Have A Tough Thanksgiving Sermon

SERMON: “HAVE A TOUGH THANKSGIVING BECAUSE GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME”

TEXT: NAHUM 1:7

INTRODUCTION

Nah 1:7

The Lord is good, A stronghold in the day of trouble; And He knows those who trust in Him. NKJV

Let’s face it, 2020 has been a real tough year. We have had to face so many frustrations, deal with so many difficulties and handle so many hardships. I declare 2020 has been a tough year.

I have come to suggest this morning that we ought to have a thanksgiving that is tougher than the times in which we live. We need a tough thanksgiving, I said we need a tough thanksgiving.

The ancient Prophet Nahum teaches us why we ought to have a thanksgiving that is tougher than our times. Nahum reminds us about the enduring and endearing goodness of God.

The phrase “God is good all the time and all the time God is good is a phrase that is indisputably, indispensably and indescribably true. Declaring “God is good all the time” is easy when you are not assaulted by pain or attacked by problems. I declare it is easy to say God is good all the time if discouragement and difficulties are not seeking to disfigure your faith right into doubt.

I wonder, what do you say about the goodness of God when peace lose your address. I wonder, what do you say about the goodness of God when trouble lives at your house and the only rent it pays is heartbreak and hardship. What do you say about the goodness of God when joy is on an extended vacation but sorrow seems to be working overtime?

Nahum the prophet writes to a people who knew something about fear encroaching on the sacred precincts of faith. This people knew something about hope being handicapped by hardship.

This prophesy is spoken against Nineveh, the capital city of the dominant world empire at the time, Assyria. It is a word of judgement against that heady and high-minded nation. It is also a word of comfort and hope for the people of God who were threatened by this brutal nation. It is a reminder to us that no matter how tough things might be God’s goodness is unquestionable, undeniable and unassailable. That is why we ought to have a tough thanksgiving.

As we unpack the passage to uncover the principles there are three truths threaded into the tapestry of the text. They form the substance of the sermon and offers the homiletical hinges on which this message swings. Notice, IN HIS ESSENCE GOD IS ORIGINALLY GOOD, IN MY EXPEREINCE GOD IS OPERATIONALLY GOOD, and IN ITS EXPRESSION GOD IS OUTRAGEROUSLY GOOD.

I. IN HIS ESSENCE GOD IS ORIGINALLY GOOD

The Hebrew word translated “good” is tobe. It means, beautiful, best, better, bountiful.” It is a word that means, “precious.” God is so good in His essence that He is precious.

I think I ought to tell somebody God is originally good. God didn’t just start being good. God always has been and always will be good.

· His mercy is everlasting,

· His love is genuine.

· His joy is unspeakable.

· His peace is unsurpassable,

· His promises are solid.

· His blessings are abundant.

· His grace is STILL sufficient.

God is good in His eternal essence. God can’t be less than good. God would have to stop being God in order to stop being good. All that he does is good. All that He says is good. All that He desires and designs for us is for our ultimate good.

Most people suffer from small thoughts about God. In an effort to see Him as our friend, we have lost His incredible and incalculable immensity. In our desire to understand Him, we have sought to contain Him. We try to restrict Him, to limit Him and to confine Him.

God will not be barricaded in our box. He will not be lock down to our limits, or placed behind our parameters. God will not be boxed in by man’s:

· False and unscriptural notions of who He is

· Narrow and untrue ideas of what He can and cannot do

· Faulty and unfaithful concepts of what His purpose is

The God of the Bible cannot be contained. He brought order out of chaos and created creation. With a word he called Adam out of dust and Eve out of a bone. He consulted no committee. He sought no counsel. He convened no focus group. Of His own will and by His own power he spoke creation into existence.

God is good because God is God. His goodness is underived and undiminished. He never started being good because He has always been good. He will never stop being good because good is who He is in His eternal essence. God was good before:

· A “let there be” was spoken over nothing and nothing became something

· At His insistence naked darkness dressed in a garment of light

· The grandfather clock called time was plugged into the omnipotent power of His purpose and started ticking.

· He piled high the mountains those majestic soldiers who stand at attention in the presence of their commander

· He played in the dirt and fashioned for Himself His crowning act of creation, man.

Oh my brothers and sisters as long as God has been God, God has been good. Here is a truth to tweet and a point to post, God has never not been God and therefore God has never not been good. Yes, oh yes, hallelujah yes, God has never not been God and therefore God has never not been good. Moses declared Ps 90:1-2

Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations. 2 Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. NKJV

Before God laid down the rolling rivers pushed down the silent valleys, unwound the rushing rivers or wrote the melody for the marking bird to sing; GOD WAS GOD and GOD WAS GOOD.

God is originally good, in fact God is the originator of good. We cannot separate what is good from God. You cannot have goodness without God, just as you cannot have God without goodness. God alone is good: The Psalmist was right, “You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees” (Psalm 119:68).

We call all kinds of things good - "This steak is good. He's a good friend. That was a good movie." But all that we call "good" on this earth is tainted and imperfect. God alone is goodness itself. That's exactly what Jesus meant when He said, "No one is good but One - God." (Mark 10:18).

God depends on no one else for His goodness; he has goodness in and of Himself. He partakes of none, but all things partake of Him. God is good of Himself and within himself, nothing else is. Everything else is good only by participation and communication with God. If we as creatures are good at all, it is because our goodness is derived and granted to us by Him. Without God there can be no goodness, since He is the fountainhead and source of all goodness. James said it best “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” (Jas. 1:17).

II. IN MY EXPERIENCE GOD IS OPERATIONALLY GOOD

I want you to know that God is not just good in some kind of abstract philosophical way. God is good in the way He operates in my life. God’s goodness is not just something I had to learn, it is something I have lived.

I’m just trying to tell you that the way He operates in my life God is good. I declare I have experienced the goodness of God. That’s why I can have a tough thanksgiving. I have been:

· Saved by His grace

· Touched by His goodness

· Lifted by His love

· Encouraged by His presence

· Healed by His touch

· Transformed by His truth

· Protected by His power

· Washed in His blood

· Guided by His word

· Filled with His Spirit

· Enriched by His provisions

No wonder the Psalmist touched by the goodness of God penned this song of praise. Ps 100

Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands! 2 Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing. 3 Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves;

We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. 4 Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. 5 For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, And His truth endures to all generations. NKJV

I am so grateful that God in His goodness chose to operate in my life. I do not deserve His acts of grace and beneficence. I must never forget the debt from which I have been redeemed, the depths from which I have been raised or the despair from which I have been released. That’s why as Christians we can have a thanksgiving tougher than our times.

When God operates in my life and in your life it is good. He transformed our:

· Valleys into victories

· Burdens into blessing

· Tears into triumph

· Pain into power

· Gloom into glory

· Heartaches to hallelujah

· Doubting into shouting

Notice that Nahum reminds us that you don’t enjoy or experience all of the benefits of God’s goodness operating in your life if you don’t trust Him. The Hebrew word translated “trust” is khasaw (hasa). The root word means “to flee to for protection.”

Oh my brothers and sisters, to all of our visiting friends that is the only wise course of actions. You need to flee to God for protection. He alone can beat back the powers of hell. He is the only one who can deliver us from the ever encroaching darkness all around us.

If you really want to experience the goodness of God “trust and obey…” Trust and obey:

· Obey the gospel of redeeming grace

· Say yes to Christ who said yes to the cross

· Turn your back on the doctrines and commandments of men

· Speak where the bible speaks…

· Be washed in the blood of the Lamb

Believe what saints in scripture believed, obey what they obeyed and become what they became, a Christian. Not a member of any denomination but a member of the Church of Christ for which He died.

I’m trying to tell somebody that if you trust and obey the Lord, if you flee to Him for protection you will experience first-hand that the Lord is good. There is no:

· Demon He can’t defeat

· Thirst He can’t quench

· Hunger He can’t satisfy

· Problem He can’t solve

· Door He can’t open

· Need He can’t meet

Others may have a lot to pout about but we Christian people have a lot to shout about. We have experienced the goodness of God in a tear drying, burden lifting, joy bringing and soul saving way. So child of God, have a tough thanksgiving.

III. IN ITS EXPRESSION GOD IS OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD

How God chooses to express His goodness in the lives of people just blows the mind. I declare God’s goodness is simply outrageous. I said its outrageous. God is….

o Lustrous in His love,

o Righteous in His rule,

o Glorious in His grace,

o Matchless in His mercy,

o Bounteous in His blessings,

o Constant in His care,

o Unfailing in His deliverance.

o Unceasing in His helpfulness

o Unending in His graciousness

What wordsmith equip with all of the tools of language and eloquence can claim proficiency when it comes to describing just how good God is?

· Language pulls a ligament in its race to describe Him

· We end having to fire every adjective and lay off every verb because they prove incapable of doing the job

· Eloquence tries to explain Him only to fall exhausted in its efforts

· Imagination writes a check emptying it’s bank account in order to depict Him but the check is returned marked ‘insufficient funds”

· In an effort to describe Him Scholarship steps up only to stagger and stumble declaring the description takes too much effort

What messaging magician can conjure up the vocabulary competence and the linguistic capabilities to adequately depict God’s goodness? God’s goodness is so amazing, astounding and awesome that we wish there was some way to explain it. We are saying that, "God is in a class all by Himself, that…

· He is unique in every way

· He is distinguished in every aspect

· He is different in every point

· He is distinct in every case

· He is special in every instance

· He is original in every feature

· He is unusual in every trait

So we just say that God has no equal. He is not subject to rivalry. He stands alone compared to that which is sublime and majestic. Paul the great apostle suffered from a similar linguistic limitation in his effort to describe how awesome our God is. Eph 3:20

20 Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us,

NASU

Paul begins to morph his words together because he can’t get enough out of his words to say all that needs to be said about the amazing power and goodness of God. The phrase “exceedingly abundantly above” is one super compound word in Greek. The word HUPER, which means, “above or beyond”, EK, which intensifies the force of the verb to a level of perfection, and PERISSOU which means, “over and above, far beyond, more than sufficient”. The word HUPEREKPERISSOU, means, “to go beyond or to exceed all measure”. This heightened form of the comparative almost defies any single, simple English translation.

God’s goodness is so outrageous that He can do far more than you ask and far more than you can imagine. There are just no words to describe just how good God is. God is:

· Incredibly incredible

· Extravagantly extravagant

· Awesomely awesome in His awesomeness

· Outrageously outrageous in His outrageousness

· Infinitely infinite in His infiniteness

· GLORIOUSLY glorious in His gloriousness

· Magnificently magnificent in His magnificentness

· His capacity we can’t tabulate

· His ability we can’t estimate

· His quality we can’t evaluate

I think I can hear somebody singing “God is an awesome God, yes He is.

Conclusion

There was a well known scholar at one of the distinguished schools of higher learning who stood up and for almost an hour argued against the fact of the resurrection. (apple conclusion)

OH TASTE AND SEE THAT THE LORD IS GOOD:

· HE IS THE SOLUTION TO ALL OF MY STRUGGLES

· HE IS THE SACRIFICE FOR MY SINS

· PEACE FOR MY PERPLEXITIES

· GUIDE FOR MY JOURNEY

· SHELTER FOR MY STORM

· BLESSINGS FOR MY BURDENS

· GLORY FOR MY GLOOM

· THERE IS NOBODY LIKE JESUS

· HE IS WORTHY

· WORTHY OF EVERY SONG WE SING

· WORTHY OF EVERY DOLLAR WE GIVE

· WORTHY OF EVERY EFFORT EVER PUT FORTH

· WORTHY OF EVERY OUNCE OF COMMITMENT

· WORTHY OF EVERY SECOND OF SERVICE

“ONCE I MET A MAN WHEN I WAS OPPRESSED BY SIN. HE OPENED UP HIS HEAR AND HE LET ME COME IN. HE LIFTED ME FROM WRONG AND STARTED ME ON A NEW WAY. NOW I FEEL SO GOOD SO NEW AND STRONG, NOW ALL I CAN SAY IS JESUS YOU’VE BEEN GOOD TO ME, OH JESUS YOU HAVE BEEN GOOD TO ME, OH JESUS YOU HAVE BEEN GOOD TO ME, EVER SO GOOD, EVER SO GOOD, SO GOOD…”