I am on the road this Lord’s Day, and will be preaching at Christ Church in Cary. At home in Christ Church, the pulpit will be filled by Francis Foucachon. Thus, as it turns out, I am not responsible for the exhortation in the call to worship this morning, or for the homily that accompanies the Lord’s Supper. But I did have something I wanted to note, by way of exhortation.
God’s people should approach Him, always and everywhere, with thanksgiving. The unbelieving heart would rather do anything than honor God as God and give Him thanks, and so we must display the antithesis of the unbelieving heart. We must overflow with gratitude. Not only has God done great things for us, but His kindness fills every nook and cranny of our lives. Of course, He sent His Son to save us, and He created us in the first place, and these are monumental things indeed. But have you ever noticed how thoughtful He is in the details, and how His kindness extends into the details? I have been up for less than an hour, and I am sure that I would already have lost count of all the little pleasant things He has done for me, if I had been keeping count.
I slept wonderfully, and woke up about ten after seven. I needed to get up at seven-thirty (four-thirty, Idaho time), and so I dozed. But you know how sometimes dozing seems to last about three seconds? And other times, the effect is reversed, and the dozing seems to last two hours, all of it semi-conscious and pleasant? So whom should I thank for this gift? And how many nerve endings did God give me to enjoy the hot hotel shower? And the scratchy towel? And the feeling from pulling on a pair of socks? This is the argument for God’s existence from the moral obligation to thank Somebody.
Bitterness is a heart snarl, and it does nothing but create more snarls. As it continues, it does nothing but close in on itself. In doing this, it becomes increasingly incapable of registering gratitude at all, and this necessitates shutting the triune God out. The God who is to be thanked might be shut out by any number of means, religous devotion being one of the sneakier ones.
But our duties remain, and one of those duties is thanking God for the small stuff. Thank God for your fingernails.