00:00:00:10 – 00:00:31:36
Clint Loveall
It’s a conundrum. Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us. As we continue looking, through the Psalms, we find ourself today, looking at another category, I think, and certainly an appropriate one. Maybe we’re a little early, but seasonally, I think this one fits. And these are the Psalms of Thanksgiving. Almost. Michael, I, I think most, most Bible people would put Thanksgiving Psalms as its own category.

00:00:31:40 – 00:00:56:40
Clint Loveall
There’s a sense, though, in which I do think they live comfortably under the heading of praise Psalms, which we looked at yesterday. That makes some sense. Thanksgiving is an extension of praise. And I think in many of these Psalms, you see a word of thanksgiving, maybe at the beginning. And then as the psalm moves toward the end, it really transitions to praise.

00:00:56:40 – 00:01:08:22
Clint Loveall
But this, this idea of gratitude is, I think, wonderfully and incredibly helpfully woven just all throughout this book.

00:01:08:27 – 00:01:34:51
Michael Gewecke
I think that you’re always in danger when we will break things out. Clint, not saying that we did this. Sure, scholars break out things like this to study them. The danger is, of course, that you start putting things in buckets that don’t fit perfectly in those buckets. All that being said here for that conversation, I think one way to think about Thanksgiving as being differentiated from just the broader category of praise.

00:01:34:51 – 00:02:05:51
Michael Gewecke
Psalms, though, is the Christian as we come to the Psalms ourselves, as we read them historically, the Psalms of Praise are really irrespective of the season of life in the sense that they arise out of our relationship with the steadfast and faithful God. They’re related to God’s character. And so therefore, all of those notes resolve with praise naturally, because we are responding to a God who is good and a God whose generous.

00:02:05:56 – 00:02:49:10
Michael Gewecke
The Psalms of Thanksgiving often arise in that moment when God has shown up, and God’s presence and God’s power and God’s answer to prayer has been seen. There’s often a moment in which it wells up out of that moment as a response to something that has played out. I don’t want to cast this too broadly, but if you’ve ever had that moment and most of us as people of faith have, when that thing that you were worried might happen or the outcome happens in the best way possible that you could have never hoped to imagine, and suddenly in that moment, you just sense this, this feeling wash over you of of how grateful you are.

00:02:49:10 – 00:03:01:39
Michael Gewecke
It’s a kind of inability to hold back the Thanksgiving for the good that’s happened. That’s the spirit I think, behind those Psalms that come out of those encounters with God’s work in our lives.

00:03:01:39 – 00:03:22:13
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I don’t want to overstate it and don’t want to put words in your mouth, but there is a sense, a general sense. There would be exceptions on both sides of this, but I think there you could argue a general sense in which where the praise songs praise psalms are more general in nature. The thanksgiving psalms are often more specific, more concrete.

00:03:22:13 – 00:03:55:46
Clint Loveall
They they arise from a particular moment as opposed to just recognizing God is good. It’s a specific recognition. So let’s jump to one. One of the early ones, Psalm nine. These these Psalms are relatively easy to spot because they use words like thanks and thanksgiving. So it’s not exclusively true, but often when you see a Psalm that’s using the word thanks early on, it’s likely that that will be categorized as a psalm of Thanksgiving.

00:03:55:46 – 00:04:21:05
Clint Loveall
So here we have this wonderful opening verse. I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart. I will tell of all your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and exult in you. I will sing praises to your name almost high. So this is a beautiful expression of thanks. But then look at verse three. When my enemies turned back, they stumbled and perished.

00:04:21:05 – 00:04:59:46
Clint Loveall
So again, a expression of gratitude related to a specific experience. And, these Psalms are great for us, Michael, because I think we have the best intentions of being grateful people. But it is it is so often and so easy to slip away from that and become self-focused or worried or fearful or whatever. And it is nice, I think, that the Psalms so often pride gratitude in us as we work our way through them.

00:04:59:51 – 00:05:27:15
Michael Gewecke
I think that is in many ways the right image. Clint. I don’t want to push this, so you have to check me on this. I think that the Psalms, though, present praise as an inevitable outcome because of God’s work in our life. I think that Thanksgiving, in an interesting way, is a lesson for us. It teaches us a way that we orient ourselves to our lives.

00:05:27:19 – 00:05:50:52
Michael Gewecke
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience where it feels like God is so close to you, in difficulty and in turmoil. Your heart is open to the presence of God. You’re looking for where God is in the midst of that moment, and then things turn really good. You’re on the mountaintop. You feel like there’s a lot of wind in your cells, and in those moments, you might find it hard to see where God is.

00:05:50:52 – 00:06:15:18
Michael Gewecke
And some of that is because the Psalms want to teach us that in those moments, God’s presence should elicit within us this gift of thanksgiving. It should become a discipline that we offer. Whether and you know, this is in many ways simple, clean. When you sit down to the meal, if you have a practice of praying before your meal, you might know that that is supposed to be Thanksgiving.

00:06:15:18 – 00:06:37:46
Michael Gewecke
It’s supposed to be reflecting gratitude for this thing that’s been provided the gift of daily bread, as we have in the Lord’s Prayer. Well, God’s kept that promise with this thing that’s in front of you. And so does that. Elicit within us thanksgiving gratitude for what God has given, or is it taken for granted? Is that a thing that we like to believe is owed to us?

00:06:37:57 – 00:06:47:54
Michael Gewecke
That’s a radically different way of encountering the world. And one of these is demonstrated in the Psalms that the way of thanksgiving and gratitude is modeled throughout the book itself.

00:06:48:05 – 00:07:17:06
Clint Loveall
And sometimes the hardest things to be grateful for are the things we’re familiar with and used to, when the when the big event happens, when the great deliverance or the good news or the test results come back, those are obvious moments of gratitude and relief. But when you wake up and have food in your cupboard for breakfast, what you’ve always had, it becomes some of those small things are actually harder to be mindful of.

00:07:17:11 – 00:07:38:08
Clint Loveall
It’s another another psalm here. Michael, I don’t know if you can make your way to 92. It is good to give thanks to the Lord to sing praises to your name or Most High, to declare your steadfast love in the morning, your faithfulness by night, by the music of the heart. For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your works.

00:07:38:13 – 00:08:06:40
Clint Loveall
All the works of your hand make me sing for joy. Again, thanks is a wonderful place to start. As we had a conversation a couple days ago that essentially we can think of the language of the Psalms as prayer. Language. Well, there may be no better starting place for our prayers than gratitude, that there may be no more appropriate way to begin a conversation with God.

00:08:06:45 – 00:08:44:42
Clint Loveall
Then thank you. And, as these hymns example for us, you know that that is such a wonderful place to begin to to be consciously, to be intentionally and willfully grateful and though that is easiest when things are going well, it is not exclusively when things are going well that we should be thankful we can find. Gratitude is, in some ways as much a discipline as it is a reaction.

00:08:44:42 – 00:08:49:22
Clint Loveall
And again, I think those things are here for us if we take some time with them.

00:08:49:33 – 00:09:23:58
Michael Gewecke
I think verse four of 92 is instructive for you, Lord, have made me glad by your work at the work of your hands I sing for joy. This is just sort of the top of a very, very deep iceberg. But Clint, this is one of the ways that people of faith, followers of Jesus Christ, are differentiated in some ways because there is this popular idea that is vogue right now, that the goal of one’s life is to let go of thoughts.

00:09:23:58 – 00:09:45:16
Michael Gewecke
There’s this idea of let go of negative emotions and let let go. Let these thoughts just pass by. Christians, of course, should let go of the doubts that we are holding, or we should let go of the anger. We should let go of the unforgiveness. We should let go of these addictions. All this, of course, but it’s fascinating.

00:09:45:21 – 00:10:07:25
Michael Gewecke
The Psalms teach us that we are to be filled with something, that it’s not just that we’re trying to let go of things that heard this, but actually God’s intention is to work a new creation within us to create something new. It’s not just tearing out the bad, it’s building something to to create something that which is God honoring.

00:10:07:30 – 00:10:32:30
Michael Gewecke
You have made me glad by your work and the works of your hands. I sing for joy. God is constructive in our lives if we’re able to see it, if we’re willing to look at the constructive act of salvation that God is working out within us, that will be the cause for joy. I think to your point, we might think that that is relegated to the times where things are going well.

00:10:32:34 – 00:10:52:21
Michael Gewecke
But if you’ve ever navigated those seasons, whether or not sometimes those moments give us the clearest picture of where the new building is happening in our lives, and that becomes an occasion where God makes thanksgiving possible in us, that we may have no human way of understanding how we got there ourselves.

00:10:52:26 – 00:11:41:09
Clint Loveall
I will, maybe you should have a little, flashing light here that we could use or something. Soap box alert. I, I, tempting it’s tempting. Here to go on a tangent, so I’ll try to keep it short. I, culturally speaking, I find that I personally, and I think many of us struggle with gratitude. We live in a culture that thrives on acquiring things, on achieving things, on winning things and having things and in that sort of water we swim in, I think gratefulness and gratitude does not often play a big enough role.

00:11:41:09 – 00:12:15:12
Clint Loveall
And then we come into a season where we talk about it. But but then we all eat 10,000 calories in the next day, wake up and go shopping and get online and watch football. So even even the cultural language of gratitude is is pretty, is pretty narrowly focused and pretty short lived. The good news in that for Christians, I think that it is an invitation for us to practice something that is uniquely ours, not uniquely.

00:12:15:12 – 00:12:43:05
Clint Loveall
Lots of people say gratitude is good, but as a as an aspect of our faith, we will have to probably do some work to learn consistent gratitude and to practice gratefulness in our prayers and in our devotional life and in our faith life. And, it is not something I think likely to just land on us from the culture around us.

00:12:43:10 – 00:12:49:50
Clint Loveall
But the good news in that, I think, is that it does belong specifically to us. If we are mindful of it.

00:12:49:55 – 00:13:11:35
Michael Gewecke
It does belong to us too, I think innately because of the God that we serve. And that’s Psalm 136 that we have queued up here. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. And if you’re a keen reader, you’re going to see that very quickly, for his steadfast love endures forever, for his steadfast love endures forever.

00:13:11:40 – 00:13:35:19
Michael Gewecke
Why do we give thanks? Because his steadfast love endures forever. Did you get it right? The Psalms are teaching us there’s a way of coming around, putting a arm around our shoulder and saying, hey, listen, I know that whatever’s happening for you right now, it’s easy to focus on it. But don’t forget the steadfastness of the God who loves you.

00:13:35:24 – 00:14:00:54
Michael Gewecke
To be aware of the fact that God is present in your life, no matter what the circumstances. And if you look ahead here, you know, you’ve got conflicts with enemies, you’ve got the beauty of creation itself. You’ve got the ordering of each and every day from the small to the large, from the individual to the national, from the very personal to the cosmic.

00:14:00:59 – 00:14:09:03
Michael Gewecke
We can see in all of these places how God’s steadfast love exists. And so therefore we can be thankful at every single one of those intersections.

00:14:09:03 – 00:14:34:25
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I love this psalm, partly because if you remember six words, you’ve memorized half the song. But but mostly because if you think about that, his steadfast love endures forever. Our gratitude is not rooted in our own experience. It’s not rooted in what goes well for me. It’s not rooted in the day that I’m having or the season.

00:14:34:26 – 00:15:03:54
Clint Loveall
I mean, it it is rooted in the steadfast love of God which endures forever. That is the basis on which our gratitude is built, not our own circumstances. And I think that’s a I think that’s such a helpful theological point made in this, in this poetry, in this song, give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever.

00:15:03:54 – 00:15:26:15
Clint Loveall
That’s the parting words here. And yes, we certainly should be grateful when good things happen for us and to us. But underneath of that, gratitude is always first and foremost a response to the God who loves us. And this Psalm, I think, teaches that wonderfully.

00:15:26:20 – 00:15:57:25
Michael Gewecke
It’s tough, Clint, because in a way, this topic is one where we are all quick to assent, to agree, to say yes, absolutely. That’s true. And yet, if we took an assessment of the vast majority of our words in the day, I wonder if we would be shocked how many of those are filled with complaint, with gossip, backbiting, fear?

00:15:57:30 – 00:16:45:15
Michael Gewecke
It may be anger. Well, whatever it is, I think an assessment of our hearts will lead us to see that. Simple ideas we might say, yeah pastors, I agree God has blessed me even though today is a hard day, or even though today I’m flying high, I can see God’s hand through it all. Great. But there’s a difference between that being a thing that we agree with and that being a thing that becomes, as you said earlier, a discipline of the Christian life when Thanksgiving becomes part of our common vocabulary, when we’re known because of that language being embedded in how we speak with others, maybe even more difficult, we speak to ourselves.

00:16:45:19 – 00:17:11:15
Michael Gewecke
This becomes a very tumultuous place where the rubber meets the road, because on one hand, having a day in whatever nation you do, that where you give Thanksgiving that can feel easy because it’s on your calendar. But that’s not what the Psalms are describing. They’re not describing one day where you have someone give a speech and that is supposed to be an uplifting speech.

00:17:11:15 – 00:17:31:55
Michael Gewecke
Now the songs are describing a kind of life in which Thanksgiving is embedded in the normal living of it. That’s a radically different, and, I would argue, more difficult task. That’s a discipline that needs pursuit. And I think that that makes this topic easy for us to agree with, difficult for us to embed in our daily lives.

00:17:32:00 – 00:18:02:42
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I don’t think anyone would push back on the idea that it’s good to be grateful, right? Right, right. I mean that yeah, that sounds like common sense, but the Christian understanding of that is a lot deeper than count Your blessings or remember that someone has it worse. Not that those aren’t helpful mantras to to listen to to hear, but but it is this reaction to what God has done.

00:18:02:42 – 00:18:28:26
Clint Loveall
And I think I’m firmly convinced. And I think psychology and religion would back me up. That’s why gratitude is such a wonderful starting point, because the path to be when a person says, I want to be more joyful, I want to be more generous, I want to be more gracious. I want to be less critical. The gratitude is step number one to all of those journeys.

00:18:28:37 – 00:18:51:24
Clint Loveall
If we can start by being grateful, we can move in all of those directions. And I’m not sure we can without it. And so I, I, I think when, if, if the spiritual journey starts with gratitude, it seems to me that it, it has found a good opportunity to move forward.

00:18:51:28 – 00:19:20:52
Michael Gewecke
Is it possible, Clint, in a single conversation, to begin with, sincere recognition of God’s presence and gifts in our lives and to offer thanksgiving for it? Is it possible to start there and then immediately go to backbiting and complaining and fear? I think it happens, but I think that those things cut deeply against the force of the first.

00:19:20:52 – 00:19:50:22
Michael Gewecke
It’s very hard to be afraid of what’s going to happen to you when you just reminded yourself of a God who has carried you through the most terrifying moments of your life. Thanksgiving creates a kind of a forcefield, a shell around us to protect us from some of the worst aspects of our sinful temptations. And it may seem like a simple thing, but simple doesn’t mean that that it’s not elegant and it’s not powerful and it’s not beautiful.

00:19:50:22 – 00:19:58:33
Michael Gewecke
I think sometimes we forsake the simple, and the Psalms of thanksgiving should not be forsaken, because I do believe they are powerful.

00:19:58:42 – 00:20:18:29
Clint Loveall
I would hope most of us at some point had an opportunity to interact with a person who we would say was truly grateful, and I bet we would not also say that they were crabby, that they were critical, that they were fearful. I know we’re all human, right? But I.

00:20:18:34 – 00:20:19:33
Michael Gewecke
Yeah.

00:20:19:37 – 00:20:42:34
Clint Loveall
I think if you can find a way to keep that gratitude at the center of your spiritual life, I think you’re exactly right, Michael. It is a protector. It is. It is a shield of sorts that helps us keep some of those other things at bay. I think Thanksgiving is very near the heart of Christian life.

00:20:42:39 – 00:20:57:52
Michael Gewecke
That’s gonna be our final word on that today. Thanks for being with us. If you found this encouraging, challenging, we would love for you to give it a like. It helps others find it in their own study. Subscribe. If you’re this far in the video, you might like to watch others like this. So hit that subscribe button and we will see you all tomorrow.

00:20:57:54 – 00:20:58:33
Clint Loveall
Thanks everybody.