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.
No comments:
Post a Comment