Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, 29 for our “God is a consuming fire.”

This passage, as we have seen, reminds of continuities between the Old and New Covenants. It is the same God we worship. We must not drive a wedge between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New. Although we can come to Him through the mediating work of Jesus (23b,24), He is nevertheless to be feared. We are to worship Him ”acceptably with reverence and awe…”

But also with thanksgiving.

I found this passage in Tom Wright’s commentary so helpful, I’m going to quote it in full:

”I was talking with a friend the other day who had been wrestling with the proper Christian attitude to what we sometimes call ‘the good things of life’ – food and drink, money and possessions. Knowing perfectly well that these things can become severe temptations if pursued for their own ends, he had often found himself led in the direction of renunciation, setting aside all interest in and claim on them, going the route of asceticism. Now he had come to the conclusion, he said, without wanting to pursue them in an idolatrous fashion, that the proper response to material goods was gratitude. Thanking God for what you have is the way to keep the things of this world in proper perspective. That way, you can never turn them into idols; nor can you make the mistake of supposing that when God made the world he made trash, which we can ignore or sneer at.

If that is so with the present world, with all its ambiguities, how much more ought we to be grateful for the world that is to come, the world that we have been promised as our true inheritance!” ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, pp.166, 167.