GIVING THANKS
A few days before Thanksgiving, a man in Florida called his son in Toronto. “I hate to ruin your day, Son, but I have some bad news for you. Your mother and I are getting a divorce. Forty-five years of misery is enough.” Frantic, the son called his sister in Vancouver to tell her the shocking news. “I’ll handle this,” the sister said. And she immediately called her parents. “You are not getting a divorce!” she told her father. “We are flying down tomorrow night, so that we can talk some sense into you and Mom. Don’t do anything until we get there!” “All right,” the father agreed. The father hung up the phone and hollered to his wife, “Okay, they’re coming for Thanksgiving…and they’re paying their own way!”
Have you noticed that many people now refer to Thanksgiving Day as “Turkey Day”? Why?
“Although they knew God [through creation], they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him” (Romans 1:21). Mankind refused to give thanks to God for earthly blessings, such as sunshine, rain, and crops. Instead, they “worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (v. 25).
Sadly, Thanksgiving has become a day when people worship a created thing (a turkey) rather than the Creator.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician and philosopher, said, “Man’s sensitivity to small things, and his insensitivity to the most important things, are surely evidences of a strange disorder.”
Two common attitudes toward thanksgiving:
• Blessings are seen as coming from US, not GOD.
Bart Simpson’s prayer: “Dear God, we paid for this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.”
“You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18).
“Every good and perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17).
“Always give credit where credit is due.”
Governor William Bradford of Massachusetts is believed to have made the first Thanksgiving proclamation three years after the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth:
Inasmuch as the Great Father has given us this year of an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forest to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as He has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of nine and twelve in the daytime, on Thursday, November 29th, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Six Hundred and Twenty-Three, and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.
On January 31, 1957, the Canadian Parliament proclaimed: “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed…is to be observed on the second Monday in October.”
The tradition of Thanksgiving was born out of the realization that all good things come from God and that He deserves our gratitude.
• PHYSICAL and MATERIAL blessings are valued more than SPIRITUAL blessings.
Life expectancy:
1st century: 20-30 years
Early 20th century: 30-40 years
Present: 65 years (source: wikipedia.org)
Canada: 80.4 years (source: cbc.ca)
Probably most of us don’t consider ourselves wealthy, but according to a website called the Global Rich List:
If your annual income is $10,000, you are richer than 86% of the world’s population.
If your annual income is $30,000, you are richer than 91% of the world’s population.
If your annual income is $60,000, you are richer than 99% of the world’s population.
We should be thankful for physical and material blessings, but we should be more thankful for spiritual blessings.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3).
GOD’S INDESCRIBABLE GIFT
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift! (2 Corinthians 9:15).
1. God’s gift is the SACRIFICE of His SON.
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16b).
a. The motive for God’s gift: LOVE.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son
“For God so loved the world.” The word “so” emphasizes the intensity of God’s love. “For God loved the world so much…” (NLT).
If you wanted to learn the meaning of the word “love,” you might look in a dictionary. [Pick up dictionary] But a dictionary isn’t the best the place to look for a definition of “love.” The Bible says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). God defines love. If you want to know what love is, you must know who God is and what He has done.
[Open dictionary] Here is how one dictionary (Merriam-Webster Online) defines “love”: (1) strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (maternal love for a child); (2) attraction based on sexual desire; (3) affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests (love for his old schoolmates).
“For God so loved the world.” “The world” means people, not the planet. According to the dictionary, love is shown to only to certain people: a family member, a friend, or an attractive person. That’s not God’s kind of love. His love is a love that extends to everyone.
The Bible describes humanity as sinful. We have turned away from God. But we still matter to Him. “The wages of sin is death [physical, spiritual, eternal]” (Romans 6:23). The world is in need of salvation. God saw our need; and, because He is love, He gave His Son to save us.
“In the gospel, we discover we are far worse off than we thought, and far more loved than we ever dreamed.”
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” Centuries before God gave the world His Son, another father was asked by God to make the same sacrifice. The father’s name was Abraham. God said to him, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about” (Genesis 22:2). In the end, Abraham discovered that God only wanted to test his obedience. Isaac was spared. But Jesus, God’s Son, was not spared. What Abraham was asked to do, God did. He sacrificed His only Son.
In the story of Abraham and Isaac, we find the first occurrence of the word “love” in the Bible. The first time we read of “love” in the Bible, it is used to describe the affection of a father for his son. When we turn over to the NT, the first time we find the word “love” in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is when God says of Jesus, “This is my Son, whom I love” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22). Finally, when we come to John’s Gospel, the first mention of love is found in John 3:16. The Son God loves was sent to earth to die for us. He gave us what was most precious to Him. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
b. The recipient of God’s gift: ANYONE.
That whoever
The acceptance of God’s gift: FAITH.
Believes in him
c. The benefit from God’s gift: ETERNAL LIFE.
Shall not perish but have eternal life
To “perish” doesn’t mean to cease to exist. It means to exist forever in a state of separation from God. This Bible calls this “hell.” Because of our sin, we deserve hell. We don’t deserve heaven. But we can escape hell and enjoy heaven because of the gift of God’s Son.
To enjoy a gift, you must first receive it. All of us have two options: (1) we can decide to put our trust in Jesus and receive eternal life, or (2) we can decided to not put our trust in Jesus and receive condemnation.
2. God’s gift is too AMAZING for WORDS.
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
3. God’s gift is worthy of our deepest GRATITUDE.
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
MORE THAN WORDS
Paul’s expression of thanks to God for His indescribable gift comes at the end of a section on giving (2 Corinthians 8-9).
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
We should give thanks by DOING something to SHOW our thankfulness.
Many years ago there was a man who had the duty to raise a drawbridge to allow the steamers to pass on the river below and to lower it again for trains to cross over on land. One day, this man’s son visited him, wanting to watch his father at work. Quite curious, as most boys are, he peeked into a trapdoor that was always left open so his father could keep an eye on the machinery that raised and lowered the bridge. Suddenly, the boy lost his footing and tumbled into the gears. As the father tried to reach down and pull him out, he heard the whistle of an approaching train. He knew the train would be full of people and that it would be impossible to stop the fast-moving locomotive. He knew the train must be lowered! A terrible dilemma confronted him: if he saved the people, his son would be crushed by the gears. Frantically, he tried to free the boy, but it was no use. Finally, the father put his hand to the lever that would start the machinery. He paused and then, with tears in his eyes, he pulled it. The giant gears began to work and the bridge clamped down just in time to save the train. The passengers, not knowing what the father had done, were laughing and having a good time; yet the bridge keeper had chosen to save their lives at the cost of his son’s.
God the Father also saw his Son Jesus Christ being nailed to a cross while people laughed and mocked and spit upon Him. Yet, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
