp of fools. But I do think we can forget who we are, and more importantly, Whose we are, and a result of this is that we begin to become drawn to the many kinds of idols that unbelievers cling to. We too can stop glorifying God, and we too can stop giving Him thanks. Why do we do this? Perhaps because we have sinned and have not confessed it to him. Perhaps because we want to keep sinning. Perhaps because we simply don’t understand how great and good and wonderful God is.

I think it is proper for a Christian to ask God, “Why did You make me?” If we understand who we are, we will find the answer. Ephesians 1 is one of the best places to see who we really are:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will—to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves. – Eph. 1:3-6

What are we? We must be something pretty special to God. He had us all planned out even before Genesis 1! And He had a plan for us – to be not just His invention, but to be His children! He made us so that He could love us! He made us so that He could lavish His love on us. What are we? We are the objects of His love!

In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And He made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. – Eph. 1:7-10

He knew we would turn from Him, and so He gave His only begotten Son for us, Jesus Christ. He let Jesus die on our behalf so that we could live in His presence, in His love, forever. The inescapable conclusion is that we are immensely valuable to God. Gold is simply some metallic rock that happens to be yellow. Does it have any intrinsic value? No. Its value lies in the fact that it is so wanted. If people didn’t want it, it would be as worthless as the composite rock and the common dirt around it. Our value is not intrinsic to us. Our value lies in the fact that God made us and wants us. He wants to be with us forever!

In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession—to the praise of His glory. – Eph. 1:11-14

I think it is easy reading this to be drawn into something that was not the purpose here, to wonder about the whole predestination thing? Wait, we say, what about free will? Does this mean that others were predestined for hell? I don’t want to dig into this here – but the extremely short answers are, “Yes, we also have free will; although it is hard for us to understand how both can be true, that’s our problem, not God’s.” and “No, God desires that all repent and be saved.” But this is not the context. This is not the middle of a heady theological discussion. This is a glorious listing of all the ways that God loves us and blesses us! Can we not simply accept the gifts?

Why did God make us? Our very making was a gift to us. He loves us and He has given us us, and He has made us His very children. He has given us Jesus Christ, the Son, and He has given us the Holy Spirit, and He has given us Himself, the Father. All has been given to us.

And so the next natural question is, “How do we respond? What can we give Him?” This is God we are talking about. We cannot give Him anything physical, for there is nothing to give that He did not make and does not own. We cannot fix anything for Him, because we cannot possibly improve on His creation. The people who tinker with genetic engineering and cloning are not going to improve His creation, but worsen it. He is not served by human hands, as though He needed anything. – Acts 17:25. So if we cannot give Him anything physical, and we cannot fix anything for Him, how do we respond?

The answer is there in Romans 1 and it is in Ephesians 1 as well. In Romans, the unbeliever’s problem was that although he knew God from creation, he suppressed the truth and refused to do the rightful thing: to glorify Him as God and to give thanks to Him. We, therefore, should do the right thing. We should glorify Him as God and give God thanks. This is our response. This is our gift to God.

And look how Paul responds at the very next verses in Ephesians 1:

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. – Eph. 1:15-16

So your response should not only to thank God for the miraculous gift of “you,” but also to thank God for the miraculous gift of “us.” Our thanks to God should be collective (for each other). It is something we do together, thanking God for creating and loving and rescuing and saving us. Together we thank Him for Jesus Christ. Together we thank Him for sending Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. Together we thank Him for raising Him from the dead as a kind of “first fruit” of what we are to become.

The next question that comes to me is this: What do we thank God for? Here I think there are poor answers, acceptable answers, and excellent answers. I want to get at the better answers.

For an example of a poor answer, turn to Jesus’ parable beginning in Luke 18:10.

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.' But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' – Luke 18:10-13

We know which of the two Jesus was not impressed with – the Pharisee. If we are not careful, we can sound like him. ‘God, I thank you that I have never succumbed to drug or alcohol abuse.’ ‘God, I thank you that, unlike my coworkers, I have my life more or less together.’ We can fall for this collectively as well. ‘God, we thank you that we are not like other churches.’ Comparison has no place in our prayers.

Of course, the problem here is deeper than just comparison; it is dishonesty. The Pharisee has blinders on. He thanks God for his few good points but does not ask God for mercy, forgiveness, or help on his many areas of sinful attitude and behavior. Thanks to God should not be used to mask our sins.

Now, suppose you gave someone gifts from time to time, and when you did so, you were often thanked for those gifts. However, it did not seem to you that this person cared for you much as a person. They tended to avoid you, and they seemed awkward around you, and it seemed as if they tried to hide lots of things from you. How would you feel? If it were me, I think I would feel “used.” There would be a strain in our relationship, and I doubt that it would just “go away.”

I would suggest that we can be the same way with God. We can thank Him for things (His gifts), and that is OK, but if we do not go deeper into relationship with Him, if we show by our actions that we don’t otherwise really care for Him, if we feel awkward around Him in prayer, if we try to keep parts of our lives away from Him, are we not doing the same thing?

Listen to this passage by Jonathan Edwards:

True gratitude or thankfulness to God for His kindness to us arises from a foundation laid before, of love to God for what He is in Himself; whereas a natural gratitude has no such antecedent foundation. The gracious stirrings of grateful affection to God for kindness received always are from a stock of love already in the heart, established in the first place on the grounds of God’s own excellency.

In other words, we should go beyond thanking Him for what He has done, to thanking Him for Who He is. We should be an open book before Him, saying “God have mercy on me, a sinner,” if there are areas we have kept closed to Him.

I like the way David describes what he does to thank God in Psalm 69:

I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. – Psalm 69:30 (KJV)

I use the KJV here because I want the more literal translation so I can point out the word “magnify.” In Hebrew this is based on the word gadol which means “big.” David says he will make God big with thanksgiving. What does this mean? I think of a telescope. What does a telescope do? It magnifies the stars. It is not like a microscope, which zooms in on something small to make it appear large enough to see. A telescope zooms in on something huge to make it begin to appear as large as it really is. When we magnify God with thanksgiving, we begin to make Him look as great as He really is. Our thanksgiving should magnify God (make Him appear as He really is).

We then spent time giving thanks to God together, remembering Him with the bread and the cup. These symbols, instituted by Christ Himself, help us remember Him. It is fascinating to think about the fact that Jesus Himself gave thanks as He broke the bread that was to symbolize his own agonizing death on the cross. He loved us so much that He was thankful for the opportunity to save us by sacrificing His own life! In Hebrews it says that for the joy set before Him he endured the cross. Let us continually give thanks to Him.