I love David’s Thanksgiving. I share the story in Children’s Church every year.
In 1 Chronicles, splashed across chapters 15 through 17, we see David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. He calls thousands of people to join him. He asks choirs to sing and musicians to play trumpets and cymbals, harps and lyres. He dances.
David provides food (a loaf of bread, a cake of dates, and a cake of raisins) for every man and woman to take home.
And then David shares a song he has written: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever.”
David’s gratitude can be seen and heard and tasted. It can be felt in his words: “Sing to the Lord, all the earth, proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.”
Then, in the first paragraphs of 1 Chronicles 17, David is at home in the palace, looking to the future, when Nathan the Prophet enters with encouraging news.
“Whatever you have in mind, do it, for God is with you,” Nathan said.
I’m not suggesting that God rewards grateful people. I’m suggesting that when you look for God in the world, and you recognize all that he has done, and all that he is doing, possibility is amplified. Opportunity becomes apparent. Imagination and energy increase. Gratitude reminds us that God is with us and he is moving, and he’s inviting us to move with him.
Let’s lift prayers of gratitude together.
On November 6, as the sun sets at around 5:12 pm, from wherever you are, with whomever wants to join you, let’s lift big prayers of thanksgiving for his provision and protection, his availability and imagination and inexhaustible energy. Let’s be thankful for our past year as a church family, let’s be thankful for His presence in our families, our neighborhoods, our friendships, our workplaces, our schools…
Let’s recite some of the lyrics of David’s song, found at 1 Chronicles 16:8-36. Feel its energy and its certainty and its hope.
And let’s pray for God to show us opportunities to make our gratitude seen and heard and tasted and felt throughout this month of Thanksgiving. Dance and sing, if you like, but let’s ask for ways to “declare his glory” in small ways, to seniors, to children, to neighbors, to co-workers, to first-responders and public servants, to teachers, to medical personnel, to the people we see every week but don’t know their names.
Let’s ask God to help us create communities where, as it is written in 1 Chronicles 16:37, “…all the people said “Amen” and “Praise the Lord.”