How Do We Thank God? : Psalm 116:17 & 18;
50:14 & 15.
Now
People of God, concerning offering whether it is thanksgiving or general
offering or whatever form of offering it may be, I would like to make you
understand that the thing that matters to God is not just what you have
brought. What is important to God is you make the offering worship to Him.
Many
of us have the wrong belief or notion that when we bring an offering to church
and we give God something, that we are helping God or helping the church or the
Pastors. Well people of God, you don’t have the capacity to help God; you can’t
help God. And if it is a question of your helping God, God will not touch what
you bring with a 100feet pole. God does not need help from anybody; God can
take care of His Church with or without you.
God
can take care of His genuine Servants with or without you. But God receives
your offering from you as an act of worship when you present it in reverence
and with the right motive. And He makes your offering upon His altar a point of
contact for returning blessing to you. That is why God said so much in Psalm 50:14 & 15.
If
you read the earlier verses before verse
14 & 15, God was telling Israel, He said “if I am hungry, I will not
tell you. You’re not bringing these things to me so that you can feed me. For I
own all the animals; they all belong to me. You can’t even feed me; the whole
heaven and earth belong to me. But what I want you to do is to give me an
offering as thanksgiving and pay the vow you made to me”.
Many
of us make these vows even without remembering them: “Father if you do this for
me, I return in with this or that in thanksgiving to you”. Most times when God
does those things; when we escape from the circumstances and challenges of that
forced us into this vows, many of us forget what we have said. And so, what God
is requesting of us is to fulfill our vows in thanksgiving as we did vow and
then call upon Him in times of trouble and He will answer you, deliver you and
you will honor Him.
Therefore
people of God, He does not only receive our offering, He first considers our hearts.
Therefore none of us is capable of giving God anything. He needs your
thanksgiving offering as a point of contact for blessing you. Give in Gratitude
to God.
Copied from the title The Power of
Thanksgiving: (to be published soon).
By Pastor Michael Okwundu Onyeka