Giving God Thanks Forever
Scripture Passage — Psalm 30
Text: “Sing to the Lord … praise his holy name… O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.”
It won’t be long until many families throughout the United States will be sitting down around a festive, great-smelling table of food the last Thursday of November to eat Turkey, filling, vegetables, pastries with possibly some Ice Cream on it, then need a nap…. or doze off during a football game on TV. The elections will be over and we will know who will be at the helm in America for the next four years and everyone will be wondering where we will be going from here. Thankfully, God is in charge. I suppose we would have to agree that America at it’s very worst is by far much better than many other countries at their best. America’s exceptionalism has been a product of our being one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Especially this soon-coming holiday season, one of the most important things we can ever say to God is “thank you.” It’s a habit we should never allow to get old. When we give thanks to God, we are usually responding to specific gifts or blessings God has been pleased to give us in recent days. Praise, though, is quite different. When we praise God, we are not so much thanking him for what he has DONE. We are honoring and adoring God for who he IS. If you read Psalm 30 closely, you discover that like many of the psalms, it is characterized by both praise and thanksgiving. Most of the psalm consists of David’s expressions of thanks to God. David thanks God for hearing his voice when he called out to him, and for lifting him up when he was down. But nestled in the middle of the psalm, in verses 4-5, is a call to praise. Like all expressions of praise, it is rooted not only in God’s actions but also in God’s character. It’s important that we remember the difference between praise and thanksgiving. We ought to work hard at practicing the vertical habit of saying “thank you” to God in response to all his gifts. But we should also remember to praise God simply for who he is. Possibly in this way we can become what Augustine said every Christian should be: “an alleluia from head to foot.” “Lord, we thank you for all your gifts, and we praise you for all your glory. Thank you for hearing us when we call to you. Help us to give you glory in everything we do. Amen.”