Jesus’s blood seals our fate, and his Holy Spirit is our guarantee. The Father himself loves us. And if we have the Father’s love, we have everything we’ll ever need because he’s a good Father. The spiritual discipline of thanksgiving gives us eyes to see the goodness of God, and when we see the goodness of God, we can’t help but thank him for who he is.

When Paul drilled down to the very heart of sin in Romans 1:21, he said, “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.” A thankless heart isn’t just a problem. It is a sin against God. Every kind of evil begins there. Francis Schaeffer said, “A heart giving thanks at any given moment is the real test of the extent to which we love God at that moment” (A Christian View of Spirituality, 205). Thanking God is loving God. Thanksgiving is not an optional add-on to the Christian life; the Christian life cannot be lived without thanksgiving.
But giving thanks is hard, isn’t it? Paul called this world the “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). It’s not easy to thank God with a broken heart or a tragic diagnosis. It’s not easy to thank God in the depths of anxiety and depression. It’s not easy to thank God in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep and don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, but you think it’s more than you can bear. Nowhere does the Bible say thanking God is easy. But nowhere does the Bible say thanking God is optional. It’s not a practice reserved only for the good times. It’s a spiritual discipline necessary at all times.
Becoming Psalm 100 People
The Bible says, “If there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8). One classic Psalm of thanksgiving, Psalm 100, gives us things of which we can think about. In fact, Psalm 100 is a perfect Psalm to grow in the spiritual discipline of thanksgiving.
We start in the middle of Psalm 100, in verse 3, because it shows us the ground for our thanksgiving. Our God is the only God. It all begins there. The one true God is ours by grace in Christ. We are his people, his very own creation. He didn’t plop us here and retreat to heaven to see how this played out. He is involved in every detail of our life, the good and the bad, the sins and the successes. He is our Good Shepherd who takes care of us and watches over us, and even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, it’s so he can take us to the green pastures and still waters we long for. We are not the first people to experience this. The Bible is filled with those who have come before us, bearing witness to these truths. God has been faithful for generations. Throughout history, God has never disappointed anyone who trusted him, and he will not start with us. “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Ps. 100:5).
These truths find their ultimate expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ. “For all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Cor. 1:20a). Every promise in the Bible that God made, every hope in the Bible that God gave, and every joy in the Bible that God promised find their Yes in Jesus. Yes, life is still hard and still hurts, but in Christ, even death is now a portal into a better world with him. “And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28a). We have victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:57). We’ve been rescued! Jesus is the reason for our greatest thanks.
We can give thanks even in the hard stuff, because no matter how hopeless today may seem, there is hope for tomorrow. As Ray Ortlund said, “God has designed reality in such a way that we praise our way into a better future.” Thanksgiving moves us closer to God’s heart and a better tomorrow.
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Rather than taking a blank canvas and layering paint drop by drop, he takes a soiled heart, made hard by sin, and softens it, reworks it, in fact, remakes it into his image. His art is not of the kind to hang on a wall for admiration. It’s the kind that stands in the hall, shouting down the corridors the glory of the artist. He’s creating not a showpiece but sons and daughters for himself. And if he’s producing such characters for his own enjoyment and pleasure, to share a part in his joy and gladness, why would he be content with any remaining sin or spot or imperfection? 

The world recognizes Leonardo da Vinci as one of history’s great artists, arguably the greatest ever. His Mona Lisa is the most famous painting the world will ever know. He never finally finished the picture. He was still working on it at the time of his death. Leonardo kept it with him, moving it from city to city, never handing it over to the one who commissioned it, because he was never done perfecting it. He tinkered and touched up and remade it throughout his last years of life. He even went to the lengths of painting the undergarments so that the proper texture was visible on the outer garment. He was meticulous and discerning. He researched the muscles of lips on corpses to get the smile just right—a smile that has sparked conversation since its revealing so many years ago. Is she smiling or not? Look at her eyes, and it appears the answer is yes. Look at her mouth, and it becomes debatable. Who could paint such a face full of motion? Only Leonardo because he alone cared enough to research the exact movements of the human mouth. He was never finished until the painting attained a specific and intentional character. So too is God.
In his book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says about God something we see in Leonardo’s intention with his art.
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We should go out of our way to honor fellow Christians, to say out loud, in front of others, the wonderful things God is doing through his redeemed people. Call it honor time. Build it into your rhythm of life together with your church family. It is not to build a mutual admiration society meeting. It is to look at the work of God in another person and name it. It is to recognize the glorious ways the Holy Spirit is building his church through his people.

Every Tuesday night we circled our chairs to face one another. Sometimes it was more an oval than a circle, an outward expression of our mutual inability to get ourselves in right order. We came from work or from school or from wherever we had been on Tuesdays. We brought our Bibles. We opened with an ice breaker. It was something people in churches do all the time. But it was something I never knew existed.
Our time was broken into three segments. We talked theology, we confessed our sins to one another, and we encouraged one another. We called that last part “honor time,” stemming from Paul’s exhortation in Romans 12:10, “Outdo one another in showing honor.” It wasn’t flattery. Flattery is saying something nice to someone else hoping they will return the favor. Flattery is self-serving. Honor is not.
Perhaps the best verse in all of scripture to explain what it is to biblically honor another is found in Colossians 1:27, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Biblical honoring is looking at another Christian and calling out the work of God in them. It is not a mere human encouragement. It has divine origins. Most people never see God’s grace in their lives pouring out to others. Most people exist on a starvation diet of encouragement. Most people assume they are who they tell themselves they are. What else is there to believe? We all need someone to help us see Christ in us, the hope of glory.
Christ in You
We start with Christ, the Alpha and Omega (Rev. 22:13). He was before all things and is above all things (Col. 1:17). From him come all good things (James 1:17). Jesus is the most praise-worthy person in the universe. His goodness is pure. He deserves all glory and honor. He is the only one who is truly loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled (Gal. 5:22–23). He is full of grace and truth. He is merciful and faithful. Everything we desire to be in our devotion to God, Jesus is perfectly. So we look first to Jesus to see clearly the fruit in his people.
The Bible teaches us that Jesus is not only “out there”; he’s also “in here,” in the hearts of his people (Rom. 8:11). Christ is in his people. We barely have proper categories to understand this truth. Jesus is not beside us like a friend. He resides inside us like our conscience, or our heart, or our brain. He indwells his people. The only perfect man to ever live is more than just a man. He is God—one with the Father and Spirit. By his Spirit, he lives in the hearts of his people.
The greatest truth about every Christian is the indwelling of God himself! Christ in you, the hope of glory.
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Our only comfort in life is that we may belong to another. If we are our own, our demise is a welcome thing. Finally, the trouble is ended. The pain will stop. But if we are not our own, our problems lie in the hands of someone else. We have an end to which we are headed. There is a solution to all our problems. There is one who cares even when we struggle to anymore. There is one who makes it all matter, who gives it all deep meaning.

My back hurts almost all the time now. It starts when I wake up. I turn on my left side to stop the alarm from waking my wife and notice the slight twinge of discomfort. If I am not careful, laying there on my pillow with my head tilted the wrong way will prepare me for a day of nagging ache.
I suppose this is part of what it means to grow old. Pain comes more quickly—if it ever really leaves. Like the birds of morning and the crickets of night, the noise of pain exists in an ever-present state, sitting in the background of everything else going on. The difference, of course, is no one considers the pain beautiful. No one stops to listen to the pain. What’s the point? It only makes it stronger.
When I finally put that first foot on the floor and rouse myself from the warmth and comfort of the bed, the pain moves to my heels. When I sit down with my coffee to read in my leather chair, the back pain returns. It is dulled only by the thoughts racing through my brain of the upcoming day. The meetings, the problems, the conversations, the projects, all of it sitting on my shoulders. I am Atlas without the strength to bear it.
However, even a bad day for me is a better day by far than most in the world both now and before. I am, after all, starting my day in a warm bed and with hot coffee. I drive a nice car to a well-paying job with enough challenges for a lifetime. I am surrounded by people who require only my attention and effort. I go home to a big family with a good dinner. Seven months out of twelve, Major League Baseball is in season. It is not a bad life. Not by a long shot.
But the pain is still there. Life is good, but it is not easy.
The right attitude would help, I’m sure. Gratitude would make a world of difference, I know. I get there sometimes. I force myself into it. But it doesn’t remove the ache. It doesn’t solve the problems. Seeing the good side doesn’t make the bad side less real. It doesn’t shine it up enough to camouflage it from the rest of life.
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Jesus can bear more reality than we can. He chose to bear more reality than we can. He came all the way down, all the way in, all the way through. The reality we run from, he came to live inside. He looked poverty in the face. He felt the leprous skin on his hand. He smelled the offensive incense of false offerings. He heard the blasphemies of man. He tasted the sting of betrayal and death. The reality we cannot bear, he chose.

In Four Quartets T.S. Eliot said, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” We shield our eyes. We busy ourselves. Like dealing with a fussy child, we direct our anxious hearts to something else hoping for a moment’s peace. Neil Postman wrote about “amusing ourselves to death.” We cram our lives with TV shows and movies and songs and social media and YouTube videos and everything else. We can face the reality of others, as long as we don’t have to tune into ours. Inside each of us is darkness we cannot face, and uncertainty we cannot bear. It’s all points to, as Eliot says, “one end, which is always present.”
We cannot bear very much reality. So we go into virtual reality. Strapping on our headsets, we depart from this world to another. We fight fake battles and climb mountains of pixels. We bowl alone, our eyes wrapped in technology taking us far, far away without leaving our chair. The day behind us falls like a blanket to the floor and the day ahead floats out front but we can’t see it. We don’t want to see it. We want an escape. The darkness is too much, so we blind it with light from a thousand sources.
Our day is not unique, only novel. We have more options for distraction. We have easier worlds to enter and more roads to take. But we cannot, no matter what we do or where we go, escape the one end, which is always present. That future we fear is only a day away. The one end makes us anxious so we prefer not to think too much about it. We cannot bear very much reality.
But, of course, reality is where we live.
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Hope, for the Christian, is as firm as can be, and even our suffering can’t take it away. As Packer goes on to say, “Though the Christian life is regularly marked more by suffering than by triumph (1 Corinthians 4:8-13; 2 Corinthians 4:7-18; Acts 14:22), our hope is sure and our mood should be one of unquenchable confidence: we are on the victory side.” We are on the victory side not because we are overcomers but because Jesus, our hope, is the Overcomer.

The two disciples began the seven-mile walk home from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Despairing recent events, they didn’t notice the man joining their party until he began talking. Had they known him? They certainly had, though they were unaware at the moment. In an ironic twist, the topic of their home going discussion was now one of their carpool. The one whom they had hoped was the one to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21) was alive again. Their hope was not put to shame (Romans 5:5). But they couldn’t see that yet. Oh, how hope is often veiled by our own doubts!
It’s a common fear, this putting to shame of one’s hope. It is a fire easily extinguished by the wet blanket of the world’s disappointments. By definition, hope is something future-oriented, out beyond, something promised though not yet possessed. Anything out in the future is, of course, uncertain, and that uncertainty plays with our mind. The things we hope for (and hope in) can let us down. We’ve been there a thousand times, haven’t we? The hoped-for Christmas present never comes. The hoped-for spouse never asks you out. The hoped-for promotion never materializes. To grow up in this world is to grow up learning to deal with disappointment.
Hope, it seems, is a fickle thing. Perhaps it’s something better left alone. That’s why so many today seem to have none. Why bother? So cynicism reigns. Things might be okay later on, but don’t get your hopes up. Everything ultimately disappoints. Even death, that release into the great land beyond is now thought by so many as a great nothingness—a removal of sorts from all that matters, never subjecting one to pain again, nor, for that matter, to any other emotion. Culturally, our hope amounts to nothing. The great hope of the enlightenment, that we were progressing upwardly, soon to be far better versions of ourselves, is no longer enough. We aren’t progressing—the twentieth century proved that well enough—but now we’re barely even trying. We dull our fears with entertainment and erase our eternal hopes with something more instantly gratifying: another hit of sugar, another purchase from Amazon, another trip to the beach, anything short-lived because who has time for things to come one day? So credit card bills carry a never decreasing balance because someone has to foot the bill of our hopelessness.
The Emmaus road disciples would find a home in twenty-first-century America. Obviously, Jesus is dead, yet the world still spins. Death is imminent but better left unconsidered. Going home is the only option left. At least there’s comfort there as we wait out the rest of our days.
But as they walked, their new partner rebuked their lack of faith and spoke wonderful things to them from the Bible. He proved something, though they weren’t sure at the time what the point was. All they knew was that their hearts began to light up with something pushing them onward, a burning inside that restored the hope they thought they’d lost (Luke 24:32). They went home despairing a dead Jesus but on the way, they met a living savior.
Hope is born out of such things. It’s when our head is lowest and our hearts are dimmest that Jesus does his best work, even if that work has been there from the foundation of the world. It’s us that needs to see it, and it’s to us that Jesus comes, rebuking if he must, but still lovingly bearing with us as if we’re the only ones in the world. To him, we are. You, Christian, are his mission—the very reason he lived, died, and rose again. In his glory, he has all the time in the world for you. All the patience too, it seems.
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