Give Thanks To Him

Open Psalm 100 and you will usually see a short line printed above verse one, before the poem proper begins. In the traditional Hebrew it reads, roughly, “A psalm of thanksgiving,” or “for the thank offering.” Scholars debate how much weight to put on these old headings, but this one is striking: of all the psalms, only this one carries that particular label. The song announces its own purpose before it says a word.

I find that steadying. We do not know the exact day it was first sung, and I am not going to invent one for you. What we can say is that psalms like this belonged to Israel’s gathered worship, the sort of thing sung as people came up to the temple. So the gates and courts in verse four are not poetic scenery. They were stone and timber, and the worshippers really did walk through them with something to give. This is a song for people on their feet, on their way in, gratitude already in hand.

Look at how the line is built. “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise.” Gates first, then courts. The gate is the outer threshold, the way in. The courts are the open ground inside, where the worshipper actually stands. The psalmist walks us inward in two steps and gives each step its own word: thanksgiving at the gate, praise in the courts.

The Hebrew behind “thanksgiving” here is todah, and it is worth knowing. Todah carries the sense of thanks offered, an acknowledgement made out loud, often with a gift in hand. It is gratitude that does something, not gratitude that merely feels warm. Thanks given, declared, brought.

What I tend to skim past is the closing phrase, “bless his name.” Blessing God sounds back to front, since we usually think of him blessing us. But here it simply means to speak well of him, to honour who he is. We arrive thankful, and we leave having said something true about him out loud.

That word todah ties this psalm to something solid in Israel’s worship. There was a particular sacrifice, the thank offering, a way of saying with an actual gift that God had been good. Gratitude made costly and visible. The psalm and the offering belong to the same world.

This is where the line runs forward to Christ for me. The whole sacrificial system was always pointing past itself. Hebrews tells us those repeated offerings could never finally deal with sin, and that Jesus offered himself once for all. So the thanksgiving this verse calls for finds its deepest reason at the cross. We give thanks now not only for harvest and mercy and daily bread, but because the gate has been thrown open by someone else’s costly gift.

The short reflection on this page already notes that Jesus called himself the gate. I would add one layer to that: he is also the offering through whom our thanks is carried. Paul tells the Colossians to do everything in his name with thanksgiving (Colossians 3:17), which is this verse grown up and given a face.

Here is my honest struggle with this verse. It tells me to come thankful, and some mornings I am plainly not. The kettle is on, the news is grim, someone I love is unwell, and “enter with thanksgiving” feels like being told to smile for a photograph I never wanted taken.

What helps me is seeing that the psalm commands thanksgiving rather than waiting for it to turn up. Todah is an act, something done, not a weather system you sit and hope will shift. Paul says much the same to the Thessalonians: give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Not for everything, but in it.

So I have been trying to make thanks a reflex rather than a feeling I wait on. I say one true thing back to God before I bring him my list. Of the ten lepers Jesus healed, only one came back to thank him (Luke 17:15-16), and I would rather not join the nine who took the gift and forgot the giver. Naming the mercy does not mend the morning. Done often enough, it quietly turns me round to face the right way.

The psalm does not only tell me to come thankful. It tells me why, and it tucks the reasons either side of the gate. Just before verse four, the song says to know that the Lord is God, that he made us and we belong to him, that we are his people and the sheep of his own pasture (Psalm 100:3). Just after it, the closing line gives the deepest ground: the Lord is good, his love holds fast, and his faithfulness reaches on through every generation (Psalm 100:5).

It matters to me that not one of those reasons rises and falls with my circumstances. Whether the morning is bright or grim, I am still made and not self-made, still owned and kept, still held inside a love that was here long before me and will outlast me. That is the sort of fact a person can lean their whole weight on. So when thanks is hard to find in the week behind me, the psalm points me back to who God is and whose I am. The gate stands open because of him, not because the week went well.

The order matters too. Belonging comes before the call to praise, not after it. The psalm does not ask us to thank our way into being his; it tells us we are already his and lets the thanks rise from there. That is a kinder shape than the one I default to, where I try to earn a welcome I already have.

This way of coming did not stay locked to one building. Psalm 95, a near neighbour, opens with almost the same welcome: come before him with thanksgiving, and lift a glad noise to the rock who saves. Two short psalms, set close together, both teaching Israel to arrive grateful rather than grumbling. The thought clearly mattered enough to say twice.

What moves me is where the pattern travelled. Centuries later Paul wrote to the Philippians from what seems to have been a prison, and told them to carry every worry to God with thanksgiving folded into the asking (Philippians 4:6). To the Colossians he wrote that gratitude and the peace of Christ belong in the same heart (Colossians 3:15). He had no temple courts to walk and no stone gates in front of him, yet he had learned that the real threshold was never the architecture. You can give thanks at the start of a prayer in a cell as truly as a pilgrim once gave it on the temple steps. The gate, it turns out, is something you carry.

I have heard this verse used as a bouncer. “Leave your troubles outside, come in thankful,” someone says at the church door, as though verse four were an entrance exam. It gets wheeled out in worship-style arguments too, cited to prove that the loud hour with hands raised is the properly biblical way in, and that a quieter gathering has somehow failed to arrive correctly. The line will not carry either load. It names two thresholds and two responses, thanksgiving and praise, and says nothing whatever about volume, or style, or the state a person is in when they walk up.

The bouncer reading also has the sentence pointing the wrong way. This is a psalm handing worshippers words for the walk in. It is not posting anyone at the gate to check them first.

There is a milder version of the same mistake, where todah gets flattened into “stay positive” and used to hush lament. But this song was written for one particular moment, a crowd arriving to worship. Reach for it to quiet someone’s honest grief and you have made it say something it never claimed.

Something worth knowing if you are the one standing at the front. This line is spoken to a company of people, not to a solitary reader at a kitchen table. The psalm opens by calling all the earth to shout (Psalm 100:1), so the “you” running through it is a plural you, a procession being called forward. I am told the imperatives here are plural in the Hebrew as well, and I believe that is right, though I would ask someone who actually reads it before building a sermon point on the grammar. The opening line makes the case without needing it.

Watch where the weight falls as the commands move. First you are brought somewhere (gates, then courts), and only then are you asked to say anything (give thanks, bless his name). Feet before mouth. Nobody is required to speak until they are already standing inside.

So if you are drawing a talk out of this text rather than dropping one onto it, follow that order instead of jumping to application: where you are being brought, what you carry across the threshold, what you say once you are standing there, and what you are still saying about him on the way home. It is the shape of an opening ten minutes too. Get people in, then get them speaking, and do not rush the first half.

This line earns its keep as a call to worship, read out while people are still finding their seats, or at the reopening of a building that has stood empty a while. To my mind the gates and courts language is doing real work in that moment rather than decorating it, because arriving is exactly what is happening to the people hearing it. It sits well at the top of a church meeting that is likely to get tense, too, settling whose house the room is before anyone starts arguing their corner.

Where I would not put it is at the bedside of someone freshly bereaved, or in answer to the honest question, “why should I thank God for this.” The psalm never argues anyone into gratitude. It assumes a worshipper who already can, and hands them words for the door they are already walking through. Used on someone who cannot get near that door yet, an invitation starts sounding like a rebuke, and that is not work this verse was ever built to do.

The Psalms are not one long undifferentiated song. They fall into five books, each closing with its own doxology, and the seam between the third and the fourth runs right through the neighbourhood of ours. Book Three ends at Psalm 89, and the last stretch of that psalm is not praise at all. It is a complaint with an edge of accusation in it: the covenant with David looks abandoned, the crown defiled in the dust, the promises apparently void (Psalm 89:38 to 51). Whoever set that psalm there left the reader standing in the wreckage of the monarchy with a question and no answer supplied.

Book Four opens at Psalm 90 by reaching straight past the wreckage to Moses, back before there was a king or a temple to lose at all. And the psalms that follow keep saying one thing over and over, in 93 and 96 and 97 and 99: Yahweh reigns. Whatever has happened to the throne in Jerusalem, he reigns. It reads to me like people repeating a true sentence until their own hearts will take it back.

So by the time we reach Psalm 100 we are not walking into a song written by the comfortable. We are walking in behind poems that had to relearn how to call God king after watching a king fall. That changes the temperature of “enter with thanksgiving” for me. It is not cheerfulness that has never met trouble. It is a decision taken in the teeth of loss, that the true King’s gates are still standing even where the visible ones came down.

Into his gates, and then into his courts. I used to hear that as one unbroken welcome, all the way in. It was not. The temple Chronicles describes had more than one court: a court kept for the priests, and a great court outside it where everybody else stood (2 Chronicles 4:9, and see 1 Kings 6:36 for the inner court and its stonework). An ordinary worshipper carrying a thank offering came to their permitted ground and stopped there. Real boundary, real doors, real people minding them.

Then here is the detail that took me years to notice, and I think it is lovely. The thank offering had a rule attached. The meat had to be eaten on the day it was offered, with nothing left until the morning (Leviticus 7:15). Think what that does to a man arriving with an animal and the bread that went with it. He cannot eat it. He physically cannot. So the thanks he came to give turns, within hours, into an invitation, and the court fills with whoever he can lay hands on: family, neighbours, the poor, strangers, anyone at all, because the alternative is watching it spoil.

That is the crowd verse four is walking through the gate. Not a queue of individuals each nursing a private gratitude, but a man who has to throw a party before sundown or lose the gift. I cannot read “enter into his courts with praise” the same way now. Thanks that God wrote rules for was thanks that had to be shared before it went off.

This verse assumes gates you can walk through. Scripture keeps the other half of that sentence too. Lamentations, written out of the rubble Babylon left behind, says the roads to Zion mourn because nobody comes to the assembly any more, and that all her gates are desolate (Lamentations 1:4). Same gates. Opposite reality. No thanksgiving crossing that threshold, and scarcely a threshold left standing to cross.

I cannot un-hear that now when I read Psalm 100:4. The people who sang “enter into his gates” and the people who wept that her gates are desolate are, more or less, the same people a few generations apart, and the same scroll carries both. Nobody edited the grief out to protect the song.

And then Nehemiah 3, on the face of it the dullest chapter in the book, a list of who repaired which stretch of wall. Eliashib and his fellow priests took the Sheep Gate. The sons of Hassenaah built the Fish Gate. Round it goes, gate by gate, name by name. I have come to think it is one of the most stubbornly hopeful chapters in scripture, because every gate on that list is a gate Lamentations had already declared desolate, and somebody sat down and wrote out who put each one back.

I will not pretend that squares anything for a reader standing at their own shut gate tonight, praying about a child, or a body, or a marriage. The gap between the burning and the rebuilding was long enough that people died inside it. Both things are in the book. I have stopped making either one explain the other away.

In 1561 William Kethe, an exile in Geneva, put the whole of Psalm 100 into rhyming English, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell”, and it was paired with a tune from the Genevan Psalter usually credited to Louis Bourgeois. We call that tune Old Hundredth now, named after the psalm it carried, and congregations have been singing it for over four and a half centuries. Kethe’s third stanza is our verse: “O enter then his gates with praise, approach with joy his courts unto.”

Here is the bit I love. A little over a century later Thomas Ken wrote four lines to close the morning and evening hymns he made for the schoolboys at Winchester. Praise God from whom all blessings flow, and the three lines that follow it. Ken did not compose a tune for them, and I am not going to tell you he had Psalm 100 in mind when he wrote them, because I do not know that and nor does anyone else. What happened is that his four lines and Kethe’s old tune found each other, and the doxology now gets sung after the offering in more churches, of more stripes, than almost anything else in the hymnal.

So on a given Sunday a congregation stands, sings four lines they could not source if you stopped them at the door, and is carried there by a melody that exists because someone in exile rhymed this psalm. Most of them will never look up Psalm 100. It does not seem to matter much. The tune got in anyway, and the thanks goes up.

Children get gates before they get almost anything else in this verse. A gate keeps you out until somebody who belongs there lets you in. Ask a child to picture the gate at a farm, or at a grandparent’s, or the one on the castle in the story, and they have it at once: outside on this side, belonging on that side. Psalm 100:4 says God’s gate is standing open, and that we are allowed, actually wanted, on the inside of it.

Where I try hard not to lie to them is the “with thanksgiving” part. I will not tell a child that saying thank you always feels lovely, because it does not, and they know quite well it does not. Any child who has had to say thank you for a jumper that itches knows exactly what I mean. Pretend otherwise and you have taught them that grown-up faith is a performance. They work that out around fourteen, and they hold it against us.

What I say instead is that we practise thank you the way we practise please, out loud, before the feeling has caught up with the words. That is not dishonest. That is what you do at a gate you want to walk back through tomorrow.

A mixed-age room can hold both halves at once, incidentally. The little ones draw the gate. The older ones sit with the harder thing, which is why we sometimes choose the words before we mean them. Nobody in that room has to be told anything untrue to understand either half.

• What is one true thing I could say back to God before I bring him anything I want today?
• Where has complaint quietly set the tone of my week, and what would coming through the gate thankful actually change?
• Am I waiting for gratitude to arrive as a feeling, or am I willing to practise it when the day is heavy?
• Of the ten who were healed, am I living more like the nine who walked on, or the one who turned back?

If you want company on the days thanks comes hard, you might sit with more from the book of Psalms or browse verses gathered by how you feel.