Thanksgiving Every Day (2)
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 11/27/2011
Last Sunday, I talked about the importance of Thanksgiving—how Thanksgiving is more than just annual celebration; rather, it’s an attitude of the heart. God wants us to live as if it were Thanksgiving every day. In fact, the Bible says, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:18 NLT).
Viktor Fankl knew how to give thanks in all circumstances.
Among the lesson’s Viktor learned in the Nazi death-camp, Auschwitz, was the importance of gratitude and counting your blessings. He wrote that prisoners in the camp dreamed at night about a certain set of things more than anything else: bread, cakes, and warm baths—the very things we take for granted every day. Frankl said that the prisoners around him began to appreciate beauty as never before. In one especially poignant paragraph, he wrote:
“If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of our prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.” (Nelson 734)
How amazing is it that a people who experienced such pain and loss could be so thankful and appreciative of such small blessings!? It’s even more amazing to me that we seem to exhibit a degree of thankfulness in life in reverse proportion to the amount of blessings we’ve received. I mentioned before that Martian Luther wrote, “The greater God’s gifts and works, the less they are regarded.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson put it another way; he once observed that if the constellations appeared only once in a thousand years, imagine what an exciting event it would be. But because they are there every night, we barely give them a look.
I believe that one of the evidences of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives is a gradual reversal of that twisted pattern. God wants to make us people who exhibit thankfulness in proper proportion to the gifts and blessings we’ve received. But thankfulness is more than just a sermon, a prayer, or even a feeling—it’s a way of life!
So, as I promised last Sunday, I’d like to share some practical ways that you and I can exhibit an attitude of gratitude. How do we demonstrate our thankfulness to God for his goodness and the love he has for us? Well, I think that King David has some insights to share with us on that subject.
Psalm 9 is David’s psalm of thanksgiving. If you have a Bible, go ahead and open it to that passage, as I’ll keep referring back to it. In David’s psalm of thanksgiving, he not only says, “thank you, Lord,” but he hints at three ways in which we can live a life of thanksgiving every day. First, David teaches us that thankfulness is expressed through witnessing every day!
• WITNESSING
David begins Psalm 9 with these words: “I will give thanks to the Lord with all my heart; I will tell of all Your wonders” (Psalm 9:1 NASB). David had a lot to be thankful for. He had been on the run, surrounded by his enemies, but through it all God kept him safe. So David wasn’t going to keep his thankfulness between himself and God. He wanted to shout it from the mountain tops. He was going to tell everyone he knew about the great things God had done for him.
Last week I read about this medical missionary who served in India for several years. Among the common conditions that he treated there was progressive blindness. For some reason, the people of that region would be born with healthy vision, but for many of them their sight deteriorated over time until they were blind. The missionary provided a simple treatment that would prevent the progressive blindness from getting any worse. The people he treated were tremendously grateful, but they never said thank you. They actually didn’t have a word in their language for thanks. Rather, whenever they wanted to express their gratitude, they would speak a word that when translated means “I will tell you name.” And they would. Wherever they went they would tell the name of the missionary who had healed their eyes. They were so thankful, they eagerly proclaimed it.
When was the last time you stopped someone to tell them what God has done for you? If we are truly grateful and thankful in our lives, then we will want to “tell of all His wonders.” That’s where evangelism finds its beginning. Someone once said, “I’m just a nobody telling everybody about Somebody who can save anybody” (Nelson 777).
That’s an attitude of gratitude.
And today, thanks to the internet and social networking sites, it’s become so much easier to express a heart of thankfulness to a massive audience. Each year I have a few friends on Facebook who participate in a trend they call 30 Days of Thankfulness. Each day, throughout all of November, they post one thing for which they are thankful. All the friends I have who do this are Christians. For thirty days, they witness to the world of Facebook about all the blessings God has put in their lives and often about their relationship with God himself. What a wonderful way witness to our friends, relatives, associates and neighbors—telling of all God’s wonders!
Of course, there will be other opportunities to witness that may require a bit more personal interaction than Facebook can provide. I just want to encourage you to count your blessings, to keep a list of answered prayer, and the next time someone asks you how it’s going, tell them the name of God, tell of all his wonders!
Charles Spurgeon urged his listeners, “Try to turn the conversation to profitable use... Be ready to seize opportunities skillfully, and lead on unnoticeably in the desired track. If your heart is in it and your wits are awake, it will be easy enough, especially if you breathe a prayer for guidance.”
Of course, witnessing is just one way that we can live a life of thanksgiving. Another way is through worshiping every day.
• WORSHIPING
As David continues his psalm of thanksgiving, he exclaims, “I will be glad and rejoice in You; I will sing praise to Your name, O Most High” (Psalm 9:2 NIV). David not only expressed his thankfulness by telling others about the wonderful things God had done, he also spoke to God about them—singing and praising his name.
David worshiped out of thankfulness.
The Bible tells us to do the same.
In Ephesians, Paul writes, “Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephsians 5:19-20 NIV). Paul didn’t just go around telling other people to be thankful and so sing and make music to the Lord; he practiced what he preached.
One day, Paul and his traveling buddy, Silas, journeyed to a Roman colony called Philippi. They had come to preach the Gospel of Jesus, but all over town, wherever they went, they were harassed by this slave girl who was possessed by a demon that gave here visions. When Paul finally got tired of being harassed by her, he cast the demon out. Now most people would be grateful, but this particular girl made a lot of money for her owners by fortune-telling. So when her owners realized that their dreams of making it big off this young girls demon-given talents were dashed, they had Paul and Silas arrested.
First, the magistrates had Paul and Silas striped and flogged—which means, they were beaten, like Jesus was, with braided leather whips laced with sharp bone and metal pieces, until their shoulder blades looked like two white caps on an ocean of blood. After that, they were thrown in prison and their hands and feet fastened in stocks.
At this point, most people would be crying, “Why me? I didn’t sign up for this!”
But, not Paul and Silas. Even after everything they’d been through, the Bible says, “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16:25 NIV).
Paul really practiced what he preached. He gave thanks to God in all circumstances. And he did it by singing and making music from his heart to the Lord. It doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting in a pew, or behind the wheel of your car, or around the family table, having a tune in your head and song on your lips is a wonderful way to live like every day is Thanksgiving Day.
When your heart is filled with gratitude, the overflow will pour out as praise to God. Witnessing and worshipping are the first two ways that David gives us to demonstrate our thankfulness. The third is waiting every day.
• WAITING
Waiting patiently—to be more specific. Notice what David says at the end Psalm 9: “The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you” (Psalm 9:9-10 NIV).
Remember that David most likely wrote this psalm during a time of great distress. He was on the run, hunted by the king and his horsemen, hiding out in caves and living off the meager morsels he could find in the wilderness. Yet, David was willing to wait on God—to trust him, to lean on him, take refuge in him. David knew that God would never abandon him and that God would work everything out in his own time. In another psalm, David also wrote, “I will thank you forever, because you have done it. I will wait for your name, for it is good, in the presence of the godly” (Psalm 52:9 ESV).
Whenever we become anxious, troubled, or disheveled about life, it demonstrates a lack of thankfulness toward God. It’s like we forget about everything God has done for us in the past, because we can’t see beyond the here and now. We kind of become like the Israelites were in the Old Testament.
The Israelites had witnessed all of God’s wonders—the fire and hail, the frogs and locust, the parting of the Red Sea, etc. Yet every little problem they ran into caused them to panic! Their knee-jerk reaction to every hiccup was to worry and complain. They ran out of food, so they cried, “God you should have left us in Egypt!” Had they just waited patiently, they would have been awed by his provision of bread from heaven. A little while later, they ran out of clean water and cried out again, “God, we’d rather be slaves in Egypt than die in the dessert!” If they’d just waited patiently, they would have been amazed when God gave them water from a rock.
We aren’t much better, are we? We get bad news from the doctor and we panic. We worry. We complain. We forget what God did for us last time we got bad news. The bill collector’s call and we panic. We worry. We complain. We forget how God provided for us the last time we got in a financial bind.
Ashley and I have a friend named Michelle Lyzenga. We met in Metropolis and she’s a big Superman enthusiast like I am. She’s also the worship director and ministries coordinator at Sunrise Church in Grand Rapids, MI and she’s one of the people I know who participated in Thirty Days of Thankfulness. This was her status on day 14: “I’m thankful that God hasn't always given me what I thought I needed, because I'm often wrong. I’m thankful that God knows best, and that He is wiser than I am!”
I’m thankful for people like Michelle, who remind me to let God be God, to trust him whatever comes our way, and to give thanks in every circumstance. Incidentally, I really liked her status on day 15, too: “To follow-up on yesterday's status, I'm thankful that God doesn't always give me what other people think I need, because they are often wrong too.”
Conclusion:
Folks, making every day Thanksgiving Day—will change the way you live your life. The famous stress researcher, Hans Seyle, claims that two attitudes more than any other influence the quality of everyday life, and on these two emotions “depend our peace of mind, our feelings of security or insecurity, of fulfillment or frustration, in short, the extent to which we can make a success of life.” The most destructive emotion is revenge. But in contrast, “among all the emotions, there is one which more than any other accounts for the absence or presence of stress in human relations: that is the feeling of gratitude.”
Living a thankful and grateful life, is essential to happiness, success, and salvation. How do we live that kind of life? By witnessing, worshiping, and wait patiently on the Lord.
Invitation:
What are you thankful for? Have you counted your blessings lately? Is eternal life among them? The blood that Jesus shed, the life He gives, is the greatest gift ever given. And, God has offered it to you. Have you accepted it? If so, be thankful. If not, do it now so that you can live a life of thanksgiving.
