Thanksgiving

Drawing up I guess it was pretty easy to rate the holidays favorite holidays obviously Christmas get toys You got candy got all the big ones there. That's the number one number two holiday It was always 4th of July you get barbecued and you got fireworks What else could a little boy want number three was Halloween? Did you got more candy got lots and lots of candy got to dress up like Superman? Number four I guess was New Year's because if it was a good New Year's Eve get to stamp late It's very nice and you sometimes you got to shoot fireworks again if you're lucky Then the kind of gets murky have Easter Easter is okay. You get candy for Easter You have to go to church, but you get candy before church. That's pretty nice Memorial day is good the swimming pool opened up on Memorial Day Labor Day was good because football was back by Labor Day Somewhere way down at the bottom What's Thanksgiving Thanksgiving completely worthless I Remember I remember this vividly we our family got together with their aunts uncles and cousins four times a year Mother's Day Fourth of July Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving always seemed to be the one that was the most boring because At the center of Thanksgiving you ate food and we ate food every day So that wasn't special and we ate turkey And honestly Turkey is not the highest on the list of things that the children at least want to eat and it just kind of seemed like it was that we can We didn't know what to do with and I think culturally we don't really know what to do with it either It's got a mini vacation, which is a little bit nice We basically celebrate gluttony eating a lot. We watch a lot of football And sometimes it turns into a Celebration of our accomplishments if we do anything's kind of like lay let's look back at how great of a year it was and by how great of a year It means look at all the things I did and it kind of becomes I don't know a little bit of a chest beat And really it just kind of becomes the beginning of Christmas Averis Black Friday, let's go shopping Let's it's the kind of the day that we rest before just the absolute explosion of activity and and Bizziness that is the Christmas season and Somehow in all of that largely due to Mentor mind and Tim Starns Thanksgiving snuck in there and Slowly worked its way up the the positions to it became my favorite holiday I love Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving for all the reasons that I used to hate it I love Thanksgiving because it's a time when we stop I Love Thanksgiving because it's a time when we have no Plants I used to take the entire week off and my boys were little and people would ask me what my plans were for Thanksgiving And my answer was always I plan to lay on the floor Watch movies and let my kids crawl all over me. They're too big for that now. That would hurt, but It's still that kind of week when when your expectations are low It's a week to feel thankful It's a week to feel blessed. It's a week to feel loved and And I always want to preach on that. I want to preach on it on this Sunday this Sunday after Thanksgiving after you kind of already Experienced it because you've already had that pause. You've already had that rest and hopefully You're still in that feeling of being blessed being loved and feeling joyful and when I want you to see today As we talk about Thanksgiving and the importance of Thanksgiving and even the command of Thanksgiving What I want you to see is that Thanksgiving resets us Thanksgiving is the huge reset button that we push every year that resets us to being what God created us to be He created us to be his precious beloved children And Thanksgiving gives us an opportunity to pause and just be that The word that I've picking out picked out the psalm I picked out for Thanksgiving is Psalm 107 So let's read that together Psalm 107 says oh give thanks to the Lord for he is good For his steadfast love and doers forever Let the redeemed of the Lord say so whom he has redeemed from trouble and Gathered in from the lands from the east and from the west from the north and from the south Some sat in darkness and then the shadow of death Prisoners and affliction and deniers For they had revelled against the words of God and spurned the counsel of his most high So he bowed down their hearts with hard labor They fell down with none to help Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble and he delivered them from their distress He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death and burst their bonds apart Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love For his wondrous works to the children of men For he shatters the doors of bronze and cuts into the bars of iron some were fools through their sinful ways and Because of their iniquities suffered affliction They loved any kind of food and they drew near to the gates of death Then they cried to the Lord from their trouble and he delivered them from their distress He sent out his word and healed them and delivered them from their destruction Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love for his wondrous works to the children of men and let them offer Sacrifices of thanksgiving And tell of his deeds and songs of joy That's far the reading of God's word all men like grass and all of our glories like the flowers of the field The grass withers and the flowers fall but not God's word God's word stands forever Amen Thanksgiving thanksgiving is this time when we When we stop and when we are reset when we hit the reset button and a restore to being God's precious Beloved children and feeling that and feeling that I want to kind of break that down for us in three parts first Don't want to talk about why Thanksgiving so hard Why is it something you have to be made to do why does God have to command it? Why do parents have to tell children to fill out? Thank you notes and and stop them before they go off and play before they before they make them say thanks Thank you before they go off and play with their toys and then secondly I want to talk about why it's important and Thirdly, how do you do it? How do we do Thanksgiving? But first let's talk about let's go talk about why Thanksgiving is so hard. Why is why is it unpopular? Why do you you know I don't know if you remember I remember opening those gifts of Christmas Eve, especially as when The whole family would come together. We would exchange gifts and you get this toy and you wanted to go play with it so badly And your mom was taking a safe. Thank you Do I have to go to your grandmother and say thank you Thank you, and then we're often play right? Oh, what what is it about? Thanksgiving that makes it so hard. I think there's several things One of them is that it's just a pause Thanksgiving stops the pause button and the in the old testament when God is giving the rules for the sacrifice of Thanksgiving He makes them hit the pause button. He says once a year. I want you to stop the busiest time of year right after the harvest When there are things to do stop Go to Jerusalem Make a a sacrifice of Thanksgiving It's been a week doing it It's that time after opening the present and before using it when you stop and you thank the person We don't like to stop stopping's inefficient We have things we need to do right we we we it's just funny in my lifetime to watch Black Friday Christmas shopping season Creep first it creeped into Thanksgiving, you know, it used to be Friday morning and then it was Thursday Thanksgiving at midnight and then it was you know black Friday shopping starts at six o'clock on Thursday and now black Friday shopping starts on Monday Four days before Thanksgiving. We're just just giving off the pause button altogether We don't like stopping. It's inefficient Stopping makes us think Stopping makes us have to feel our feelings And remember what the year was like But what God wants us to see is that in those pauses When you slow down and eat your food when you taste its goodness When you stop to look at your family and friends around you When you stop to ask yourself how did I get this house? How did I get this wife? How did I get this this food? How did I get this family when you stop? There's joy in that There's a deep profound joy in Thanksgiving But we don't like to stop. Secondly, we don't like to feel vulnerable There's something incredibly vulnerable about going to someone and saying thank you You're you're acknowledging I had a need and you met my need You came to me at a time of weakness. I love this song because it's over over again It's listing times of weakness when we sat in darkness. That was that was the description of of how I spent a large part of 2020 sitting in darkness a feeling of friction Feeling distress and and God brings us out of the darkness and when he brings us out It's very tempting to to ignore that and he says no say thank you for it Thank Thanksgiving is vulnerable to miss. I was in need of redemption. I was in need of help and You helped me We don't like to expose ourselves. We don't like to admit our vulnerability We don't like Thanksgiving very closely related to that vulnerability as this Truth that when we thank somebody else we're giving away to credit And we don't want to give away credit When we thank someone we're saying you did this for me and and that's not our favorite sentence Our favorite sentence is I did this I built this this is mine look what I did all by myself I remember when my kid when one of my sons he finally learned how to ride his bicycle and he started Growing at the top of his lungs. I'm doing it all by myself I just remember thinking all by yourself I've been pushing you up and down this road for two hours And this is this is the hardest I've ever worked on anything All by yourself who bought you that bicycle who took those training wheels off But you know, we're all that little boy, aren't we? We all want to say I did it probably Probably the proudest I've ever been of anything was graduating college Mainly because I didn't think I was going to make it and And I remember that feeling that feeling of I did this I did it all by myself and and then Just realizing the selfishness of that comment all by yourself I thought you've had school teachers ever since you were four years old Teaching you to read teaching you to write teaching you math and in those schools You didn't pay them you didn't find them you didn't train them. It took an entire state of people paying taxes to build these schools So that you can learn so that you could graduate so that you could grow that you did it all by yourself That's us, isn't it? We don't like Thanksgiving We don't like to lose that credit We have this sinful ability to feel entitled to whatever we have You don't like Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving reminds us that it's not ours. It's someone else has given us something And we have this ability is incredible ability to almost immediately stop feeling thankful and start feeling entitled It's mine We don't want to share that's that's that's it's a very core of sin as this Forgetting to be thankful for what God has given us. What was it to make Adam and Eve so? Temptable Well, was it that made them vulnerable to sin? They forgot all the trees all the food that God provided for them and Focus their attention on the one thing he had withheld What was it that drove the Israelites in the sin as they followed Moses through the wilderness? They stopped being amazed by the the mana from heaven they stopped being amazed by the water from the rock They felt entitled to that stuff and they were grumbling and complaining and angry that they didn't get meet with it It's hard to be thankful Because our sin has made us self-obsessed It's just so easy for us to be proud of ourselves our stuff our Abilities our entitlements and Thanksgiving forces us To hit pause And to say what do I have that I haven't been given and if I've received it Why do I act like it's mine? We don't like Thanksgiving, but we need it We need it God loves us too much to let us stay selfish Self-obsessed brats he loves us too much for that and so he he commands us to stop and to give thanks He commands Thanksgiving to reset us Just to prevent us from becoming self-centered and into force us to go back to being when he created us to be his beloved children His beloved children Thanksgiving is important because it makes us better people but the first value of Thanksgiving is it makes us better people better about what better? I mean bigger-hearted More loving more gracious more time more magnanimous more generous More hopeful more joyful it makes us better people we know that we know implicitly in our hearts we know that Getting everything we want and never saying thank you for it never being thankful for it that that corrupts our souls Psalm 166 describes that actually talks. It's it's a psalm. It's describing The children of Israel and the wilderness and the grumbling and it says in verse 15 God gave them what they wanted But he sent a wasting disease to their soul Being spoiled is the old-fashioned term, doesn't it? Being spoiled getting too much of what you want It ruins us. We know that look at the The thick look at the literature right I grew up with Nellie Olsen that being the the foil to Laura Ingalls The younger children grew up with Draco Malfoy being the the foil foil of the Harry Potter the the spoil kids the kids They got everything they ever wanted Corrupted their souls it made them small it made them shallow it made them narcissistic it made them Obsessed with how they looked it made them assume that they were better than others because they had more it made them Assume they were smarter than others because they were richer And when someone goes their whole life without hearing the word know that they have no ability to say no to themselves They have no ability to to protect themselves from From the diseased sins that are all around them They have no ability to hear no from anyone else. They can't accept it They want to deny it. They want to cry and complain but but people Who understand who appreciate? Thanksgiving Who appreciate that that there's nothing out there they have that they haven't been given and they didn't have to be given it That that makes us it makes us appreciative and this is the thing. This is why that's important Because you were never Created to function alone You were never created to function alone You were created to love others and to receive love you were created to receive God's love and to be and to be Treasure cherished to be treasured. You were never created to be alone. You were never designed to function alone And thanksgiving celebrates that I can't I want to stress this for you because I think in our culture especially we just glorify this kind of Individual survivor by myself. I need no one. There's even television shows that glorify that right there's a Reality show. I love that phrase a reality show where you go around with camera men eight feet away from you And one of them is it's called alone and it's about who can survive the longest and the wilderness alone And you know who always wins those competitions People who were trained by other people Nobody was born with this knowledge Yeah, sure if you spend a year under the tutelage of other people then maybe you can learn how to survive alone But that just goes to show you how unnatural it is. It's not how you were created to be You want to know you want to know what you'd be like alone? Is it he'll gives us the vision? I think it's chapter 15 It gives us a beautiful vision of what it's like to be alone He says I saw you there on the day of your birth. There was no one no one to cut your cord No one to wipe the blood off of you You were left wallowing in your blood and I saw you there alone and You were left to die And I threw my cloak over you and I said you live And I washed you that's that's where we are alone were completely helpless and left to die And thanksgiving reminds us it gives us this time to pause and to thank all of those people that have made us into beloved and loving Family members We've kept us from being alone Thanks thanksgiving Makes us no loving people who appreciate the people around them who appreciate the help that we've gotten Thanksgiving also makes you enjoy your gift more Like I said when you when you stop and enjoy the food When you when you pause You you you take the time to remember and you see how good the food tastes You remember how good your job is you remember how bad it was to not have work You you remember how valuable your life is and how awful it felt to be lonely you remember how valuable your parents are and all the things that they taught you and Sacrifice for you even begin to thank God for things like your illnesses one Goofy movie. I remember watching with my kids years ago I remember the details because how I am right I'm taking them to get shots and They screamed at me for getting shots and I'm rewarded them with ice cream and I took them to see five kids too terrible movie It's fine. It's probably fine. But what I remember about Spy Kister is It was all about granddad granddad couldn't walk And at the end of the movie he is forgiving the person who took away his ability to walk And he said I want to thank you and I'm not gonna give you all the worst this cheesy speech, but basically he said this By taking away my ability to walk You taught me what it was like to depend upon other people and By depending upon other people I Learned for the first time how truly loved I am I would never have known how loved I was if I hadn't have been made to depend upon other people Not fascinating. He's he was being thankful for his injuries thankful for his infirmities Because in those infirmities he realized how loved he was

Thanksgiving it makes us enjoy the people around us more it makes us Enjoy the gifts that God has given us more and it makes us appreciate the give or more It makes us appreciate the give or more and that's important. It's so important to do that I a friend of mine's a pastor in another state and he was getting ready to do a Fundraiser, you know capital campaign and we've done that and he knew I'd done that so he called me up He's like do you have any advice because I don't want to do this believe or not preachers We that's our least favorite thing to do. This is our favorite thing to do raising money's our least favorite thing to do And he said I don't want to do it. You have any advice for me. And I said yeah, I said Stop to really appreciate the fact that these people are giving you their money Just pause and think about that for a second and when you think about like all the things they could be doing with that money instead They could be getting nicer homes are going on vacations or getting nicer cars, but they're giving your church They're money and when you think about that you'll appreciate them more

What I wanted to challenge you to do today Is to think about how great it is That God gave us the gifts he gave us and what do I mean by that? Think about all the things he's done that he didn't have to do You're eating those leftovers for the fourth day in a row Think about how amazing it is that God gave you taste He didn't have to make give you the ability to taste He didn't have to make chocolate taste so good He didn't have to make Tart cranberries taste so tart and sweet potato taste so sweet He didn't have to do that Think about how amazing it is that God gave us the ability to smell he He didn't have to make burning leaves smells so awesome He didn't have to make Christmas trees sell smells so beautiful Think about how great it is that God gave us Sunset he didn't have to make them beautiful Think about how Wonderful it is he made love feel so good and when you stop to pause about all those things and and to just to appreciate The God intentionally made things feel look smell and taste good Just for your pleasure when you stop to think about that you begin to realize It is just amazing That we have a God like that And you go from taking things from granted to realizing that he he loves us and and you never have more dignity Then when you realize that this food this this person this Husband this job this home Whatever it is that this is a gift from the Lord of the universe who loves me and she let that knowledge sink in on you You'll never have more dignity than that Do you see how it makes you a better person Every sets you to being the beloved children of God That he's created you to be that that's why God wants you to be thankful because it is making you into his your image by making you thankful he's giving you your dignity. So so how does he do it briefly? Let's jump into this I Don't know why I'm bravely you don't have anything else to do I'm saving you all the time from running that you would spend driving home. So be patient with me Three things about how to give things first we've already said a few times But I wanted to just remind it again Paul's Paul's and come together God commanded that and in Leviticus and and all these songs whenever you see Serve the Lord with gladness make a joyful noise knows before the Lord Interest gates with Thanksgiving. Those are actually commands from the Lord. It's not just good ideas Come together Gather together in worship and and remind each other of of the things that he's done for us Secondly, name the gifts Receive them as gifts from the Lord of the universe who loved you so much receive this This day in front of the fireplace this day watching football receive this rainy weather when you're not going to want to go out Receive this this meal receive this this person not as Receive this husband not as this man who smells bad in the morning and drives me crazy half the time but as As a gift from the Lord of the universe Who loves me so much he gave me his own son and who gives good gifts to his children

Paul's name the gifts notice them and Finally the final way that we give thanks is We enjoy the gifts enjoy him Eat the food that that's beautiful. I want you to notice this because I'll bet you haven't been thinking about this In Leviticus again when God is commanding people to give Thanksgiving celebrations Make the sacrifices of Thanksgiving. They would bring a lamb or a young ball Sacrifice of grain, but this is how they would do it They would bring it to the priest and they would roast it. They would barbecue it and then the command was very specific You have to eat all of it before morning Eat it all don't know you're not going to save it in a doggy box You're not going to take it home for tomorrow. You're not going to worry about eating too much You're going to feast you're going to eat it all everything that's not eaten will be thrown away What's he saying he's saying? He's not giving you're not giving it away. You're celebrating He wanted you to do come and eat it at the temple before him He wants to watch you enjoy your gifts just like any parent. Why do we love Christmas so much as parents? We love giving gifts to our children so that we can see their their faces light up We love to see our children happy. Why aren't we like that because God is like that He wants to watch you enjoy your gifts It makes him delighted it makes him happy to see you happy It makes him happy to see you enjoy. That's why we feast on Thanksgiving. We don't fast Because it makes God happy to see you enjoy the gifts he's giving you Isn't it amazing that we have a God like that? Isn't it amazing that we have a God who takes his greatest joy and seeing us joyful?

That's what eternity is about. That's what this entire Creation, redemption, salvation, love story is all about That God wants to spend all of eternity looking into your joyful face That's why I gave his own son to die on the cross for you So that he can spend all eternity looking into your joyful face as you look at him and go There's no way you love me this much In every Thanksgiving we get to celebrate just a glimpse of that Now I want you to do that today Let's celebrate that we have a God like that Please pray with me Father, with every breath, with every bite, with every verse of music that brings us joy With every hug, with every kiss, over and over again, Lord We are reminded how amazing it is that we have a God like you Father, I pray that our singing and our celebrating and our eating and our resting would all be set to the music of Isn't it amazing that we have a God like that? Amen All right, we're seeing a-