Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“When you sacrifice a thank offering to the Lord, sacrifice it in such a way that it will be accepted on your behalf. It must be eaten that same day; leave none of it till morning. I am the Lord.

• Leviticus 22:29-30

Praise the Lord, all you nations;
    extol him, all you peoples.
For great is his love toward us,
    and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord.

• Psalm 117

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    his love endures forever.
Let Israel say:
    “His love endures forever.”
Let the house of Aaron say:
    “His love endures forever.”
Let those who fear the Lord say:
    “His love endures forever.”

• Psalm 118:1-4

“And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying:
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
    the One who is and who was,
because you have taken your great power
    and have begun to reign.

• Revelation 11:16-17

“We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is ‘good,’ because it is good, if ‘bad’ because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

• C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (to Don Giovanni Calabria, 10 August 1948)

“Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”

• C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

The verses above from Leviticus and Revelation are the first and last verses in the Bible that have both “thank” and “you” in the same verse.  Most of the verses that have those two words are talking about how “you” should give God the thanks.  The two psalms in between talk about adoration, although Psalm 118:1 does start off with “thank you.”

Since I used those two psalms, I felt the second C. S. Lewis quote was necessary.  It comes from a long discourse on adoration.  We are told to do both, and C. S. Lewis gives a definition for each to differentiate, but the line gets blurred other than the fact that we need to show God our love and we need to give God thanks.  We need to recognize that we have blessings and from where those blessings originate.  Thus, we need to thank Him.  But we can love Him for just who He is and what He means to us, which goes over the line, back into thanksgiving.  In the end, God sorts that stuff out, if our heart is in the right place.

But my reason for writing this was a conversation that my wife had with a group of cousins in the Netherlands.  When my wife visited them, she brought a bottle of wine from the Wein Strasse, which the lower end was very close to where we lived.  The northern end was in Bad Durkheim, Germany where the annual wine festival is held, rivalling Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany.

My wife made a mental note that none of her cousins or an aunt or two said, “Thank You.”  As my wife was trying to reassimilate into Dutch culture and dredge up a vocabulary that was getting smaller as each year went by, she made a comment about giving thanks, saying “Thank You,” and what were the customs.  Her cousins were not impolite, but they basically said that her sending Thank You cards was not worth the ink, card, or postage stamp.  They said that some people said those words, but it was getting to be fewer and fewer.  Other than the church’s influence getting weaker and weaker throughout Europe, she never found any reason why her relatives had simply decided that the custom was outdated.

I may have said thank you, but I did not follow up with a card.  My wife tried to do both.

But in our society, I have seen people who did not say “Thank You” because they felt they should have gotten more.  I have even seen people take a gift that my wife spent 2-3 days going from store to store to find just the right thing, but I have seen the gift in the trash can when we had not left yet.  And my wife studied people, knowing their likes and dislikes.  She knew what they liked.  Even when giving a simple bottle of wine, she knew what type of wine that they liked best.

Well, you have a lot too much pride if you think you deserve more, when the gift came from the heart and my wife did not have to do it.  And even if you said, “Thank You” and you threw away the gift right in front of us, the words were useless.

When someone does not have to do so, but they do it anyway, they are showing God’s love.

And when we cannot say “Thank You” and mean it when dealing with neighbors, fellow church members, and friends, do we really mean it when we say “Thank You, Lord?”

In our society, I have seen an erosion of common courtesies, and if I have slipped, I am truly sorry.  We should say those things, not because we feel better than they are, but that we are showing God’s Love in return.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.