Thanksgiving
By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
Thanksgiving Day is only a week away. It is one of America’s secular but highly cherished holidays, stemming not from some feature of the Christian calendar such as Christmas or Easter. However, as Christians we have every reason to make Thanksgiving Day a time vested with deep religious significance. Giving thanks is a biblical thing to do. Passages abound that admonish us to give thanks or that testify to the rightness of being grateful persons. For example, 1 Thessalonians 5:18 admonishes, “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Ephesians 5:20 speaks about thanksgiving all the time for all things when it says, “Giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Psalms talk to us about “coming before His presence with thanksgiving” (95:2), as well as encouraging worshippers to “enter into His gates with thanksgiving” (100:4).
If we look closely behind all of the reasons we have for giving thanks, we will be looking upon some aspect of the grace of God, as James 1:17 reminds us, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.” As Christians through the ages have thought about God’s grace, they have identified two broad categories of grace. One is often called common grace or general grace. Jesus made reference to God’s common grace in the Sermon on the Mount, with the assertion that God “makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). If indeed people do pause at the season of Thanksgiving to express gratitude to God, the emphasis tends to be on giving thanks for the many expressions of common grace. Giving of thanks will make mention of food that is made possible by the common blessing of sunshine and rain. Christians and non-Christians alike experience multiple expressions of the general grace of God. Mention will likely be made about the supply of life’s basic necessities, such as what prompted the thanksgiving of the pilgrim colony at Plymouth in 1621. In addition to material benefits such as food, clothing, shelter, friends and family, we may well give thanks for common nonmaterial blessings, such as love, friendship and peace. In the Thanksgiving season we will no doubt think about the common freedoms that all of us enjoy as citizens in this “land of the free and home of the brave.”
Particular grace
The second category of grace is usually termed “particular grace” or “saving grace.” John 1:17 speaks of the grace that “came through Jesus Christ.” In like manner, Titus 2:11 calls attention to “the grace of God that brings salvation.” Then there is the witness of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” For those of us who are among the whoever-believes-in-Him group, our national Day of Thanksgiving has so much deeper and eternally meaningful reasons for expressions of gratitude. Whatever the particular terminology that Christians might use in giving thanks for God’s particular grace, we will be offering thanks for the gift of His Son. In doing so, we will be doing our best to speak about God’s gift that is unspeakable by attempting to express what is inexpressible or take the measure of what is immeasurable (2 Cor. 9:15).
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