where is your thanksgiving going?
I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving. — Psalm 69:30
Thanksgiving is a holiday that everybody in the U.S. can celebrate. No matter your background or religious beliefs, everybody acknowledges that it’s good to be thankful. And so many people give at least some thought to gratitude each Thanksgiving, even if it’s just going around the table and expressing thanks for one thing.
But our culture has a problem with thankfulness; it never gets directed toward anything. We are thankful for many things but have no one to be thankful to. For many, thanksgiving is abstract gratitude indirectly expressed to no one in particular. We list off the things we’re thankful for, but they are like a helium-filled balloon that gets loose, drifting off to nowhere in particular.
This type of thanksgiving masks what’s actually going on in our hearts. While externally we might be thankful, internally we are caught up in either a spirit of self-congratulation or a sense of getting lucky. While outwardly we express thanksgiving, deep down, we’re really congratulating ourselves; we’re the ones who put in the hard work to get the job, make the money, pay the rent, and keep everything going in our lives.
But giving thanks for the blessings of our lives shouldn’t be an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back or to thank our lucky stars. First and foremost, thankfulness is about giving thanks to God. Why? Because all of the things that we’re thankful for are ultimately from Him. As the Bible says in James 1: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father.”
When we don’t give thanks specifically to God for all of the gifts He has given to us, we commit, as one pastor puts it, “cosmic plagiarism.” When we commit cosmic plagiarism, we use God’s blessings but refuse to give Him the glory for what He’s done. We steal the glory that God deserves and try to take it for ourselves.
Instead of expressing thankfulness for things indirectly, we should be like the psalmist in Psalm 100, who expressed his gratitude directly to God. He wrote:
Know that the Lord, He is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
True thanksgiving is ultimately directed toward God, the source of every good thing in life. This means that you should be thankful to God for the opportunity to:
Have a job and make a living.
Experience good health and another year of life.
Develop your gifts and make progress towards your goals.
Live in a time of relative peace and stability.
Enjoy a variety and abundance of food.
It’s easy to take the many good things in our life for granted in our culture, but they aren’t here solely because of human ingenuity or random chance. Rather, they are a result of God’s blessing on us, our families, and our communities.
But what are we supposed to do if we don’t feel particularly thankful? Some of you have no doubt had difficult years. It’s important to note that the psalmist doesn’t thank God for easy circumstances or prosperous conditions but rather for His steadfast love. Steadfast love is the English translation for hesed, the Hebrew word for God’s covenantal love. The psalmist grounds his thanksgiving towards God on His unchanging redemptive love found in God’s promise to redeem His people.
The foundation of thanksgiving isn’t that we’ve had more good things than bad happen over the last year, but rather that God, despite the ups and downs of your life, continues to love you with an enduring love, working through everything that happens so that you might experience His faithfulness. We can still be thankful, even in times of trial and difficulty, because God’s covenant promise to, through Jesus Christ, never leave or forsake us.
So this Thanksgiving, as you have the opportunity to give thanks for many things, give God the glory that He deserves for all of the blessings that He has given to you.
