A Thankful Spirit Series

lesson I learned from that experience was that if you have all the fresh water you can drink

and all the food you care to eat, you ought never to complain about anything."

The problem is, most people don't spend 21 days on the Pacific starving and drying of

thirst. Most also do not spend 14 days being blown across the Mediterranean by a hurricane

starving. One suspects that even God would find it a challenge to arrange for all people to

have these types of experience. The rest of us need to learn from their experience how to

have a thankful spirit in spite of a small content of things to be thankful for. A good question

we need to consider is, how much does it take to make us thankful? If there needs to be a

large content to our bag of blessings before we can be grateful to God, then we are not truly

thankful people. Thankful people can be thankful even if the table of contents in their book

of blessings has only two chapters, says Paul, and they are food and clothing.

We sing, Count Your Many Blessings, and we can do it, for our list is longer than our arm

of the things for which we have to be grateful, but Paul says, even if your list consists of just

two, and who can't count at least two, that is sufficient content for the truly thankful heart.

So count your blessings one by one.

If two is all you find under the sun,

Then like an incense to the skies,

Let your prayer of thankfulness arise.

As we look at this Thanksgiving in a hurricane, on the high seas, we can first of all be

grateful that we do not have such a little to be grateful for, as they did. But we can also be

grateful that by God's grace a Christian can be grateful when there is so little to be grateful

for. The question is not, just how much do you have to be grateful for, but how little can you

have left, and still be grateful? Can you suffer the loss of all things, and yet thank God for

life, and the food you need to sustain life? How much content do you need

on your Thanksgiving list to be content?

An old time evangelist past the hat for an offering, and when it came back it was

embarrassingly empty. He shook the hat to make clear it was empty, and then lifted his eyes

to heaven and said, "I thank thee Lord that I got my hat back from this congregation." One

has reason to doubt the sincerity of this expression of thanks for so little, but there is no

doubt about the sincerity of Paul's spirit of thanks. When you truly have a thankful spirit, it

does not take a lot to make you thankful. It is good for us to measure the content of our

thankfulness, and find out if we need plenty to be grateful, or if we can, like Paul, have a

thankful spirit even with very little. Thirdly look at=

III. THE CONTAGION OF HIS THANKFULNESS.

Verse 36 says they were all encouraged and ate some food. One positive optimistic

thankful person can change the whole atmosphere in a terrible situation. Thankfulness is a

contagious spirit. If everybody is complaining and gripping, and one person shares their

spirit of thankfulness, the others feel embarrassed to go no complaining, and they too begin