Welcome to the Servants of Grace podcast hosted by Dave Jenkins. Our podcast exists to provide trustworthy, expository messages through the Bible and faithful answers to your theology questions. Now, for today's episode, let's join our host, Dave Jenkins. Well, welcome back to the Servants of Grace podcast. My name is Dave and I'm the host for this show. And on today's episode, Listener writes in and they have a great question. And the question is this, how is the story of your life told by your Thanksgiving? Well, first I want to say happy Thanksgiving to all of you here in the United States. Thanksgiving is a Pauline theme, ever relevant for all of us on any given day. This national holiday is a fitting time for a question. On Romans 121, and how God worded Thanksgiving, or a lack of it, it shapes the trajectory of our whole lives. How is the story of your life told by your Thanksgiving? This really is an astonishing text. I've thought about it many times over the years. I've even spent a lot of time just soaking it up, especially because of its claim in Romans 121 that every human being knows God. They know his eternity. They know his power. They know his being creator of all. They know his deity. Everybody knows God. Atheists know God. Agnostics know God. Animists know God. Every person you meet on the street knows God. Well, apart from God's saving grace, Romans 1.28 says, every human being suppresses that knowledge. The reason we do this is because every human being finds other things preferable to God himself, which is the very essence of evil, the essence of sin. Jeremiah 2.13 says, my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. That is the arch-evil, the primal sin, the root of all other evils. find things, people, the creation, preferable to God. And so even though those other things are like dirt by comparison, we don't prefer God. We don't find God attractive. We don't find God desirable, beautiful, satisfying. That's the evil of all evils. And that's why Paul says we suppress the knowledge of God that we have because that knowledge shows him as preferable to all things. So we claim not to know God. We claim not to know Him, but we do know Him. We get angry at the Lord for not making Himself more plain, but Paul is saying that God has made Himself perfectly plain to everybody in Romans 119. Our problem is not lack of revelation. Our problem is that we don't want to see. We don't want to see, and so we suppress and pretend that we don't see. Paul says that's our darkness. That's our foolishness. That's the futility of our mind in Romans 121. We find God unattractive, distasteful, offensive, even abhorrent. Then, in all kinds of ways, we exchange His infinitely beautiful, all-satisfying glory for pitiful subsuit-like images of ourselves, our cultural artifacts that exalt our ingenuity and even our intelligence and our creativity and our vaunted independence. The result is that humankind is under the just wrath of God, so that He hands us over to more and more greater and greater degradation, which we see happening all around us. And even in the middle of this dreadful description of our human condition, Paul mentions the positive alternative to that darkness and that foolishness and that futility and that suppression of the truth, namely, glorifying and thanking God precisely because He is God. That's what's missing. Glorifying and thanking God. That would change everything. Now let me read Romans 1, 18-23. It says this, The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteous men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them, or made it plain. For His invisible attributes, namely His internal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived. Ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made, He is our Maker, and we know it. And so they are without excuse. For although they knew God, and that's probably the most amazing statement in this text, they did not honor or glorify Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So what our listener is asking about today is the place and even the function of thankfulness in Romans 1. The text there in Romans 1 says, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks. So Paul mentions both honor, which is like glorify and give thanks because he knows that they're overlapping realities. You see, when we thank God, we're showing him to be glorious and no one can truly glorify God with a heart of ingratitude. So to glorify and even thank are overlapping realities, but they're not the same. There are ways to feel and to think and to act that glorify God, but we wouldn't call them thankfulness. The reality of glorifying God, it's wider. It's bigger. It's a bigger reality than thanking God. Thanking God is a subset, a subspecies of glorifying God. And yet, Paul, of all the ways to glorify God that he could have chosen, he chooses to mention thankfulness alongside glorifying God. Well, why is that? Well, first, it relates to the fact that Paul has just said that what can be known about God is known through the things He has made. In other words, everything a human being looks, whether in the sky, the forest, the mountains, the rivers, the sea, the land, the family, the mirror, all of it, everywhere, you look as being made by God and as a gift of God from the maker to humanity. Every single thing that gives us any pleasure at all in this world is a gift of God. Now the heart response that God created for glorifying him for his gift is thankfulness. That's what he created. That's what he designed in the human heart as a response to this vast, vast array of made things, of gifts. Of course, it's not wrong to speak of being thankful to God for God himself. That's not wrong. But in the Bible, thankfulness most clearly relates to God's gifts and his deeds to bless us. So for sure, God himself is the gift, and we must be clear about that. And if we don't arrive there, we haven't arrived. Still, it is still right and good that our hearts brim. They just brim with thankfulness that God is maker. Everything that is not God was made by God. Therefore, at every turn, everything we look at all the time, 24-7, we should feel profoundly, continually, earnestly thankful for God's gifts. And that's one of the reasons why Paul lists thankfulness as a counterpart to honor or glorify in our text today in Romans 1. Paul also calls out being thankful to God, alongside glorifying God, because built into thankfulness is humility, a sense of dependence and gladness and needy receiving. Humility, dependence, glad, neediness, not surprisingly, these sound a lot like faith. And maybe if you press Paul, he would say true thankfulness towards our all-glorious, all-powerful, all-providing Creator. It includes humble, dependent, glad trust. Thankfulness and trust may not be the same thing, but they are so intimately and integrally connected that Paul thinks thankfulness is a good thing to mention here. where he also wants to call attention to trust. Can anyone truly say, I am joyfully thankful to God for his all-satisfying beauty and his all-governing power and his all-providing goodness to me, but I don't trust him? Nobody can talk like that. Something is inauthentic if that kind of sentence is spoken. So thankfulness, when oriented on God, is a deep and even a powerful experience. And so when thankfulness fails, Paul describes his absence like this, saying, They became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Their claim to be wise was shown to be foolishness, and they fell into sacrilege of exchanging God for images, especially the one in the mirror. That's the absence of thankfulness. It's a horrible, horrible description. Now the absence of thankfulness as the absence of humility, dependence and gladness and trust is one way of describing the darkness and the folly and the futility of our times. It's the opposite, you could say, A pride with a capital P, the very pride that calls our shame glory, exactly the way Romans 1 describes it when they exchange God for the person in the mirror. The exchange of the opposite sex for the same sex and our passions is an outflow, Paul says, of that very exchange of God for the person in the mirror. And there are many ways to describe the desperate need of the world, and according to Romans 1, one way is repentance from pride and independence and self-sufficiency towards a humble, dependent, happy, trustful, neediest for God, as he's revealed himself in Jesus, in the word of God, which we call thankfulness. Well, I want to thank you for listening or watching today's episode of the Servants of Grace podcast. Until next time, may God bless you and keep you. Thank you for listening to the Servants of Grace podcast today. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a rating on the app, and share our episode with your friends and family. 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