What Does God’s Timing Teach Us about Thankfulness?
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- Updated Oct 31, 2022
"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT
"I love this place, because it makes me think of what heaven will be like." Our family, together with our best friends, gazed at the sight of a magical castle and fireworks before us. It had been a long time since we'd all been able to be together and share in the trip we had been looking forward to long before the pandemic de-railed all of our plans. Thankfulness was the unspoken theme that week. "My family is here…" anchored the reasons why it felt like heaven, centered around thankfulness for who we are and the people God has placed in our lives. (And probably included Mickey Bars.)
Thankfulness is to feel or express gratitude; to be appreciative. Appreciation is defined as gratitude; thankful recognition. Appreciation, dictionary.com explains, is "the act of estimating the qualities of things and given them their proper value." Thankfulness, gratitude, and appreciation blend together in our hearts and minds to create a sense, and sometimes an expression of, the thankfulness we celebrate as we enter the holiday season.
Thanksgiving is an amazing stature to take in our everyday lives, yet at this time of the year, our attention towards it is piqued. Solomon, often accredited as one of the wisest people to live, wrote generously about thankfulness. "The book of Ecclesiastes speaks directly to this person and to all of us from the perspective of someone who had it all, became disillusioned, and eventually realized the surpassingly simple things that are ultimately important in life," Jessica Udall wrote in '3 Important Lessons from the Book of Ecclesiastes' for Crosswalk.com, "Eventually, it seems that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes as a chastened man who learned the hard way what really matters."
What Does Ecclesiastes 3:11 Teach us about Thankfulness?
1. God Created Everything
"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time." God is our Creator, Elohim. The Bible begins:
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of the God was hovering over the surface of the waters." Genesis 1:1-2 NLT
Solomon proclaims God created everything; God made everything beautiful and created everything with specific timing and purpose. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were present on the first page of Scripture. The apostle John wrote:
"In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1 NLT
Christ Jesus is the Word. He is the Word of God fulfilled, in a story that God began writing as the Spirit hovered over the surface of the waters in darkness. Our thankfulness is rooted in our very existence. Everything God created, He proclaimed "good." Thankfulness is rooted in acknowledging who we are. We are created by a good God, who proclaims we are "very good."
2. God Is Everywhere and Is in Control
"He has planted eternity in the human heart."
"This means we can never be completely satisfied with earthly pleasures and pursuits," the Life Application Bible explains, "God has built in us a restless yearning for the kind of perfect world the can only be found in his perfect rule." Thankfulness is rooted in the character of God. Who He is generates thankfulness, gratitude, and appreciation in our hearts. The more we seek to know Him, the better we will not only understand what it means to be thankful but experience the overflow of it from our hearts and minds as we realize who He is and Whose we are.
Omnipotent, omniscient, and sovereign are often words used to describe who God is. Sovereign refers to supreme power or authority. Omnipotence is almighty or infinite in power. Omniscient means to have complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding. The prophet Isaiah wrote:
"My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9 NLT
We come to the Father through Christ and are able to see through the lens of eternity, which produces thankfulness in our hearts alongside the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which grow as we walk alongside Him in our daily lives. We can see what to be grateful for because of who He is.
3. God Is All-Knowing
"People cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end."
It's a basic human need to be known. Thankfulness lies in being seen, known, and loved. All of us wake up each day with all three of those attributes. We cannot see, or understand, the totality of who God is and how He operates! But we know enough to allow thankfulness to take root in our hearts. God sees us:
"The eyes of the LORD watch over those who do right; his ears are open to their cries for help." Psalm 34:15 NLT
God hears us:
"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us." 1 John 5:14 NIV
God answers our prayers:
"I will answer them before they even call out to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers!" Isaiah 65:24 NLT
God loves us for who we are, right where we are at:
"But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners." Romans 5:8 NLT
He knows our hearts because He knit them in our mother's womb:
"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." Psalm 139: 13-14 NIV
He sees injustice, unfairness, and heartache and does not sit idle:
"The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still." Exodus 14:14 NIV
God sees through the sinful curse of man, and the fallen world full of evil, to the people He created in love and proclaimed "very good." It's the greatest story of all time, God's love for us, to send His only Son to earth to die - so we could be saved. The apostle John wrote:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16 NIV
God's timing teaches us to be thankful for who He is and who we are as His children. We can trust His timing in our lives with grateful hearts, knowing He has good plans for us. Scripture teaches us a lot about thankfulness. Each verse of the Bible is like an onion to be peeled back and applied to our everyday lives as we read them, trusting the Lord to meet us where we are.
Additional Resources:
Life Application Study Bible. Tyndale House Publishers. Copyright 2019.
