The School Of Thanksgiving!
*Outline from James McDonald*
Here’s the problem I have on a morning like this. I grew up in a secular home where we celebrated with gusto the holidays. You’ve heard me share with you about the materialism of the Willis family Christmas. But not just Christmas, holidays in general were big deals to us. If there was a long weekend there was sure to be a special outing or at the very least a family feast. I was probably 13 years old before I realized that the Easter weekend was the commemoration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Easter in our house was a mixture between Christmas and Hallowe’en, scaled down and in warmer weather. We always got a toy at Easter and we got plenty of junk food and there was always a family feast. Growing up, thanksgiving commemorated for me most of all the first long weekend of the school year. It was the first break from school, and it really was all about the food, about the family event, getting to stay up late on Sunday night and sleep in on Monday morning. I can’t ever remember feeling exceptionally thankful on Thanksgiving weekends, just exceptionally excited about lots of turkey, mashed potatoes, stove top stuffing, and that fake cheese cake from a box that my wife still refuses to make for me (If its not from scratch it just doesn’t cut it).
Starting when I began to follow Christ, but progressing into my adulthood I tried to seek more of a sacred understanding of holidays. I don’t want a fake thanksgiving . . . I want true thanksgiving. But that’s difficult, not simple in the culture that we live in.
History tells us that the commemoration of the first thanksgivings in the United States and Canada dealt with a desire for people to thank Almighty God for what they had . . . and it wasn’t because they had the abundance that we all have . . . abundance for them simply was to live another day . . . that there was something to eat . . . that they were not dead of disease. That they didn’t die on the agonizingly long and dangerous boat journey from Europe to the Americas. Day to day life was way more concerned with survival. We live in an era of so much abundance that our days are really more about leisure then they are about survival. We have so much abundance in our culture that we have a 24 hour cable station called the Food Network and all they air all day and all night is different ways to ‘prepare’ the abundance. We have so much we have to take time to figure out what to do with it all!
Do you want a true thanksgiving? Maybe its just me . . . but why am I haunted by the thought that the first people who celebrated thanksgiving were far more thankful than those of us who live in this era? Who after all has more to be thankful for, us or them? We simply have abundantly more than they did, but I would suggest that when we have the proverbial silver spoon shoved in our mouth it makes it very difficult for the words thank-you to be heard.
READ: 1 Chronicles 29:10-13
The message of 1 Chronicles 12 is that God is the provider and the proper response to a provider is thanksgiving! This is the basis . . . the foundation of thanksgiving. If you will, we can call it . . .
1. Grade School Thanksgiving – 1 Chronicles 29:12-13
I haven’t raised children but I’ve had plenty of friends who have and Irene and I have had the opportunity to be in relationship over the years with many young families. We love kids. Over the years when we’ve spent time with young families I’ve really marveled at the great job that it is to teach our children to be thankful. If you have young children or are grandparents . . . you know all too well what I mean. It’s one of those things you have to keep on as a parent.
Every time your child receives something from someone else. Every time a child shares a toy or a cookie, you’re on them to make sure that they say thank-you. As someone who occasionally has the privilege of spending time with small children, I’ve often been on the receiving end of awkward exchanges. Maybe we’ve given a child a gift, or there’s a family in our home and I give their child something special to eat from the pantry or the cookie jar and there is this almost chant like response from the parent . . . “what do you say to Mr. Willis”, “say thank-you to Mr. Willis”. I don’t know about you . . . but its always made me feel uncomfortable. . . maybe because I don’t expect a thank-you for something I consider so small . . . or maybe because someone else telling someone to say thank-you and then receiving an almost forced thank-you to me doesn’t seem to add up to a real thank-you. But I understand it . . . I’ll do it with my kids as well, but why do we do it. Is it because we don’t want to be embarrassed by our kids, because we’re concerned about the right thing, or is it because we want our kids to be thankful people. My hope is that we want our kids to be thankful people!
But I’m sure this is how we all learned how to say thank-you, we’ve all been through this ourselves, and have brought our children and our grandchildren through it now as well. This is grade school thanksgiving. This is cookie jar thanksgiving. We all learn when we are really little, that it is appropriate to say thank-you but also that if we do not say thank-you, what is communicated is that we will not receive, and so we learn in grade school thanksgiving that we say thank-you to get something. Actually, when we’re little we’re taught that if we want something we should say please and then we get it and then we say thank-you. But you don’t say please to receive a gift. A gift is just given, but we’re taught as little ones that if we do not say thank-you, even a gift might be taken away!
Children are always saying thank-you because they are not able to provide for themselves. They struggle to put on their own shoes, they need help with their food. They can’t reach anything. They can’t provide for themselves, and so they are taught with almost everything . . . to say thank-you for it. Because the majority of what they experience in life is done for them. When David’s praying here in 1 Chronicles 29, he is describing grade school thanksgiving, the kind that praises for provision and realizes that everything we have comes from a source not of our own. You and I need to be constantly reminded that as David prayed, “Both riches and honor come from you oh God and it lies in your hand to make great and to strengthen everyone.” And yet we often act like riches and honor and greatness and strength is of our own production.
When my wife was a child and her mother was teaching her manners like not putting her elbows on the table her mom would fork Irene’s elbows. Irene’s learned quite well, well enough that now she forks my elbows when they’re on the table. It’s not fun to be 33 years old and be stabbed in your elbow with a fork. Gotta say, it doesn’t just hurt the elbow, but the pride a little bit as well. Grade school thanksgiving may just be discipline we teach our children, but forget ourselves. Can you imagine someone following you around at work, at school, or at home, as you run your business, teach your students, disciplining your children having a chanting voice in your ear, “what do you say . . .” . . . “thank Mr. so and so”
Grade School Thanksgiving is remembering to say thank-you for all the good that we receive, but as we grow up we hopefully don’t stay in grade school forever, hopefully we make it to . . .
2. High School Thanksgiving – 1 Thessalonians 5:18
1 Thessalonians 5:18 reads, “In everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
In High School we usually begin to get our first tastes of independence. Maybe we get our first real job. We get a drivers license. We get to leave the house on our own. Though some of us might have overbearing parents that would like to keep us under their thumb, it’s less likely that we have someone hanging over our shoulder with the chant, “what does a good boy say”.
No longer is everything handed to us, we now have to work for what we get. This can be the beginning or the end of true thanksgiving. It can be the ending of true thanksgiving if we forget the voice in our ear . . . if just because we’re beginning to earn our own way through life, we begin to forget the words of David’s prayer in Chronicles that both riches and honor come from you oh God and it lies in your hand to make great and to strengthen everyone.
But there is a hope that it can be the beginning of thanksgiving if we begin to understand what the preacher says in Ecclesiastes 2:24-25, “There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him.” We begin to understand that work is good and it is God’s way of giving and that there are good aspects in the challenging circumstances of life.
So we take Paul’s words seriously, in everything we give thanks and that means that we don’t just say thank-you for what is handed to us on a silver platter or fed to us on a silver spoon, but we learn to look for the goodness of God despite labor, despite trial, despite effort, despite pain, or what the writer of Ecclesiastes would say, despite the folly of this world.
How do we do this? Well we enjoy and give thanks for the gifts that labor, toil, and effort bring, like family and friends, good food and drink. We enjoy and give thanks for pastimes and sport. We go for walks in the forest. We look at leaves. We marvel at God’s creation. Last week Wade shared at Men’s breakfast that he is thankful for where we live, the beauty of the prairies and the abundance that the resources bring us.
I wasn’t in high school anymore, but my thanksgiving was still high school oriented one day when I was headed into Vancouver on a spring day with a couple of buddies and we were talking about life and I can remember saying to them, you know, I said, life might be hard, but its still worth living for all the great things we get to experience, like the taste of a hot slice of pizza, the thrill of playing hockey, the beauty of the mountains, the nervous excitement of talking to a girl you think is pretty.
It was very high school oriented (it was somewhat shallow of me to say), I don’t think I even had begun to scratch the surface on how hard or difficult life could be. When I read Paul’s words, “In everything give thanks” I saw it as saying, you know even when things are crummy there has to be something good to around to be reminded of . . . Have you been there? Are you there now?
Somewhere along the line though I moved on from high school thanksgiving, I don’t know when exactly I began to understand that there was more to thanksgiving . . . but I began to understand that there was a . . .
3. Graduate School Thanksgiving – Ephesians 5:20
Paul writes in Ephesians 5:20 . . . “Always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Grade school thanksgiving is thanking God for all the “good stuff” he gives us. High School thanksgiving is realizing that even when were living within tough circumstances there is something to be thankful for. Graduate school thanksgiving shouts praise to God for all things, good and bad.
It’s an always, continual type of thanksgiving. It doesn’t stop when the clouds roll in. It’s not pre-empted for darkness when it will not seem to lift.
I’ve often been perplexed by two perspectives. Jesus told his disciples, “What man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”
Jesus says this and yet, how many of us have asked for life and received death? How many of us have asked for blessing and yet seem to be living with cursing? Life often seems to deal us out our fair share of stones and snakes.
Paul also writes what we talked about last week, “that momentary light affliction is producing in us an eternal weight of glory.”
The lessons we learn in graduate school thanksgiving is that things are not always as they appear. What looks like a snake, God can use to nourish us like it was a fish. What is as heavy as a stone, can become bread of life. Graduate school thanksgiving is the school of hard knocks.
In this life we do not see graduation from graduate school thanksgiving. The smartest students are always students, they keep learning how to praise God for what comes their way. You may be wondering . . . how do I get to graduate school thanksgiving? I don’t think we can study at the graduate school unless we continue to study the basics of grade school and high school thanksgiving. If you want to learn how to find thanks in the bad things of life you do it by, practicing giving thanks for everything you have. You do it daily. You make it a discipline. Instead of whining go for a walk in the forest. Don’t just eat your turkey dinner, savor it. You might not have a voice chanting over your shoulder so write thank-you on your hand if you have to. Sing thank-you. Read about thank-you. Expose yourself to stories and facts that cause thank-you to rise out of your heart and pass your lips.
How do you say thank-you for miscarriage? I don’t exactly know, but what I do know is that miscarriage has helped me to . . .
- It’s helped me love and appreciate my wife more.
- It’s helped me hug my nieces tighter.
- It’s helped me sing louder praise to God.
- It’s helped me long for heaven more.
- It’s helped me hate abortion more.
All of these things I think I should thank God for . . . I think I’m better off than I was before. The issue of thanksgiving has everything to do with two things that we either believe or don’t believe about God.
Do you believe God is good? Really good? Always good?
Do you believe God is the giver of all your abundance? All you have?
