Bible Wonders- The Relationship of Thanks to Learn and Praise

Did you ever wonder? Did you ever wonder?

I do. Did you ever wonder? Why the sun always rises, but the stars never fall?

Why dry land is never satisfied by water? And why fire never says enough? Today on Bible Wonders, I would like to wonder with you about the word thank, as in thank you, and how that relates really so much to both praise and to learning. And it's interesting how God got my attention on this. I do a podcast with James Banks, the host of Encouraging Prayer, and actually he's the author of Prayers for Prodigals, and he's also a contributor in the Our Daily Bread piece that comes out every day, and the author on many, many books on prayer.

I don't even know how many. An amazing man of God and one of my favorite people, and the whole concept of how much he loves prayer and how much he loves to study it. Well, the piece that we did Friday, he was talking about when you don't know what to pray sometimes, and you're up against, you know, your prayers hitting the ceiling, then think about thanking God, and that will lead to praising God, and which I will put the link to that particular podcast.

I really highly recommend you listen to it every week it comes out over the weekend. He does something on prayer every single week, and it's always worth listening to. Well, this morning, not coincidentally, as I'm beginning to pray and really just climb up in the Father's lap and try to figure out where we're going, I just wasn't feeling it, and I'm sure you've experienced that. Maybe you haven't.

I hope not. But anyway, I'm not feeling it at all, and all of a sudden I recalled, oh yeah, James said, if you start thanking Jesus and God and the Father and all, the way that I believe it was one of the authors he was quoting would say that for you to thank God until you got to the point of praising God. And I thought, well, that would be good. So I just started to think about things I could thank him for, and of course one of the immediate ones was thank him for James and all that he's taught me. And the next thing I know went from this thankful to that thankful, and oh my goodness, before I knew it, I was truly praising God, and my world was filled with thankfulness. And so I said, oh well, let me go look at the word thank in Hebrew. Knowing me, that's where I'm going to go. And so when I looked at that word, my mouth just dropped open.

As if I were to pronounce it, it looks like it would be pronounced Yuda, but oh my goodness, what goodness that I was like, I can't even believe how cool this is. And where you'll find it, I just went to my Bible search with the Blue Letter Bible app. I just typed in the word thank and did a search, and it came to 1 Chronicles 16, 4, where the Levites are being instructed on how they're to set up their thanks and their praises.

And so you find the two words right next to each other, and here's the actual quote. It says, and he appointed certain Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord and to record and to thank and to praise the Lord, right? And so that word thank right there, which you'll find it throughout the Scripture, is a yud, then a dalud, and then a hey. And that's why my mouth dropped open, because you might remember, as I was talking about the word teach, that the yud, that little bit means a lot letter, that first dot that you make on the page, which is the spark of God, can also be considered a seed. And so when that seed, especially Bible truth seed, is what the gimel that would run, the rich man that's going to run to give to the poor man what's been stolen, that letter gimel, when he runs, he gives it to the dalud, which is the bent over servant, which we talked about as King David himself, right? That his name was dalud, vav, dalud. Well, when the little seed is received by the dalud, which you do when you teach, right?

You're through the Spirit, you're taking this seed of the Bible and you're sharing it with the poor man that has, it's been stolen, the truth, the understanding of God. And so as that seed is received by the dalud, it makes the letter hey, which is a dalud with a yud down in the corner. When the dalud is received, the yud, you now have the letter hey, which means to express. Literally, it means behold. And it's the first letter of God's name, Jehovah, or even Yah, or it's used in so many ways to express God. And so how cool is it when you think about it, to be thankful, is to like, oh, well, there's dalud, the servant, received the seed. And immediately when you receive that seed, what do you want to do?

You're going to thank God. And then how cool is that, that that would lead to praise, which when you look at the word praise, it is another hey, like behold, and then two lameds. One of those lameds could be learning and the other one could be loving. It's like your heart, the lamed itself is your heart. Okay. And so you got your heart expressing what you've learned and how you love. I mean, how cool is it that these things are so linked together, this hey, this yud, and this dalud to mean thankful.