Thanksgiving Catalogue

Thanksgiving Catalogue

The biggest Thanksgiving killer, is the day after when Christmas shopping begins in earnest and we stop thinking about what we have and start thinking about what we want.

Many of us like to peruse the Christmas catalogue looking at all the neat stuff we want. We ought spend more time looking at the neat stuff we already have. In Psalm 103 we find Gods Catalogue of Blessings, not a Christmas catalogue but a Thanksgiving Catalogue.

There are 5 blessings we can Praise God for:

1. He forgives our sins

2. He heals us from our diseases

3. He redeems our life

4. He crowns us with love and compassion

5. He satisfies our desires with good things.

A. Most Blessings are taken for granted.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the six million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation...you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead, and a place to sleep...you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace...you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.

What if you had to put a price tag on your other blessings?

For example, if you bought a new Ford Escort, it would cost you between $13,000-$18,000. If you took that same car to the junkyard and sold it off, one piece at a time, at junkyard prices, it would be worth over $100,000.

I’ve read that the human body, with market prices on all our minerals and compounds, is worth about $0.47. If you took this same body and sold it off for parts, how much would you be worth?

Look with me at what you are willing to pay, in the time of a tragedy to restore something you are currently blessed with:

1. Coronary artery bypass surgery $15,000 - $20,000

2. Heart transplant $210,000

3. Gastrointestinal Surgery $15,000

4. Fertility Treatment $40,000

5. Kidney Transplant $42,000

6. Liver Transplant $115,000

7. Bone Marrow Transplant $106,000

8. Lung Transplant $105,000

God forgives our sin and then forgets about them. “I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

God heals our diseases. It may be a physical healing but that may not be God’s first priority. It may lead, in fact, to a spiritual healing.

God redeems our lives. Redeem means to obtain by paying a price, to buy back. God has paid the price to redeem us.

God crowns us with love and compassion. He has given us true honor and great honor. And what greater blessing than to be brought into the love and favor of God?

God satisfies our desires with good things. List the things you have; God gave you those things for your pleasure. Your attitude about those things determines your satisfaction. Half the world is unhappy because it can’t have the things that are making the other half unhappy. The unhappy person isn’t someone who didn’t get what he or she wanted. The unhappy person is the one who got what he or she wanted and then found out that it wasn’t as wonderful as expected. The secret of a happy life is not to get what you want but to live with what you’ve got. Most of us spend our lives concentrating on what we don’t have instead of thanking God for what we do have.

Our problem is that we are looking at the Christmas catalogue focusing on what we want rather then rejoicing in what we have!

There’s a great paradox here. We’re satisfied but never satisfied. I love M&M’s. I’m always satisfied when I eat some, but I always want more because what I’ve experienced makes me want to taste it again and again. So it is with God’s blessings. We’re filled and the filling is so sweet and so rich and full that we want more.

That is why Thanksgiving is so important each year. We need this reminder. We need it because it forces us to add it all up & recognize where all these things we enjoy actually come from.

We need to look at the correct catalogue to keep things in proper perspective. We need to remember to think about what we have instead of dreaming about what we want.

We need to remember to thank God for ALL of his blessings.