Thanksgiving Bible Verses

Psalm 100 is five verses long and has one subject: coming to God with thanks. Over it the King James Version prints a short heading, “A Psalm of praise.” The Hebrew word in that heading is todah, the same word the KJV translates “thanksgiving” in Leviticus 7:12, where an Israelite brings a thank offering. So this really is the thanksgiving psalm.

Read it slowly and you will find seven invitations: make a joyful noise, serve, come, know, enter, be thankful, bless. Then come the reasons. God made us, “and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3, KJV). We belong to him the way sheep belong to their shepherd. And he is good, with a mercy that never runs out and a truth that will outlast every generation sitting at your table.

Notice where the thanks comes in: at the gate. “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving” (Psalm 100:4, KJV). Thanks is not a fee you pay to get close to God; it is how you walk in. The psalm is short enough to read aloud before the meal, or to learn as a family in the week before Thanksgiving, one verse a day for five days.

Jesus gave thanks before he fed the five thousand (John 6:11) and before he broke the bread at the Last Supper (Luke 22:19). Paul did the same on a ship that was about to be wrecked in a storm: he “gave thanks to God in presence of them all” (Acts 27:35, KJV), all 276 frightened people on board. Thanking God over food is one of the oldest habits in Scripture. These three verses suit a table where everyone is hungry and the food is getting cold.

Psalm 145:15-16 is a whole grace in two lines: God feeds every living thing, and we are among them. (In the KJV, meat means food of any kind.) Deuteronomy 8:10 adds the part most of us forget, giving thanks after the meal as well as before it. And Nehemiah 8:10 is for anyone cooking for a crowd: eat well, and “send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared” (Nehemiah 8:10, KJV). A plate carried next door, or a chair pulled up for someone who would otherwise eat alone, is a very old way of saying thank you.

Try reading Psalm 136 together. Every one of its 26 verses ends with the same words, “for his mercy endureth for ever” (Psalm 136:1, KJV). One person reads the first half of each verse and everyone answers with the refrain; even small children can join in by the third verse. Verses 1 to 9 and 23 to 26 take about a minute, and verse 25 fits the table perfectly: “Who giveth food to all flesh” (Psalm 136:25, KJV). If no one feels like reading, Faithero can read the chapter aloud in the KJV, verse by verse, with the voices built into your iPhone.

For a short prayer after the reading, see these prayers before meals or the Thanksgiving prayers written for the day.

Some years Thanksgiving comes after a funeral, a layoff, a diagnosis or a long, lonely stretch. If that is your year, the Bible does not ask you to pretend. It gives you people who gave thanks with shaking hands.

Look at the small words “In every thing” (1 Thessalonians 5:18, KJV). Paul does not ask you to call the loss good or to smile through it. He asks you to look for what God is still giving inside it: the friend who showed up, the meal someone dropped off, the strength for today. He wrote those words to a young church that was already suffering for its faith (1 Thessalonians 2:14).

Habakkuk's book opens with a complaint, “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” (Habakkuk 1:2, KJV), and closes with this song. In it he describes a farmer's worst year: no figs, no grapes, no olives, empty fields, no flock in the fold and no herd in the stalls. Then comes one small word, Yet. He does not say the harvest came back. He says God is still his salvation, and that is enough to sing about.

The KJV heading over Psalm 34 ties it to one of David's lowest days, when he had to pretend to be mad to escape a foreign king (1 Samuel 21:10-15). The words “at all times” (Psalm 34:1, KJV) included that day.

If there is an empty chair at your table this year, it is all right to say their name and thank God for them out loud, even through tears. Gratitude and grief can share a table. When your own words run out, these prayers for grief may help.

And if the holidays bring thoughts of ending your life, please reach out today. Call or text 988 in the US or Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a helpline near you at findahelpline.com.

Thanksgiving lasts a day. Gratitude is meant for the other 364, and Scripture shows what it looks like.

Gratitude remembers. “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2, KJV). David goes on to list them: forgiveness, healing, rescue, lovingkindness, good things (Psalm 103:3-5). Writing your own list is a good way to keep this verse.

Gratitude comes back. Ten men were healed of leprosy. Only one “turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks” (Luke 17:15-16, KJV), and Jesus asked where the other nine were.

Gratitude calms worry. “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God” (Philippians 4:6, KJV). Careful here has its old meaning, full of care. Thanks belongs inside the worried prayer, and the next verse promises that God's peace will keep your heart and mind.

Gratitude is shared. “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful” (Colossians 3:15, KJV). Paul wrote it to a whole church, not to one person.

Gratitude grows from roots. “Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:7, KJV). Thankfulness is what a life rooted in Christ produces, the way a healthy tree produces fruit.

Gratitude is an offering. “By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name” (Hebrews 13:15, KJV). The thank offerings of the Old Testament become words of thanks, offered every day.

For prayers you can use all year, see these prayers of gratitude, or read more Bible verses about joy.

The American holiday is not in the Bible, but the thing it is named for is everywhere in it. Israel had a sacrifice called the thank offering, brought with loaves and cakes: “If he offer it for a thanksgiving, then he shall offer with the sacrifice of thanksgiving unleavened cakes mingled with oil” (Leviticus 7:12, KJV). Psalm 107 pictures people with reasons to bring one: travelers lost in the desert, prisoners set free, the sick made well, sailors brought through a storm. After each rescue comes the same call to praise, and for the healed it adds, “let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and declare his works with rejoicing” (Psalm 107:22, KJV).

Israel also kept harvest feasts. The feast of ingathering came “in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field” (Exodus 23:16, KJV), and Leviticus calls it the Feast of Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:34):

For seven days families lived in shelters made of branches, to remember how God had cared for Israel in the wilderness (Leviticus 23:42-43; Nehemiah 8:15-16). And the guest list was written into the law: “the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates” (Deuteronomy 16:14, KJV). Israel's harvest feasts were meant to have room for people with no harvest of their own.

The American Thanksgiving came much later. In the autumn of 1621, after their first harvest, the Plymouth colonists held a celebration, and the Wampanoag leader Massasoit came with about 90 men; they feasted together for three days. Edward Winslow described it in a letter published in 1622, though the name “the first Thanksgiving” was only given to it in 1841. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November, after years of letters and editorials from the writer Sarah Josepha Hale. His proclamation called the nation's blessings “the gracious gifts of the Most High God.” In 1941 Congress fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November. Canada keeps its Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.