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. Well, as Jerry noted, as we're in the Thanksgiving season and heading into the season of Christmas, the Advent season, I wanted to take a Sunday away from our study in John and consider this topic of thankfulness and thanksgiving. I don't expect that I'm going to say much that is not familiar to all of us, but I think these are things that we have to constantly be reminded of and challenged with respect to. So that is what I hope that we can accomplish today. that the Lord will help us in this endeavor so let's commit this time to him in prayer. Father we do so long I trust to be a thankful people and thankful in the way that you intend us to be. I pray that you will convict each one of us and that you will renew our thinking, that you will challenge us to step back and consider again, not just whether we are a thankful people, but what it means to be a thankful people, what it means to offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving as a fragrant aroma. So help us in this time. Open our hearts and our minds. And Father, by your good spirit, lead us into all truth. We ask these things in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. Well, over the last, I don't know, couple of weeks, I guess, coming up to Thanksgiving, I've seen a couple of times where they've done, you know, the man in the street kind of thing, asking people about Thanksgiving, what they believe about it, what they know about it, and it's I don't know, maybe somewhat startling to see how few people know, Americans know anything really about the Thanksgiving holiday, how it came about, what it really represents. But at some level, most people do understand, even just from the name Thanksgiving, that somehow this holiday has something to do with being thankful. I hope that Christians recognize the fact of the importance of thankfulness, maybe more than non-Christians do, and have a greater sense of the obligation of thankfulness. But I find, even as I look at my own life, but certainly having been a Christian a long time, I think that Christians tend to be thankful in the same way that the world is thankful. When it comes to the mindset, the frame of reference that we have, the way of thinking that we have as we come to this issue of thankfulness and thanksgiving, I think that sadly there's often very little that distinguishes us from those who don't know Christ. Our thankfulness as all things that are a part of our lives in Christ should reflect and express that truth. of a new identity, a new creation, a new humanness, a new identity that we have, a new nature that we have in Christ. And my point in that is to say that I believe the frame of reference that we bring to bear and the nature of our thankfulness is more important, more critical than the fact of our thankfulness or the content of it, the specific things that we may happen to be thankful for. The frame of reference that we bring to bear and the nature of our thankfulness, those things are more important. And I think that Paul hinted at this truth with one of his closing comments to the Thessalonians. If you want to turn to 1 Thessalonians, I'm just really going to draw out one verse at this point, a couple of verses. But I think that Paul, in an indirect way, is putting his finger on these things that I've just mentioned and where I want to go today. 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 16, he says, rejoice always. Always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. He deals with the issues of perpetuity, constancy, and an all-comprehending quality to our rejoicing, to our praying, and to our giving of thanks. Give thanks in all things, a perpetuity, a perpetual quality to our thankfulness, and also an all-comprehending quality to our thankfulness. If you will, an indiscriminate thankfulness. Paul is not calling for thankfulness as a repeated operational practice. Okay, I'm thankful now, I'm thankful now, I'm thankful now, I'm thankful now. And he's also not calling for thankfulness on the basis of assigning gratitude to certain particular things. He's talking about thankfulness as fundamental to God's design for human beings as we are ultimately sharers in the life of the true man. And so I have a couple, I have three kind of foundational premises that I want us to work off of today as we consider this idea of thankfulness. And again, I don't know that any of this will be entirely new to any of you, but there are things that I think we do need to constantly be reminded of and reconsider in our own lives with the Lord and even with one another. Three foundational premises. The first is that thankfulness is who we are. It speaks to who we are, not what we do. Thankfulness speaks to who we are and not what we do, and who we are as Christians, as those in Christ. And flowing out of that as a second premise, if that is the case, then thankfulness is not circumstantial. Thankfulness is not tied to circumstances. It doesn't mean that it's unaware of circumstances. It doesn't mean that it's not in any way a response to circumstances. But thankfulness is not bound to, it's not tied to personal circumstances or natural circumstances. It is not circumstantial. It is who we are, not what we do. And flowing out of that, then thirdly, true thankfulness is the result of a way of thinking. It is not a discipline of practice per se. It is the result of a way of thinking. Thankfulness is a way of being. Just as prayer is a way of being, just as rejoicing is a way of being. That's how Paul deals with these things in a perpetual sense. a perpetual sense. So I want us then today to rethink this idea of thankfulness and reconsider our own thankfulness, how we understand it, how we practice it, how we live it out as those in Christ. And I want to begin at what I think is the starting point, which is the recognition of how the scripture understands this idea of thankfulness. It's interesting that in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew language and in the Old Testament development, thankfulness does not exist as a discrete category or discrete thing. There is no term or verb that specifically means to give thanks in the sense that it sits as a discipline of life or a particular thing that we're to incline ourself to. Thankfulness in the Hebrew scriptures is a connotation of the idea of confession. Now, not confession in the sense of a creed confession, or confessing of our faith in Christ, or confessing our sins, not that sort of idea. but confessing again in the most broad biblical sense of a speaking forth that which is true, and specifically that which is true concerning God and his works. And so confession, that Hebrew idea, is bound up with two other things very, very closely, praise and thanksgiving, or thankfulness. Praise and thanksgiving can overflow, but in a certain sense, praise is an acknowledgement of God himself, who he is, what he's about, what he's done, how he interprets and understands what he has done. And then that recognition, that confession that expresses itself in praise also causes us to have an orientation of thankfulness or gratitude. Note that in the first instance it's not tied to specific things and not even personal things. It's tied to the big picture of who this God is, what he is doing, where this is going, what his purposes are in the large sense. The theological word book of the Old Testament says this, the best rendering of the term, this idea that is sometimes rendered thanksgiving, this Hebrew term, 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. Not the confession of sin per se, although it's used in that way, but the most general sense, particularly as it relates to the idea of thanksgiving, is one's public proclamation, one's confession of one's agreement or declaration of God's attributes and his works. This concept is at the heart of the meaning of praise. Praise is a confession or declaration of who God is and what he does. This term is most often translated to thank or give thanks in English versions, but such is not really a proper rendering. The Old Testament does not have our independent concept of thanks. It doesn't mean it doesn't have a concept of thanks. It doesn't have an independent concept of thanks. Thank you for this meal. Thank you for my health. Thank you for this. Thank you for that. It doesn't have that independent, isolated concept of thanks. The expression of thanks is towards God and is included in praise. Thanksgiving is a way of praising. Thanksgiving is a way of praising. And so my point is that Thanksgiving is absolutely foundational and essential. It is of the very essence of this thing we call worship. If we are worshippers, we are thankful. If we are not thankful, we are not worshippers. So confession, the idea in the New Testament in Greek, homologeo, it's to agree with, to say the same thing. To confess isn't what I say about me as much as it is me agreeing with God. Not just concerning him or concerning me, but concerning everything, what it is that he's doing. It's the acknowledgement that is born out of understanding. Confession is the expression of our yes and amen, our yay and amen to God. And responding appropriately to that yay and amen with praise, adoration, and thanksgiving. I'm not going to take the time to look at these passages today, but if you look at the primary prayers of the Old Testament, you see this dynamic woven in. I would steer you to Nehemiah 9 at the time of the reconsecrating of the city when the walls are built. Read Nehemiah's prayer. and see these things of the acknowledging of God and what He has done in the eruption of praise and adoration and thanksgiving. Tied to, again, this God and what He has done. Even the concept of faithfulness. Nehemiah 9, Daniel 9. as Daniel is contemplating the return from exile and the 70 years that are decreed by God until the restoration of all things, Daniel 9. Revelation chapter 4 and 5, the great worship scene that John sees in a vision, also Revelation chapter 11, the worship scenes See how this idea of thanksgiving is woven into confession, confessing of God. So that sort of confession with all that it entails, all that it implies, that sort of embodiment of praise, adoration, and thanksgiving, that the author of Hebrews says is the sacrifice that God desires. Offer to God the sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that give thanks to his name. Thanks to his name. Hebrews 13, so that's the first thing. Thankfulness is absolutely fundamental to the idea of worship. The Old Testament knows nothing about an independent concept called thankfulness. We're grateful to God for specific things that pertain to us. Now I'm not saying that's irrelevant, but that's not how the scripture understands in the first instance the principle of thanksgiving. It is really what worship does. It is bound up in worship. And flowing out of that is, secondly, this principle that thankfulness is directed toward God in Jesus Christ. Thankfulness is directed toward God in Jesus Christ. And I put that little prepositional phrase on there because all Christians would say, yes, our thanksgiving is directed towards God. We recognize he gives us everything that we have, so we thank him for it. But I'm saying more than that. I'm saying our thankfulness and thanksgiving are directed toward God in Jesus Christ. God has, throughout the salvation history from the beginning, God revealed himself by what he did and how he interpreted what he did through other actions and through the words of his prophets. God acted, and then he interpreted his actions. And that was the way in which he revealed himself. And when you look at Israel's great worship hymns, when you look at the Psalms in particular, and we saw that in the Psalms that we read today, this eruption of praise and worship and thanksgiving is directed to this God who has done these things. And he has done these things not arbitrarily, not in a vacuum, not capriciously, but he's done them purposefully towards the accomplishing of a plan that he has made known and is making known to us. And he has shown himself faithful to his purposes and we can trust him moving forward. So seeing what God had done explained to Israel how they were where they were. Their present state and relationship with him was defined and understood in terms of what God had done in the past and the meaning of what he had done and that helped them to understand their own future moving forward. And so their worship, their praise, their adoration, their confession, their thanksgiving were bound up in that sort of a way with God. It wasn't, thank you for Fido, thank you for my meal. And again, I'm not trying to illegitimize those things. I'm just trying to put this in a more biblical framework of how we, in the first instance, understand and approach this idea of thankfulness. So praise and thanksgiving are rightly directed towards God's works because as I said, God has revealed himself, his mind, his purpose through what it is that he has done. I'm talking about his works as his purposeful actions in the salvation history. Not the individual things that he has done in my life. God gave me a husband, God gave me a new job. I'm not talking about that. The works of God, the mighty works of God are expressive of the intentional time, space, hand of God by which he is working all things towards the accomplishment of this purpose that he has for his creation in relation to himself. And to praise God for those works is to praise God himself because God is known through those works and his interpretation of those works. So we trust the God who is true, who is faithful to his purposes and his promises. That is when we give thanks to him for his works, when we praise him for his works, we are acknowledging and thanking him for what it is that he has done and how he understands what he has done. We're not thanking him or acknowledging the truth of our perceptions and our expectations. And I wanted to just point us back by way of trying to explain what I'm getting at there. When you look back at Paul and go back to Acts 23 through like 26, And remember when we were in the book of Acts, when Jesus, Paul was in Jerusalem and he was brought before the council and he testified and there was such a melee, such a riot that he was arrested and he was put in jail for his own safekeeping. And during that time, Jesus appeared to him and told him that he was going to bear witness of him in Rome, as he had done throughout Judea and throughout Macedonia and Asia Minor. He was going to testify of him in Rome as well. And Paul did do that, but not in the way that he expected. Paul was taken from Jerusalem in chains and he was taken to Caesarea and he spent two years in Caesarea having to appear before Felix and then Festus and then Agrippa and having to have these kings constantly trying to get a bribe out of him when he hadn't done anything wrong. I thought I was going to Rome. I thought you told me I was going to testify of you in Rome. Here I am, day after day, month after month, sitting in Caesarea, imprisoned, playing games with these stupid kings who expect me to be bribing them. I thought I was going to Rome. And then when he does go to Rome, he goes to Rome in chains. And he had told the Romans, I am coming to you and I will minister to your faith and you will minister to mine. And I'm sure Paul thought he was going to go and he was going to meet in their houses and he was going to minister to them and it was going to be great. And he did minister to their faith, but he did so in chains. So my point is, again, We have to be careful that even as we're grateful to God for his works and what it is that he's doing, that we're grateful to him based on how he interprets and works out what he's doing, not what we think he means, and not bind him over to our expectations. If we do that, our thankfulness will not be thankfulness. We cannot bind him to our expectations, the self-derived truth of our perceptions, our expectations, and I'm going to deal with that more. So thankfulness is directed towards God in Jesus Christ. In terms of the movement of the Old Testament history, thankfulness was directed towards God in view of his mighty works. But both the person of God and the works of God become incarnate in Christ himself. He is both the exegesis of the Father as the presence of the Father. He is also the sum and substance of the Father's work. All of God's works are yea and amen in him. All of the salvation history, everything God did and everything, the way in which God interpreted what he was doing, all of those things came to their fullness, their full meaning, their full expression in Christ himself. So thankfulness to God for his mighty works becomes in the context of the age in which we live, the fullness of the times. thankfulness to God who has revealed himself in Christ, the one who is the full exegesis of God and the full exegesis of the works of God. Our thankfulness has to be Christ-centered. It has to be gospel-centered. Our thankfulness, our praise and adoration of God are in Christ. In Christ. Christological, Christocentric. So my point is this. Our thankfulness has to be grounded in, it has to have its very substance and its premise in the gospel. Gospel realities. It is in and through Christ as sharers in him by the spirit that we offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Think again about what Paul said to the Thessalonians. In everything give thanks. This is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. In Christ Jesus. Turn to Ephesians 5. As Paul talks to the churches about this issue of thankfulness, look at the Christ-centeredness. It's grounded in the realities of the gospel, the good news of the kingdom of God, what God has done in Jesus himself. Ephesians 5 verse 18. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. Be being filled with the Spirit. speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, adoration, praise, always giving thanks in all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great premise and the great substance of our thankfulness is Christ himself, and not in some kind of isolated vacuum idea, but Christ as this one who has come as the full revelation of the Father and the Father's will and work, and the one in whom all things are yea and amen. Again, Israel's thankfulness was to be directed towards Yahweh, the covenant God, and specifically the way that he administered his relationship with them unto the accomplishing of his purposes. In other words, the works of God. The works of God were the way he administered that relationship towards the goal of his accomplishing of his purposes in Israel, but mainly through Israel on behalf of the world. Well, all that God is in relation to his purposes and his works has now become embodied in Christ. That means even natural blessings, even natural gifts, even natural good things have their meaning, their value, their praiseworthiness in relation to him. In relation to him. You can see this in 1 Timothy chapter 4. So we look at Ephesians 5, flip over to Philippians chapter 4. See this same principle. Philippians 4, beginning at verse 4. Paul says the same things over and over again. Not because they're profound and nobody understands them, but because the saints need to be constantly reminded of them. It's essential to their transformation, the renewing of their minds. Verse four, Philippians four, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice. Let your forbearing spirit be known to all men. Patience. endurance. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." Do you see the Christ-centeredness of prayer, of rejoicing, of thanksgiving, of praise? Colossians, next book over, chapter 3. We'll pick this up in just verse 15, but really it's important to back up, but we'll pick it up in verse 15. Paul says, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful. Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you with all wisdom, teaching, and admonishing one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father. Do you see the Christ-centeredness of thankfulness? It's not just this idea, okay, I'm a Christian, I believe in God. God gives me all the good things that I have. I have my job because God gave it to me. God, thank you for my job. That's not biblical thankfulness. And I'm not saying not be grateful for your job, but things have to be framed within a larger purview. That's where we'll conclude today, looking at the particulars. So thankfulness is directed towards God in Jesus Christ. And then the third thing I want to point up today is that thankfulness is the fruit of faith. This flows out of the previous consideration. If thankfulness is directed to the God who is true, who is yea and amen, who has revealed the truth of himself and his works in Jesus Christ and what it is that he's accomplished in the good news of the kingdom of God, then thankfulness must be the fruit of faith. The first implication of that, and I'm not going to develop this, but I'm just going to set it in front of you. It should be obvious, therefore, that those who lack faith cannot be thankful. And I'm not saying that natural men outside of Christ can never have any sense of or express any kind of gratitude. But in the scriptural sense of thankfulness and what it is, it does not exist in the realm of human beings outside of new life in Christ. Thankfulness is the fruit of faith. Faith is one of the two ways in which human beings can live their lives. Faith isn't just believing information. Faith is a way of perceiving everything within our purview. Faith is one faculty of perception. There is another faculty of perception that the scripture calls sight. Sight is the faculty of perception that all people as they are born in this world operate with. I'm not just talking about our eyes seeing things. When the scripture talks about this concept of sight, it's talking about the way in which people naturally perceive and interact with everything within their purview, themselves, everything outside of them, everything that has to do with them. It is the natural faculty of perception, and therefore it is the unconscious faculty of perception. It is the way people do this thing that's called life. It's the paradigm of living and existence. And because it is just the way we are, it's invisible to us. We're not aware that we're that way, because we're just that way. like the fish in water that doesn't know he's wet. He doesn't know there's a thing called dry, right? It's just the way it is. Sight is the way people naturally relate to all things and interact with all things, including God and all spiritual realities. The only alternative to sight is this thing called faith. It's not a second option, it's the only other option. It's either faith or sight. Those are the two ways in which human beings can perceive and interact with everything within their purview. And faith is a completely different faculty of perception that allows for a completely different way of seeing. It's not just a modification of this thing called sight, it is a whole different paradigm of perception. It is as different as The life of the old man is from the life of the new man, as the kingdom of darkness is from the kingdom of light, the kingdom of the sun, and the translation from the one kingdom to the other. The author of Hebrews tells us that faith enables a person to see what can't be seen. Let's just look at that first verse of Hebrews 11. He tells us two things about faith, but they're related, they're parallel. 11.1, faith is the substance of things hoped for. It is the making present and real and substantial of that which lays out there. It's not here. But it takes what is hoped for, and hope doesn't mean wishful thinking. It means the confidence of the realization of what God has promised and what it is that he's doing. Think of Romans 8, hope. It's not just wishful thinking, I hope it rains today. Biblical hope is not that. It's looking towards that which isn't yet present, but knowing that it will be present. But faith takes what is out there and gives it substance now. It doesn't just imagine things or make things up, but it makes real and substantial and present now what exists in the future. The faith of, and where he goes with this, is that the faith of these who preceded Christ reached out and laid hold of Christ before he had come. They all died in faith, not receiving what was promised, but they hoped in it, and they died waiting for it. It's Joseph who dies in faith, leaning on his cane, and he has them take his body and put it in a sarcophagus. It's not buried. because he's going to go back to the promised land when God keeps his word. And they do take his bones back, right? He believes God for what he says, even though he doesn't himself inherit it at that time. So faith, it makes, gives substance to that what is hoped for. It is the conviction, the surety The reality of things not seen. Just like when our eyes see something, we know that that thing exists. I saw it. I know. I saw it. I saw that accident. I saw that car crash. I know what happened. Faith is the eyes that allow us to see what is not seen. So faith enables us to perceive things through the grid of the truth as it is in God, rather than in terms of the apparent truth, what appears to us, the apparent truth that appears to our senses and our experience. And that faculty of faith has its origin in the spirit and his renewing and transforming work. The Spirit is the author of faith, not in the sense that he enables us to believe information. He is the author of faith in the sense that he enables us to see what is not seen any other way. What cannot be gotten at by the senses, what cannot be gotten at by experience, in fact, what often contradicts what we see and what we experience. Faith is most faith when it is a conviction that argues against all the evidence, all that we can see, all that we can touch, all that we experience. So faith and sight are antithetical ideas. They don't blend, they don't complement, they are two different ways of perceiving reality, two different ways of living, and it's one or the other. Now only Christians, therefore, possess this faculty called faith, but my point today is that few Christians really employ it as their paradigm of seeing. Typically, and I'm speaking in generalities, I'm not saying everybody and in every instance, but very commonly what Christians call faith is actually sight. Faith as presumption. Faith is in our, very commonly, when we talk about faith, we're trusting God to bring the outcome that we're looking for. We're trusting God to make things look the way we think they ought to look. We're hoping in that which we have concluded is right or proper or appropriate. That's sight. That's trying to bind God over to our perceptions, our judgments, our expectations, our assessments. If you look at Psalm 91, I'm not going to go down this path, but Psalm 91 is this great psalm of what the faithful man looks like in relation to God and how God is in relation to the man of faith. That's a psalm that begins, he who takes his shelter, finds his place in the shelter of the Most High shall have his security under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, my rock, my God, my refuge, my stronghold, my God in whom I trust. It's the psalm that Satan quotes from when he's tempting Jesus. He will give his angels charge concerning you. They will guard you in all your ways. They will bear you up in their hands lest you strike your foot against a stone. It's a psalm that exalts in the man who trusts God and the surety and the security that he has when he trusts God. Because he loves me, God says, therefore I will deliver him. I will set him securely on high because he has known my name. I will rescue him. I will deliver him. I will honor him. I will cause his eyes to feast on my deliverance. And Satan says, this psalm speaks to what a man of faith looks like. Therefore, throw yourself off the temple, because he says he's gonna give his angels charge concerning you to bear you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. And what does Jesus say? He didn't say this psalm doesn't apply to me, but he didn't say this is also a messianic psalm. What did he say? He said, you should not put the Lord your God to the test. Jesus is tested at the point of him being a true man. He's tested at the point of being a human being in truth in relation to God. And Satan is trying to trip him up and test him at that fundamental point of conformity as a man to God, which is this issue of faith. And he's trying to get him to think that faith and presumption are the same thing. And that's the common flaw. That's what Israel fell into. That's what Adam fell into. That's what we tend to want to fall into. What we call faith is presumption. God loves me therefore. He promised me this therefore. I can do this. I can do that. He's going to do this. He's going to do that. He's going to do the other thing. What we call faith is actually sight and more specifically, it's presumption. We think we understand what God has promised. We think we know how things work. We think we know what would be best. We think we can make those sorts of judgments and decisions. And if you think this doesn't fill the church and our way of thinking about faith, just consider the way the concept of faith is taught in churches, the way that it's taught on Christian television. Faith is a magic potion to move God to give you what you want, right? It's a magic potion. If you believe God enough, here Jesus said you can move, you can say this mountain be lifted up and thrown into the sea and it'll happen. So you just have to believe, believe, believe. God's gonna give you that husband. God's gonna give you that job. God's gonna give you that car. God's gonna heal your body. Just believe, believe, believe, believe. And if you believe enough, then God will join himself to your wish dream. Another proof of the fact that we confuse faith with presumption is all of the negative pathologies that characterize the Christian church, the Christian community. Discouragement, despair, depression, bitterness, resentment, all of those things are evidence that what we call faith is actually presumption. God didn't come through. God isn't doing what he's supposed to do. I'm depressed. I'm discouraged. I'm disheartened. I'm giving up. Where is God? God has left me. He doesn't love me. He doesn't care about me. Well, how does faith then work together with thankfulness? That's a little consideration of faith and sight, and the tendency to still want to operate by sight and to confuse sight with faith. How does faith work with thankfulness? Well, again, the paradigm of sight determines and defines the thankfulness of every non-Christian. Sight is the way that people naturally live and therefore it also determines and defines their thankfulness. In other words, they are grateful for what they see and experience to the extent that their interpretation of what they see and experience seems favorable or pleasing. They are grateful, right? Even when the child says thank you for Fido, his perception of this dog in the family and his relationship with this dog is that this is a good thing. Thank you for this thing that I perceive as good. Thankfulness for non-Christians is determined by this faculty of sight. And so it is with Christians to the extent that they still are living by sight and not by faith. Thankfulness and thanksgiving so often are determined by personal issues and personal circumstances and our perception of those personal issues and personal circumstances. We look at the lay of the land, and we assess the lay of the land, we make judgments concerning the lay of the land, and based on our conclusions concerning what it is, then we are thankful or not thankful. Right? Isn't that how it works? We're thankful to the extent that we perceive our lives coinciding with our desires and expectations. Our expectations of this world, our expectations of what's fair, what's good, what's nice, what's pleasant, what's just, our expectations of God. And to the extent that our perceptions of our lives and circumstances coincide with our expectations of what our lives should be, we are thankful. Where there isn't a coinciding between our perception of our lives and our expectation of what ought to be, Far from being thankful, we are disappointed. We're despairing. We're depressed. We're discouraged. We're resentful. We're bitter. We go away sad. That sort of thankfulness, saints, which is so characteristic of Christians and something that we tend towards even ourselves as individuals, that sort of thankfulness is fraudulent. God does not regard that as thankfulness. It is fraudulent because it is self-centric. I look at the lay of the land, I assess the lay of the land, I determine what would be the proper situation, circumstance, outcome, whatever, and based on that I give thanks to God or I don't give thanks to God. That sort of thankfulness has nothing to do with him, it has everything to do with us. And biblically, this is why I started where I did, thankfulness and thanksgiving are essential components of worship. So there isn't thankfulness where there isn't worship, and there isn't worship where there isn't thankfulness, but things looking the way I want them to look has nothing to do with worship. It's not about God, it's about me, right? That sort of thankfulness is the antithesis of worship. And the other thing, saints, is that God will not tolerate that which is false. See, when our thankfulness is oriented in that way, it's always going to be fleeting. Paul says that this is to be a way of being, and it can't be that. Thankfulness cannot be perpetual and all-comprehending when it is thankfulness by sight. Why? Because life is dynamic. And what I'm thankful for today is gone tomorrow. Nothing stays the same. Life is dynamic. It's full of what the Puritans used to call vicissitudes and dark providences. Life is ever-changing. It's ever-changing. And even when it seems to be static for a moment, life never conforms to our personal norm. Normal is a myth in our heads. It doesn't exist. But because our psyches tell us we have to have, there is a definition that is right and proper and that we seek, we put the label normal on that. And to the extent that things are normal, we're thankful. But it changes, it slips, there is no normal. All there is is now and we don't even know the meaning of now. The very dynamic of life under the sun means that if we have the wrong sort of thankfulness, thankfulness that is based in this premise, this faculty of sight, we will always be struggling to be thankful people. Because it's always slipping through our hands. Oh, I'm so glad I got this toy at Christmas. I remember being a kid, you know, and you stay up for weeks and your cruise, you know, perusing the Christmas catalog from monkey wards, you know, and pennies and all that back in the day, Sears. And, you know, the pages are, are dog, dog-eared and you're up early on Christmas and you're down there and you're opening your presents and you got the thing that you wanted so much. Oh, I dropped it and it's broken or in a week it's gone. Right. The transitory, ever-changing nature of life means that if my thankfulness is bound to things looking the way that I think they need to look, then I'm always going to be struggling to be thankful. And I'm in fact going to be going back and forth between what I think is gratitude or thankfulness and thanksgiving and praise to God and dissatisfaction and disgruntlement and despair and depression. Today God is good, tomorrow now he's not. He was, but now he's not. I can praise God for this, now I can't. God loves me, well now he doesn't. You see, we're just in this constant cycle. And that's the way so many Christians live their life. And they think if they'll just believe God enough and just really hold tightly to what they know that he wants for them, then somehow it'll all usher into this bliss of normalcy and everything will be the way they want. And it never happens. But we hold out hope that it will. Just like the next toy or the next bobble is going to finally satisfy me and then I'll be done longing. And it never happens, does it? So here's my point. Our inherent ingratitude, we think we're a thankful people, we think that we're a grateful people, we think that we're marked by thanksgiving to God, but our inherent ingratitude is exposed by our natural thinking. To the extent that we think naturally, to the extent that we operate by sight, we are ipso facto unthankful people. And that's true regardless of whether we find ourselves grateful or thankful for particular things, particular circumstances, particular outcomes. Even if we find ourselves at moments and points in time and regarding certain things being thankful, we are still unthankful people. when all of that is the operation of a natural mind and a natural thinking. We are inherently intrinsically unthankful, even if at a moment in time we're grateful for something. Do you understand what I'm getting at? So how do we become thankful people then? How does this really play itself out? Well, again, a summary of the principles that I've tried to flesh out today. First and foremost, thankfulness is a way of being. It's not something we do in the first instance, it's who we are. If we as Christians are sharers in the life of God in Christ by the Spirit, our lives are now the shared life, poured out life of God into us. We are taken up in his life and love. We have become defined by this thing called worshippers. We're going to see this when we get to John 4. The woman at Samaria is saying, you Jews say we worship God in Jerusalem. Our fathers say here on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. Which is it? Jesus says, an hour is coming and now is when neither there nor here, but in spirit and truth. Worship is not tied to a place, an occasion, a circumstance, a building. It is the very nature and character of a human life that exists in a right relationship with God. Worshippers is who we are, not what we do. And if the very essence of worship is thankfulness, then thankfulness is who we are, not what we do. In the first instance, it is who we are. It is not tied, just like worship isn't tied to dates, places, circumstances, occasions, thankfulness is not tied to circumstances, particular issues, particular outcomes. It is who we are. That means, though, that thankfulness stands on the foundation of our new life in Christ, and it depends upon a mind conformed to Christ, a mind taught by the Spirit. We may have the mind of Christ, but we can fail to employ it. Remember 1 Corinthians. That's how Paul kept challenging them. Don't you know who you are? Don't you know who you are? Don't you know who you are? You're thinking wrongly, you're thinking wrongly. Repentance is a rethinking, a rethinking. We can fall into this pattern very easily of thinking as the old man thought. Thinking an old way of being, an old way of perceiving, an old way of living. And so just because we are born of the spirit doesn't mean that we operate with the mind of the spirit. We have to operate with the mind of Christ. We have to seek to be conformed to the mind of Christ by the spirit in order to actually be thankful people. It doesn't just happen because we're born of the spirit. Just as Paul says, put off the old man who's been put to death in Christ and put on the new man who has been created, right? In the righteousness and holiness of the truth. We have to live into who we are. And again, thankfulness is, first of all, a way of being. It is who we are. But it's something that is going to flow out of us taking ownership of and applying ourselves to be who we are. And secondly, this is again a summary of what we've seen, thankfulness has its object in God and his mighty works. Consider the Psalms again. And God and his mighty works both coalesce and have their full substance and exegesis in the person of Jesus Christ. That's where God and his mighty works, and I'm not talking about just miracles or whatever. His mighty works refers to the hand of God in time and space in the salvation history as he's moving all things towards this purpose that he has. Not just for us, but for the whole creation. Thankfulness has its object in God and his mighty works as they are realized in Christ. So that means first that thankfulness must be framed by the reality of the gospel. We cannot be a thankful people if we're not a gospel minded people and gospel in the sense that we've been learning all these years. The good news that God in Christ has accomplished what it is that he's been promising and building the case for. not just gospel in terms of the four spiritual laws. What God has accomplished in Christ and the goal towards which he is working in all things. We have to be mindful of that if we're to be a thankful people. In our own circumstances, the things that we've gone through the last several years, people ask from time to time, how do you keep going? How do you not just Just lose it or despair, give up or whatever, just you can't go on. And I tell them, and this is honestly the truth, I have to discipline myself to step back from the circumstances and again, have a heart and mind set on things above. I have to deal with things in terms of the larger picture of this God and what it is that he has done and is doing. And not get focused on myself and my life and my family and my issues. Not that I forget about those things, but this now becomes a context in which to think about these things. See what I'm saying? That's what I mean when I say thankfulness must be framed by the realities of the gospel. And it is within that framework, then, that our thankfulness can now have reference to ourselves. See, you listen to me and you might hear this guy saying, oh, he's saying it's illegitimate to ever be thankful for the good things God has done for us. No, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that for thankfulness to be thankfulness, as it pertains to even ourselves and our lives, it has to be framed in this way. Otherwise, then I am thankful for the good things as I see them and not thankful for the bad things in my life as I see them. I have to have this perspective in order to even deal rightly with myself and my life and my circumstances in order to really be thankful in all things. That's my point. If you're still there, flip over to Colossians 1. If you were still in chapter 3, you may not have been. But just again, a few verses here, and we really should begin farther back. Well, let's just pick it up at verse 15, Colossians 1.15. Speaking of Christ, he says he is the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn. of all creation. By Him all things were created in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, or authorities. All things have been created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. All things are bound together. All things have their substance in relation to Him. He is also the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning He is the firstborn from the dead, that he himself might have preeminence in everything. You see, Paul's high Christology is this Christ who came into the world to accomplish the purposes of God for the world. Not, oh, he's divine, so he's great. That's not the point that Paul is making. It was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, unto what end, that through Him He would reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross, reconciling through Him everything, whether things on earth or things in heaven. And though you were formerly alienated, hostile in mind, engaged in the evil deeds of the natural mind, Think back to John last week. Yet he has now reconciled you in his human body through death in order to present you before him holy and blameless and beyond reproach. If indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven and which I, Paul, have been made a minister. There is the framework for where I wanted to go, which is actually before that. But Paul, now in speaking to the Corinthians, as he's now, and again, I'm kind of doing this out of order, but Paul tells them who they are, how they're to understand what God has done, how they fit into this. And now he says in verse 9, since the day we've heard of your faith, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding. that you would walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, pleasing him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for the attaining of steadfastness and patience, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He delivered us from the domain of darkness, transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. I read the other part first because it explains what Paul is really meaning by this, that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will. Not his will for your life, who are you to marry, what job are you to have? His will that you are wrapped up in, the summing up of everything in Christ, this great and glorious grand will. and in that that he would strengthen you, that he would empower you, that he would give you steadfastness, that he would give you perseverance, and that you would actually be a thankful people as you recognize this movement of God that he has now judged all things and brought in the age of the new creation and transferred us from the dominion of darkness and placed us in the kingdom of his Son. Thankfulness. Thankfulness framed by the truths of the gospel enables us to be thankful now with respect to ourselves, our lives, our circumstances. That's the sense now in which we can understand that thankfulness is grounded in the paradigm of faith and not sight. Faith doesn't mean I believe information about God in some informational way, or that I believe that God is going to come through for me. Faith is the conviction of things not seen. It is the giving substance to that in which we hope. Well, what is that? It's that this God who has begun this work and in which we are a part will bring it to its fullness. He will not fail. He will prove faithful. He will prove faithful. And so faith is the paradigm of our thankfulness, not because we believe God for certain outcomes that we deem right or preferable, but we trust Him because of His revealed design for us and for the world and our confidence that He is faithful. What the prophets did for Israel is they always took them back. It was a ministry of remembrance. Remember what God has done. And that helps you to understand your good circumstance now. Even if you're in trouble or trial or danger, the security and settledness that you have now is because the God who was faithful in the past and has brought you thus far will be faithful in the future. He will be faithful in the future. When the author of Hebrews has that statement, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, it's not a doctrinal statement of Jesus' deity or his immutability. What he's saying is that as these have trusted him, even in promise, These who went before, they trusted Him, and even those who have now led you, and you've seen the outcome of their faith, you've seen how their confidence, their trust in the Christ who is unchanging, how that has been rewarded with God's goodness towards them, so you can know that you can walk that same path, because Christ is the same today as He was yesterday, and He will be the same forever. And so you have need of endurance that when you've done the will of God, you will receive what is promised. What is the will of God? In a very little while, he who is coming will come and he will not delay, but my righteous one must live by his faith. He must trust, he must walk, he must believe. Knowing that faith gives substance to what is hoped for, it allows us to see what can't be seen. trusting the God who has shown himself faithful. And Paul put it this way. The prophet said, remember your history. God brought you here. He brought you out of Egypt. He brought you to this point. Here's how it's going to look. Paul put it this way, he who began a good work and you will complete it in the day of Christ Jesus. And therefore he said, I do not lose heart. I don't grow weary. The time even for my departure has come, but I trust him. I don't know the where, the when, the how, or even the why in the narrow sense, but I know whom I have believed and I'm persuaded that he is able to keep what I've entrusted to him against that day. So from that vantage point, saints, we can begin to answer the questions of how thankfulness and thanksgiving apply to our specific issues, to the specific matters of our life. Can I be thankful for my food? Can I be thankful for my car? Can I be thankful for my wife or husband? Yes, but hopefully, again, within this framework. So the matters of our life, I've kind of put in these three categories, spiritual endowments, natural endowments, and trouble and suffering. Can we be grateful to God for spiritual endowments? Yes, but recognizing that spiritual blessings are those realities associated with the spirit and the realm that God himself inhabits. What Paul calls the spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms. Not spiritual blessings in the sense that the spirit's gonna give me all these things that I want. Spiritual blessings for this natural world. not earthly outcomes we hope to secure by the Spirit. The spiritual endowments are things that we should be grateful for, life in Christ. Go back and read Ephesians 1. But also natural endowments, natural gifts. But once again, gratefulness for the gifts is gratefulness to the giver. Gratefulness to God for the goodness of his gifts is gratefulness to the God who is good. The things themselves really only have their goodness because they come from God. Not because we assign goodness to them. The meaning, the significance, the value of all things is their relationship to God or their relationship in this dynamic of our relationship with God. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon says, there's nothing better than for a man to eat and drink and to enjoy his days under the sun. Well, that doesn't sound very spiritual, Solomon. There's nothing better for a man than to eat and drink, enjoy his days under the sun, enjoy the days God's given to him with the wife of his youth. Well, you just said it's vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Which is it? It's both. Because Solomon says, these are a gift of God. When things become an occasion of our worship, remember thankfulness is worship. When things become an occasion of our worship, then we are actually thankful in the proper sense. You have to maybe think about that a little bit. Paul put it this way, Satan wants us to think about things as good or bad in themselves. He calls that the doctrine of demons. The goodness in things exists because God has created them and because he endows them to us. and we are thankful for them because of how they testify of God's fatherly love and care and also the way in which they and all things contribute to his purposes, not just in us, not just for us, but in relation to us as we fit into a cosmic scheme as a critical piece of the puzzle. If I'm grateful for my husband, my wife, my dog, my car, my good job, whatever it happens to be, as such, then I'm back again in this realm of ingratitude. It's when really those things are just a reminder to me of the God who is faithful, who I am in relation to Him, what it means to be a part of this great and glorious work of God. And now it becomes a matter of worship. And I'm not worshiping my car, and I'm not worshiping my spouse, but they become an occasion of my worship. So we don't need to ignore the things that God has given us and say, oh, they're natural, they're temporal. Paul says they're all good. They are sanctified by God's own word and by prayer when they're received and understood in a certain way with the spirit of thanksgiving. And then lastly, this issue of trouble and suffering, which do characterize life in this world. You have to be pretty young to not know that the world is characterized by trouble and hardship and suffering and pain. And you certainly don't get to be very old before you start learning that's the case. The bubble gets popped pretty quickly, right? And Jesus said that. In this world, you have one thing, trouble. but I've overcome the world." You have trouble, but I've overcome the world. So how do we deal with trouble and difficulty, the dark providences of life? We don't wear rose-colored glasses. We don't pretend things are not what they are. We don't say, oh, this evil is good. We don't say that evil is good because it's come from God. That's not the way the scripture wants us to think. We don't call the evil and brokenness of the world good. Jesus didn't call it good. He said, I've overcome it. And so we thank and we praise God that he works in and through the evil and the brokenness of life in this world as the means to his all-comprehending good end. We don't wear rose colored glasses. We don't call evil good. We don't resign ourselves to the fact that God is sovereign. We can't change it. He's gonna do what he wants. He's in charge. So I'll just put my neck in the yoke and I'll just live this miserable life somehow fabricating a sense of thankfulness to God for all these terrible things. We don't do that either. We thank and we praise him that he works in and through the evil and wrongfulness and brokenness of the world as the means to his all-comprehending good end. That's what Paul means in Romans 8. He doesn't say that all things that happen are good. He says God works in all things for the good of those who love him. And so he has a good design in evil. Evil is the servant of God. Brokenness is the servant of God. Otherwise, the world wouldn't be broken. Otherwise, Christ himself would not learn sonship in the context of a broken world, right? God is teaching us what it means to be children of his, to live by faith and not by sight, to trust him, to walk with him, to love him, rather than to try to say, okay, well, based on the odds, this, this, this, this, the other thing, if I don't get this, I'm miserable, I'm in the tank. Here's my concluding statement, and I want this to be our point of meditation coming to the table. I think I've probably said it before, but I want you to think about it. I'll probably read it twice. Unsettledness, hardship, and suffering, which fill this world, even if we're not suffering in some grievous way at a point in time, life is unsettled and suffering is coming. Unsettledness, hardship, and suffering undermine and suffocate natural thankfulness. But these things give birth to and nourish and strengthen authentic thankfulness, the thankfulness that is the heart of worship and praise, the thankfulness that is the essence of the Christian life. Do you want to know whether you're a thankful people? How does unsettledness and hardship and suffering affect you? They will undermine and they will suffocate, they will choke the life out of what we naturally call thankfulness and we'll be bitter and resentful and despairing and depressed and bedridden. But those are the very things by God's design that give birth to and put wings under and nurture and cause to flourish authentic thankfulness. Because it is worship and it is directed to God and a confidence that what he is doing he will be faithful to accomplish it in perfection. Do we see it? No. Do we believe him? Yes. Sometimes we look in the mirror and it's hard. Denise and I talk about this a lot. It's hard to believe this thing of the new creation actually exists. Not just when you look in the mirror, but when you look in the church, when you look in the world around us. But God doesn't just say it exists. The resurrected Christ is the proof that it exists. And the outpouring of the Spirit is the proof that what has its origin, its germinal point in Christ, is moving out and will take the world into its grasp. Do we believe it? When we come to the table, I pray we do, because that's what the table is telling us, right? We partake in this Christ. We partake in his life. And partaking in his life is the promise of the fullness to come. The table looks backward, but it also looks forward, doesn't it? We do this as a remembrance until he comes. He who began this work will complete it. And saints, if we can live that way, we will rise above our difficulties. Not that we deny that they exist, but we can look at them through a different pair of glasses and we can be a thankful people. And when we can be a thankful people where it is who we are, not what we connect to circumstances as they seem to fit our agenda, then the world will recognize maybe this thing of the new creation is actually true. Maybe it does actually exist. Maybe the father has sent the son. Let's pray. Father, help us in these things. We do struggle. It is a challenge to be thankful, but we often are struggling in the wrong area. We're looking to correct the wrong problem. We think that the solution to ungratefulness is to step back and count all of our natural blessings and recognize that we have more good things than bad things. And for every difficult downturn, there's lots of happy, good things in our lives. But Father, when we do that, we're simply still operating according to this paradigm of sight, that we should be grateful because the good outweighs the bad as we see it. I pray that we will be a people whose gratitude is bound up in the truth of the gospel and who we are in you, in Christ, by the Spirit. And all of the circumstances of life, whether well-fed, whether hungry, whether plenty or want, whether sleepless or well-rested, in sickness and in health, in easy times and difficult times, we will be the same people, the same worshipers, the same thankful people. because our thankfulness is directed to who you are, what you have done, where this is going, our glorious privilege of being sharers in it. In that way, Father, we will be what you have called us to be, worshipers who are thankful. Press these things upon our hearts and minds and give us the grace and even the courage to repent of our ingratitude, to repent of our natural thinking. And as we come to the table, refresh us again in the glorious reality of what it means to be sharers in Christ, to Him be the glory in the church now and forever. Amen.