by A. W. Tozer
There is probably no such thing as a wholly thankless heart. Everyone at some time feels a sense of gratitude for benefits received. This seems to be instinctive, or if not instinctive then surely acquired at a very early age.
That a great many persons fail in the degree of their thankfulness we all know too well. Hardly anyone but has known remorse for his failure to express proper gratitude to father or mother or friend till it was too late. And most of us have felt the chill that comes to those who do acts of kindness for persons who receive them as matters of course without so much as a word of thanks. Even Christ appears to have suffered from such treatment, for after He had healed ten lepers and only one returned to give Him thanks, He asked rather sadly, "Where are the other nine?" (Luke 17:17). We dare not read too much into this, but it seems fair to assume that He wanted the cleansed lepers to thank Him, and was disappointed when they did not. But even here we must not conclude that these men were wholly thankless. They may quite easily have been grateful to friends and relatives, or even to total strangers who might have helped them in the past, and still have failed to express their thanks to the One who deserved it most.
This habit of thanking everyone but God is not confined to those nine lepers. Enter a plane, a train, a restaurant or any other place where modern civilized men and women meet and mingle and you will see evidences of the same spirit. You will hear thanks given and acknowledged right and left without so much as a mention of God. Somewhere I read of the Christian farm boy who went to college and who in the dining room always bowed his head to thank God before beginning to eat. When some of his fellow students ribbed him for it, he grinned and said, "Hogs don't thank anybody either when they eat their swill." It might have been a bit direct, but I am sure everyone got the point.
It is important that we trace our benefits back to their source and express our thanks to the One "from whom all blessings flow," rather than merely to feel a vague stirring of gratefulness that results in nothing real. I once lived with a fine old couple, neither of whom was a Christian, and I was impressed with the profound sense of gratitude they felt for everything they possessed. When the winter winds moaned through the trees and made the old house tremble, the old man would smile and say, "Ah! How good it is to have a warm place to sleep on a night like this." And the mother would often speak of her large family, now grown and scattered: "How grateful I am that they are all healthy and all mentally sound. I am so thankful." Their gratitude was genuine. Of that there could be no trace of a doubt, but I often wondered who was the recipient of it. Whom were they thanking? They never said.
The irreligious world has its own way of reacting. When things "break" fortunately for a businessman, an athlete or a politician he will slap his hands together and shout, "Great! Wonderful!" He is thanking someone; but whom?
It could be that the old couple of whom I speak were actually meaning to express their thankfulness to God, and that the modern man who shouts his pleasure at his lot in life secretly feels his indebtedness to God; the trouble is that they were and are ashamed to direct their gratitude pointedly to One with whom they are not acquainted. They flee like Adam and hide among the trees of the garden rather than face up to the God they know they have offended. Fear of being thought queer sometimes leads people to express religious ideas in generalities instead of in concrete terms.
It is much easier to say "I am thankful" than to say as Paul did, "Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:25). The first does not commit the man. It is broad enough to afford footroom to retreat if someone should challenge him. The second burns its bridges and takes up its cross.
In these last bright brown days of autumn, we will be reminded a hundred times that we have a world of blessings for which we should render thanks. Let's not withhold our expressions of gratitude. Thankfulness that is put into words has a healing effect upon the soul and has a good effect upon those who hear. But let's avoid pagan ambiguity. "For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live" (1 Corinthians 8:6).
( The Size of the Soul, Chapter 38 )
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