^{I Thess. 5:18} in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Thanksgiving is a Holiday. The idea of the word Holiday literally comes from Holy Day. A Holy Day, is a day set apart and distinct from the days that are common. Actually as Christians we have 52 Holidays every year though we seldom think like that anymore. Those 52 days of course are our Lord’s days.

So, we see in the whole idea of Holidays, Thanksgiving included, the idea of distinction. We distinguish this day from the others and we do so by celebration and festivity with kith and kin. On Thanksgiving when giving thanks  we are thankful for the particulars in our lives. When we give thanks for family we give thanks for our family and the families of those we know and love in our Church and community. When we give thanks for blessings we give thanks for the blessings that God has been pleased to pour upon us. When we are thankful for the Church we have particularly in mind our Church. When we give thanks we thanks to the God of the Bible and not the pagan false deities that festoon our culture. Not only is the day a day of distinction but the Thanks we offer up are for peculiar and particular blessings.

We could pray, “Thank you Father for the Human Race and Thank you for every blessing you’ve given everybody ever” but that would make our giving of thanks brief, and abstractly universal and esoteric. This would be non-incarnated gratitude. Thanking God for the particular is incarnating our gratitude. Thank you Father for this wife, for this family, for these fellow saints. Thank you Father for this food, this table, and this roof over our head. Thank you Father for this Church, these musicians, and these leaders.

I merely note this to reinforce the pleasure we should have in the particular. We live in a culture that is at war with the particular and with distinctions. At this Thanksgiving time we should pause to Thank the Triune God for the distinct and peculiar blessings with which He has blessed us.

Knowing the Triune God is for us we can even particularize our Thanksgiving in terms of our struggles as they have been providentially assigned to us as means to our sanctification. These particulars burdens are to us increased Christlikeness and  our character formation.

Samuel Rutherford could write, in what has become  quote I return to repeatedly,

“Oh, what owe I to the file, to the hammer, to the furnace of my Lord Jesus! who hath now let me see how good the wheat of Christ is, that goeth through His mill, and His oven, to be made bread for His own table. Grace tried is better than grace, and it is more than grace; it is glory in its infancy.”

We can easily be Thankful when the Bank account is full, when there is no sickness, when personal resistance to us in the politics of the workplace are minimal but can we be Thankful when the thorn in the flesh is gouging more than usual? Can we be Thankful when when disappointments becomes a familiar companion?

Another thing we might note here is that Christian Thanks giving is a an act that communicates satisfaction with both the past and present indicating a confidence in the future. The person shriveled with animosity regarding the past will not find it in his soul to give thanks. The person not content with the present will not give thanks. And the person convinced that the future is bleak will hardly be a candidate for the giving of thanks. Christian Thanks giving then is a supremely worshipful act communicating volumes regarding one’s disposition towards the past, the present, and the future.”
I posted this thought online and a non-Calvinist who is a very sharp chap took exception with it saying,

Gratitude and reality can co-exist. We have lost much over the last several decades, we are currently in a struggle to the death with forces that are turning our lives into a sewer in the present, and the future, outside some miracle of God, is indeed likely to be bleak before I die. I am indeed grateful that God has seen me and my family through the events of the years we have lived in, and pray that He will give us the resources to survive what’s ahead. But my gratitude is tempered by sadness and loss.

I don’t believe that what we’re experiencing is necessarily what God has ordained or desires for us.

It is easy to appreciate this insight but we have to keep in mind that this is the exact present that God has ordained for us and if that is true we can be thankful. This is not to say we can not have regrets in regards to our failures in paying heed to God’s will of precept. It is to suggest though that we can be Thankful because what has been past, present, and future is what God ordained for us in keeping with decreed will.

Now we are not pollyannas and we do continue to lean against the Darkness but we do it as a people thankful for the file, the hammer, and the furnace.

But having said all this we note that life is not always file, hammer, and furnace and we are thankful for that as well. We are thankful for when we are led so as to lie down in green pastures. We are thankful when he leads us besides still waters and so restores our souls. We are thankful for the wise Mentors he has placed in our lives and the wisdom of the generations he has kept for us in books seldom read. We are thankful for the generations gone behind who have given us such a rich inheritance and we are thankful for the rising of the generations we are seeing coming behind us. We are thankful for cousins, and Aunts and Uncles and Grandparents. We are thankful for Elders.

And we are thankful that no matter how dark it gets outside there is always light to be found by those who are lovers of Truth.