I’ll be leaving this Friday to WV so that I can spend a week hunting with my parents and my son. Since I won’t be blogging at all during Thanksgiving Week, I want to post about giving thanks this week.

Several years ago I read Evangelism & The Sovereignty of God by J. I. Packer. Below is a quote that I have treasured up in my heart to remind myself that I am to give God thanks not only for my salvation, but for my response to the gospel as well, which is why I labeled this post with tongue in cheek. Enjoy!

Romans 6:15-18; Philippians 1:3-6,  27-29; 1 Thessalonians 2:13
2 Thessalonians 2:13-14

“You give God thanks for your conversion.  Now why do you do that?  Because you know in your heart that God was entirely responsible for it.  You did not save yourself; He saved you.  Your thanksgiving is itself an acknowledgment that your conversion was not your own work, but His work. You do not put it down to chance or accident that you came under Christian influence when you did.  You do not put it down to chance or accident that you attended a Christian church,  that you heard the Christian gospel,  that you have Christian friends and,  perhaps,  a Christian home,  that the Bible fell into your hands,  that you saw your need of Christ and came to trust Him as your Savior.  You do not attribute your repenting and believing to your own wisdom, or prudence, or sound judgment, or good sense.  Perhaps,  in the days when you were seeking Christ,  you labored and strove hard,  read and pondered much,  but all that outlay of effort did not make your conversion your own work.  Your act of faith when you closed with Christ was yours in the sense that it was you who performed it; but that does not mean that you saved yourself.  In fact, it never occurs to you to suppose that you saved yourself.

As you look back, you take to yourself the blame for your past blindness and indifference and obstinacy and evasiveness in the face of the gospel message; but you do not pat yourself on the back for having been at length mastered by the insistent Christ.  You would never dream of dividing the credit for your salvation between God and yourself.  You have never for one moment supposed that the decisive contribution to your salvation was yours and not God’s.  You have never told God that, while you are grateful for the means and opportunities of grace that He gave you, you realize that you have to thank, not Him, but yourself for the fact that you responded to His call.  Your heart revolts at the very thought of talking to God in such terms.  In fact, you thank Him no less sincerely for the gift of faith and repentance than for the gift of a Christ to trust and turn to.  This is the way in which, since you became a Christian, your heart has always led you.  You give God all the glory for all that your salvation involved and you know that it would be blasphemy if you refused to thank Him for bringing you to faith.  Thus, in the way that you think of your conversion and give thanks for your conversion, you acknowledge the sovereignty of divine grace.  And every other Christian in the world does the same.”