How To Be Thankful To God When You’re Not

“How to be thankful to God during difficult times?” is a question rummaging through my head currently. Thankfulness is not just a nice thing positive people should be, thankfulness has many implications for our outlook on life and our trust in God’s providence. It deserves our attention.

Being thankful does not mean you cannot experience disappointment or be bummed out. Thankful doesn’t mean bubbly or overly energetic at 6 AM. Thankfulness is a deeply rooted trust that God is good, you have more than you deserve, and He is at work in all things, even disappointments.

Thanksgiving during difficult times is not saying you enjoy the sting of disappointment, nor is it pretending there is no sting in difficulty. It is the trusting of promises that were given to you by God, primarily the trusting of His sovereignty, His goodness, and His timing. That it is all working together for your good and His glory.

Why be thankful in difficult times?

I’m not trying to paint an unrealistic picture of being thankful when your life falls apart. When tragedy strikes, or you end up in the hospital, or you get fired. It would be unloving and even damaging for someone to tell you in that moment: “Well, that stinks. But be thankful!”

Why though is thankfulness something, down the road of disappointments, we should seek to cultivate into our lives? Because thankfulness can be a pressure valve on our bitterness. It’s a re-focusing our gaze from what we do not have, to what we do. It keeps us from living stuck in the past or escaping to the future. It reminds us the life we have is the life we have and there are good things in it.

Thankfulness is a discipline

This excerpt from John Piper is helpful:

“Do not say, 'But it is hypocritical to thank God with my tongue when I don't feel thankful in my heart.' There is such a thing as hypocritical thanksgiving. Its aim is to conceal ingratitude and get the praise of men. That is not your aim. Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude. You are not seeking the praise of men; you are seeing the mercy of God. You are not hiding the hardness of ingratitude, but hoping for the in-breaking of the Spirit.

Thanksgiving with the Mouth Stirs Up Thankfulness in the Heart

Moreover, we should probably ask the despairing saint, 'Do you know your heart so well that you are sure the words of thanks have no trace of gratitude in them?' I, for one, distrust my own assessment of my motives. I doubt that I know my good ones well enough to see all the traces of contamination. And I doubt that I know my bad ones well enough to see the traces of grace. Therefore, it is not folly for a Christian to assume that there is a residue of gratitude in his heart when he speaks and sings of God's goodness even though he feels little or nothing. To this should be added that experience shows that doing the right thing, in the way I have described, is often the way toward being in the right frame. Hence Baxter gives this wise counsel to the oppressed Christian:

'Resolve to spend most of your time in thanksgiving and praising God. If you cannot do it with the joy that you should, yet do it as you can. You have not the power of your comforts; but have you no power of your tongues? Say not that you are unfit for thanks and praises unless you have a praising heart and were the children of God; for every man, good and bad, is bound to praise God, and to be thankful for all that he hath received, and to do it as well as he can, rather than leave it undone.... Doing it as you can is the way to be able to do it better. Thanksgiving stirreth up thankfulness in the heart.”

―John Piper,When the Darkness Will Not Lift: Doing What We Can While We Wait for God—And Joy

Not all things are good, but all things work for good for those who love Him. Thanksgiving is a discipline, not just a reaction. You are not called to be thankful for everything. You are called to be thankful in everything.