Psalm 116:17: “I will offer to You the sacrifice of thanksgiving, / And will call upon the name of the LORD.”

May 1st, 2024 by Pastor Ed in devotional

David was careful to thank God even though it was a sacrifice for him to do so. Being thankful is so easy when the sun is shining down on us and so difficult when the storms of life are raging all around us. It is especially hard to thank God when He is disciplining us because we have tried to run from Him. Jonah offered an almost identical prayer in Jonah 2:9, when he gratefully thanked the Lord, even though God had not yet rescued him from the belly of the fish: “But I will sacrifice to You / With the voice of thanksgiving.” In fact, it was immediately following that prayer that God had the fish spit Jonah up onto dry land near Nineveh. Both David and Jonah learned lessons the hard way in life. When we try to run and escape from God, we only bring heartache and disaster onto our own heads.

D. L. Moody, in the late 1800’s, used to tell this story from his visit to the highlands of Scotland:

Doctor Andrew Bonar told me how, in the Highlands of Scotland, often a sheep would wander off into the rocks and get into places they couldn’t get out of. The grass on these mountains is very sweet and the sheep like it, and they will jump down 10 or 12 feet, and then they can’t jump back again, and the shepherd hears them bleating in distress. They may be there for days, until they have eaten all the grass, and he will wait until they are so faint they cannot stand, and then they put a rope around him and he will go over there and pull that sheep up out of the jaws of death. Why don’t they go down there when the sheep first get there? I asked. “Ah!” he said, “they are so very foolish they would dash right over the precipice and be killed if they did!” And that is the way with men, they won’t go back to God until they have no friends and have lost everything.

“LORD, we are thankful to You for Your salvation and we do call on your name for rescue from sin today.”