Thanksgiving 2024
Those who know me well know my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. A big reason for this is the day’s enduring resistance to commercialization. Unlike many of the other major holidays we celebrate, Thanksgiving has no huge build up toward getting people to buy things because you simply can’t commercialize anything with such an outward-thinking focus. True gratitude comes from a place of debt and moves towards thanksgiving to the one who has forgiven the debt. Think about it this way – at Christmas, I may get several presents. I can be thankful for the thoughtfulness of the ones who gave them to me. But this is often reciprocal as I also give gifts. Commercialism knows this and plays on it, guilting the population to buy a little or a lot more than the budget allows in keeping with the perceived ability of each gift-giver. In so doing, it moves the whole gift-giving exercise from a focus on the thoughtfulness of the one giving the gift to the actual value of the gift itself. Thus, gratitude can become as ubiquitous a throwaway as wrapping paper. In contrast, Thanksgiving focuses on intangibles that have a bottomless quality about them like the love of family or the freedoms we enjoy. We can’t pay for those and we know it. This leads us to gratitude.
Of course, you know where I’m going with this. Our debt to God was paid through the blood of Jesus Christ! Our salvation cost the life of the only perfect man and we are totally unworthy of this gift (Romans 5:8)! What else could we be but thankful? Any other response is totally incomprehensible to the New Testament writers – bottom line, thankfulness is our hallmark and if we are not thankful, we can hardly even call ourselves Christians. Everything we think, say, and do is to be saturated in gratitude (Colossians 3:15-17) which is the way our worship becomes acceptable (Hebrews 12:28)! So, today, I am thankful… God has truly been good to us!