Sermon Tone Analysis

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.