1 Timothy 4:1-5: in context

Paul warns Timothy that in later times some will drift away from the faith, following deceptive teachings, and he names a specific shape the error will take. These teachers will forbid marriage and command people to abstain from certain foods, treating things God made as though they were unclean or evil in themselves. It is a spirituality of prohibition, one that imagines holiness is mostly about rejecting the physical, saying no to the body, marriage, food, the ordinary goods of created life. And Paul answers it with a flat, bracing principle: everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.

There are two things in that answer. The first is that the created world is good. God made food and marriage and the body, and they are not obstacles to holiness to be grimly refused; they are gifts. A faith that despises what God called good has misread God. But the second half is just as important and easier to miss: these good things are sanctified, made holy, by being received with thanksgiving and prayer. The gift becomes holy not by being refused, and not by being merely grabbed and consumed, but by being received with gratitude, with thanks turned back to the Giver. Thanksgiving is what hallows the ordinary meal.

Most of us today are in little danger of the first error; we are not forbidding ourselves food. But the second half examines me sharply. I receive God's good gifts constantly, meals, comforts, the pleasures of the body and the world, and mostly I simply consume them, grabbing them without a thought, never turning them into something holy by thanks. Paul says the difference between a gift consumed and a gift sanctified is thanksgiving and prayer. Do I receive the good things God gives me with the gratitude that makes them holy, or do I just take them?