Oct 23, 2019
By Katrina Goodrich
…And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. —Colossians 3: 15b-17
Colossians 3 begins by telling us to throw off our old selves for we are new creations in Christ and we should fix our minds on things above. Paul then gives us a fantastic list of things we should avoid in order to accomplish this. Then he gives us a list of things we should do and replace those things in the avoid category. He ends the positive “do these things” list with thankfulness.
Paul begins verse 15 with “let peace rule your hearts” and ends it with “…and be thankful.” Okay, Paul, sounds good…we’re moving on. He then writes to let the word of Christ dwell in you, teaching and admonishing one another in wisdom… singing psalms, hymns, etc.—basically do church together. Sounds good. Then we’re back to thankfulness. Why did he choose to structure these verses that way?
Typically, when I’m writing I try to keep like items together, keeping the organization and ideas flowing nicely into one another. This is very different from the way I speak, chasing rabbit holes and the like. But I try not to disappear down rabbit holes when I’m writing something for another person or I am trying to get an important idea across in writing. If you can accept that Paul, more or less, wrote in the same manner, even with his fondness for run-on sentences, then the thankful sandwich here means he wants us to be thankful for something.
I would argue that something he wants us to be thankful for is the church and not just the music. For many, the music in church is a highlight—there is an emotional connection with the hymns and songs we sing together at church. It’s easy to be thankful while we’re singing, especially while we’re singing songs that highlight the goodness and mercy of God. But that sentence doesn’t only call out music as a time to be thankful.
How many of you feel thankful when you’ve just finished an awesome time of praise and maybe even prayer—and the pastor gets up to give his sermon which can last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours? How many of you find it a time to be thankful when you have to spend time “admonishing” one another in the spirit of brotherly love?
Maybe it’s just me, but that is not really my typical experience. Three-hour sermons don’t typically make me thankful, even if interesting and well given. Either side of admonishment hasn’t stereotypically been related to thankfulness either. Thankfulness for these might come in retrospect but most often that takes time. The way these two pieces of church life are linked in this verse seems to suggest that we aren’t called to be thankful after retrospect has set in.
Being thankful to God isn’t constrained to when we are singing songs about His awesomeness. Certainly we absolutely should be thankful in those moments, instead of turning it off as soon as that time has passed. What if we carried that thankfulness to God throughout life’s moments that weren’t spiritual highs? I’m not saying we should be happy when we have to come to one another with burdens of sin on either side of that scenario, but rather that we should be thankful to God that He made a way for us to be renewed via His mercy and thankfulness.
So be thankful. Even when things are messy because—God is Good. All the time.
