Praise and Thank God!

Today is Thanksgiving. This memorial of our forebears’ blessings and gratitude toward God was established as a national holiday in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. God undoubtedly had a hand in inspiring Abraham Lincoln in setting aside the fourth Thursday of November as a day of gratitude, because, as the late Herbert W. Armstrong often pointed out, ingratitude is perhaps the most common sin.

“I begin all my prayers with thanksgiving, first of all for God Himself—that the one who has more power, more authority, above every power is God who is love, and who loves me, and who will never leave nor forsake me,” Mr. Armstrong said in December 1981. “Then I thank Him for a lot of other things, and for the truth He has given me. I thank Him next, usually, day after day after day, for beating me down; for conquering me; for bringing me to a point of unconditional surrender to Him where I said, ‘I give my life to you.’ … But I thank God then for revealing His truth, for conquering me, for revealing His truth, and then, what is more important, letting me share that truth with thousands and millions of people around the world.”

What a wonderful attitude Mr. Armstrong had! He thanked God for his blessings; he thanked God for his trials; he thanked God for the truth; he thanked God for allowing him to share that wonderful spiritual light with millions of people. He started his prayer with thanksgiving every day, and his whole life was filled with continually thanking God.

Following this example is more important than we might realize.

Mr. Armstrong said his final book, Mystery of the Ages, was the most valuable gift he could give to anyone because it explained the Bible, including a full summary of God’s master plan for mankind. He gave this book away freely to as many people as possible because he was thankful for the opportunity to share God’s truth. His successors at the Worldwide Church of God tried to blot out this message, so the Philadelphia Church of God has gone to great lengths to share this book with the largest audience possible. Like Mr. Armstrong, we are extremely thankful for the opportunity to share God’s truth with people—with you!

Mr. Armstrong wrote in a 1985 co-worker letter about this special book: “In real fact, I feel I myself did not write it. Rather, I believe God used me in writing it.” In other words, Mr. Armstrong was God’s instrument, and he was happy to serve God. It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of this age, the spirit of selfishness, the spirit of ingratitude, the spirit of “get.”

The solution to this trap is not only expressing gratitude to God but also giving God’s truth to others.

“This book is a partial expression of my thanks and gratitude to you for being a co-laborer with me and with Jesus Christ,” Mr. Armstrong continued in his co-worker letter. “With all my heart, I do appreciate and thank God for your part with me in the wonderful work in these closing days.”

We have done our best to follow in Mr. Armstrong’s footsteps. My father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, fought against the discontinuation of that book, risked a lot to publish it, fought in court to make it available, and continues to print and mail it to thousands of people freely. I can tell you firsthand that it has been and is a wonderful work.

Revelation 12:9 says that the whole world is deceived. How special is God’s truth in a world full of deception? It is the most valuable, precious information we could receive!

King David was another great man of God who was truly grateful. He wanted his people to always be aware of their great blessings, so he institutionalized godly praise and thanksgiving.

“And he appointed certain of the Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord, and to record, and to thank and praise the Lord God of Israel” (1 Chronicles 16:4). This aspect of history might be something you read over at first, but stop and think about it. David organized a special group of people whose full-time job was to praise and thank God so that the people would always be able to hear God’s praise!

In his book The New Throne of David, my father writes:

David continually praised and thanked God! He said, We must always be praising God and thanking God for everything He gives us. That reflects very spiritual thinking. The fact that David praised and thanked God so much shows strongly that he was a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22).

A man after God’s own heart builds his life around praising and thanking God! When you praise and thank God continually, do you realize how converted that makes you? Just thinking normally, you won’t continually thank and praise God; it is not a natural way to think. But if we are to be men and women after God’s own heart, we must think in a way that is very unnatural! Think about how unnatural it is to do what David did. He was not a natural-minded man. He was a man after God’s own heart. He wanted to think and act like God in every way.

David practiced what he preached. You can see that when you read his psalms.

I want to draw your attention to another book: The Psalms of David and the Psalter of Tara. My father finished it a little over a year ago. It has a wonderful, uplifting, inspiring message that comes straight from the Psalms and from David and Jeremiah. It will really help you change your life to begin revolving around praising and thanking God more! It shows you how to dwell on the Psalms. The more you fill your mind with the Bible, with this aspect of the Bible in particular, the more easily you will fill your prayers, as Mr. Armstrong did, with praise and thanksgiving!

“David loved to praise God and thank God and show love for God,” my father writes in this book. “He wrote songs, then appointed singers and assembled giant choirs whose job was simply to praise God! He institutionalized praise for God. He organized the people to enthusiastically show God how much they loved Him—through wind instruments, stringed instruments and large choruses. We need to understand why we should praise God, and the nation under David learned that in an extraordinary way.”

This institutionalized praise is a vital component of God’s throne room culture. When the line of kings failed in the kingdom of Judah, the Prophet Jeremiah had to institutionalize praising God in the kingdom of Ireland.

“God’s commission brought Jeremiah, late in his life, to Ireland,” my father continues. “There this venerable and faithful prophet not only accomplished what God had asked of him regarding the throne of King David, but went on to establish a culture of praise and thanks, of music and dance, patterned after the model David had established four centuries earlier. Jeremiah had learned so much from David! That example had galvanized his own relationship with God and his spiritual life. He wanted to build that same love for God in all the people. So he drew upon the same trove of spiritual riches that had so inspired him: the psalms of David.”

You might be familiar with our stage production Celtic Throne, which highlights how the Prophet Jeremiah institutionalized the praise of God in Ireland. If you watch my Trumpet Daily podcast, we often play feedback from audience members at those shows. The thing that’s striking in all of that feedback is just how positive the experience is for viewers. My children have been in both Celtic Throne and Celtic Throne II—Psalter of Ireland, and they’ve received a lot of special training over the years. One thing that I tried to help them see when they were just little children, now they’re in their 20s, is how important it is to be grateful for great instruction. King David appointed people with a full-time job to praise and thank God, and this Celtic Throne show continues in that glorious tradition.

It’s easy to take things for granted or not to appreciate blessings and opportunities from God. Mr. Armstrong often suggested reading Ephesians 1 to increase your thanksgiving to God: That is a great Bible study idea.

The Apostle Paul wrote that men would be unthankful in the end time (2 Timothy 3:2). Yet Mr. Armstrong knew the solution. “One of the most common sins among God’s people has always been griping, complaining—called ‘murmuring’ in the Bible,” he wrote in 1961. “This attitude of criticizing, finding fault, grumbling, is negative, unspiritual, and is a disease that produces unhappiness and loss of faith in the perpetrator and great annoyance to others who hear it. The cure is to set your mind in the opposite mood—that of gratitude.”

You can cure ingratitude with God’s help. Colossians 3:2 says to set your mind on the things above. Set your mind in the direction of gratitude. Ingratitude is one of the most common sins among God’s people, even in God’s Family. It’s common to be ungrateful and unthankful, so you have to fight against this tendency.

“In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

Read that again. “In everything” means everything. In everything give God thanks. Celebrate God and His way of life, His culture, His joy, His music, His poetry. Read Mystery of the Ages, The New Throne of David and The Psalms of David and the Psalter of Tara. These books will help you to institutionalize that vision of praise and thanksgiving in your life and in your household.