Sermon Tone Analysis

Thanksgiving

As we think about this season, we encounter the topic of thanksgiving.

Christians are commanded to be thankful.

Main Premise: The Lord wants us to have a thankful heart.

The Lord wants us to have a Thankful Heart

It’s easy to not be thankful.

Often, I have to wrestle my heart to get to a place of gratitude.

I don’t know about you, but it seems that the way my morning goes often sets the pace for the rest of my day.

There are some mornings that I wake up and I feel joyful.

My mind is immediately focused on the Lord, and I have scripture running through my head, and a song in my heart.

I usually spend those mornings in long sessions of prayer and listening to music while accomplishing small chores.

Those are the best mornings.

My walk with God is easy and it sets the pace for the rest of my day.

My heart is filled with thankfulness, and my songs and prayers filled with Thanksgiving.

But then there are those mornings when I wake up, and I am wrestling with my flesh.

I’m not focused on Christ, I’m worried about finances or thinking about selfish wants.

I know that a heart of thanksgiving would be good, but it seems like the furthest thing possible at that moment.

It would be an uphill battle to achieve that morning.

Some days I make that fight to wrestle myself into a place where I can be thankful, but other times I let myself be consumed by worries, by passions, by the flesh.

And maybe you can relate to these mornings as well: the good and the bad.

My question is, “How, even on these challenging mornings, can you obtain a heart of Thanksgiving?”

“How can we obtain a thankful heart?”

Fortunately God’s word helps guide us and instruct us.

And I found Psalm 100 to be particularly helpful when addressing this question.

So please read along with me, Psalm 100.

Psalm 100

Let us pray.

(pray)

Before we jump into the meaning of the text, I want to help you see the form of the text.

This Psalm is a chiasm, which means the important point is in the middle.

Just as our English language may have something like this used in its literary style, where you have the introduction, a build up to the climax of the story, a downward falling action, and then a conclusion … you see that the point is in the middle … so also Hebrew has a form of writing where it’s almost like you could fold the whole poem in half and get the same thing, except the climax, the important point, is in the middle.

I went ahead and diagrammed this for us.

As you can see, ...

Make a joyful noise to the Lord all the earth

Serve the Lord with gladness!

Come into his presence with thanksgiving

Know that the Lord, he is God!

It is He who has made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of His pasture

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!

Give thanks to him; bless his name!

For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

The Psalms are not only words for us to live by, but are also beautiful in their literary form.

And knowing that form helps us to understand which part is being emphasized the most.

So, because there are four parallel parts to this Psalm, I have four points for us this morning:

A thankful heart fears the Lord (3)

A thankful heart comes to God (2b, 4a)

A thankful heart responds in praise (2a, 4b)

A thankful heart remembers the Lord’s goodness (1, 5)

1.

A Thankful Heart Fears the Lord

The Lord is central to this poem.

Lord, God, he, his are repeated 16 times in a matter of these five verses.

God is the center of the focus and worship here.

The line that reads “Know that the LORD, He is God” makes you think to who God is … that he is the LORD, the great I am, the one who IS. Think back to the burning bush when the Lord spoke to Moses and proclaimed the holy ground which Moses tread, who spoke to Moses through a burning bush.

The LORD is the one who reigned down terrors upon Egypt because they thought that their gods actually did something.

But the LORD is the one with the power over the heavens and the earth.

While the Egyptians tried to conjure frogs and flies and to summon darkness, The LORD is the one who did all of those things, and then some.

Remember that the LORD is God.

And he still is to our day.

While all the other gods or ways of belief in this world are ultimately nothing, the LORD is the one who created the world.

It is he who formed heavens and the earth.

It is he who has the power to protect and to save, to change a sinner’s heart.

While all of the other belief systems in this world appeal to rocks or to sticks and stones or to a demon for their salvation, our God is the one who is high above it all.

He is the living God, the all-powerful God, the all-knowing God, the eternal God.

Believer, you know this and have it written on your heart.

The LORD, HE is God.

And who are we before his presence?

It is this LORD who we are to fear: to have a reverence for because of his great power and authority.

Nothing.

We cannot claim deity for ourselves: we did not create the world, we do not know all the answers, we are not perfect in every way.

But God is.

Fear of the Lord is knowing who God is and who we are compared to him.

And the LORD, in his might and splendor and majesty … made us.

(change tone)

He made us.

And we are his.

a people for his own possession.

We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

God knows you and cares for you.

You are a living, breathing, creature with a soul made after the image of God, you are someone who God has placed his image upon to reflect his goodness and his beauty and his wisdom.

We know that because of sin that image of God placed in every man has become marred, corroded, covered up.

But the almighty God humbled himself to become a man, I’m talking about Jesus Christ, so that he might live the life you were meant to live, and to die the death you were meant to have.

And in his great sacrifice on the cross, when he took your pains and your sin upon himself and he endured the wrath of God that was stored up for you and when he gave you his own righteous robe, he called you to be his own.

Someone whose image of God has been restored, who can now live as the person the LORD has created you to be.

A person who knows to fear the LORD, instead of living life their own way.

Through Jesus Christ we are able to fear the LORD.

We recognize who God is and how we fail to meet his perfect standard.

But by grace God has granted you access to him through the Son.

And now you are a part of his pasture.

He will never let you go.

You are the sheep of his pasture.

Who can snatch you out of the Father’s hand?

No one.

No one.

The Lord loves you.

He has done what no other god or system of belief can do, by reaching into your life and changing your heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and making you spiritually alive.

Let us be thankful to him.

Rather than a heart of selfishness and self-focus, thinking we could do life our own way, we now have a heart that has been broken and made new: made to see God’s love and his intentions for us: that we may display his goodness and kindness toward others and that we may know him as LORD and love him.

For the Christian, this is the heart of Thanksgiving.

It is the heart of genuine response in praise and worship to what God has done in displaying his great love toward you.

Thankfulness, praise.