Dear friend,
I want to name a sin that almost nobody is talking about.
Not because it is rare. Because it is everywhere. Because it has become so normal that the people committing it have completely stopped being able to see it. Because it looks nothing like a sin from the outside. It looks like ordinary life.
And because I believe it is the root from which almost everything else that is wrong with American Christianity is growing.
The sin is ingratitude.
Not the obvious kind. Not the failure to say thank you for a gift or acknowledge a kindness. Something deeper and more pervasive than that. The specific, quiet, thoroughly normalized ingratitude of people who have been given extraordinary things and have decided somewhere along the way that they deserve them.
Let me show you what I mean.
What you have that most humans who ever lived did not.
You have a Bible in your own language.
I want you to sit with that for a moment before you move past it. The Book sitting on your nightstand or your coffee table or your phone. The one you may not have opened this week. The one you have probably had for so long that it has become part of the furniture of your life.
People died for that Book.
William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 for translating the New Testament into English. John Wycliffe's followers were executed for distributing handwritten copies of Scripture in the common language. For centuries the people who wanted ordinary Christians to be able to read the Bible in their own tongue were hunted, imprisoned, and killed by the very institution that claimed to represent God on earth.
The Book on your nightstand is the thing they died to give you.
When did you last open it?
You can pray without being arrested.
Right now in North Korea Christians are in labor camps for owning a Bible. In China house church leaders are being detained for gathering more than a handful of people to worship. In Iran converting from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death. In Nigeria churches are being burned and Christians are being killed for their faith with a regularity that the western media does not consider worth reporting.
You woke up this morning in a country where you can pray out loud, attend church openly, wear a cross around your neck, put a Bible verse on your front door, and discuss your faith with anyone who will listen — without a single consequence.
When did you last treat that as the extraordinary gift it actually is?
You have access to the God of the universe personally.
Not through a priest who alone can enter the holy place. Not through an elaborate system of sacrifice and ritual that requires perfect execution to produce uncertain results. Directly. Personally. The veil was torn from top to bottom in Matthew chapter 27 verse 51 the moment Jesus died and the access that was previously restricted to one man once a year became available to every person who calls on His name.
You can talk to God right now. In your kitchen. In your car. In the middle of the night when the fear gets loud. Without an appointment. Without a mediator. Without a sacrifice. Because the sacrifice was already made.
When did you last treat that as anything other than ordinary?
What Paul said about where ingratitude leads.
In Romans chapter 1 Paul described something remarkable.
He described the collapse of a civilization. The specific, step by step process by which a society moves from the knowledge of God to the complete abandonment of everything God calls good.
And the first step — the thing from which everything else follows — is not the dramatic sins that come later in the chapter. It is something much quieter than that.
Verse 21. Although they knew God they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him. And their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
They did not give thanks.
That is where it started. Not with the sexual immorality or the wickedness or the greed or the depravity that Paul lists afterward. With the quiet decision to stop being grateful for what they had been given.
Ingratitude darkened their hearts. And darkened hearts produced darkened thinking. And darkened thinking produced everything else Paul describes in the rest of the chapter.
I want you to read that sequence carefully. Because Paul is not describing a sudden collapse. He is describing a process. A gradual, almost imperceptible drift from gratitude to entitlement to the specific blindness that makes people unable to see what they have become.
That process does not announce itself. It never does. It just slowly makes everything that was given feel like something that was owed. And the person who believes they are owed what they have been given stops being able to receive it with any kind of joy or wonder or worship.
And that is exactly where American Christianity is tonight.
What entitlement produces.
The person who has decided they deserve their Bible does not read it with hunger. They read it with the casual familiarity of someone browsing something that belongs to them already.
The person who has decided they deserve the freedom to worship does not worship with urgency. They worship with the mild appreciation of someone enjoying an amenity.
The person who has decided they deserve direct access to God does not pray with desperation. They pray with the distracted half-attention of someone checking in on something that will still be there whenever they get around to it.
And then they wonder why their faith feels hollow. Why the services feel routine. Why the prayers feel like they are going nowhere. Why the God who once felt real and present and urgent has become background noise.
It is not God who moved.
It is the gratitude that went first. And when the gratitude went everything else slowly followed.
What gratitude actually does.
In Luke chapter 17 Jesus healed ten lepers. He sent them to show themselves to the priests which was the required ritual for being declared clean. And as they went they were healed.
One of them turned back. One. When he saw he was healed he came back praising God in a loud voice and threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him.
And Jesus said something that I have been sitting with for fifty years.
He said were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?
Ten healed. One grateful. Nine who received the miracle and kept walking toward the next thing they needed.
Jesus noticed. He always notices.
And then He said to the one who returned your faith has made you well.
The other nine were healed. Only one was made well. There is a difference in the original language between those two words that most translations smooth over. The nine received the physical healing. The one who came back received something more. Something that the miracle alone could not produce. Something that only the return — only the gratitude — unlocked.
Ingratitude receives the miracle and keeps walking. Gratitude receives the miracle and is transformed by it.
What I am asking you to do tonight.
Not a grand gesture. Not a dramatic rededication or a public confession or a new spiritual discipline that you will abandon by Thursday.
Something smaller. And harder.
I am asking you to spend five minutes tonight — before you sleep — naming specifically what you have been given that you did not earn and do not deserve.
Not generally. Specifically. The Book. The freedom. The access. The specific people in your life. The specific moments of grace that you walked past without stopping. The specific prayers that were answered in ways you did not recognize at the time because you were already focused on the next thing you needed.
Name them. Out loud if you can. Because there is something about saying the specific things you are grateful for out loud that does what the general feeling of gratitude never quite manages to do.
It changes the temperature of the room.
I want to leave one more thing with you before I close.
The forces that are working against this country and against the faithful people in it are counting on ingratitude. They are counting on the people who have been given the most to appreciate it the least. To treat their freedom and their faith as unremarkable. To be so focused on what they do not have that they cannot see what they do.
Because people who do not know what they have do not fight to keep it.
I wrote about this in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. The man at the centre of this moment has been attacked from every direction. And one of the things I have observed is that the people who have stayed faithful — who have continued to stand even when standing cost something — are the ones who understand what is at stake. Who have not taken for granted what they were given. Who know the specific price that was paid for the things they carry.
Gratitude produces that kind of faithfulness. Ingratitude produces the nine who kept walking.
Read it this week if you have not. You may access it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: : https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I think after tonight it will land differently.
Give thanks tonight, friend.
Specifically. Out loud. For the Book. For the freedom. For the access. For the specific, extraordinary, historically unprecedented gift of being alive in a country where faith is still possible and still protected and still worth fighting for.
And then fight for it.
God bless you. More than you know.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 25 this week. The whole section. Pay attention to verse 21. Read it as a diagnostic not a condemnation. Ask yourself honestly where on that spectrum you currently sit.
Two. Read Luke chapter 17 verses 11 through 19. The ten lepers. Count them. Notice which one came back. Ask yourself which one you have been lately — the one who received the miracle and kept walking or the one who turned back.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: : https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it partly as an act of gratitude — for the clarity to see what I believe God is doing in this country and for the community that made me want to say it clearly. Read it as someone who is deciding to stop taking for granted what they have been given.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.