How to Lead Your Family in a Culture of Thanksgiving

We will soon be gathered around a table with family, piling plates, cutting our children’s food, and wishing the Pilgrims ate steak at the first Thanksgiving. Dedicated reflection time and giving thanks is vital. Yet, I hope thanksgiving is commonplace, and Thanksgiving is seasonal. Let’s talk through some ways to make gratitude cultural in your home, rather than a celebration in November.

To keep things simple here, let’s use three foundations for forming a culture of gratitude in our homes. A culture of gratitude in the home requires grace-filled thinking, gospel expression, and a language of gratitude.

Cultivating Grace-Filled Thought

Understanding grace produces thankful thought patterns. It does so because grace fundamentally assumes no worth or claim (Eph. 2:8). It affirms insufficiency and admits complete dependence (2 Cor. 12:9–10). People who rightly evaluate themselves recognize their worth, claims, and source for life are graces from the hand of God. If we truly believe we deserve nothing from God we will be appropriately thankful to God for everything.

Inversely, if we believe we are owed something, gratitude will lose out to greed, because we will operate as though we live to add to the worth that already existed, receive our due for our rights and privileges, and make our life what we want it to be by our own means.

Parentally, we will foster greedy thinking in our children when we cultivate the belief that they deserve what they want, the rights they think they have, and the feelings they feel. We deserve only wrath. Our only claim is in Christ. And the only feelings we should trust are the ones dictated by God’s Spirit, not ones derived from the flesh. This is not merely a matter of having spoiled kids. It’s cultivation of grace, which inevitably results in expressions of gratitude. How to do this, though?

Say “Yes” and Explain Grace

When asking for permission, give ‘yeses’ and remind them that you’re saying yes because you love them, and not because they have earned it or not earned it. When they ask for something, say yes occasionally, and remind them you had no particular reason to say yes. You can say yes too much, but you can’t explain grace too much.

Say “No” and Explain Grace

Your kids should not be strangers to “no.” We are not tyrants indifferent to withhold. Yet, neither are we genies, granting wishes to one who figured out they should first ask for endless wishes. You can also say “no” too much. Our Father in Heaven is a gift-giver (James 1:17). When you say no and explain grace, be careful not to tell them you’re saying no because they don’t deserve a yes. That is the exact opposite of grace. Instead say things like “I have reason I know that wouldn’t be good for you.” Or “you know I love you and I know a no would be better for you.” “God doesn’t say yes to everything, because he knows we ask selfishly sometimes” (James 4:3).

Cultivating Gospel-Expression

How your home, and the people in it, express themselves reflects the cultural expectations, norms, and unique features of the culture of your home. I’m a southerner planted in the Midwest. I greatly miss two southern cultural staples— sweet tea and southern BBQ. The midwest is great but their tea is unsweetened and their BBQ is mid. Every home has cultural “staples.”

We should be concerned when the cultural staples of our home are unspiritual ones. The gospel functions to produce several fundamental expressions, self-giving and thanksgiving. These should be our cultural norms. It should feel odd when they are not present and available. Parentally, we set the cultural tone for these staples.

Setting Self-Giving as a Cultural Norm

We should expect our children’s self-giving, and subsequently their thanksgiving, to be a reflection of ours. If we are applying grace in our living it will be proved in our self-giving. They should see us serving our own food last. They should see us insist their mom sit down and have a rest while we wrestle to occupy them. They should see us apologize first and hear us complain the least. They should know our interests are typically the interests of others (Phil. 2:1-3). Husbands and fathers should be the self-giving trend-setters in the culture of their home.

Setting Thanksgiving as a Cultural Norm

Before we get to thanksgiving as a language in your home, let me encourage two practical priorities which will establish gratitude in the culture of your home: cultivate contentment and be satisfied with simplicity.

1. Cultivate contentment: teach your kids what a need actually is (1 Tim. 6:8). Do this by drawing a line between priorities and pleasures. Priorities are required, pleasures are extras. If we’re always buying a bigger TV, or expressing our desire for one, we’re teaching them that a pleasure has become a priority. If we’re constantly jumping jobs to climb the corporate ladder, we may accidentally rob them of the value of learning to plod. Gratitude is a test case for the contentment of our hearts.

2. Be satisfied with simplicity: teach them that most of life’s value is in the mundane, not the exceptional. Set a culture of investing time, self, and feeling into activity and decisions rather than what is easiest, quickest, and most convenient. For example, a family dinner around the table offers greater opportunity for gratitude than constantly DoorDashing. Nature provides greater opportunity for awe, and therefore gratitude, than screens.

How To: Cultivating Thankful Language

Cultures are uniquely characterized by their language, not just their dialect, but their colloquialisms and metaphors. If I go to Japan, I’ll be a linguistic outsider. If thanksgiving is a linguistic outsider in our home, then it may be a reflection we are not gospel people.

Let’s be really practical here. Just say you’re thankful, a lot. Work “I’m thankful for…” regularly into your language. Take moments to pray prayers of thanksgiving after safe trips, vacations, healed ouchies, and new things. Say “I love you and I’m thankful for you because… .” This reinforces grace-filled thinking and gospel-expression. In other words, talk like gratitude is normal, and it will be.

A culture of gratitude doesn’t create itself. May God make us gospel people so that we are thankful people!