Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God (Phil 4:6).

As there are various kinds of prayers—a prayer of repentance, a prayer in your own secret room, a prayer of two agreeing on something, an intercessory prayer, etc., there are various kinds of thanksgivings—a thanksgiving for the forgiveness of sins, a thanksgiving of the deliverance of many kinds, a thanksgiving for the guidance or the wisdom he gives, etc. But most of the thanksgivings we give are those for the wonderful things God has already done for us. For instance, Psalm 107 says:

Give thanks to the Lord,

for he is good; his love endures forever.

Let the redeemed of the Lord say this—

those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,

those he gathered from the lands,

from east and west, from north and south (Ps 107:1-3).

Note the past tense of the verbs “he redeemed” and “he gathered.” We have been redeemed, so we give thanks to him. The psalm goes on to say:

Some wandered in desert wastelands,

finding no way to a city where they could settle.

They were hungry and thirsty,

and their lives ebbed away.

Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,

and he delivered them from their distress.

. . .

Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love

and his wonderful deeds for men (vv. 5-8),

This is typical of the thanksgivings we give. We come to know how good our God is and how he loves us through the way he saved us and delivered us from our sufferings in spite of the fact that all such sufferings had come to us as results of our mistakes, sins, disobedience and rebellion against him. That is why “he is good.”

But there is another type of thanksgivings we see in the Bible. Note that in the above scripture of Phil 4:6, the adverbial phrase “with thanksgiving” modifies the verbal phrase “present your requests to God.”

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God (Phil 4:6).

The requests that you present to God are what you ask God to do. So, at the time you present your requests, you have only the words of God’s promises, and do not see your requests being granted, yet, in the reality of this world. But you still give thanks to him because of the promises you have in the Bible just as you say, “Thank you,” to a person who promises you to do something by saying, “Okay, I will do it for you,” even before he has not done anything yet.