Is there a cure for worry, misery and fear? Keep that question in the back of your mind as we continue today.
In a region of Mexico HOT AND COLD SPRINGS are found side by side. Because of the convenience of this natural phenomenon the families often bring their laundry, boil their clothes in the hot spring and then rinse them in the cold spring.
A tourist watching this procedure commented to his Mexican guide, “They must think mother nature is generous to freely supply such ample clean hot and cold water.”
The guide replied, “No, señor, there is much grumbling because she does not supply the soap.” [Hodgin, Michael. 1001 Humorous Illus. Zondervan. p 348.]
What lens do you look at life through? Is life a problem to solve, a sad condition to be indured? Is life one hardship after the other, with little rest in between?
Or do you see life as a blessing. Your life, as a blessing. Do you see life as being full of challenges that you are eager to rise up to meet?
Another way of asking this question is: what is your internal dialogue like? In the day-to-day, does your life seem to yourself, and others, one of Thanksgiving? Or does it perhaps more like one of Gripes-giving?
I was toying with calling this message “The Power of Gripesgiving”. I was going to start by talking about how healing and fulfilling it is to complain and gripe about our problems.
I was going to go on and on as if I thought the day was really called “Gripesgiving”. Then I was going to have a couple of people yell out: “It’s not Gripegiving Day. It’s Thanksgiving Day, ya nit!”.
Then I woulde have said: “That’s very different. Nevermind”.
For those of us old enough to remember Rosanne Rosanadana, the Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live who would go on rants based on things she had misunderstood, that might have been funny.
For the rest, it might have just been weird.
Anyhow, it’s perhaps enough to ask those two questions about the lens we see life through and the nature of our internal thoughts or dialogue.
The theme of thanksgiving in Scripture is one that you find over and over again when you read the Bible; this reminder to remember good things and to do so with genuine gratitude. But it’s never the idea of gratitude presented as a platitude or shallow comfort.
In the Bible you don’t find anyone having a particularly pleasant time. You don’t find people who are living lives of leisure being encouraged to think positively about their circumstances.
What you find in the Bible as you spend any amount of time there is troubled people, living under oppressive political regimes. You find people suffering in exile.
You find people far from home and comfort. You find people who are sick, who are needy. You find people at the end of themselves, more often than not crying out to God in desperation.
So that’s what you find in the Bible. And it’s not really all that different from what you find out in the world today. It’s not so different from the way most people on this planet live. It’s not so different, perhaps, from our lives.
And all those people are encouraged to give thanks.
Really? “That’s rich”, you might say. In fact, we might be inclined to react badly when we hear about thanksgiving.
We might actually complain long and hard about how just truly miserable and impossible our situation is and how the call to being thankful that Scripture offers us is no solution at all, no help or use at all.
It’s true that thanksgiving is not a concrete solution to any problem. It’s not about how to fix stuff that’s not right.
It’s not particularly practical when you first think about it.
But thankfulness IS a call to a different perspective, a different way of looking at life and at the challenges life is throwing at us right now.
There is no doubt that for many on this planet, including many of us, much of life, or at least parts of life, are incredibly difficult.
But God offers another way. I’ve been reading through the Old Testament for many months now.
It’s good to read, but if you have much empathy, the amount of drama and suffering and hardship can be a little overwhelming.
The Scripture that ____ read is found around the middle of the Bible in a book that’s really a songbook, called the Book of Psalms. This psalm, like many others, was written by King David, a fella who had not had an easy life on any level.
He had known hard work as a young man, serving as a shepherd. He had been made king, technically, at a very young age… But, in reality, he was hunted like a dog by the presiding current king of Israel.
He was promised that he would be king but instead had to put his energies to not getting killed by King Saul instead.
His son rebelled against him, making his life miserable. He also did things himself to seriously hurt others and suffered from the consequences.
So he was familiar with hardship, with misery, with living in impossible situations. Yet he wrote this:
1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.
This is not so much encouragement to have a general sense of thankfulness. I've heard people balk at the notion of "giving thanks for all circumstances", for good reason.
In many circumstances there is actually very little, or nothing at all to be thankful for...in the circumstances themselves.
When someone that you love is suffering, when someone that you love dies, when you're desperately struggling to make ends meet, when there's too much month at the end of the money…we’re likely not going to want to give thanks.
But as this passage invites us to do, regardless of the circumstances we face, we can give thanks to God. Why? He is good. His love never fails, it lasts forever. In other words, God is not the problem. The truth is that the circumstances we face are never greater than God.
But this requires an attitude adjustment. It's pretty simple actually: keep our eyes focused on our circumstances, and we will have a very up and down, roller-coaster-like experience of life.
But if we keep remembering that no matter what happens to us, God is good, and his love is never withdrawn, his love endures forever, we will lead infinitely more grounded lives.
Remember…King David wrote this, and as when he wrote most of the Psalms, his external world was very topsy-turvy. But he stayed grounded on the inside by remembering to give thanks to God.
His internal dialogue stayed strongly focused on God, in a disciplined way, and because of that he was able to overcome all the hardships he faced in life.
2 Let the redeemed of the LORD tell their story—those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, 3 those he gathered from the lands, from east and west, from north and south. wandered in desert wastelands, finding no way to a city where they could settle.
You've got a story. Tell your story. If you have been a follower of Jesus for more than a few days, you have an experience of God's faithfulness. You have an experience of God's grace and mercy.
Life may have thrown you many curves, you may be suffering now, there may be suffering among those you love. But you likely have a story of God doing something marvelous, something miraculous, unexpected in your life.
Funny thing about when God does such things, he always cloaks them in coincidence.
That's his way of giving you permission to exercise faith and proclaim that God has been at work in your life; or exercise doubt and continue to practice being skeptical. It's his way of letting you exercise free will in the day-to-day.
Up until I was 17 years old, I lived my whole life being an atheist. I had no respect or care for God, because I was sure he did not exist.
A month after (just one month after) I became a Christian, I'm crossing the street at Coxwell and Danforth Avenue, and this complete stranger stops me in the middle of the intersection, looks at me and asks me "Are you a Christian?"
I was very surprised, and I simply said “yes”. He said something like "cool!", and walked away. I never saw him again.
Was that a coincidence? Was that God showing himself to me, reinforcing the reality of his existence and his love, when I was a very young Christian? It's up to me to decide. God will never force the reality of his existence upon you.
He will never make a single incident undeniable or irrefutable evidence that he exists. He will always let us choose - to believe or not believe. So when you tell your story, you don’t do it as proof of God’s reality, you do it as evidence that a person will listen to.
But be sure to tell your story, which for one who truly follows Jesus will always include a very genuine testimony of His faithfulness and goodness.
The psalm continues with the story of how God delivered his people. That's really the same of much of the old testament. Did God deliver you from a life of waste and shame? Tell your story. Has He healed you? Tell your story.
Has God been present in your life from the cradle, and were your parents faithful to live as good examples of what it truly means to follow God, and did that leave an impression that inspired you, also, to commit your life to Christ? That's an amazing story...maybe the best of all.
They were hungry and thirsty, and their lives ebbed away.
6 Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.
7 He led them by a straight way to a city where they could settle.
8 Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
9 for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.
So the Bible is full of stories of people who struggled, people just like me and you. And they, just like me and you, were inclined to complain. Gripesgiving was more ‘natural’ than thanksgiving.
Their lens was likely to be clouded with seeing life as a problem to solve, one hardship after the other, with little rest in between.
Their internal dialogue that happened before they verbalized their complaint, was, Of course, also pretty negative. Filled with worry and fear, and with thoughts like: “I can’t do this”, or “The mountain is just to hard to climb”.
My brother was once asked: “Do you see life as a cup, half-full or half-empty”. He said he saw his life as being a cup overflowing. Overflowing with blessing, with love, with God’s grace.
He said that knowing that in a few months before he would die of cancer. He said that as he looked back at his life that God had filled with purpose and joy. He said that as he anticipated the end of his own earthly life and the life that continues beyond this one.
Our reading earlier from Colossians 2: 6 said this: “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him,7 rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness”.
May you and I choose to live thankfully. Thanksgiving is in fact a big part of the cure for worry, for misery, for fear.
A commitment to being people of thanksgiving means that we make the conscious choice that because God loves us, because God is good, our cups are overflowing.
May we be mindful that God is never absent from our lives, and in fact that God wants more and more to be central to our thoughts and evident in all of our actions and words.
May we be careful to have a positive internal conversation or dialogue with ourselves, and may we as a result find that what comes out of our mouths is less and less gripesgiving, and more and more thanksgiving. Amen.
