Thanksgiving

Philippians 4:6

November 26, 2025

When resources are scarce, anxiety is over food. Jesus asks, “Why do you worry about what you will eat?”

There’s no scarcity in America. But there’s still anxiety. And the anxiety still often connects to food. We eat our feelings. Or drink our feelings. Or find other ways to make ourselves numb – doomscrolling, binge watching, cyber shopping – something to distract us from our meaningless lives trapped on the conveyor belt, ending in a nursing home reeking of urine and loneliness.

“Do not be anxious about anything,” the Epistle for Thanksgiving says. How? Anxiety is our daily bread.

We want freedom from worry. We imagine it can be obtained if we just had more resources. If we had a large enough stash of money, then we could weather any bear market, withstand any illness, persevere through any calamity. But there’s never enough.

And time. That’s another resource that is too scarce, yet one we easily overestimate.

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got

Till it’s gone?

Worry will always be with us. The command, “Be anxious for nothing” seems impossible. But the path to freedom is found in the words that follow: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

Now these things appear contradictory. Supplication and thanksgiving? Supplication is about what you don’t have. Thanksgiving is about what you do. How can you supplicate with thanksgiving?

Perhaps we should put it the other way around, though: How can you not? The supplication of a child is different from that of a stranger, a pauper, a beggar. Out on the street, it’s uncertain. Inside the house, the child knows the character of the Father.

The Father has been providing food and drink, clothing and shoes, house and home from the beginning. He has been defending the child against every danger, guarding and protecting from all evil. All this He’s been doing only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in the child.

So when the child is hungry, he goes to the Father, knowing He has a great storehouse. Now sometimes, when the child is sick, dad has slathered on some strong-smelling stinky ointment. Sometimes there are needles and stitches, blood and bandages, slings and casts. There may have been some stern words, and the removal of privileges. But over time, the child has learned that this is all for the good. Cuts need stiching, bones need setting, attitudes need checking.

But with the Father there is no starvation, even if there is waiting. There is no hatred, even if there is rebuke. And so with such a Father, there is no anxiety. There can be, should be, perpetual thanksgiving.

As the table is being set, and the aroma of the feast wafts through the room, one is thankful to the host before a single tine of the fork has touched the meat. The food is coming, even if it is still hours away.

That’s what’s happening with the dispersal of anxiety by the action of prayer and worship: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

The noun “Thanksgiving” (eucharistia) appears 15x in the NT; all but one are oriented toward God. And then, in the earliest Christian writings after the New Testament, thanksgiving (eucharistia) becomes a technical term for the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion. One could argue that this is some kind of ritualization of the faith, priests and liturgists taking over a prior, more pure thankfulness of heart.

But I don’t think that’s what happened. Rather, the Supper Jesus established, where He gave thanks before distributing His body and blood – that Supper becomes the place where we bring all our hurts and anxieties and sins, all our misuse of food and drink, and all our thanklessness. We bring them to Jesus and in exchange He gives us Himself. And if we have Him, the One by whom all things were made – if we have Him, then we really can be anxious for nothing.

We can be on our last leg, about to draw our last breath, at our wits end, we can come with absolutely nothing at all but sin and death, and still give Him thanks. Because Jesus receives a pauper, a beggar, a sinner, a nobody, and seats us at His table as His little brothers and sisters, children of His Father. And we are thankful because all things are ours, even if the plate is not yet dished up. It’s coming, not a turkey but a Lamb, a feast for the ages, unto the ages of ages.

So Thanksgiving is not a thing we do here and there, but the persistent relationship of child to Father, of sheep to Shepherd.

Up to now, we’ve grasped for food hoping it will satisfy, despite so many times in the past having gorged to the point of pain. But this will not keep us alive. Our food can only satisfy when it is received as gift, received with the same lesson the manna taught the ancients in the wilderness: that man does not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So be anxious for nothing. You are a child with a Father, sheep with a Shepherd. In every circumstance give thanks. The meal is coming, resurrection is coming, life is coming. It’s already yours.