Do You Give Thanks to the Glory of God?

"True gratitude or thankfulness to God for his kindness to us, arises from a foundation laid before, of love to God for what he is in himself; whereas a natural gratitude has no such antecedent foundation. The gracious stirrings of grateful affection to God, for kindness received, always are from a stock of love already in the heart, established in the first place on other grounds, God's own excellency."1

You might hear many people giving thanks to God, but for what reason? Perhaps people thank God for the death of Jesus Christ on the cross because to them it shows God makes much of them. Sadly enough, I think this is all too often the case. Simply put, we often give thanks to God with wrong motives. Like Jonathan Edwards says, we need not give thanks or gratitude to God because of something he has done for us for that is rooted in self-love. I.E. being enamored with the gifts rather than the giver. In fact, we need to give gratitude to God for who He is in Himself, in His character, in His excellency. That is how we fulfill 1Cor. 10:31 in giving thanks to God to the glory of God. If we fail to give thanks this way, then we are simply reverting back to the way unsaved people give thanks, namely in a self-love manner.

Listen to what James 4:3-4 says:
"3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4 You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

Many of us are like this toward our Lord. We are like a wife who asks her husband to fund her adulterous affairs and passions. The problem is not our asking nor is it our thanking. The problem lies in our motive of thanking and asking.

I think we can take several things away from this lesson.

1. Do you even thank God?
2. Are your motives of thanking God rooted in self-love or in God's excellency?
3. Will you endeavor to purely thank God and have God centered gratitude?
3. We need to check our motives to see if they are self-oriented or God's glory oriented.

May you all have a wonderful day of thanksgiving rooted in pure grattitude to God and others.

God bless,
Michael.




1. Jonathan Edwards. Religious Affections, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, orig. 1746, p.247.