We’ve all been living with grocery inflation, but this is something else: cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun just spent $6.2 million on a banana taped to a wall. He called his purchase “not just an artwork,” claiming that “it represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.”

He now plans to eat his multimillion-dollar investment, but there is no word if it will be part of his Thanksgiving dinner.

The Benefits of Gratitude
According to the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving this week. This comes at a time when global risks such as AI, asteroid and comet impacts, climate change, nuclear war, severe pandemics, supervolcanoes, and the rising specter of world war continue to dominate the news.

Perhaps the former is a beneficial way of responding to the latter: no less an authority than the Harvard Medical School assures us that gratitude brings positive health benefits. Research associates thankfulness with social, emotional, and psychological well-being.

But here’s my question: Doesn’t gratitude logically require a person (or Person) to whom we are grateful?

Thankfulness can be a generalized feeling, which may explain the fact that nearly two-thirds of Americans will say a prayer or pronounce a blessing at their Thanksgiving meal, while less than half of us are religious enough to even have a membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque. However, feelings come and go depending on the circumstances of the moment.

For Thanksgiving to be a transforming lifestyle, it must be directed at a transforming source. It is one thing to be grateful for the benefits of electricity, for example, but another to connect to a wall plug that brings those benefits to us personally.

In the same way, God assures us that when we “enter his gates with thanksgiving” (Psalm 100:4), our gratitude to him positions us to experience the “steadfast love” he offers us (v. 5). This principle is so empowering that we will discuss it across this Thanksgiving week.

“Here Is God, No Monarch He.”
Br. James Koester of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston notes:

The world has, in fact, never seen, except once, the kind of king we mean when we speak of Christ the king. Instead of a throne, our king reigns from a cross and rules on his knees. His crown is thorns, His orb and scepter, a basin and towel. His law is love.

The British writer W. H. Vanstone expressed lyrically the mystery of his Incarnation:

Drained is love in making full,
Bound in setting others free,
Poor in making many rich,
Weak in giving power to be.

Therefore he who shows us God
Helpless hangs upon the tree;
And the nails and crown of thorns
Tell of what God’s love must be.

Here is God, no monarch he,
Throned in easy state to reign;
Here is God, whose arms of love,
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

And yet it is just this suffering sacrifice that gave us the gift for which we should be most thankful.

Of all our needs, to be saved from our sins and the hell to which they rightly consigned us is the greatest. It is human sin that most causes the depravations and crises of our fallen lives. And it is the eternal hell to which they destine us that is our most horrifying danger.

For a holy God to forgive our sins requires that their just penalty be paid by someone who had no sins of his own. Someone whose death in our place could purchase our salvation. Someone whose resurrection from the grave could presage and guarantee our own.

In short, someone who did just what Jesus did and does what Jesus does.

“Peace to My Head, Light to My Heart”
When we take our salvation for granted, we grieve the heart of the Father who watched his Son suffer a tortured death and bear our sins on his sinless soul. And we minimize the urgency of salvation for others, undermining our commitment to evangelism and missions.

So, as Thanksgiving week begins, let’s begin with the greatest reason for thanks in all the universe. If you have not yet accepted this gift, let me urge you to do so today. (For more, see my article, “Why Jesus?”) If you have, take a moment even now to thank Jesus for your salvation and its cost to his sinless soul. And resolve to make your gratitude tangible this week by sharing his gospel with others.

In the twelfth century, the Celtic poet Muiredach Albanach authored this hymn of praise:

How great the tale, that there should be,
In God’s Son’s heart, a place for me!
That on a sinner’s lips like mine
The cross of Jesus Christ should shine!

Christ Jesus, bend me to thy will,
My feet to urge, my griefs to still;
That even my flesh and blood may be
A temple sanctified to thee.

No rest, no calm my soul may win,
Because my body craves to sin
Till thou, dear Lord, thyself impart
Peace to my head, light to my heart.

May consecration come from far,
Soft shining like the evening star!
My toilsome path make plain to me,
Until I come to rest in thee.

Will you make his words your worship today?

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