Thankfulness Makes You Full Inside

There was a time when I thought that if we wanted to change our lives, to start good habits, or to break bad habits, all we had to do was decide to do it. We just had to choose. I come from a family with a lot of will power. But the more I have had to wrestle with my own weaknesses, the more I realize that the choices you make are important, but choice isn’t the whole story. Sometimes it’s just plain really hard. There are times when change us isn’t in us.

Of course, education can really make a difference. Often we can’t change because we just don’t understand. We don’t understand clearly what the Christian life even looks like or the steps to get there or the steps for breaking old habits. And so studying God’s word and discussing it together are very important. If you want to get somewhere, it’s a big help to know what the goal looks like and the steps that others have found useful for getting there. But information still isn’t the whole story.

We are often not free to choose. We may decide to start a self-improvement program, to read our Bibles every day, or something like that, and be able to choose once or twice to do it. But then we forget. We fall back into old habits. And we realize that we aren't as free as we thought. And we feel guilty and discouraged.

In Jesus' time it was the Pharisees who figured it was enough to give people long lists of rules and expect them to just do them. But it just isn't that simple. Jesus criticized them for giving people rules and then not lifting a finger to help them follow them. What we do flows out of who we are. Our behavior flows out of what is deep inside of us and it isn’t easy to change the deep core of our hearts.

Jesus said, “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” (Matthew 12:34). It is the inclination of our heart that determines what we do. The real battle is down deeper than just this decision or that decision. The battle is to change the whole inclination of our hearts.

This pitcher is full of air. How can I get it out? How can I get leverage on air? If I pull out one handful, the atmosphere that surrounds it will just push more air right back in. How can I get the air out? I can't, directly. I could yell at the air and try to make it feel guilty for not moving, but it wouldn’t do any good. I could post a list of rules for air, but that wouldn’t help. I could take a college course in aer-o-dynamics and get a lot of information about the movements of air, and maybe come up with an air pump or something complicated that would pull the air out, for a time. But that wouldn’t last.

But if I can fill the space with something more substantial, like water, it just pushes the air right out. (Pour water into the pitcher)

The most important thing is to fill the space in your heart with something more substantial, to replace the vices with virtues. And our text today holds up the virtue of thankfulness as something that fills our hearts with good things so that there is no room left for the vices. And a thankful heart, a heart focused on its blessings, sees no end of opportunities to bless others with love and generosity. Thankfulness makes you full inside.

Our text is just two verses, Ephesians 5:3-4. "But fornication and impurity of any kind, or greed, must not even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints. Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let there be thanksgiving."

We are surrounded by a world of people with empty hearts. And in their desperation they are turning to one empty thing after another to fill the void.

We don’t like to talk about sex in church, but Paul lists sexual sins first, "fornication and impurity" as things for Christians to avoid. We live in a sex obsessed culture. How does an advertiser make a project sell? Find some way to make people think it will make them more sexy. So sell your car by suggesting that it will help the guy get the cute girl. Sell the perfume or the clothing or the breath mints or soda pop or cigarettes or beer, or pretty much anything we sell, suggest that it will make you sexy and people will buy it.

I once found a package of wood screws in a hardware store with a picture on the package of a man up on a step ladder, screwing something to the wall. And there’s this sexy blond gazing up at him in rapt admiration. I bought them because those were the screws I needed. No sexy blonds followed me home.