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Sunday, December 1, 2019

The Thanksgiving Habit

This is the message given at the Onida community Thanksgiving service on Wednesday, November 27, 2019.  The Bible verses used are Philippians 4:4-9.


There’s a saying going around that you may have seen.  It goes, “What if you woke up today with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?
Now, I don’t think we need to take that literally.  I don’t think we need to thank God for a long list of things every single day.  But it does give me a little pause for thought.  How many things have I received that are blessings from God?  And how many of those blessings do I just take for granted?  And how would I feel if God, for whatever reason, decided to take some or all of those blessings away? 
When you think about it, every good thing we have is a blessing from God.  We’re tempted to say, “Well, I earned this with my hard work.”  But God gave us the ability to work hard.  We’re tempted to say, “I earned this because I’m so smart.”  But God gave us the ability to think.  We’re tempted to say, “I deserve this because I’m so good.”  But as Jesus said, no one is good except God alone.  Every good thing we have or ever will have is a blessing from God.
            And the thing is that thinking of those good things as things we’ve earned leads us into trouble.  It can do that in a couple of different ways.  For one thing, it can make us arrogant.  If I’ve earned things because I’m so smart, and if I deserve things because I’m so good, what does that say about people who do not have as many blessings as I have?  Well, they must not be as smart as I am.  They must not be as good as I am.  I must be better than they are. 
None of that’s true, of course.  We do not receive blessings because we’re so good.  As Jesus told us, no one is good except for God.  God looks at each of us and sees the same thing—a sinner in need of forgiveness and salvation.  But if we arrogantly believe we’ve earned blessings from God, if we believe we deserve them, that can keep us from asking God for the forgiveness we need.  We put up a wall between ourselves and God, because we don’t recognize how great God is and how small we are.
And what that leads to is taking God’s blessings for granted.  And we tend to do that a lot.  We take so many of God’s blessings for granted that we sometimes we don’t even think of them as blessings.  I think almost all of us are guilty of this to one degree or another.  We’re quick to blame God when things don’t go the way we want them to go.  But when things go the way we think they should go, well, we don’t really even think about that very much.  We just take it for granted.  Why should we thank God for that?  That was just things happening as they should.  And even if God had something to do with it, well, that’s God’s job, to make things happen as they should.  Why thank God for that?
But the thing is, God does not owe us anything.  God certainly does not owe it to us to make things go the way we think they should go.  God does not owe it to us to give us any good things at all.  In fact, God does not even owe it to us to give us mediocre things.  God does not owe us anything.
There’s another reason that thinking we’ve earned good things can lead us into trouble.  If the good things we have are the result of things we’ve done, what can happen?  We can lose them, right?  And so then what happens is that we start to live in fear of losing them.  We start to hoard our blessings.  We’re afraid to share them with anyone else, because we might not have enough.
In other words, we do the exact opposite of what Paul tells us to do in our reading from Philippians.  Paul tells us to rejoice in the Lord!  Paul tells us not to be anxious about anything, but instead to simply present our requests to God through prayer.  Trust that God will know what to do, that God knows what we really need, and that God will give us what we need when we need it.  As Jesus also said, God knows how to give good gifts to God’s children.
And when we do that, what happens?  We get peace.  We get, as Paul says, the peace of God, which transcends all of our understanding.  That peace of God will guard our hearts and will guard our minds.
And the way we get that is to realize that all of our blessings have come from God.  When we realize that, we can rejoice in the Lord.  We can stop being anxious.  We can feel that peace.  Because if God has given us blessings before, we can trust that God will give us blessings again.  Not because we deserve them, but simply because God loves us that much.
But that’s the attitude we need to keep.  An attitude that says I trust God to give me what I need, not because I deserve it, but because I trust in God’s love.  I don’t take for granted that God will give me what I want, I just trust that God will love me enough to give me what I need.
Now, the truth is that if God took away every blessing God has ever given us, we would have no legitimate cause to complain, because we have done nothing to deserve them in the first place.  We have no right to demand God’s blessings, and God does not owe it to us to give us blessings.  When you think of how awesome and holy and perfect God is, and how small and imperfect and sinful we are in comparison, it’s a miracle that God takes any notice of us at all.  We are not owed God’s love and God’s blessings.  What we really deserve is punishment for our sins.  And we would get that, if not for the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in dying on the cross took the punishment that should have gone to us.  If God took away our blessings, we would be getting no more than what we deserve.
But the awesome thing is that God would never do that.  God loves us too much to take away all of God’s blessings.  God could do that, because God is God and God can do anything.  And again, if God did choose to do that, we would have no good reason to be angry with God, because we had no right to those blessings to begin with.  But we can be confident that God never would do it, because we can be confident in God’s love.  As the Apostle Paul said, nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God.
            But the point is that, because we have no right to demand God’s blessings, we need to be more grateful to God for giving them to us.  We need to spend more time thanking God and praising God.  We should do that all the time, of course, but we need to start sometime.  And here we are in November, on the eve of Thanksgiving.  What better time could there be to start a habit of thanking God and praising God, a habit that lasts well past Thanksgiving and continues for the rest of our lives?
            But let’s not just say that.  You know, every year at this time, every pastor in town talks about our need to thank God.  And maybe we remember to do it on Thanksgiving day, and maybe even for a couple of days after that.  And then, a lot of times, we forget about it and go on about our business until next year, when we go through the cycle again.
            So here’s a suggestion.  Every night, before you go to sleep, just take a minute to think of all the blessings you received that day.  Think about all the things that went right.  Sometimes it may be a big list, sometimes it may be a small list.  But almost every day, we can think of something if we really try.  So think about those things, every night.  And take the time to thank God for them.
            It may seem a little strange at first, but keep at it.  Because if we do, this feeling of thankfulness will become a habit.  And then, it will become a lifestyle.  It will become natural to us to give thanks to God.  And the more it becomes a habit and a lifestyle, the more things we’ll find to thank God for.  We’ll start to notice all these small things that we used to take for granted.
            And when we do that, we get what Paul writes about.  We’ll get peace.  We will stop being anxious, and get the peace of God.  That peace of God will be in our hearts, in our minds, in our souls.  That does not mean everything will go perfectly.  It means that we’ll be able to trust God with the stresses of life.  We’ll trust that God has always been there for us, and that God will always be there for us.  Knowing that is what gives us peace.
Each of us has received numerous blessings from God.  Let’s make sure we thank God for those blessings.  And let’s make sure we continue to thank God, at Thanksgiving time, at Christmas time, at Easter time, and all the time.

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