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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.