Create in Me a Clean Heart: The 40-Day Challenge (Psalms)Sample

VI. OFFER GOD A SACRIFICE OF THANKSGIVING

At the end of this forty-day pilgrimage through the Psalms, let’s spend the last seven days in thanksgiving. And let it not be a superficial thanksgiving, but let it be deeply thought out and valuable, like the sweet-smelling sacrifice that the Lord deserves. Words of gratitude have already been mentioned in other psalms, but now let it be a thanksgiving with which we will seal our Covenant with God. This is the God whom we recognized as the one who has no equal, and before whom we acknowledged our frailty and powerlessness. This is the God to whom we have confessed our sins, to whom we begged for mercy and from whom we received forgiveness once and for all. It is God who enables us to experience the joy of salvation and who offers us his wisdom for everyday life. We can offer God, daily, our sacrifice of thanksgiving.

Offer God a Sacrifice of Thanksgiving

Psalm 116

Perhaps among your childhood memories, some of you can also remember one when your parents reminded you “What do you say?” after a relative, neighbor or someone unknown to you (and obviously important to your parents) gave you something. Such scenes like this usually ended with the child shyly muttering “Thank you”, and the parents smiling apologetically for the insufficiently high level of gratitude.

If we know the Bible well, the term “sacrifice of thanksgiving” will not be foreign to us. And yet, if we think about it, two realities seem to collide in it: a sacrifice as an indication of renunciation - a visible act, but also something potentially unpleasant that we would rather avoid - and gratitude as something that should arise spontaneously, from the inner being as a response to experienced affection or kindness.

The psalmist has no problem with this: after God has saved him from the edge of the abyss, from distress, anguish, anxiety and possible death, he feels that he has returned to the land of the living. From this position of gratitude, no sacrifice or vow is too difficult for him, and his mouth is full of God’s goodness.

If we feel like him, it will not be difficult for us to join him. If right now we don’t feel that we have a reason to be grateful, and our jaws tighten - let’s remember that a whole life consists of the little things, and start from those. Let’s find one tiny thing that comes to us from our God. And then one more...

After that, maybe the words will flow by themselves.