Reasons to Thank God
“Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” Psalm 100:4, 5
The American national holiday of Thanksgiving remembers the many things we have to be thankful for in our country. We are a people truly blessed with natural resources, religious liberties, and noble political ideals. While we have difficulties and struggles, we have many blessings for which to be grateful.
This week, I found myself looking through the 5th century theologian Augustine’s Confessions. In it, he reflects on his spiritual journey and finds many reasons to be grateful to God. In thinking about his birth, he recognizes that life itself clearly comes, not from us but from God. “Where could a living creature like this have come from, if not from you, Lord? Are any of us skillful enough to fashion ourselves? Could there be some channel hollowed out from some other source through which existence and life might flow to us, apart from yourself, Lord, who create us?” Whatever else we know, we know this, says Augustine; we did not create ourselves. Only God could have done so.
Augustine also considers how God does not allow us to enjoy our sins. Instead, he uses them to convict us of our need for him. “In this way you turned to my good the actions of those who were doing no good, and gave me my just deserts by means of my sin itself. Matters are so arranged at your command that every disordered soul is its own punishment.” It is God’s good gift to us, designed to turn us back toward him, that we do not go happily along the paths of unrighteousness; God’s Spirit convicts us and causes us to experience the wages of our sins for our own good.
When Augustine finally converts to Christianity, it will be a wonderful release of conscience for him. He will say, “I had gasped for you, but now at last I breathed your fragrance, insofar as your wind can blow through our house of straw.” “You pierced my heart with your word, and I fell in love with you.” What, asks Augustine, do I love when I love God? He replies: “I love a kind of light, a kind of voice, and certain fragrance, a food and an embrace, when I love my God: a light voice, fragrance, food, and embrace for my inmost self, where something limited to no place shines into my mind, where something no breath blows away yields to me its scent, where there is savor undiminished by famished eating, and where I am clasped in a union from which no satiety can tear me away. This is what I love, when I love my God.”
In a famous statement, Augustine says that God has “made us for himself, and our hearts are restless” until they find their rest in him. In this season, we give thanks to God for many blessings. Of them all, the greatest is the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. God has been good to us; let us lift up hearts and voices to declare his praise.