There is nothing we have that isn’t a gift, but God’s greatest gift is the one that enables us to see this truth—the giver behind the gifts. G.K. Chesterton got at this when he said, “We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?”

All day long we stand beneath a cascading waterfall of God’s grace, his unmerited gifts to us: life, health, friends and family, food and sunshine and rain and the pleasures we meet in immeasurable ways. Our duty is to receive all of these and then look at the source, the spring that it all flows from, and simply say thank you.

The prophet Jeremiah says the human heart is the epitome of deceit and desperately wicked–“who can know it?”, he asks rhetorically. And so we take the most obvious gifts and obscure their source. Jesus confronted the people that did this with the Bible in his day in John 5:39: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” Instead of meeting God through the book, they bowed down and worshipped the book. It’s like being given a fork to eat with but deciding instead to stick it in your eye.

God gives the us Bible, the liturgy, the Lord’s Supper, the sermon, forgiveness, one another, all of these things, so that we would enjoys the gifts and through them see and thank the Giver.