It’s the season of the year when our calendars and family gatherings help us orient our lives toward gratitude. This annual reminder is good for us, especially in an ad-soaked culture like ours where comparison and discontentment are rampant. As I once heard a counselor say, to compare is to despair. That seems about right.
Gratitude pulls us out of that slough of despondency.
This is true and good, but thinking about the power of gratitude in our own lives only gives us part of the story. Gratitude is more than just a right response to God’s goodness or a tool for improving our mental health. Our gratitude is part of God’s mission in the world.
Out of the Miry Bog
The missional power of gratitude came home to me a couple weeks ago as I prepared and then preached on Psalm 40 as part of Grove City College’s chapel program.
The Psalm, which is attributed to David, begins with a description of God’s action on behalf of the Psalmist. Up until a few weeks ago, I had always read this portion of the Psalm as David’s prayer of thanksgiving to God for the deliverance God had orchestrated in his life. As I dug deeper into the Psalm, I realized that my assumption had been wrong. David does turn his thoughts in prayer to God, but, according to most commentators, this turn doesn’t take place until the fourth verse. The opening verses of the Psalm aren’t addressed to God; they are addressed to other humans.
In short, they are a grateful testimony.
They are also, as David knows, a testimony that does work in the world. “Many will see and fear” (v. 3) the Psalmist tells us, and the result of this will be that they “put their trust in the Lord” (v. 3).
The News of Deliverance for the Great Congregation
As the Psalm turns from public testimony to prayerful petition, the power of gratitude expressed through public testimony remains a key theme. David has experienced the multiplication of God’s “wonderous deeds” and His “thoughts toward him” (v. 5), and he has not been bashful about expressing his gratitude. Twice in the next several verses David reminds God that he has “told the glad news of deliverance” (v. 9) and “spoken of your faithfulness” (v. 10) in “the great congregation.”
God’s work in David’s life is for David’s good, but it is not only for David’s good. It is for everyone. It is a way God carries out His mission in the world. As one commentator notes, “To withhold praise does not damage God, but it does damage God’s mission, in the sense that to withhold praise is to withhold saving knowledge from the neighbor who needs it.”[1]
The Rest of the Story
If the Psalm ended there we would be left with the good feeling that all is right in the world, that the trajectory of our lives, like the trajectory of the first ten verses in this Psalm, might move up and to the right like the growth curve of a successful business.
The next several verses pull back to a more complex reality.
Psalm 40 ends with a prayer, not of gratitude but of petition. The Psalmist, due, it seems, to both external circumstances (“evils have encompassed me”) and his own sin “my iniquities have overtaken me”), is once again in a place of desperation. He is crying out to God, and God’s previous action on his behalf is only a memory.
Perhaps that’s the point.
Gratitude and Corporate Memory
Surrounded by sin that seems to blind him (v. 12) and voices that mock him in his distress (vv. 14-15), the Psalmist listens for something else—the praises of God’s people. “But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; may those who love your salvation say continually, ‘Great is the LORD.’” (v. 16).
I found myself wondering at this point if the Psalmist was asking God to encourage others—perhaps others who had heard his own testimony of praise in the great congregation—to do the same for him, to remind him, in his moment of weakness, of the greatness of the LORD. Perhaps this is what gives him hope even though he is “poor and needy” (v. 17)? Perhaps this testimony is what helps him keep looking to the God for deliverance?
Gratitude and the People of God
If you are part of the church, chances are good that you have experienced the power of a similar gratitude in your own life. None of us can completely avoid disappointing circumstances or the impact of our own sin. Likewise, none of us live lives untouched by the gracious compassion and longsuffering love of our Maker.
Part of the gift of being part of the people of God is that whenever we are struggling to remember that God is both good and great, someone else in the family of God is currently experiencing the gracious goodness of God. In the church, there is always overlap. There are always folks with whom we must weep, but there are always folks with whom we must rejoice.
When we tell our grateful stories of God’s provision—of his open ear to our cries and his movement in our direction (v. 1)—not as a saccharine-sweet gloat but as a testimony of our own deep need and God’s gracious action, we play a small part in advancing the mission of God in our sphere of influence. In the gracious goodness of God, we may also be laying the groundwork for our own path to hope if our journey takes us back through difficult times, times when we each have to work to remember that God is “my help and deliverer” (v. 17). Fortunately—thanks to the gift of God’s people in “the great congregation”—we never have to remember alone.
[1] Nancy Declaisse-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth Laneel Tanner, The Book of Psalms, NICOT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 379.
Charles E. Cotherman is executive director of the Center for Rural Ministry and an assistant professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. He is also a pastor at Oil City Vineyard, a church he and his wife Aimee had the privilege of planting in 2016. He has written on rural ministry, church planting, and history for a variety of publications including Evangelicals, Modern Reformation, Front Porch Republic, and Plough. He is the author of To Think Christianly (IVP Academic) and a contributing editor of Sent to Flourish: Guide to Planting and Multiplying Churches (IVP Academic). He lives with his wife, four children, and a spoiled cat and dog in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Charlie can be reached at charlie@ruralministry.org
