Worship-Level Thankfulness

Thanks is supposed to be an everyday kind of thing for the Christian. But we sinners can mess up just about anything. For this reason, Thanksgiving is an immensely helpful holiday to reorient ourselves. One of the points of having traditions is to remind us of important things that we too easily forget. But let’s grant that you haven’t forgotten about thanks. You still give thanks at meals and in regular prayer times. Yet even there our thanks can fall short.

How can that be? Because there are two levels of thanks, and to confuse them is gravely dangerous. First, let’s remember what thanks is. It is expressing the recognition that another person has done something good to us. We are acknowledging that we have been helped, protected or blessed in some way. With that definition, we recognize that most of us express this every day in a thousand different ways. We do this when people let us go before them or they pass the salt or they give us a gift. We readily tell them what that means to us. We give thanks to them and rightly so. This is the first level of thanks. It is the peer-level of thanks that normally happens horizontally.

The second level of thanks operates on the same definition, but it happens in a fuller, expansive, and total kind of way. We acknowledge that we have been helped, but the help has been from top to bottom, through and through. This is the kind of help that is so total it gives us the very air we breathe. We are protected, but in an expansive protection that covers our whole life, directing everything that does or does not happen. We are blessed in an uncountable number of ways so that our whole life is derived from this grace. And so, this deserves worship-level thanks. It is the kind of thanks that is a part of how we glorify the object of our thanks; we are exalting the glories of an all-sufficient giver and provider.

What happens when worship-level thanks and peer-level thanks gets mixed up as sometimes does happen? An individual or an organization can become so idolized, so depended upon, and so loved that a person or group of people will attach their identity to that individual or organization. They see their life as coming from that individual or organization. They see their supplies and their sustenance coming from that individual or organization, and they start to think that all good things come from that source. This can happen in cult situations, this can happen in governmental situations, and can happen in celebrity situations. It can even happen in some interpersonal relationship situations.

Let’s take one of those above situations and make it the most plausible it can be. What would we say about thanks when person A has their life saved by person B? And what if person A receives all their money, food, shelter, companionship, security, and more from person B? Wouldn’t thanks from A toward B have to be full enough and expansive enough to become worship-level thanks? The answer is always No. Why? Because we are taught in Scripture that all good things come from God (James 1:17). God alone is the ultimate source of all we receive, be it breath, rain, food, and gladness of all types (Acts 14:17). This means that person B, no matter how strong and sufficient he is, is still being sustained by God also. He might be a conduit of grace to person A, but person B is just as much a receiver of grace as person A is. So, while person A should give strong thanks to person B, it must forever be peer-level thanks. It must never become worship-level exaltation of that person because he or she is still a creature.

The opposite form of this error is much more possible for people. It is common for people to give a peer-level thanks to God instead of worship-level thanks. You hear it in awards ceremonies from artists and athletes. You hear it in the perfunctory prayers over food. God gets a nod and everybody is happy. But God is not happy. He knows the heart, and God rejects any sacrifice or offering that is done ritualistically, glibly, and/or religiously. Or, as I am expressing in this blog, he will reject your peer-level thankfulness. God isn’t just helping you out, he isn’t just giving you a hand up, he doesn’t just “got yo back”, he isn’t just being your co-pilot. Oh no. God holds your very life in his hand. There is not one thing you have ever received that didn’t come from him, and He has given you undeserved grace after undeserved grace every second of your life. There is only one kind of thanks that rightly honors him, and it is the thanks of worship. It is glorifying God as the giver of every facet of your life, beginning with the true and eternal life we have in Christ.

My fellows Christians, do not let your thanks dip down into peer-level thanks. Make sure it is up to worship-level. How will you know it is staying up at worship-level? Because when we recognize that everything is ours in Christ, Ephesians 5:19-20 says that there will be a song arising from your heart. Also, 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says that you will recognize God’s hand not just in good things but in his sovereign control over all things, and give thanks in it all. Philippians 4:6 says that you will pray about everything and your thanks will come as the requests are made, not when they are granted. Worship-level thanks sees God as both the originator and the goal. It is all from him and it is all for him. He gets the glory as the giver, and he gets the glory as the gift. He is all-in-all. Knowing that and seeing that takes our thanks higher, into true worshipful thanksgiving .