Thanksgiving and Enjoyment: Which Comes First?
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Are we not more thankful to God for the good things in our lives because we do not enjoy them enough? Or is it more that we do not enjoy them as much as we might because we are not more thankful for them to begin with? In other words does the enjoyment of God’s gifts determine our level of thankfulness or is it the other way around? Perhaps a spirit of thanksgiving not only must come before any true enjoyment of a blessing but also largely defines the “level” of enjoyment.
We live in a world replete with blessings from our Maker. This is true for both believers and unbelievers. God blesses the just and the unjust and blesses them both abundantly, though in different ways. In the case of Christians these blessings go beyond the realm of common grace to include the unique and transcendent favors that only the possessors of saving grace can experience. But, in both cases, God is a giver by nature and all of us are the recipients of the good things He “scatters abroad” to the creatures He has made in His own image.
But it is one thing for God to give us His gifts and quite another for us to fully receive them. The Church has no lack of believers who feel unfulfilled and listen with frustration as their brothers and sisters give thankful testimony to the unremitting goodness of God in their lives. These frustrated Christians ask themselves, “Why am I not enjoying these things that it seems second-nature for others to enjoy?” They may have felt some of the benefits of God’s favor in their individual Christian walks, but it seems in much smaller proportion to other saints in their midst.
In my experience the most joyful followers of Christ have almost always been the most thankful. Thanksgiving and the experience of joy are indissolubly linked in the economy of God. You cannot have one without the other. In the reality of this “spiritual law” I think most, if not all, believers would agree.
But the question of which comes first, thanksgiving or enjoyment, has not always been so clear. In some congregations it is implied, if not explicitly taught, that the pleasure supposedly inherent in whatever good thing our Lord has granted us is the greatest motivator for giving Him thanks. At the very least the gift is assumed to generate the impulse of gratitude. I would agree that there is some truth here, especially at the beginning of our Christian lives when we have just received salvation as a free gift that we only had to sincerely ask for to receive.
In fact it seems a bit illogical to give thanks for something we have not even begun to enjoy. “How”, we might inquire, “does one feel thankful for a gift just given and not yet benefitted from?” The answer is that the spirit of thanks does not necessarily wait for that to happen. For instance we can be thankful for the birthday gift someone gives us, one that we knew we wanted, as soon as the package is opened and the gift received. This thankfulness precedes the actual use of the gift and is different from that which arises from its use. We are initially just thankful for the thoughtfulness of the giver.
Beyond this it may be that it is the initial appreciation of the person doing the giving that makes our enjoyment of the gift all the more satisfying. This is because we do not enjoy the thing simply for itself, but also for the love expressed by the one who gave it to us.
So it is too, I believe, for those things that come directly from the greatest Giver of all. When we cultivate a spirit of thanksgiving towards that Giver as a first priority in life, we may come to a far deeper enjoyment of His gifts than we knew when we tried to be thankful based on how much we enjoyed whatever the thing was that He gave us. In this paradigm thankfulness does both precede and follow the blessing, but it is the initial gratitude that makes the blessing so much fuller.
After all, ultimately, it is receiving the Son of the Giver of all good things as our Lord and Savior that we have the most to be thankful for. Christ, Himself, is the greatest gift any of us will ever know and receiving Him both precedes and far exceeds any single gift that His Father, in His great love, may grant us afterwards.