Showing Our Thanks

(Galaxie Software: 10,000 Sermon Illustrations. Biblical Studies Press, 2002;

In being thankful, we come Coram Deo, face to face with the source of blessing and recognize the one upon which we should be so thankful. Thanks be to God, from whom all blessings flow.

As a people of God we gather together this morning to give thanks in 1)Praise of God’s Eternatlity (Ps. 90 1-2)

2) The Perception of our Frailty (Ps. 90 3-13)

The opposite of being thankful is being presumptuous.

This situation should cause us to consider out time

Proverbs 27:1 [27:1]Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.

James 4:13-14 [13]Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"-- [14]yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (ESV)

-When we are most thankful for what we materially or physically have, then we are foolish, for they are fleeting and so subject to change.

Please turn to Gen. 3

Psalm 90:3 [3]You return man to dust and say, "Return, O children of man!"

-The translation is best understood as dust and not “Destruction” as some translations put it. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and other annihilationist like to use that translation to say that sinners will ultimately be destroyed.

Gen 3:17 And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ’You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; Gen 3:18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. Gen 3:19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

-Sin has very real consequences. Because of sin, we suffer against a planet in rebellion, work is difficult, and our bodies deteriorate until death, when we return to the dust from what we were first created.

-The ultimate solution to the environmental problem is not the UN, Keyoto teaties or councils on climate change, but holiness.

-We show our thanks to God, as we live in obedience to God’s decrees, we will be good stewards of His resources.

We must realize that things can change:

Psalm 90:5-7 [5]You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning: [6]in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. [7]For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed.

The physical bodies of the human race wear out by the effects of God’s judgment on sin in the universe (cf. Deut. 4:25–28; 11:16, 17). Death is by sin (Rom. 5:12).

-Perhaps we feel that we have eluded the effects of sin. But Sin takes a physical, mental, and relational toll.

-This Psalm remember was written to a generation that suffered because of sin.