November 25, 2020. Thanksgiving Eve Sermon - Psalm 136:1. Grace-Vail.
.כִּי ְלעוֹלָם ַח ְסדּוֹ
:טוֹב-הוֹדוּ לַיהוָה כִּי
“Give thanks to the LORD for he is good, his mercy endures forever.” Why is thanksgiving so attractive? We feel good when we are thankful. We don’t feel so good when we are not thankful. If you could choose: thankful or not; we’d all choose thankful. But so often in day to day life, we get stuck in a not thankful place. It’s healthy, useful, helpful to have a holiday built around remembering to be thankful. The Bible gives us extra reason for thankfulness. My prayer is that by considering Psalm 136:1, your thanksgiving celebration will be even more thankful with God involved than it would be with you trying to be thankful on your own. 5 parts to this talk. 1. Give thanks. 2. To the LORD. 3. For he is good. 4. His mercy. 5. Endures forever. 1. Give thanks.
הוֹדוּ
What is gratitude? What is thankfulness? In one word I’d say, appreciation. What gets in the way of gratitude, of thankfulness? In more than one word I’d say: entitlement, expectations that I don’t think are being met. Basically, we all have stories about how our lives should be going. We all have beliefs about what we should have, or be, or know. And when we perceive that we aren’t living the story we think we should be living; when we believe that we are not what we should be, that we don’t have what we should have, that we don’t know what we should know; we become dissatisfied. We become discontent, we become ungrateful. For example, you might think, at my job, I should be more advanced, more capable, more important than I am. You have an expectation about where you should be, and since you’re not there, you can miss the fact that you are way better at your job than you were 3 years ago. You’ve got friends at work because you care about them. You’re financially stable because of your ability to work well. Or you might think, my relationship with my husband or wife, or boyfriend or girlfriend, we’re not as close as we should be. You have this relationship expectation, and since you perceive that you;re not there; you miss the fact that you’ve cared for this person for years, you've helped them become a better version of themselves; or maybe that by getting out of a bad relationship with an ex, you’ve come to a more safe and stable place, or maybe if a spouse has died, the fact that they’re not here robs you of the great memories you have and the gratitude that could be yours. We all have expectations of where we should be in life, and if we’re not there, we get ungrateful. What if you traded your expectations for appreciations? What if you took time to notice all the good things in your life that you take for granted? What if each morning you took 30 seconds to acknowledge that your heart is beating, that your lungs are taking in oxygen, that you did nothing to receive a heart and lungs that work. They were just given to you, by your parents, but even more by your God. What if