Thanksgiving as an Offering
i've been told that it's "a good idea" to write topical newsletters
Family,
The modern American church always seems to offer coffee on Sunday mornings. Regardless of denomination, a non-trivial portion of the congregation keeps a fairly strict routine of entering the church, grabbing a cup of coffee, and then finding a seat for service.
Within the team, coffee has become a shorthand for exhorting the congregation to actively engage in worship regardless of their current dispositions. A few years ago, a worship leader at Lakewood was charging the room to worship, and she (very directly) encouraged the people in the room to “put down your coffee and raise your hands in worship,” to lean in to the worship being offered. After that service, the desire to see the room engage in worship has become synonymous with the desire to see them put down their coffee.
As someone who loved the Presence of the Living God so dearly, it was beautifully incomprehensible to that worship leader how someone could not engage in worship. To her, it doesn’t matter whether your day was good or bad, or whether it was convenient to be there or not, or whether the Broncos are playing or not, or whether you like the music today or not. If you saw God standing before you, it’s unlikely that you would continue to be holding your coffee: there would be a visceral and tangible response to being in the Presence of God, regardless of how you were personally feeling. Thus, if you believe that the Holy Spirit — or the Presence of God — inhabits the worship of His people, then worship on a Sunday morning becomes about so much more than just coffee.
In any worship, there’s always the tension of needing to “put down my coffee” even if I don’t feel like it, to recognize that He is holy regardless of how I feel about Him. Worship necessitates a surrender of myself, of my desires or dispositions, as a response to His holiness.
Why do I worship Him even when it’s inconvenient to how I feel? In many ways, it’s an expression of thanksgiving, of recognizing that He’s done more for me than I could ever imagine, even when it would be easier to bitterly evaluate what I think He could be doing better. In this way, thanksgiving becomes a surrender of the self, of prioritizing His holiness over anything that the self believes to be securely within its own province of ownership.
Psalm 50 describes thanksgiving as a sacrifice and goes one step further to say that such a sacrifice glorifies God. Speaking through the psalmist, God says that “the one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me.” Within the context that everything — all power and dominion and creation and talent — is actually His, thanksgiving becomes a recognition that He deserves the glory for how He expresses Himself in my life.
This was especially the case in the Old Testament when the sacrificial system was a critical part of humanity’s relationship with God. Sacrifices were not easy to offer: they were expensive and time-consuming. It would have been easier for the Israelites to not offer a sacrifice, to claim their labor and work as their own. In a similar fashion, thanksgiving in times of hardship or struggle requires a quiet strength, a resilience to offer a sacrifice that is emotionally expensive and time-consuming.
Further, not only does thanksgiving glorify Him, but it also reminds my heart that it should be subservient to its Creator. For me, worship is inconvenient and displeasurable when it is uncomfortable to recognize that my life is not about me. Shouldn’t what I think is fun or pleasurable take priority over anything else? Shouldn’t I be able to get my coffee and listen to some good music from the band on the platform?
In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a distinction between what I want and what He wants. In a world that hasn’t fallen, I would be so enamored with God and so cognizant of His holiness that my highest pleasure would be worshipping Him. C.S. Lewis writes that in Eden, which was the ideal relationship between God and His Creation, “pleasure was then an acceptable offering to God because offering was a pleasure.” But, in a fallen world, there exists a tension between offering to God what is rightly His and the satisfaction of elevating the self above anything else, including Him. Therefore, sacrificial worship realigns my heart to acknowledge that there is no higher pleasure than glorifying Him.
There’s also something special about corporately offering a sacrifice of worship in that it is encouraging to those who do not yet understand that offering is a pleasure. To see someone who has lost everything, whose life has been upended by the actions and decisions of others, who cannot possibly have anything to give thanks for.. to see that person worship is a radical glorification of God. It not only glorifies God to Himself but also glorifies Him in front of others. By choosing to offer thanksgiving in brokenness, it proves that God is glorified through the redemption of broken things, that He is glorified in the surrender of a broken and rebellious spirit.
When that worship leader urged everybody in the room to put down their coffee, it was out of a desire for every person in the room to experience the joy of sacrificial worship. Initially, it is neither enjoyable nor pleasurable to surrender the self, to take your hands out of your pockets, or to uncross your arms, or to put down your coffee and engage in worship. But, if thanksgiving is a sacrifice that glorifies God, then it is expected of me regardless of how I feel, and it becomes an immense pleasure to recognize that He is worthy of the thanksgiving I have to offer.
So, have a wonderful Thanksgiving, friends.
Here we go,
Isaac