1 Thessalonians 5:18 – “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Thankfulness and thanksgiving are frequent commands in the Bible.  Many Christians yearn to know God’s will for their lives; we should ask our Lord what he wants when we face decisions.  At the same time, the Bible already tells us several things that are “God’s will for you” – usually certain character traits that God wants us to cultivate.  These, in turn, will have a significant impact on how we pursue our careers, family relationships, ministry, and so forth.

The New Testament repeatedly instructs us to be thankful in every situation and circumstance (see Ephesians 5:20; Philippians 4:6; Colossians 3:17).  We should intentionally develop the practice of finding things to thank God for in every circumstance, good or bad.  This does not mean that we should thank God for a disease, death, or other afflictions – we know that the Enemy sends those things, too.  Some believers make the mistake of thinking they will seem super-spiritual if they thank God for bad things that happen to them.  This is not Biblical – we should not attribute every bad thing that happens to God, especially when the Bible is so clear that there are evil forces in the world.  We should thank God within our trials, despite our trials, but we do not have to thank Him for the trial, as if God is the author of disease and poverty.  When we are sick or grieving the loss of loved ones, we can thank God for other blessings we have, like eternal life and the comfort of His Spirit.  We thank God that the situation is no worse than it is, and that we know He will bring us through it.  We do not have to pretend tragedies are not tragedies.

God delights in our gratitude and expressions of thanks to Him (thankfulness is therefore very important), but we should not condemn ourselves for the fact that we need to improve in this area. It is very rare that the Bible condemns or criticizes anyone for not being thankful enough (see, for example, Romans 1:21 or Luke 17:17), and these are about people who were not thankful AT ALL – they simply ignored God completely.  We should not think of the fact that we could MORE thankful as some kind of sin.  Most believers thank the Lord for things regularly; at the same time, we all need to grow in this area.  Christian virtues are not an either-or, succeed-or-fail endeavor, but rather as something that all Christians have to some extent, but that we all need more, no matter how much we already have.

We must address a strange practice regarding thanksgiving that is prevalent among many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches: the habit of praying for a miracle and simultaneously thanking God for the miracle, even though it has not yet occurred.  Sometimes they say, “I thank you in advance knowing you will answer my prayers.”  Others say, “God, I thank you because I know you have ALREADY healed this person!” It is strange enough that they are thanking God for something before it happens; it is stranger still that these people believe that it makes God more likely to do the miracle (or answer the prayer) if they have uttered these words and thanked Him already.  They act as if thanking God in advance were a magical incantation; that somehow they are binding or forcing God to do the miracle.  God appreciates the thankfulness overall, and God often answers the prayers, but thanking God in advance does not cause God to act or make it more likely that He will answer the prayer.  It is good to have faith that God answers prayer, but we must be careful about suggesting that the specific words we use matter so much.  This is the mentality of witchcraft, not of prayer.  Witchcraft starts with the idea that saying special words or doing certain rituals makes something happen miraculously.  Prayer is the opposite – it is simply our conversation with our Heavenly Father, part of our relationship with Him, an expression of our dependence on Him to meet our needs.  The witchcraft mentality seeks to control things, to bring events under human control.  Prayer, in contrast, yields or surrenders control of the situation to God.  Therefore, we should not teach church members to thank God in advance for things.  They should thank Him for the privilege of coming into His presence, and we should certainly thank God when He answers the prayers.  We need not turn prayer into pretending.