At this time of year we are all faced with a question: Should we or should we not participate in our national Thanksgiving festivities? Most of us grew up with them, so we probably take it for granted that we will cel­ebrate Thanksgiving in some way. But as Christians, I am not sure it should be so obvious for us that we partici­pate in our national Thanksgiving cel­ebrations. Let me explain.

Celebrate?⤒🔗

• First, as Paul tells us in Philippians 3:20, "Our citizenship is in heaven." Though I have an American passport and an Iowa driver's license, my citi­zenship is in heaven. We have more in common with Christians in China, India or Ethiopia than we do with other North Americans who are not believers. So it should not be obvi­ous to us that we follow our national customs and traditions without ques­tioning them. We only live in North America; we do not belong here.
• Second, Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday in the sense that Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, As­cension Day, and Pentecost are Chris­tian holidays. The other Christian holidays each celebrate those holi­days in order to keep the gospel of God's grace in the very front of our minds. But Thanksgiving celebrates no event in the story of the gospel. We celebrate it by national custom.

And many of the Thanksgiving cel­ebrations that we see, especially on TV, are entirely secularized. It seems that Thanksgiving can be heartily cel­ebrated by many with no reference to God, or if the term "God" is used it sounds more like the God of civil reli­gion than the God of the Bible. I am sure that the Pilgrims, who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621, would have considerable difficulty in recog­nizing the tradition they started.

Celebrate!←⤒🔗

In light of these considerations we surely should not celebrate Thanks­giving thoughtlessly; and if we celebrate it at all, it will have to be for very weighty theological reasons. Do these reasons exist? I think they do. I think it can be good to celebrate Thanksgiving, provided we fill it with real thankfulness to God, because thankfulness should be at the very center of our relationship with God. Let me explain this in three points.

First, ingratitude to God is at the very heart of sin. In Romans 1:21 we read of unbelievers, "Although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."

Through the world He created, God is always making Himself known. Ev­ery human being is continually con­fronted with the reality of the living God through the created order. But sin being what it is, people do not want to recognize God for who He is, for then they would have to give Him thanks. Rather than give thanks to God, people would prefer to deny or ignore Him. Lack of giving thanks to God is central to sin.

Occasionally Christians focus their attention on this or that particular sin as most important. But at least here Paul seems to suggest that other sins are symptoms of not thanking or glorifying God. He mentions people who are "filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice" (Romans 1:29). These various sins are in fact the pun­ishment for the basic sin of not thank­ing or glorifying God. All sorts of sins can be symptoms of ingratitude to­ward God.

This suggests something important: any type of gratitude may restrain sin. The only ultimate solution to sin is salvation by faith in Christ. But as Christians we are not only interested in eternal salvation; we are also in­terested in seeing sin restrained right now. And a little bit of thankfulness, a small measure of gratitude, may go a long way in restraining sin right now. In ourselves, in our children, among our colleagues and neighbors, a simple "thank you" may change things. A little bit of gratitude, whether to God or other people, is a powerful force for good. Therefore, if a Thanksgiving holiday prompts even a few words of thanks or gratitude, it may be a good thing.

A second point I would make is that thankfulness to God sets believ­ers apart from the unbelieving world. This follows naturally from the previ­ous point. If ingratitude toward God leads to more sin, gratitude toward God leads in the opposite direction. Gratitude leads to knowing God; a desire to glorify God leads to greater obedience to God. So gratitude to God sets believers apart from unbelievers. It points us in the right direc­tion.

1. Part of this has to do with how thankfulness breaks the grip of the secular worldview. In this regard we have to look carefully at 1 Timothy 4. In some of the churches they had false teach­ers who said it was wrong to eat certain foods and that it was wrong to get married. This may seem a little strange to us at first. The background of this is that some supposed leaders and teachers in the church mixed Christian beliefs with part of the non-Christian worldview of the day. This is the usual source of false teaching or heresy in the church. The popular worldview of that day, sometimes called "Hellenism," said that the physi­cal world is bad. Because they thought physical things were evil, certain enjoyable foods were seen as bad. And marriage was forbidden because of the physical/sexual side of marriage. Over against this Paul alludes to Genesis 1 where we are told several times over that God made the world good. When we give thanks for a meal, we are reminded and openly confess that God made the world good. And note: giving thanks to God would break a person out of the grip of the Hellenistic worldview and place a person inside the worldview of the Bible. Thankfulness did break the grip of the unbelieving worldview for early Christians.
   In our day most of us are not seriously threatened by Helle­nism, though some parts of the New Age Movement remind me of it. The reigning worldview in our culture is Naturalism or Materialism. It says that what you see is what you get; the physi­cal world is all that exists and all that has ever existed. Natu­ralism is constantly threaten­ing the church in our time, and naturalism threatens the faith of each believer. It is part of the air we breathe. It tries to drive us to act and feel like God does not do anything, even if He does exist.
   But when we give thanks to God, even for a tasteless quick hamburger, somehow in our minds we are ripped out of the Naturalistic worldview. We are reminded that God created this world; even if the hamburger is lousy, we are confessing that all we have is by God's care and provision. A simple word of thanks to God breaks us out of the clutches of the unbelieving frame of mind.
2. There is a second way in which thankfulness to God sets the believer apart from the unbelieving world. That is, thankful­ness breaks coveting. In the Ten Commandments we read: "You shall not covet." Coveting has to do with improper desires, desiring things that are not properly ours. It is the hardest commandment to keep.
   And coveting is probably the most characteristic sin of mod­ern culture. The unbelieving world has not caught on that wealth is deceitful. It promises that it will make us happy, but it only makes us wealthy. So people covet and covet and covet...
   Thankfulness to God is the way out of the trap of coveting and being trapped by the deceitfulness of wealth. It seems that when we are thankful to God, there is not room in our souls for coveting. Thankfulness to God tends to fill us within so that our hearts and mouths are filled with good things, not cov­eting.|
   So in terms of worldview and in terms of our desires, thank­fulness to God sets believers apart from the world.
3. My third point is that Christians should be filled with gratitude. In Scripture we are told a hundred times over to give thanks to God, and that for a thousand reasons. I will mention just a few.

• The first has been mentioned already: Creation. If God had not created, there would be nothing. And there is no rea­son God had to create this world, except that He wanted to do so. This should fill us with awe.
  When the Bible speaks of cre­ation, it not only speaks of the universe at large. It also says that God created each of us. In Psalm 139:13 we read: "You cre­ated my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb." Each of us is a particu­lar creation of God. Each of us can thank Him for the gift of life.
• Second, we can thank God be­cause He sustains and cares for us. In Psalm 107 we read about dramatic times when God res­cued His people. And some of us can remember times when God dramatically answered our prayers. But more than that, even when there is nothing dra­matic, God sustains us. In Mat­thew 10:30 Jesus says: "Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." God's day by day care for us is cause for grati­tude.
• A third great reason for thanks is salvation. Even though we had rebelled against Him; even though it cost Him dearly, God provided us salvation in Christ. In Romans 5:8 we read: "God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us." If we stop and think about it, this should fill us with thanks to God.

Giving thanks to God is really very important. And we have good reason to do so. A challenge I would place before us is to really use the Thanks­giving holiday to give thanks to God. On such holidays it is easy to spend the entire day on food, friends, fam­ily, football or watching a parade on TV. And generally there is nothing wrong with those things. But let's try to also seriously give thanks to God.

Maybe after a meal we should take a few minutes to talk about what we are thankful for. Or maybe we can take some time for prayers of thanks­giving. Some may want to sing some hymns of thankfulness.

Having a special day to give thanks to God is a good thing. So let's try to make it what it can be.