Give Thanks

Introduction

This past week was Thanksgiving. I hope you all had a great week. My family travelled to MO to see my parents and siblings and cousins. We ate a ton of food, we watched some football, and we laughed a lot. Here’s something I’ve noticed that I was talking to PV about last week: Thanksgiving has kind of gotten overtaken by the surrounding holidays. Like, Halloween has stretched into a whole monthlong affair and it’s like as soon as Halloween is over, it’s time for Christmas. The lights are up, Walmart has changed over. Everybody starts planning their gifts and parties and everything. Some people (you know who you are) have no respect for Thanksgiving.

But today, I don’t want us to rush onto Christmas. I want us to take a moment to remember gratitude and what it means to Give Thanks. Gratitude is an important spiritual practice and it’s something that we should practice not just when we take a bite of mashed potatoes or watch the Cowboys score a touchdown. It should be a daily practice.

So, what I want to do is look at Psalm 100 as a starting point and look at a few things we can learn about gratitude and how that helps us grow in Christ. Cool?

Psalm 100 NLT

A psalm of thanksgiving. Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth! Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before him, singing with joy. Acknowledge that the Lord is God! He made us, and we are his. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.

PRAYER

Gratitude is worship

The first and most foundational thing that I want us to see from this Psalm is that Gratitude IS worship. When we give thanks to God, that’s not just a nice thing to do, but it is a form of worship to the God who has given us everything. This Psalm as a whole is a psalm of praise and worship, but one of the ways we do that is through giving thanks. Verse 4 specifically says we should enter his gates with thanksgiving. Which means if you’re walking through the doors of church for worship, you should be doing so with a heart of gratitude.

That’s because worship, ultimately is a response to God’s gracious actions toward us.

If you think about it, a thank you is really an acknowledgment of something good about the person being thanked. When I was a kid, my parents made me write a thank you note for everything (which is probably why I’m so bad at it now!). And when you write a thank you note, you’re thanking the person for having the ability and the care and the thoughtfulness to do whatever they did to help you. It’s basically saying, “thanks for being awesome and I know that you’re awesome because you did this thing.”

There’s a story in the Bible (in Luke 17) where Jesus comes across ten men with leprosy, which was a pretty gnarly skin disease, and they cry out to him, begging him to heal them. So he did, but not right away. He told them to go show themselves to the priests, because the priests were the ones who would inspect them make sure they were clean and able to re-enter society. So, the ten men set off to see the priests and on the way, they realize that they’ve been healed. Luke 17:15 says:

Luke 17:15–18 (NLT)

One of them, when he saw that he was healed, came back to Jesus, shouting, “Praise God!” He fell to the ground at Jesus’ feet, thanking him for what he had done. This man was a Samaritan. Jesus asked, “Didn’t I heal ten men? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?”

So, the man who was healed from leprosy thanked Jesus and praised God in the same sentence. His thankfulness was a form of worship to God and Jesus. And Jesus says, “Where’d everybody else go? Didn’t I heal ten men?” You see, the other nine were so excited about the gift Jesus gave them that they forgot about the giver of the gift.

I think sometimes many of us act like the other 9 lepers. We’re praying and praying and praying and God comes through for us in a big way and we immediately move on without returning to thank him for what he’s done in our lives. And when we fail to thank God, we fail to worship properly. Having a spirit of gratitude makes our worship of God personal. It’s one thing to say God that was really cool what you did for the Israelites in Exodus, and it’s another thing entirely to say thank you God for what you did for me today. It’s not abstract anymore; it’s personal.

TBD?

Gratitude is a community project

Last week, on Sunday, we hosted a “friendsgiving” with our grow group. Everybody brought something and we feasted on some amazing food. We had ham and turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and mac n’ cheese and Karly made homemade bread. (This is not intentionally an advertisement for grow groups, but if the Spirit is speaking, he might be saying that homemade bread is not the main reason you should join a group, but it is A reason.) Anyway, we got together in community with one another and we shared a meal and encouragement and laughter.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about the greek word for “thanksgiving.” I’m not always big on using the greek in sermons, but I think there is an interesting connection here, so stick with me for a second.

The greek word for thanksgiving is eucharist. Which also might be totally unfamiliar to you, but if you grew up in certain denominations, like Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, you probably recognize that word eucharist as one of the terms for what we usually call “communion” or “the Lord’s Supper.” It comes specifically from the gospels like in Mark 14:23 when Jesus takes the wine and “gives thanks” for it.

Mark 14:23 NLT

And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them, and they all drank from it.

So, the communion meal is specifically a meal of thanksgiving. Jesus gives thanks for the bread and the wine as we too should give thanks for Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross. But here’s the next step: In the earliest churches, they didn’t do communion like modern churches do with the COVID-safe cup and wafer. Their eucharist meal was, in fact, a full meal. A weekly feast shared by the church to give thanks for God and for one another. Which is to say that way before Thanksgiving was a national holiday, before the United States existed, before the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts and were saved by the generosity of the Native Americans, the early Christians shared a Thanksgiving feast with one another.

Which brings me to my second point: Gratitude is a community project.

We see that as well in Psalm 100. It says he made US and WE are his people. Not he made ME and I am his person. No, we are a community of people that God has created in his image, and we are his people, the Church, that Jesus has brought together in his name. And as one people, we are grateful for God.

Before service each week, we have a time of prayer for the people who are here to serve. And we always begin by asking what we can praise or thank God for. I remember one time this spring when I was having a particularly bad time and felt very hopeless and I have to be honest, I didn’t want to praise God. I didn’ t feel like I had much to thank him for and I didn’t really want to hear what he was doing in everyone else’s life. And I don’t think I had any big realization or breakthrough that day, but over time, hearing other people thank God and praise God reminded me of the good that God was doing in the midst of the bad.

Being grateful is not easy. Worshipping God is not easy. We don’t have to pretend like it is. Our sinful nature and the world around us and spiritual powers ALL are working against us, to push us and pull us away from God, but he has given us each other to be support and encouragement, and one way we do that is by thanking God for each other and with each other.

Gratitude brings contentment

One of the things I’ve noticed abut a lot of the spiritual practices we’re given as Christians is that they often work like an antidote to the pull of sin in our lives. Without generosity, we easily get pulled into greed. Without Sabbath, we too easily get pulled into busy-ness. And without gratitude, we can get pulled into discontentment and/or pride.

B/C when we’re not practicing gratitude, we can fall into the trap of thinking only about what we don’t have. And I don’t mean materially. I just mean we start to imagine the “perfect life.” Especially now. I was thinking about how many of our parents or grandparents just picked a career and they did it for like forty-five years and then they retired. And maybe I’m wrong—I wasn’t alive then—but I feel like there wasn’t all the angst we have now about choosing a career. And I think it comes down to the question: “What if there’s something better?”

But instead of getting caught up in that question, gratitude reminds us of how great what we already have is. Listen to this verse:

Philippians 4:6–7 NLT

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

Here’s what’s interesting about this verse: it doesn’t say that we should tell God what we need and then he provides it and THEN we thank him for that. No, we just tell him what we need and thank him for what he has already done, and then we experience God’s peace. Because peace is not about God changing our circumstances, it’s about the perspective we have in the circumstances.

There’s a book by Ann Voskamp called One Thousand Gifts and it’s all about gratitude. It’s about finding God’s grace in the darkest of circumstances, she found it by thanking God for 1,000 gifts. She set out to write a list of 1,000 things that she could thank God for, and in the end, found that it changed her.

My kids and I like the J. Cole song Love Yourz, and he says “no such thing as a life that’s better than yours” and “you’re never gonna be happy until your love yours.”

What we find, in the end, is that God has already given us so much.

So, as we close, I just want us to find the joy in worshiping God though thanksgiving. We are called to enter his courts with thanksgiving. When you walk in that door over there, enter with a spirit of thanksgiving. When you open up the Bible app or your prayer journal, or you think of God on your lunch break, go into his presence with a spirit of thanksgiving. What has God done for you?

Of course, the biggest thing he’s done for all of us is Jesus. He has given us his very life. etc. etc.