Why Should I Be Thankful?

Why should I be Thankful? Thanksgiving Sunday, 2008

You Know You Overdid Thanksgiving When....

Paramedics bring in the Jaws of Life to pry you out of the EZ-Boy.

The "Gravy Boat" your wife set out was a real 12’ boat!

You receive a Sumo Wrestler application in your e-mail.

Tuesday, you set off 3 earthquake seismographs on your morning jog.

Pricking your finger for cholesterol screening only yielded brown gravy.

A guest quotes a Biblical passage from "The Feeding of the 5000."

That rash on your stomach turns out to be steering wheel burn.

Representatives from the Butterball Hall of Fame called twice.

You consider gluttony your patriotic duty.

Your arms are too short to reach the keyboard & delete this.

After-Thanksgiving Poem

I ate too much turkey, I ate too much corn, I ate too much pudding and pie.

I’m stuffed up with muffins and too much stuffin’; I’m probably going to die.

I piled up my plate and I ate and I ate.

But I wish I had known when to stop,

For I’m so crammed with yams, sauces, gravies, and jams

That my buttons are starting to pop!

I’m full of tomatoes and french-fried potatoes

My stomach is swollen and sore,

But there’s still some dessert so I guess it won’t hurt if I eat just a little bit more!

Food…it’s what many people feel thanksgiving is all about. After all, try to find a parking spot at some of the grocery stores lately, and you get the idea that food supplies are falling as fast as the stock market is these days. People are jockeying for position to pick up a turkey or a ham, if there are any left. They are looking for cranberry sauce in a can because we don’t can our own cranberries anymore. They’re grabbing decorations and table cloths and napkins in fall colours, and paper fold-out turkeys. Pumpkins are being used as centre pieces on the table.

Families are phoning and e-mailing and face-booking and blogging and begging trying to find out who is coming to dinner at who’s house on Monday or Saturday or Sunday. You were there last year, this year it’s our turn to have you…Who’s bringing potatoes, have we got enough chairs, who’s making dessert, did we forget the kids at home? Dessert, can’t have too many desserts…can we?

So we pile in the car, travel somewhere to eat, and then we over-eat. Then we ask ourselves WHY we did, and promise ourselves, and everyone else, that we’ll never do that again…until the next Thanksgiving meal, which usually is the next day, because we have to eat thanksgiving left-overs for the next WEEK!

Whew! That’s a lot of food fuss isn’t it? And in the end, all we end up with is a lot of dirty dishes, a turkey carcass, and sleeping men on the couches in front of a football game that none of them are really watching. Is that Thanksgiving?

I’ve been reading a TON of scriptures this week about thanksgiving and being thankful.

There are over 100 references to thanks and thanksgiving in the Bible. These few that I want to share with you today, though, seem to sum up what, why, when, and how we ought to give thanks.

I found the first reference to THANKS in the Old Testament laws as written by Moses in

Leviticus 7:11-13 (New International Version).

The Fellowship Offering

11 " ’These are the regulations for the fellowship offering [a] a person may present to the LORD :

12 " ’If he offers it as an expression of thankfulness, then along with this thank offering he is to offer cakes of bread made without yeast and mixed with oil, wafers made without yeast and spread with oil, and cakes of fine flour well-kneaded and mixed with oil. 13 Along with his fellowship offering of thanksgiving he is to present an offering with cakes of bread made with yeast.

1) I NEED TO EXPRESS MY THANKSGIVING TO GOD. Sometimes the hardest thing for people to do is say ‘thank you’. We try to teach our kids to do it. ‘What do you say to the nice lady son?’ ‘thaaannnk yooouuu’. Not the most sincere necessarily, but it’s cute. The point we try to instil in our kids though, is to BE thankful. When you’re given something, you say thanks. We have been given SO much by God. We’re breathing aren’t we? Aren’t we?! He gave us life. He gave us this earth. He gave us each other. And He gave us salvation through Jesus Christ. We need to thank Him for all this, and more. Have we? Have we really, truly, honestly, and whole-heartedly THANKED God for all that He has blessed us with? If not, we need to. And there are MANY ways to express our thanks to God. We can write a letter, write a poem, paint a picture, share a story, dance with joy, or just be still before the Lord.