Unlimited Thanks

The Pilgrim settlers joined with the Wampanoag, with Massasoit, Samoset, Squanto, and all the Indians who joined them for that first celebration, celebrating their first successful harvest, sharing gifts, and building alliances. There was no indication they called it Thanksgiving, but that is really what it was. And that is why we, even to this day—wrapped in whatever levels of folklore and mythology we have placed upon it—still celebrate it and use it as a reminder of what we are supposed to do when we think about the blessings and provisions of life. Even those individuals who had very meager provisions still recognized that giving thanks, counting their blessings, looking back on life, and finding things big and small for which they could give thanks was appropriate.

The problem I have—and maybe you have this too—is that when I try to do that, when I try to count my blessings, when I try to look back on my life and look for things for which I can give thanks, I feel like I run out of things pretty quickly. And the longer I try to come up with new things for which to give thanks, it seems like they get pretty lame pretty quickly. Maybe that is the curse of affluence. The Pilgrims had almost nothing, and they were able to give thanks. Their future was far from certain. There was no guarantee that they were going to make it. There was no guarantee that they were going to have continued success. And yet they found ample reasons to give God gratitude, while we who have so much so often struggle to come up with more than a handful of things for which we can be thankful.

But I have good news for you—I have very good news for you—because there is in the Bible a key, not really a secret, but a tool that we can use to unlock unlimited thankfulness. No more will you have to sit around the Thanksgiving dinner table and try to come up with another lame thing for which to give thanks. The secret, the key, is found in one of the most often-repeated expressions in the entire Bible: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His steadfast love endures forever.” You have heard that before, haven’t you? It is all over the place in Scripture. And if we use this as a template, we can rid ourselves of that dilemma of struggling to come up with things for which to give thanks. Really, what this does is give us unlimited fuel for thanksgiving by just thinking about God—thinking about God. That is really our first shortcoming when we go to give thanks: we think about our circumstances first. We look around at what we have and what has happened to us. We have got to think about God first.

So even in this little expression—“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His steadfast love endures forever”—there is a little secret, because part of it has to do with when we move from one language to another; we oftentimes lose certain aspects of the original. And that is definitely the case in this expression. That Hebrew word that we translate “give thanks” really has more in common with our word “give praise.” And that is really the first key to unlocking unlimited thanks: you have to prioritize praise. This word is connected to the idea of giving thanks, but it is not a direct synonym. In fact, this is what we find in one of the Hebrew lexicons called the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament: “The Old Testament does not have our independent concept of thanks. The expression of thanks to God is included in praise. It is a way of praising.” So a better word is “praise” or even “confess.” This is not an insignificant distinction. Notice the connection from giving thanks to praising.

I will give you one example. 1 Chronicles 29:13 says this: “And now we thank you, our God, and praise your glorious name.” Or a verse that I want to focus on this morning: if you turn to Psalm 106, one of the places where we find “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His steadfast love endures forever.” And if you look at verse one, it begins with the expression, “Praise the Lord! Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” That word “Praise the Lord,” you know it—you just may not realize you know it. It is the word “Hallelujah.”

So, let’s go back to our Thanksgiving table scenario. You only have to think back to Thursday. The typical “count your blessings” around the Thanksgiving table—my experience, and I am assuming if it is not all of yours, you can at least relate—goes something like this: you all go around the table and say something you are thankful for. Have you ever done this? You know, your mom makes you do it or whatever, and so then somebody will say, “Oh, I am thankful that we all got to be together this year”—family around the table. Somebody: “Oh, I am thankful that I have been able to keep my grades up this semester.” “Oh, I am thankful I was not laid off this year; it looked like that was a real possibility a few months ago.” “Oh, thankful that Aunt Becky made it through her surgery last week.” Is that sort of a fair representation of the kind of things that get thrown out around the Thanksgiving table?

Well, did you notice the common theme? It tends to be often about you or things that are directly connected to your life. And the farther away—even just going a few degrees outside of your immediate circle—it gets to be really hard to come up with things for which to give thanks. I mean, you have to think a long time. That is why this biblical pattern of giving thanks to God always starts with praising him. It is the reverse pattern that we tend to operate under. We attempt to give thanks to God, and the reasons that we think of for which to give thanks become why we praise him—because of what he has done for us. Whereas the Bible starts with who he is, praising him for who he is.

I am going to go back to the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. It says this: “Thanksgiving often follows praise. For when one declares God’s attributes and works, he cannot help but be thankful for these. Praise leads to thanksgiving.” Okay, this is where, if you want to unlock unlimited thanks, you need to prioritize praising God. You need to start with who God is. And if you look to Psalm 106, you will see why. Look at the second verse after this call to “give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” The writer of this psalm says, “Who can utter the mighty deeds of the Lord or declare all his praise?” He is saying you have reached an unlimited well of opportunity to praise God. You are never going to reach the bottom of that well. You are never going to utter all the praises you can utter about God. They are limitless.

Maybe if you have grown up in the church and you have heard some of the older hymns, you might have heard the song “The Love of God.” It has this verse in it—very poetic, very beautiful: “Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; nor could the scroll contain the whole though stretched from sky to sky.” And the writer of that psalm is basically saying even just talking about the love of God—just taking one of his attributes and talking about it—they are expressing this idea that it is an unlimited resource for which to praise him. You could not write it all out.

The Bible affirms this as well. Even just talking about the life of Christ, John in his gospel says in chapter 21, verse 25: “Now there were also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” And John is just talking about the roughly 33-year life that Christ lived here on earth. He is saying, “I wrote this gospel account, and I could have written so much more that all the pages on earth could not have contained everything that was accomplished by Jesus Christ in just that short amount of time he was here on earth.”

Or Paul in Romans 11:33 says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” When these individuals are thinking on God—whether it is the writer of this psalm, whether it is the writer of the song “The Love of God,” whether it is John talking about his gospel account of the life of Christ, or Paul in Romans just talking about the riches and depth of God’s knowledge and wisdom—they all say the same thing: it is unlimited. It is vast beyond vastness. God is infinite in all of his attributes. Which means if you want to give thanks to God, you can prioritize praising him, and you will find you have no end of things for which to be thankful.

We see this even in Psalm 106. After saying “Praise the Lord” and “Give thanks to the Lord,” what does the psalmist do? Well, he begins to praise God: “for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” Which brings us to the next key. If you want to have unlimited things for which to be thankful, after you prioritize praise, then I, just like this psalmist, recommend you start by stating the obvious—stating the obvious. What could be more obvious and simple than “he is good”? Just starting right there. Let us just lay it right out there—just the most obvious thing we can think about: “Oh, he is good.” Or the expression we find regularly in Scripture: “God is love.” That is pretty obvious, pretty basic, pretty simple.

When we say that God is good, what do we mean? I mean, you probably said at Thanksgiving, “Oh, this food is so good,” right? Or maybe you would agree that the Toyota Camry is a really good car. We might say that our sports team is really good this year, or we just watched a good movie. I mean, we use that word all the time; it is a descriptive term, but what it is describing can be pretty diverse. It can have a wide range of meanings. Here are some examples of what the word “good” can mean: good can mean desirable; good can mean that it is of superior quality or superior worth; good can mean that something has a practical benefit to you; good can refer to a moral goodness—that it is something that we would call right or righteous, the opposite of evil. But when we talk about God being good, really he encompasses all of those things. He is desirable. He is of superior quality and worth. He is of practical benefit, and certainly he is of moral goodness.

God’s goodness—it is interesting when we think about this—if we say that when we talk about God, his goodness encompasses all of those, and that word “good” can be applied to all of his attributes and every aspect of him. In fact, we often take that “good” and we expand upon it and we say “perfect”—perfect in all his ways. What is so interesting, if we were to go back to Psalm 106 and look through it—it is a longer psalm; I would encourage you to kind of look through it later today—but what this psalm is doing is presenting the glaring contrast between God and his people. And God on the one hand is good. And as his people are presented in this psalm, they are not good. They are wicked. They are rebellious. They are degenerate—whereas we might call them today “toxic.” Whereas God has blessed them with all sorts of blessings—he has provided for them, he has protected them, he has delivered them—they have again and again and again rejected him, refused him, rebelled against him, complained about his provisions. They have followed other gods. They have turned their back on him again and again and again. And yet what remains true is God remains good.

In fact, what we see in this psalm is that in spite of their rebellion, in spite of their rejection, in spite of their wickedness, God has done wonderful things for them. Because of him, they were able to accomplish feats that they would not have been able to even attempt on their own. And they respond by forgetting, by rebelling, by falsely accusing, by rejecting his counsel, and by following other gods. So highlighting this one seemingly simple attribute of God—“he is good”—establishes that God operates on an entirely different plane than we do.

In fact, if you turn over to Romans chapter 3, you will see that it is not just the Israelites who are this way, but it is actually every one of us. Look at Romans chapter 3, beginning at verse 10: “There is none righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Which is a very dramatic way of talking about the fallenness of humanity, or what we often call total depravity—that every one of us is under the curse of sin. Everyone apart from the grace of God, apart from his intervening in our lives, is bent toward opposition to him and is bent toward wickedness. And we try to diminish that by comparing ourselves to people that we perceive to be worse than us. But the reality is we have to compare ourselves to God. And when we do that, it becomes pretty clear that God is good and we are not.

And apart from what we call common grace—grace that he imparts generally to this world—the world would be a lot worse than it already is. And we all testify to how bad things are. So even in that we can see how easily we can move then from praising God for his goodness to praising God for his grace. Because of his grace, the world continues to function. And even people whose hearts are far from him, because of his grace, are able to do good things—but without him they would not. So when praising God, this statement that we find so often in Scripture—“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good”—encourages us to start with the easiest, the most obvious, the most plain truths about God. And what you will find is that as you do that, more and more and more will flow from there. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.

There is one more key. There is one more key, and that is: after you prioritize praise and you state the obvious, then this psalm—or this statement that we find throughout the psalms and elsewhere—encourages us to exaggerate everything—exaggerate everything. Consider the ending statement: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His steadfast love endures forever.” Not just love, but steadfast love—it is actually one word; it is sometimes translated “loyal love.” And then the same thing: “endures forever” is one word.

We have already mentioned that Psalm 106 gives ample reason for God to consider ending his love for his people. They have treated him very badly. Does not Donald Trump say that all the time in his tweets? “These people have treated me very badly.” So he is going to cut them off. They are out. They are off the team. They have said something mean about me. God, on the other hand, is steadfast in his love. His love is eternal. In spite of all that can be and is done against God, his love remains unbroken. His love is steadfast. It endures forever. Because God is perfect, because he is infinite, because he is holy.

The reason why I say “exaggerate everything” is because it is impossible to overstate his attributes. You cannot exaggerate them. Try as you might, you will only sell them short of what they really are. So it is best to make every effort to try and embellish as much as we can, because even in doing that, we are not even telling the whole truth. We cannot. We are finite. How can a finite being express the fullness of an infinite and holy being, which is what God is? So try and exaggerate all you want. Try and embellish all you want. Try and overstate all you want. You will not do it. It is impossible.

Scripture tries to help us in this. Let me read a couple verses for you. 1 John 4:9–10: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Propitiation is the atoning sacrifice—he has turned away the wrath of God because of what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross. And John, in emphasizing this, is saying it is not that we were first loving God so God decided he would love us back, but it is the opposite: he shows his love toward us by sending his Son. And so because of that—because we are saved through the work of Jesus Christ—we love him.

Or John 3:16—we know this, right? We have heard it: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Paul says this in Romans 8:38–39: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” He is talking about the unbreakable bond that the love of God latches onto his children, and it cannot be broken, and there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. Paul is trying to embellish as much as he can, and even in that he probably does not do justice to the love of God for his children. It is this unbreakable bond—there is nothing that can wrench us from the hand of God. There is nothing that can pry that love off of us. Nothing that we can do. Nothing that any circumstances in our life can do. No other reality. No other power. No other thing.

We see examples of this in Scripture all the time, where even believers’ sin is not enough to mute God’s love for them. Maybe a well-known example would be Peter. I mean, think about Peter and his denial of Jesus Christ in Jesus Christ’s hour of need, as he has been arrested and is being falsely accused prior to his execution. And Peter is so timid and so afraid to be associated with Jesus that he denies even knowing who he is—the person who had so boldly claimed, “Even if they kill me, Lord, I am not going to deny you”—and yet he does. And still God’s love for Peter remains, and it is Christ after his resurrection who approaches Peter and encourages him—encourages him to feed his sheep, to be a leader in the church.

Even I see this in the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain is so wounded in his pride and his jealousy over God accepting Abel’s sacrifice is twisting him up and gripping his heart, and God comes to him and appeals to him to reconsider bitterness and to not let this anger and jealousy and hatred rule him—that it is crouching at his door. And yet, in that we see the love of God for Cain, appealing to him to do the right thing, to not give in to his hatred and his jealousy toward his brother.

I mean, this is what the gospel is all about. This is what we are remembering when we partake of communion: the love of God toward sinners in the sending of Jesus Christ to stand in our place—to live a sinless life that we did not live. This is why we deserve death and judgment, but Christ comes and he is our substitute. He goes to the cross to pay the penalty for sin and death, to take on himself that punishment, to suffer and to die. That is why he can, on the cross before he dies, declare, “It is finished.” He has in that moment atoned for sins. He has paid the punishment. God is satisfied. The Father is satisfied with that sacrifice. And so he dies, is buried for three days, and rises from the dead, victorious over sin and death, ascends to heaven, is glorified, seated at the Father’s right hand, interceding for us, waiting for the day when he will return. It is impossible to overstate the love of God for sinners in that act.

Think about every other attribute of God. Think about every other thing that God has done and promises to do. Exaggerate it all you want. You will still fall short of the true reality of what it is. So the next time you want to give thanks to God, the first thing you do is not consider your circumstances. The first thing you do is not look around at your life and all the stuff piled up around you and let that be the checklist of things for which to give God thanks. The first thing you do is direct your heart and your mind toward God. Praise him. State the obvious about who he is and begin to exaggerate everything. Embellish everything. Try and overstate it as much as you want, because we are talking about an infinite God. You will not come up short.

What I think is so encouraging about this is it is one thing for you and me here in first-world America to give thanks to God, to count our blessings. But what this means is that this truth—this ability to give thanks—can be demonstrated to and from people living in poverty, people under persecution. I mean, the example we used is the Pilgrims, right? And they were very much impoverished. People under severe persecution for their faith. People living in isolation. People in war-torn countries. People who are experiencing chronic and debilitating illnesses and pain. And whatever the worst circumstances you can think of—none of that diminishes the truth of who God is. And so none of that diminishes an individual’s ability to give thanks to God. And that is why we see that so often the most thankful and the most praise-filled people are the believers who are living in adverse circumstances—that they almost are much more free with their praise of God than we who live in comparative opulence. God remains infinite and holy and unchangeable even when our circumstances are maybe less than we would want them to be. That is why, when giving thanks, we think about God first and not just what is going on around us in our lives, because that remains unchanged. Who God is remains unchanged.

Let’s pray. Dear Lord, I thank you for this simple expression that we find so frequently repeated in Scripture—that we are to give thanks to you, for you are good, for your steadfast love endures forever. We do want to give thanks to you. You have done great things for us. You have blessed us in innumerable ways. And even when we do not see that, even when we do not perceive the fullness of that blessing and the reality of what that is, the truth about who you are remains undiminished and unshaken. And so if we want to be thankful people, we can always look to you. We can always look to who you are and find there an unlimited pool from which we can draw our thanks. We ask that you would help us to do this on a daily basis. Help us to do it when life is easy so it is easy to do when life is hard. Help us to be people who understand who you are, who regularly reflect on how your Word communicates to us the truth about who you are. Let that be a source of joy. Let that be a source of comfort. Let that be a source of security for us, so that wherever we are, whatever the circumstances, we have unlimited reasons for which to give thanks to you.