 |
||
By Pastor Glenn Pease
CONTENTS
1.
THANK GOD FOR HIMSELF Based on Psalm 30
2.
THANKSGIVING POWER
Based on I Chron. 16:1‑36
3. A THANKFUL PERSPECTIVE
Based on Psa. 138
4. NEGATIVE THANKSGIVING Based
on Psa. 30:1‑12
5. THANKSGIVING FOCUS Based on
Psa. 103:1‑14
6. TOP LEVEL THANKSGIVING Based
on Psa. 118:1‑5
7. A GRATEFUL HEART Based on
Luke 17:11‑19
8. A THANKFUL SPIRIT Based on
Acts 27:27‑37
9. THANK GOD FOR MAN Based on Acts 28:11‑16
10. THANK GOD FOR RIGHTS Based
on Acts 22:22‑29
11. THANK GOD Based on Rom.
1:18‑21
12. THANKS BE TO GOD Based on
II Cor. 2:12‑17
13. THANK GOD FOR AMERICA
Based on Gal. 5:1‑12
14. THE PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING based on Phil. 1:3‑6
15. THANKSGIVING THROUGH THANKS-LIVING Based on Col. 3:15‑17
16. THANK GOD FOR GRANDPARENTS
Based on II Tim. 1:1‑7
17. THANK GOD HE LET ME PLAY
Based on Gen. 45:1‑11
18. THANK GOD FOR A HAPPY ENDING based on Gen. 45:1‑15
1. THANK GOD
FOR HIMSELF Based on Psalm 30
BY PASTOR GLENN PEASE
A chaplain of some prison trustees once came to his group and
announced that he was going on a six week trip to Europe. He had been a faithful servant to them for years,
and they appreciated him a great deal.
They began to slap him on the back as they expressed their
congratulations, and they gave him big hugs.
When the service of that day was over the leader came to the chaplain
with a big box. He said, "We can't
give you much, but we want you to have this, and asked that you not open it
until you get home."
He was so touched, he could not wait to get home and share
with his wife what had happened. It
was an exciting moment as he pulled the top of that box back, and there he saw
his own billfold, his own tie clasp, his own pen, and his own watch. In embracing him they had stripped him of
every loose possession he had, and this is what they gave him back. They had nothing to give him that was not
already his. So it is with us and
God. The poet was right who said,
We give thee but thine own dear Lord,
Whatever the gift may be.
All that we have is thine alone,
A trust O Lord from Thee.
If all we are and all we have is a gift from God, then the
best we can do is to give back to God what is already his. But this leads to a problem. The problem is, it seems like much ado about
nothing. Our giving to God is like
giving a thimble of water to the ocean, or like giving a candle to the
Sun. It seems so insignificant that we
tend to lose the thrill of Thanksgiving.
Sir Michael Costa, a
famous composer and conductor from Naples, was once rehearsing with a vast
array of instruments and hundreds of voices.
With the thunder of the organ, the roll of the drums, the sounding of
the horns, and the clashing of the cymbals, the mighty chorus rang out. You can understand the mood that came over
the piccolo player who said within himself, "In all this din it matters
not what I do!" So he ceased to
play. Suddenly, Costa stopped and
flung up his arms, and all was still.
He shouted out, "Where is the piccolo?" His sensitive ear missed it, and it's
absence made a difference to him.
God has a sensitive ear as well, and he misses any voice that
is not lifted in Thanksgiving to Him.
Besides the angelic host of heaven, millions on earth join the chorus with
all sorts of spectacular things to thank God for, and it is easy for us to feel
like that piccolo player and say, "How can it matter what I do? In the colossal symphony of voices, what
does it matter if I remain silent?
God's blessings are more than I can count, but my ability to express my
thanks is so inadequate."
Simon Greenberg expresses the frustration of the thankful
heart as he deals with the gifts of God just in nature alone:
Five thousand breathless dawns all new;
Five thousand flowers fresh in dew;
Five thousand sunsets wrapped in gold;
One million snowflakes served ice cold;
Five quiet friends, one baby's love;
One white mad sea with clouds above;
One hundred music--haunted dreams,
Of moon--drenched roads and hurrying
streams,
Of prophesying winds, and trees,
Of silent stars and browsing bees;
One June night in a fragrant wood;
One heart that loved and understood.
I wondered when I waked that day,
How--how in God's name--I could pay!
He never even got into the greatest gifts--the gifts of love
and salvation and eternal life in Jesus Christ. We can't even pay for the gifts of natural life let alone for the
gifts of eternal life. So let's face up
to the reality that Thanksgiving is not a way to pay God back. All we can give is what is already His, and
we can only give a fraction in return for the fullness He has given us. So forget the idea that thanks is to
pay. It is not to pay, it is to pray,
and to say to God, this is how I look at life, history, nature, and all that
is, because I acknowledge you as my God.
Thanksgiving is the expression of an attitude, or a philosophy of
life.
The thankful person is a person who looks at life from a
unique perspective, and, therefore, sees what the ungrateful do not see. At best we see only a part, a mere fraction
of God's grace. We see through a glass
darkly Paul says, and so none of us can be as thankful as we ought to be, for
we are all ignorant of so much that God has spared us from, and even of what He
has given us.
We can get tiresome and superficial when we try to enumerate
all the things for which we are thankful.
One author describes the boredom of going through and endless litany of
thanks:
For sun and moon and stars,
We thank Thee, O Lord.
For food and fun and fellowship,
We
thank Thee, O Lord.
For fish and frogs and fruit flies,
We thank Thee, O Lord.
By the time you are
finished, what you are most thankful for is that the list is over.
David here in Psalm 30 does not give us a long list, but
focuses on just a few ways of looking at life that expresses the grateful
heart. I hear him saying here, thank
God for the past; thank God for the present, and thank God for the
permanent.
I. THANK GOD FOR THE PAST.
David looks back and recognizes that had God not loved him,
led him, and lifted him, he would have been long gone, and a part of the
population of the pit. The only reason
any of us are sitting here, and not lying in a cemetery is because of the grace
and providence of God. There have been
millions of people just our age who have gone into the grave because of war,
accidents, or disease, but we are alive, and not because we are more worthy,
but because we have been spared.
David knew he was alive
for that same reason, and he says in verse 3, "O Lord, you brought me up
from the grave; you spared me from going down into the pit." Life has its burdens and sorrows, and
sometimes we even get depressed enough to want to chuck the whole thing. David knew these dark depths as well, but
most of the time we feel like David does here, and like the modern poet who
wrote,
Thank God I'm alive!
That the skies are blue,
That a new day dawns
For me and you.
The sun light glistens
On field and on tree,
And the house wren sings
To his mate and to me.
The whole world glows
With a heavenly glee!
I know there are heart--aches,
A world full of strife,
But thank God, O thank God,
Thank God just for life.
We could not say that or
feel that unless we could look back to the past and see how God has spared us
and protected us to this point.
David saw many a good man go down in battle. Israel was a winner, but even the winners
lose men, and often a great many men.
Some of you have no doubt survived wars. Some of us could have been killed in the wars of our nation, as
many thousands were. We were spared,
and we got the chance to live, to marry, to raise children, and to have
grandchildren. We have been granted the
gift to be a part of history, and not because we are more worthy, but because
of the grace of God.
It is good for us to reflect on this, for it can help us to
develop a more thankful perspective. So
often we forget the enormous privilege it is just to be alive, that we become resentful
and even bitter because we are only among the riches people of the world, and
not literally the richest people around.
The curse of comparative thinking takes its toll on all of us at come
point in life. We compare ourselves to
others who have been more materially blest, and who have acquired more things,
and we envy them, and this envy quenches the spirit of thankfulness.
Many of the most blest people alive are not happy to be alive because they are caught in this
curse of comparison. There is no level
of life you can arrive at where you can escape this curse. Millionaires compare themselves with
multi-millionaires, and they grieve.
The multi-millionaires compare themselves with billionaires, and they
grieve, for they have been deprived of the highest place. Art Linkletter actually has a friend who has
eight million dollars, but he is always depressed because all of his friends
have at least 10 million dollars.
The only cure for this curse is to change your perspective and
look at life like David is doing in this Psalm. He is not comparing himself to
the Pharaoh of Egypt, or to the kings of the world. He is comparing himself to
those in the grave, and he likes his place better. If you have to compare,
don't look up, for by this foolish logic everybody is nobody except the man at
the very top. The only one who can win the comparison game is the one that has
nobody he can look up to because he is on top of everyone else. In other words,
only one can win this game, for anyone else is below him and thus, by
comparison are failures.
But if you look the other way, and compare yourself to those
who are in the grave, you are the very essence of success and superiority. How do you measure the degree of value
between you and those not alive? Are
you fifty percent, seventy five percent, or one hundred percent better
off? Keep in mind, we are not talking
about eternal life, but temporal life.
The dead in Christ are with him, and are blest beyond our knowledge, but
they have zero potential to enjoy the gifts of God in this earthly life. Compared to them we are infinitely
blest. Therefore, let us look back, and
thank God for the past and for all the ways by which He preserved us so we
could be alive this day.
In our pride we often think we are who we are because of our
labor and wisdom. There is some truth to this, but if it hinders our sense of
thankfulness to God, we need to see life from a new perspective. Did you choose to not be raised by the
Mafia, and learn to live by crime? Did
you choose not to be born in Ethiopia, and be starving? Did you choose not to
live in Mexico City and be killed by a earthquake? Did you choose not to be a farmer in Columbia and be killed by a
volcano? The list could go on for hours
of all the evils you have escaped, not by your own choice and wisdom, but by
the grace of God.
Henry Ward Beecher said, "A proud man is seldom a
grateful man for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves." David is a grateful man for he knows he has
received so much more than he deserves.
Let us join in the spirit of David, and thank God for all His
deliverance's of the past that bring us to the present, alive and full of
potential. Thank God for the past.
II. THANK GOD FOR THE PRESENT.
David calls upon us to
join him in song in verse 4. "Sing
to the Lord you saints of His, praise His holy name." Do it now, even if it is a tough time, and
you feel like you are under God's anger.
The good news David says in verse 5 is, God's anger only lasts a moment,
but His favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping
may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. David is thankful for the present because he
is an optimist. No matter how heavy the
present is, the burden will soon become lite, and joy will replace sorrow. We see here that weeping is no sign of
weakness, but is merely an honest expression of emotion, which even a strong
man like David could show. Being an
optimist does not mean you do not feel the sorrow of present suffering.
How many times have we been there? The cloud cover is oppressive and living is a chore, and so many
things are discouraging. But those days
pass by, and the sun shines again, and we are delighted to be alive. Not everything in the present is pleasant,
but the thankful heart can and will see values that are missed by the
complaining heart. Listen for example
to the insight of this poem--
Thank God for dirty dishes,
They have a tale to tell:
While others may go hungry,
We still are eating well;
With home and health and happiness
We have no right to fuss;
This stack is ample evidence
That God's been good to us.
The challenge of life is to
find a reason to be thankful in what seems on the surface to be a reason to
complain.
There are volumes of testimonies by people who have come to
actually thank God for problems and trials, and even diseases and accidents
because these so-called misfortunes opened their eyes to the fact that they
were going away from God, and they were motivated by their need for God to get
back on the right road. Their burden
became their greatest blessing.
Charles Colson in his book Loving God said all of his proud
and sophisticated labor in Government was not used of God--it was his shame,
humiliation, and fall, in the Watergate scandal that God used for His glory,
for when he was down he prayed as David did in verse 10. "Hear O Lord, and be merciful to me, O
Lord, be my help." God listens to
such a prayer, and most of the thankful
people in the world are so, because they know God listens to the cry for
mercy and help, and will work with them even in the worst situations to bring
forth good.
Chuck Colson is thanking God for the present ministry he has
in the prisons of our nation where many are coming to Christ because God is
merciful and turns wailing into dancing.
The worst can be used for the best, and that is why the thankful heart
can always be thankful for the present, for no matter what it is, it has
potential for good. The very trial you
now endure can be laying the foundation for a triumph tomorrow, and so be
thankful for the present. The thankful
heart is ever searching for that diamond that is hidden in life's dirt.
Matthew Henry, the famous Bible scholar, was once accosted by
thieves and robbed of his money. He
wrote these words in his diary.
"Let me be thankful.......
First, because I was never
robbed before,
Second, although they took
my purse they didn't take my life,
Third, because, although
they took my all, it wasn't much,
Fourth, because it was I who
was robbed, not I who robbed."
Could you be thankful for the present if it was as unpleasant
as being robbed? You could if you
choose to count as someone has written-
Count your blessings instead of your crosses,
Count your gains instead of your
loses,
Count your joys instead of your
woes
Count your friends instead of your
foes
Count your courage instead of
your fears,
Count your health instead of
your wealth,
Count on God instead of
yourself.
One of the quickest ways there is of quenching the spirit, and
thereby withering the fruit of the spirit in our lives, is by an attitude of
ingratitude which focuses on what we do not have rather than on the abundance
which we do have. The quickest way to
cure any negative mood is by the therapy of Thanksgiving. There is healing power in praise. David said his sack cloth was removed and he
was clothed with joy,
and that is what can happen
to anyone who will chance their tune from the blues to the song of
Thanksgiving.
A surprising conclusion that many have come to is that
Thanksgiving is to the Christian what swearing is to the non-Christian. It is a release, and a therapeutic expression
of emotion. The one takes the low road
of the negative, and the other takes the high road of the positive. Pastor Chase, a Presbyterian minister, was
visiting a hospital ward late at night where two elderly women were in great
pain.
Both were terminal
patients. One of them was cursing God
and swearing at life. The other was thanking God for the precious memories of
that life and love had given her. She
was saying with the Psalmist, "Blest the Lord O my soul and forget not all
His benefits."
The present was unpleasant for both of these ladies, but one
was building on a broader foundation than the moment. She had a reservoir of memories she could thank God for, and that
made her thankful for the present, for her now was not empty, but was packed
with grateful memories of the past. The
past influences the present, and, therefore, every one of us has an obligation
to our future self to start being grateful for the present, so we can have a
positive past to influence our future.
This makes more sense than it sounds like, for what it means
is, everyday we are laying up a treasure of Thanksgiving that will bring
healing in some future circumstance. If
we neglect being thankful for the present, we will someday go to the medicine
chest, and find it empty. If you want
to enjoy the therapeutic power of Thanksgiving do not wait until someday, start
now, and thank God for the present.
III. THANK GOD FOR THE PERMANENT.
David begins this song of Thanksgiving by saying, "I will
exalt you O Lord," and he ends with, "O Lord my God, I will give you
thanks forever." God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the
end. In between these two peaks of
permanence, David has a whole range of verbal mountains, as he lifts up the
Lord, over and over again. David has
discovered the essence of Thanksgiving.
It is not in his past or his present, but in God's permanence. It is his
foreverness that is the basis for all Thanksgiving.
David was preserved from death many times, but this
deliverance did not last forever. His
deliverance from all kinds of trials filled his heart with gratitude, but they
did not go on forever. We can be so
thankful for God's providence in our lives, but there is no guarantee that they
will be permanent. That is why
Thanksgiving has to be more than a feeling.
It has to be a faith. It is a
conviction that regardless of what happens in life, God will have the final
word, and because of that we will,
like David, give thanks to
the Lord forever.
The story goes that a preacher, a boy scout, and a scholar
were all up in a small plane. The pilot
turned and said that he had bad news.
The plane was not operating properly and they would likely crash. He also compounded the crisis by telling
them they only had three parachutes. He
added that he was a family man and his family needed him, and with that he
grabbed one of the chutes and jumped.
The scholar said, "I want you to know I am one of the
smartest men in the world. My lost
would be profoundly felt in the intellectual world." He grabbed another chute and jumped. The preacher looked at the scout and said,
"Son, I've lived my life and I am ready to die. You take the last chute."
The scout said, "Cool it Rev. there's no problem. That smartest guy in the world just jumped
with my knapsack."
Smart people can make some big mistakes, and David is a great
example. His sin and the foolish
blunders to cover it up led to great sorrow for him the rest of his life. But
through it all David had a grateful heart, for he knew the negatives of life
were passing, but the positive were permanent.
God is merciful, and as long as a man will call upon God, there is no
mistake that can rob him of eternal love.
In essence, the whole of David's Thanksgiving, and the whole
of all Thanksgiving that really matters, is summed up in the phrase,
"Thank God for God." If God
was not who He is, and did not have an eternal plan for man, all the rest of
theology would be a fly by night operation.
It's here today and gone tomorrow.
If the basis of my thanks is my health, that can be gone tomorrow. If the basis is my wealth, or my
possessions, or my relationships, or anything else you can think of, those are
all subject to change, and I can be robbed of them at any time. For Thanksgiving to have a stability that can ride out the changes of time it has
to be based on the nature of God, which is untouched by the ravages of
time. An unknown poet, who was a wise
one wrote,
My God
Today I kneel to say
"I thank you for You."
For once my prayer holds no
request,
No names of friends for you to
bless.
Because I think even You,
Might sometimes like a prayer
that’s new.
Might like to hear somebody pray,
Who has no words but thanks to
say.
Somebody satisfied and glad
For all the joys that he has had,
And so I say again,
"I THANK YOU, LORD FOR
YOU."
May God help us to be thankful for our past; thankful for our
present, but most of all thankful for the permanent, which means, thanking God
for Himself.
2. THANKSGIVING
POWER Based on I Chron. 16:1‑36
Almost everyone has heard of Leo Tolstoy the author of War and
Peace, but few have ever heard of his grandfather Prince Nicholas
Volkausky. This old man took 8 of his
slaves on his country estate and formed them into an orchestra. He taught them how to play the finest
classical music in the world. Every
morning at 7 o'clock this slave symphony was set to go off like a modern clock
alarm. They assembled under the
master's window, and when the signal came that he was awaking they began to
play this beautiful music. There hands
were rough like sandpaper, but they produced an atmosphere of loveliness. Then they went off the slop the hogs, spade
the garden, and fix the fence.
They were just 8 men of humble origin, but because the
master chose them and gave them instruction they had this great privilege of
creating beauty. They pleased their
master and then went to their labor with a spirit of joy because they were
partakers in the beautiful. This is the
picture we have in the Old Testament of God and His people. He called them to develop the gifts of
praise and thanksgiving. The best music
in the world to God's ear is the voices of thanksgiving. God's taste has never changed in this
regard, and we read in Heb. 13:15, "Through Jesus, therefore, let us
continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise‑the fruit of lips that
confess His name."
The sound of praise and thanksgiving is the best offering
you can give to God. Not only does such
music please God, it sends us into life with thanksgiving power. When David brought the Ark of the Covenant
back to Jerusalem, the first thing he did was to appoint Levites to make
petition, to give thanks and to praise the Lord. To give momentum to this goal he wrote a Psalm of Thanksgiving
himself, and he gave it to his worship leader Asaph. There are not many songs that are repeated in the Bible, but this
one is repeated in Psa. 96. It teaches
us many things, but there is just two important truths about thanksgiving that
I want to focus on.
I. THANKSGIVING IS VITAL.
Vital means essential to the existence of something. It is so basic to the life of the spirit
that to remove it is equivalent to removing the heart from the body. A spirit without thankfulness is a dead
spirit. If you feel down and spiritually
lifeless, there is a good chance that you are low on thankfulness. You body can get lifeless if you lack
potassium, and your spirit can get lifeless is you lack gratitude. Jesus said, "Without me you can do
nothing." And so when we feel like
we can do nothing it is because we have pulled the plug that links us to
Christ, and we are trying to operate on our own power. When we are plugged in and we are
worshipping our Lord we are capable of saying with Paul, "I can do all
things through Christ who strengthens me." That is thanksgiving power.
The degree of our optimism and thankfulness is easily
seen. The fruit of the spirit is not
hidden. It hangs on the tree where it
can be seen. If we are gripping and
complaining, it is rather obvious that we have quenched the Holy Spirit and
have decided to govern our own life. If
we are letting the Holy Spirit guide us the fruit will be conspicuous, for
love, joy, peace, and all the others are positive things that can be easily
seen in a person's life. Thanksgiving
then is a vital ingredient in the Christian life. It is the means by which we measure our obedience to God's will. If you find yourself being less and less
thankful, then you are going to the wrong direction. If you are seeing more and more for which you are thankful, then
you can know you are walking with God in the right direction.
When people are thankful and praise God they look on life
with a perspective that lifts them up and enables them to see all of life from
a heavenly viewpoint. One of the
purposes of worship is to get our eyes off self and the world, and get them
focused on God. He is the one who can
give us a hopeful perspective whatever the circumstances we face on earth. You will observe that this Psalm of
thanksgiving is God focus from beginning to end. It is His works and wonders for which we are to be persistently
thankful. Verse 34 says we are to give
thanks to the Lord because He is good and His love endures forever. The things we will never cease to give
thanks for are permanent, but the things for which we gripe and grieve are
often merely passing and trivial things in comparison. If our lives revolve around the passing we
will have a pessimistic perspective that robs us of the spirit God wants us to
have.
The spies who went into the Promised Land saw giants and
odds they felt they could never overcome.
They took their eyes off from the God who brought them out of Egypt, and
they looked at their own puny resources.
The result was they became thankless pessimists, and they paid for it by
40 years of plodding through the desert going nowhere until they died. But Joshua and Caleb had a different
perspective, and they went into the land and gained a great victory. The difference was that they looked up to
God and were grateful for what they had done for them. Their optimism pleased God and they became
the leaders God used to lead His people into the Promised Land.
When we cease to look up to God and remember what He has done
we lose a thankful spirit, and that is the beginning of the end. That is why the Bible is so full of songs of
thanksgiving. We need to be constantly
pulled back from a self‑centered view of life to a God‑centered
view, and there is no more powerful agent for doing this than
thanksgiving. Even thanksgiving can be
perverted if it becomes purely self‑centered. The Pharisee stood in the temple saying, "I thank God that I
am not as other men." He had an I
problem. I thank God that I‑he
had two I's where he put himself in the first place and last place. This Psalm
has just the opposite view point. It is
all about who God is and what He has done for us. If you look to self you soon loose your optimism but if we look
to God we see one who offers assurance that we can be optimists.
C. S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia has the majestic
lion Aslan representing Christ. In the
second book the children return to the enchanted land where everything has so
changed they become disoriented and lost.
After a dreadful series of events Lucy finally finds Aslan in a forest
clearing, and her heart is filled with joy.
She ran and threw her arms about his neck and buried her face in the
beautiful rich silkiness of his mane.
Aslan said, "Welcome child."
Lucy responded, "You are bigger." Aslan replied, "That is because you are older little
one." She said, "Is it
because you are?" Aslan, who
represents Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever said, "I am
not, but every year you grow, you will find me bigger." The point of Lewis is that Jesus can't get
any bigger than He is, but He can grow in all ways in our experience as we
mature. God gets greater and greater as
we get more thankful. That is why
thankfulness is so vital to the Christian life.
If you find you are not thankful for life, you are living a
wilderness life and just marching in circles until you die. This is not God's will for any Christian. We are to recognize that thanksgiving is
vital and begin to use tools like this thanksgiving song, and get our eyes on
God and His wonders. David says by his
actions here in our text that thanksgiving is not a secondary issue, or a
fringe item in the agenda of God's people.
This is a starting point, and if you do not start here, wherever you go
is not worth being, for you have gone without a thankful heart, and without
that you just as well have not gone at all.
God cannot be pleased without this vital ingredient. Without faith it is impossible to please
God. Faith is the ability to see the
unseen, and then have a thankful spirit even when the visible is not
encouraging. Faith is thanksgiving
power.
II. THANKSGIVING IS VERBAL.
Thanks is a word, and words need to be verbalized to give
them life and power. Thanks is to be a
word that we make a part of our vocabulary on a frequent basis. Thankful people say it to God, mates, to
others. It is word that does not hide
in the deep inner caverns of their minds, but it is on the tip of their tongue
and ready to fly instantly to bless others.
It is a sin of omission not to verbalize thanks when it is in
order. That leaves most of us
guilty. There are Christians who are
thankful but seldom say it. We are all
too much this way. This is a
defect. You cannot be over thankful,
for Paul says, "In everything give thanks." We tend to get weak in this area and begin to take our blessings
for granted.
We need to get a thanksgiving recharge. David's song of thanks was designed to do
just that for God's people. There is a
constant reference to the need to verbalize our thanks. "Let the redeemed of the Lord say
so," is the point. Tell the world
what you are grateful for says David.
Tell the nations about the nature and work of God in the world that
makes you thankful. How often do you
tell somebody that you are so thankful for the universe and the way God made
it? Sure it is a fallen world with more
problems than we can measure. That is
all the more reason why the world needs to hear people who can verbalize
thankfulness for the positive side of reality. In verse 8 he says, "Make known among the nations what He
has done." Verse 9 says,
"Tell of all His wondrous acts."
God is a God of history and He has done so many wonders. There is always good news when we focus on
the works of God.
In verse 12 we read, "Remember the wonders He has done‑His
miracles and His judgments." Tell
your own testimony of what has done, and of your gratitude. Tell of what He has done for others. The world is filled with the wonders of His
grace that we are to verbalize. Verse
27 says, "Proclaim His salvation day after day." The news is never so bad that there is no
good news of God's salvation. God never
ceases to work for good with those who love Him. Most of us think of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood has kid's stuff, but
there is more to it than that. He is an
ordained Presbyterian minister with the special charge to minister to children
and their friends through the media.
His calling is to verbalize the love of God for people, and to help them
realize they have self worth.
Back in the mid‑eighties Lauren Tewes, who was the
cruise director on Love Boat was making a million dollars a year. She was on top of the world, but she was a
loser, for she had no sense of self‑esteem. She tried to escape her insecurity through drugs. She lost her job and her fortune for her
drug idol. One morning she flipped on
the TV in a state of despair. She was feeling worthless and hopeless, and there
on the screen was Mr. Roger's in his red cardigan sweater singing, "I'll
be your friend. Will you be
mine?" This young actress broke
down in tears and pathetically answered him out loud, "Yes!" That verbalization of friendship caught her
at a turning point where she could choose life or death, and it gave her the
strength she needed to choose life. She
conquered her cocaine habit and got her life back together. She said, "Mr. Rogers saved my
life." By the power of positive
verbalization of love and good news people can be saved for time and
eternity.
People need to hear the good news, and it is only people who
are charged up with thanksgiving power who will verbalize this good news. If we do not tell people the good news of
God's love, and of how it is manifested in His Word it is because we are
ourselves have forgotten it. We have
come to the point where we take all the wonders of God's salvation for granted,
and we just don't even think of sharing it with a grateful heart. Lack of thanksgiving is the primary cause
for Christians being poor witnesses of the grace and glory of God. When we are truly thankful we are full of
enthusiasm to tell of what He has done.
But when we forget and take it for granted we can no more generate the
fire of enthusiasm.
If your fire has gone out you can generally assume that you
have lost your spirit of thanksgiving.
There is no more fuel to keep the furnace burning. When this happens we become negative
thinkers and do a lot of complaining.
This is a valley that all of us travel through from time to time, but it
is folly to settle down there. We have
an obligation to get out of that valley, and one of the key ways of doing so is
to verbalize the positive. One of the
best examples I have ever read of verbalizing thanksgiving is the letter of a
28 year old woman dying of leukemia.
She wrote this letter to Ron Davis, who was the leader of the Bible
study for Minnesota Vikings. I will
share just a portion of it.
"Many people have asked
me if I feel any bitterness about my
long illness and imminent
death at a young age. No, I feel no
bitterness or anger. Many people would demand to know, "Why
me?" But I can't help but ask, "Why not
me?" .....................
My life has been permeated
by a faith in the resurrected Christ.
He has been my purpose in
life. He has been my peace in death.
So mourn for those I leave
behind, but don't mourn for me.
I'm not afraid to die
because the resurrection of Jesus Christ
is not just some doctrine to
me; it's my reality. I've settled the
matter of my own death, and
that sets me free to truly live."
Here is the thanksgiving verbalized. She has a grateful heart rejoicing in God's
goodness even though she is dying with a dreaded disease. It is folly when we become depressed over so
many matters that will soon pass away.
We do so because we have stopped looking up to God and giving Him
thanks. When you stop giving thanks you
deprive yourself of the very oxygen of life.
If you cannot see much to be thankful for, it is because you have let
the fog of forgetfulness blind you. If
you begin to verbalize your thankfulness, that fog will lift, and you will see
that you are blessed with many riches.
It is sure to be dark if you close your eyes to God's goodness, but it
is sure to be light if you open your eyes and look at what God has done.
It is by verbalizing thanks that we come to feel the joy in
what we have. The more we express it
the more we possess it. Thanksgiving is
a paradox, for the more we give it the more we have of it. By verbalizing it we possess what we already
have to a greater degree. Paul and
Silas were in prison, and this is not a typical setting for celebration, but
the began to verbalize their gratitude to God in song. The other prisoners listened to their
praise, and God responded with an earthquake.
The jailer and his family were won to Christ because of it. That is a lot of good things coming out of a
very bad situation. Had Paul and Silas
not verbalized their thankful spirit that whole victorious story may never have
happened.
Thanksgiving moves God, motivates men, and changes
history. Paul was not just filling in
space when he told Christians to rejoice always and in everything to give thanks.
He meant it, and he practiced it, and the result is he saw the worst of
settings become the best opportunities for God to gain victory in this dark
world. The Old and New Testaments are
in complete agreement, for David's song and Paul's song teach us the same
lesson. Pessimism leads to
powerlessness, but praise leads to thanksgiving power.
Does your heavenly Father
give you
Many blessings here below?
Then on bended knew before
Him
Frankly, gladly, tell Him
so.
3. A
THANKFUL PERSPECTIVE Based on Psa.
138
G. K. Chesterton has written a delightful account of a students
encounter with his professor at Oxford.
The professor, or tutor as they called them, was a bright young man, but
he was a follower of the pessimistic views of Schopenhauer. He was disgusted with the weary worthless
lives around him, and with the trash they treasured, and which he had to look
at from his second floor apartment.
Especially offensive was that unattractive stucco house with a silly
duck pond complete with ducks.
At the end of one of his frequent observations on the
foolishness of people, the low estate of most human minds, and the futility of
life in general, he concluded that the only intelligent course of action for a
man of sense and sensibility would be to remove himself from the scene
permanently. This is where the student
comes in. He felt the time had come to
test his professor's theory. He
returned to the professor's quarters later waving a wicked looking
revolver. He declared that he had come
to put his tutor out of his misery. The
professor was reduced at once to un‑philosophical entreaties. As he begged for his life he backed out of
his window and perched on the flagpole hoping to attract the attention of
someone passing by.
The student standing at the window with the revolver called
upon the pessimist to recant. He made
him give thanks for his miserable life, for the sky, the earth, and the
trees. He was also given the
opportunity to bless his neighbor and express satisfaction with the ducks on
the pond. All of this he gladly did,
and thereby showed that his theory on life was not very attractive in
practice.
There are many pouting pessimists who would change their
tune on a flagpole with a revolver in their back. This would not prove that they were truly thankful people, but it
would demonstrate that they were more grateful for life than they were willing
to admit. Facing death gives on a new
perspective on life, and it makes it look even good to the pessimist. Most pessimists and most un‑believers
do not need a revolver in their back to admit they have much for which to be
grateful. All it takes is the pressure
of tradition and a family get together on Thanksgiving to compel them to
recognize their good fortune.
Almost all non‑Christians will be thankful for their
material blessings, and for the fact that they are not freezing with the
homeless, or starving with the hungry poor.
Christians cannot claim a monopoly on the attitude of gratitude. What
distinguishes the Christians thankfulness from the natural thankfulness of all
people? The distinction consists
basically in the fact that the Christian has someone to thank. The essence of his thanksgiving is a
relationship to a person, and a supreme person who has a plan and purpose for
his life. The unbeliever's thanks is a
sense of well being about his good luck, but there is no ultimate meaning
behind it, for he has no concept of an ultimate purpose. This means he loses the essence of
thanksgiving, which is gratitude to God for his personal concern and purpose
for us as individuals. This is a key to
happiness, for only people with a purpose can be truly happy on a permanent
basis.
Paul tells us that the cause of much of the misery and
darkness of the pagan world is due to the fact that they were not
thankful. This led to all kinds of
perversions in religion and sex in a futile effort to find happiness without
God. Many are seeking to do the same
thing today, but they are failing as men always have. Man's only hope for happiness is in a thankful relationship to
God, and in a finding of His purpose through Christ. William Law asked, "Who was the greatest saint in the
world?" Then he answers, "It
is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms, or is
most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice; but it is he who is always
thankful to God, who receives everything as an instance of God's goodness and
has a heart always ready to praise God for it.
David was far from a perfect man. He was, in fact, notorious for his failures, and yet he is called
the man after God's own heart. It is
hard to avoid the conclusion as we read the Psalms that the redeeming factor in
his life that lifted him so close to God was his grateful heart. Praise flows unceasingly from his lips and
heart. He competes with the angels of
heaven who praise God night and day.
David had more than his share of trials, but he never ceased to praise
God. From youth to old age his theme
was praise. Whichever way he looked on
the path of time he saw the providence of God at work. He would agree with the poem prayer of Will
Carlton:
We thank thee, O Father, for
all that is bright,
The gleam of the day and the
stars of the night,
The flowers of our youth and
the fruits of our prime,
And the blessings that march
down the pathway of time.
We want to follow David on one of his thankful journey's
along the pathway of time, for he establishes a pattern of thankfulness that
ought to be a characteristic of our lives as Christians. In whatever direction he looks he has a
thankful perspective. Let's go with him
first into yesterday and his thankfulness for the past.
I. YESTERDAY.
In verse 3 David looks back to a time of crisis when he
cried out to God for help and mercy.
His heart is filled with praise to God because God heard him and gave
him the strength he needed to cope with the trial. There is not a Christian alive who cannot look back to yesterday
and praise God for what He has done in their past. If you forget all else, you cannot forget the cross and the fact
that God has received you as His child because of your trust in Christ. If yesterday was empty of all but the cross
the Christian heart would still look back and be filled to overflowing with
thankfulness. But God did not stop with
the gift of His Son. When God gives He
pours. Showers of blessing have been
ours already. The reality of the trials
does not diminish the reality of the blessings. They are no less real because they have not been all of the
real.
Above a bed in an English hospital is a bronze tablet with
these words: "This bed has been
endowed by the savings of a poor man who is grateful for an unexpected
recovery." Most all of us can look
back and recognize that God has spared us from some illness or accident that
would have taken us from the stage of history.
None of us would be here to praise God today had he not delivered us in
some yesterday.
When Jesus
instituted the Lord's Supper to keep us ever looking back to the cross, He knew
the human tendency to forget and neglect the blessings of the past. That is why he urged us to do this in
remembrance of Him. Benjamin Franklin
had the same idea in mind when he moved at the Constitutional Convention in
1787: "That henceforth prayers,
imploring thee the assistance of Heaven and it's blessings on our
deliberations, beheld in the assembly every morning before we proceed to
business." In his speech in
support of this motion he said the following:
"In this situation of
this Assembly, groping as it were,
in the dark to find
political truth, and scarce able to
distinguish when presented
to us, how has it happened,
sir, that we have not hitherto
once thought of humbly
applying to the Father of
Lights to illuminate our
understandings?
In the beginning of the contest with
Britain, when we were
sensible of danger, we had daily
prayers in this room for the
Divine protection. Our
prayers, sir, were heard;
and they were graciously
answered. To that kind Providence we owe this happy
opportunity of consulting in
peace on the means of
establishing our future
national felicity. And have we
now forgotten that powerful
Friend? I have lived, sir,
a long time; and the longer
I live, the more convincing
proofs I see of this truth,
that God governs in the affairs
of men!"
This illustrates the tendency of American people to be like
the people of Israel, and to forget God's great blessings of the past. It also illustrates how a man who believes
in a God of purpose and providence is filled with thankfulness. Therefore, let us like David look back on
yesterday and be grateful. Look back,
not like Lot's wife to mourn over what was forsaken to obey God. Look back, not like the Israelites longing
for the garlic and onions of Egypt. He
who puts his hand to the plow and looks back like this is not fit for the
kingdom Jesus said. But let us look
back like David to review the blessings of yesterday stored in the attic our
memory, and let us praise God for His providence in guiding us as individuals
and as a nation. David was not one to
live in the past, however, and think that all the good days are the good old
days. He is grateful for God's
continuous providence, and so in verse 7 he expresses his thanks for the
present.
II. TODAY.
His today is not all filled with sunshine and roses, but he
is assured of God's presence and protection.
Today is always the most variable part of our lives. the present is in a constant state of
change. In just a few moments
everything can be altered, but the Christian knows that God never ceases to
work toward His purpose, even in the troubles of today to prepare for a better
tomorrow. Consider the experience of
the Pilgrims. The story is well known
of their suffering, and of the many who died the first winter, but less is known
of how God was providently working in their troubled today to prepare for a bright
tomorrow.
Squanto was an Indian boy who had been carried away to
England in 1605 by the exploring party of Captain George Weymouth. Squanto returned to Plymouth in 1614, but he
was kidnapped along with 20 others from his tribe and was sold as a slave in
Spain. He came under the care of monks
who instructed him in the Christian faith.
He eventually made his way to England and then back to Plymouth just 6
months before the Pilgrims arrived. He
found that his whole tribe has perished in a plague of smallpox, and he was the
only survivor. When the Pilgrims came
he joined them and never left them, and his presence was a blessing beyond
calculation.
Squanto knew the Indians and the ways of this country. He taught the Pilgrims how to build fish
traps, snare animals, and how to plant and fertilize corn. He served as their interpreter and adviser
in all their relations with the Indians.
By his help peace was maintained for over 50 years. God was working every day in their lives,
even in the midst of all their trials.
Jesus said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." He never promised escape from trials, but He
promised His presence and power to endure and conquer. A pastor in East Germany under the
communists said, "The pressure is always on. We never know what to expect, but we thank God for His presence
in every situation." This is true
for every child of God, for we can thank God for yesterday, and also for today,
and then go on to the next step as well.
III. TOMORROW. v. 8
David ends on a high note of blessed assurance. He says, "The Lord will fulfill His
purpose for me." God's faithfulness
and steadfast love endures forever.
What He has begun He will complete.
This assurance of God's fulfilling His ultimate purpose for us is the
greatest cause for thanksgiving. The
highest happiness we can experience is in the knowledge that our lives have
ultimate and eternal meaning.
Christian thankfulness breaks the time barrier and reaches out into tomorrow
to praise God for what is yet to come.
It is the hope of tomorrow that gives meaning to the blessings of the
past and present. If these were ends in
them selves there would be no ultimate purpose to life.
In William Saroyon's play The Time Of Your Life, Joe is a
bored but rich young loafer who was asked why he likes to lay around and
drink. This was his reply: "Everyday has 24 hours...out of the 24
hours at least 23 and a half are, my God, I don't know why‑dull, dead,
boring, empty, and murderous. Minutes
on the clock, not time of living, but spent in waiting, and the more you wait,
the less there is to wait for. That
goes on for days and days and weeks and months and years, and years, and the
first thing you know all the years are dead.
All the minutes are dead. You
yourself are dead."
This is the purposeless, meaningless tomorrow that drives
so many into a foolish and wasteful use of life today. But the Christian has no part in this
pessimism. Thank God for tomorrow echoes
through the pages of Scripture. God
has a purpose for each of us, and He will accomplish it if we put Christ first,
and make Him the center of our lives.
The work which His goodness
began,
The arm of His strength will
complete;
His promise is yea and amen,
And never was forfeited yet.
As Pilgrims with a purpose we march forward with praise on
our lips and a song in our hearts, for our Lord is the unchanging Christ who is
the same yesterday, today and forever.
His promise, His presence, His providence, and His protection and
provision will be as sure tomorrow as they were yesterday and are today. It seems almost too good to be true, and so
it was even for David, for he ends with the prayer, "Forsake not the work
of Thine own hands." This is an
admission of his unworthiness to be the object of such steadfast love. I summed up David's whole attitude in this
poem:
Thank God for yesterday when
in need I cried,
And he heard my prayer, and
gave me strength inside.
Thank God for today whether
skies be dark or clear,
For I am confident that
Christ my Lord is near.
Thank God for tomorrow
however rough and steep the hill.
I'll climb in full assurance
the Lord his purpose will fulfill.
Thank God for all these days
When we can in grateful
praise
Say thank you Lord in joy
your sorrow,
For yesterday, today,
tomorrow.
May God grant each of us the blessing of having such a
thankful perspective.
4. NEGATIVE
THANKSGIVING Based on Psa. 30:1‑12
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in being occupied with what
happens that we forget that there is so much to be thankful for because of what
doesn't happen. For example: Peter Marshall died of a heart attack as a
middle aged man with great potential ahead of him as Chaplain of the Senate and
popular Washington pastor. It was a
tragedy, and Catherine Marshall has written much about the horrible grief and
agony of adjustment, but she has also written about the marvelous blessing of
what did not happen to Peter Marshall.
This puts even the tragedy into a new light.
As a young man he was taking a short cut one dark night
through unfamiliar territory. He did
not realize how dark it was. He suddenly
heard someone call his name. He stopped
and took a few more steps, and then he heard it again. He stopped completely still and tried to
peer into the darkness. It was so
scary, for he could not see anything.
He fell to his knees and began to feel around him, and to his shock he
discovered that he was right on the brink of an abandoned stone quarry. One more step and he would have plummeted to
his death. There was never a doubt in
his mind that God had spoken and spared his life. By grace all that he did for the rest of his life was made
possible. Later a car killed a friend
he was walking with, but it missed him.
He was spared again. Another
time a plane crashed that he had missed, and a boat caught on fire 10 miles out
to sea, and he was again spared.
The point is that though he died so young, he didn't die so
much younger, which he easily could have done.
He lived long enough by the grace of God so that his early death was a
shock and a loss to the whole Christian world.
His life has had one of the greatest impacts on America than that of any
preacher in this century. And it was
all because of what did not happen. It
makes me think again of the book of Ruth where, if Elimelech would have died
sooner, Naomi would never have been in Moab to meet Ruth. If her sons would have died sooner she never
would have been Ruth's mother‑in‑law, and all of the influence of
Naomi and Ruth on history would never have been.
It was what did not happen that made possible all that did
happen. We need to balance out life and
its problems by looking at what did not happen as well as what did. It is the non‑events that help us see
the happenings from a broader perspective.
They add light to the darkness, and give meaning to what otherwise may
seem senseless. In almost every negative
event of life you can find something that did not happen that enables you to
have a basis for thanksgiving.
Your life and mine only have meaning right now because of
what did not happen. It is not likely
any of us would be alive today had certain things happened in the past that did
not. One of our members told of an
event in his younger years where he was working and a man pulled a large knife
on him and threatened him. The
adrenaline poured into his body and he was so angry that he grabbed a clever
and so frightened the man that he fled at such a pace that he didn't even open
the screen door but went right through it.
That story could have had a different ending with him on the floor
stabbed to death. But that did not
happen, and that non‑happening is the basis for his great
thanksgiving.
We all have stories that could, with just slight changes in
the timing, have led us to an early grave.
We are only here because of many things that never happened. That is what David is thanking God for in
verse 3 of Psa. 30. "O Lord, you
brought me up from the grave; you spared me from going down into the
pit." David was alive and well,
and he was praising God because of what did not happen. This theme of negative thankfulness runs all
through this Psalm. In verse 1 David exalts
God for what God did not let happen.
One of David's great fears never materialized. He dreaded to have his enemies gloat over him, but he thanks God
that it never happened. He not only
didn't die physically, but he didn't die psychologically or emotionally. I can just imagine David saying, "If
that ever happened to me I would just die." But it didn't happen, and he is grateful for that which never
was.
Count your blessings we say, and rightly so, but when you are
done with this list you have not scratched the surface of all you have for
which to be thankful. The list of
things that are blessings because they never happened is near infinite.
Paul gives us a couple of
examples of negative thanksgiving. In
Rom. 14:6 he describes to Christians who are thankful for opposite things. He says, "He who eats meat, eats to the
Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and
gives thanks." One is thankful he
eats meat, and the other is thankful he does not. Both are thankful they are not like the other one.
Have you ever said that I am thankful I am not like so and
so? That is legitimate, but it is also
legitimate if they are thankful they are not like you. There are endless numbers of things that
make people different, and we can be grateful for these differences we do not
possess. I can be thankful I am not as
tall as Wilt Chamberlain, or as short as Micky Rooney. But the can be equally grateful they are not
as commonplace as I am. This life has
endless non‑realities and non‑events for which we can be thankful.
Paul looked at the mess in the Corinthian church and all of
the division that had come over personality clashes within the church, and he
writes in I Cor. 1:14‑15, "I am thankful that I did not baptize any
of you accept Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you are baptized into
my name." Imagine that! Paul is being thankful for what never
happened, even though it would seem to be a positive thing if it had
happened. What if he had baptized a
hundred members of that church? It
sounds like something he could have been proud of, but instead he is grateful
that it never happened, for this non‑happening prevented his success
being used for the negative purpose of raising up a competitive cult in his
name.
This opens endless doors of potential gratitude. How many wonderful things have never
happened to you for which you ought to be grateful? What if my father was a millionaire and I would have inherited it
and became a rich playboy with no thought of God, but totally devoted to self‑pleasure? I would have missed the love of Christ and
service for His kingdom, and the precious hope of eternal life in the family of
God. Not only is life filled with
endless negatives that never happened, but it is filled with endless positives
and successes that never happened that could have led us to miss God's
best. Thank God for all the burdens and
all the blessings that never happened that could have been enemies of my best
self. If we only knew, we could even
thank God for prayers that were never answered.
Paul could look back and say that had I been more successful
I could have baptized many more people, but thank God that never happened, for
in the long run less was better, and failure was my success. If Christians were successful in everything
they did, they would never move on to other challenges God wants them to
tackle. That is why even non‑success
and non‑happening of good things can be a reason for thanksgiving. What didn't happen was even a basis for the
thanksgiving of Christ. He prayed in
Luke 10:21, "I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth because you have
hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little
children."
Jesus was grateful that God did not operate on the same
level as the world. He did not give
priority to those with power and learning, but rather to the innocent and
helpless. In other words, thank God
that the Christmas story was not given to the king or high priest, but to the
lowly shepherds. What God does not do
in history is almost as marvelous as what He does do. This means that there is no end of things that never happen for
which we can be thankful. Jesus was not
born in a palace. He never joined the
ranks of the official religious leaders of Israel. He never became a legalist like the Pharisees. He never fell for the lures of Lucifer. He never gave up on His disciples. He never took the easy way out when He faced
the cross. The things that never
happened in the life of Jesus are the foundation for all our thanksgiving.
Life is not only full of things for which to give thanks,
but it is also empty of things for which to give thanks. Everyone has their problems, but if you add
up all the problems, trials, and diseases, and then count how many of them you
don't have you will be overwhelmed by the multitude of non‑happenings for
which you ought to be grateful. Richard
Armor gives a trivial example that illustrates just how near infinite the realm
of negative thanksgiving can be.
"Make yourself at
home," I'm urged
By hosts when I'm a guest,
But I am very careful not
To do as they suggest.
For if I did, I'd take off
coat
And tie and also shoes,
And put my feet up on a
chair
And take a little nooze.
And then I'd turn the TV on
To something they'd find
hateful.....
No, I won't make myself at
home‑
For which they should be
grateful." Author Unknown
Thank God for all the people who do not take you literally
and follow through on your offer to make themselves at home. The point is, from the trivial to the
tremendous we have an endless resource of thanksgiving in the realm of the
negative, which are the things that are not, were not, and never will be. These negatives of life are not all
absolutely non‑events, however.
Sometimes they are only relatively so, and so we want to look at the 2
categories of non‑happenings that David deals with in Psa. 30.
I. NEGATIVES THAT ARE
PREVENTED.
President McKinley developed a custom of always wearing a
pink carnation in his buttonhole. His
wife raised them at the White House.
Wherever he traveled he always gave his carnation to the engineer of the
train. He would walk up to the engineer
and lift the pink flower into the grimy hands of the engineer and say, "I
sincerely thank you for your skill and my safety." He was being thankful for what was
prevented. Every time we take a trip
and get back safely we can be thankful for what was prevented. This of course is a major part of David's
thanksgiving. He was spared from
disgrace and humiliation, and from fatal disease. These evils never happened because they were prevented.
This always has been, and always will be, the best kind of
negative non‑event. The next best
is the second category we will be looking at, which is negatives that do happen
but do not last. For example, the
getting sick but then being healed. It
is better to prevent the sickness, for you can't beat staying well, but it is
also a great second best to be healed and restored to health when you do get
sick. Prevention is total non‑happening
of the negative, and this is the best source for gratitude. We can learn from suffering, even as Jesus
did, but thank God we do not have to learn everything by the negative of
suffering. God prevented Jesus from
having to learn by being born with handicaps.
He was prevented from having to endure diseases of all kinds. He was prevented from being made a slave, or
of having to grow up as an orphan.
Jesus missed a multitude of negatives, and so it is with all of us.
Preventative medicine alone has blest most of our lives. Many of us escaped the diseases that killed
children by the thousands because we were given shots. Thank God for the evils and sufferings that
never happened because they are prevented.
Prevention does not make the headlines, for non‑events do not make
news, but the fact is, the non‑events of life are some of the best
news. It would be a marvelous headline
that would say, "Fifteen million babies do not have polio this
year." We need to be reminded of
all the evils that have been prevented to have a totally thankful
perspective. The prevention of one evil
can lead to the prevention of other evils, and so one non‑event can lead
to another non‑event.
For example: "In
1874 a young Texas doctor named John Burke treated a patience suffering from
typhoid fever. The patient recovered
and, upon leaving, promised the doctor that he would some day repay him. After a few years the doctor moved to
another town. One day when walking to
his office, he noticed a group of horseman heading towards the bank. He realized that they were robbers and that
the leader was his former patient.
After a few minutes of pleading by the doctor that he and the entire
town would suffer if the men carried out their plan. The band of men rode out of town on their leader's orders. With this, the patient had repaid his long‑overdue
debt. The bandit leader was none other
than Frank James, brother of the notorious outlaw Jesse James." Because Frank James didn't die a bank
robbery didn't happen. The prevention
of his death led to gratitude that prevented the robbery. Every evil prevented leads to, who knows,
how many other evils that never happen?
There is no way to calculate how many things are not
happening every day in our lives, and in our world, because they are
prevented. You can focus on the
problems that were not prevented and get discouraged, or you can begin to count
that innumerable list of burdens you did not have to carry, and see that
negative thanksgiving becomes a basis for rejoicing even when all is not
well. We must be constantly aware of
just how little we really know about the future. We jump to conclusions all the time because we assume that we
know that certain non‑events will be destructive to our future.
Naomi had a plan.
She was going to get Ruth to go back to Moab, and she would be free of
all responsibility. She failed to achieve
her goal, however, and Ruth refused to go back. What she longed for did not happen, but this non‑event, the
thing she sought for, was the best thing that never happened to Naomi. Had it happened she and Ruth would have
separated and gone into oblivion and played no roll in God's plan. It was this non‑event that led to her
greatest success. Thank God for things
that do not happen. Naomi and Ruth had
a future filled with thankfulness because God prevented Naomi from doing things
in her grief that would have defeated His best for them both.
The point is, you do not know which is best for you. Is it failure or success? So when the dream you have does not happen,
and the goal you set does not materialize, do not give up hope, for the non‑happening
may yet be the basis for your thanksgiving.
Give God time to show you how even the negatives of life can prevent you
from missing the positives that He has waiting for you. Both good things and bad things that do not
happen can be the best things that never happened to you.
Lavonne and I have thanked God so many times for one of the
best things that never happened to me.
Had we gotten the service we wanted at a drive in one summer night my friends
and I might never have gotten impatient and gone to another town down the road,
and I never would have met Lavonne. It
was a negative situation that caused it to happen. What we wanted to happen was not happening, but because of that
non‑happening one of the best things that ever happened to me happened. It was a non‑event that prevented me
from missing a major event. Thank God
for those things which never happened.
Next we look at‑
II. NEGATIVES THAT ARE
PASSING.
David avoided many of the sorrows of life, and much evil was
prevented in his life for which he was deeply thankful. But the fact is, it is only in paradise that
all evil is prevented, and so David had his share of life's sorrows. He experienced sickness of body and sickness
of mind. He had fear and depression,
and many tears over life's problems. He
experienced sickness of soul because of sin and separation from God. He acknowledges all of these in Psa.
30. Yet none of these negatives stops
this from being a Psalm of thanksgiving.
It is because all of these negatives are merely temporary, and they all
pass away, and they leave only the positives as permanent.
In other words, what does not happen is the negatives of life
stay and hang on forever. They come and
they go. They are no nomads that pack
up and move on. That they visit us at
all is a pain, but that they don't stay is our great pleasure. They happen, but they do not happen
permanently, and their non‑endurance is ground for gratitude. They passed into the realm of non‑being.
For the Christian all negatives will eventually pass into this realm.
I have a slight crack in one of my fillings, and every once
in awhile I chew something hard and I put pressure on that crack and end up
with a toothache. It hurts bad enough
so that I feel like I'm in for some trouble, but then it ceases to hurt and I
rejoice that it was only a passing pain.
It is easy to endure that which is only temporary. It is so wonderful when it goes away that I
am motivated to thank God for that which does not happen, which is the
continued and persistent pain.
I've read of an ocean steamer which decades ago was dashed
against the rocks of Newfoundland. Most
all of the passengers lost their lives.
A telegram came to a home in Detroit announcing the drowning of a young
man of that household. It was a sad
day, and loved ones entered the darkness of grief. A few hours later another telegram came explaining that the young
man had been found. He had survived
after all, and that family framed and hung that second telegram on their wall
as a reminder of the glorious good news of what had not happened. Their sorrow was quickly over, for the
negative was merely passing. In this
case the bad news was not real, but even when it is real it can be a merely
passing negative.
Look at the cross.
Jesus really did die, and the disciples were plunged to the depths of
the pit of sorrow. Nevertheless, in
only a few days they were rejoicing in the risen Christ, for the worst that
Satan and all the powers of hell could do was only temporary. It was real, but evil is only a passing
reality. That which is forever is the
good, the true, and the beautiful. That
is why David ends this Psalm on the high note of perpetual praise. "O Lord my God I will give you thanks
forever." Thank God that
thanksgiving will never end. Here is
something that will never happen, and that is the cessation of thanksgiving,
and for this eternal non‑event we will be eternally grateful.
Forever and forever he will thank God that none of his
sorrows and sufferings follow him into the presence of God. All evil will cease to happen, and that
eternal non‑happening of evil will be added to the eternal happenings of
God's love and grace so that David and all God's children will have an infinite
supply of reasons for eternal thankfulness.
All the former things will pass away says the New Testament, and for all
eternity we will enjoy the non‑happening of sin and sorrow, and all the
other consequences of man's fall. Thank
God that the worst that evil can throw at us is passing. Weeping may remain for a night, but joy
comes in the morning.
Abraham Lincoln had more than his fare share of life's
trials. At age 7 he and his family were
evicted and suffered humiliation. At 9
his mother died. At age 26 his partner
in business died leaving him saddled with great debt. At 28 he was rejected by the girl he proposed to. When he did marry he lost his 4 year old son
in death. He lost numerous elections
and came near a mental breakdown in battles with depression. Yet he became the 16th president of the
United States, and one of history's most thankful leaders, and one for whom
much thanks is given. Thank God for
what didn't happen in this great man's life.
He didn't give up and stop the onward fight for what was just and
right. That never happened, and the
result is we forget all of the passing problems he had to endure. We remember him for the good that endures
because of him.
David had to endure the judgment of God on his sin, but even
this was passing, but God's mercies on him were new every morning. Mercy is what God does not do to us that we
deserve. We deserve judgement, but God
does not deal with us as we deserve, or reward us according to our
iniquities. In mercy He provides a way
of escape that we might experience His grace forever. Because of God's mercy there is no end to the things that never
happen that if they did it would be a curse.
But the do not happen because of God's mercy. Count your many blessings, but also count your many non‑cursing
that you deserve but never get because of God's mercy.
"When all thy mercies,
O my God,
My rising soul surveys,
Transported with the view,
I'm lost in wonder, love and
praise."
This was David's song, and if we see life whole and see the
infinite realm of the non‑existent and non‑happenings of life, we
to will have a song of praise and a heart of gratitude regardless of life's
troubles and trials. We will be getting
a glimpse into that infinite treasure of negative thanksgiving.
5. THANKSGIVING FOCUS Based
on Psa. 103:1‑14
You will, no doubt, think me strange for saying it, but I am
thankful for my ignorance. It gives me
so much to be thankful for. My vast
ocean of ignorance is my playground where I can fish for new insights, and I
can dive for the sunken treasure of golden truths that lay hidden in God's
Word. Paul said, "Now I know in
part and I see through a glass darkly."
That is why even when he was in prison he wrote, "Bring me the
books and the parchments for I must be to my dying day growing in my knowing of
what God has revealed." Paul was
ever pressing on, for there is never an end to discovery in God's Word.
The continents have all been discovered. The oceans and seas have all been
discovered. Even the planets have all
been discovered. But there will never
come a day in history when it will ever be said that the exploration of God's
Word has ceased, for all truth and wisdom have been discovered. Because God is infinite, discovery is
eternal, and that is one of things I am most grateful for, for I desire to make
discoveries forever. This is not to say
that this should also be your desire.
The palmist David says in verse 5, "He satisfies my desires with
good things." You desires may be
altogether different. It may be torture
for you to do research and seek to discover new insights. That is okay, for God gave the body many
members with a variety of gifts and interests.
What satisfies my desires may not do so for you. It is whatever renews our youth like the
eagles that satisfies our particular desires.
In other words, you are most thankful to God for those
things that make you feel young and alive again. Those things that fill you with energy and enthusiasm are the
real high of thankfulness, and they are the things that renew your spirit. What do you anticipate doing when you are
free to make the choice of how you use your time? That is a life renewing activity, and when you want to be filled
with the spirit of thanksgiving think of that desire that is satisfied.
This will vary because all of us have many things in common,
but we thank God for those specific desires that make you soar with the
eagles. These are the ones you need to
focus on to be filled with gratitude.
This Psalm is loaded with examples that fit all of us at various times
in our lives. In verse 2 he says to his
soul, "Forget not all his benefits."
We are not likely to forget those things that give us an eagle high, but
there are many other things that we can forget if we do not give effort to
remember them. The poet mixes in the
trivial and the tremendous to recall to our memory that we have endless reasons
to be thankful.
Thank you, God, for a
hundred things‑
For the flower that blooms,
for the bird that sings,
For the sun that shines,
And the rain that drops,
For ice cream and raisins
and lollipops.
Thank you God for the gift
of time‑
For the clocks that tick, and
the bells that chime,
For days gone by,
And future cheers,
For seasons, and moments,
for hours and years.
Thanks for the people who
give life pizazz‑
For folks who play sports,
those who act and play jazz,
For friends and for
families,
For folks of all races,
For hands that give help and
for bright smiling faces.
Thanks for the planet you
give as our home‑
For the sky with its clouds,
for the oceans' white foam,
For the creatures and
critters,
The lakes, falls and
fountains,
For hills and for valleys,
for canyons and mountains.
Thank you, God, for the gift
of your Son‑
For the love Jesus shared,
for the battle He won
Over death, for the promise,
That He would be near
To lead and to guide and to
hold us so dear.
Thank you, God, for a
hundred things‑
For autumn and pumpkins, for
dragonfly wings,
For Thanksgiving dinners,
For seasides and shore,
For a hundred things, and a
thousand things more.
Author unknown
The poet has captured the idea of this Psalm by ranging all
the way from the God centered level of grace, forgiveness and salvation to the
more self‑centered level of personal desires. The point is, the reasons for thanksgiving is endless. Variety is the spice of life because God is
the God of variety, and He has given so many benefits that there is no way to
become overly thankful. Whoever heard
of someone say of another, "He is just too thankful, or she is a fanatic
for being so grateful?"
When President George Washington proclaimed the first
Thanksgiving in 1789 he stressed this very issue of the variety of God's
blessing. This is what he proclaimed:
"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of
Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly
implore His protection, aid and favors....Now, therefore, I do recommend assign
Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these
states to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the Beneficent
Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all
unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and
protection of the people of this country, and for all the great and various
favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us."
David begins this great praise Psalm by talking to
himself. He is giving his inner man a
pep talk on praising the Lord. It can
be a good thing to talk to yourself, for the fact of life is that you are more
likely to listen to what you tell yourself than to what others tell you. The most effective form of communication is
that which goes from your mind to your body.
Tell yourself to praise the Lord and you will do it. Tell yourself not to forget the Lord's
benefits and you won't. You listen to
yourself, and so we need to tell ourselves often to be thankful. If you quit telling yourself, you will become
less and less thankful.
David starts this Psalm by telling himself to praise the
Lord, and he ends it by telling himself to do it again. If we would tell ourselves as we begin the
day to praise the Lord and not forget all His benefits, and if we would end the
day by doing the same, we would be different people. We would be grateful people, and grateful people are the happiest
people.
David deals with major negative issues in this song of
praise. He stresses the forgiveness of
all his sins, and the healing of all his diseases. Everyone of us is here only because God did not judge us for our
sins. We have all sinned, but we are
not dead because God has forgiven us in Christ. There is not one of us who is alive who could not have died with
some disease we have had. If we had the
time to compile the list, we would be able to reveal an amazing example of the
providence of God right in this room.
There are many disease that some of us have had that have killed others,
but we are still alive. We have been
redeemed from the pit of death by the grace of God. Everyday we live we can thank God for the gift of life.
Spiritual and physical healing are the two major themes of
David's gratitude. In the midst of
these gigantic reasons for being thankful he slips in a sort of generic reason
in verse 5. He says, "He satisfies
my desires with good things." The
terms here‑desires and good things‑are very general. They cover all the varied things that each
of us may be thankful for that mean little or nothing to others. Each of our unique and trivial reasons to be
grateful are covered by the Hebrew word used here. The word is adi, and it refers to any desirable thing. It is most often used in the Bible to refer
to ornaments. For example, in Jer. 2:32
we read, "Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding
ornaments?" Ornaments is the same
word David uses here for desires. A
bride loves her accessories that beautify her and make her feel good about
herself. They are the basis for a
thankful heart, even though they may seem trivial to us.
This word refers 11
times to the ornaments of both men and women.
My tie is an ornament. If I am a
person that is growing in my awareness of things to be thankful for, I will be
thankful for my tie. I confess I do not
ever remember thanking God for any of my ties.
I thank Lavonne for she is the one who buys most of them for me. But I do enjoy an attractive tie, and it
does satisfy a desire. It is one of the
positive good things in my life, but I have never done what David does here and
include gratitude for my tie in the same prayer where I thank God for
forgiveness, healing, and redemption.
David links the trivial with the tremendous, and he teaches
us a lesson on thanksgiving that most of us have not yet learned very
well. The lesson is this: The major things of life cannot sustain a
spirit of thanksgiving without the aid of the minor things of life for which we
are to be grateful. If all you can be
thankful for is forgiveness, healing and salvation, you will grow cold in your
thanksgiving because the emotions become weaker and weaker. You are not healed everyday, so your
gratitude for your recovery of last year is weakened by time. Even your thanks for being saved grows
weaker, and becomes a mere habit after thousands of times.
That is why we need the trivial to keep our thanksgiving
fresh. What good thing in your life is
currently making you grateful? Is it a
new watch, a new video game, a new book, a different responsibility at work, or
a new recipe? You can go on endlessly
looking at all kinds of things and experiences that are adding some excitement
to your emotions. Use these relatively
trivial aspects of life as a basis for your daily songs of praise. God loves to be thanked for the little
things. The poet put it this way:
Thank you God, for the
little things
That often come our way,
The things we take for
granted
But don't mention when we
pray.
The unexpected courtesy, the
thoughtful kindly deed.
A hand reached out to help
us
In time of sudden need. Oh, make us more aware, dear God,
Of little daily graces
That come to us with
"Sweet surprise"
From never‑dreamed of
places.
Burbank Gardens Newsletter.
The value of this focus on the little things of life is
twofold. It enables us to do what David
urges his soul to do in verse 2. It
enables us to forget not all his benefits, which includes the trivial as well
as the tremendous. This will make us
more grateful people, and the little things will open our hearts anew to the
major things of forgiveness, healing, and salvation.
The second thing it will do is open us to the awareness that
God uses little things to accomplish big things. Little acts of kindness that are a trivial part of life can lead
people into the kingdom of God. Get a
person to be grateful for some trivial act like washing their windshield and
this can lead them to one day praising God for forgiveness, healing and
salvation. The road to heaven for many
starts with the first step motivated by a trivial act of kindness.
Steve Sjogren in Conspiracy of Kindness tells of some of his
youth group who volunteered to shine shoes free in downtown Cincinnati. A young man named Paul who was a scary
looking guy with his black leather clothes and black boots was amazed that
Christians would polish his black boots free just to demonstrate the love of
God. He was a tough guy and a criminal,
but this act of kindness touched the gratitude button in his mind, and he came
to the church. Several months later he
asked Jesus to enter his life and he became a Christian. He only got to the major league of thanking
God for salvation because someone got him started in the minor league of
thanking God for a free shoeshine.
The major mistake Christians have made in evangelism is
thinking that people leap to the level of salvation in one huge effort. Studies show that most people get to the
decision to trust Christ as Savior by a series of small steps that prepare them
for the final step. The trivial becomes
the foundation for the tremendous, and the more we are aware of this the more
we will be thankful for the trivial, and the more we will practice trivial
kindness.
Many years ago a skid row bum found a dollar bill, and he was
excited about going to the bar and treating some friends to a drink. But on the way he passed a sporting goods
store and saw a bat in the window. It
brought back memories of his youth when he longed to play ball but had no
bat. Seeing the price for the bat was just
a dollar, he went in and bought it. He
took it to the local orphanage. He put
it by the door, rang the bell, and ran away.
The keeper of the orphanage found the bat and decided to make it a
Christmas present to an awkward gangly boy who loved to play ball but had no
bat. That boy who benefited by the
trivial act of kindness from a bum was none other than Babe Ruth.
The point is, you never know how big an impact will be made
in another persons life by some little act of kindness. The key to getting any person to move in the
direction of seeking God's forgiveness and redemption is by awakening in them
some degree of thankfulness. When
people are unthankful they are in a state of sinful darkness where they cannot
even see their need for God's grace and forgiveness. The unthankful heart is among the most deadly of sins. In Rom. 1:21 Paul says that the whole world
of lost men is under the wrath of God because, "For although they knew
God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him." In II Tim. 3:2 he describes the terrible
times of the last days, and he says that people will be unthankful.
The deadly characteristic of lost people from the beginning
of history to the end of it is an unthankful heart. The best way to get such people to move in God's direction is to
give them something to be thankful for that somehow connected with the love of
God. The whole idea behind the
conspiracy of kindness is to do acts of kindness that compel people to recognize
that God is love, and that they ought to be thankful to Him.
Pastor Sjogren tells of one Friday evening before Labor Day
when the rush hour traffic was backed up for a mile, and the temperature was 95
degrees. He got ten people to quickly
ice down 400 soft drinks and set up a sign.
The sign said free drinks ahead.
People were amazed when they came to that spot, and they said we are
giving away free soft drinks to show people God's love in a practical way. People would ask why, and they would reply,
"Just because God loves you."
All 400 drinks were gone, and they had talked with 600 people. Soft drinks do not save anybody, but they
can give people a spark of thankfulness for this trivial act of kindness, and
this spark can lead them to seek for more evidence that God loves them. They can become open to hear the good news
of the tremendous kindness of God in giving them a Savior.
The point is, if you can get people to be thankful for
trifles, there is hope that they will move on in the direction that leads to
the tremendous. Any act of kindness can
lead to people becoming thankful for what God has given them in Christ. This same principle operates within the
kingdom of God with God's own people.
Get Christians to be thankful for all sorts of trivial benefits and they
will be in a praise mood making them grateful for all the wonders of God's
grace. John R. Rice, one of the
greatest evangelists of the 20th century, wrote, "Our first five‑room
house didn't have carpet on the floor.
We had linoleum. But when Gerri
and I bought our second home it was carpeted.
I had never lived in a home with carpet. So I would take off my shoes and walk barefoot. I thought, 'That's the most wonderful thing
in the world: I don't deserve
this.' I would lie down on that carpet,
pull the loops up, run my finger down the loop and thank God for each loop in
the carpet. I really felt gratitude in
my heart for such luxury."
He illustrates that when the trivial leads you to praise God
it is no longer trivial. The good
things of life may not be the main things, but they are more like the fringe
benefits, but being grateful for them will make you more grateful for the major
gifts of God in Christ. A major cause
for Christians losing their spirit of gratitude is their focus on big things
they don't have rather than little things they do have. Check your focus and ask, are you feeling
bad because of the bigger house you don't have rather than being grateful for
the smaller one you do have? Are you
down because of the bigger car you don't have than up about the one you do
have? Apply this all areas of life and
you discover that the primary cause for every thankless thought in your head is
due to a focus on what is not rather than what is.
You need to talk to
your soul like David does, and tell it not to forget all God's benefits. Tell it to focus on desires that are being
met with good things. Dr. Criswell, who
was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas for several decades, tells of
a family who had a very strange thing happen to them. Oil was found on the property of people all around them, but none
was found on their land. Everyone was
becoming rich but them. It was a trial,
but they focused on what they had and not on what they didn't have. Years later they were still reaping the
benefits of this focus.
All of their neighbors moved into the city and bought big
homes, new cars, and sent their kids to the finest schools. They joined country clubs and changed their
life style completely. One by one their
marriages failed, their kids rebelled, and none of them kept going to church on
a regular basis. They were able to turn
a blessing into a curse. The father of
the family that didn't get rich said to Dr. Criswell, "Pastor, God did us
a big favor by not putting oil on our land.
We are all still together and love each other like never before. We thank Him everyday for giving us what is
important and protecting us from the things that aren't." Here was a grateful Christian family that
could have become bitter and out of fellowship with God had they focused on the
big things that didn't happen rather than the precious little things that
did.
When you find yourself being down and not being grateful for
life, talk to yourself like David does in this Psalm. Remind your soul not to forget what already is, for all of us
have much to praise God for if we have this biblical thanksgiving focus.
6. TOP
LEVEL THANKSGIVING Based on Psa. 118:1‑5
Leslie Weatherhead tells the story of the 5 year old boy use
to listen to the radio even though he could not understand anything but the
children's programs. He observed that
his parents listened every day to what was called the news. He could make nothing of that. One Sunday
morning he went into his mother's bedroom where the radio had been turned low
so as not to disturb the baby. Assuming
it was the news, he listened and heard a word he recognized. The speaker kept using the word God. He took off down the stairs to the kitchen
where his grandmother was preparing a meal, and he said, "Granny, you had
better turn on the radio. It's the
news, but today it's about God."
If ever the world needed to hear news about God, it is today. God news is good news, for God is good and
the source of all that leads to thanksgiving.
If we live in a world of diminishing gratitude, it is
because we live in a world retreating from God. Gamaliel Bradford expressed the minds of millions of modern materialists
who suspect that they have been short changed in their trading of God for
gold. He wrote,
Of old our father's God was
real,
Something they almost saw,
Which kept them to a stern
ideal,
And scourged them into awe.
I sometimes wish that God
were back
In this dark world and wide;
For though some virtues He
might lack,
He had His pleasant side.
Had the poet taken some time to study the nature of God he
would find that the only reason God had an unpleasant side, and must be a God
of judgment, is because of men like himself who push God out onto the fringes
of life, and put idols in the center.
The modern American is in danger of forgetting his heritage, and like
the pagans of old, worshiping the creature rather than the creator. Years ago a Chinese delegate to a summer
conference in America told of how an Indian, Chinese and American would react
to seeing Niagara Falls for the first time.
The Indian would become deeply meditative, his mystic soul being stirred
to commune with the infinite spirit.
The Chinese with his ingrained sense of family solidarity would wish his
family could be there to enjoy it with him.
The American, however, would begin immediately to figure out how much
horsepower was going to waste per minute.
This is an exaggeration, but one based on the obvious fact
that we as a people are becoming so obsessed with the means of living that we
are losing sight of the meaning of living.
G. K. Chesterton said that future generations will discover how
miserable we were by our daily reminder to each other that we ought to be
happy. If we were a people basically
happy we would not need constant exhortations to be happy. The fact that every Thanksgiving we sigh and
say we really should be more grateful for all we have reveals how ungrateful we
are. This does not mean that most
people do not appreciate having the good things they have. It is just that it is hard to get excited
about it. Turkey and all the trimmings
might turn you on temporarily, but it doesn't last. That is the problem with materialism and thankfulness on the
level of getting good things and pleasure.
Thanksgiving in the Bible is on the level where it has
lasting meaning. In Psa. 118 the author
expresses thanks for many things, but notice how he begins and ends this song
of gratitude. He begins and ends with
God. Only when God is the alpha and
omega of our thanks do we experience thanksgiving on the biblical level, which
is the top level. We tend to center our
thanksgiving around our blessings rather than around the Blesser, and so we
loose much of the emotion and joy of a heart filled with lasting
gratitude. We need to lift our eyes to
God and His goodness, and not glue them on the gifts. We must, with the Psalmist, gaze on God's being first, and then
on His blessings.
The fire of gratitude can only be kept burning bright by
feeding it with the fuel that comes directly from God's own nature. Those who rely on the fuel they can produce
are from their own nature soon become cold and ungrateful. Give thanks to God for He is good, says the
Psalmist. God is good; that is the
basis for everlasting praise, and not the fact that you have got everything you
need and much beside. Start with
God. "Give thanks and praise to
God above, For everlasting is His love, Praise Him ye saints, your Savior
praise, Forever good in all His ways."
The first thing this great hymn of gratitude makes clear is‑
I. THE BASIS OF
THANKSGIVING.
It is the goodness of God.
Thanksgiving based on anything less is inadequate and sub‑Christian. If you start out by saying I am thankful
because I am healthy, tomorrow you may be sick, and you have lost the basis for
your thankfulness. If you say I am
thankful because I am well off financially, a tragedy could change that, and
your basis for gratitude would be gone.
Everything you build on short of the goodness of God is sinking
sand. It alone is the solid unchanging
constant, and the stable rock, which endures forever when all else passes
away. The man without God, and the man
who has not put his trust in the goodness of God can never know the joy of
absolute thankfulness. The gratitude of
the unbeliever is always relative and shaky because the basis for it can
crumble at any time. Here, however, we
have a basis for thanksgiving that never changes, and that is God's
goodness. Whittier wrote,
Yet in the maddening maze of
things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit
clings,
I know that God is good.
It was faith in the
unchanging goodness of God that caused martyrs to sing this psalm as they faced
death. The Mediaeval Church ordained
that this Psalm be read at the bedside of those who were dying. Death for man does not change the goodness
of God. It is highly probable that this
Psalm was the song sung by Jesus and His disciples just before He went to
Gethsemane. It is the last of the songs
called the Hallel, which the Jews sang at the Passover. Things in this Psalm refer to Jesus that are
very appropriate. Whether He sang it or
not, He faced the cross with the assurance that God is good and His steadfast
love endures forever.
This hymn of thanks has been precious to the saints all
through the ages, but none loved it more than Luther. In his dedication of his translation of this Psalm to the Abbot
Frederick of Nuremberg he wrote, "This is my Psalm, my chosen Psalm. I love them all, I love all holy Scriptures,
which is my consolation and my life.
But this Psalm is nearest my heart, and I have a peculiar right to call
it mine. It has saved me from many a
pressing danger, from which nor emperor, nor kings, nor sages, nor saints,
could have saved me. It is my friend;
dearer to me than all the honors and power of the earth..." Luther lived in the realm of top‑level
thanksgiving, for his trust was not in man, but in the goodness of God.
O praise the Lord, for He is
good;
Let all and heaven above,
And all His saints on earth
proclaim
His everlasting love.
The Psalmist is so aware that the basis and foundation of
all his gratitude is in the goodness and steadfast love of God that he calls
upon all to join him in praise.
Spurgeon says, "Grateful hearts are greedy of men's tongues, and
would monopolize them all for God's glory." First he calls on Israel to join him. Who was ever more vacillating than Israel, and yet time and time
again God forgave and restored her to favor because of His steadfast love.
Let Israel now devoutly say
that all His ways are pure,
And that the mercy of their
God forever does endure.
He calls on the house of Aaron to join him, for as priests
they had to enter the presence of God for the people, and they knew it was only
by God's goodness and mercy that they were not consumed. Then he calls upon those who fear the Lord,
those Gentile proselytes to join the song.
They were in darkness, and yet they received the light because God is
good and His steadfast love endures forever.
All believers have one thing in common, and that is that they are saved
solely by the goodness and mercy of God.
That is why God's nature must become the basis for all our thanksgiving.
We tend to take the goodness of God too lightly. When a man called Jesus good master, Jesus
said, "Why call me good. God only
is good." Jesus was saying that
nothing and no one less than God is worthy of the term good. If you wish to call me good, then recognize
me as God. Good is a word, which
belongs solely to God. Man is only good
to the degree that he partakes of the nature of God. We use the term loosely, and so it does not convey the reverence
with us, which it had on the lips of Jesus or the Psalmist. In order to be thankful on the top level,
and in order to live on the highest level, we must give more thought to the
goodness of God. Let me share with you
one of the greatest paragraphs ever written on the goodness of God. It is from the pen of that great saint William
Law.
"The goodness of God
breaking forth into a desire to
communicate good was the
cause and the beginning of
the creation. Hence it follows that to all eternity God
can have no thought or
intent towards the creature
but to communicate good;
because He made the
creature for this sole end,
to receive good. The first
motive towards the creature
is unchangeable; it takes
its rise from God's desire
to communicate good, and
it is an eternal
impossibility that anything can ever
come from God as His will
and purpose towards the
creature but that same love
and goodness which first
created it; He must always
will that to it which He
willed at the creation of
it. This is the amiable nature
of God. He is the Good, the unchangeable,
overflowing
fountain of good that sends
forth nothing but good to
all eternity. He is the Love itself, the unmixed,
un‑measurable Love,
doing nothing but from love,
giving nothing but gifts of
love to everything that He
has made; requiring nothing
of all His creatures but
the spirit and fruits of
that love which brought them
into being. Oh, how sweet is this contemplation of the
height and depth of the
riches of Devine Love! With
what attraction must it draw
every thoughtful man to
return love for love to this
overflowing fountain of
boundless good!"
This is a theme worthy of all the time that can be given to
it, but we want to lay one block at least on this foundation before we
finish. Let us never forget that we can
only climb to the heights of top‑level thanksgiving by first of all
laying this solid foundation. The basis
for true and lasting gratitude is the goodness of God. Only after the Psalmist makes this clear
does he go on to write‑
II. THE BLESSINGS FOR WHICH
HE GIVES THANKS. v. 5
This verse reveals his gratitude for deliverance from
distress. The language indicates that
he was in a tight spot, but that God heard his prayer and led him into a wide
place. He is caught in a crevice and is
about to be crushed by the rocks of oppression, but God leads him out into a
wide open plain. He is grateful first
for God, and secondly for the highest gift God gives to man, which is the gift
of liberty. Freedom is the blessing he
is so grateful for. Salvation is
another term for freedom. If the Son
shall make you free you shall be free indeed.
What was salvation for Israel but to be delivered from the bondage of
Egypt? All through the Bible salvation
is pictured as release from bondage, and escape from the chains of sin and
evil. Every time we break away from the
pressures of sin we can sing a new song of salvation.
In my distress I called on
God;
In grace He answered me;
Remove my bonds, enlarge my
place,
From trouble set me free.
The greatest liberty comes when we call on the Lord as a
sinner in need of forgiveness. This is
our exodus and our coming out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of
light. This is when we experience God's
goodness at its best. Those who have
never put their faith in Christ and followed Him into the promise land of
salvation are still in the Egypt of bondage, and they cannot sing the song of
thankful deliverance. Top‑level
thanksgiving depends on deep awareness of the goodness of God, and none can
have this awareness until they have the assurance of salvation in Christ. You must experience God's goodness and mercy
in being forgiven and set free from sin to have the thankful heart of the
Psalmist. Alan Paton in Cry, The
Beloved Country writes, "The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended
again." This is the greatest
tragedy of life. It is not that men are
broken and are in bondage to sin, but that they are not mended, made whole and
set free, when God in His goodness has made provision for such healing and
liberty.
Even those of us who have been set free from bondage have
many trials, and often find ourselves being pushed into a narrow pit. The kind of liberty that keeps us
perpetually grateful comes only through constant prayer and victory over the
forces of evil.
In bondage of distress and
grief
To God I cried and sought relief.
In wondrous love He heard my
plea,
And set my soul at liberty.
Every day we need to call on the Lord to set us free and
keep us on the wide plain of liberty.
The facts of life an history reveal that Christians do not always escape
from the trials and dangers of life.
But the facts also reveal that when believers have their roots grounded
in the goodness of God they are always free people. Hugh MacKail, a Scottish preacher who sought to propagate the
faith when it was forbidden, was captured in 1666, and was given 4 days to
live. As he was led to prison the
people wept, but his face was happy, and he cried out, "Good news, good news. I am within 4 days of enjoying the face of
Jesus Christ." Here was a man set
at liberty, for he knew the good news of God's eternal goodness.
Juliana Hernandez brought the New Testament into Spain
where it was forbidden. He was
arrested, tried and burned. The stern
judge said, "I fear you are throwing yourself into the fire, and for
what?" Today school children in
Spain read with a thrill the martyr's answer.
"For the joy he cried of bringing food to the perishing, water to
the thirsty, light to those who sit in darkness, rest to the weary and heavy
laden. Sir, I have counted the cost and
I will pay the price willingly."
Here was a man who could repeat verse 6 of this Psalm and mean it
sincerely. "With the Lord on my
side I do not fear. What can man do to
me?" You can never rob a man of
his liberty who has made the goodness and mercy of God the foundation of his
life. Let us be grateful for all the
gifts of God, but above all for the gift of freedom. All else is minor in comparison to the liberty he has given us in
Christ.
There are many more blocks to be laid on the foundation of
God's goodness, but we need to close with a recognition that this song of
praise begins and ends with God's goodness.
Only those who are most thankful for God Himself are among the most
thankful of people. Let us live on the
highest plain and let the attitude of this Psalm and the poem of Georgia B.
Adams characterize our Thanksgiving.
I am thankful, Lord, for
many things,
But this Thanksgiving Day
I am dedicating to the
praise
Of only Thee, I pray!
Aside from blessing
temporal,
Apart from gifts so kind,
I'm thankful for the Giver
more
Than all the gifts combined!
I'm thankful, Lord, for who
Thou art,
For Thy great love divine
That stooped one day at Calvary's
cross
And saved a soul like mine!
I'm grateful for the years
gone by
In which with guiding Hand
Thou hast with utmost wisdom
led
All by a perfect plan!
I'm thankful, Lord, for many
things,
Apart from gifts so kind,
I'm thankful for the Giver
more
Than all the gifts combined.
7. A
GRATEFUL HEART Based on Luke 17:11‑19
Thanksgiving is unconditional for the believer. We are not to be thankful only because of
blessings, but even in spite of burdens, for life at its worst does not change
the most precious truth for which we are to be thankful, and that is salvation
through Jesus. There have been
Christian people who have nothing of great value materially, and they have
known nothing of a Thanksgiving Day, since this is uniquely American, but who
never the less have had a grateful heart.
We need to remember that Thanksgiving grew out of a tragic
situation because of people of God who put their trust in Him in spite of
tragedy. Half of the Pilgrims died the
first winter in America. Their crop was
so poor they had to ration out 5 grains of corn at a time. At one point there were only 7 of them who
were not sick to help the rest of them.
And yet these are the people who gave us Thanksgiving. Their faith did not waver with the winds of
fortune. They labored 7 years to pay
back loans to London bankers where they got the money to come to America.
Elder Brewster in the early days of Plymouth could set down
to a meal of clams and a cup of cold water, and look up to heaven and return
thanks, "For the abundance of the sea and for the treasures hid in the
sand." God prospered the Pilgrims
because they had grateful hearts even in the midst of great difficulties. Gratitude can even grow in the garden of
grief when watered with the showers of trust in God. Robert Louis Stevenson spent most of life in bed with much pain,
and he died at 44, but he saw more to be thankful for than most healthy
people. He wrote, "The world is so
full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as
kings." Sometimes those who are
most blest are most blind. They spend
their days in complaining and lose the greatest blessings because they lack a
grateful heart. We want to look at a
biblical example of this as found in the account of the healing of the 10
lepers. We see here 3 aspects of
gratitude.
I. THE RARENESS OF
GRATITUDE. v. 17‑18
Here were 10 men in awful misery who experienced the
blessing of almighty mercy, and yet 9 of them never came back to say
thanks. If Jesus had only 10 per cent
express their gratitude for a miracle, how much less must he have received for
common mercies? How little does he
receive from us for every day blessings?
Does he receive more than puddles of praise for the ocean waves of mercy
he causes to splash against the shore of our lives? Spurgeon said, "If you search the world around among all
choice spices you shall scarcely meet with the frankincense of
gratitude." Why is this? Here are a number of reasons:
A. SELFISHNESS. From the minute a person is born he is self‑centered. All of life revolves around a child, and
what makes him happy is good, and what does not is bad. You can have fun with a child doing
everything he wants for hours, but then refuse him one thing his heart desires
and he becomes angry and charges you with meanness. It is tragic when adults exhibit this same ungrateful
attitude. Albert Schweitzer tells of
how difficult it was to teach the natives that they had to help keep up the
hospital by giving a chicken, a few eggs, or some bananas. Some of the more savage people came to him
after they were cured and demanded a gift of him. Paul in Rom. 1:21 tells us that one of the causes for the
darkness of the pagan mind and heart was that they were not thankful.
This natural selfishness is a part of the civilized world as
well. People with great abundance are
constantly more concerned about what they don't have than thankful for what
they do have. When Andrew Carnegie left
a million dollars to a relative that relative cursed him saying, "Old Andy
left 365 million to public charities and cut me off with one measly
million." Such ingratitude seems
incredible, but it reveals that the ungrateful heart loses even the blessings
that it does have. I can just imagine
that those 9 who did not return were discouraged within a couple of days. They would be complaining that their leprosy
put them so far behind in their work.
They would complain that its hard now to get their crop in on time, or
fill that pottery order they had before they got sick. Even a dog will wag its tail at a kindness
shown, but these selfish 9 did not even take the time to say thank you. Shakespeare was right when he said,
"Blow, blow thou winter wind! Thou
art not so unkind as man's ingratitude."
B. THOUGHTLESSNESS. It may not be that they purposely did not
return. Maybe they stopped to think of
the giver, but then got their minds focused on other things. This is another form of selfishness because
it leads us to forget the source of our blessings. These 9 had some real faith, for they took Jesus at His Word and
went to the priests. They wanted help
and they believed Jesus could help.
They called on Him for mercy and He heard them, and when the crisis was
over they no longer thought about their need for Him.
Think and thank come from the same root word, and
thoughtlessness leads to thanklessness.
So many cry out to God in emergency situations, and then they forget Him
when the emergency is over. But even
the righteous are in danger of being thoughtless. The Psalmist says to himself, "O bless the Lord O my soul
and forget not all his benefits."
Jesus gave us the Lord's Supper to keep us reminded that His sacrifice for
us is the center of our Christian faith.
Physical amnesia is seldom heard of, but spiritual amnesia is as common
as the cold, and we need to pray that we can escape being infected with this
germ. The poet put it,
Forget him not whose
meekness
Forgiveth all thy sin:
Who healeth all thy weakness
Renews thy life within.
II. THE RESPONSE OF
GRATITUDE. v. 15‑16
Let us be thankful that one did respond to the grace of
Christ and return to thank Him and praise God.
Jesus was doubtless disappointed in the other 9, but how it must have
delighted His heart to see this one return.
Jesus does not bless because He wants to be thanked. He blesses because He cares. Even if none had responded Jesus would have
healed them. He healed them out of
compassion for their need. God's grace
is poured out on millions who never thank Him.
He makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the unjust as well as
the just. Jesus died for the ungodly,
even though masses of them will never accept His sacrifice. God must love an express that love whether
man responds or not, but it is this one responding that delights the heart of
God and makes it all worth while.
At age 72 industrialist Charles Schwab was taken to court on
a petty lawsuit by a young man he had tried to help. The young man was only out to get some easy money and
notoriety. After Mr. Schwab finished
his testimony he asked if he could speak a few words. Permission was granted, and he said, "I am an old man and I
to say that 90 percent of my troubles have been due to being good to other
people. If you younger folk want to
avoid trouble be hard‑boiled and say no to everybody. You will then walk through life unmolested‑but"
and a smile came across his face, "You will have to do without friends and
you won't have much fun."
The Christian is to show love and mercy because it is being
like Christ and not because he looks for gratitude. Luther said, "He who would be a Christian must learn to
remember that with all his benevolence, faithfulness, and service he will not
always reap gratitude, but must also suffer ingratitude. But this should not move us to withhold help
and service to others." We can be
thankful if we even get a 10 percent response, for that is all Jesus got.
If we examine the response of this one who returned we see
that it was basically praise. Praise is
voluntary, and it comes from the heart because the heart cannot hold it
back. It reveals the true nature of the
person. Jesus never asked them to come
back and praise Him, but here was a man who did not live by the letter but by
the spirit. The other 9 obeyed the
letter of the law, but they did not have a heart of gratitude. Spurgeon felt that Christians ought to have
praise meetings as well as prayer meetings.
All 10 of them prayed but only one was most blest because he also
praised. Spurgeon said, "I chide
myself sometimes that I have wrestled with God in prayer, like Elijah upon
Carmel, but I have not magnified the name of the Lord, like Mary of
Nazareth." Only one came back, and
every believer should be among that minority that always comes back with a
grateful response. It is easy to
request, but hard to return in thanks.
Charles E. Jefferson said, "If Christians would praise
God more the world would doubt Him less."
Let us admit it that we seldom make it known how grateful we are to be
Christians by our praise of God and thanksgiving before the world. His praise should be continuous. We tend to think we need only to praise when
something spectacular happens, but this reveals our thoughtlessness again, for
we have an abundance of things to be grateful for every day. Heaven help the man who only has thanksgiving
once a year. Dr. Malbie Babcock said
that the ideal would be to set one day a year aside to do all our complaining
and gripping, and leave the rest for thanksgiving. That is the way it ought to be.
Meet and right it is to
sing,
In every time and place;
Glory to our heavenly King,
The God of truth and grace.
Join we then with sweet
accord,
All in one thanksgiving
join!
Holy, holy, holy Lord,
Eternal praise be thine.
May this be our response of
gratitude for the grace of God that is ours in Christ.
III. THE REWARD OF
GRATITUDE. v. 19
There is great reward just in the possessing of a grateful
heart. It makes one glad if he
appreciates life and its blessings. Those
9 may have come to their senses at some time in their life and have regretted that
they did not go back. When they heard
Jesus was crucified they certainly would remember the mercy He showed to them,
but then it was too late to thank Him.
The world is filled with those who, like Albert Schweitzer, stood over
graves of loved ones and deeply regretted their failure to let them know how
much they were appreciated.
Schweitzer wrote in his
Memoirs Of Childhood And Youth, "When I look back upon my early days I am
stirred by the thought of the number of people whom I have to thank for what
they gave me or what they were to me.
At the same time I am haunted by an oppressive consciousness of the
little gratitude I really showed them while I was young. How many of them have said farewell to life
without my having made clear to them what it meant to me to receive from them
so much kindness or so much care!"
On the other hand, a few reaped the rewards of gratitude
shown. William L. Stidger was thinking
of people who had helped him in life, and he remembered a teacher he had who
went out of her way for him. He wrote
her a letter of thanks, and here is the reply he received.
"My dear Willie,
I cannot tell you how much your note meant to me. I am in my eighties, living alone in a small
room, cooking my own meals, lonely and, like the last leaf of autumn, lingering
behind. You will be interested to know
that I taught in school for 50 years and yours is the first note of
appreciation I ever received. It came
on a blue cold morning and it cheered me as nothing has in many years."
A friend of his reported that Stidger was not a sentimental
man, but he wept when he read that. We
could all receive so much more if we would express more gratitude. But as Spurgeon said, "We receive a
continent of mercies, and return and island of praise." Great are the rewards of gratitude even on
the level of person to person, but greater yet are they between God and
man. Jesus said to the man who returned
in verse 19, "Your faith has made you whole." There was more here for this man than
healing, for all the others were healed too, but this man received not only
bodily benefits, but his soul's salvation.
His grateful heart brought him into the kingdom of God. But Jesus also felt the pain of those who
did not receive all that He wanted to give them. The poet has written,
Were not the ten made
clean? Yet only one
Returned to lay his homage
at Christ's feet
In thankfulness for what the
Lord has done;
The other nine were hurrying
to meet
The friends of other days
that they might find
A hearty welcome and a bed
and food;
Their utter selfishness had
made them blind
To the supernal law of
gratitude.
Do not these lepers typify
the race
Who crave God's many
blessings day by day?
And when He lavishes His
healing grace
Upon them, one by one they
go away;
And once again we hear the
Lord repine:
Were not the ten made whole?
Where are the nine?
Gratitude is not a secondary subject, but it is of primary
importance. Not only is faith without
works dead, but faith plus works without gratitude is also inadequate. A saving faith includes gratitude. We cannot really believe Christ has died for
our sin and forgiven us if we are indifferent and ungrateful for it. True faith will fall at the feet of Jesus and
praise Him with joy and thanksgiving.
Let our prayer be that of
the 17th century poet George Herbert who wrote, "O Lord, thou has given us
much, give us one thing more, a grateful heart."
8. A
THANKFUL SPIRIT Based on Acts 27:27‑37
The more I study the history of man and the sea, the more grateful
I become that I am a landlubber. Tens
of thousands of lives have been lost in ship wrecks in my lifetime. But some sailors have much to be thankful
for in spite of ship wrecks. John
O'Brian, for example, was off the coast of India when his ship was wrecked, and
all hands were lost, but he and four other sailors. The next ship he was on floundered off the Cape of Good Hope, and
he alone of all the crew got to shore safely.
Then in July of 1747 he was on the Dartmouth, a ship of 50 guns, which
was engaged in battle with a Spanish Man Of War with 70 guns. His ships magazine blew up, and he was blown
off the ship. Only 14 of the 300 man
crew were rescued. He was one of
them. He was found flowing on top of a
gun carriage that had been blown off the ship with him.
There are few men in history who have as much to be thankful
for, for protection on the sea. There
is one in the Bible however who beats this amazing record. The Apostle Paul says in II Cor. 11:25,
"Three times I was ship wrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open
sea." Paul not only ties John
O'Brian in ship wrecks he survived, but he spent more time in the water, and
above all, Paul is the only man we know of who was the key to the survival of
every man on board a ship that was totally lost. 276 men survived this terrible ship wreck. Charles Hocking in his Dictionary Of
Disasters At Sea, reveals that many ships have gone down in storms, and some
had survivors, but more were lost than saved. Just a few examples gives you the
picture.
In 1857 in the gulf of
Finland‑826 lost, none saved.
In 1863 off Japan‑584
lost, only 69 saved.
In 1854 Australian ship‑459
lost, only 39 saved.
In 1914 off Brazil‑445
lost, only 143 saved.
In our text we are looking at one of the greatest ship wreck
stories of history, for not only was it a spectacular ordeal for all involved,
it stands alone as a story where the ship and all its contents were lost, but
where every life on board was saved. We
would expect to see a Thanksgiving service after such a dramatic story. We would not expect to see it during the
ordeal itself, and before anyone has yet made it to safety on land, but that is
what we see in our text. Paul has a mini‑Thanksgiving service while all
of their lives were still hanging by a thread.
It would seem that the only value of this scene for us is to make us
grateful that we were not a part of it.
It was a horrible experience, but nevertheless, it is loaded with food for thought as we
approach another Thanksgiving. Paul's
thankful spirit here is of value for all of us for three reasons. First because of‑
II. THE CONTEXT OF HIS THANKFULNESS.
We have already referred to the fact that these 276 men were riding
out a hurricane. Some of us know how frightening it can be out on a lake for
even a few minutes when the wind and waves are high and threatening. These men had been helpless for 14 days as
they were driven across the Adriatic Sea.
14 days of hanging on for life.
It was not exactly party time.
Bill Robinson in A Sailor's Tales tells of a 24 hour storm he had to ride out in the Gulf Stream in 1976. He said all of your energy is concentrated
on just staying on board the ship. He
said that nobody eats, for the same reason you don't see people eating while running from a charging
bull, or while escaping from a burning house.
Your life depends on not being distracted by anything but the need to
hold on for dear life.
This contemporary testing confirms the account of this ancient
story of riding out a hurricane. Paul
said that for 14 days they lived in constant suspense, and did not eat any
food. Here were over 270 men in
extremely weakened condition, with minds as worn out as their bodies, with fear
and despair, and their ship ready to be dashed against the rocks at any moment,
and yet, in this context, Paul does not curse the darkness, but lights a
candle. He gives a little pep talk;
says a prayer of thanks to God, and they all eat some bread. It was the first positive thing they had
done in 2 weeks, and it gave them the shot in the arm they needed to press on.
The context of Paul's thankfulness is a key lesson for all of
us. Anybody can be thankful lying on a
beach in the sun while sipping cool drinks.
But Paul was thankful in the worst storm we have on record, next to the
one Noah had to ride out. Thankfulness
is only a real virtue when it functions in the context of stress, strain, and
storm. It is still pleasant in the
sunshine, but there it is a mere natural virtue of which all men are
capable. The reason we honor the
Pilgrims for their role in giving us Thanksgiving is because they were thankful
in a context of great suffering. 47 of
them died their first winter in this land.
They braved the stormy sea, and risked their all to be free. Mrs. Felicia Hermons wrote of them‑
The breaking waves dashed
high
On a stern and rock‑bound
coast,
And the woods, against a
stormy sky
Their giant branches toss'd;
And the heavy night hung
dark
The hills and waters o'er,
When a band of exiles moor'd
their bark
On the wild New England
shore.
Not as the conqueror comes,
They, the true‑hearted,
came,
Not with the role of the
stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings
of fame;
Not at the flying come,
In silence and in fear,‑‑
They shook the depths of the
desert's gloom
With their hymns of lofty
cheer.
Amidst the storm they sang,
And the stars heard and the
sea!
And the sounding aisles of
the dim woods rang
To the anthem of the free!
America was not a paradise then. It has become what it is for us, because of thankful people who
did not give up because of misery and hardship. Like Paul, they paused in the struggle for survival, and said,
thank you Lord, and then pressed on.
All though history the truly great stories of thankfulness are those
that come out of a context that none would choose, but which have to be endured
with either bitterness or thankfulness.
Many Christians get themselves into messes, like Paul was in,
by no mistakes of their own, but due to circumstances they cannot control. If Paul would have had control, they would
be safely harbored through this whole storm.
He warned them not to go, but the decision was not his. He was at the mercy of other people's
choices. All Paul could do was to be
faithful and thankful for each day he was alive, and to make some difference in
the world for Christ.
Henry Muhlenberg was a young German pastor who set sail for
England to minister in America in 1742.
Pirates threatened the seas, and so there was a 3 week delay. When the ship did get going, the water on
board was foul, and the sailors were a quarrelsome and
drunken crew. The rats were so numerous he counted several
thousand, and on top of all this, he was dreadfully seasick. It was a 75 day journey of misery. When he landed the trip to Philadelphia was
just as miserable, with rainy weather, mud, and washed out roads. He finally
made it, and for years was a faithful pastor, even though, when the
Revolutionary War broke out, he was constantly being sought by British officers
to be arrested. People urged him to
flee with his wife, but year after year he avoided them, and kept preaching
until the peace treaty was signed. His
was a life of suffering and service under fire, yet, he was a man of
faithfulness because he was a man of thankfulness. A thankful spirit will keep you going when no other fuel
can. It is one of life's greatest life‑savers,
and career savers. People who are
thankful do not give up, but, like Paul, keep pressing on, for they are able in
all settings to see something for which to be grateful.
Dietrich Bonhoffer, in prison for resistance to Hitler, wrote
this letter to his parents just before his execution. "Dear mother, I want you to know that I am constantly
thinking of your and father everyday, and I thank God for all that you are to
me.....Thank you for all the love that come to me in my cell from you during
the past year, and has made everyday easier for me. I think these hard years has brought us closer
together." Great thanksgivers are
not Pollyanas who pretend nothing bad every happens. They are people who suffer the bad to the depth, and yet they
never lose their optimistic thankful spirit,
because they believe that above every storm the sun shines, and that
light will overcome all darkness in Christ's good time.
Note how Paul not only
gave thanks to God in the context of the roughest ride of his life, but in
verse 35 it says he gave thanks to God in front of them all. In other words, in a context where he was a
minority, with a couple of Christian friends, and all the rest were pagans. Paul was bold and unashamed of his faith in
God. He thanked God openly before all
these men who had probably been cursing their gods for what they were
enduring. Paul was a fanatic for
seeking every opportunity to witness.
In a cartoon sequence from Peanuts, Linus says to Charlie
Brown, "When I get big, I'm going to be a real fanatic." Charlie asked, "What are you going to
be fanatical about Linus?" With a
quizzical look on his face Linus reflects, "Oh, I don't know, it doesn't
really matter, I'll be sort of a wishy‑washy fanatic." Paul may have felt wishy‑washy as he
had just spent 14 days being splashed and soaked like a load of clothes in a
washer, but he was a fanatic who knew what he was a fanatic about. He was a fanatic for being thankful in all
situations. Paul did not just write the
words, "In everything give thanks," for he lived it, because he
really believed there is no context of life you can be in that does not have
something for which to give thanks.
Mark Twain was just the opposite of Paul. He wrote to a friend once, "I 've been
reading the morning paper. I do it
every morning, well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and
baseness and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me
to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human
race." Paul knew everything Mark Twain did, and then some. Paul knew the depth of human depravity. He was a part of it himself, as he
imprisoned and killed innocent and righteous people. Nevertheless, with all his knowledge of the darkness, Paul loves
life, and he loves people, even those scummy pagan sailors, and Paul is
thankful.
The real test of a thankful heart is how it responds to a
context of crisis. Dr. Arthur Caliandro
tells of the 25 year old woman who was flying in a small plane with her boss
when they had to make an emergency landing in Texas. The pilot was killed instantly, and she was knocked
unconscious. When she regained
consciousness, she saw her boss was dead. She was in great pain, and she cried
out, but of course, there was no response.
It looked hopeless, but five hours later she was discovered and
rescued. It was a wonder she was still
alive, for she had severe internal injuries, but she was taken to a hospital
and her life was spared. When Dr.
Caliandro heard her story he expected to visit a woman who would be grateful to
be alive, but he found just the opposite.
She did nothing but complain and gripe about her cruel fate. She remained in the hospital for two months,
and none of the staff ever heard a positive word out of her. She was totally restored to health, but she
was the unhappiest woman he had ever met, for her philosophy was, this is the
devil has made, let us complain and be miserable in it.
In contrast was the philosophy of Helen Baker, a woman who had
a nerve disorder that affected her body, neck, and speech. She was never healed though she prayed for
it often. Yet, with her handicap she was faithful in worship and in her service
to others. She was such an
encouragement to others in their suffering that she came to a point where she
could say, "I can honestly thank God that I am infirm." When you can come to the point where you can
be thankful in a negative context, then you have arrived at the level of Christ‑like,
and Paul‑like thankfulness. It is
like the man who lost his leg in a train accident who said, "I am just
thankful it was the leg with the rheumatism."
If you are only thankful when all is right and wonderful, you
are on the level of mere humanistic gratitude.
This is universal, and there is nothing uniquely Christian about it.
Atheist feel it as well as saints. But
when the context is negative, and the emotions are down and pessimistic, that
is when the light of Christian thankfulness has a chance to shine. 14 days of sea water soaking could not put
out Paul's flame of thankfulness. The
thankful spirit may not change the context,
but it can radically change the person whatever the context. The most dramatic example of this is seeing
in Thomas Gaddis' book, The Birdman Of Alcatraz. Robert Stroud, a two time murderer, had spent most of his 70
years in prison. For the first 20 years
he was hard and bitter and withdrawn.
But then Stroud found a sparrow that had fallen from its nest in a
storm. He took it from the prison courtyard
to his cell and nursed it back to life.
His interest in birds was aroused, and he read everything he could on
birds.
Other prisoners began to bring their sick canary's to him, and
he would often cure them. He had not spoken to a guard for 20 years, but he
wanted an orange crate to make a bird cage.
When he gave it to Stroud, for the first time in 20 years he mumbled,
"Thank you." That thank you
was his beginning to be restored to the human race to become a normal man
again, who would relate to others. A
simple thank you did not change his context, but it changed completely how he
functioned in a negative context. A
thankful spirit will do it every time.
What it did for Paul it will do for all. Secondly, look at‑
II. THE CONTENT OF HIS THANKFULNESS.
The fact is, we do not have Paul's prayer here. Dr. Luke, who recorded this, had been hanging on for 14 days too, and probably was
in no position to take notes on this prayer. Luke just tells us that after he
had shared with the men that one man would lose a single hair from his head, he
then took bread and gave thanks to God.
This means he obviously gave thanks for the bread, but possibly, and
even probably, he thanked God for the promises to spare the lives of all these
pagan sailors.
My point here is, Paul did not likely have a long prayer, but
one that was short and to the point. It
was a thanksgiving for life, and bread for one last meal to give them the
strength they needed for survival. Paul
makes a point of this in verse 34. You
need food he said to them. This bread
was no luxury, it was a necessity for their lives. Without this meal many of them could have died. God promised to save them all, but God's
promises still involve man doing his part.
There is no record of anyone ever surviving continuous non‑eating. Food is essential for life, even if you are
in the hands of God. That is why food
is the most universal cause for thanksgiving.
By our standards, or even theirs, it was a lousy meal, for it
was apparently merely bread. It was the
kind of insignificant snack that we would consider unworthy of grace before
eating it, but for them it was a gift of life.
A little can mean a lot in the context like this, and Paul was thankful
for that little. He was not gripping
and complaining, even though he had good reason. The whole ghastly nightmare could have been avoided had they
listened to Paul, and stayed safely in port.
Paul had plenty to be frustrated and angry about, but these emotions
were not allowed to run his life. He
demonstrates for all the world to see, it doesn't take much to make a truly
thankful man thankful.
Paul was grateful for bread with a sincerity and intenseness
that only a smorgesboard could stimulate in most people. Paul did not need a long list of blessings
to get his spirit of thanksgiving reved up.
He really meant what he wrote to Timothy in II Tim. 6:3‑8,
"For we brought nothing into this world, and we can take nothing out of
it. But if we have food and clothing,
we will be content with that."
People who live close to the
edge of life, like Paul, tend to be able to be content with far less. Eddie Rickenbacker, famous for his survival
after 21 days of drifting on the Pacific, was asked what lesson he
learned. He said, "The biggest
lesson I learned from that experience was that if you have all the fresh water
you can drink and all the food you care to eat, you ought never to complain
about anything."
The problem is, most people don't spend 21 days on the Pacific
starving and drying of thirst. Most
also do not spend 14 days being blown across the Mediterranean by a hurricane
starving. One suspects that even God
would find it a challenge to arrange for all people to have these types of
experience. The rest of us need to
learn from their experience how to have a thankful spirit in spite of a small
content of things to be thankful for. A
good question we need to consider is, how much does it take to make us
thankful? If there needs to be a large
content to our bag of blessings before we can be grateful to God, then we are
not truly thankful people. Thankful
people can be thankful even if the table of contents in their book of blessings
has only two chapters, says Paul, and they are food and clothing.
We sing, Count Your Many Blessings, and we can do it, for our
list is longer than our arm of the things for which we have to be grateful, but
Paul says, even if your list consists of just two, and who can't count at least
two, that is sufficient content for the truly thankful heart.
So count your blessings one
by one.
If two is all you find under
the sun,
Then like an incense to the
skies,
Let your prayer of
thankfulness arise.
As we look at this Thanksgiving in a hurricane, on the high
seas, we can first of all be grateful that we do not have such a little to be
grateful for, as they did. But we can
also be grateful that by God's grace a Christian can be grateful when there is
so little to be grateful for. The
question is not, just how much do you have to be grateful for, but how little
can you have left, and still be grateful?
Can you suffer the loss of all things, and yet thank God for life, and
the food you need to sustain life? How much
content do you need
on your Thanksgiving list to
be content?
An old time evangelist past the hat for an offering, and when
it came back it was embarrassingly empty.
He shook the hat to make clear it was empty, and then lifted his eyes to
heaven and said, "I thank thee Lord that I got my hat back from this
congregation." One has reason to
doubt the sincerity of this expression of thanks for so little, but there is no
doubt about the sincerity of Paul's spirit of thanks. When you truly have a thankful spirit, it does not take a lot to
make you thankful. It is good for us to measure the content of
our thankfulness, and find out if we need plenty to be grateful, or if we can,
like Paul, have a thankful spirit even with very little. Thirdly look at‑
III. THE CONTAGION OF HIS THANKFULNESS.
Verse 36 says they were all encouraged and ate some food. One positive optimistic thankful person can
change the whole atmosphere in a terrible situation. Thankfulness is a contagious spirit. If everybody is complaining and gripping, and one person shares
their spirit of thankfulness, the others feel embarrassed to go no complaining,
and they too begin to look at something for which they are grateful. But as long as all join in complaining, the
negative will prevail. It takes one to
go against the mood flow and interject a word of thanks to reverse that flow.
Paul did it here, and 275 other men were encouraged in moments
after 14 days of fear and discouragement.
Like a virile but virtuous virus, Paul's spirit of thankfulness infected
the entire ship, and you get a picture of 276 men enjoying the taste of food
together, and then laboring in unity to empty the ship of its final cargo, with
a sense of hope that their miserable story might have a happy ending after
all. Paul was a thankful person, and
thankful people are contagious people.
They generate hope in desperate situations. Arthur Rubinstein wrote of his own life, "I'm passionately
involved in life: I love its changes,
its colors, its movement. To be alive,
to be able to see, to walk, to have
houses, music, paintings....its all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life from miracle to
miracle....What people get out of me is this outlook on life which comes out in
my music." Such enthusiasm and
gratitude for life is contagious, and by means of his music he spreads that
spirit.
A thankful spirit encourages others to see the positive in
their own lives, and so being thankful is a ministry in a world where the bad
news is thrown at us so often we tend to forget the good news. We need people with a thankful spirit to
remind us that light is as real as the dark.
One 12 year old girl even sought to encourage God. She prayed, "Thank you Lord for all
you've done, and keep the good work."
God does good work through His faithful servants, like Paul, who, by
giving God thanks gave all the frightened and despairing men hope. His spirit was contagious, and they began to
feel encouraged about the future. The
beauty of thankfulness is that it is not only a fire that warms you, it warms
others as well. There is just no
question about it, one of the best ways we can make a positive difference in
this storm‑tossed world is to exhibit and express everyday in some
positive way a thankful spirit.
9. THANK
GOD FOR MAN Based on Acts 28:11‑16
Edward R. Morrow once told of the commencement speaker who was a
Yale graduate. He used the 4 letters of
YALE for his speech outline. Y was for youth; A was for ambition; L was
for loyalty, and E was for energy.
After his tedious trip through these four points one of the board
graduates turned to another and said, "I am so thankful he went to
Yale." "What do you care
where he went?" replied the equally unenthused victim. "Because," he responded,
"Imagine what we would have had to endure had he gone to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology."
You have to give him credit for seeing the brighter side and
finding the silver lining in the dark clouds.
It is always there somewhere, or how else can be expected to obey Paul's
command in I Thess. 5:18, "In everything give thanks." In every situation there is something in
which to be thankful. But let's be
honest as Paul was. There are days and
circumstances when it is mighty hard to find.
We find Paul in just such a tough time in his life in Acts 28. Most all commentators agree that Paul was in
a state of depression. There was good
reason for it. He was a prisoner on his
way to Rome. He had more freedom than most prisoners, but he was still a
captive heading for a very uncertain future, and it brought him down.
He was not thankful that he was down, but you and I can be
thankful that he was, for that is more than likely where we would be if we were
in his shoes. Paul's idealistic advice
would be a burden rather than a blessing if we did not see that he too had to
struggle to make it real. It is good
for us to see the best of people at the bottom, and see that even heaven's
heroes are not always on the mountain top.
Thank God for biblical reality where we see the best of God's servants
in their weakness, for this gives us hope, even as their strengths give us
motivation to press on. Peter's many
blunders make us realize we need not despair for our follies and mistakes, for
like him we can be forgiven and welcomed back into the Savior's love. Thank God for Peter's multiple blunders, for
they reveal that God's grace is sufficient for any of us.
Thank God also for Paul's depression for it reveals his
sensitive human spirit that makes him easier to identify with than does his
perfectionist sounding theology. Here
is the man who says to give thanks in everything and to rejoice always, but now
he is dragging. He is no robot, but a
real man just like us. But notice what
happens in verse 15. Christians in Rome
heard that Paul was coming and so they sent out a delegation to meet him. It was 40 miles from Rome, but they traveled this distance to encourage
this brother they had never met. The
text says, "When Paul saw these men he thanked God and was
encouraged."
Notice that Paul was thankful to God, but it was for these
men that he was thankful. This does not
seem like a very startling revelation until you begin to examine Paul's
thinking all through the New Testament.
You discover that man is the primary means by which Paul is made
thankful. He is constantly thanking
God, not for angels, or theology, or for high and exalted ideals, or for things. Paul's thanksgiving focus is on people. Look
at the evidence:
Rom. 1:8, "First, I
thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being
reported all over the world."
I Cor. 1:4, "I always
thank God for you..." Then he goes
on to describe how they have been enriched by the grace of God.
Eph. 1:15‑16,
"For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus
and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for
you.."
Phil. 1:3‑5, "I
thank my God every time I remember you.
In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your
partnership in the Gospel.."
Col. 1:3‑4, "We
always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you,
because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have
for all the saint."
I Thess. 1:2, "We always thank God for all of you.."
II. Thess. 1:3, "We
ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith
is growing more and more, and the love everyone of you has for each other is
increasing."
Paul is constantly giving thanks to God for man. He is thankful to God, for God is the source
of the grace that makes man capable of exercising all of his virtues. He is thankful for man, for man can choose
to be open or closed to God's grace.
They can choose to grow in grace and in knowledge and be channels of
God's love. Paul is so thankful for
people who are saying yes to God and being instruments of His love. Paul could be content in any state because
he did not need a home, chariot, fine clothes, or more money. All he needed was to know that other people
cared. Paul was tough, but he still
needed others.
We all need to recognize that God gives us most of what we
need through others. His entire
revelation came to us through people.
We can thank God for the many authors of Scripture whom He inspired. We can thank God for the Apostles, early
church fathers, reformers, pilgrims, pioneers, missionaries, founders and
leaders of the many schools, books, and other resources that help us grow in
Christ. We have such a rich heritage
that has come to us through people.
Martin Luther stressed a doctrine that changed the history of
the church. It was the doctrine of the
priesthood of all believers. Every
Christian can minister to every other Christian. In our text layman were ministering to one of the greatest of the
Apostles, and Paul was saying thank God for these people. Blessings flow from the bottom up as well as
from the top down.
Paul had found the key to perpetual thanksgiving. Just focus on what God has given you through
people and you will never lack for things to be grateful for. This does not mean Paul never got
discouraged and frustrated. He had his bad days, but at some point in that day
the sun would shine and Paul would be lifted by his spirit of thanksgiving
because he had so many people for which to be thankful. Paul could say with the little girl who was
asked what she was thankful for and she replied, "I am thankful that I am
thankful." It is one of life's
greatest blessings to be a thankful person for other persons.
In Yuma, Arizona there was a motel that advertised, "Free board everyday the sun doesn't shine." Travelers coming into town on a rainy day would see this as a good gamble and check in. The owner never seemed worried, however, for he had been making this offer for many years and never lost money. At some point in the day the clouds would disappear and the sun would shine. That is the way it was with Paul. There would be depressing times as he reviewed the problems of the church