November 25, 2020. Thanksgiving Eve Sermon - Psalm 136:1. Grace-Vail.
.כִּי ְלעוֹלָם ַח ְסדּוֹ
:טוֹב-הוֹדוּ לַיהוָה כִּי
“Give thanks to the LORD for he is good, his mercy endures forever.” Why is thanksgiving so attractive? We feel good when we are thankful. We don’t feel so good when we are not thankful. If you could choose: thankful or not; we’d all choose thankful. But so often in day to day life, we get stuck in a not thankful place. It’s healthy, useful, helpful to have a holiday built around remembering to be thankful. The Bible gives us extra reason for thankfulness. My prayer is that by considering Psalm 136:1, your thanksgiving celebration will be even more thankful with God involved than it would be with you trying to be thankful on your own. 5 parts to this talk. 1. Give thanks. 2. To the LORD. 3. For he is good. 4. His mercy. 5. Endures forever. 1. Give thanks.
הוֹדוּ
What is gratitude? What is thankfulness? In one word I’d say, appreciation. What gets in the way of gratitude, of thankfulness? In more than one word I’d say: entitlement, expectations that I don’t think are being met. Basically, we all have stories about how our lives should be going. We all have beliefs about what we should have, or be, or know. And when we perceive that we aren’t living the story we think we should be living; when we believe that we are not what we should be, that we don’t have what we should have, that we don’t know what we should know; we become dissatisfied. We become discontent, we become ungrateful. For example, you might think, at my job, I should be more advanced, more capable, more important than I am. You have an expectation about where you should be, and since you’re not there, you can miss the fact that you are way better at your job than you were 3 years ago. You’ve got friends at work because you care about them. You’re financially stable because of your ability to work well. Or you might think, my relationship with my husband or wife, or boyfriend or girlfriend, we’re not as close as we should be. You have this relationship expectation, and since you perceive that you;re not there; you miss the fact that you’ve cared for this person for years, you've helped them become a better version of themselves; or maybe that by getting out of a bad relationship with an ex, you’ve come to a more safe and stable place, or maybe if a spouse has died, the fact that they’re not here robs you of the great memories you have and the gratitude that could be yours. We all have expectations of where we should be in life, and if we’re not there, we get ungrateful. What if you traded your expectations for appreciations? What if you took time to notice all the good things in your life that you take for granted? What if each morning you took 30 seconds to acknowledge that your heart is beating, that your lungs are taking in oxygen, that you did nothing to receive a heart and lungs that work. They were just given to you, by your parents, but even more by your God. What if
you learned to appreciate what each moment was offering you, even the challenging or unpleasant moments? Expectations can often get us in our heads thinking about the past - what we didn;t have; or about the future, what we think we’ll miss out on; and we can miss out on what the present moment is offering. There’s always room to appreciate what is given us. Some of you may have heard of Corrie ten Boom. She was in a concentration camp in wwii; and when she and her sister were taken into their barrack, it was a row of basically a wooden rectangle only big enough for a person to fit into. The straw was rotten and smelly. And Corrie lay down and felt fleas biting her. She told her sister and her sister asked, “What should we do?” But she wasn’t asking Corrie, she was asking God. And they remember the passage from 1 Thessalonians 5 that says “Give thanks in all circumstances.” So they started thanking God for the fact that they were together. Thanked him that they had been able to bring a Bible into the room. That they could read it out loud to a room full of people. Then they even started to thank God for the fleas. Thank God in all circumstances. Most of us don’t have near the suffering they did. But they were able to find reason to give thanks. They were able to tune into what the moment was offering them instead of what the past had taken away or what the future wouldn’t give. Give thanks, the command given in Psalm 136, is an invitation into appreciating life, rather than blaming God or others or yourself for why your life isn’t the way it should be. But it means challenging your story about how life should be, or challenging your perspective on how you don’t measure up to how your life should be. But there’s a problem. What do you know? What do you know about what life should be like? What do you know about the kind of person you should be? You’re just a flawed person with limited perspective. That’s where the Bible helps out. Not just give thanks; but give thanks to the LORD. 2. Give thanks to the LORD.
לַיהוָה
Who determines what your life is, and what your life should be? It’s the LORD. He’s the one who invented human life with all its complexity and brilliance. He’s the one who made all there is, and made people last as the crown jewel of his created universe. He’s the one who made people not to control them, not as some interesting experiment to watch from a distance. He made people to live in community with him, to be collaborators in bringing what is good out of the created world and universe. He made you and all people to enjoy and explore life as a human being, under God, over all the rest of creation, serving him as a friend, a father, a created, the LORD God. The specific name L-O-R-D all capital letters reminds us that God simply is. He always has been and always will be. When Moses was commissioned by God to go to tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelite labor force have their freedom, Moses wanted to know, “Who should I say has sent me?” And God speaking to him from a burning bush said, “I am has sent you.” That’s the name LORD that we have
in our Old Testament Bibles. God was saying, “I am that I am.” He’s the only being who exists completely on his own, needing no one else or nothing else to keep him going. He simply is. There is ultimate reality that you will deal with one way or another. He is God, we are his creation. That’s fundamentally the story about you. Later in Moses’ life, God once passed in front of him and proclaimed his name this way, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” The LORD is worth your appreciation, your thanks, because he is so compassionate. He sees people in their need and is moved to act on their behalf, in their best interest. He is slow to anger, abounding in love. This is the nature of ultimate reality. God is love. In him there is no darkness at all. There’s so much to appreciate about life if that’s who God is. But we often don’t live that way. We often get ungrateful because we act like we have to be the gods of our own lives. We need to see God as he is, we need to see that we’re not gods, we never were designed to be. We need to acknowledge, God is a forgiving God, but he does not force his forgiveness on anyone. To any who determine to live distant from him, he will not force closeness; but instead will allow a punishment to come; the punishment more than anything else is distance from him. God will allow people to be free of his presence, which is actually the worst kind of slavery there is, slavery to having to be in charge of their own lives. The real reason for lack of gratitude, is distance between a person and God. To get reconnected to him brings naturally a gratitude and joy that he is God, and that’s a good thing. Gratitude at life in general is beneficial, but there are limits to gratitude removed from God. There are ways to appreciate life without God involved, but there is so much more reason for appreciation with him in the picture. Your life more than anything else is a gift from the LORD, because he is good. 3. Give thanks to the LORD for he is good.
טוֹב-כִּי:
The basic problem beneath all problems is the belief that God is not good. Think back to the serpent talking to Eve. Did God really say you should not eat from the tree in the garden? Behind that question is already the insinuation that God is not good. God is not to be trusted. Why would he keep something from you? Something that seems so attractive and delicious. God is not good. Don’t trust him. Don’t listen to him. Everything else followed. And if God is not good, that actually leads to a twin belief: I must not be good either. If I need to depart from God to get my needs met; the next step is I need to cover, to hide, to conceal. I’m not good.
I’m ashamed. I want to hide. I’ll look out for myself. And notice what gets lost in those beliefs. Gratitude. There’s no room for gratitude if you are basically a problem. If you are basically flawed, and not good, and God is not a good place to go for help. In place of gratitude, there’s shame, fear, desire to isolate, to blame. All you have to do is look around at the problems in the world, at the problems in your life, and you might think, God isn’t good, we’re not good, I’m not ok. That’s why we need the Bible to show us the truth. God is good. He’s so good he didn’t abandon Adam and Eve after their disobedience. He called to them, he sought them. He clothed them. He promised them a champion would come later on to crush the serpent and undo the damage he had done. God is so good he heard the cries of his people under the oppressive slavery of Egypt. He rescued them by humbling Egypt. He set his people free. He still hears the cries of the oppressed today and promises freedom. He has not abandoned our world, even with all its problems. He still makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall to provide so much growth and good. All that is good comes from God, James tells us in the New Testament. Everything that makes you smile, has the smile of God behind it. Everything that you love doing has God’s love. Every bit of laughter and joy and appreciation you’ve ever felt comes from him, because he is good. He is good enough to show his mercy to you. 4. Give thanks to the LORD for he is good, his mercy.
ַח ְסדּוֹ
God sees you in your need, and moves in action and affection to help you. To serve you, even though you haven’t earned or deserved it. God is so good, he values you so much; that to give you back the image that you desire; he took on your image. In Jesus God has become man so that man may again participate with God in friendship and fellowship; acceptance and approval. Jesus knew this was a costly mercy. God’s love is only free to you because it was so costly to him. His mercy led Jesus not only to become man, but to allow his perfect human life to end in a situation that no other human would be grateful for. He was beaten, he was abandoned, he was killed. All of it in your place. And amazingly we’re told in the book of Hebrews that it was for the joy set before him that Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame. What possible joy could Jesus have had in facing the cross? Only the joy of knowing that his death, coupled with his resurrection, would bring you back to himself again. That in being made ugly for you; he could make you beautiful again in him. Jesus anticipated that when people would see his death and resurrection; they’d be convinced again: God is good. He loves us. And not only that; I’m ok too. I can love and accept myself because God loves and accepts me that much. I can walk around not believing that I’m a failure, or worthless; instead I have every reason to believe that God values me, treasures me, wants me close to himself always. Gratitude naturally follows when I know who I am and what God has done to restore to me the image he designed for me.
You get to experience this mercy first through faith. You get to grow into this identity more and more as you step into it in your work, in your family life, in the times you spend with no one else but yourself; even in how you handle the dark sides of yourself that you want no one else to see. Take it all to Jesus, and watch as he transforms you to the person you’ve always desired to be. You don’t have to worry about the stories you tell yourself. Jesus has the true story of who you are. You’re his follower. 1 John 3 says, “How great the Father’s love, that he has generously poured out on us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are.” Not because we say so, but because God in Christ has said so. And it goes on, “what we will be has not yet been revealed. But when he is revealed, then we also shall appear with him glorious.” You don’t even know who you are, not fully. There is so much more to you than you know. Let Jesus show you. Little by little he’ll make it clearer and clearer, and you’ll have more and more reason for gratitude, until the day he appears, and gratitude, thankfulness won’t just be a once a year holiday, it won’t just be a every once in a while feeling. It’ll be your permanent and eternal way of being. His mercy lasts forever. 5. Give thanks to the LORD for he is good, his mercy endures forever.
כִּי ְלעוֹלָם
God’s mercy has always been there. Before you were born, his mercy endured. As you took your first breath, his mercy endured. As your heart beats 100,000 a day, his mercy endures. As you breath in and breath out 20,000 times a day, his mercy endures. As you sleep, as you wake up, his mercy endures. In your childhood, your adulthood, into old age, his mercy endures. It’s always been there, and his mercy is active for you right here, right now. You don’t need to be someone else to experience his mercy. You get to be you. You don’t need to be somewhere else to be grateful. You get to be here. You don’t need to wait until later. He offers himself to you right now. His mercy will never end. Psalm 23 ends by saying, “Goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life.” Goodness will hunt you, mercy will pursue you. Jesus did not abandon you when it cost him his life in agony. What makes you think he will abandon you now, or any time in the future? Romans 8 tells us, “Neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus my Lord.” So what do you believe about yourself? Do you have reason for thankfulness? How can your story about how life should be get adjusted by God’s story of how life is? How can your belief about who you are shift to reflect who God says you are? How can you trade your expectations for more appreciation of all God has done for you? Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His mercy endures forever, Amen.