Thanksgiving I: Encourages others towards love and thanksgiving

How long will you hold onto something valuable?

For more than 20 years, a popular radio station and a car company would organise an annual competition.

Competitors would place put one of their palms on a car and the last person who kept their hand on the car gets to drive it home.

Would you join a competition like this if the prize is a Nintendo Switch 2, a road bike, or the latest iPhone 17?

But what if it is about holding tight to the values we firmly believe in.

Like the St Andrew’s TRUE WISE values,

Or the idea in the National Pledge, which we will say in a short while in our Mother Tongue?

That’s what the writer of Hebrews asked him audience to do, in Hebrews 10:23–25

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

Holding onto something physical might be easier than holding onto a belief and a hope.

Because you can see the physical thing in front of you.

But things like love, hope, and thanksgiving, are abstract nouns - ideas which you cannot necessarily see with your eyes.

It doesn’t mean that these things are not real.

In fact, the writer of Hebrews said that “for he who promised”, that is God, “is faithful”.

Meaning the hope that we have in Jesus’s opening of the way to God, though we cannot see it with our eyes, is real,

Because God, through what Jesus has done on the cross, has promised us this.

And God is faithful.

But because we can’t see these things,

it becomes easier for us to waver, and loosen our hold on them.

We forget to thank God and start living our lives as if there was no hope in our lives.

And that’s why the writer to Hebrews tells us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works”.

He or she wants us to think carefully how to stir up, how to poke uncomfortably, and to make each other accountable,

to be saints who encourage one another to love and good works.

After you listen to morning devotions every day,

Do you talk to your teachers and friends about what was shared?

Does that challenge you to practise the value, eg. Thanksgiving today throughout the day?

And do you also remind and encourage each other to even practise that devotion when you go out of St Andrew’s Village?

It is not impossible, for I’ve met many old St Andrew’s boys who still want to give back to the school.

Some of them are as old as your parents or your grandparents.

But some of them have just crossed over to SASS, finished army, or in university now.

Yet their hearts are often filled with thanksgiving for what they’ve learnt and received in SA.

Saints, being a thankful person is a lifetime thing.

It is not hard to hold onto the hope we have in Jesus.

But it is hard to continue to hold on, without letting go.

Thank God we have a faithful God who has given us this promise,

And we also have this community of one family broken,

to stir up one another to love and good works.

Because when the Day of Jesus’s return comes,

I hope that’s what Jesus will find us continually doing -

practising the value of thanksgiving,

by loving one another and doing good works.