Thanks Be To God! Series

INTRODUCTION / ILLUSTRATION PART 2… food52.com/blog/14637-the-brief-history-of-the-turducken-and-stuffing-food-in-food

If you want to learn how to make a turducken for Thanksgiving, listen up! You’ll need a 12-14 lb. turkey, whole duck, chicken, sausage, and stuffing. Turducken recipes are quite long and involved but in short, the process involves deboning a chicken and laying it flat side down on plastic wrap on top of a cutting board. Then, add a tightly rolled sausage link to the center of the chicken and roll the entire chicken up into a tight cylinder.

Next comes part two: debone and butterfly a duck so that the meat can lay flat on a board, skin side down. Spread more sausage meat over the inside of the duck meat. Take the chicken-sausage cylinder and place it inside the center of the flatten duck.

Sounds appetizing, I know! Roll it up into one larger package.

Now comes the fun part. Add the chicken-duck-sausage and place it in the center of a whole butterflied turkey. Wrap the two sizes of the turkey over the chicken-duck roll-up, tie it all up and then roast it.

If you’re embarking on making a turducken, you should know that it will be significantly more expensive than roasting a regular turkey since you need to buy three to four expensive cuts of meat rather than just one. Duh. Also, because a turducken calls for so many different cuts of meat all in one very large bundle for carnivores, plan for it to take significantly longer to cook than a regular turkey. Depending on the size of the bird, a turducken could take anywhere from 7 to 12 hours to cook in a large roasting pan.

Boom! Now you know.

TRANSITION

The passage that I believe will help us focus on thankfulness this morning and perhaps help us forget all the info about turduckens is in Romans 6. This passage, much like a turducken, has layers around it and at the center is the phrase: “Thanks be to God!” It is that phrase in the center that caught my attention.

READ ROMANS 6:15-19 (ESV)

“What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.”

Romans 6:15-19 overall speaks about the transformation that believers undergo when we move from being slaves to sin to being slaves to righteousness. The Apostle Paul is very specific that we have much to thank God for because of this transformation. There are several truths pointed out for which we can be thankful!