By Dennis Pollock
Jesus tells us: “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil.” (Luke 6:35). Here we gain a profound insight about the character and behavior of God. He is not only kind to believers, but also to those who pray and read His word regularly, attend church, and those who try to treat people with respect. He is kind to evil people, those who refuse to submit to Him, and those who even deny His existence. In another place, Jesus says that God “makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45).
Interestingly, Jesus links evil people with the unthankful. When we think of those who are evil, we may think of cruel, angry, violent people who enjoy hurting and taking from others. But we rarely think of unthankful people as being especially wicked. Perhaps they are just too busy with their lives to pause and give thanks to God. But in truth, unthankful people do not recognize God as the source of their blessings, and this makes them, in some sense, evil.
God is the Fountain of all blessings. James tells us, “every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father…” (James 1:17). Every good thing in your life is a gift from God. But not everybody recognizes this. We evangelical Christians get this. If we receive any blessing in our lives, our automatic response is to say, “Father, thank You for this blessing.” This spouse, this car, this house, this job, this child, this opportunity, this ministry… when a blessing appears in our lives, we know full well where it came from, and we give thanks to God. Maybe we worked for it, it involved us making sacrifices to get it, or we did a lot of research and brainstorming beforehand, but still, we understand that ultimately God has done it, and we are grateful.
But amazingly, people who never thank God for anything, who never even pray, who do not attempt to please God, and are skeptical that God even exists, still get blessed by God. When, after a season of drought, the rains come and fall upon the farmlands, it is not merely the praying, Bible-reading Christian farmers who get the rain. Hard-boiled farmers who can barely speak a sentence without lacing it with profanity get rain on their fields as well. When it is a boom year for the wheat farmers, the ungodly, immoral farmers prosper as well as the godly. God does not reserve His physical blessings exclusively for His children.
They Never Realize
It never dawns on these unthankful folks that they have been blessed by a kind and compassionate Creator. They just attribute their blessings to their own hard work, or they assume they got lucky. And so, they never bow their heads in prayer and give thanks to the Heavenly Father. They go about their business, happy, but entirely ignorant of how it was that their blessings appeared.
Paul preached to the people of Lystra and described how God made all there is: the heavens, the seas, the earth, and everything in it. He then stated: “Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” (Acts 14:17). According to Paul, God’s goodness in supplying both the sinners and the godly with all they need for a happy life, was a witness to the world. In other words, when we look around and see how blessed we are and the abundance in our lives, we should recognize that this is due to our kind and benevolent Creator. But of course, many people do not see this at all.
Most people these days are not farmers, but nearly everyone has happy, blessed seasons in their lives. These are times when it seems the sun is shining, times when our career is prospering, when our lives are filled with pleasant relationships and peace. These “fruitful seasons” are given to us as a witness of the goodness of God, and it is expected that we will recognize this and give thanks to God for it. And it is not just Christians who receive these seasons of blessings, but sadly, it is usually only Christians who ever pause to thank God for them.
Ignorant and Unthankful
Sometimes, in our enthusiasm for God, we Christians will say something like: “If I didn’t know God, I would be dead,” or “If I didn’t have Jesus in my life, I would be a total failure.” That may be true, but the truth is that there are sinners who live to an old age; there are non-Christians who have good marriages, successful careers, friends, nice houses, take pleasant vacations, and live happy lives. Their problem is not that they suffer from a lack of blessings – their problem is that they do not have enough sense to realize from whence these blessings come.
We Christians have a habit that most non-Christians will never practice. We bow our heads and give thanks to God for our meals. We recognize that the food on our table is a gift from God. Even though we have eaten thousands of meals previously, we do not take it for granted that the Father has graciously allowed us to enjoy a breakfast, a lunch, or a dinner. That hamburger, pot of beans or salad on our table did not just come from the supermarket – it came from God. Yes, we purchased it with our money, but it was God who gave us the job that gave us the means to purchase these meals. And that meat and broccoli that sits before us is a witness of our loving Father who art in heaven, who gives us our daily bread. And we say, “Thank You.”
Different gifts provoke different levels of thankfulness. I do not spend hundreds of times thanking God for a hamburger meal I enjoyed twenty years ago. I did thank God for that meal at the time, but by now it is long forgotten. But for some blessings, I thank God repeatedly. My wife Benedicta is one such blessing. I could never count the number of times I have thanked God for drawing us together, and for that special time she came up to the car as I was preparing to be driven back to my hotel after the morning ministry in Lagos, Nigeria. Ben wanted to interview me for a video she was making, which led to us getting to know each other and eventually marrying.
But the greatest gift of all, for which we should thank God continually, is the blessing of salvation through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. All of us who are in Christ, who have been made keenly aware of our loving and generous Heavenly Father, were at some point drawn unto Jesus by God. We did not discover Christ accidentally. Our hearts were opened by the Holy Spirit, and we came to believe that God so loved the world, God so loved us that He gave His only begotten Son for us, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. And for that, above all else, we will give thanks continually.
