“Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.” Psalm 100:4
Another Hebrew word for “praise” is towdah. It has the same root as yadah for extending the hands, but with a meaning of acceptance and thanksgiving. Towdah is thanking God for things not yet received as well as thanking Him for what is already in our hand. Towdah comes to God with an open heart that seeks God’s manifested presence with anticipation to accept what God wants to do and to receive what God has to give.
The hands are symbolic of the power we have to work and to give. They are also symbolic of our choice to receive. When we lift up our hands to God in thanksgiving, we are both giving our praise to God as well as preparing our hearts to receive from God. We understand that God is our loving Father – a benevolent, generous, gracious Father that overwhelms us with abundance of love and blessing. When we experience the unreasonable, immeasurable, undeserving grace of God, we realize that in comparison to His ability and resource, we can never repay Him. Our response to His grace can only be “thank you.”
When we realize that that God is faithful to keep His Word, we can count on His promises as being as good as done from the time that the promise was given. When we accept His promises as good as done, we’re thankful. We experience joy and peace of receiving a promise in our hearts before the promise is ever in our hand.
To be able to receive, a person has to have a humble heart. A heart that is in a proud condition finds it difficult to receive. Pride wants control. Pride wants to earn what it has. Pride doesn’t want to owe anyone. Humility is a position of surrender. Humility is yielded to the Lord in loving trust. Humility is able to receive. Humility is thankful and happy to receive.
Application: It’s in the manifested presence of God that exchanges are made. God is a spirit, and His promises are given and received in the spirit first, before those promises are in the hand. Thankfulness is a response of receiving from God in the heart. Seek the presence of God through individual worship and in corporate worship services. Give your thanksgiving to God for what He has done, for what He is doing, and for what He about to do.