Gratitude in All Things

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:18

From 1988 to 2001 Elisabeth Elliot spoke to a large listening audience through a weekday radio programme called Gateway to Joy. The name suited her teaching. She believed that the gate through which joy enters a human life is not good fortune but thanksgiving — and that thanksgiving is open to anyone, in any circumstance, because it rests not on what happens to us but on who God is. Gratitude ran through her teaching like a bright thread. It was, for her, not an emotion to be waited for but a habit of faith to be practised.

In everything, not for everything

She was careful with Paul’s command to the Thessalonians. It says to give thanks in everything, and she did not take it to mean that we must thank God for evil as though evil were good. A murder, a betrayal, a cancer, a death are not gifts in themselves. But in every one of them there is something to give thanks for: that God is present, that He has not changed, that He is able to bring good out of what He did not cause, that the sufferer is not abandoned, that Christ has gone this way before. The believer may thank God in the darkness without pretending that the darkness is light.

Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. EPHESIANS 5:20

Ephesians goes further and speaks of giving thanks for all things, and here she pointed to the larger picture of God’s sovereignty. If nothing reaches the believer except through the hands of a loving Father, then even what is painful comes wrapped, in the end, in His purpose. She did not use that truth to silence grief. She used it to steady faith.

Job’s blessing

The scriptural model she returned to was Job in the first hour of his losses, whose words of acceptance chapter six has already considered. Before any of the arguments, before the friends came, he fell to the ground and worshipped. That act of worship did not take away his grief. It came out of it. And it shows that thanksgiving is not the opposite of mourning but its companion in the believer’s heart.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped. JOB 1:20

Her own life gave her the right to teach this. She had been bereaved twice, had lost her work more than once, and knew the long weariness of disappointment. She did not teach thanksgiving from a comfortable chair. She taught it as something she had to choose, often against her feelings, and found to be true.

The sacrifice of praise

The letter to the Hebrews speaks of the sacrifice of praise, and the word sacrifice mattered in her teaching. A sacrifice costs something. Praise that springs up naturally when all is well costs nothing; praise offered in loss is an offering laid on the altar. It belongs with all the other offerings in her teaching — of loneliness, of suffering, of plans and preferences — and like them it is transformed in God’s hands. The believer who gives thanks when it is hardest often finds that the giving changes him.

By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name. HEBREWS 13:15

Everlasting love

The two promises with which Gateway to Joy began, as chapter three described — the everlasting love and the everlasting arms — explain her gratitude. Thanksgiving is the natural response of someone who believes them. If God’s love is everlasting, nothing can exhaust it; if His arms are underneath, nothing can let us fall below them. Joy, in her teaching, did not wait for sorrow to be taken away; it came from God’s being near, and gratitude is the way the heart turns towards Him.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

Ordinary gifts

Not all her teaching on gratitude was about suffering. Much of it was about the ordinary goods of life that most of us take for granted: food, work, a home, the faces of friends, the beauty of the sea and the sky, the morning. She thought that ingratitude for small things is one of the commonest sins of comfortable Christians, and that it quietly poisons the heart. The cure is simple and old: to stop and say thank you, to God and to others, for every gift, however small. She thought a grateful household a happy one, and saying thank you a habit worth teaching to every child.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. JAMES 1:17

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. PSALM 103:2

Weighing it

This teaching is close to the centre of the New Testament, and it needs little qualification. One caution may help. Gratitude in all things can be demanded of others in a way that wounds — as though a grieving person who does not feel thankful were failing God. The command is given to each believer for himself. We may encourage one another in it, but gently, and we should be quicker to give thanks for our own sorrows than to require others to give thanks for theirs. The psalms of lament stand in the same Bible as the psalms of praise, and many of them move from one to the other in the course of a few verses. That movement is the path she was describing.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before you go to sleep tonight, name five specific things from the day for which you are grateful, and thank God for each.

2. Think of your present hardest circumstance. Find one thing in it, not about it, for which you can honestly give thanks.

3. Read Job 1:20–22. Pray Job’s words over something you have lost.

4. Write a thank-you letter this week to someone who has never been properly thanked.

5. Begin each day this week by thanking God for one gift before you ask Him for anything.

A PRAYER

Father of lights, every good and perfect gift has come from You, and I have taken so many for granted. Forgive me.

Teach me to give thanks in everything — not pretending that sorrow is joy, but trusting that You are present in it.

When I have lost what I loved, let me fall down and worship You, as Job did, and not turn away.

You have loved me with an everlasting love, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Let my life be a sacrifice of praise to You, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.