Calvary Lutheran Church

O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endures forever. Amen.

Psalm 100:4-5

 “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever, his faithfulness continues through all generations.”

 Dear thankful people:

          So what will you be doing on Thanksgiving Day? I assume you will have the day off if you work. I know you will have the day off if you go to school. Maybe you will spend the day with family or friends and enjoy a delicious meal you conveniently purchased at the grocery store. Maybe you will watch a little football in the comfort of your favorite chair or go shopping at the nearest mall. And that will be it. Thanksgiving Day will be over. You don’t have to think about it for another year. And that’s the way we like our Thanksgivings—short and sweet, so we can turn our attention to the big one—Christmas.

          While it is true that Thanksgiving Day will be over quickly, the act of giving thanks for a Christian is never over. It is a process that is to continue daily. And that’s because giving thanks to God cannot be confined to just one day or one year or one lifetime. Indeed, giving thanks to God will take an eternity.

          But there is another reason why giving thanks is an on-going process, and that is because thanksgiving is not just a thought, it is not just words, but it is an action. That is inherent in the word” thanksgiving” itself. It has the action verb “giving” in it. So thanksgiving means you do something, you show somehow that you are thankful. And our text tells us how to do that:

HOW CHRISTIANS SHOW THANKFULNESS.

          Verse four again, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.” Thanksgiving means, first of all, that you go public with your gratitude. Oh, you could sit in a corner of your house, I suppose, and whisper under your breath, “Thank you, Lord, for all that you’ve done.” That’s probably what these nine lepers did who were healed by Jesus in our gospel lesson for today. It wasn’t that they weren’t thankful to Jesus for healing them, it was just that they didn’t show it. Only the one leper did something. He came back to Jesus and expressed his thankfulness, and he was the one whom Jesus considered truly thankful.

          This text encourages us to show our thankfulness to God by doing something—speaking it, singing it, shouting it, or giving in return. And one of the best places to do that is right here in this church, together with other thankful, believing Christians. The “gates” and the “courts” that the psalmist is talking about are the Lord’s temple, his place of public worship.

          Oh, how God loves to hear and see your thanks. In Psalm 50, God is speaking, “He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me” (Psalm 50:23). God is honored by your praise here this morning. After the flood Noah built an altar to the Lord and offered a burnt sacrifice of thanks, and we are told, “The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma” (Genesis 8:21). You know how it is when you walk into a candy store or you pass a cinnamon bun counter at a mall, how the pleasant aroma explodes in your mind. Well, God takes great pleasure in the aroma of our public thanks and praise.

          So one way to show thankfulness is to public with our praise to God in his church and elsewhere. But another way is to display contentment with what we have.

          The whole idea of Thanksgiving Day must be confusing many people today, because they wonder, “Thanks to whom?” In some public school history books the revisionists have the Pilgrims giving thanks to the Indians. I hope that everyone here knows that the Pilgrims were a very religious people who were really giving thanks to God and simply invited the Indians to join them for a meal.

          A further point of confusion for many is, “Thanks for what?” Most people today believe that everything they have they earned and deserved by their hard work. And it is somewhat awkward to be thankful to yourself. And then they look at what others have that they don’t have, and they become discontent. And discontentment is like a dagger through the heart of thankfulness.

          My friends, you know whom to thank and for what. You thank God that he has provided you with every good and perfect gift. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Everything you have comes from the Lord. And if it comes from the Lord, you don’t have to look at what others have, but be content with what you have. Why? Because you know that this life is only a journey.

          When you go on a vacation are you unhappy or discontent because you cannot carry with you all of your possessions—all your clothes and stereos and TV’s and appliances and furniture and cars? No, those things are not necessary when you are on vacation. Those things only slow you down from seeing and doing exciting things. Why, some have been perfectly happy vacationing with just a backpack and tent.

          So also the Christian life is a journey. It is a thrilling walk with Christ Jesus ruling in our hearts, and we doing his will. We don’t need things to make us happy. Oh, God may give us lots of nice things to enjoy, but we rejoice in the Lord. After all, the journey will end someday in heaven, and then we will have everything we ever thought we wanted and more. But in the meantime, while on the journey, we show our thankfulness by being content with what we have.

          And we show our thankfulness by accepting with joy even in our troubles and trials. Most people dwell too much on the negative side of their lives. The ten thousand daily blessings from God are lost sight of in the occasional clouds of difficulty that cross their paths. They think of the $1,000 lost on car repairs than the $50,000 earned for the year at a good job. They think more of the few days of sickness than the many months of health. They think more of the loved one who has died than the many loved ones who are yet living.

          Claude Powell lived with his six children in Philadelphia. Just before school was to start all the children were in need of new shoes, but he knew he couldn’t afford them. To make matters worse he was just laid off his job, and had to find work the best he could repairing washing machines. One day he was at a house repairing a machine when he got into a conversation about children. Claude started complaining on how difficult it was to feed and clothe six active children, and now they all needed shoes. The woman of the house said nothing. After he had finished he was about to leave, and he noticed a child sitting in a wheelchair in the living room. The woman explained that the child had been paralyzed from the waist down from birth and had never worn out a pair of shoes. And Claude said, “When I got home I picked up all the worn-out shoes I could find—worn out from running and jumping, skipping rope and kicking balls—and I put them on a pile in my bedroom, Then I knelt at my bed and gave thanks to God for the worn-out shoes in our house.” How often shouldn’t our gripes be sources of giving thanks to the Lord.

          The world likes to think, “Gloom, despair, and agony for me.” That’s why the evening news is full of the bad things that are happening in the world. But the Christian says, “Even these things are for my good. I don’t know what troubles yet lie in my life’s journey, but this I know, the road that I have to travel in this life is paved with God’s goodness and love.” David wrote in his famous psalm, “Surely, goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6). How could he say that; by viewing troubles and trials as blessings.

          And that brings us to another way we show our thankfulness—it is by focusing our thanks on the simple things in life.

          Why is the psalmist in our text so thankful? He tells us in verse 5, “For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” Most of us think to thank God for successful surgery or a new baby or a 50^th wedding anniversary or an accident averted; in other words, those big blessings from God that have a dramatic impact in our physical lives. The psalmist, instead, thanks God for simple things that are mostly about God himself—his goodness, his love, his faithfulness.

          If you were a parent and you just gave your child a gift that they really wanted, you would probably be pleased if your child said, “Oh thank you so much for this wonderful gift.” But you would probably be ecstatic if your child, especially your teenager, said, “Oh thank you for being so good to me. Thank you for being you.” After picking yourself up off the floor in shock you would probably say, “That was the nicest thanks you could ever give me.” The way we show our thanks to God is to thank him for his gifts, yes, but also to thank him for who he is.

          And who is he? Oh, God is good. In fact, the word “God” comes from the word “good.” Can you imagine what life would be like if God was not good? If you were to ever roam outside the Christian faith you would find out in a hurry. In Islam, god is great. The word Islam means “submission” to the will of Allah.” In Hinduism, god is many—hundreds of thousands of gods, and you need to honor them all with gifts of food, water, garments, perfumes, flowers, and so forth. In Buddhism, god is mysterious, he can only be known after years of study and meditation. In the Mormon religion God is reluctant to forgive sins. Spencer Kimball, a former president of the Mormon church once wrote, “It depends upon you whether or not you are forgiven and when. It could be weeks, it could be years, it could be centuries before that happy day when you have the positive assurance that the Lord has forgiven you. That depends on your humility, your sincerity, your works, your attitudes.”

          Only in Christianity is God good. Psalm 25, “Good and upright is the Lord, therefore he instructs sinners in his ways” (Psalm 25:8). When you are off sinning somewhere, as you and I do regularly, God comes to us and instructs us in the way back to his fold. And that way is to repent and change from our sinful ways. And God forgives immediately. John wrote in his first epistle, “If we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

          Only in Christianity does God’s love endures forever. There is never going to be a time when God does not love you. No matter what you do, you cannot make God stop loving you and seeking your repentance and salvation. In fact, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s love displayed itself best when he sent his Son Jesus to be the world’s Savior through this suffering and death on the cross. No greater love is this than one lay down his life for another.

          And God’s faithfulness continues to all generations. Faithful means keeping his promises. God is not like us who say one thing and then do something else. Every promise that God has made in this book he will keep, not just to you, but your children and their children and to all generations.

          Yes, the way the Christian shows his thankfulness is to thank God for the simple things, which are really his greatest qualities of all—his goodness, love, and faithfulness.

          Your Thanksgiving Day will probably be very different from the first Thanksgiving Day 396 years ago. According to the latest historical research that first thanksgiving went like this: after the first corn crop had been gathered, Governor Bradford and the Pilgrim fathers decided to have a feast of in-gathering—a day of thanksgiving. Along with the 55 English-speaking people present, they invited the friendly Indian Chief Massasoit to join them. He and his braves numbered 90 strong, and they came with venison and wild turkey. The surrounding woods provided the woman with wild fruit, and the rivers supplied fish and clams. In other words, none of it came from the grocery store. There was no cabin large enough for the gathering, so tables were set under the pine trees perhaps as late as December 13. So they weren’t in the easy chairs of their heated homes watching football. And the first Thanksgiving wasn’t just one day, it lasted three days and consisted of not just eating but of games and conversation and even preaching.

          The fact that they were thankful at all is amazing, because sickness had taken a heavy toll on the colony. Over 40 of their group laid buried under the sod, many of them women. Of the 55 mentioned there were only four grown women. But they along with the young girls and one servant, prepared the meal for that large company of almost 150.

          What were they most thankful? According to one researcher, “Governor William Bradford set Thanksgiving Day aside as a day of feasting and prayer, to show the gratitude of the colonists that they simply were still alive.” Maybe that should be the focus of our Thanksgiving Day celebration this year—God has brought us to this point in our lives, and we are still alive enjoying God’s goodness, love, and faithfulness in Christ. Amen.