Thankfulness

Thankful

“I will give thanks to you, LORD, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds” (Psalm 9:1).

As I recently read this verse on a train ride, the phrase ‘with all my heart’ captured my attention.  It pierced the depths of my heart with a simple but profound question: What am I thankful for with all my heart?

When people say ‘thank you’ either to God or people, sometimes it is out of obligation, something routine and thus even edging near the shallow end.  I have experienced this in my own prayers.  Sometimes, I will begin, “Father, thank you for this day…” without a thought.  The questions, 'what am I thankful for about this day?' or 'Why am I thankful for this day?' never cross my mind.  It is merely something I tack on to my prayer because I learned to do it that way.  Or perhaps the more probable is that at one time I was truly thankful for the day but then just made it a routine to thank him for it. 

But giving thanks must go deeper.  The nuance of the word ‘thanks’ in this verse is ‘to confess’ or ‘to acknowledge’, usually publicly. This makes sense when I say ‘thank you’ to a person for such and such a gift, deed or service. I acknowledge that this person went out of his or her way to give me a part of his or her heart.  It is similar with God.  When I say, “Thank you God for such and such” I confess and acknowledge that God gave or revealed something about his heart to me. 

The second part of this verse helps me to understand how to give thanks ‘with all my heart.’  “I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.” Perhaps the best way to stir up gratitude in a cold heart is to begin to recount God’s wonderful deeds, both what he has done as revealed through the Bible or what he has done in your own personal life.

I still remember working a night shift at a grocery store during school.  I did not want to be there and confess that I had a negative attitude about the whole matter.  Then a foreign thought came into my mind: “I’ll try to come up with a hundred things to thank God for.”  So as I worked, I began to recount God’s wonderful deeds and things I was grateful for.

It started with the simple things I knew: the day, my eyesight, my ears to hear, my hands to work and touch, the ability to work, my family, my friends, the chance to study (I was going through school at the time), things I was learning, my workplace and onto the greater works of God such as his forgiveness, his righteousness given to me, his adoption of me into his family and so on.  After each of these I asked the question: “Well, what about the day am I thankful for?” or “Why am I thankful for my parents?” or “What about God’s forgiveness am I thankful for?”  This helped me to go deeper in my thanks and gratitude to God. Somewhere around numbers 30-40 my whole outlook on things changed.  Being thankful kindled a warm fire in my cold, stubborn hard-heart that would glow and warm others by its fire. 

I later wrote (whether this was the incident that inspired this quote or not I’m not sure), “A heartfelt ‘thanks’ to God heats our cold prayers, saturates our dry ones and turns sour complaints into sweet praise.”

Don’t settle for shallowness in your thankfulness.  Dig deep in your thankfulness.  Be specific not shallow.  Recount his deeds not your worries.  Be thankful and don’t complain. 

My desire is to say as David said long ago:

“I will give thanks to you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.”