Thank you for listening to this message from Sovereign Grace Community Church in Denver, Colorado. We pray that you are encouraged and edified by it. You can find more information about Sovereign Grace Community Church by visiting our website at www.sgccdenver.org. If you would like to make a donation to our small ministry, you can do so using the donate button on our website or on the SGCC Denver sermon audio page. Again, thanks for listening and may grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God our Father and of Jesus our Lord. Please pray with me. Father, it's good and it's needful as well that we would be reminded in this Thanksgiving season of the critical importance and the rich goodness of thankfulness, of being a thankful people. And Father, we all must confess that we struggle with with being thankful. And especially we struggle with thankfulness as you know it, as you intend for us to know it, and to experience it and to live it out. And so I pray that you will attend to our thoughts, that you will Allow us in this time to perhaps consider some things we hadn't considered before, and at the very least to have a fresh reminder of the great privilege that we have and the high calling that we have to be a thankful people. Free us from distraction, free us from the things that preoccupy our minds, and weigh down our hearts, and carry us as it were into your very presence, filled with joy, filled with peace, filled with all hope in believing. Father, meet us in this time. Minister to us by your good spirit. For the sake of Christ, our Lord, whose name we claim, whose life is ours. Amen. I didn't know exactly where Steve was going to go today, but he laid a great foundation for what I wanted to consider. We finished off chapter seven of Hebrews last time, and so I wanted to step back for this Sunday, given the Thanksgiving holiday, and consider this thing of thankfulness and thanksgiving. I've titled this message Worshiping in Spirit and in Truth, Living as Thankful People. Ultimately, my goal is to tie together this idea of thankfulness with our worship But again, Thanksgiving time is a great time to consider this issue of thankfulness. It's something that we're all aware of and certainly as Christians we all understand that we're to be a thankful people, that thankfulness is really a key aspect of the Christian life. And I think we would all have to confess that we are not as thankful as we ought to be. But I think we often don't stop to step back and think about what really is this thing of thankfulness. How do we understand it? What is its nature? What is its orientation? What does it really mean to be a thankful people in the sense that the scripture understands it, in the sense that God understands it, in the sense that he calls us to be a thankful people? The problem with thankfulness, like everything else that is a part of our lives, is that it's conditioned by our own perspective, by our own understanding. It's something in that sense that is very personal to us. Just like everything else that happens in our lives, in our hearts, in our minds, we are ultimately, we as individuals, are the reference point in our thinking about all things, and certainly this issue of thankfulness. but it's not necessarily something that we're consciously aware of. We're like the fish in water that doesn't know he's wet. We just live in our own minds and so we hear this thing, okay, be thankful, give thanks. Christians are to be thankful people, but we don't really stop and think about how we think about thankfulness and whether we truly are thankful people in the way that God intends. And again, that's an unavoidable challenge because we do live in our own minds. We may not be conscious of that, but we do. Everything inside of us and everything outside of us is looked at, appraised, valued, and interacted with through the grid of our own minds. That's what it is to be human. That's what it is to be a sentient being. And the answer isn't to be liberated from our minds, but to have our minds renewed. We can say in a very real sense, God lives in his own mind. So the problem isn't living in our own minds, it's the way that our minds work. We wrestle with this virtue and the obligation of gratitude. But the problem is more than just simply are we thankful, are we not thankful? This dynamic of, again, living in our own minds has two, I think, at least two obvious implications. The first of which is that how we perceive this virtue that we all acknowledge, this virtue of thankfulness, how we apply ourselves to it is determined by our own thinking. the perspective, the frame of reference, the orientation of our own understanding, our lives as people. And what that means is that if we're really going to honor this privilege and this obligation to be thankful people, we have to do business with our own thinking. We have to do business with our own thinking. if we're to really live the authentic Christian life that has, at its very core, this idea of thankfulness and thanksgiving. So I want to consider today, and most of this I don't think will be new, but it's always good for us to be reminded. You know, when you look at the New Testament writers, from a pastoral standpoint, you hear this out of Paul, out of Peter, out of James, out of John, that pastoral ministry is primarily ministry of reminder. reminding us what we know, but that we don't tend to keep consciously in our minds all the time. So I don't expect that this is going to be new, but I think it's a good reminder. It's certainly been good for me to go back and revisit these things this week. So what is it then to live as a thankful people? And I want to treat this under two heads, if you will, take kind of the classical Puritan approach of the doctrine and the practice. What is this thing? What is it? How do we understand thankfulness? And then how do we practice it? We can only practice it rightly if we understand what it is. And if we're called to be a thankful people, it begs the question in the first instance, okay, what does thankfulness actually look like? So I want to start then with this doctrine, if you will, of thankfulness or understanding what thankfulness is, again, from the standpoint of the scripture itself. The first thing to note is that thankfulness, and I think all of these things can be derived from the scripture, but I'm not gonna tie them to specific verses per se, but the first thing is that thankfulness is a human virtue, it's a human attribute. It's not in the first instance a Christian thing, it's a human thing. It's a human thing. And that's evident in the fact that all people, all cultures, whatever the background happens to be, all people recognize thankfulness as a virtue. We teach our children from the time they're tiny, tiny to say please and thank you, right? And we even, we take offense with people that aren't thankful. We despise ingratitude. Everybody has an inherent sense of this virtue of gratitude, that it's important, that it's good, that it's right to be thankful. But because thankfulness is a human quality, it's also constrained by our humanness. It's constrained by our humanness. And what that means is that who we are as human beings will define and determine and constrain how we understand and do this thing called thanksgiving and thankfulness. As natural people, as we come into the world, that means that our thankfulness is defined by our natural, if you will, our fallen humanness. By the natural concerns and interests, perceptions, perspectives that we bring to our human existence. So thankfulness is a human quality or attribute, but that means also, because of that, it's also a Christian attribute, because Christians too are human beings, right? We don't stop being human when we come to faith in Christ. And yet, this constraint, this connecting of thankfulness with our humanness at least suggests that in whatever ways and to whatever extent we become a different sort of human being as Christians, there's also a corresponding alteration in the way we understand and practice this thing called thankfulness. Our definition as Christian human beings also constrains and defines this idea of thankfulness. A new way of thinking, a new way of judging, a new way of living in our minds, if you will, brings with it a corresponding new understanding and practice of this thing that we call thankfulness. Well, what then is the essential distinction between thankfulness as we naturally know it and practice it and thankfulness as it is true, as it characterizes those who are in Christ? I think many Christians, and I think this was true of me, I mean certainly looking back on growing up in the church and thinking about how I thought about these things, I think our kind of instinctive answer to what is that distinction is that Christians are more thankful than non-Christians. If human beings ought to be thankful and we teach our kids to be thankful and we gather around the table at Thanksgiving and we talk about this issue of being thankful, perhaps we think, okay, well, the distinction is that if anybody's thankful, Christians ought to be thankful. Christians are more thankful than non-Christians. And in that reality of being more thankful, Christians weave God into their thankfulness. Their thankfulness has God as a part of it and things associated with God. The natural man is not going to be thankful for things related to God, the person in the work of God. The Christian is thankful for things related to the person in the work of God. But I would argue that it's much more subtle and much more profound than that, the essential difference. First of all, when we look at the natural man and his thankfulness, it, as I said, is constrained by his humanness. And what defines our fallen humanness? We are isolated within ourselves. We live self-centric lives. Even to the extent, as I said, in self-centered doesn't mean that I only care about myself and I never think about anybody else, but everything is viewed and judged and interacted with through the lens of myself. And so even my self-giving, even my sacrificial behavior still ultimately has me as the reference point in it. I've used the example before, if you make a meal for your sick neighbor and you're not expecting your neighbor to send you a card or, you know, fly up a banner saying what a great guy my neighbor is or even to make a meal for you. But if weeks go by and you run into your neighbor and you say, you just mentioned the meal and they say, yeah, you know, it was kind of burned, I threw it in the trash, even without consciously thinking of it, the first thing that happens in your mind is I'm not going to do that again because it wasn't appreciated. It just shows that ultimately everything is about us. Even what we call love is ultimately about us. We are at the center of our existence. Now that doesn't mean that self-centric, self-referential thankfulness doesn't mean that we're not thankful in any sense or to any degree, but like everything in our existence, our gratitude has us as the point of reference and ultimate concern. Well, In the very nature of the case of what it is to be a Christian, Christian thankfulness is theocentric or God-centered. If natural thankfulness is self-centered, Christian thankfulness, the thankfulness that characterizes those in Christ, thankfulness as a Christian virtue, if you will, is God-centered. Now, nothing profound in that. I think every Christian would acknowledge that. Yes, God is at the center of our thankfulness as Christians. But the way we understand that and apply that is very often, probably more often than not, certainly in terms of the natural inclination, our sense of the God-centeredness of our thankfulness is itself a natural thing. The way we think about the God-centeredness of our thankfulness is itself a reflection of a natural mind and a self-centric existence. For instance, if we say, okay, a God-centered thankfulness means that God gets the first place of thankfulness in my life, or that I see everything in my life as coming from God, and so I have to kind of, in a sense, put him as the first priority in my thankfulness. or simply acknowledging that the things that we're grateful for are things that God has given to us. All of that in the nature of the case can be very much still natural thankfulness. Because the thankfulness that is actually characteristic of this life in Christ has God not just as the point of reference or the first point of priority, but as the very substance of our thankfulness. God is the very substance of our thankfulness. It's a thankfulness that perceives and acknowledges all things as they exist and as they function in relation to the God who is known in Jesus the Messiah. God himself, who he is in himself and what he has done is the very substance of our gratitude. It's not just that I thank God because he gave me that bicycle or I thank God because he gave me that wife or that husband. It's not that. It's that all things are viewed as they exist and have their meaning and their significance in relation to God himself. God is the substance of this thankfulness. There's the essential distinction. So the first thing then is that you have thankfulness as a human quality and therefore also a Christian quality but in a different sort of way. But if these things are true, if this essential distinction is grounded in God being, is this idea of God being the very substance of our gratitude, and not just God in terms of G-O-D, whatever we pour into that box, but God as he is known in the person and the work of the Messiah, then thankfulness is obviously grounded in new creation. Again, I'm not saying there is no natural facsimile of thankfulness, but just like other intrinsic human qualities, love, hope, faith, joy, peace, There are natural facsimiles that still don't really get at the essence of what those things are as they become true in our renewal in the Messiah. You know, we dealt with that in 1 John with respect to love, right? Whoever loves is born of God. And I've had this discussion several times through the years. What are you telling me? Because I'm not a Christian, I don't love? I love my kids, I love my husband, I love my parents, I love all kinds of people. You're telling me I don't love my kids just because I'm not a Christian? you have an affection for them that is a facsimile of love, but it is not love as it is true in God. It's not Christian love in the sense that love is the very nature of God himself. And that's John's point, whoever loves has been born of God, because we don't love unless we love with God's love, and the only way we love with God's love is to share in his life, because God is love. It's not what he does, it's who he is. And so we become lovers by sharing in the God who is love. And in the same way, we can manifest thankfulness in all sorts of ways, even religious thankfulness, even spiritual thankfulness, but it is only truly what the scripture is getting at, what the Psalms exalt as Israel's worship literature, when it is that thankfulness that is grounded in new creation. It has its substance in a true knowledge of God and therefore doesn't exist in human beings in their natural state. But again, if this renewal in Christ extends to every dimension of our being, including ultimately our physicality, our bodies, right? If the whole person is transformed in Christ, then there's a transforming of our thankfulness as well, a transforming in the way we understand it and therefore the way that we practice it. So here's the point then, it's not sufficient for us as Christians either in our discussions with one another, in the way we instruct our children, it's not sufficient for us to simply talk about the virtue of thankfulness and exhort one another to be thankful people. And less thankfulness as every Christian virtue, as every dimension of our lives, as those in Christ. Unless our thankfulness and our thanksgiving are understood rightly as they characterize human renewal in Jesus, all we're doing is encouraging and nurturing natural behavior. We're just encouraging and nurturing what is a natural counterfeit or facsimile. If we simply say we need to be thankful people, if we don't understand what that looks like, then we're just reinforcing a counterfeit. Thankfulness is grounded in new creation. And then the last thing that I want to mention about that in terms of what is this understanding Thanksgiving, the doctrine of thankfulness and Thanksgiving, is that thankfulness is rational and volitional. It is not emotional. Now that may seem like common sense to us, but really our natural sense of things, our natural kind of way in which we do this thing of thankfulness is that gratitude is an emotional response, if not a spontaneous one. Just like we often say that, you know, love has to be a spontaneous thing. If you have to think about it, if you have to work at it, then you choke the life out of it and it's not real. And in the same way, gratitude or thankfulness can't be manufactured. It can't be mandated. It can't be dictated. It has to arise within us. It's a response within us. It's the rising of our hearts. It's a sense of something rising in us. It's emotional. But the truth is that genuine thankfulness is cognitive and intentional. It's cognitive and it's volitional, it's willful. And that's evident in the scriptural understanding of thankfulness, thanksgiving, gratitude. And I've read you this before, but I'm going to bring it up again because it's important. In the Old Testament, the way in which we think about thanks, giving thanks, thankfulness, as a kind of a discrete idea, it doesn't exist in the Old Testament. It doesn't exist in that way in the Hebrew language. Thankfulness has a very close counterpart in the idea of praise. And it really is a connotation of the idea of confession. Remember again, confession isn't in the first instance, okay, I did this wrong, I'm sorry I did this. Confession is our willful, knowledgeable agreement with the truth. It's not just confessing the things that we've done. We're going to see that in Hebrews, and we've already seen it, this idea of confession of Jesus. Confession is the idea literally of saying the same thing. It's agreeing with God. It's owning and attesting the truth. And thankfulness is a connotation of that idea of confession. It's a closely related idea. the theological word book of the Old Testament, and these are excerpts from a longer section. But the writer says this, the best rendering of the term is confession, the term for thankfulness or thanksgiving. The best rendering of the term is confession, and it was predominantly employed to express one's public proclamation or declaration of God's attributes and works. When I say confession is agreeing, testifying to the truth, well, the truth as it's yes and amen in God himself. And ultimately, therefore, yes and amen in the Messiah, because that's where the truth of God is actually known and experienced, right? As the logos. Predominantly employed to express one's public proclamation or declaration of God's attributes in his works. This concept is at the heart of the meaning of praise. Praise too is volitional and cognitive. Praise is a confession or declaration of who God is and what he does. This term is most often translated to thank or to give thanks in English versions, but such is not really a proper rendering. The Old Testament does not have our independent concept of thanks. The expression of thanks to God is included in praise. It is a dimension of praise or a way of praising. That's why I say that this idea of thankfulness has its substance in God himself. It's not acknowledging something that God has given to me, per se. It's acknowledging the God of the gift. In the New Testament, thankfulness, often this term eucharistia, you probably hear eucharist in that, right? Eucharistia is this praise or this acknowledgement that is directed towards God's goodness and faithfulness in relation to his purposes in Christ. If you search on that term through the New Testament, that's what it's always oriented towards as it pertains. It's almost always something that men do in relation to God, but specifically, not again abstract ideas about God is wonderful, God is great, God is this, God is that, but the truth of how God has made himself known in his concrete deeds and words in the Messiah. That's how the idea of Eucharistia came to apply to the Lord's Table, because the Lord's Table is this great testimony in a very condensed and concentrated way of the truth of the God who is and what he's accomplished in relation to the Messiah. It's both a remembrance and a forward looking. It's a promise, right? We remember the Lord's death until he comes. It's backward looking, it's forward looking. So that's an important point that we have to keep in mind is that thankfulness is not an emotional or a sensate thing in the first instance. It's a cognitive, rational, volitional thing. So in terms then of the practice of thankfulness, what does it look like then to be a thankful people? Well, the first thing ought to be obvious, which is, in view of everything that I've said so far, thankfulness demands a renewed mind. It's grounded in new creation. And the formation and perfecting of the life of Christ in us is a mind issue, right? Paul says, don't be conformed to this world, but be being transformed, how? By the renewing of your minds. Remember where I started, I said the issue is not that we live in our own minds, it's that our minds are broken. God lives in his own mind. Jesus lived in his own mind, but he manifested in his own life what it is for the human being to have his mind perfectly accord with the mind of the Father. That's what Jesus meant when he said, when you see me, you see the Father. He didn't mean you see my deity because there's a big halo over my head like you see in, you know, a lot of medieval artwork or whatever. You know, a big rainbow around me and I'm floating above the ground. You see the father when you see me. My words are my father's words. My works are my father's works. And God wasn't giving Jesus a to-do list every day. Say, go do this, go do that. Okay, now here's what I want you to say. It wasn't like a puppet master putting words in his mouth. You had the human son in such perfect accord with the father that to hear and see and experience the son was to hear and see and experience the father. One heart, one mind, one will, one purpose. A renewed mind. And if we are being conformed into the likeness of Christ, which is what it is to be a Christian, that Christ deformity looks like the renewing of our minds. The obtaining in ever greater measure and perfection the mind of Christ. And when this is all said and done, as I've said so many times, when our Christ deformity is complete, we'll be able to say just as Jesus did, when you see me, you see the Father. When you hear me, you hear the Father. My words, my works, my purpose, my heart, my existence is a perfect reflection of the Father. Being partakers in the divine nature, being truly imaged children, consummately. So thankfulness requires a renewed mind, and a renewed mind in the sense of an informed mind, an informed mind. So the thankfulness that the scripture recognizes, that the scripture calls us to, that God calls us to in Christ, is the thankfulness that is grounded in our right and growing knowledge of and right relation to the truth, The truth, again, as it is in Jesus, as we have come to know him by sharing in him. For human beings, there is no knowledge of truth in the scriptural sense outside of sharing in the life of the Messiah. It doesn't mean we can't fix a bicycle tire or something like that, if we call that truth. But truth, in the sense that the scripture understands it, is all bound up in the Messiah himself. I am the way, the truth, and the lie. So our gratitude inwardly and outwardly has to reflect the mind of Christ. It has to reflect the truth as it is in him and as we are sharers in it in order for it to be the thankfulness that the scripture recognizes. Now, am I saying, so we don't care at all about earthly blessings or natural things to be thankful for things that God has given us in this life is inappropriate? No, I'm not saying that. If I were to be saying that, it could be disproven instantly from Jesus' own experience. Jesus manifested thankfulness for earthly things, right? Natural things. Even thanking the Father for a meal, right? But the thing is that we give thanks for natural things, natural blessings, if you will, as we perceive them and receive them and interact with them in the way that God himself intends them to be understood and received, perceived. In other words, as they fit into and contribute to his purposes for us and his world. We're thankful for them, not in their own right, but in terms of what they actually represent in relation to God's own intention and purposes. Think again about Paul as he wrote to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4. And we can argue about what he means by the later days or the latter days, but he says, in these latter days, men are going to give heed to seducing spirits and the doctrine of demons. How does that deception come, demonic deception, through hypocritical liars with seared consciences? And what do they do? They forbid marriage and they forbid the eating of certain foods. Those are the two things he mentions. Do not taste, do not touch, do not handle. Things which God has created to be received with gratitude by those who believe and know the truth. He says, indeed, all things that God created are good. All things are good and are to be received. They're not to be pushed away. Everything God has created is good. It's not to be resisted, but it's to be received with gratitude. Having been sanctified by God's own word and by prayer, the prayer of thanksgiving. And Paul wrote to Titus and he said, to the pure all things are pure, to the defiled nothing is pure because his mind and his conscience are corrupted. What's the point that I'm making? The point that I'm making is that Paul says, and look in Romans 14 where he talks about the weak and the strong. Look in 1 Corinthians 8 where he talks about food sacrificed to idols. And he says people have a sensibility and a sensitivity about these things, but the truth is that because a piece of meat came out of an idol temple, there's nothing wrong with it. What matters is how we think about it. If your brother is offended by it, don't eat it. Why? Because there's something wrong with it? No. We know an idol is nothing. Meat sacrificed to idols is nothing. But if your brother stumbles over it, then don't eat it for conscience sake, not yours, his. Why will you destroy your brother for whom Christ died? The issue is how we think about things. And so if we receive God's good gifts in a wrongful way, even if we're thankful for them, it still isn't pleasing to God. Our gratitude is tied to the way in which we receive God's good gifts, the things that God has created. Again, viewing things with a renewed mind, thinking about them in a right sort of way. The same is true with our thankfulness for spiritual things, the things that God does for us that are not material, they're not physical, temporal things. But just like with natural things, we can receive God's spiritual gifts, we can, his spiritual blessings in a false way. Think about how many people are taught to be thankful for their salvation. Think about how many people are thankful to God himself. Again, through the lens of how is this working for me, how is it not working for me? See, this thing of living in our own minds, what we're constantly doing, we're not conscious of it, but we're constantly correlating our perception of the aspects of our lives with our expectations of what our lives ought to consist of. We're measuring our perception of what is with what ought to be. And to the extent that those two don't coincide, We're resentful, we're discouraged, we're envious, we're bitter, we're angry, we're unthankful. Bonhoeffer's wish dream. This is what it ought to be. Bonhoeffer talks about Christians who are zealous for the way the church ought to be. And their sense of what the church ought to be isn't even necessarily wrong, but they come in and they want to make things be the way that they're convinced it ought to be, and they rip things to shreds. We're constantly assessing how things fit into our expectation of how they ought to be. That's what normal is all about. Normal is just a wish dream. There is no normal. But normal is our sense of how things ought to be. And to the extent that they coincide with the way we think they ought to be, then we say, this is God's good gift and I'm thankful. And to the extent that they don't coincide with the way we think they ought to be, then we say, well, God, fix this, do this, make this be the way that it ought to be. And we're unthankful. Thankfulness requires a renewed mind, but it also requires a disciplined mind. It's a function of faith and faithfulness. There's two ways people can live their lives, by faith or by sight, right? Sight doesn't mean just what your eyes tell you, it means existence by your senses. I remember being in grade school and being told, you know, if you could get rid of all of your five senses, you'd have no awareness of anything outside of you. You'd only be aware of yourself in your own head. I don't know if you've thought about that. But if you didn't have any of your five senses, you would have no awareness of anything around you. Well, what does that tell us? That all of existence is ported through and processed through our senses. This is what Paul calls sensuality, life by our senses. That's what sight is about, life by sight. What we know, what we've experienced, what we predict, what we can expect, what it ought to be. What we see in the lives of others, what we see here or believe here or have been taught to expect here, the way we grew up, the way we've been taught, the way this, the way that, that's life by sight. And our thankfulness can very much reflect that same thing. But authentic thankfulness flows from a life lived by faith. I've put it this way before. Its oriented thankfulness is in the God who has promised and gifted and gifts, the God who promises and gifts or bestows, not the promises themselves. When we claim the promises of God, rather than claiming the God who has promised, it's always gonna trip us up. Because our perception of what God has promised is just that, it's our perception. It's the reason why it's so problematic, and this is an easy case to demonstrate. We pull out the Bible and we say, see here, Jesus said that he came that you would have life and have it abundantly. God promises you an abundant life. Well, what happens in our head? Each one of us as individuals is deciding even unconsciously what an abundant life looks like. And so we're taking the promise of God and we're defining it according to our own wish stream. This is the problem with claiming or binding ourselves to what God has promised rather than to the God who promises. Because we don't really understand. This was Israel's problem. They bound themselves to the promises of God, waiting for the Messiah and the Kingdom. And all of these things that God had said He was going to do, and He did every single one of those things, but it wasn't at all what they expected. And so when Jesus came on the scene, they were like, We can't connect with this guy. We don't know what he's about. He's not the Messiah. Why? Because he's not doing what we expected. He's not being the Messiah in the way that we expected. And saints, we do it all the time in a myriad of ways. We do it theologically. To disagree with me is to disagree with God. Why? Because everything I believe is true or I wouldn't believe it. So I'm the measure of truth. It never occurs to us that maybe the problem is with our wish dream. No, it's that of course my wish dream is the truth as God would see it. What I think this is is what God thinks it is. Therefore, he's unfaithful. And it affects our thankfulness as well. But thankfulness that's determined by sight or it will always leave us unthankful. because God's not going to write himself into our wish dream. He's not going to make life look the way we think it ought to look. So we don't bind ourselves to the promises of God or even to the gifts of God, but to the God who promises and the God who gives, the one who is the same yesterday and forever, the one who never changes. Thankfulness as a matter of faith allows us to be thankful regardless of our circumstances and how things appear to us. See, this isn't Pollyanna stuff, talking ourself into, okay, I'm going to be happy no matter what. You know, as Steve said, we stick our head in the sand and just ignore everything around us. It's not that. It's recognizing that even our perception of the evil around us and how God is working through this evil is flawed. We think it would be better if it were this way. We think it would make more sense if, and you hear this, this is the common objection of human beings if you talk about the whole theodicy problem and the problem of evil. How can a good God allow evil to exist in the world? And what people aren't even realizing is that they're defining good and evil out of their own heads based on what they think good and evil should look like. So essentially they are saying, unless God is me, he can't exist. Binding ourself to the God who is true, the God who is the definition of who we are, the God into whose story we have been written, not writing him into ours, but understanding and recognizing and growing cognitively in our understanding of what it is to be written into his story allows us to be thankful no matter what. And Paul said it's a mystery that we have to learn, right? The secret of contentment, it's a mystery. So true thankfulness is not emotional. It's not tied to circumstances or situations or outcomes or expectations. It is existential. It is intrinsic to who we are. It is not what we do. It is who we are, if it is authentic. In our reading that we had earlier, I don't know if you noticed it, but one of those readings was Colossians 3.15. Let the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, right? And it says, and be thankful or something to that effect. What really Paul says there is become thankful ones. He doesn't say be thankful. Become thankful ones. It's an existential thing, not a behavioral thing. Do you understand the difference? It's who we are. It's not what we do. Now, it's gonna express itself outwardly, actively, but it's who we are. Become thankful ones in your beings, in your persons. So I wanted then to just conclude then, how does this fit in with the idea of worship? Because certainly if the Psalms were the heart of Israel's worship literature, and they were, what is at the very center of the Psalms, praise and thanksgiving? Steve mentioned it himself. You can't even hardly pick a psalm. that doesn't center itself in that way. But again, I would mention that the praise and thanksgiving is always tied to rehearsing and recognizing this God and what he has done. Even the idea of God being faithful is an acknowledgment that he keeps covenant. that he does what he said he would do. Even the righteousness of God is tied in very tightly with that. It's not an intrinsic attribute of impeccability within him. His righteousness is that he is right, he does right. What does it mean for him to do right? He will do what he says he's going to do. Even his covenant name, Yahweh, I am who I am. How do we know who you are? I am this kind of a God who does this, who does this, who does this, and I will be faithful. Israel lived on the faithfulness of God. He will yet do what he has said. He will yet keep his word that he pledged to Abraham. You see, with the birth of Jesus, God has proven faithful, right? God has proven faithful. He has kept his word. So thankfulness then is simply relating to the living God in truth. That's why I say it's existential. It's the way that we relate to God. It's not just our favorable acknowledgement of particular situations, circumstances, outcomes, you know, material things. And again, I'm not saying we shouldn't in any sense be thankful for what God does for us. But the truth of those things, the reason why we're thankful, the basis of our thankfulness, the value and virtue in those things is how they fit into God's purposes and work that implicates us, but ultimately his larger purposes. It's not just God gave me a car, I'm glad I have a car, thank you God. But if thankfulness is relating to God in truth, it shows how thankfulness is an essential and primary expression of worship. Because the most basic definition of worship is this idea of confession, praise, thanksgiving. It is rehearsing back to God the truth of who he is. How do we know who he is? By what he's done. Look at when, look at David and Israel's worship when David enthroned the Ark of the Covenant, enthroned Yahweh, brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. Look at how Israel worships. David calls for Asaph, I think, and the Levites to worship. And they say, our God has done this, he has done this, he has done that. When they dedicate Jerusalem at the end of Nehemiah when the walls are built and the gates are in place and they come together and they worship God, what do they do? They rehearse God's faithfulness to Israel. When you look at Daniel's worship of God in view of the exile and the captivity and the promise of God to bring that to an end, Daniel 9, what does he do? tells the story of God's faithfulness to Israel. You see the same thing in the worship scenes in Revelation 4, 5, 7, 11. Worthy art thou, O Lord, for you have taken men and purchased men for God from every tribe and tongue and nation. People made them to be priests and kings to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. You see what I'm saying? Worship is rehearsing back to God, attesting Him, confessing Him in terms of what He has done, who He is known in terms of what He has done, rightly responding to His person and work in that way. So thankfulness as the right relating to the living God, relating to him in truth is the very essence of worship. And what that means is that to the extent that we are unthankful, which includes natural thankfulness, natural thankfulness is itself unthankfulness. When our thankfulness is tied to circumstances, situations, outcomes, the satisfaction of the wish dream, when our thankfulness is tied to that, it is actually unthankfulness. And in that way then, whatever we might think we do on a Sunday morning, our worship is actually neutered and even falsified. To the extent that we are unthankful people, our worship is neutered and falsified. We show ourselves to be idolaters, not worshipers of the true God. because our thankfulness still has us at the center of it. Just like the person who says, no God worth knowing would allow evil in the world. God should be fill in the blank. God would do fill in the blank. I know God is love if fill in the blank. Idolatry is nothing more than us being our own God ultimately. We live in our own minds. And any God that is God is going to conform to my expectation and consideration and perception of what G-O-D should be. We show that our commitment is to a God framed by our own self-perceived interests and expectations. A God who is really only just an extrapolation of ourselves. That's why it's so important to know the God who is. Because otherwise we take a container called G-O-D and we put in the content that we want in there, rather than the content that actually exists. And we look at life's circumstances through that false lens, through that false grid. But saints, if we are Christians and the truth is, and this is again worship as rehearsing the truth of the God who is and who does, if we are Christians, we've been liberated from our self-enslavement to actually know and to commune with the living God as image children in truth, to become partakers of the divine nature. And not just to know God in truth, but to know ourselves in truth, to know one another in truth, to know God's creation in truth. We've become and are ever more growing into, if we are Christians, what God created us to be. And therefore, we have both the capacity and also the reason, the basis for the thankfulness that uniquely belongs to God's imaged children. Our thankfulness is itself worship, if it's authentic. Our thankfulness is itself an existential testimony of who we are as imaged children. And in that sense, our thankfulness bears witness to the truth of the living God. You see, it goes far beyond simply, am I thankful for the good things that God has done? And am I willing to hold myself in abeyance? It's a theology of, okay, you might be suffering now, but it's a pathway leading into blessing that's coming. You can endure, you can be crushed under this for a while, a few days, a few months, or whatever. Just like Job, he had to put up with it for a while, but then it all came back in a marvelous way. So you can endure because God's gonna fix it for you soon. Your blessing, your miracle's right around the corner. If that's how we deal with the difficulties of life, then we're not thankful people. But if we give thanks in the way that I've been describing, if that is the marrow of our worship, then it is saints also one of the surest evidences that we are growing up in Christ. This sort of thankfulness is one of the greatest evidences when people say, how can I have any sense that I'm actually a Christian? And I nervously say that because all of us struggle with unthankfulness. And if we measure it in the absolute sense and say, is there unthankfulness in me? Is there fleshly thankfulness in me? Okay, then I can't be a Christian. I'm not saying that. But to the extent that we are growing up in Christ, to the extent that we are being conformed to him, we should find ourselves increasingly becoming thankful people. Not in our behavior, but as who we are, regardless of our circumstances. You know, we don't know what it is to live in a gulag. I mean, I remember reading about a guy, a Christian, and it was actually, I think, in China, but he spent like 30 or 40 years and watching all these people die around him in like an internment camp. And his job every day, all day, was filling buckets of human waste to be distributed in the fields as fertilizer to grow their crops. That was his job, all day, every day, for decades. And watching all the people around him dying because the disease and the hygienic situation was so bad. Could he be thankful in the midst of that? No earthly blessings to thank God for. Is God the substance of his gratitude? Then he could be thankful even in that. And that kind of testimony to the world is immense. It's huge. I hope as we come together around the table at Thanksgiving time, you know, that we will have these things in our mind. And again, I'm not saying we shouldn't be grateful for the blessings that we have, but I do always wince a little bit when at Thanksgiving gatherings and everybody wants to go around the table, you say what you're thankful for. Well, I'm thankful for my wife. Well, I'm thankful for my car. Well, I'm thankful for my job. Well, I'm thankful for my this, my that. And it's like, you're not really getting at the issue here. Oh, but Christians are to be thankful. So, you know, name something you're thankful for. If we're gonna really testify of Christ, then we have to be thinking about these things in a different sort of way. Become thankful ones. In all things, give thanks. This is the will of God for you. Father, I pray that you would press each one of us We all grumble, we all complain, we're all fearful. We all lament circumstances. It is a very dark world. It's a very fearful and uncertain time in our country. But our God is the same. And the kingdoms of this world have in Christ become the kingdom of our God and of his Messiah and he will reign forever. Even now Christ is manifesting all authority in earth as in heaven. What can people do to us? People aren't in control. Circumstances aren't in control. And Father, I pray that even in whatever ways and suffering and loss and difficulty and pain and sorrow, all sorts of unsettling and hurtful things have and will continue to come into our lives. And we don't know what lies ahead for us in this country, in our marriages, in our homes, in our employment, Can we be thankful, not in the hope that you'll turn things around for us, but thankful because our lives are hidden with Christ in you. Because we are seated in the heavenly places in the Messiah. And because the renewal that has come in him will one day take everything into its grasp. thankful because we are imaged children. Help us to think about these things, Father. Help us to give time in contemplation and meditation that we would bear a truthful testimony, not the testimony of fear and uncertainty and doubt and worry, consternation. but the testimony of peace, thankfulness, sure hope, all confidence. Forgive us. Do not leave us alone. Complete this work that you have begun, not just in us, but in your church, in your creation. And we sing your praises for it. Amen.