We Have Much to Be Thankful For [a psalms mini-study of how God “deals bountifully” with us]
My dad often repeats the phrase, “We have much to be thankful for.” While I was growing up, he’d say it at the start of a meal, when the family celebrated a holiday or a birthday, or simply at the end of a long day. For years, I thought those words were just another dad-ism, a phrase heard so often I’d be tempted to dismiss the sentiment and opt for an eye-roll instead.
But that regular expression of gratitude wasn’t a cliche or truism. For him, it has been a lifeline. I heard him say “we have much to be thankful for” while his hair fell out and his body weakened from cancer treatments. He said, “we have much to be thankful for” through tears, praying before dinner while my mom slowly deteriorated from her own cancer, lying in her bed just down the hall.
His gratitude was never an attempt to put on a fake smile. Instead, those words were spoken as a liturgy tethering our broken hearts to our sure hope. Gratitude didn’t replace lament; it often grew out of it.
Around Thanksgiving, we often repeat the psalms that contain shouts of joy from start to finish. Psalm 100:4 says, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!” Psalm 111 begins, “Praise the Lord! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, in the company of the upright, in the congregation.” But there are also many psalms offering words of gratitude in the midst of pain and uncertainty.
The Hebrew word gamal is usually translated in the ESV as “to deal bountifully.” In a number of different psalms, the writers praise God and remember what he’s done, saying some version of, “God has dealt bountifully with me.” Like my dad’s oft-repeated phrase of thanksgiving, praying these words of the psalmists help us practice gratitude even when he seems silent, when our souls feel restless, or when the future seems dark.
When God Seems Silent: Psalm 13:6
Psalm 13 begins, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” Many of us have cried out with these words over the past few years as we’ve lamented the grief and injustice we’ve seen–and many have personally experienced. The headlines this week alone give us plenty of reason to rage at God with the words, “How long, O LORD?!”
Where is God and why does he seem so silent?
But even in the apparent silence of God, the psalmist, David, can say, “I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (13:6, italics added).
In the middle of grief and sorrow, David sings of God’s provision, even before he’s received it. He’s not putting on a fake smile or masking his pain with shallow words. Like a person caught in torrential floodwaters, he’s desperately gripping the only thing that will hold him fast, the only One who can hold him fast. He’s grasping onto the sure hope he has even while sorrows swirl around him. He remembers what God’s done and knows God can do it again. John Calvin put it this way: “We may not be wholly free from sorrow, but it is nevertheless necessary that this cheerfulness of faith rise above it, and put into our mouth a song on account of the joy which is reserved for us in the future although not as yet experienced by us.”[1]
When Your Soul Feels Restless: Psalm 116:7
Like Psalm 13, the author of Psalm 116 is in deep anguish. He pleads with God for mercy (verse 1) and deliverance (verse 4), begging for rescue from his distress. Then verse seven says, “Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you” (italics added).
So often, our worries and fears and restlessness grow because we forget. We’re like the Israelites in the desert, anxious because they don’t have food or water or a strong enough army–but when did God ever fail to provide for them? When has God ever failed to provide for us? In times when it seems like he hasn’t provided, it may simply be that we need to learn to wait for his provision–or accept that his provision looks different from what we expected.
So often, we want God’s provision to look like taking away or erasing or healing whatever ails us. I wanted God to take away Mom’s cancer. In times of financial struggle, I wanted God to give my husband a new job with a steady paycheck instead of having to trust God with our finances all over again, every single day. We want our vulnerability removed. But that’s not always how God works. As Tish Harrison Warren wrote, God doesn’t promise to keep bad things from happening. Instead, “[h]e promises that we will not be left alone. He will keep watch with us in the night.”[2]
God dealing bountifully with us doesn’t mean our vulnerability is removed; it means we have a God willing to sit with us in our vulnerability, a God willing to come to earth in the form of a tiny baby, open to experiencing all the hardships and struggles a human can experience.
Charles Spurgeon wrote of these verses, “The Lord hath dealt bountifully with us, for he hath given us his Son, and in him he hath given us all things: he hath sent us his Spirit, and by him he conveys to us all spiritual blessings. God dealeth with us like a God; he lays his fulness open to us, and of that fulness have all we received, and grace for grace…let us come back to him who has treated us with such exceeding kindness.”[3]
When our soul feels restless, we can find rest in remembering the exceeding kindness and provision of God.
When the Future Seems Dark: Psalm 142:7
David wrote Psalm 142 while hiding in a cave. He was distraught and, like in so many other psalms, crying out to God for deliverance. “Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul” (verse 4). Maybe his words echo the cries of your own soul. Our grief can feel so great and our troubles so vast that no one seems to care–not even God. But then a few verses later, David says, “Bring me out of prison, that I may give thanks to your name! The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me” (verse 7, italics added).
Sometimes the future seems so dark, so uncertain, so hopeless, that we may as well pull a chair into the cave where we’re stuck and try to get comfortable. Rescue from our current circumstances feels impossible. We can be tempted to give up or find solutions apart from God, like Hezekiah trying to negotiate with the king of Assyria by giving him gold and silver before he brought his problems to God (see 2 Kings 18 and Isaiah 36).
I’m prone to try to figure out solutions on my own, and only when I’m at my wits end do I approach God. But this psalm reminds us that sinking into despair or walking away from our Deliverer are no solution. Instead, we can cry out to God with raw honesty and cling to the reality of what God will one day do. He will deal with us bountifully.
Finding Solace in Our Good God
Speaking words of gratitude may come more easily when our outward circumstances warrant celebration and thanksgiving. Yet it’s just as important—if not even more important—during other times. Honest cries before God and ourselves may unearth pain we've buried, but it's often in torn up soil that gratitude grows. It’s often in our wrestling with God that we eventually find solace in his embrace.
In Psalm 131, David says his soul is calm and quiet “like a weaned child with its mother” (verse 2). “Weaned” comes from the same word as “deal bountifully”. The weaning process may have been filled with struggle, but the psalmist has been satisfied by the goodness and nurture of God–and so he can rest. Spurgeon commented on this psalm saying:
To the weaned child his mother is his comfort though she has denied him comfort. It is a blessed mark of growth out of spiritual infancy when we can forgo the joys which once appeared to be essential, and can find our solace in him who denies them to us: then we behave [maturely], and every childish complaint is hushed.[4]
In hardship or heartache, we can find solace in our God who has dealt bountifully with us. We don’t have a guarantee of a certain outcome here and now, but we do have a guarantee that God is and will be good. All the time.
That reality gives us reason enough to rest. It’s reason enough to give thanks like the psalmists. And it’s reason enough to say in any and every season, “We have much to be thankful for.”
Reflect
How has God dealt bountifully with you? How has he shown his provision and love to you, even in the midst of hard seasons?
This week, consider reading through one or more of the psalms mentioned here: Psalm 13, 116, 142, or 131.
[1] John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Volume First. Translated by Rev. James Anderson, https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom08/calcom08.xix.iii.html#fnf_xix.iii-p7.3.
[2] Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 33.
[3] Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, Volume 3 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1990), 69.
[4] Ibid, 137.
