faithfully and patiently expressed the worshipers’ grati tude for “ this beautiful Sabbath morning,” now blos soms out into thanksgiving for “ these rich harvests of good things which Thy bounty affords.” We are getting ready for Thanksgiving. When the happy day arrives at last, we meet in noisy groups around our tables and proceed to eat every thing in sight as an indisputable proof that we are not devoid of the grace of gratitude. This is our American institution of Thanksgiving, and long may it wave. The basic idea behind Thanksgiving is good. Grati tude is a sweet virtue pleasing to God and pleasant to know among men. The saints have ever been thankful. The men of the Bible were filled with a deep spirit of thankfulness, sincere, tender, and touched with emotion. They thanked God frequently, volubly, and loudly. They would not be quiet. They would get God’s ear, and they would make Him understand how thankful they were. In the New Testament, Paul more than all other writers is possessed with this spirit of gratitude. His let ters abound with expressions of thankfulness to the saints and for the saints. No kindness, however small, shown him by any person was ever overlooked. He took time out from his prodigious labors to keep caught up on his thanksgiving. He was not only thankful to the saints for their many acts of kindness to him, but also he was thank ful to God for the saints themselves and for all they were and are to each other, to God, and to the world. It is profitable to notice the many facets in the shining jewel of his gratitude. He was thankful to God for the Romans, “ that [their] faith [was] spoken of through out the whole world.” He thanked God for the Corin thians, that they were possessed of every gift. He was thankful for the fellowship and generosity of the Philip- pians, for the great love “ in the Spirit” which belonged to the Colossians, for the “ work of faith, labor of love, and patience of hope” revealed by the Thessalonians. Indeed his heart seemed literally to overflow with tender appre ciation of the saints. He was a thankful man. Let us allow the occasion of another Thanksgiving season to remind us to be thankful. And while the object of our gratitude always must be the all-gracious Father of lights from whom every good and perfect gift descends, it is well also that we should learn to be thankful to Him for all of His believing children. Assuredly they have faults — for perfection is not of this earth — but they are, for all that, His own dear children. In them His glory is bound up, and through them His glory is yet to be re vealed to the universe. Each of us owes a great debt to God’s people, living and dead. To the gifted great of the kingdom, we owe such a mighty burden of debt that we could not in a life time repay it, even were such an opportunity afforded us. How much do we owe to those “holy men of God [who spoke] as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” ? And what is our debt to those bearded guardians of the sacred oracles who through centuries of persecution shielded with their lives the precious treasure committed to their charge? How much do we owe to those obscure and for gotten scholars whose patient toil kept pure the sacred text? Or to those meticulous word masters whose transla tions brought the Word of God out of the cloisters and gave it to the common man? How much do we owe to the great Christian writers of other days for books that have blessed the ages: Augustine’s Confessions, Taylor’s Holy- Living, Bunyan’s Pilgrim ’s Progress, Milton’s Paradise Lost, to name only a few When we turn to the hymns of the church, how can we sufficiently praise God and thank His servants? The St. Bernards, the Wattses, the Newtons, the Wesleys, and such as they! They have given voice to the church’s jubi
lation, have caught and set to music her tears and tri umphs and joys and longings; they have enabled her to sing, without which she must have suffocated, like Keats’ tongueless nightingale, from the fullness of her unexpressed delights. Then there are the prophets and apostles, the martyrs and reformers whose sacrificial toil has made us rich. As we muse on what they have done for us, thanksgiving rises naturally to our lips. We cannot thank them in per son (we may be able to do so in the world to come), but we can thank God often for them and for all they have contributed to our eternal happiness. Were any of us able to trace back the path by which the good Word of God and the blessings of the gospel have come down to us, we should hardly be able to restrain our grateful tears. That humble and now forgotten pastor of a hundred years ago (to go back no further) who prayed and struggled against indifference on the one hand and hostility on the other, till at last he won out and a strong church was established; those deacons and elders and praying mothers who kept that church alive over the years; the plain inarticulate members who had no public gifts, but who could and did work long hours in the cold and the heat to acquire means to support that church — the church where in later days we heard the saving gospel — are not we heirs of such as these and under everlasting obligation to be thankful for them? How much we do owe to so many for a thousand com mon things overlooked entirely, or taken as a matter of course with scarcely a nod of gratitude! I am grateful for a plain, hard-working father whose rough and callous hands were the support of my child hood and youth. I am grateful too (and I wish I had told her so before she went away) for a small, sweet-faced and tired mother who counted no day too long to spend in willing toil for me, and no night too weary to sit by my bedside when some childish illness made me fretful. And grateful thanks, not unmixed with wondering incredulity, rises in my heart at the memory of those teachers in the public schools who labored, I sometimes fear, with but scant success, to beat into my unwilling head the rudiments of education and to refine away the savage. Though I cannot understand it, I am profoundly grate ful to them for their patience. But far above this I am grateful to that long-suffering God who endured from me more than they could have done, till in my young man hood the Shepherd found me and brought me to His fold rejoicing. To modify slightly a famous quotation: “ He who is careful to be thankful for everything will always have something for which to be thankful.” It is a blessed habit to acquire, this habit of thankfulness. It will cure a host of injurious evils in our dispositions: self-pity, resentment, murmuring, faultfinding. All these will wither and die of themselves; for how can they grow inside a heart over flowing with gratitude and praise? The habit of being thankful, once it takes a firm hold of the life, will soon produce a multitude of other benefits as well. It will serve to turn our eyes outward instead of inward and thus bring about a healthier state of soul; it will raise our joy level far above anything we have ever known before; it will go far to cure pessimism and en courage a happy outlook on life; it will help to keep us humble and make us more winsome and easier to live with (for which blessing the other members of our fami lies will be thankful in their turn). It bestows so much and costs so little — strange that all of us have not made more of it. Let us begin now to be thankful for each other. It will pay amazing dividends!
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NOVEMBER, 1963
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