Thought for the Week - 19th November 2023

Dear Friends, 

In my daily Bible Study notes we have been thinking about ‘thankfulness’ and thanksgiving which enables us to look back and recall what God has said and done in our lives, to be grateful for what he is doing and what he has provided, and to look forward with grateful hope and expectation. We read in the apostle Paul’s letter to the believers in Ephesus, in a section about instructions for Christian living, that we should ‘be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Ephesians 5:18-20). That call to give ‘thanks to God for everything’ we sometimes may find difficult to do. When life is going well for us, thanksgiving to God may be easy, but what about when we are facing life’s challenges, or when we see around us those things that are destructive and unhealthy to ourselves and others, what about thanksgiving to God then? At those times in life, we should be thankful to God for his presence in our lives to sustain and help us. My Bible notes quoted G K Chesterton, the Christian apologist, author and creator of the Father Brown novels saying, ‘You say grace before meals. I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and the pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in ink’ (Life with Lucas, 48). You may have heard of the distinction between the sacred and the secular, in other words where God may be found, and that God can only be found in the sacred. But learning to be thankful to God for and in everything helps us to see that God is present and at work in both what we might term ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. A final thought from my Bible notes, ‘Thankfulness enables us to ‘soak up the gravy’ of the good that we enjoy. God helping us, let’s live with our eyes open, and our hearts warmed as we give thanks’.   

Grace and peace,

Neil

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