Have you ever publicly thanked God for your blessings?
Many of us Christians share on social media how we have been blessed with full stomachs, new jobs, new houses, cars, boats and holidays. Sound familiar? Face book is full of Christians giving credit to God for the good stuff.
But what about the bad? Would you ever thank God privately, let alone publicly for losing your job, smashing your car, going hungry, or dare I even mention the ‘c’ word, getting cancer?
The other day I read a very thought-provoking article by The Accidental Missionary that raised the subject of how we talk or rather don’t talk about God’s action in our lives. You can read the full piece here:
In this article titled, “The one thing Christians should stop saying”, the author highlighted our willingness to give recognition to God in the good things and the good times we have. It also showed how such notions of blessing didn’t quite square with Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount where he described those who are being blessed as the ones who are more likely to be the materially poor, were dissatisfied, hungry and basically having a hard time.
So should we stop calling ourselves blessed?
On one hand we only have to look to the New Testament to find Jesus taking up the practice of giving thanks to God for food; the book of Psalms encourages us to praise God for things like creation and His sovereignty. Many of us don’t like sounding unthankful, like we are some self-made people. Some of us realise that life is very fragile and material blessings are very tenuous and so we want to give thanks to God when they arrive.
I really appreciated the thoughtfulness of this article, but I didn’t find the author’s suggestion to alter our language from ‘we have been blessed with’ to ‘I am grateful for’ to be very useful. Grateful to whom? To mother nature? To ourselves for our hard work? Don’t we mean just the same thing as ‘blessed’, that we are grateful to God? Christians are trying to express the gratefulness to God as the ultimate source, which I think is a good thing and encouraged by Scripture.
Are we always blessed?
I suspect the problem lies in not expressing how God is working in our lives through all things. Yes things like disappointment, starvation, unemployment sickness and grief. We are either silent, or we are praying for God to put things right or put things back to normal. By ‘normal’ we mean ‘smooth sailing’ but you only have to glance at the book of Revelation, (despite how opaque that book may first seem), to see that easy living should not be the expected norm for the Christian. Our problem perhaps lies in only giving thanks for the material comforts, the good times but being silent during the hard times. Perhaps we need to trust the NT and ‘give thanks always’ (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Something I’m terrible at doing privately in hard times and for which I have trouble finding words to express publicly.
One of the reasons we are in the cross-hairs of atheists is because we haven’t found this language equivalent for times of suffering. Ricky Gervais cleverly highlighted this in his telly movie ‘The Invention of Lying’. ***Language warning***. People learnt that ‘The Man in the Sky’ (God) was always in charge so he was responsible for both the good things in the world and the bad. So this made him ‘kind of a good guy, but also a kind of a prick too’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlX0Fk-701Q
Ricky is more honest than we are. We credit ‘The Man in the Sky’ with our good times, but are silent when He serves up the hard times. If God is in control when bad stuff happens aren’t we stupid, irrational people who can’t spot the obvious contradiction?
I’m not sure if we can call cancer a blessing. The thing itself is a terrible disease. It is not good. However, the Bible I think encourages us to be grateful to God as the ultimate source in all things but without evil intent.
King Solomon answered the question in his beautiful and very famous poem in Ecclesiastes 3. Opening with these words, “there is a time for everything under heaven”. God has made everything beautiful in its time (Eccles 3:11). In other words despite appearances God works his purposes for good, even when the most mind-bending evil happens on our planet. The apostle Paul takes us further in the book of Romans reminding Christians that for those who trust in Jesus, God works everything out for their good (Romans 8).
Blessed through restless contentment?
I remember reading the story of Corrie Ten Boom and her sister Betsy as they tried to survive the concentration and extermination camps of the Nazis in World War II. When the two sisters are moved to a set of new barracks they find that the barracks are filled with fleas. Betsy insisted that they keep praying and relying on God no matter what. So they listed some of the good things they still had such as each other and their health and again thanking God for their remaining ‘blessings’. At the end of the prayer Betsy added one more thing, ‘thank you God for the fleas’. Corrie could not bear this and thought it was just plain stupidity. How can you thank God for fleas? At least this is a step up from the loud silence Ricky Gervais so cleverly mocked. But Betsy reminded her that they were to thank God in all circumstances (Philippians 4:4). Why would you do this? You can only do this if you trust God is in complete control. You see, no matter what happened in life, no matter how much was stripped away Betsy knew that God was enough.
I think the state of mind we are looking for is joy or contentment. Now, I’m sure Betsy didn’t want to stay with the fleas, content with the status quo. No she longed for liberation. But she rested in God’s ‘time for everything’. Maybe it’s a restless kind of contentment.
Later it turned out that in these barracks the ladies were able meet freely, pray and do Bible study unmolested by the guards. Why was this so? The guards avoided the barracks because of the fleas! So Betsy and Corrie were able to cling closer to God and draw others toward a living and eternal hope through the seemingly hopeless circumstances of their new flea ridden barracks in the death camp.
I read of a Christian whose grief at losing a loved one in the Christchurch earthquake a few years back was made worse by people who stated publicly that God had nothing to do with it. There were church leaders who frankly denied God’s control over world events like this. But the Christian man found comfort in knowing that ‘there is a time for everything’ under heaven. It was more bearable that God was sovereign. In Jesus he trusted that God works out all things for his good. God was enough.
So what is the language we need to have when faced with 9/11 or the Lindt Café, permanent disability or chronic fatigue? When everything we normally call a blessing is stripped away, it’s difficult to imagine saying “I’m still blessed”. Or even that I’m grateful to God for the fact that I’ve lost everything. Sounds perverse doesn’t it?! Suffering itself is not good.
Should we join Monty Python and encourage each other to always look on the bright side of life? What bright side is there after all when you are hanging on across? For Jesus, all was lost, ‘Father why have you forsaken me?’ But, even God when had abandoned him and there was no blessings to count, no bright side, he entrusted himself to God who will judge and put things right. God raised him from the dead. God was enough.
I think the big elephant in the room is the problem of suffering. Our inability to articulate joyful gratitude to God in all circumstances is injurious to ourselves and confusing to unbelievers (Philippians 4:4 “Rejoice in the Lord always”)
Maybe when we hit rock bottom like Job, the best we can manage might simply be, ‘I’ve lost everything, I can’t even raise my mind to think of a single blessing that remains, but wait on…I know this, I have Jesus. And Jesus is enough”
In 2015 Stephen presents a new show for his kids and families gospel show, Anton's Antics 'If God is in control, why doesn’t He stop bad times happening?' (based on Ecclesiasts 3) www.antonsantics.com
PS: This is not everything that could be said, the problem of evil and suffering is very complex and I’m no expert. One very good book on the subject is by Don Carson called ‘How Long O Lord’.
