The holiday season has once again rolled around and people are wondering where did the year go. It seems like Thanksgiving is over in most people’s minds. The stores are already filled with Christmas decorations, children and grandchildren are already making their lists and wondering what’s going to be under the Christmas tree, and Mom and Dad are already worrying about how they’re going to pay for it. Thanksgiving has become some kind of a pre-season holiday, a warmup for the more important holiday of Christmas … and that’s a shame because the art and practice of “giving thanks” is what separates us from the rest of the animals. Saying “thank you” is a way for us to acknowledge that someone has given us a gift … usually something unexpected or something that we did not earn or do not deserve. As Christians, we are thankful because we know that life itself is a precious gift from God … which is why we give thanks for everything and the holiday of Thanksgiving is a unique and special time where we can show our gratitude to God and thank Him for everything that He’s done and for everything that He has given us.
My Thanksgiving message today is unique … kind of different … because we’re going to be taking a good look at Psalm 131 and then I’m going to ask you to do something for Thanksgiving that you may have never done before. I am going to ask you to not only give thanks for all the things that God has done for you and God has given you … [pause] … but I am also going to ask you to give thanks to God for all the things He HASN’T done for you or given you. You heard me right. This Thanksgiving, I’m asking you to thank God for all the things that He has done for you and given you and I’m asking you to thank God for all the things that He hasn’t done or given you.
I hope you brought your “Owner’s Manuals” with you. Turn with me to Psalm 131. The first thing that you’ll notice is that Psalm 131 is a very short song. It has only three verses. There is a reason for that. Psalm 131 is part of a collection of psalms … or songs … known as “pilgrim psalms” … which are made up of Psalms 120 to 134. You’ll notice that Psalms 120 to 134 all have the words “A Song of Ascent” at the top or beginning of the psalm. Psalms 120 to 134 are psalms or “songs” of “ascent” because they were sung by Jewish pilgrims as they began climbing or ascending the hills around Jerusalem as they made their way to the City of God to celebrate in one of the annual festivals. You’ll also notice that all of the “psalms of ascent” are short … except for Psalm 132 … so that they can easily be memorized. They were sung to prepare the hearts and minds and spirits of the pilgrims for worship at the Temple.
As I’ve already pointed out, Psalm 131 only has three verses so it has not been viewed as important as, say, Psalm 23, Psalm 100, Psalm 121, or Psalm 130 and that’s unfortunate because this little hymn of David is actually a packed jewel. The preeminent preacher Charles Spurgeon described Psalm 131 as “the shortest to read, but one of the longest to learn” (https://www.christianity.com/bible/commentary.
php?com=spur&b=19&c=131). Psalm 131 is made up of three verses and each verse reveals an important trait or quality that I hope will inspire us and prepare us as we make our “ascent” or approach into Thanksgiving and the holiday season.
Look at … or listen to … verse 1, which starts out: “O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high.” At first this might sound as if David is kind of down or depressed … “my heart is not lifted up” sounds like he has a heavy heart and the fact that his eyes are not raised too high suggests that he’s downtrodden, looking at the ground. In reality, David’s opening statement is a declaration of his humility. The phrase “my heart is not lifted up” means that he is not full of himself … that his heart is not puffed up or swelled up with pride. The Hebrew word that we commonly translate as “proud” literally means “high.” In the Old Testament, it was used to describe “high” trees or “high” mountains. Someone who’s proud is someone who thinks of themselves as one of the tallest trees in the forest or sees themselves as towering over everyone else like an imposing mountain. We mean the same thing when we accuse someone of sitting on their “high horse.”
David’s humility is based on his limitations. He states in the second half of verse 1 that he doesn’t not occupy himself with things that are too great and too marvelous or wonderful for him to understand. I love the plain way that The Living Bible puts it: “Lord, I am not proud and haughty. I don’t think myself better than others. I don’t pretend to ‘know it all.’”
Let’s be honest with ourselves on this point. We live in a culture that puts a very low value on humility From the moment we enter the world we are taught, we are urged, and we are constantly being pushed to “get ahead,” to “climb the ladder of success,” to look out for Number One, to win at all cost and show off our success by the car we drive, by the home we buy, by the clothes we wear, and by the friends that we keep. A lot of rushing to go where. As William Shakespeare put it: “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth. Act 5, Scene 5). We wear ourselves out chasing, chasing, always chasing to become what we think we should be … to get what we think we deserve … and we fail to experience the calm, the quiet, the peace that comes from humility.
Humility means that you now longer have to run the world … and, in fact, you never did and you never will … and that’s a very freeing thought. As we discussed last week, we don’t have to solve all our problems by ourselves. Where we end, we find that God begins. David knows his limits, do you? Outside of his limits, outside of what he can do, he can do nothing … so why worry … why stress out over things that are too big, too marvelous, too wonderful for us to handle as David says. It’s a waste of time and energy for us … but not for God. Happy is the person, says David, who knows their limitations. We discover a peace and a joy when we let go and let God take over our lives, amen?
Let’s see how good your memory is. Several weeks ago we took a deep look at another one of David’s songs … Psalm 22 … remember? He spoke about the comfort and security that a child experiences when it is held by its mother. God delivered David like a mid-wife who places the child on the mother … in the case of Psalm 22, that’s God … who kept David safe and protected. As you recalled, David lamented over the fact the God appeared to be ignoring the cries of His child, David. In verse 2 of Psalm 131, we also see another stark and disturbing image of God as One who appears to be a cruel and uncaring mother. “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul within me is like a weaned child” (Psalm 131:2).
Mothers in particular will understand what David is trying to say. When a child is born, it looks to its mother’s breasts for nourishment. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack all come from the same place. When the child is hungry, it does what? It cries, amen? And when the mother responds and the child gets what it wants or needs, what does it do? It stops crying. The child “calms” down and falls into a peaceful and satisfied sleep … just as David’s soul is calmed and quieted when it gets what it needs and wants from God.
Unfortunately, this joy and bliss doesn’t last forever. Eventually the child has to be weaned from his mother’s breasts, amen? Boy, it that a lot of fun, am I right parents? Woo boy! The child doesn’t know or understand what’s going on. It doesn’t know that weaning is a good thing, an important thing if they’re going to continue to grow and eventually become independent. All they know is that a breast appears every time they cry and their cries are reward with nourishing, comforting food. When their cries suddenly go unheeded, what do they do, mothers? They cry louder and louder and louder as they get angrier and angrier and more and more frustrated. Crying and fussing worked a thousand times before, why isn’t it working now? Their souls are anything but at peace and quiet, amen? And neither is the mother’s heart and soul at peace and quiet. It’s a tough, tough time for both the child and the mother, amen?
The mother doesn’t stop feeding the child. Instead, she gives the child a bottle. When the child is old enough, she will wean the child off the bottle and they will go on to eat solid food. The child’s culinary world gets bigger and wider as they get to experience new and different foods. They get to sit at the table and eat with the rest of the family … all things that they would have missed had they never been weaned. What seems like something cruel and uncaring on the part of the mother becomes a necessary and loving action that encourages the child to grow and experience more of life. It also changes the relationship between the mother and the child. The child no longer comes to the mother for nourishment but it can still come to the mother for love and comfort and security … again, in a broader sense than just at her breasts, understand? Unless a mother weans her child, that child will never fully grow up. It will be a baby all the days of its life. Though it may seem hard … and though the child totally misunderstands ... a mother who loves her child will not give up until the child is fully weaned and able to eat on its own … and the child no longer screams and hollers and cries for what it once found to be indispensable. The child goes from being absolutely dependent upon its mother’s milk to realizing that it no longer needs it.
In the beginning, weaning feels like having something removed from your life which you thought you absolutely could not live without. But over time, David came to realize that the things that he thought that he absolutely had to have … or that he thought he would die if he didn’t have … money, wealth, power, safety, security … he found out that he didn’t them need anymore … that he could and would survive without them. When God tried to “wean” David off of his dependence on the things of this world, he probably screamed and hollered like a frightened child … but over time he realized that the only thing that he needed was God … and when he came to see and understand that, he felt a peace and calm and a quiet … he felt “content” … and his soul felt “content.”
What does “contentment” mean to you? For most of the world, “contentment” means having all our needs met … like a baby at its mother’s breast. Unfortunately, most of us will never reach a point in our lives where all our needs are continually met, amen? If that’s true, then our chase for contentment will never end … our constant pursuit of contentment will always be more of a source of frustration than comfort, and it will most likely always end in disappointment. For most of the world, the chase will never end. A billionaire was once asked if he would ever stop working. “When I make enough money,” was his reply. “And how much money is enough?” he was asked. His answer: “Just one more dollar … just one more deal … and I’ll have enough.” Funny but true, amen?
Most of us aren’t that much different from that billionaire, are we? If only we had one more dollar … if only we could close one more deal … if only we could pay off the car loan or the mortgage … or the kid’s college tuition … or have enough money so that we can retire without a lapse in our present lifestyle. If only we had this and if only we had that … and the world keeps dangling that carrot in front of us and the devil keeps laughing while we keep chasing after our elusive “contentment.”
No wonder Thanksgiving whizzes by so fast. No wonder Christmas is so overwhelming. We are thankful, yes … but are we content? Are our souls content? We are thankful for what we have. We are thankful for what God has done … but we give Him a wink and a nod, a tip of the hat and we chase on. We’re thankful for what we have but always have our eye on the next thing, the next achievement, the next goal. Instead of being weaned from the world we are “welded” … I mean … “wedded” to it. We are thankful but our hearts, our souls are anything but calm, anything but quiet, anything but content.
The key to contentment is simplicity. As David pointed out in Verse 1, God is God and he is not … and when he realized that, he stopped playing God … and when he stopped playing God and trying to run the universe, his mind, his heart, and his soul were calm, at peace. Jesus said that unless we change … unless we become like children … trusting and faithful … we will never have peace, we will never have trust, we will never have faith in God’s Word or God’s promises. Like Abram and Sarai, we’ll “over think” them. God’s promises will confuse and elude us. They become things too great and too “wonderful” for us to comprehend or figure out so we’ll try to figure out how to make them come true under our own power, under our own resources … and we will fail miserably … as Abram and Sarai did. If I have the simple faith of a child then I will believe in God’s promise and I won’t need to worry or stress out about how that’s going to happen … I absolutely know that God can and will make it happen … and as a result of my faith and trust my heart and my mind and my soul are calm, quiet, and at peace, amen?
Little Amy found out that her aunt Sue was going to be a missionary in a far away country. Amy was close to her aunt and was having a hard time understanding why her aunt was leaving and going so far away. Just before her aunt had to leave, Amy asked her grandmother why Aunt Sue was going to Africa. Her grandmother replied, “Well, Amy, God called her and said, ‘Sue, I need you to go to Africa for me.’” Amy thought about it for a minute and then asked her grandmother: “How do we know that He was talking about our Sue? He might have meant some other Sue. Did He use her first name and her last name? Did He say that He just wanted ‘Sue’ to go or did He ask for ‘Sue Windowski’? After all, there are a lot of ‘Sues in the world and God could have meant someone else.”
The grandmother thought about it and then decide that Sue should answer that question for herself, so she called Sue on the phone and then handed the phone over to Amy. Sue explained to her niece that God had indeed called her by her first and last name. Once Amy heard that, she told her aunt that it was okay with her that Aunt Sue was going all the way to Africa. In her childish way, Amy was content because God had called her Aunt Sue to go to Africa so everything was going to be all right.
Simple trust … simple faith … something that we can learn from our children. Our thanksgiving should spring from the same source of trust and faith as it does for our children, amen?
So … how does God “wean” us from our dependence on the things of the world? Bible commentator Henry Matthew neatly described the process over a hundred years ago. First, God makes the things of this world bitter to us. Second, God removes the things on which we depend one by one. Third, God gives us something better. Beautiful, amen? He takes away our appetite for the things of this world … He doesn’t take them away from us in one overwhelming fell swoop. As He lovingly takes away the things that we cling to, He doesn’t just let us sit there with empty arms and empty hearts crying like babies. He replaces what He took with something better. I can only speak for myself, but when God tries to wean me from the things of this world, I act like a baby … I kick, I scream, I holler … and then He lovingly replaces what He has taken with something better and I feel like a fool because I should have trusted Him in the first place and let Him take anything, everything from me that He wants because my experience has been that He only takes away the things that are bad for me or that are holding me back and He has always … always! … replaced what He’s taken with something better. So far it has always turned out that I not only didn’t need it but that I do quite well without it. As He weans me from the world, I grow more and more dependent upon Him … the more dependent upon Him that I become, the more I discover the truth of Psalm 131: “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me, but I have calmed and quieted my soul” (v. 1b-2a).
In 1818 France, a 9 year-old boy sat in his father’s workshop and watched as his father worked. The father was a harness-maker and the boy loved to watch his father work the leather. "Someday, Father," said the boy, "I want to be a harness-maker, just like you." "Why not start now?" his father asked. The father took a piece of leather, drew a design on it, and handed it to his son. "Now, my son," he said, "take the hole-puncher and a hammer and follow this design, but be careful that you don’t hit your hand." Excited, the boy began to work, but when he hit the hole-puncher, it flew out of his hand and pierced his eye! He lost the sight of that eye immediately. Later, he lost the sight in his other eye. A few years later, he was sitting in the family garden when a friend handed him a pinecone. As he ran his sensitive fingers over the pinecone, an idea came to him. He became very excited and began to create an alphabet made up of raised dots on paper so that the blind could feel and interpret what was written on it … thus, Louis Braille opened up a whole new world for the blind – all because of what he had lost.
When Knute Rockne was coaching at Notre Dame, there was a sports writer for the South Bend newspaper who had a well-earned reputation for being the meanest and cruelest writer in the country. This anonymous writer constantly wrote about the team’s weaknesses, pointed out the mistakes of individual players, told the team that they were lazy, criticized them for their lack of discipline, and on and on. Angry, the players went to Coach Rockne to complain. Rockne listened with sympathy but said there was nothing that he could do to stop the writer but there was something that the players could do … they could prove the columnist wrong by training hard, improving their skills, and winning games. Later it became known that the anonymous sportswriter was Knute Rockne himself. He knew his players’ weaknesses and used his anonymous columns as a way to motivate his players and get them to train harder and become a better team. God’s Word often makes us uncomfortable, but it always tells us the truth because God knows us, God loves us, and God wants us to make us winners.
Where are we so far? In verse 1, David humbly starts out by reminding himself that God is God and he is not. His limitations force him to put his trust and faith in God. In verse 2, his growing freedom as God weans him from his dependence on the things of this world comforts and quiets his heart, his mind, and his soul. Now we come to verse 3. “O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore” – David’s recipe for the continuous, on-going calm and quiet that he found in verse 2 as a result of his confession of humility in verse 1.
“O Israel, hope in the LORD” … the Hebrew word for “hope” that David uses means to “wait expectantly.” It is very similar to our word “confidence” which literally means “con” … “with” ... “fidelis” … “faith” … to “wait expectantly” or “with faith.” “O Israel, wait on the LORD with hope, with faith.” Wait with hope … wait with faith because you know that God is faithful. You know what you are waiting for will happen because the person you are waiting on … God … is trustworthy … and that trust and that faith is what makes your heart, your soul calm, at peace.
“You who are about to enter the gates of Jerusalem,” says David, “right now your heart and your soul are calm, are at peace because your journey is almost over and you are about to enter into the very presence of the One … with a capital O … who understands great and marvelous things because He created every great and wonderful thing. You’ve prepared for this journey for a long time … you’ve traveled many, many miles through dangerous territory … and now you are climbing Mt. Zion and your hope is about to be fulfilled. You who are about to enter into the Presence of God can give thanks because it was God who brought you safely into His Presence … and life is the same way. We prepare for what lies ahead as best we can. We journey through life, minute by minute, day by day. We face trials … we struggle … we trudge and we climb … and our hearts are calm and our souls are quiet because our LORD is with us … and He will bring us safely through life until we can finally reach the summit and goal of our hearts and our souls … to be in His Presence forevermore.”
We put our hope, our trust, our confidence in God who has weaned us from our dependence on the things of this world. Our hearts are calm and our souls are quiet because we are free of the constant yearning and constant chasing after the shadows and illusions that the world offers. Every day, says David, every day we put our hope and our faith and our trust in God … and the day after that … and the day after that … forever more. Like the pilgrims singing this song as they are ascending Mount Zion, we live with a sense of constant expectation. The Holy City of God is right there … right around the next bend … and David says that he lives in that calm, quiet, blissful state of constant expectation that God is right there … and so should we. Our hope, our trust, our faith in the LORD is not a weary thing or a dreary thing fraught with doubt and uncertainty but something filled with anticipation and delight. We put our hope and our faith and our trust in God … who knows great things … marvelous things … wonderous things … all things, amen? And our hearts are calm today and our souls are quiet today … tomorrow … and forevermore. Now tell me that isn’t beautiful and something to be thankful for every day, amen?
I want to close by making you a challenge. In the spirit of Psalm 131, I’m going to ask you to sit down sometime between now and Thursday and make a list … a very personal, private list … of the things that God has weaned you from during this past year. In other words, I’m asking you to make a list of the thing that caused you suffering and hardship during the past year because God has taken them away from you … and now your faith is stronger, deeper … and your walk with God means more to you now than it ever did before.
I’m asking you to make a list of the things that you thought you could never live without but now that you don’t have them you have discovered the truth that you actually can. Maybe it was a dream that you’ve been chasing for years, decades that consumed all your energy but you finally realize that it’s never going to happen … and you’re okay with that because you trust that God has taken that from you for a reason. Maybe it’s a relationship … an idea … something that you owned … maybe a job or a promotion … maybe it’s a person that you’ve invested a great of your life into and now that person is gone. It was difficult to let go, but you did, and now you are stronger for it. Maybe it was something that you fought for, strived for, lived for, worked for … but when you finally got it you realized that it was as not as vital or as satisfying or as important as you once thought it was.
Your list may contain things that are good and proper in and of themselves … and that’s okay. Most of the things on your list probably won’t be evil or bad or sinful … and that’s okay too. Just write down anything that has happened in your life over the past year that God has shown you that you don’t need to have in order to be happy, content, or at peace.
Our closing song is “Count Your Blessings.” I am literally asking you to “count your blessings, count them one by one” by actually picking up a pen or a pencil and putting them down on paper. You may be surprised to discover that your blessings are more than just the material things that God has given you. You may discover, as David has, that your pain and suffering, your times of loss are also blessings … blessings in disguise. While you couldn’t see it at the time, they too were signs of God’s goodness and grace.
Thanksgiving is only four days away. Let us be thankful not only for the things we have but also for the things we no longer have or the things that we though we had to have and let’s join with our fellow pilgrims as we ascend into God’s presence with hopeful thoughts, calm hearts, and quiet spirits now and forevermore, amen? I’m going to do something unusual. We are going to close by praying the 23rd Psalm together. As you listen to the words, you’ll see why I consider it appropriate to what I’ve been talking about and what I’ve asked you to do. So … let us pray:
Dear Loving Lord:
You are our Shepherd, we shall not want. You make us lie down in green pastures; You lead us beside waters of rest; You restore our souls. You lead us in right paths for Your name’s sake.
Even though we walk through the darkest valleys, we fear no evil; for You are with us; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort us.
You prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies; You anoint our heads with oil; our cups overflow. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the LORD our whole life long.
In the love and grace and mercy of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, we pray and we make it so by saying … amen!
