I know I’m a little early, but I just want to be the first person to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! However I still need to add (like I did last year on this topic) I am a Brit…if you didn’t already know, we, unfortunately, don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, so I am new to this holiday, this year being my 4th one celebrated. Not only am I new to the holiday of Thanksgiving but I am fairly new to the concept of thanksgiving, in other words, I haven’t always been a thankful person. Sure I used to be “well mannered” as I suspect a lot of you reading this are. I said my please and thank yous, but I wasn’t a “thankful” person. What do I mean by this? Well, let me expand.

Instruments of God

Did you know that everything you receive, whether it be an act of kindness from another person or a hot meal around the table every night, is a gift from God? We read in James 1:17 that “every good gift and every perfect is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights.” Everything you have is from God. So if we thank ourselves or someone else for things and never God, we aren’t truly thankful. Sure, God may use other people to bless you, and they may do nice things for you, and I believe they do deserve to be thanked for those things. However, if that thanks stops there, can you say that the One who deserves all thanksgiving is honored?

Picture it this way, if someone writes you a very moving and thoughtful letter, who do you thank? You don’t thank the pen or the paper! They were just the instruments used by the one who wrote you the letter. So it is with God, we are His instruments, used to bless others. Going back to my original thought, why I wasn’t a truly thankful person. Before I was a Christian, I was separated from God. I could not and would not give Him thanks. I was too busy thanking the “pens” of this world for the lovely “letters” God was giving me, if I could use that illustration again.

Blessings of God

Praise and Thanksgiving go hand in hand in the Bible, and we know that unbelievers will never seek the glory of God nor give Him the praise that is due His Name. So can someone who doesn’t have a relationship with Christ be a thankful person? Again, they can be thankful to other people (like I was) but until that thanksgiving is extended to God, I would argue that they can’t be.

So this Thanksgiving, reflect on this one thing: are you a truly thankful person? If you are, and you have been redeemed by Christ, then my encouragement to you is to excel still more. Reflect on all the blessings God has poured out on you. I would say read the whole letter of Colossians and take note of how thankful the Apostle Paul was, and his commands to you, to be thankful. Take these things to God in prayer and repent of those things you aren’t thankful for. If you aren’t a thankful person, and you realize that you don’t have that right relationship with Christ, and you have never been truly thankful to God, then the Bible has the answer for you too.

We see from Scripture that “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6) and obviously, as God desires to have thanksgiving that would please Him. So to please God and be thankful to Him, we need faith, but what kind of faith? Is it enough to just believe that God exists? No, even the demons believe in God! (See James 2:19). So the faith I believe it is talking about here is saving faith. Only someone who has faith in Jesus Christ and has been saved can please God and thus be thankful to Him. The Bible says that we must place our faith in Christ as the only way for salvation. We must also repent of our sins by turning away from them, forsake them and confess them to God. The Bible says that whoever comes to God in this humble way, seeking His forgiveness, will receive it. You will finally be able to please God and be thankful to Him.

Please consider these things as we approach this holiday of Thanksgiving.