A Grateful Heart

On Sunday we had a Day of Thanksgiving, I woke up with my heart already prepared for it. Before the service even began, I began searching the Scriptures to understand thanksgiving more deeply, and I quickly realized that thanksgiving is not a small thing in the passages I searched. It turned up in the psalms, in the offerings, and in Paul, and that is as far as I traced it.

As I searched, one question settled in my heart, what is truly behind thankfulness, and what is truly behind unthankfulness?

The speaker said something to the effect that thanksgiving keeps us burning. I cannot give you his exact words, and I am not going to put words in his mouth, but that is what I carried away, and I hold it as true from what I have seen in myself. My pastor often sings a song about looking back and seeing what God has done, and how the remembering of it makes you want to magnify the Lord. That simple thought carries something true, and I have found that when I remember what God has done, it moves me to worship Him.

The Hebrew word for thanksgiving is todah, and it is related to yadah, which carries the idea of confessing and of giving thanks. Together that word family carries ideas of acknowledgment, confession, praise, and giving thanks. And what I take from that range is that it is a spoken thing, a declared acknowledgment of who God is and what He has done. And read where it turns up.

Enter into his gates with thanksgiving. And it was not only spoken, it was brought.

A sacrifice of thanksgiving, carried in. And here is what I see in it. God was shaping more than an emotional response. He was shaping a heart that openly acknowledged His covenant faithfulness.

The Greek word eucharistia deepens the thought, and it is built on eu, meaning well or good, together with charis, grace. And the word Paul actually uses in 1 Thessalonians 5:18 is the verb form of it. And here is what I see in that word family, and the seeing is mine. Thanksgiving becomes gratitude that flows because grace has been recognized.

And set the two beside each other. The Hebrew one is a thing declared. The Greek one has grace inside it. And both of them start in the same place, with recognizing.

This brings us to a sobering question, what happens when grace is present but not recognized?

Israel gives us the answer, God delivered them from Egypt. He parted the Red Sea, He fed them with manna every day. And Moses reminded them of a mercy they had been walking in for forty years.

Forty years, and their clothes held and their feet held. Yet Psalm 106:7 says,

The psalm names what it was, and I will not name a different thing. They remembered not the multitude of thy mercies. And the murmuring is right there in the same psalm.

The psalm holds the two together, the not remembering and the murmuring, and it does not tell me which one came first.

And Paul sets down an order of his own, and I put the two beside each other because they both begin with a knowing that stopped being acted on.

Notice the progression. They knew God, they glorified Him not as God and were not thankful, then their thinking became futile and their foolish heart was darkened.

Ingratitude was not the final problem, it revealed a deeper one. To me, it revealed a heart drifting from trust. This caused me to examine my own life.

Years ago, while on a week of fasting, I was shut in before the Lord. Prayer partners came during designated times throughout the week. During one gathering, I sensed in my spirit to ask a brother to anoint a sister who was recovering from a stroke, specifically on the affected side, she had not asked.

The next day she returned without her cane, the therapist had instructed her to stop using it, and I believed God had done something.

At our next gathering, I expected her to testify. There was silence, I stood and testified on her behalf. After that season, I never saw her in that gathering again.

At the time, I was a young believer, and the whole experience deeply affected me. I could not understand how someone could receive such grace and remain silent about the Giver.

Years later, I understand the lesson differently, and I say it as what I have seen and not as a rule. A miracle can change a condition without changing a heart. And Jesus met the same thing, and He counted it out loud.

Ten cleansed, and one came back. The healing was genuine in all ten. And read who the one was, a stranger, a Samaritan, and Luke makes a point of it. Luke does not tell me what became of the nine afterward, so I will not tell you either. Nine did not come back, and Luke records that and no more. Grace had been received by ten, and one of them turned back.

The Lord later taught me another lesson, after leaving America, I found myself in a country where I struggled to find fellowship that fed my spirit. One Sunday morning I prepared myself for church, waiting to be picked up, no one called, no one came.

I was hurt, I went back inside to remove my church clothes, then one simple thought interrupted everything. So I searched online for another church, called a taxi, and went.

God did nothing to me. People may have failed me, but God had not.

Looking back now, I believe that moment showed me something about my own heart. I did not allow disappointment with people to become disappointment with God.

The situation passed, I moved on, but it left me with a lasting conviction. My heart was still alive toward Him.

That is what I have found thanksgiving doing in me. It held me steady when circumstances disappointed me, and I believe it guards a heart from hardening.

Today I find myself thanking God for things I would once have overlooked. Small mercies, quiet provisions, simple moments, sometimes it is nothing more than a whispered, thank You, Lord. There is no audience, no performance, only recognition.

And I believe those quiet thank yous are changing me. They are teaching me humility, and I hold that as my own testimony and not as a promise I can hand you. Perhaps that is why Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:18,

Paul is not asking us to celebrate pain, and what I hear in his instruction is that we are not to lose sight of God while walking through it. Thanksgiving is not pretending life is easy, it is refusing to let life’s difficulties blind us to God’s faithfulness.

And what I have come to fear is not unanswered prayer. It is an ungrateful heart that slowly stops recognizing grace.

May we never become so familiar with God’s goodness that we fail to acknowledge it, may our thanksgiving never be occasional, may it become the constant language of a heart that has learned to recognize the grace of God every day.