(upbeat music) - Happy Thanksgiving to all of you here in the States. Thanksgiving is a Pauline theme that we read about all over in the New Testament, ever relevant for all of us on any day of the week, any day of the year. But this national holiday is a fitting time for a question on Romans chapter one, verse 21, and how Godward Thanksgiving, or a lack of Godward Thanksgiving, shapes the trajectory of our whole lives.

How is the story of your life told by your Thanksgiving or its absence? This is a great question from a listener who likely isn't celebrating Thanksgiving Day today, James, because he lives in the beautiful, rugged peninsula of Cornwall, England. Here's his email. Pastor John, thank you for your ministry and for this podcast.

I was wondering if you can explain the logic of the trajectory Paul talks about in Romans chapter one. Specifically, I wanna better understand the role of God-centered thanksgiving in verse 21. Quote, "For although they knew God, "they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him." End quote.

This failure to thank leads to a deeper and deeper sin bondage and greater and greater judgments from God on sinners. So my question is, negatively, how does thanklessness help us understand what sin is? And positively, how does thanksgiving shape the trajectory of our lives? - This really is an astonishing text.

I thought all over again, I mean, I spent a lot of time just soaking in the amazing statements of this text, especially because of its claim 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.

Everyone knows God. Atheists know God. Agnostics know God. Animists know God. Every person you meet on the street knows God. And apart from God's saving grace, it says, every human being suppresses that knowledge. And the reason we do is that every human being finds other things preferable to God, which is the very essence of evil, the essence of sin.

"My people have committed two evils," Jeremiah says. "They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and dug out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water," Jeremiah 2:13. This is the arch evil, the primal sin, the root of all other evils. Humans find things, people, the creation preferable to God, 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 him for not making himself more plain. But Paul says God made himself perfectly plain to everyone. 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. So Paul says that's our darkness. That's our foolishness. That's the futility of our minds. We find God unattractive, distasteful, offensive, even abhorrent. And then in all kinds of ways, we exchange his infinitely beautiful, all satisfying glory for pitiful substitutes, like images of ourselves, cultural artifacts that exalt our ingenuity and intelligence and creativity and vaunted independence, with the result that humankind is under the just wrath of God so that he hands us over to more and more and greater and greater degradation, which we see happening all around us.

And in the middle of this dreadful description of our human condition, Paul mentions the positive alternative to that darkness and foolishness and futility and suppression of the truth, namely glorifying and thanking God, precisely as God. That's what's missing, glorifying and thanking God. And that would change everything. So let me read the text so that people can hear for themselves everything I just said.

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. So I'm just reading the text now. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them, made it plain. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

He's a maker and they know it, we know it. So they are without excuse for although they knew God, that's probably the most amazing statement in the text. Although they knew God, they did not 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 James is right. James is asking about the place and the function of thankfulness in this text. For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks to him.

And I think when Paul mentioned both glorify and give thanks, he knew that they were overlapping realities. When we thank God, we are showing him to be glorious and no one can truly glorify God with a heart of ingratitude. So they are overlapping realities, but they're not the same, are they?

There are ways to feel and think and act that glorify God, but we wouldn't call them thankfulness. So the reality of glorifying God is wider, it's bigger. It's a bigger reality than thanking God. Thanking God is a subset, subspecies of glorifying God. And yet Paul, of all the ways he could have mentioned that glorify God, he chooses to mention thankfulness alongside glorifying God.

Now, why is that? First, I think 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, everywhere a human being looks, the sky, the forest, the mountains, the rivers, the sea, the land, family, the mirror, all of it, everywhere you look is made by God and is a gift of God, the maker to humanity.

Every single thing that gives us any pleasure at all in this world is a gift of God. And the heart response that God created for glorifying him for his gifts 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, gifts.

It's not wrong to speak of being thankful to God for God. That's not wrong, but mostly in the Bible, thankfulness relates to God's gifts and his deeds to bless us. For sure, God himself is the gift. And if we don't arrive there, we haven't arrived, but it is right and good that our hearts brim, they just brim with thankfulness that God is a maker.

Everything that is not God was made by God. Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look, all the time, 24/7, we should feel profoundly, continually, earnestly thankful for God's gifts. I think that's one of the reasons why he listed thankfulness as the counterpart to glorify in this text. Secondly, I think Paul called out being thankful to God alongside glorifying God, because there is built into thankfulness, humility, a sense of dependence, and gladness in needy receiving.

So humility, dependence, glad neediness, which not surprisingly sounds a lot like faith. I think if you pressed Paul, he would say true thankfulness toward our all glorious, all powerful, all providing creator includes humble, dependent, glad trust. They 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 when 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. It's something's inauthentic if that kind of sentence is spoken. Thankfulness when oriented on God is a deep and powerful experience.

And so Paul describes its absence like this. When thankfulness failed, quote, 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 the sacrilege of exchanging God for images, especially the one in the mirror. That's the absence of thankfulness.

It's a horrible, horrible description. So yes, I think James is right. The absence of thankfulness as the absence of humility and dependence and glad neediness and trust is one way of describing the darkness and folly and futility of our own times. It's the opposite, you could say, of pride, 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, because the exchange of the opposite sex for the same sex in our passions is an outflow, Paul says, of that very exchange of God for the person in the mirror.

So there are many ways to describe the desperate need of the world. And one, according to Romans 1, is repentance from pride and independence and self-sufficiency toward a humble, dependent, happy, trustful neediness for God as he has revealed himself in Jesus, which we call thankfulness. - Wonderful, thank you, Pastor John.

It is right and good that our hearts brim with thankfulness, that God is a maker. Everything that is not God was made by God. Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look, all the time, 24/7, we should feel profoundly, continually, earnestly thankful for God's gifts, amen. May the course of our lives be charted by our Godward thanksgiving.

Thanks for joining us on this Thanksgiving day, or maybe the day after, a couple days after, or whenever you catch up on the podcast. In either case, we pray that your Thanksgiving is or was a wonderful day filled with Godward thanks. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you Monday.

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