Count Your Blessings
As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, we would do well to consider just how vital giving thanks is to the worship of God. We get a sense of its importance when we read this devastating indictment in Paul's letter to the Romans:
For the wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their
unrighteousness suppress the truth. For
what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes, namely,
his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since
the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor
him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking,
and their foolish hearts were darkened (Rom. 1:18-21).
Here
we find the root of all sin – a failure to honor God as God (i.e., as the
Lord of all) and, consequently, a failure to give him the thanks he is
due. The result of this double failure is
to become futile in thought and dark in heart.
“They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were
darkened.”
Is
this not the story of our first parents in a nutshell? God had said, “You shall not eat of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day you eat of it you will surely
die.” The serpent countered, “You will
not surely die, but will instead gain wisdom and become like God, knowing good
and evil.”
If
they had honored the Lord as God, they would have taken him at his word. Instead, Eve thought, “The word of the Almighty
and Eternal God – the Maker of heaven and earth – is not enough for me. I must verify his word by my own experience.”
That’s when the battle was lost. And of course, Adam watched the whole thing unfold
and did nothing to stop it, but rather joined her in her disregard of God’s
honor.
A
vital aspect of that disregard was their failure to give him thanks. Think about their original condition. They lived in a world of God’s own making, filled
with every delightful thing. He placed
them in paradise (Eden means pleasure).
He told them they might eat from every tree of the garden, except one.
It’s important that we grasp this.
Only one tree was prohibited.
There were apple trees and banana trees and peach trees, coconut,
pomegranate, and pecan trees – every fruit and nut bearing tree you can name,
and probably several more that have long since become extinct. And what do Adam and Eve do? They obsess over the one tree that was forbidden to
them. They didn’t thank God for all that
he had given them but instead grumbled and complained over the one and only
thing he withheld.
And
we tend to do the same thing, do we not?
We focus on what we wish we had instead of what we do have;
and so we become restless and discontent, in a word, ungrateful.
There
is wise counsel in the refrain of an old hymn.
Count your blessings,
name them one by one.
Count your blessings,
see what God hath done.
This
is the antidote for what ails us. All
the more so when we consider that we have received these blessings quite apart
from our deserving them. We have
received them because the Lord is the “overflowing fountain of all good.”[1]
Let
us strive not only to be content with what we have (1 Tim. 6:6, 8) but genuinely
grateful, for as James puts it,
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