Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
There is a curious word in your Bible; you’ll find it in places like,
I will confess Thee among the peoples, O Lord, I will chant unto Thee among the nations (Psalm 58:12 lxx)
I will confess Thee, O Lord my God, with all my heart, and I will glorify Thy name for ever (Psalm 85:11lxx).
Meanwhile, often during the vigil, we sing the Psalm that begins, “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his mercy endures forever.”
That sounds pretty different, but it’s the same word: “Confess” and “give thanks” are from a Greek word that literally means to agree. To say the same thing. That’s why the Apostle John writes:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8,9).
One word in your Greek Bible means both to acknowledge your sins in confession, and also to acknowledge the goodness of God in thanksgiving.
Both confession of our sins and giving thanks to God are ways we line up our words and actions with reality. That puts truth in our mouths – so that our words can teach our minds, and our mind can teach our heart.
If we say that we have fellowship with God, and we walk in darkness, we are lying, and not doing the truth: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:6-7).
Well, that is great for people who walk in the light and do righteousness!
But what about sinners like me? I’m a terrible excuse for a disciple.
If that’s you, too, then agree with the Lord. Your words and actions reveal the truth about you. So speak the truth to the Lord. God is not afraid of your honesty.
“Lord, I keep promising to trust you but you know I’m full of fear, and my thoughts say you don’t love me, you won’t do what I need. I keep acting and speaking without compassion or gentleness, and my thoughts show I’m full of envy and impurity and my own superiority. I come to church but my thoughts are somewhere else, and I don’t even want to be here sometimes. My prayer life is boring as often as it’s inspiring. Lord, my words and my actions show that I don’t love you and there is no fear of God in me.”
What if we all talked to God like that?
Well, “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Did you think you were going to surprise the Lord?
“Lord, thou knowest when I sit down and when I stand. Before a word is even on my tongue, Lord, thou knowest it already” (Psalm 139mt).
You can’t offend the Lord with the truth. Now you’re telling the truth, you’re walking in light, and you’re in a place where you can receive grace.
It’s the place called humility.
* * *
Have you seen advertisements for products and supplements that are meant to purify your blood? You know, you’ve actually already got a liver and kidneys to do that. They work full-time pulling poisons out of your bloodstream.
Your soul has something similar. Day by day you encounter pain and suffering – this is normal in this world damaged by sin – just as the Lord promised, “In this world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33).
But your soul is not meant to fill up with the poison of pain and sorrow, or turn septic with anger or cynicism or shame; you have a mechanism that’s meant to purify the poisons from your soul. It is called thanksgiving.
The saints, with the wisdom of experience, tell us to give thanks even for betrayals, insults, disasters, and injustices, “Knowing that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing” (James 1:3-4).
We disciples of Christ are meant to thank the ones who rob and do us wrong, because they help free us from the sicknesses of soul that we call love of possessions, or love of our own rights.
But many of us are not strong or wise enough to “give thanks for all things” (Ephesians 5:20). So for us, it is vital to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 33:8lxx) and meditate on “his goodness, and his wondrous works to the children of men!” (Psalm 106:31lxx). To confess the truth about who God is.
How many times, in today’s Divine Liturgy alone, do we say that God is good and loves mankind? I sometimes meditate on what our lives might look like if we began to really believe that.
What if we taught ourselves thanksgiving as a discipline?
You didn’t learn to drive in a day. You practiced parking and changing lanes. My teacher repeated over and over again, before doing anything, look at your mirror and your blind spot, then hit your signal. I’ve been driving for 45 years and as I drive I still hear myself mumble mirror blindspot signal.
What you practice becomes normal to you.
We need to practice the goodness of God. Did you get cut off in traffic? “Bless them, Lord! Remember them forever in your kingdom!” Did someone fail to do what they said, or disrespect you to your face? “Lord, you are good and you love mankind. Do good to them, and I thank you that you are faithful to me.” Practice will put these thoughts down into your mind till they come out your lips.
Take the thoughts you permit in your head and the words you allow in your mouth, and line them up with what you know to be true. Persist until this is habit for you.
Because gratitude is not a mood. It’s a discipline. We can’t withhold thanks when we don’t get our own way; God will not be coerced, but will continue to let “rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).
And if we learn to confess the truth about God and about ourselves, then when a stone falls on our lives, we are not crushed by our grief – because we know how to “give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his mercy endures forever” (Psalm 135:1lxx). “I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness; I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord Most High” (Psalm 7:17lxx), “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knows right well” (Psalm 139:14kjv), for “he hath done all things well.” (Mark 7:37).
Saint Paul teaches how to pray: “With thanksgiving present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).
With thanksgiving, present your requests to God. We’re not delusional. We have pain and trouble, and our Lord expects us to tell him about it. You can’t offend the Lord with the truth. He’s not afraid of your honesty.
But, as you do, remember the mercy of God. Pour out your frustration and pain and grief. “Lord, I hate this!” and ask for what you will – with thanksgiving. That’s when the peace of God can guard your heart and mind.
If we will allow thankfulness to have its full work in us, it will purify the poison from our sufferings. Then “ye will be blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and perverse generation, in which ye shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15).
And don’t stop with merely verbally saying that God is good: DO good, especially when you have been wronged.
Friends at the parish in Boise have told me about a 99-year-old concentration camp survivor named Lyuba, now departed in blessed memory. She used to say, “When someone throws a rock at you, throw back bread instead!”
This is a virtue the Bible calls philótimo (Romans 15:20; 2 Corinthians 5:9; 1 Thessalonians 4:11). Philótimo is remembering how deeply we are indebted to the good God who loves mankind, so that we are filled with love for others – and without thought of our own rights, we love to honor and supply and serve others. “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise — the fruit of lips confessing his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased” (Hebrews 13:15-16).
Ever wondered why we praise the Lord? I assure you, the living God is not an egotist or narcissist who needs people to say nice things about him or his day is ruined.
I know one reason. I can confess that the Lord is “good” – but that’s one word, and it may not penetrate deeply to make me able to trust and be at peace.
So this morning, we’ve taught ourselves by singing Psalms:
Praise the Lord, O my soul; I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God while I have being.
Compassionate and merciful is the Lord, abounding in steadfast love and compassion.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
We praise the Lord to line up our mind’s concept of God with the reality that our God is kind, abundant and overflowing, wholesome and ready to make us strong and righteous with his own hand; faithful and beautiful and full of light, with no shadow of turning.
Like the Jesus Prayer, your confession that God is good may feel hollow and uninteresting if you’re not exposed to his revelation of himself in the scriptures. Your daily encounter with the reality of Christ in the Gospels gives shape your prayers and thanksgiving because he keeps showing you who he is.
Finally: Just as the steadfast lovingkindness of God is not a feeling or a mood but a constant energy from his unchanging character, in the same way, let thankfulness be your commitment and discipline, reflecting and participating in the character of God. It requires practice. No virtue becomes natural to us without being practiced daily — but with intentional repetition it can become our accustomed way of life.
The difference between the person who is hardened and destroyed by their suffering, and the one who is made compassionate and holy by suffering, is in the way they cooperate with the divine action of grace. Let thanksgiving open your mouth to confess that the Lord is good.
And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him (Colossians 3:15-17).
To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
