Ephesians 5:20 — giving thanks for everything is not calling everything good
20giving thanks always for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God the Father.
It is not even a full sentence: it is a participle hanging off a clause that began two verses earlier. That changes a good deal about what it is asking for.
Short answer
Ephesians 5:20 is a participle inside a longer sentence about being filled with the Spirit, sitting alongside singing and speaking in psalms. It describes thanksgiving as the steady climate of a community, addressed to God the Father through the name of Jesus. It does not say everything that happens is good.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
Few verses are used with this much unintended cruelty. It turns up at funerals, in hospital rooms and in well-meant messages that end by asking a wrecked person to give thanks for the thing that wrecked them.
Where this verse appears
The sentence starts back at Ephesians 5:18, with the contrast between getting drunk and being filled with the Spirit. What follows is a run of participles: speaking, singing, chanting, giving thanks. This verse is the fourth item on a list, not an isolated command.
The setting is congregational worship. Paul is describing how a Spirit-filled church sounds, and the sound he describes is music and gratitude, not private enthusiasm.
The sentence keeps going into the next verse, into mutual submission — which means that in the text, thanksgiving and the way people treat each other belong to the same breath.
What it says
Two words carry the verse: always and everything. They are the source of both its force and its misuse. They put gratitude outside the reach of circumstance — it is not a reaction to things going well, it is a practice that does not wait for good news to begin.
What the verse does not do is declare that everything which happens is good. It does not appraise events; it says where a person turns while facing them. Worth noting: a nearby letter, 1 Thessalonians 5:18, frames the same practice with "in" rather than "for", and Christians still read the distance between the two prepositions differently. Anyone using this verse to demand that a person give thanks for a tragedy is leaning on one available reading, never on a certainty of the text.
And there is the detail that citations tend to drop: the thanks travel through the name of Jesus Christ and land on God the Father. That is what separates this from optimism. It is not a technique for feeling better; it is an address — someone to thank, and someone to go through.
What to do with it today
An honest way to practise this verse on a bad day is not to hunt for the silver lining of what happened. It is to look for what remains true in spite of it: someone who called, food on the table, a body still breathing. That denies no pain, and the text does not ask you to.
There is a reverse pastoral use, and it matters more. If this verse comes to your lips in front of someone who has just lost something, keep it. Paul wrote it for a church singing together, not as a correction for someone crying.
A prayer to carry with you
Father, thank you for what I missed today because I was busy with what was missing. Teach my heart to give thanks without lying, in the name of Jesus. Amen.