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What a beautiful thing, God, to give thanks, to sing an anthem to you, the High God! To announce your love each daybreak, sing your faithful presence all through the night. 
Psalm 92:1, 2 (the Message).

The 16th century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross famously stated that God refuses to be known except by love. However we apprehend God by other means - the beauty of creation, the joy of community or the grace of life itself - we return always to the foundation of his love. 

Paul prayed that above everything his readers would be rooted and grounded in love and that they’d be granted ever-deepening power to perceive the vastness of God’s love. We often affirm that as creatures made in his image we have an innate longing for God. We could define the longing further as that which corresponds to our hearts and our relational nature: to be known and loved. If we were able to start with a blank slate with no knowledge of God and search our deepest selves as to what kind of God we would wish there to be, we would find that we long for a God who knows and loves us.

C. S. Lewis wrote: “You asked for a loving God: you have one...the consuming fire himself, the love that made worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work...exacting as love between sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their creator’s eyes.”

It does pass reason, but is there any greater wonder and joy than this? No, it’s the pearl of great price. The Psalmist calls us to integrate the wonder of God’s love into the rhythm of our lives, proclaiming and offering thanksgiving morning and evening for his love and faithfulness.

How may we respond to God’s love? By giving thanks. Psalm 92 is uniquely named a Song for the Sabbath. How beautifully appropriate that in observing the Sabbath - God’s gift of rest from activity and labor - attention is turned towards him in thanksgiving.  We’re called to stop, to interrupt the flow of our lives. We’re called to both celebrate and ponder the fruit of God’s active love toward us: gladdened hearts, wonder at his unseen depths; strength for life, and the flourishing of lives lived in his loving presence.

 It is because of the bedrock of God’s love that our thanksgiving extends to those areas of our lives that are painful and inscrutable.  Paul admonishes his readers in Thessalonica: Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. To live in the ever-increasing practice of thanksgiving is not to deny the pain and challenges of life, Paul didn’t!  Rather it’s to return often to the reality of God’s goodness and care that is both transcendent and imminent and that will infinitely outlast any hardship in this life.

 Let us be among those who take occasion, to stop and ponder - in the course of a day, through silent prayer or through gathering in community - the loving care of God.  Let us offer thanksgiving, because it is truly a beautiful thing to give thanks, to sing an anthem to the High God, to announce his love each daybreak, and his faithful presence all through the night.
                                                                              Paul Woodyard -  Imago Dei Christian Communities.

For reflection, prayer and thanksgiving:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. John 15:9.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:16-19.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38,39

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash