THANKSGIVING FOR A WORRIED MIND

I am a specialist of the art of worry. Now I want to be a specialist at the art of giving thanks. Why? It seems that thanksgiving is an antidote to worry:

·       And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. (Colossians 3:15 ESV)

How are we to derive this peace of Christ? It seems that one answer is through thanksgiving. We find this same association in the prior epistle:

·       Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice…The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

I rejoice because I have so much to be thankful for in the Lord. Paul therefore prayed that we:

·       …may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19)

I am learning that His love for me is able to address all of my needs in full. This knowledge, combined with the knowledge of my unworthiness (Luke 17:10; Romans 5:8-10), continues to lead me to prayer.

I have never been able to achieve anything by mind control. Worry laughs at my feeble attempts to control my anxious thoughts. I don’t have what it takes. That’s why I need to pray to the One who is sufficient to answer my worries. However, it seems that this passage (Philippians 4:6-7) also requires that I pray with thanksgiving. Even Jesus gave thanks when He prayed Matthew 14:19; John 11:41). For what should I be thankful? For everything; for all the good I’ve received (James 1:17); for what He has done for me.

As far as I can tell, all of the exemplary prayers found in the Bible express thanksgiving to our Lord. Mary’s Magnificat is devoted only to praise and thanksgiving:

·       “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” (Luke 1:46-54)

These great prayers are not only expressions of God’s worthiness but also of our unworthiness. Both the confession of our sins and the praise of His glory are necessary ingredients of thanksgiving.

Besides, it is privilege to give thanks. It lifts us above our worries. It doesn’t matter whether or not we feel thankful. Instead, we should be thankful. Even if we don’t feel thankful for our lives, we have been promised eternal world of love to be thankful about. We therefore thank God, because He deserves it, especially in light of the fact that we don’t deserve His mercy.

Thankfulness is a life-preserver. Therefore, we should not feel bullied into expressing thankfulness. Instead, thankfulness is part of the gift our Savior gives us to disconnect from our worries by connecting with Him.

Psychologists also recognize the value of thankfulness. University of California psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky advises us to “Count your blessings”:

·       One way to do this is with a “gratitude journal” in which you write down three to five things for which you are currently thankful – from mundane (your peonies are in bloom) to the magnificent (a child’s first steps). Do this once a week, say, on Sunday night. Keep it fresh by varying your entries as much as possible. (Time)

While Lyubomirsky’s advice is helpful, it is focused entirely upon heightening our feelings and not upon the truth that there are things that we must be thankful for. She offers us an exercise not the Lord. Yes, she does point to family and friends to whom we should express thanks, but what if we are terminally ill and our friends are all gone? Or they have hurt us? It is only our Lord who can give us a solid basis for thankfulness in whatever situation we find ourselves.

Memory is our reservoir of thankfulness. Moses continued to remind Israel of God’s wondrous miracles to redeem Israel from Egypt lest they forget Him and turn away:

·       Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him. (Deuteronomy 4:33-35)

We too need to be reminded of God’s work on our behalf lest we become discouraged and fall prey to worry. In the midst of his depression, the Psalmist forced himself to remember God:

·       Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you… (Psalm 42:5-6)

Our Lord is the source of all hope, and this is becoming increasingly apparent to me. After imbibing the news from my computer, I find that I am contaminated with worry like a toxic dump. However, my worries, coupled with my inadequacies to address them, lead me in one direction – to prayer. He knows our burdens and encourages us to cast our cares upon Him:

·       Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:6-7)

However, Paul had admitted that first he had to painfully learn to not trust in himself but in God alone:

·       For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. (2 Corinthians 1:8-10)

We have to unlearn self-trust and relearn God-trust. Through this process, we will gradually observe how God has delivered us from peril and, as a result, more quickly cast our cares upon Him.

Why do we have problems entrusting our anxieties to God? For one thing, we might think that we can handle them ourselves. In this case, He will have to humble us first to reveal our need so that we might be fully invested in Him. Moses explained this process to the Israelites:

·       And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.  And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)

Trusting in God is trusting in His Word. It is only through painful humbling circumstances that we are enabled to trust in the Lord and His Word. Afterwards, Israel was able to look back at the how the Lord had delivered them on so many occasions. However, humbling must precede healing. Without the humbling, we fail to pray and receive not (James 4:2).