Thanksgiving Eve Service

Thanksgiving Eve Service 2018

(adapted from Ray Pritchard’s “What Children can teach us at Thanksgiving”)

Well it is Thanksgiving Eve, and how are your preparation plans coming? Do you know where you are going tomorrow and when? Or do you know who is coming and when? How many place settings do you need, or do you have your contribution to the Thanksgiving feast finished? Maybe you still have things to do after our time tonight. Maybe you still need to do some buying, measuring, stirring, whisking, mashing, pouring, baking, boiling, freezing, covering or… packing all those things up to do it all somewhere else. It’s a lot of work to put together a Thanksgiving Feast.

There are a lot of preparations needed, and maybe some of you are like me – I am just gonna show up and eat whatever’s there. It’s always great, and we have no idea what those plans are but maybe we are busy with other plans. Maybe some of us just prepared by finding out which football games are on at which times or how we are going to fit in the meal with the hunting hours. And if you are really crazy, like some of the people in my extended family, you make plans for someone to pick up the big newspaper with all the Black Friday Ads so that you can put your shopping plan into motion.

And that is a good summary word I think for much of what we do during the Holidays. There is a lot of motion. We have a flurry of activity leading up to the Holiday and a flurry of activity moving through the holiday and a flurry of activity to clean up after the Holiday. Let me ask you, in all the motion and commotion that our preparations for this “Holy Day” brings, how much effort have we put into planning to really stop and “Give Thanks”. To “give” thanks. That’s the thing about thankfulness, it is something that we give. It’s a gift, not a reward, not a motivator to motion – it’s a gift in response to love.

The truth is, thanksgiving is something that is uniquely human, the rest of the created world doesn’t do this. I remember the first dog that we had, when Rachel and I were first married. Her name was Susi and we wanted her to have good manners so we trained her how to say please. When she saw that we had a treat for her we would say, “Say Please” and she would sit up and pull her paws to her chest. When she did this we would give her the treat. So she was able to say “please” but never once did she say thank you. She never received a treat and then came back and sat up and then walked away to say thank you. If she did it again, she would expect a treat again. So basically she was saying “Please” again. It was never “Thank You”.

Thanksgiving is something that is uniquely human, God created the human species to operate with thanksgiving and that is why the Bible is full of commands for us to be thankful and to give thanks.

There is something about stopping to give thanks that runs counter cultural to our hurried lives isn’t there. It is like we are constantly running around saying, “Please, Please, Please” in order to acquire or secure the next blessing in our life, but when we stop to recognize in gratitude everything that which we already have, it flies directly in the face of all that.

Rachel and I were talking this morning and she was sharing with me something from one of the authors that she is reading. This author was talking about taking time to slow down and rest and how God had to implement the idea of Sabbath for his people specifically because they were coming out of slavery in Egypt. Slaves don’t get days off. Slaves don’t get holidays. They work until their broken-down bodies can’t move anymore and then they are allowed some rest, but only enough so that they can get back up and get to work. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

When God brought his people out of Egypt into freedom He knew that the habits and mentalities that they had formed as slaves would drive them back into that same pace and routine. So he formally established the Sabbath day. A weekly holiday, if you will, where God’s people can rest in the assurance that God is watching out for us and we don’t have to operate in the broken down methods of slavery anymore. We can work hard on 6 days and then spend one day in worship and rest. In some ways, this is a weekly holiday. A regular reminder of our dependence on God all the time and how He is worthy of our thanksgiving all the time, not just when we think about the Pilgrims.

Speaking of Pilgrims, I wanted us to take us through a Pilgrim Psalm this evening, and I found one that I believe fits the idea of restful thanksgiving very well. For one thing it is only 3 verses long, so nothing that will take us all night, but even more than that it strongly points to the idea of rest. Since it is only three verses, let me read through it once and then we can look at it with a little detail.

131 O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. 2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.

3 O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.

The title heading in most Bibles tells us that this is “A song of Ascents. Of David.” What this means is that this is one of the songs that the people of God would sing on their way up to the Temple to Worship. They would pilgrimage to Jerusalem and on their way there were songs that they would sing to prepare them for their arrival. This is very similar to the reason that we begin our services each Sunday with singing. It is a way to get our hearts ready and aligned for what we are about to experience. And this one of the many Psalms that was written by King David.

That is especially interesting in understanding the first couple lines:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high;

Or if you were to read it in the NIV it says:

My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty;

The first attribute needed for genuine Thanksgiving is

1. Humility

It seems a little odd to start out a prayer with declaring your own humbleness. In fact that is a little confusing isn’t it. It’s like the guy who said, “Of course I am humble, just ask anyone and they will tell you that there is no one that is as humble as me”.

Remember this was written as a song to sing as you enter into worship, so more than a declaration of what is, but a call to what needs to be. When we come to the Lord with our Worship, our praise, and our thanksgiving we are to do it in a humble way. Even the King, King David, needs this humble heart.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons that offering sincere thanksgiving is so hard for us. Just like the former slaves of Egypt, our culture has wired us to think in a certain way. We have the American can do attitude. I can accomplish anything that I put my mind to. While the “Independence” of our culture has some great benefits, it also has some significant challenges. If you think that you can do anything, that it is really just all up to you, then what do you have to be thankful for?

We have to recognize that even the freedoms, abilities and opportunities that we have are gifts of God’s grace. We are responsible to use them wisely, yes, but they did not appear by an act of our will. When we forgt this the only person that we really have to be thankful to is ourselves, and we find ourselves saying foolish things like:

“I did it by my hard work and determination - that’s the American way”

– ok, but who said that you would get to be born in America?

We have to start with humility, because the reality is that there are things that are so beyond our ability to understand them. Remember when we talked about this when we briefly hit on the story of Job. Thankfully, even though we can’t understand it all, we have a God who does and we can trust him. That is what David means when he writes:

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

We start with Humility. Secondly, we strive toward:

2. Simplicity

Where verse 1 declares what we have not done, in contrast verse 2 tells us what we have done:

2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.

I don’t know about you, but I remember a lot of Thanksgivings that would never be described with words like this. What might it look like to have a calm and quiet soul during this holiday season? For many of us, the only time that travels close to this is when we finally sit down and are about to pray for the meal, but with the meal sitting before us it often feels more like a “Please, Please, Please” than a true thank you.

What a peaceful image David gives us with a weaned child and his mother. It is important however to remember that getting to this picture of calm took a lot of chaos. When a child is weaned from the milk of his mother it is hard on the mother and the child. The baby knew that as long as he was close to mom their “Please, Please, Please” was answered. But a weaned child no longer looks to the mother in this way. To be weaned is to have something removed from your life which you thought you couldn’t live without. David is saying, “I’ve come to the place where the things I thought I had to have, I don’t need anymore. Now my soul is quiet and content in simply being with God.”

We have very few voices convincing of the value of Simplicity. In fact, we typically see simplicity as a bad thing. They are just being “simple minded” or they don’t understand the “real world”. Maybe the problem is that we understand how this world works too much. We depend on it as if it something that we cannot life without. We become slaves to it. One commentator writing over a century ago said that there are three steps that God uses to wean us from the world.

1. He makes wordly things taste bitter to us.

2. He removes those other things that we depend on one by one.

3. He gives us something better.

Have you ever found yourself in any of these three steps in your life?

3. Integrity

The final principle to add to humility and simplicity is Integrity. Verse 3 says,

3 O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.

The word “hope” here is not like we use the hope. We use the word very lightly like it would be nice if this happens, but…you never know. This is the Hebrew word “yee hell” and it means first to wait, then to cause to hope. It is the idea of waiting expectantly. The concept is much closer to how we typically use the word “confidence” then how we use the word “hope”. Basically it means “to wait on something because you know the thing you are waiting for will happen because the person you are waiting on is trustworthy.”

This is really David saying that We have a choice to make. Either we will choose to live like everyone else or we choose to wait on the Lord.” Once a child is weaned, the apron strings have been cut. The child comes to rest on his mother’s lap not because he wants something but to be near his mother. In the same way, God weans us from our dependence on the things of this world so that we will not be bribed into trusting him.

I talk to so many people who still struggle in relating to God in this way. They say that they trust God, but what they mean is that they trust that God will keep things that are going well to continue to go well and to fix those things that aren’t. So we are thankful for our spouse, our home, our jobs, our families, our security, our reputation, our connections and our health…and we should be thankful to God for those things, but what if God were to take one or all of those thing away? Would we still trust him? If not then isn’t that more of a “Please, Please, Please” kind of interaction than a genuine “giving of Thanks”?

That’s what integrity is all about. It’s choosing to put your confidence in God alone. It’s believing that he has answers to questions that “too great and marvelous” for us to understand. It’s coming to the place where you don’t measure your spirituality by your prosperity. It’s finding rest in your soul because you discover that the things you used to crave aren’t so important anymore.

That is where true Thanksgiving comes from – it comes not just from the many worldly blessings that God has allowed us to enjoy. We are thankful for those things, but we don’t depend on them. If we didn’t have them we would still have our faithful God – it is that relationship that is most worthy of our Thanksgiving.

So let’s pray and then we will do a little exercise together.