Cultivating a Thanksgiving Mindset

“O give thanks to the LORD, call upon the Holy One’s name, and make known God’s deeds among the peoples.” – 1 Chronicles 16:8

It’s October you know what that means! Thanksgiving! If you thought I was going to gush about my love for Halloween again, you’re wrong! Now, if you’re wondering to yourself: “Pastor George, why are you talking about Thanksgiving during spooky season? Thanksgiving season isn’t until November.” You’d be right! However, this year our church is going through our year of stewardship, and the focus for October is thanksgiving. This way our minds and soul will be prepared well in advance of the holiday for which this practice is named.

The practice of thanksgiving happens all over the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Thanksgiving isn’t just a special prayer that you say where you thank God for all that he has given you, but it is a spiritual practice. It is a mindset that one cultivates through assistance of the Holy Spirit so that we can be thankful to God in all times. A tough thing to do. Even if we were to cut out some of the larger trials of our lives this is still hard. I had to get a tire changed recently and I was not feeling very thankful when I was sitting in the mechanic’s waiting area. That was just over having to get a new tire, a relatively common and expected occurrence. If I struggle to be thankful during that, how am I to be thankful at other, more pressing, times?

There are many answers to that. It usually comes down to our hearts. Sometimes we may be too hard-hearted to want to give thanks, or we may have been deceived into believing that thanksgiving is a useless practice. Maybe you fall into those categories, or maybe you just haven’t made it a spiritual practice. Well, now is the time to start. The question is: where do we start?

I think the Bible helps us a lot with determining that. What you will see, if you were to look at many thanksgiving passages of scripture, would be recounting of what the Lord has done for the person in the past. Now, that isn’t surprising. After all, when we thank someone, we are always thanking them for something they have done for us in the past. But what separates these biblical accounts of thanksgiving is that they stretch back far into the past. Long before the person who is praying to God was ever alive!

Take for example the text that I picked 1 Chronicles 16:8. This verse is the opening line of song that David either writes or commissions when the ark is brought to its place in Jerusalem. This is a big moment for the Hebrew people because this is in many ways a culmination of God’s promises all the way back in Genesis. The song runs from verse 8 to 36 and I would recommend reading the whole thing. But if you keep reading after this opening line of thanksgiving you see David recounts all the ways the Lord has blessed the people of Israel from the time of Abraham to his own present day. David was not alive for most of this time, but David is able to rejoice because he remembers that the Lord isn’t just faithful to him but has been faithful to hundreds of thousands before him.

As human beings our perspectives are very limited. It is hard enough for us to be thankful for all the things we have been given in our life, so it might be hard asked to see ourselves as another link in the long chain of people who God has blessed, but that’s the mindset that we should have. Maybe we should start with that. How has God been faithful to our parents? Our grandparents? Our great-grandparents? Our Church, but not just our church while we have been here, but even before we came? How about how God has been faithful to the church before CPC was even founded? The church didn’t just start in the 1950’s!

When we realize that we are part of a chain, and all the small decisions, all the small happenstances that occurred in order to bring us where we are, we can thank God for that. Of course, for the big events in our lives we should be thankful! But if we want to cultivate a thanksgiving mindset then it’s a good place to start to just remember the continual faithfulness of God not just in our lifetimes but in the lifetimes of those before and in the lives of our brothers and sisters around us.

David in this passage had a lot to be thankful for, but we have even more. David and many people around him may have believed that this was the final culmination of many of the Lord’s promises. After all, they had been given the land promised to Abraham and the Lord was dwelling with his people in Jerusalem. Sure, the temple would still have to be built, but all the big stuff has been accomplished. But as Christians we know that this was only a foretaste to the main event. A reminder that the ark was just a shell, but that God himself would take on flesh in the person of Christ, dwell with us, die for us, raise for us, and promise to dwell with us again. We have even more of God’s promises to lean on.

So even though it is October, start practicing thanksgiving. Remind yourself of God’s big gifts, but even all of his small ones too, and the way he has been faithful to you from thousands of years in the past.

Pastor George