There has been a lot of interest in the topic of gratitude in recent years. Extensive research has been carried out as to the benefits of cultivating gratitude for our overall well-being. People use gratitude journals to write down what they are thankful for each day. It seems to me there is a lot of good in this, and it intersects with the Bible’s emphasis on thanksgiving. Yet, there is an important difference between the feeling of gratitude and the activity of thanksgiving.
Consider how we are so insistent on teaching our children to say thank you to others. In my experience, you will find this habit the world over. Parents will follow the offer of food, drink, or a toy with the prompt, “Say thank you now …” We learn these basic manners by echoing our parents. As children get slightly older, parents will often intervene if a child forgets to say thank you to others. The shop assistant might even participate in the ritual, withholding the item briefly until the child follows the parents’ instruction to say thank you. Even if we can’t always articulate exactly why this is so important, most parents intuitively know there is something profound involved here that can’t be neglected.
Another dimension of this comes into focus when we notice that we don’t teach our children to say thank you to vending machines. We don’t give them a few dollars, help push the correct combination of letters and numbers for some treat, and then prompt them to say thank you back to the vending machine. Why is that? It’s not just the financial transaction; we still teach our children to say thank you to those serving us in a restaurant after all. That contrast between a person and a machine shows us that saying thank you is about relationships. As we thank someone, we acknowledge who they are and express our respect for them. We grow in our relationship through thanksgiving.
One very simple reason we need to be encouraged over and over to give thanks to God is that we tend to forget. Just as for children, thankfulness does not come naturally to us. We see this in the Old Testament as Moses prepares the people to enter the Promised Land. He says,
And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land He has given you. Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping His commandments and His rules and His statutes, which I command you today. (Deuteronomy 8:10–11)
The people had been slaves in Egypt, had wandered through the desert for many years, and were finally coming into the land of plenty. After their many sufferings (often self-inflicted), the Lord’s promises were coming to fruition. Moses knew that it was possible to forget all this quite quickly, and so he tried to get out ahead of the problem and warn them against this forgetfulness. Yet forgetful ingratitude was again exactly what happened.
One poet offered a helpful illustration of how we can so easily take things for granted. Consider the beauty of the night sky with the moon, stars, planets, and galaxies, and how few people are out at night looking up at it. The poet suggested that if the night sky were only visible once every thousand years, people would flock to see it and remember it for generations.[1] Yet because it’s there every night, we easily forget the beauty and grandeur right outside and rarely take the opportunity to look up. I’m reminded of this myself sometimes. As I write, I am living in the country, and so the night sky is even more impressive. When I come home late from a meeting or need to head out into the dark having forgotten to bring the trash in, I catch a glimpse of the majesty that is visible above every clear night and marvel not only at its beauty but also at how often we seem to forget.
Thanksgiving is an essential component of our relationship to God. We don’t treat God as a giant cosmic vending machine where we put in the right prayer or act of obedience and expect the demanded blessing to come down automatically. Instead, we acknowledge that all of life is a gift from God and we trust in Him no matter the circumstances we are in. The only right response to all He has done for us, especially in His gift of Jesus Christ to save us, is to give thanks to Him. As we thank God, we acknowledge who He is and what He’s given us and so grow in our relationship with Him. While gratitude can remain an internal feeling, thanksgiving moves us out of ourselves and toward the other––both to other people and to God. Gratitude is good, but thanksgiving is better.
“Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (Colossians 3:17).
[1] This illustration comes from the 1849 essay Nature by the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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