Our church has a Thanksgiving Eve service, and I will deliver a brief meditation on the topic of “thanksgiving” (of course!). As I’ve been preparing, it occurs to me that American believers may confuse our culture’s way of expressing thanks with the biblical way of expressing thanks.
In our culture, we offer thanks by going directly to the person for whom we are grateful and saying, “Thank you for bringing meals to our family when we were sick.” However, the OT term translated “give thanks” or “thanksgiving” (Hebrew, yada) refers to a public declaration or confession. It shows up in texts like Psalm 100 or Psalm 107. I’m going to use Psalm 107 at our Thanksgiving Eve service. Thanksgiving, then, is not simply going to God and saying “thank you,” as appropriate as that may be. Rather it is publicly praising God for what He has done for us.
Peter O’Brien makes a similar comment about the Apostle Paul’s use of the term “thanksgiving” in the NT (Greek, eucharisteo). He writes: “Our English word ‘thank’ means to express gratitude to a person because of personal benefits received, and can therefore be rather self-centred; thanksgiving for the apostle, however, approximated what we normally understand by ‘praise’ [Pillar NT Commentary on Ephesians, p. 397, note 150].
This might be a good concept to clarify the next time you preach on the topic of thanksgiving.
Posted by Steve Mathewson at 11:02 AM on November 20, 2007
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