'What are you thankful for?' is, like every year, the wrong question

By now you’ve likely spent days listening to dopey morning television personalities putting it to you, Greg:

“What are you thankful for?”

The likely answers are the usual litany:

My family, my job, my house, my car, America, my savings account, my health, my hairline, my virility, etc.

As usual, we get gratitude wrong, because we make it about the what and not the whom. Or should I say the Whom? The Thanksgiving tradition, nominally anyway, may have originated with the pilgrims and the Indians sharing a meal, which may or may not have involved turkey. But it’s not about the meal, and it’s not even really about the blessings.

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It’s about the One who gives the blessings. It’s about gratitude toward God.

And indeed, it can be no other way. Gratitude isn’t sitting around and aimlessly appreciating your good fortune. It’s not about taking stock of all the good stuff in your life, nodding to yourself and thinking, “Eh! Not bad! I feel good about this.”

Gratitude never works that way. You can’t be thankful unless you know who to thank. If a guy stops and helps you change a tire, you don’t just think to yourself, “That was pretty cool.” You tell the guy thank you! If the gratitude isn’t offered to the one who blessed you, it’s no gratitude at all. You don’t post on Facebook: “Thankful for my changed tire!” Unless you’re a total jerk. You post on Facebook that a nice guy stopped and helped you and that you’re grateful to him.

This is how gratitude works.

My pastor preached on gratitude on Sunday, and he hit on some crucial points. Yet even the points he hit revealed a flaw in the way our modern culture thinks about gratitude. He made several points:

We sometimes gripe about our jobs, but we should be grateful that we have a job.

We sometimes gripe about our spouses, but we should be grateful that we have someone to spend our lives with.

We sometimes gripe about our children, but we should be grateful for the opportunity to be parents.

We sometimes gripe about our meals, but we should be grateful we have food.

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All of that is true, and yet: Even the invocation of those basic things implies that there should be conditions to gratitude. Should the person with no job, no spouse, no children and no food to eat be ungrateful to God? Not at all. Because God gave that person life, gave His son for the forgiveness of sins and has given that person gifts that can be used to improve at least some of the situations referenced above.

God has given us many good things, and yes we should be grateful to Him for those things. But the primary reason we should be grateful to God is simply that He is good. God had every right to obliterate humanity when we rebelled against Him, but because of His great and abiding love for us, He did not. Instead, he set in motion an astonishingly complex chain of events designed to restore Eden and give every one of us an opportunity to be there with Him.

America is a wonderful country, but the person living in war-torn Syria or socialist Venezuela should also be grateful to God, because He is on the throne and He loves them.

My children are healthy and well, but if they were not I should still be grateful to God because He calls me His own.

When we start making these lists of things we’re grateful for, they turn into little more than humblebrag sessions. Yes, everybody’s very happy so many things are going well in your life. But gratitude isn’t about you. It’s about God, His goodness and His mercy. When we go before God to thank Him today, we can really save a lot of time and spare Him the recounting of all the stuff. He knows all the things He’s done for you. What He wants is your heart and your devotion to Him. That is the only legitimate outcome of true gratitude, because it honors the One who provided the blessings in the first place.

So I don’t care what you’re grateful for. But I hope you’ll offer a grateful heart to Heaven because of the character of God, which is the real reason we have anything at all.