Ephesians 5:4 - Let there be thanksgiving.
You may have noticed that the Apostle Paul talks this way a lot: “Let there be — *insert some good thing or character trait* — in your lives and churches.” And I mean to focus on the first three words: “Let there be…”. It may not sound like much, but it stands in fairly notable opposition to the more direct, “Be [something]” or “Do [something].”
You also may have noticed that it sounds a lot like Genesis 1 when God says, “Let there be light.” It’s held out for us to see, plain as day: Paul is speaking in creation language. He’s mimicking God’s voice itself. The correlation between creation, gospel, and the Christian life is a common occurrence in the New Testament, and is made even more clear in places such as 2 Corinthians 4:6 where it says, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.” God is speaking things into existence again, just like he did in the beginning. And Jesus is the “word” he’s using.
I think Paul knows how difficult it is to just say to someone, “Be thankful.” Not that there’s not a place for that. But here he does more. He wishes it, prays it, and prophetically pronounces it into being, in the wake of the gospel’s work. “Let there be thankfulness where there presently isn’t any! May God create it out of nothing!” It’s incredibly freeing, isn’t it? — to know that many of the imperatives of the New Testament are worded this way, especially when we struggle with being thankful? Contrast this with the Old Testament which many times required capital punishment when someone disobeyed. It’s as if the Bible wants us to know that things are different now with Jesus, that God is working in our hearts to re-create us through the Spirit rather than expecting us to moralize our old selves to death.
This is also why these types of verses are always found at the end of the letters: because they’re less important. They serve as moons that reflect the light of the sun rather than serving as a source of light themselves. Thankfulness only comes from the Spirit of God, when we put ourselves (as moons) in the path of the light of the sun of the gospel. The more we think we have something to do with our salvation, the less thankful we’ll be. That’s just common sense. But the less we think we have to do with our salvation, the more we’ll be able to direct our thankfulness outside of us toward the only one truly worthy of our praise.
So, “Let there be thanksgiving” has a semantic range to it when read in context with the rest of the Bible. It means: “Hiawatha Church, let there be thankfulness among us as we gather together underneath the good news that Jesus has saved us. May he make us more thankful, not so much as a byproduct of us trying harder, but as a byproduct of our realization that all is given and nothing is earned (1 Cor 4:7).”
CHRIS WACHTER / LEAD PASTOR