A Thanksgiving Bible Study That Goes Beyond “Be Thankful”

It’s nearly Thanksgiving again.

If you’ve taught adults for very long, you probably know what’s coming. Psalm 100. The ten lepers. “Give thanks in all circumstances.” Maybe James 1 and every good and perfect gift.

They’re great passages. That's the main reason we keep coming back to them. They contain much of what Scripture has to teach us about thankfulness.

But you may have taught some of them before. Your class may have studied them before. And everybody already knows where the lesson is going:

Christians should be thankful.

So what other passages should I teach from this year?

Maybe that’s the wrong question.

Maybe you don’t need a new passage or a new truth about thankfulness. Maybe you need a fresh conversation around the familiar ones.

A Fresh Thanksgiving Bible Study May Start With a Different Question

Take the ten lepers in Luke 17:11–19.

It would be pretty easy to build a Thanksgiving lesson around the importance of thanking God for His blessings.

One man returned to thank Jesus.

Nine didn’t.

We certainly ought to be more like the one.

True enough.

But I’m not sure anybody in your class is going to be surprised by that conclusion.

So instead of starting with what the grateful leper did right, suppose we spend some time thinking about the other nine.

Why didn’t they come back?

Were they ungrateful? Distracted? So excited about being healed that they simply moved on with their lives?

And then the question gets a little more personal:

If you had been one of the ten, do you think you would have come back? Why or why not?

Familiar Thanksgiving Passages Still Have Plenty of Room

Psalm 103 gives us another example.

David tells his own soul to “forget not all his benefits.”

We could certainly make a list of those benefits. In fact, David does.

But I’m intrigued by the fact that he tells himself not to forget them in the first place.

Apparently, forgetting God’s goodness is something he considered entirely possible.

I understand that.

I can remember the one thing that went wrong this week without making any effort whatsoever. Remembering five ways God has been good to me may take a little more intentionality.

Remembering God’s goodness sometimes takes intentionality.

There’s a fresh Thanksgiving Bible study hiding in there.

We could explore why our disappointments can be so much easier to remember than God's benefits. We could think about what competes for our attention, or what happens to gratitude when what we don't have begins to occupy more of our thinking than what God has already provided.

The Goal Isn’t to Come Up With Something Clever

But . . . there is a danger in this approach:

Once we decide we want a fresh approach to a familiar passage, it’s easy to start hunting for some clever angle nobody has ever thought of before.

That’s not what I’m suggesting.

We don’t need to make Scripture novel.

And we certainly don’t want originality badly enough that we start making a passage say something it doesn’t say.

The text still governs the conversation.

A good question simply helps adults slow down, look carefully at what’s actually there, and think about implications they may have rushed past before.

Sometimes that means noticing a word.

Sometimes it means asking why someone in the passage responded the way he did.

Sometimes it means asking adults to compare what Scripture says with the way they actually think or live.

And sometimes it means leaving enough room for an answer we weren’t expecting.

That’s one reason Thanksgiving can actually be a particularly good time for discussion.

Everybody knows the expected answer.

The opportunity is to help them go further.

You Could Build Your Own Thanksgiving Bible Study

Of course, you can do all of this yourself.

Choose a familiar Thanksgiving passage.

Study it carefully.

Decide what you most want your class to understand.

Think about where the passage should challenge them.

Then write questions that help adults observe the Scripture, think about what it means, and wrestle with how it should affect the way they live.

There’s real value in doing that.

There’s also a fair amount of work involved.

Writing a good discussion question takes time.

So does deciding which passages to use.

And ten individually good questions don’t necessarily make a good discussion. They need some progression so the conversation builds rather than wanders. That's often the hardest part.

You still need to prepare, of course.

A set of discussion questions shouldn’t substitute for studying the Scripture yourself.

But you don’t necessarily have to spend your preparation time building the whole conversation from scratch.

That’s the part I’ve already done.

Want to Try a Thanksgiving Bible Study Free?

I’ve developed 5 Conversations on Thankfulness, a set of five ready-to-use discussion guides built around Psalm 100, James 1, 1 Thessalonians 5, Luke 17, and Psalm 103.

Each approaches thankfulness from a somewhat different direction. And each is designed to help adults do more than arrive at the expected answer that Christians ought to be thankful.

If you’re wondering whether that approach would work with your class, try one complete discussion guide free. No need to guess whether the questions fit the way you teach. Take a look at the actual thing.

And if you decide you’d rather have all five conversations ready to go, the complete five-lesson set is available for $12.95.

Use one for Thanksgiving. Use a couple earlier in November. Use all five. Or pull individual questions into the curriculum you’re already teaching.

Because maybe the question this year isn’t:

“What can I possibly say about Thanksgiving that I haven’t said before?”

Maybe it’s:

“What could my class discover in this familiar Scripture if I gave them a different question to think about?”