O Give Thanks to the Lord - Psalm 107
Over the next three months at Christ the King, we will let Psalm 107 direct our prayers personally and corporately, drawing our attention to God’s goodness and steadfast love. In verse 1, the psalm bursts onto the page with exuberant and contagious thankfulness to the Lord: “Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!” To whom is the psalmist speaking? “The redeemed of the Lord.” These are those who have experienced the goodness and steadfast love of the Lord for themselves. He encourages them to join him in giving thanks to the Lord. He exhorts them, “Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he has redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” (v. 2-3). In short, the psalm invites those whom God has redeemed from all over the earth to explode, like a mentos and coke cocktail, with thankfulness for what God has done in Jesus Christ.
The psalm invites those whom God has redeemed from all over the earth to explode, like a mentos and coke cocktail, with thankfulness for what God has done in Jesus Christ.
Psalm 107 finds its truest fulfillment in the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said himself, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). Sent by the Father, Jesus came into the world filled with the Spirit to save all kinds of people. He came to save people from each hemisphere, from every social strata, and from all kinds of lostness. He came to save them, to save us from our great Trouble: death. He did so by dying on the cross in our place for our death causing sins. Then on the third day He put death to death by walking out of the grave. Now, those of us who hope in Christ are sealed with the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of eternal life in the age to come when all things will be made new.
If you’re reading this, and you are like me and already a Christian, I imagine you feel much like I do. We know that we should give thanks to God, but we often don’t feel thankful. I bet you’re also like me and you often feel guilty that you don’t feel more thankful. We feel fake, hypocritical, or just plain gross. No matter how hard we try we can’t make ourselves be thankful. For us recovering ingrates Psalm 107:1 can feel more like our mom’s nagging than a volcanic eruption of uncontainable gratitude. The good news is Psalm 107 isn’t after a forced thankfulness anyway. Through Psalm 107 God wants to heal us (v. 20) and create in us heats that split wide open with thankfulness unto the Him.
The remainder of Psalm 107 takes us through a variety of geographies, social strata, and sins to bring us back to our “wits end” (v. 27). This is to help us re-experience the surprising goodness and steadfast love of God (v. 33-42). We’ll explore these twists and turns in the future, but here is the wisdom of Psalm 107. The psalm closes with the encouragement to “attend to” and “consider the steadfast love of the Lord.” The kind of thankfulness demonstrated early in the psalm must move beyond duty to delight. Uncontainable and uncontrollable thankfulness, akin to a mentos and coke cocktail, is formed in us by remembering and re-experiencing the goodness and steadfast love of God in Jesus Christ. This is why we want to pray through Psalm 107 this summer, and I pray you will join us in this venture. May God by his Spirit form in us, in Christ the King, in Hickory, and to the four corners of the earth hearts that burst with thankfulness for Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
