Giving Thanks

I invite you to turn with me as I read from Psalm 30—the Thirtieth Psalm—and then we’ll turn from there to Ephesians chapter 5. Psalm 30, and then we’ll turn to Ephesians 5.

“A Psalm of David. A song at the dedication of the temple.”

I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up
 and have not let my foes rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
 and you have healed me.
O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol;
 you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.

Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints,
 and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment,
 and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night,
 but joy comes with the morning.

As for me, I said in my prosperity,
 “I shall never be moved.”
By your favor, O Lord,
 you made my mountain stand strong;
you hid your face;
 I was dismayed.

To you, O Lord, I cry,
 and to the Lord I plead for mercy:
“What profit is there in my death,
 if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
 Will it tell of your faithfulness?
Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me!
 O Lord, be my helper!”

You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
 you have loosed my sackcloth
 and clothed me with gladness,
that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent.
 O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!

Thanks be to God for his Word.

And then, as we turn to our studies in Ephesians 5, we pause and pray:

O gracious God, you know every one of us here now. You know our thinking, our background, where we stand in relationship to the things of yourself, revealed fully and finally in Jesus. And we pray for your help, that as we turn to the Bible, that you will bring it home to our hearts and minds with clarity and with compassion, with conviction, and with saving power. For we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, in our ongoing studies in Ephesians, we have arrived appropriately but without planning at 5:20: “… giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” If we had been simply looking through our Bibles for a verse that we might employ on the Sunday following our Thanksgiving celebrations, we might equally have arrived just at this verse. So we’re very thankful that in the course of our studies we find ourselves here.

Because this verse comes in that context, I want to say two things by way of introduction: one concerning context and the other an important contrast.

The context, the immediate context of verse 20, is obviously the surrounding verses. And in the surrounding verses, Paul has urged the readers of his letter to “be filled with the [Holy] Spirit”[1]—to have an ongoing infilling of God the Spirit—and for that then to reveal itself in the way in which they worship and praise God, so that their songs and their thanksgivings will be expressive of God’s invasion in their lives.[2] And when he urges the same thing in writing to the Colossians, as we saw last Sunday evening, he issues there a threefold call to thankfulness.[3]

In doing so, Paul is simply acting as you would expect a Jewish man to act—one who had discovered that the psalms that he sang as a boy were often calls to thankfulness, so that he would have sung the Thirtieth Psalm, which we read: “Sing praises to the Lord, … you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name.” Or in Psalm 107: “Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good …! Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.”[4]

So what Paul is doing is urging these believers in Ephesus, who have been brought out of a background in which their celebrations were anything but marked by tranquility and gratitude and godliness, and he’s saying to them, “You know, when you come together as a group, your gatherings should convey gratitude.” There should be, if you like, a sort of corporate attitude of gratitude. There should be a sort of enthusiastic thankfulness that is almost tangible amongst the people of God when they gather.

And there is something of a challenge in that, isn’t there? Even as we think about ourselves making our way this morning: I don’t know what your attitude of heart was when you awakened or when you traveled or when you arrived—or even now, for that matter. But I wonder: If people were to come in, would they be struck by a sort of exuberant thankfulness—by the fact that people said, “You know, these people seem to be remarkably thankful”? That’s what Paul is saying. And that context is then set in the contrast between what their lives once were and what they have now become in Christ.

Now, Paul is very, very clear in all of his writings to distinguish between humanity without God and humanity having come to know God in and through the Lord Jesus. So, for example, when he gives lists, as he often does, you will often find that thanklessness or ingratitude is embedded in those lists as an evidence of the fact that people do not appreciate who God is or what he’s done. That doesn’t mean that no one other than a Christian can be thankful; clearly, that is not the case. But it is both the basis of thankfulness and the nature of it and the extent of it that is being addressed.

So, for example, when writing to Timothy, describing humanity without God, he begins, and he says people will be, number one, philautos; that is, they will be lovers of themselves, self-love. They will be philargyros; they will be “lovers of money.” They will be “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”[5] In other words, he says the sort of general tenor of a culture will be stuck on itself. And when that is the case, when people are convinced about the nature of the autonomous self—who I am, what I am, what I’m becoming, what I’ve achieved, and so on—then pride will stand as a barrier to genuine thankfulness. Then we will find ourselves saying, “Well, I deserve this.” And someone gave me a gift or was kind to me, I’d say, “Well, what of it? I deserve this.” Or we may be even worse: We may say, “I deserve more than this. That’s all they gave me? Wow! I thought I would have got more.”

Humility dethrones the self and opens the door to thankfulness. If you take the Old Testament picture of Nebuchadnezzar, who was sort of like the daddy of self-absorption, and the amazing picture of him sitting there in Babylon and saying to himself, “You know, this is really fantastic. I have done a terrific job.” And it’s recorded in Daniel: He says, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power … for the glory of my majesty?”[6] “I, me, and mine.” And then something radical happens to him: God intervenes, shows him what he’s really like, turns him upside down. And everything is changed. And he returns to his place, and he surveys things, and he issues an edict to the land, and he declares, “His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and he does according to his will.”[7]

Humility dethrones the self and opens the door to thankfulness.

So, you see, this is the great contrast: “I, me, mine”—self-sufficiency. “Can get by okay. It’s nice to be thankful every so often. It’s nice to have that once a year and so on. But generally, I’ve got it under control.” As opposed to “It’s his dominion.”

So, the corporate thankfulness is to be expressed, and the contrast is with the ingratitude of those who do not know and love God.

Now, with that said, we come to our verse, verse 20, where, in a matter of a few words, Paul explains when, for what, and to whom, and how a man or a woman in Christ is to be thankful. You say, “That’s quite a lot.” Well, it is quite a lot, but we’ll move through it speedily. So, four simple questions concerning thankfulness.

Giving Thanks Always

“Giving thanks” when? Answer: “always.” “Always.” Everybody can understand that. They know the difference between always and for a few days or once a week.

Children are told, “I want you to brush your teeth.”

“When?”

“I’d like you to do it every morning.”

“Oh, do you mean we have to do it always?”

“Yes, always.”

“We can’t just do it once a month?”

“No, it would not be a good idea. Always.”

That’s what he’s saying. Everybody can understand that: “giving thanks” to God “always.” So that’s comprehensive. So, we can understand why that would be the case when everything is going well, when we’re enjoying the sunshine, when blessing and comfort appear to be our portion, when our health is in relatively good order, and when none of our family are in jail or in long-stay hospital situations, when we’re enjoying seasons of blessing, when we are comforted, when we’re aware of the wonder of God in creation, in his preservation of our lives, and of his inestimable love in the Lord Jesus providing redemption for those who admit their sin. We could tick all of those boxes. I find that very easy. But, you see, the “always” covers the downside too. The “always” covers the dark side—always: even when the wind is in our face; even when the wheels fall off; even when, as the hymn writer puts it, “sorrows like sea billows roll.”[8] Yes, “always.”

Paul, when he writes to the Romans, he reminds them in the fifteenth chapter that everything that has been written before, referring to the prior Scriptures, has been written, he says, so “that through endurance and … the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”[9] In other words, as we read of God’s dealings in the past, it assures us in the present and gives us hope for the future. And one of the ways in which we do that is just by reflecting on the way in which God has dealt with individuals—normal men and women, as it were—in times past.

So, for example, when you think about “always” giving thanks to God, let’s go back to Daniel and to chapter 6. Here is Daniel. He is separated from his family, along with some of his friends. He’s taken away into Babylon. He’s in captivity. He’s sequestered. He no longer has access to the things that were his lot and his expectation in life. He’s risen to a position of usefulness. God has blessed him. But now he finds himself opposed by everyone around him and by the plotting of evil men. And he is facing the lions’ den. And what do we read? Well, we read that “he went [down] to his house,” “he got down on his knees,” and he “gave thanks … as he had done previously.”[10] “Well,” you say, “that’s quite striking.” It’s not particularly striking if he gave thanks when he was given a new position of authority in the government. People would say, “Well, that’s really straightforward. I can see why he would do that.” But now he faces the prospect of being ripped apart by lions, and “he got down on his knees,” and he “gave thanks … as he had done previously.”

Or what about Jonah, who got himself in a whale of a problem? Finds himself in the belly of a great fish, and out of the belly of the fish he says, “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you.”[11]

Thanksgiving in the prospect of the lions’ den, thanksgiving in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, and equally so in the life of Paul himself. You remember Luke records how Paul and Silas are taken, and they are imprisoned; their feet are fastened in the stocks, but not until they’ve had a really good beating. So, they’ve been beaten, and then they have been shackled. And Luke records that they caused a major stir in the jail, not by their complaining but by their singing. And it says at midnight they were “praying and singing hymns to God.”[12]

In other words, Paul, when he writes to the Ephesians, “I want you to be thanking God always,” we might say reverently, he knows what he’s talking about. Because that’s actually been his MO, no matter whether it was up or whether it was down. And the striking thing in each instance, whether in the Old Testament or here in the New with Paul, is that contentment in each of these individuals’ lives was a contentment that seemed to be able to manage changing conditions and circumstances. In other words, they didn’t key or cue their thankfulness from the upside of the circumstance or the nature of the condition. They didn’t see the conditions as an end in themselves, but rather, they saw them as being part of the overall purpose of God to bring to completion his good work begun in them.[13] So, when we ask the question “When?” the answer that is given in the text is “always.”

Giving Thanks for All Things

When we ask the question “For what?” the answer is equally clear. For what shall we give thanks? “For everything”—or, in another translation, “for all things.”[14] “For all things.” That means the good, the bad, and the ugly, of which each of us can speak with some honesty and conviction. Paul has begun the letter, as we saw a long, long time ago when we began, by reminding his readers of God’s amazing grace—reminding them that they have been chosen and adopted and redeemed and forgiven and seated in the heavenly places and created for good works and so on.[15]

And all of this is the work of “God the Father … of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Well, you say, “Well, of course it is.” No, no, don’t just go so quickly there. What Paul is speaking about here when he’s talking about giving thanks, as we will see in just a moment, is not giving thanks to ourselves, it’s not giving thanks to a concept, it’s not giving thanks to a sort of philosophical notion, but giving thanks to the God and Father who has provided for us, who is completely unlike us, who is wonderfully kind to us, who speaks through the prophet Isaiah and says,

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
 so are my ways higher than your ways
 and my thoughts than your thoughts.[16]

So we need to recognize that when the call here is “for all things,” we are confronted by the mystery of the purposes of God—a God who actually controls the universe, who stands outside of time.

As I was reviewing my notes last night before I went to bed, I was reminded again—and I’ve told you this a hundred times, but it’s locked so firmly in my mind—in that one-woman play that was on Broadway years ago featuring Lilly Tomlin, and at one point in the play, where she talks about her anxieties and her fears and her terrors, she has that great line where she says, “I worry about my place in the Cosmic Scheme of things.” And then she stops, and she says, “I worry that there is no Cosmic Scheme of things.”[17]

Now, what Paul is telling us here is that there is a cosmic scheme of things and that God, who controls the universe, is the heavenly Father to all who will trust in him. He’s the heavenly Father to all who will trust in him. He is Father of all by creation, but he’s not our heavenly Father except as we come to trust in him through his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Very important we understand that! Because then we can respond to the Bible as those who have come to know God in that way through Jesus—so that when we read, for example, Jesus’ words to his disciples, and he says to them, you know, “The God who feeds the birds of the air, whose care extends to the sparrows, is your heavenly Father, and you can trust him”…[18] You can trust him in all things. Because remember Romans 8:28: [For] we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”[19] You see, God is the one who provides for us all that we need. All that we need.

When we read through the pages of Scripture, we realize that the story of God is the story of his provision.

The notion of the doctrine of providence is fundamental to a thankful heart. Providence—the origin of providence, if you like, in terms of the biblical record is when in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Isaac is going with his father to the place of sacrifice, and he asks, “We’ve got everything except a lamb for the sacrifice.” And you remember the response? Says, “God himself will provide a lamb.”[20] And when we read through the pages of Scripture, we realize that the story of God is the story of his provision. And what that means in the life of the individual who trusts him is vitally important.

So, for example, in the catechism, in question 26, asking about the nature of providence, the reply in part is this; here’s the implication: “I do not doubt that God will provide whatever I need for body and soul and that he will turn to my good whatever adversity he sends me in this sad world. He’s able to do this because he’s Almighty God. He desires to do this because he is my heavenly Father.”[21]

Giving Thanks to God

Thankful to whom? To Almighty God. Thankful to whom? To the God who is my heavenly Father. Therefore, I can learn to be patient when things go against me. I can learn to be thankful when things go well not only in my own life but in the lives of others, whom I might otherwise find myself being jealous of. I can be confident in the face of the future, and I can be secure in coming to terms with my past.

You take all the circumstances of our life that is represented in this room now, if we were to say, “Let’s all just gather in groups. Let’s have a group over on the left-hand side who are unduly worried about the present. Let’s have another group over on the right who are unduly worried about the future. And then let’s, the rest of us, all go outside who are deeply concerned about our pasts.” Do you know how often I spend time with individuals who don’t realize that they have a heavenly Father? Who don’t realize—Psalm 139—that God intricately wrought them in their mother’s womb,[22] that they’re not here by chance, that they’re not spinning in a random world, that their DNA was established by God, that a loving heavenly Father has therefore shaped your life physically, psychologically, temperamentally in order to make you the person that you are. Of course, if you want to believe that you were born without reason, that you prolong yourself by chance, and that you die and go into oblivion, then I can’t help you, except to ask you to consider the fact that the evidence points to this God who is intricately involved in the world and to whom we owe thankfulness and gratitude “always” and “for all things.”

You see, this morning, in Jesus, I’m not what I ought to be. I’m not actually what I’m going to be. Because our heavenly Father has begun a work in us and is determined to change us and to make us like his Son Jesus. That doesn’t remove me from the difficulties of life. It doesn’t change everything. I still have my struggles, still have my mistakes, still have my false starts, disappointments. But the person that I am now is the person that a loving heavenly Father has shaped me to be at this point in time for his purposes, employing in the process my disobedience, my faults, my failures, my arrogance, my jealousy, my boastfulness, my sin. Surely you would want that kind of process to be under the jurisdiction not of an idea or a deist God but of a loving heavenly Father.

You say, “Well, I don’t know this God.” You may actually say to me, “Alistair, how do you… No one’s ever seen this God that you keep talking about. How can I come to know an invisible God?” Well, interestingly, John, in his Gospel, he actually mentions that at the very beginning of his Gospel. He wrote his Gospel; he says, “I could have written a much longer Gospel, but I’ve written these things down in order that people might come to know who Jesus is and that in knowing who Jesus is, that they might believe, and that by believing they might find life in his name.”[23] And at the beginning of it he says, “The one and only Son, who is himself God …, has made him known.”[24] “The one and only Son, who is himself God …, has made him known.” “He who has seen me,” says Jesus to Philip when he asks the question, after Jesus has said, “I am the way, … the truth, and the life,” and “No one comes to the Father except through me,”[25] Philip puts up his hand and says, “If it would be okay if you could show us the Father?” And Jesus says, “Philip, goodness gracious! He who has seen me has seen the Father. Don’t you get it?”[26] Clearly, he didn’t get it. And you might not get it either.

You ask yourself the question: Why is contemporary America, with all of its affluence, all of its power, all of its accessibility, all of its internet, all of its everything—why do you find that men and women are riddled with insecurities, riddled with confusion? You don’t have to scratch hardly just beneath the surface a tiny piece, and people will be prepared to let you know.

My mother’s favorite bird was a robin—not a big, fat American robin but a nice, standard British robin. And I’ve grown to love this bird as well, because it reminds me again and again of the little doggerel from Sunday school:

Said the Robin to the Sparrow,
 “I should really like to know
Why these anxious human beings
 Rush [around] and worry so?”

Said the Sparrow to the Robin,
  “[Oh], I think that it must be
That they have no Heavenly Father
  Such as cares for you and me.”[27]

Do you know that you can know God as your heavenly Father by climbing down off your Nebuchadnezzar perch and admitting that he is the Savior that you need? And then “giving thanks always … for everything” will be to him. To whom? To “God the Father.” “Every good and perfect gift,” says James, comes down from above, “from the Father of heavenly lights, in whom there is no shadow due to turning.”[28]

In other words, this God—this God to whom thanks is due—is concerned about his children. And of course he is! Think of all the children that are here this morning, and all the nursery, and that you sign them in, and you get a sticker—and I don’t know what all you do—and you’ve got to get a number and a sticker. I mean, what’s all this? Just throw them in there. They’ll be there when you get back. Don’t worry about it! If they’re not there, take another one. What do you care? You might get a better one, like if you leave your coat in a cloakroom, you know. Take a coat! There’s a chance you may get a good one. “No!” you say. “You couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that with my coat. You wouldn’t do that with your child.” No. Do you think God does that? Do you think our heavenly Father does that? Nothing that happens to his children is outside his will or outside his care—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Think it out! The alternatives are horrible. As difficult and as mysterious as that concept is, it’s worthy of consideration.

And this Father in heaven is able to do what no earthly father can do: stay with his child forever and forever. Hebrews 13:5: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”[29] Never! That’s the promise. That’s the promise in a world of shifting shadows. That’s the promise in a world of farewells. The whole of our life is made up of hellos and goodbyes. The whole of this gathering over Thanksgiving is filled with the anticipation of great joy and the expectation of a recurring sadness, because the same door that opened to bring the family and friends in is the door that is opened out of which they must go. And that is true of every facet of our lives: my health, my money, my property, my friends, my family, my wife—everything!—I will be separated from, except I have a relationship in Jesus with a heavenly Father to whom I owe thanks always, for everything, because he loves me with an everlasting love. “If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to them that ask me!”[30]

As I was studying again and going through, not looking for things but just doing what I do, and I came on a story in the London Times yesterday (I don’t know if it was covered in American papers; I would be surprised if it’s not)—a very touching story about a young lady, Bailey Sellers by name, from Knoxville, I take it, in Tennessee, who has just turned twenty-one. There was a picture in the press of her sitting on her father’s shoulder. And the headline identified the fact that as she celebrates her twenty-first birthday, which she has just done, it was touched with sadness. I went on to read and discovered that her father, who had died of cancer when she was sixteen, had prepaid for her to have a bouquet of flowers sent to her on her birthday. The twenty-first was the final bouquet to come. For the intervening five years, she’d been receiving the bouquet and a note from her dad, and this year’s message read, “I will still be with you, with every milestone. Just look around, and there I will be.”

There is no such thing as a past or a future in God. God is fully present in every time and fully present in every place.

Beautiful sentiment. Of course, the fragrance of the memory lingers, but his presence is not there, no matter how hard you look around. Why? Because our world is a fallen world. Our world is dictated to by partings and disengagements, whether in the loss of a marriage relationship, the loss of a child through whatever. We know all that. Everybody knows all that. And here Paul says, “And I want you to realize that in Christ, God is your Father, that you are his adopted child, and that he is the only one who can send you a bouquet every year on your birthday and tell you, ‘Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you.’” Because, you see, God is “I Am.” There is no such thing as a past or a future in God. God is fully present in every time and fully present in every place. Do you know this God? Are you living life without this God?

Giving Thanks in Christ’s Name

Last question: How do you do this? When? “Always.” For what? “Everything.” To whom? “God the Father.” How? “In the name of [the] Lord Jesus Christ.” You see, often when we pray or we hear people praying, they say, “And I pray in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” But what are we saying when we do that? Well, actually, what we’re saying is that we’re coming to God the Father on the basis of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done—so that when we give thanks to God, we pray in line with the provision that he has made for us and the desires that he has placed in us by the Holy Spirit. So in other words, our prayers are not just to be stupid and outlandish, but they are framed by what is consistent with God’s character and will.

If you find yourself struggling over an idea like that, one of the questions that is good to ask is “Is what I’m being told here, does this work with Jesus?” And so, if I look at the life of Jesus, does this work? Well, you remember Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, facing the awesomeness of the cross? “Father, if you are willing…” “If there’s any other way we can do this, this would be a good time to figure it out—if you’re willing. However, not my will but your will. And I will thank you.”[31] And thank him he did, for at the very heart of the celebration that took place in the upper room with his disciples, the Gospel records all tell us that it was thanksgiving that was on his lips—that “he took [the] bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it.”[32] “When he had given thanks, he broke it”: “Thank you, Father, that as I break this bread, it is an emblem of the fact that my body is going to be broken. Thank you, Father, that as I distribute this cup, it’s going to be a reminder of the fact that my blood is about to be shed, that I am going to be the very Lamb that you, the Father, has provided so that men and women may be redeemed and made new and transformed and changed and may be your adopted children. Thank you, Father.”

There are people who say, “I can’t thank him for everything. I thank him that this has happened and that has happened.” Listen, listen: How do you do anything? He is the way. He’s the truth. He’s the life. Only by his grace and by his enabling. Because, you see, in the midst of all of this short sermon, we’re reminded of the fact that God’s ways are absolutely mysterious. They’re absolutely mysterious. At the same time, the Bible tells us that all that he wills and all that he permits is of necessity for the good of his adopted family. There’s nothing random about it. There’s nothing haphazard about it.

You say, “Do you mean that it includes this and that?” ’Cause we all have the this and the that. Yes. You say, “But I don’t feel it.” Don’t worry about feeling it. Believe it. This is actually a command, not a suggestion: “giving thanks always … for everything to God the Father in the name of [the] Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul says, “Do it. Do it.” And if you don’t feel it, do it.

Two or three times this week, with my son at home, he went to exercise. He came in once: “Are you coming?” “Eh.” He came back a second time: “Are you coming?” And before he could come the third time, I said I had to go. I had to go. I didn’t feel one bit like doing it, but I just did it. Afterwards I felt really good.

Let your feelings catch up with your faith. You can’t unscramble all the eggs that you’ve smashed on the kitchen floor of your life any more than I can. You can’t get all that stuff back into the shells. God has never intended for you to. He’ll do the cleanup. He will show in the end that all of that mess was actually necessary for you to become the person that he designed for you to be.

[E. K.] Simpson, a commentator of old—and I’ll wrap up now—speaking in metaphorical terms, says, “The mixed yarn of life, woven in the loom of heaven by the Father of mercies, traces a perfect design for those [who are] ‘in Christ,’ and their thanksgivings should [ascend] to [the Father] through [the Son],”[33] who loved them and gave himself for them.[34]

Corrie ten Boom used to take the exact same picture and convey it in an easier way to understand. Corrie, you remember, worked with her father in the watchmaker’s shop in Amsterdam. She took in Jews who were being taken away in the Nazi Holocaust. As a result of her being prepared to hide them, she herself was then imprisoned along with her sister. And her life went in a variety of directions, not all of them wonderfully wholesome.

By the time the war had ended and she had opportunity to move into another phase of life, she gave talks concerning the privileges that she’d enjoyed during that period in the Second World War. And one of the things that she liked to do was to bring these two prints to show to folks. She was unable to put them up on slides, at least maybe towards the end of her life; she died in ’83. But up here to your left and my right is the underside of what is up here to my left and your right. Okay? So, over here you’ve just got all these threads. It looks like a random mess. There’s no obvious cohesion to it at all. Somebody looking at it in that way would say, “What a shambles!” Flip it over. And as those pictures sat up there, she quoted this little poem:

My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I do not choose the colors
He works so steadily.

Oft times he weaves in sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget he sees the upper
And I, the underside.

Not till the loom is silent
And the shuttle cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.

The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern he has planned.[35]

“Giving thanks always … for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That really is thanksgiving.

Father, thank you that when your Word calls for us to give thanks always for everything to you through Jesus, it drives us again to turn to you in childlike trust and in believing faith, asking you to accomplish in us that which you have purposed and planned. Lord, many of us this morning may find ourselves responding, “But I just don’t feel it.” And so, Lord, we pray that we might believe it, and then that, in your goodness, our feelings may catch up to our convictions. For we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[1] Ephesians 5:18 (ESV).

[2] See Ephesians 5:19.

[3] See Colossians 3:16.

[4] Psalm 107:1–2 (ESV).

[5] 2 Timothy 3:2, 4 (ESV).

[6] Daniel 4:30 (ESV).

[7] Daniel 4:34–35 (paraphrased).

[8] Horatio G. Spafford, “It Is Well with My Soul” (1873).

[9] Romans 15:4 (ESV).

[10] Daniel 6:10 (ESV).

[11] Jonah 2:9 (ESV).

[12] Acts 16:25 (ESV).

[13] See Philippians 1:6.

[14] Ephesians 5:20 (KJV).

[15] See Ephesians 1:3–23.

[16] Isaiah 55:9 (ESV).

[17] Jane Wagner,The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe(New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 26. Paraphrased.

[18] Matthew 6:26 (paraphrased).

[19] Romans 8:28 (NIV).

[20] Genesis 22:7–8 (paraphrased).

[21] Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 26. Paraphrased.

[22] See Psalm 139:13.

[23] John 20:30–31 (paraphrased).

[24] John 1:18 (NIV).

[25] John 14:6 (ESV).

[26] John 14:9 (paraphrased).

[27] Elizabeth Cheney, “Overheard in an Orchard.”

[28] James 1:17 (paraphrased).

[29] Hebrews 13:5 (NIV).

[30] Matthew 7:11 (paraphrased).

[31] Luke 22:42 (paraphrased).

[32] Luke 22:19 (ESV). See also Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22.

[33] E. K. Simpson and F. F. Bruce, Commentary on the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition and Notes, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1957), 126.

[34] See Ephesians 5:2.

[35] Grant Colfax Tullar, “The Weaver.” Paraphrased.