We give thanks to you. Oh, God, we give thanks for your name is near. We recount your wondrous deeds.
– Psalm 75:1
This is such a good verse to just simply and plainly do, to pause. This is what I want to lead us to do in prayer, to pause and just give thanks to God. “We give thanks to you oh, God, we give thanks.” He says it twice. “For your name is near.”
Psalm 75:1 is calling to meditate on God’s faithfulness in our lives.
I love that, just picture the names of God being near to you right now. He’s Provider, Protector, Defender, Deliverer, Bread of Life, and satisfaction for our souls. Our Good Shepherd, our Great Shepherd, our Great High Priest. He is near to us in all these ways right now. So we give thanks to him and we recount your wondrous deeds. It is good to periodically pause and just recount wondrous deeds that God has done in history. And specifically in our lives.
So I’m going to try to lead us in prayer this way altogether. But I hope it will lead you maybe to pray a little extra on your own. And just spend time giving thanks to God for specific things in your life. Just start thanking him, “Thank you for,” and all the things that come to your mind, just let them flow. Let the Spirit lead you in prayers of thanksgiving and in recounting God’s wondrous deeds. Just recount specific things God has done in your life. Bring them to mind and thank him for the ways he’s shown his wonder on your behalf.
All right, let me pray because I want to give you time to have some extra just between you and the Lord more specific to your lifetime. God, we pray according to Psalm 75:1. We give thanks to you. God, we give thanks for your name is near. We give thanks to you for breath today, for our hearts beating, for the ability to pray. Jesus, we thank you for making this possible as our Great High Priest. We thank you for being our Good Shepherd today, for leading us and guiding us, for working all the things in our lives together for our good.
Psalm 75:1 calls us to be grateful for God’s faithfulness.
God, we thank you for your promises to us that we stand on today. We thank you for being our Refuge and our Strength today for helping us and for your promises to help us in every way we need. God, we thank you for all the ways you have helped us faithfully. God, we thank you for your faithfulness to us, despite our unfaithfulness to you in so many ways.
Jesus, we thank you all over again today for dying on the cross, for our sins, for rising from the dead, for ascending to heaven, and for sending your Spirit down to live in us. Thank you for your Holy Spirit in us who today is our Comforter and our Counselor, and our Leader and our Guide, and our Lord and our Savior. All these names that are near to us right now. And God, we recount all your wondrous deeds. Well, there’s no way we can recount all of them in the little bit of time we have here, but God, we praise you, we praise you for speaking and creating the world. What a wonderful deed.
Oh God, we praise you for saying, “Let there be light,” and light coming. We praise you for creating the moon and the sun and the stars and mountains and hills and valleys, God, just your creation. Lord, we look around us, we praise you for your wondrous deeds. We praise you for your wondrous deeds on behalf of your people, for splitting a sea in two so they could walk through on dry land, for feeding them with bread from heaven and water from rocks, for leading them with a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.
This verse encourages us to praise God for work on our behalf.
God, we praise you for your wondrous deeds revealed all throughout your Word and in history. We praise you for generations of followers of Jesus, many at the risk and cost of their lives who’ve passed the gospel on from generation to generation. We praise you for people who’ve died at the stake because they believed the gospel and proclaimed it even though it cost them their lives. Oh God, we praise you for your wondrous deeds throughout history and your wondrous deeds in each of our lives personally.
And so the rest of the time we have to pray, I just want to ask your Spirit to lead each of us where we are and to more time in specific personal thanksgiving and specific personal recounting of your wondrous deeds. We say Psalm 75:1 to you, oh God, we give thanks to you. We give thanks for your name is near, and we recount your wondrous deeds in Jesus’ name. Amen.
All right, you keep praying now as the Spirit leads you to give thanksgiving and to recount God’s wondrous deeds.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
