Prayer, With Thanks, Brings Peace

11.22.23 Philippians 4:6–7 (EHV)

6 Do not worry about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Prayer, With Thanks, Brings Peace

Martin Luther taught us to pray by authoring his Morning and Evening Prayers. I love these prayers. They are so simple and straightforward. Even if you have a hard time being a spiritual leader in your family, it isn’t too hard to pull out these prayer cards and speak them in the morning and the evening. And how do they start out?

I thank you, my heavenly Father . . . they start with thanks.

Why is giving thanks so important? You see, thankfulness in prayer appears to be part of the antidote to worry from what Paul writes to us today. Do not worry about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. It’s not just prayer, but prayer WITH thanksgiving. It’s kind of like Ranch salad dressing for some people or ketchup. They put it on their salad, their french fries, their meat, their beans, everything. And so it is with thankfulness. God wants it to go along with our prayer.

But that’s easier said than done. Thankfulness doesn’t just come from commanding it. It seems the more gifts you have, the more things you have to be thankful for, the less thankful we are. Instead, thankfulness often comes from want and need. They are the soil in which thankfulness grows. It’s hard to be thankful when you have all you need. Take for instance, your back has been hurting for a long time. You want a reprieve. You pray that God grants success to your surgery. It works! For the first time in months you can sleep on your back. What’s the first thing you think? “Thank you Lord!” You’re naturally thankful for something that most people take for granted, for something simple like a good night’s sleep.

The soil of want and need goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden with the Fall into sin. Right from the start God shows us our origins, digs us into this hole of sin and corruption. Now we are born in sin and we are bathed in it at birth. Look at the history of humanity in the Bible, a history of murder, adultery, wickedness and rebellion. We see the Israelites make the golden calf. We see David murder Uriah and steal his wife. We see Manasseh sacrifice his own son. We see the Israelites rebel against God’s commandments.

We look at our own generation of people living in this world. Drug addiction. Anger. Broken relationships. Loneliness. War. You see children get murdered and abducted and raped. We hear God say to us, “This shows you what I’ve been saying. This is humanity. Born to die. Fallen. Wicked. Evil.” God responds. He brings the Flood. He opens up the earth to swallow Korah and the rebels of Moses’ time. He brings in the Babylonians to tear down the temple and take the Israelites captive. He threatens worse than that, with hell and fire and judgment. And then God says to us, “You deserve it too!” It’s a completely different vision of humanity than our world has and also a different version of God that we imagine. We aren’t naturally good. The world isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. The soil of want and need is deep when you read the Bible and see humanity for what it is.

Then we see Jesus. We see God take on flesh and come into this miserable and wicked world. We watch Him die a miserable death. We hear Him cry, “It is finished.” We hear Paul then say, “This is free. This is grace. This is salvation, through faith in Christ alone. This is how your sins are washed away, in the waters of baptism. This is how you continue to receive this grace and mercy, in the body and blood of the Lord’s Supper. Shed for you.” The words come out so naturally. “Thank you Lord!”

As Lutherans, within the Word and the liturgy we are bred to be thankful for the sheer fact of just being called God’s children! That He would think to adopt us into His family and send His angels to protect us! That He would promise to work all things out for our good! To design our lives so that we would have plenty of opportunities to do good works to the glory of His name! Think of how John writes it in 1 John 3:1, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” That’s the attitude the Holy Spirit breeds in us through His Word! When you go through the history of humanity and then the history of God’s mercy, you become anything but entitled. You become thankful for every day of God’s grace. And then to think that He gives us so much more! Food and clothing, house and home, wife and children . . . this breeds thankfulness within!