We’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving Day this Thursday. I hope that everyone will have a lovely time with family and friends.

Thankfulness/gratitude is one of the main expectations that God has for his people. Christians should be thankful people. We should express our thanks to God and to others as a normal, regular part of our lives.

Today I want to look at some of the NT texts that mention thanksgiving, and in particular I want to focus on those passages that describe how to give thanks or how certain people gave thanks. I’m not focusing on what the people in these examples were thankful for but the manner in which the text describes thanksgiving.

Some of these passages command us to be thankful and tell us how to do that, while others describe how people were thankful to God. I want to focus on the manner of thanksgiving, the way that we express our thanks to God.

These passages suggest a pattern of thanksgiving. We ought to be thankful in the ways these verses describe thanksgiving. We can be thankful in many ways, but we should make sure that we are expressing our thanks in the ways that the Bible describes.