Overflowing Thanksgiving

What do you know about Thanksgiving?

Take a few seconds or so to write down what you know about thanksgiving and how it began.

1621 for the Pilgrims and after the Civil Way when Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday a national holiday in 1863.

Goal-To help us grow in thanksgiving year round.

As we start this 3 week series on Thanksgiving I have a couple goals. ONe is this to help us grow in thanksgiving year round.

Goal-To help us know what creates thanksgiving.

We can grow in the knowledge of thanksgiving and the quantity of thanksgiving but we must also learn what creates thanksgiving. This may sound simple but I hope each week to point out at least one way, probably multiple, we can create thanksgiving that has nothing to do with turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.

Two words: εὐχαριστίαν and χάρις.

These two words are key to our understand of this passage and the purpose of thanksgiving; and how to have thanksgiving. Now someone of you are saying, “that looks Greek to me” and it is.

χάρις is the word grace.

To grow in thanksgiving means we must be able to grow in grace and the recognition of grace.

The grace of Jesus sustains.

This is the point of verses 8-12 to some extent.

εὐχαριστίαν means thankfulness.

It can be also spoken to mean the Eucharist, or Communion. However as we see in the text this morning thanksgiving and being thankful is a result of the grace of Jesus and the salvation He offers.

The Lord’s Supper, Eucharist, was tied with thankfulness in the early church.

We have separated the two at some point in time. Yes, the early church did a lot of eating.

If we need thankfulness, proclaim Jesus’ salvation.

We need not just try to muster up happiness even when we dont’ feel it. Yes to some extent due to life we may notfeel grateful this Thanksgiving but we can grow in thankfulness because of people responding to the Gospel.

This Thanksgiving may we get back to sharing Jesus.

Our world needs Jesus. Our churches need Jesus.

Let us get back to the basic of proclaiming Jesus.