The Supernatural Power of Thanksgiving
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, set apart and officially designated for giving of thanks. Which . . . as it turns out, does not come naturally to us. Two events in my life illustrate this difficulty.
At 13 years of age, I battled with thank you notes. Night after night, my mother coerced and cajoled me into writing a personalized thank you note for each and every gift I received:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bittman,
Thank you for coming to celebrate my Bar Mitzvah. I really like the Star of David tie clip and cufflink set[i] you gave to me.
Sincerely,
Danny
The gold-plated Cross pen (another gift) I used left grooves and a dent in my finger that I feared was a permanent deformity. By the time the last card was sealed and stamped, I was suffering PTSD (Post Thank-you-card Scribing Disorder).
Eighteen years later, the struggle revived. Over a three-and-one-half-year period serving as a front-line evangelist, I hand wrote, addressed, and stamped approximately 10,500[ii] “thank you” post cards to supporters of the ministry:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Miller,
Thank you so much for your faithful support of our ministry.
Please pray for…
Gratefully In Messiah,
Dan
Producing that much thankfulness week after week was still an uphill slog, but with a significant difference. Now I understood my struggle and had embraced the solution.
Why the struggle?
Thankfulness is foreign to our fallen selves. Paul reminded us of this when he wrote, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks….”[iii]
Note that refusal to honor or worship God for Who He is includes ingratitude. The need to train every child to say “thank you” demonstrates how universally alien the giving of thanks is to our sin-bent human nature.
Unawareness of a good that has been done is not our problem; rejection of God is. When we push God out of our lives, we become the center of all things. Thanksgiving is unnatural because we assume what has been done for or given to us is our due.
This explains why at age 13, I naturally thought, Why wouldn’t people want to give me gifts? Writing thank you notes was a burden because it cut across the grain of my God-rejecting ingratitude.
The good news is there is a solution. Coming to faith in Messiah changed all this. Having finally seen my rejection of God and then experiencing His overflowing free abundant forgiveness in Yeshua, my natural self-love was dealt a mortal blow. God, my creator and sustainer, the giver of all good gifts . . . was back at the center of my life. Now every aspect of life is seen for what it is – one more precious drop of God’s overflowing grace.
Whether you are Jewish or Gentile, I hope my struggle with thanksgiving resonates with and encourages you to seek true thankfulness (even if it’s not Thanksgiving season where you live). For some, this means taking a step of faith. Recognize the roots of your struggle as rebellion against God, and then receive His cure by trusting Yeshua’s atoning sacrifice on your behalf. When you do, God forgives and receives you forever, and true thanksgiving begins flowing in and through your life!
If you have already received God’s cure, Thanksgiving Day is a perfect occasion to publicly thank God for it! Let this opportunity to say “thank you” be a willing act of worship of the One to whom all thanks are due.
Also, don’t be shy about sharing God’s thankfulness cure with others. The Scriptures remind us, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.” Our nation and world have never needed the joy of real thanksgiving more!
Written by Dan Strull, LIFE Board Chair
Footnotes:
[i] I still own the cufflinks and clip!
[ii] This number represents ten hand-written postcards per day, six days a week, over 3.5 years (175 weeks minus two weeks off per year for vacation).
[iii] See Romans 1:21. In context the Apostle Paul is presenting humanity’s willful rejection of God despite what is known about Him through nature.