Thanksgiving

When Gratitude Stops Short of God

I like Thanksgiving. There is something remarkable about setting aside a day—not to celebrate a military victory, not to commemorate an achievement, not to proclaim our greatness, but simply to give thanks. At least that is what we say we are doing.

For one day we gather around tables that are usually too full, with people we do not see often enough, and remind ourselves that we have received much. We speak of family. Health. Home. Food. Freedom. Friendship. Work. Children and grandchildren. Another year of life.

And there is nothing wrong with any of that. Those are gifts.

The danger begins when the gifts become the destination. We can become so occupied with the bounty that we forget the One from whose hand the bounty came. We can become so interested in the practice of gratitude that gratitude itself becomes the point.

Be grateful.

Count your blessings.

Practice gratitude.

Good advice, perhaps. But gratitude can become strangely empty if it never gets beyond the grateful person.

I can appreciate my circumstances. I can recognize that I am fortunate. I can acknowledge that other people have less than I have. I can remind myself every morning to think of three things for which I am thankful. And never encounter God at all.

There is a difference between appreciating something and giving thanks. Thanksgiving has an object. You thank someone. And for the Christian, that changes the question.

The question is not merely: What have I been given? It is: Who gave it?

And then another question follows: What does the gift tell me about the Giver?

We did not give ourselves life. We did not invent our capacity to reason, to love, to recognize beauty, to seek truth, to laugh, to grieve, to remember, to imagine, to choose.

We received them. America’s Declaration of Independence uses an extraordinary word: we are endowed by our Creator. Endowed. Given something by another.

A government may recognize a right. It may protect it. It may violate it. But if the right is genuinely endowed by the Creator, government did not create it in the first place. The gift came before the government. And the gift points beyond itself.

A gift tells us something about the giver. The ability to know suggests something about the One who gave us minds. The capacity to love tells us something about the One who made love possible. Our hunger for justice tells us something about the One by whose nature we recognize injustice. Beauty tells us something. Conscience tells us something. Personhood tells us something.

The gifts are not merely things God has scattered around His creation for us to collect and enjoy. They are signs pointing home. And perhaps one of our spiritual dangers is that we stop at the sign.

We are grateful for life, but seldom ask why life was given.

We are grateful for freedom, but seldom ask what freedom is for.

We are grateful for intelligence, but may use it merely to advance ourselves.

We are grateful for our voices, but do not always ask whether we use them truthfully.

We are grateful for forgiveness while remaining reluctant to forgive.

We are grateful for abundance while guarding it as though it were entirely ours.

The gift becomes possession. And possession very easily becomes entitlement. Eventually we can find ourselves saying, perhaps without ever putting it into words: I have these things because I deserve them.

And now gratitude has performed a remarkable transformation. It has become pride.

Jesus once described a man who went to the temple to pray. His prayer began beautifully. “God, I thank you…”

What could possibly be wrong with that?

But then he finished the sentence. “I thank you that I am not like other people.”

There may be no more frightening example of counterfeit gratitude in Scripture. He remembered God. He prayed. He gave thanks. And the entire exercise was about himself.

He looked across the room at another man and used that man's failures as evidence of his own worthiness. Thank You, God, that I am not like him.

We can do the same thing much more politely.

Thank You that I made good choices.

Thank You that I worked hard.

Thank You that my children turned out well.

Thank You that I have been responsible.

Thank You that I did not make the mistakes those people made.

We may even give God verbal credit while secretly treating the blessing as proof that we deserved to receive it. And that is where grace has disappeared.

Grace, among the many things we may say about it, is unmerited favor. Unmerited. I didn't earn it. The moment I believe God owes me the gift, it is no longer a gift in my mind. It has become wages.

There is an enormous difference between saying: Look how blessed I am

and saying: Look how gracious God has been.

One can very easily turn the light toward me. The other leaves it on Him. And ultimately Christianity takes us far beyond the ordinary gifts we place on our Thanksgiving lists.

God did not merely give us things. God gave Himself.

That should stop us. The eternal God entered His own creation. “The Word became flesh.” God took the form of a servant. God became obedient. Not merely obedient when obedience was pleasant. Not obedient as long as the circumstances remained favorable.

“Obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

We have heard those words so many times that we risk no longer hearing them. God entered our world. Human beings saw Him. They heard Him speak. They ate with Him. They touched Him. He touched them.

John, years later, could still write of “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes… and our hands have touched.”

Imagine living with that memory.

I touched Him.

And then those same people watched Him die. And afterward they saw Him alive. That reality became so deeply embedded in them that they could not keep quiet about it. The first century did not explode with the gospel because the apostles had discovered an effective technique for changing the world.

They had encountered the risen Christ. They knew what had happened. And they were faithful to what they knew.

“We cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

Perhaps that is one of the things we have lost. Not necessarily doctrine. We can still recite the doctrine.

Perhaps we have lost some of the astonishment.

Incarnation.

Crucifixion.

Resurrection.

Three theological words that can sit comfortably on a page. But they describe events that ought to leave us almost unable to speak. And once we begin to comprehend them, another assumption becomes difficult to maintain.

Why would followers of the crucified Christ expect Christianity to guarantee them an easy life? Jesus did not say, “Follow Me and I will make you comfortable.”

He said: “Take up your cross and follow Me.”

That does not mean we should seek misery. It does not mean suffering is inherently virtuous. It certainly does not mean every inconvenience is “my cross to bear.” It means that faithfulness may cost us something. Sometimes a great deal. And why should that surprise us?

The One we follow became obedient to the point of crucifixion. Yet Christianity does promise comfort. Paul begins his second letter to the Corinthians by blessing “the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.”

But notice what Paul does not say. He does not say God prevents all affliction. He says God comforts us in our affliction. Those are very different promises.

God's comfort is not necessarily the removal of suffering. It is His presence in it.  And Paul says that the comfort we receive becomes something we can give to another suffering person.

James sees another movement.

Trial.

Testing.

Perseverance.

Maturity.

James describes suffering producing perseverance, character, and hope.

Again and again, the New Testament refuses to pretend that discipleship means an easy road. Instead it tells us something much larger: The road is going somewhere.

And that brings us to Christian hope. Christian hope is not optimism.

It is not: Everything will work out.

It is not: God will fix this situation.

It is not even: Tomorrow will be better.

Sometimes tomorrow is worse. People we love die. Bodies fail. Plans collapse. Injustice goes unanswered. Faithfulness costs more than we expected.

Christian hope does not require us to deny any of that. Christian hope says: Endure this for a season.

Not because suffering is unreal. Not because everything in this life will eventually arrange itself to our satisfaction. But because God has made a promise.

And our confidence is not merely in the promise. It is in the One who made it.

And beyond even that, God has already given us something in history on which that promise rests: Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead.

If resurrection were merely an optimistic possibility, it would not sustain us. Paul understood that. If Christ has not been raised, he says, our faith is futile. Everything depends upon the event.

But if Christ has been raised, then the resurrection is not merely something extraordinary that happened to Jesus. He is the firstfruits. The beginning. The promise made visible. The future breaking backward into history.

So the Christian standing in suffering does not say: I think everything is going to be all right.

He says: Christ has been raised. God has promised. Therefore this is not the end.

That changes Thanksgiving. We can be thankful for the table. We can be thankful for the people sitting around it. We can be thankful for health when we have it, prosperity when we have it, freedom when we have it, comfort when we have it.

But those things cannot carry the weight of Christian gratitude because every one of them can disappear.

The deepest thanksgiving must rest somewhere else. Beyond the table. Beyond the bounty. Beyond the gift. Beyond even this life. It must finally rest in the Giver.

Perhaps that is what I want to explore as Thanksgiving approaches. Not merely whether we are grateful. But whether our gratitude ever reaches God. Whether we have mistaken blessing for deserving. Whether comfort has become expectation. Whether thanksgiving has quietly become self-congratulation. Whether we have become so enamored of God's gifts that we have stopped looking at God. And ultimately whether we believe the greatest gift God has given us is not anything we can place on a Thanksgiving table.

It is Himself. The gift became flesh. The gift went to the cross. The gift came out of the grave. And because He did, thanksgiving does not have to depend on how much is left on our table.

The Giver is still there.