Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
His faithful love endures for ever.
Give thanks to the God of gods.
His faithful love endures for ever.
Give thanks to the Lord of lords.
His faithful love endures for ever.
With these three opening verses, Psalm 136 plunges into a sustained deluge of thankfulness to God. Each successive verse heaps on reason after reason to be thankful to the Lord and ends with the refrain, “His faithful love endures for ever.” This unique call-and-response pattern draws the reader inexorably into the psalmist’s mood of thankfulness until the last verse bookends the psalm with a concluding thankful shout:
Give thanks to the God of heaven!
His faithful love endures for ever.
As busy modern believers, we may be tempted to regard thankfulness as a secondary aspect of the Christian life, something that occurs to us now and then. Psalm 136, in step with the rest of Scripture, reminds us that thankfulness is not an option, but a duty and a delight, essential to our daily walk with God, our worship, and our own spiritual and mental health.
Songs of thanksgiving
The book of Psalms is the songbook of Scripture, overflowing with expressions of thankfulness to God. According to Psalm 100, God is worthy of our undying gratitude simply because he is God, our Creator:
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the Lord is good and his love endures for ever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.
(Psalm 100:3-5)
Even though God is entitled to our eternal praise just for being God, he graciously gives us a wealth of additional reasons for it throughout the Psalms and elsewhere in his Word. More than being our Maker, God is the Creator of the universe with all its wonders. He sustains and cares for it, and provides for every one of his creatures, human and otherwise. All creation depends on him, praises him, and declares his kindness and his goodness.
God’s faithful love endures for ever; he is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, ready to forgive, help, and save all who call upon him. With artful parallelism, Psalm 107 presents four vignettes of people in desperate circumstances, either through their own sin, or by falling into natural perils. The same phrase describes the turning point in each story:
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble;
he rescued them from their distress.
(Psalm 107:6,13,19,28)
God responds by rescuing each group, providing the specific help they desperately needed. Although each act of deliverance is unique, the response to each is the same:
Let them give thanks to the Lord
for his faithful love
and his wondrous works for all humanity.
(Psalm 107:8,15,21,31)
How should we respond to such expressions of God’s goodness and faithful love? In Psalm 9, David offers a brief yet heartfelt answer:
I will thank the Lord with all my heart;
I will declare all your wondrous works.
I will rejoice and boast about you;
I will sing about your name, Most High.
(Psalm 9:1-2)
God’s indescribable gift
All God’s wondrous works, celebrated in the Psalms and throughout the Old Testament, foreshadowed his most wondrous work of all: sending his Son into the world to redeem it. Through Jesus, God entered his creation, lived a sinless life, died an atoning death on our behalf, rose from the grave, and returned to heaven, so that he might offer forgiveness and eternal life to everyone who would believe in him.
As Paul explained to the Corinthian church, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Such a colossal act of grace cannot be reduced to a mere theological talking point. It is meant to inflame our hearts with gratitude, as it did for Paul. Later in the same letter, the apostle was driven to exclaim, “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!”
(2 Corinthians 9:15).
It’s small wonder that Paul began most of his letters with thanks to God for bringing his readers to eternal life in Christ. Moreover, the apostle urged them to remain thankful to God for his grace as an essential prerequisite of their peace and joy:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. (Colossians 3:15)
Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)
The perils of prosperity
When Paul told the Thessalonian church to give thanks in all circumstances, he meant the good as well as the bad. This is the testimony throughout Scripture. The Psalms are filled with songs of lament, honest about suffering and hardship, yet still trusting and thanking God for his faithful love.
Job, after he lost everything, asked rhetorically, “Should we accept only good from God and not adversity?” (Job 2:10). He expressed his deep grief as well as his gratitude to God:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will leave this life.
The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
(Job 1:20-21)
God himself made this truth explicit through the prophet Isaiah:
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the Lord, do all these things.
(Isaiah 45:7)
As prosperous Westerners, we may balk at the idea that God is the author of disaster as well as prosperity. We may think it difficult – perhaps even impossible – to imagine being thankful to God amidst the worst hardship. Yet God has promised to be with us through it all, using it to refine us and make us more like his Son. Jesus assured his disciples, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
It may seem strange to us, but Scripture warns that prosperity, rather than hardship, is the greater danger to our thankfulness toward God. Through Moses, God repeatedly warned his people about forgetting him during prosperous times:
You may say to yourself, “My power and my own ability have gained this wealth for me,” but remember that the Lord your God gives you the power to gain wealth, in order to confirm his covenant he swore to your ancestors, as it is today. (Deuteronomy 8:17-18)
Commenting on Psalm 106, Tim Keller wrote:
This psalm is about ingratitude. “They did not remember your many kindnesses” (verse 7). It is the root of all human sin: “They neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him” (Romans 1:21). That may not at first sound serious, but consider the crime of plagiarism. It is both theft and lie. It robs others of their due and creates the illusion that you are more able than you are. Sin is cosmic ingratitude. It gives you the delusion that you have the ability to conduct and hold your life together. Actually every day that your heart keeps pumping, your country is not invaded, and your brain keeps functioning is wholly an undeserved gift of God. We ought to live simple, normal, uneventful days full of amazed, thankful joy.
Thankfulness and health
Whether we’re going through the best of times or the worst of times, God is always good, and his faithful love endures for ever. The fact that he repeats this so often in his Word suggests that we need to be reminded of it just as often. Being reminded, we’re not simply to file it away as theological head knowledge. We’re to let it sink into our hearts until they burst and overflow with deep gratitude to our Lord.
Thankfulness to God is not an option, but a delight and a way of life. He is our Creator, our Sovereign Lord, and our Heavenly Father, who richly gives us all things to enjoy. Most of all, he has given us his beloved Son to redeem us so that we might enjoy him forever.
We owe everything, including our eternal gratitude, to God. Yet in his kindness to us, he has made our gratitude a source of our own well-being. This goes beyond our spiritual health to our physical, emotional, and mental health as well. The Scriptures connect our thankfulness to a sound mind and a sense of peace and joy, a reality that’s beginning to be borne out by medical science.
Thankfulness is not meant to be a simplistic solution to every problem. It is, however, an essential factor in our daily walk with God, which strengthens our faith, our resistance to sin, and our assurance in knowing and feeling God’s pleasure with us. As such, it cannot help but be good medicine for our bodies, hearts, and souls.
Tim Keller ended his meditation on Psalm 106 with this short prayer, one which we might keep in mind as we meditate on thankfulness:
Lord, I thank you for my routine mercies. I thank you for sustaining my life daily, for being endlessly patient with me, for shielding me from so many consequences of my foolish behavior, for the ways you have walked with me in trials, and for all my answered prayers. Amen.
Sources and further reading
Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller, The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms, Viking, 2025.
