Thanksgiving Service

Every year we set aside a Sunday before Thanksgiving for a gathering that looks a little different than usual. We keep the teaching short, because the bulk of our time is given to something we don’t do often enough: actually giving thanks out loud, together.

There’s something genuinely good and healthy about stopping to give thanks. But most of us need help getting there. You’ve had a busy, full week. You rushed to get here on time. There may have been crying in the car on the way. Walking through the door doesn’t automatically put your mind in the right frame. So we start by turning our attention to the one thing that makes thanksgiving possible in the first place — the faithfulness of God.

Great Is Thy Faithfulness

There’s an old hymn that has carried generations of believers through exactly this. Thomas Chisholm wrote the words in 1923, and the first stanza goes like this:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.

Psalm 92 opens in the same key: “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, and to sing praises to Your name, O Most High; to declare Your lovingkindness in the morning, and Your faithfulness by night.”

Consider what that claim is actually asserting. All of human history — everything human beings have experienced from the garden to this present moment — has one single through-line running underneath it. Not human progress. Not human goodness. God’s faithfulness.

You could go further and say every breath you take is a testament to it. God is intricately aware of every need you have and precisely how to meet it, because His faithfulness demands nothing less. It is out of His inexhaustible love that we’re able to thrive at all in a world that is constantly at war with His design, His perfection, His perfect garden.

“There is no shadow of turning with Thee.” No drift. No cooling off. No slow erosion of interest. “As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.”

Faithfulness Written into Creation

The second stanza pushes the point outward, into the physical world:

Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

God’s faithfulness guides the restorative cycles of His creation. Seasons turn. The ground goes hard and cold, and then it softens and produces again. The sun and moon and stars keep their courses without fail. Creation itself is a running witness — a manifold witness, many voices at once — to a God who does not quit.

And notice what those cycles are constantly rehearsing. In nature, death brings new life. A seed goes into the ground and dies before anything grows. Which means the world outside your window has been quietly preaching the gospel the whole time. Christ’s death and resurrection was, and still is, the ultimate restoration of our souls. The pattern God wove into creation is the same pattern He accomplished for you.

And He accomplished it at cost. Christ was abandoned by everyone. He took on the full weight of our sin and the death we deserved, knowing full well that carrying it would mean separation from His Father. It was a death that cost Him everything.

He was faithful when we were faithless.

That sentence is worth sitting with for a moment before you rush past it. Not “He was faithful when we were trying hard.” Not “He was faithful when we finally got our act together.” He was faithful when we were faithless — actively, willfully faithless.

Strength for Today, Bright Hope for Tomorrow

The third stanza is the one that tends to catch people:

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

Look at the inventory in those four lines. Pardon for sin — the guilt is genuinely dealt with, not managed. A peace that endures — not a mood that evaporates by Tuesday. His own dear presence, both to cheer you and to guide you. Strength sized for today, not for the imagined worst-case scenario ten years out. And bright hope for tomorrow, which is a different thing than optimism, because it rests on someone’s character rather than on the odds.

Then the line that keeps the whole thing from sounding stingy: “blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside.” Whatever you can currently name, there are ten thousand more you haven’t gotten around to counting.

Here is what I want you to hear. God is faithful when you are afraid. He is faithful when you doubt. He is faithful when you’re joyful and when you’re full of sorrow. He is faithful when you grieve. He is faithful when you are selfish. He is faithful when you run from Him, and He is faithful when you return. Over and over and over again, like a wave crashing on the shore and then crashing again, God’s faithfulness is constant.

Which is exactly what the chorus insists on:

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided —
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

Morning by morning. Not once, gloriously, in the past. New mercies today, and then new mercies again tomorrow. And when you look backward across the whole stretch of it — all I have needed, Thy hand hath provided. Not everything I wanted. Everything I needed.

The Only Reasonable Posture

So in the middle of God’s unrelenting faithfulness, how do we respond?

There’s really only one honest option: worship. Praise. Adoration. Thankfulness. When you actually reckon with the immensity of God’s faithfulness, the only posture that makes any sense is to get down on your hands and knees and worship.

Psalm 100 says it this way:

Shout joyfully to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful singing. Know that the Lord Himself is God; it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For the Lord is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations.

Notice the order in that psalm. “It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves.” Thanksgiving starts with getting the authorship right. You did not make yourself. You did not secure your own existence. Once that lands, “enter His gates with thanksgiving” stops being a religious instruction and starts being the only accurate way to walk in.

Let the Peace of Christ Rule

Paul gives the church a similar instruction in Colossians 3:

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

Three times in three verses: be thankful, with thankfulness in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father. Paul clearly doesn’t consider gratitude a personality trait that some people have and others don’t. He treats it as something the peace of Christ produces in a body of people who let His word live in them richly.

And notice how wide he casts it — “whatever you do, in word or deed.” Not just the church parts of your life. All of it, done in the name of the Lord Jesus, with thanks running underneath.

Three Questions Worth Answering Out Loud

Here’s what we did with the rest of our morning, and I’d encourage you to do the same around your own table this week. Get into a group of three or four — family, or just whoever is nearby, and make sure nobody is left sitting alone — and answer three questions:

• A person you are thankful for.
• A place you are thankful for.
• Something about God you are thankful for.

Simple questions. But saying them out loud to another human being does something that thinking them privately never quite manages.

And then there’s a fourth one that isn’t on the list, but that some of you most need to say.

The Hard Thing You’re Thankful For

Some of you need to name the difficult thing you’re thankful for.

Because it is so often through the struggle, through the pain, through the trial, that we come to see God in new ways and appreciate things about His character we would never have noticed from a comfortable distance. The people who talk most compellingly about God’s faithfulness are almost never the people who’ve had the easiest year. They’re the ones who found out that the ground held.

If that’s you, don’t keep it to yourself. What you are thankful for is going to help someone else become thankful. Somebody in your life is sitting in the middle of something hard right now and quietly wondering whether God is actually present in it. Your story is part of how they find out.

Maybe you need to honor a person who did something for you this year and never got thanked properly. Maybe there’s a place where God did real work in your life and you’ve never said why it mattered. Maybe you watched God move this past year in a way that plainly deserves the credit going to Him.

Say it. Out loud. To someone.

Thanks Through Jesus

We give thanks to God through our Lord Jesus Christ — the one who went to the cross for our sins, and who, because He went willingly, was able to come out of the grave alive.

That’s the foundation under all of it. Not that this year was easy. Not that everything worked out the way you hoped. But that God has been faithful — to the point of the cross and out the other side of the tomb — and that His faithfulness has not developed a shadow of turning since.

So be thankful for what you have. Be thankful for the people He has put around you. Be thankful for what He has done for you, and even for the things He has put in you. Let this be a season of truly giving thanks in all things, for His glory and your joy.

Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.