08.01.07
Prayer in the Shorter Catechism (6): And Thankful Acknowledgement of His Mercies
Read: Luke 17:1-19
For every ten who ask, there is only one who thanks. It is my observation as a parent that I do not need to educate my children into the art of asking for things, but I do need to teach them how to say thank you. Last time we looked at a hard word to say to God - the word ‘sorry’, and this time we are looking at another hard word to say to God - ‘thank you’. But just as saying sorry, or confession, is a vital part of prayer, so is saying thank you, or thanksgiving. And so we reach the last of our six studies into what the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches us about prayer in A.98 - “Prayer is an offering up to God of our desires, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with due confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgement of His mercies” by looking at what the Catechism has to tell us of the unbreakable link between prayer and thanksgiving. I want to see three things tonight about thanksgiving in prayer - first, the fundamentals of thanksgiving - things we need to understand about thanksgiving before we go any further; secondly, the fund of thanksgiving - things we are to give thanks for; lastly, the foundation of thanksgiving or why we need to give thanks to God for what He gives us.
[A] The Fundamentals of Thanksgiving
In this section I want to look at what the text of the Shorter Catechism answer tells us - “and thankful acknowledgement of His mercies” - in other words, what does the text tell us about our thanksgiving:
1. Realising and the Mind - we are to be in the attitude of acknowledgement of the mercies of God towards us. And the point I’m trying to make here is that we must know what God has given us - after all, that word know is at the heart of the word acknowledgment - to know is at the heart of all thanksgiving - the mind is at the centre of the process of thanksgiving. If we don’t discipline our minds into the ways of thanksgiving, we will be like the nine lepers who didn’t come back to thank Jesus - we’ll be askers, but never thankers - it requires discipline of mind and heart to come back and thank the Lord - and yet, that’s no less than our God deserves.
2. Realising the Source - where do the things we give thanks come from? The answer tells us - they are ‘His’ mercies - ‘He’ gave them to us. Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 6:17 that “God richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment”. Everything we have and everything we are we have from Him. He is the source of everything. You didn’t earn what you have, God gave it to you - it didn’t come from the industry of your arms and legs, or the intelligence of your mind - those are the means God might have used, but at the end of the day, it was He who gave it all to you. This would make a brilliant Dickens novel - here we are, poor wretches, born in the dust but raised to the heights by means of a benefactor, from whom everything in our lives comes to us. God is our benefactor and everything comes from Him. And the half of thanksgiving is realising that, because the moment we start thinking that it came from us, that we are our own benefactors, that we put the shirts on our backs and the cars on our driveways, we’ll stop thanking God.
3. Realising the Gift - the last thing in this section is merely to note that these things are God‘s gifts to us - we don’t earn or deserve them - that’s why our forefathers called them mercies. You thank people for gifts they give you at Christmas because they are gifts. And that’s they way it is with God - He gives us things and they are His mercies to us. We would sometimes think our forefathers pernickety when they would insist saying grace over a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit - and yet, even these are the mercies of God to us - things we don’t deserve, gifts of His pure grace and love to us.
Again, I know we think perhaps that we do deserve them - we deserve our wages, we deserve our dinner at night - why should these things be called mercies and why don’t I deserve them? Because, by nature, we are sinners - our every thought and action spites the God who is so good to us. We strike out at God even as He fills our lives with every good thing. And so, true thanksgiving takes place when we realise with our minds and hearts that God is the ultimate source of everything we have, and that it’s all ours not because we deserve it, but because God is a gracious and merciful Father to us.
[B] The Fund of Thanksgiving
What things are we to give thanks for? The list is endless - as one elderly lady in our congregation sometimes says, ‘when I start thinking of ways in which the Lord has blessed me, I run out of fingers and toes’. But I think there are three broad groups of things for which we are to give thanks:
1. Once-for-all Salvation - here I am thinking of the indescribable gift God gave to us in the person of His One and Only Son Jesus Christ. The Jesus who descended from heaven’s heights and was born in shame; the Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Palestine and healed lepers on the way - the Jesus who was flogged and crucified to take away my sins; the Jesus who was raised from the dead and is seated at the right hand of God on High. Our salvation is like a diamond with a million facets, and when the light shines through, it casts a slightly different picture of the diamond each time. As we learn more about what Jesus has done for us, both through our experience and in what He tells us in His Word, we cannot but turn to thanksgiving. And you’ll never tire of that salvation, because there are a million different ways of looking at it - a million different funds of thanksgiving!
2. Day by Day Provision - day by day, we receive provision and supply from the source of everything. The Bible tells us that His mercies are new every morning. Day by day He pours down upon us His blessings and good things - He gives us physical mercies - the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the health we enjoy, the jobs we have, the houses in which we live, the water we drink - everything comes from Him. He gives us spiritual mercies - the awareness of His presence, His protection from Satan, the gift of prayer and His Word, the fellowship of other Christians, the promise of eternal life - so many thousands, millions of things He gives us every day. No, the elderly lady is absolutely right - we run out of fingers and toes when we start thinking about how much God gives us. But what if we are going through bad times - what if we don’t feel that there’s much to be thankful for? Well its not easy to say, but it is true that there is no condition of life but there is some mixture of mercy in it. Hebrews 12 tells us that discipline isn’t pleasant at the time but it results in a harvest of righteousness and peace. D.M. McIntyre, first principal of Glasgow Bible College writes, “the best night that Jacob ever spent was that in which a stone was his pillow and the skies the curtains of his tent.”
3. Eternal-Life-Long Presence -here, I am thinking of the character of God - a character we are coming to know better and better day by day, and throughout the long ages of eternity will never tire of seeking to understand. It’s all very well thanking God for what He gives us, but shouldn’t we also thank Him for who He is? After all, He is God - perfect in all His ways, loving and just in all His ways. We therefore thank Him that He is who He is. When you start thinking about the kind of God we have, when you start reading the Scriptures and learning more about Him, you realise that three score years and ten really isn’t long enough to spend adoring Him for who He is.
So let’s not think that we have nothing to thank God for - let’s not clam up or skimp on the thanksgiving section of our prayers. We have an infinite, an eternal fund of issues for which to thank God for.
[C] The Foundation of Thanksgiving
In this last section, I want to ask the ‘why’ question and the ‘what happens’ question - why must we include thanksgiving as an integral part of our lives of prayer, and what happens when we regularly, as Paul says he did, ‘gives thanks on all occasions for all things’? As I see it, there are four things here:
1. It is the most we can do - remember back in our first point, we talked about how, because of the sinners that we are, that we don’t deserve the things we have but rather they are God’s mercies to us - we’re going back there because thanksgiving is the ultimate response that God is looking for from the mind and heart of His children. Thanksgiving, praise and worship is not the least we can do to ‘repay’ God - we can never hope to repay God for even the smallest thing He has given us, never mind the greatest and most indescribable gift of them all, His One and Only Son - but we can thank Him. That’s what the one leper did in the story we read together - he did all he could for Jesus and he returned to say ‘thank you’. So often, we get caught up in a welter of church business as a way of trying to repay God for what He’s done for us - but if I may with reverence say that is not what God wants - all He wants is for us to come before Him with genuine thanksgiving in our hearts. The activity will come later.
2. It is the Way to get more - according to Paul in Philippians 4:6 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God…” - thanksgiving for past answers forms here a powerful element in the prayer through which God replaces anxiety with peace. To be ungrateful is a sure way of closing God’s hand against us - after all, if someone doesn’t say thank you to you for things you do for them, you are going to be far less likely to do something else for them in the future. Thomas Boston writes, “Unthankfulness mars the course of divine communication; but to the thankful it is opened. We should never beg a mercy from the Lord, without heartily thanking Him for all we have formerly received, as this is the ready way to procure more.” Thanksgiving is at the heart of a powerful prayer life.
3. It will do us good - in the story we read in Luke 17, in vs. 19 Jesus says something strange - bearing in mind that the ten lepers had all been healed on their way to see the priests, why then, in the case of the one who returns does Jesus say him ‘your faith has made you well’. We are here being told that there is a sense is that one leper, who went back to thank Jesus was ‘whole’ in a way the other 9 lepers weren’t. In other words, going back to Jesus to say thank you was not just the right thing to do, but it was good for that former leper - it made him absolutely whole. Going to God with thanksgiving is not just the right thing to do, it is good for you and will make you a rounded Christian. Having an attitude of thanksgiving will transform the way you see God - it will do you good because it will help you to realise how much He loves you.
4. It is the best kind of witness - we live in a world where what you have is never enough. Everyone is complaining about something. Nobody is 100% grateful for what they have - Paul tells us in Romans 1:21 that unthankful ness is a disease pandemic to worldly mankind. What kind of impact then will a thankful Christian have upon her workplace - someone who sees everything as being a mercy of God and therefore doesn’t complain - she doesn’t moan about how little she gets paid; she doesn’t grumble about her boss; she doesn’t winge and backbite against her colleagues - that’s the kind of person who will transform the whole working atmosphere of an office or department - or the student who doesn’t grumble all the time about how hard his course is, and how many assignments he has to do - that’s the best kind of witness because it is 100% counter-cultural and it is 100% Christ-like.
Thankfulness - it glorifies God, it does you good, it is all we can do to thank God for Christ, and it is the best kind of witness we can have. As we take our leave of prayer and the Shorter Catechism, I hope we have all been enabled to see what a gift and a privilege we have in prayer. I come back to what I’ve basically said at the end of every one of our studies and that is the words of Jesus - ‘now you know these things, blessed are you if you do them’ or the words of his brother James, ‘do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says!’ AMEN