“Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise: give thanks to Him and praise to His name.” (Psalm 100:4 NIV)
We’re continuing on in our thirty days of thankfulness, each morning waking with gratitude feels a little more imperative than the one before. Today we identify thanksgiving as a means of increased intimacy. Of course, the blood of Jesus gives us access to the Father, but thanks pulls us further in: out of the dust and grime of earthly affairs and into the heavenly realm where perspective and purpose are far more accessible to flesh and blood like us. Jesus is the passport but thanksgiving and praise are the ordinary vehicles that move us into God’s presence.
We need access to the throne room right now, don’t we? It more and more feels as though the world’s on fire and everything and everyone has been cancelled. We’ve got to get close to God if we’re going to find our way forward and out of this mess. We need to recall His heart for humanity and align ourselves with divine agenda. We need to remember with wonder the great grace, love and sacrifice we both required AND received in Christ Jesus. Humbled by that thought we can turn around and lay our ‘selves’ down for the sake of our fellow man. We need over and over reminded of the coming realities of heaven so we can live victoriously in the warfare of here and now.
“Enter with the password: “Thank You!” Make yourselves at home talking praise. Thank Him. Worship Him.” (Psalm 100:4 MSG)
The modern language of the Message makes the Word so accessible. I read this passage – “make yourself at home” and hygge-induced images were eclipsed by an imaginary ‘r’ – “mark yourself at home.” We think of facebook and the trend of marking one’s self safe. When we enter the throne room through thanksgiving and praise, we are marking ourselves safe from the events of this world. We aren’t eliminating consequences or escaping the tedium of day to day living: we are reminding ourselves of the much larger story still unfolding. We are shrinking today down to appropriate stature as we consider the size and scope of eternity and the still good plan of our Father.
Lord, thank You for sinless blood spilled out for sinners like us. We clutch our passports with gratitude and we praise our way into Your presence. Help us spend enough time in the throne room to solidify our understanding of the Kingdom coming. Shrink today down to it’s appropriate stature. Fill hearts with hope as we await Your return and the dawn real lives with You. Amen.
“The things that began to happen after that were so great and so beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can truly say they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life on this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the great story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” (The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis)