Thanksgiving

Psalm 100

Shout triumphantly to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness come before Him with joyful songs. Acknowledge that Yahweh is God. He made us, and we are His^[a] —His people, the sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him and praise His name.  For Yahweh is good, and His love is eternal; His faithfulness endures through all generations.

This week is Thanksgiving week. The kids are all out of school for a few days. You get off of work for a couple of days. You get to spend time with family and just enjoy one another’s company. And, not to mention it is the one time of year where people celebrate a day to be “thankful” for what God has blessed us with.

I love Thanksgiving; being able to spend time with family, eat good, watch football, and think about what has happened so far this year that I should be thankful for. Those are all good things within themselves, but shouldn’t the whole thing be about thanking God for what He has done for us? Why do we have to set aside a special day out of the year? Shouldn’t we be more aware of what God is doing in our lives?

As we look at the Psalm above we see that reasons for thankfulness is broken down to the simplest form we could imagine, or at least what seems simple to us.  He starts off with the fact that we should be thankful because we are made in God’s image. How often do we think about the fact that we are made in the image of God? We are His prized possession. The Psalm tells us that “we are His people”. Who are we that God should care about us. I think that all too often we hear this and just let it roll through our head and we don’t think twice about it, but this is a huge deal. The God that spoke our universe into existence has chosen US as His people! That is amazingly awesome! That is defiantly something worth celebrating!!

Then the second reason it gives for thanking God is the fact that He is “good, His love is eternal, His faithfulness endures through all generations”. God is never changing! He always loves us! No matter what happens in our lives we know that God loves us. If we have given our lives to Christ then we should be happy in the fact that no matter what we have God on our side! And the fact that God is unchanging should be a point of celebration too! In a world where injustice seems to be the normal thing, and laws no longer apply to anyone, and sin runs wild, we can celebrate in the fact that we serve a God who is never going to change the rules on us! He will always be for justice and we know that He will rule honestly.

So as we go into Thanksgiving we need to ask what are we thankful for? And how often do we express to God that we are thankful for Him? We serve a powerful God and He deserves our thanksgiving for all that He has done and all that He is going to do!