This year has been challenging for all of us with inflation at a 40-year high, interest rates climbing ever higher, and the cost of going to the grocery store feeling like a major drain on our bank account. There are times in life when we see only what we do not have. We become discontent, frustrated, and dissatisfied.

Sometimes it can be hard to be thankful. How do we turn this around? It might start with picking up your Bible and read through Psalm 136 ESV - His Steadfast Love Endures Forever - Bible Gateway. The psalm begins and ends with the same words: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” These words are like book-ends around the entire psalm. Throughout Psalm 136, there is a recurring phrase which is repeated over and over again; in fact, it is the refrain of each and every verse: “… for his steadfast love endures forever.”

During the month of November, as we prepare to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, I urge you to reflect on the opening and closing words of Psalm 136: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” The giving of thanks which is so fundamental a part of the Christian life begins with who God is: “… for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” God who is good (the two words are closely related), is also a God of love – not a selfish, fickle, fleeting kind of love that is here today and gone tomorrow. The love of God is self-giving, constant, and eternal, in sharp contrast to our own love that can be so changeable and inconsistent. Giving thanks to God flows out of a realization of all that God has done and continues to do for us each day. And nowhere is God’s gracious, steadfast love seen more clearly than in giving the life of his only Son, Jesus, for the sins of the world – yours and mine. When everything else in life is stripped away, what remains? Only the unchanging and eternal love of God that is more real than life itself.

Some of the most severe human suffering imaginable took place during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 (Thirty Years' War - Wikipedia), a war that has been described as one of the most devastating in all history. At the age of thirty-one, Martin Rinkart received a call to become pastor of the Lutheran congregation in Eilenberg, Germany. He arrived just as the violence and bloodshed of the Thirty Year’s War began, and he spent the remaining thirty-two years of his life ministering to the people there. At this time, Germany was the battleground between warring Catholic and Protestant forces from all over Europe. The German population dwindled from sixteen million to just six million over that thirty-year period. Because Eilenberg was a walled city, people from near and far sought refuge in it. Living conditions were horrendous. Waves of the plague struck the city and famines swept through it as well, as army after army marched through. The plague of 1637 was especially severe and at its height, Pastor Rinkart was the only living clergyman to care for the sick and dying. At times, he presided over forty to fifty burials each day. There were no outward signs and indicators of peace or prosperity in this individual’s life; in fact, quite the opposite. Death and destruction were everyday occurrences. And yet in the midst of all this, Pastor Martin Rinkart wrote of his gratitude and confidence in a loving God. The words of Pastor Rinkart are familiar to us after nearly four hundred years:

                                    Now thank we all our God

                                    With hearts and hands and voices,

                                    Who wondrous things has done,

                                    In whom His world rejoices;

                                    Who, from our mothers’ arms,

                                    Has blest us on our way

                                    With countless gifts of love,

                                    And still is ours today.

(Lutheran Service Book 895, stanza 1)

Can we do the same? In our own times of great distress, uncertainty, and pain, can we affirm what both the psalmist and Martin Rinkhart did; namely, that the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever? For the Christian, Thanksgiving is more than a one-day event in late November. For the Christian, Thanksgiving is an every-day event. As we look forward to dinner tables covered with wonderful food and special moments with family and friends, may our thanksgiving be transformed into thanksliving, offering our selves, our time, and our possessions to see Christ in our neighbor and be Christ to our neighbor. May each one of us be moved to follow the example of the psalmist and Martin Rinkart to say and to sing: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever.”