Welcome to Faith for Living. Live in what the Bible calls the day of salvation. This is the day of God's patience. It is the day in which the offer of His salvation is extended to everyone everywhere. And His framework that we talked about a few minutes ago continues as long as the earth endures. As I understand it, the earth is enduring today with one primary purpose. First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga brings you today's teaching designed to apply God's Word to the struggles and challenges of our day that we might have Faith for Living. On the 4th Thursday of every November, many Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. The American holiday of Thanksgiving is typically traced back to English settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts. That, however, was not the first day of Thanksgiving, as we'll see in our lesson today entitled The First Thanksgiving. The Bible text for today is from Genesis 8, verse 15, through chapter 9, verse 3. Here now is Dr. Mike Pregg. No, I had a great deal to be thankful for. And so do we. And as we look at the things which Noah thanked God for, we're going to see two broad categories of God's blessing. His common grace and then his saving grace. Our blessings from God can still be cataloged helpfully in much the same way. Why are we doing this today? Well, we're doing it because I'm afraid that even though we've set aside this day for national Thanksgiving, that our expressions, and I'm talking about mine as well, our own expressions of Thanksgiving and gratitude to God are too often kind of brief, somewhat cursory, perhaps shallow, sometimes even perfunctory, even on Thanksgiving day. Our Thanksgiving is sometimes kind of a preamble, if you will, to the real business of eating. And so we want to look at the scripture together today with a view toward identifying God's blessings, kind of cataloging those blessings, naming them, counting them one by one. Why? So that you and I may be a more thankful people, not only at Thanksgiving time, but much more so throughout the year as well. First place here this morning, Noah was thankful for God's common grace. Now this marks the first time specifically in the Bible that God deals with men in arrangements that he calls covenant. If we look down further in chapter 9 at verse 9, we'll see I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you. Covenants are arrangements that God makes with us. He makes promises and he outlines certain requirements for us. Now most of the covenants in our Bibles like the covenant, for instance, with Abraham, like the new covenant that he makes in Jesus Christ. Most of those covenants are with believers. This covenant is a little bit different. This covenant made by God through Noah extends to everybody, to all people. This covenant marks if you will, a new beginning between God and people. There has been a great flood that has encompassed the whole earth. Most people have died as a result of that flood. And so God makes a new covenant here with Noah. It's almost like a second creation. And so this covenant with Noah involves what theologians sometimes call common grace. Not a particularly difficult term to understand because we're talking about grace here that is common to all men and women everywhere. God gives these good gifts to all people, doesn't he? Gifts that we share in common with everybody, whether or not they are believers. And this passage is very instructive this morning because it outlines three particular blessings that form an outline or a summary of God's common grace. Three blessings, three gifts from God that are absolutely essential. Essential to the preservation, essential to the enjoyment of human life on this earth. In all places, in all cultures, and in all time. Noah was thankful first of all for God's common grace. Are you thankful first of all here this morning for God's framework? What does that mean? Look at verse 22 again. He says, as long as the earth endures, seed time in harvest, cold in heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. That's God's framework. That's the regular schedule of the passing of time. Every time we look at the clock, every time we look at the calendar, we're looking at God's framework. The most basic prayer of Thanksgiving that I hope most if not all of us pray, we pray in the morning. And we pray, thank you, Lord, for this day. And so things go on, don't they? Our lives go on, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, and why do they go on? They go on because of God's faithfulness to this promise. They don't go on because of some abstract laws of nature. And Hebrews 1, at verse 3, we are told that He sustains all things by His powerful work. By this promise of God, there is regularity. There is a framework for life. There is dependability. There is seed time. There is harvest. There is spring, summer, fall and winter. You and I go to bed each night believing and knowing that the sun will come up tomorrow morning. And that is true for all people everywhere on the earth. There are no breakdowns, no delays, no mistakes, no slip ups. He knows the end from the beginning. He foredains whatsoever comes to pass. And so the question is for you and for me this morning, are we thankful for God's framework? I don't know about you, but it's pretty easy to take it for granted. Do we demonstrate our thankfulness by our stewardship of the time that He has given to us? Your life characterized by things like schedule, discipline, diligence, you know, our favorite subjects. Do these things mark your stewardship of the time that God has given you? Are you thankful this morning for God's common grace? Are you thankful for the blessings that come to all people, thankful for his regular, dependable framework? And then Psalm 68 at verse 6 says that God sets the lonely in families. Are you thankful to God for your family? Verse 1 of chapter 9 says God bless Noah and his sons. God deals with us in families, the essence of this arrangement that He calls a covenant. Genesis 9, 9 says, I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you. And so there is no dearer circle upon the face of the earth than our families.
At Thanksgiving and other holidays as well, we long to be with our families. And for some of us during this season of the year, our family circle has gotten smaller. And we're going to miss those folks, aren't we? For some, the circle has gotten larger. And we're going to enjoy getting to know those new ones as well. As I was growing up, I remember very well that Thanksgiving was always the time for the great Cravial Family Reunion. That was all of my mother's relatives. They were all in somewhat the same area of the country and they all would gather on Thanksgiving. And there were so many of them that they had to rent a hall. I suppose there were three or four or five turkeys. I don't remember, but it was a very blessed time and forever etched in my memory. We ought to be so thankful to God for our families. You know, it's a tough time for families. Our marriages in these days are more likely to be broken by divorce than by death. Unmarried couples who are living together have increased by 865 percent since 1960. We're increasingly allowing a perversion of our God-given sexuality through homosexuality and pornography. We're destroying our God-given faithfulness through abortion. We're allowing many of our children to grow up without much discipline and without much respect for authority. Quite a list goes on. But you and I cannot write all those wrongs all by ourselves. We can pray but we can also set an example. I'm truly grateful for my family. I can let that gratitude work its way into my actions. How? I can be the best husband or the best wife that I can be by the grace of God. I can take parenting as my most serious responsibility. And then if I'm here as a child this morning, I can obey my parents in the Lord. No, it was thankful for God's common grace. That grace that comes to all of us. Jesus said He causes His son to rise on the evil and on the good and He sends His rain on the righteous and the on-righteous. No, it was thankful for God's framework for His family and inevitably in this Thanksgiving season He was thankful for food. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you, verse 3 of chapter 9. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. Of course those green plants were given to Adam way back in Genesis 1 and now God is adding meat to our diets, the beasts and the birds and the fish. And even though we've hunted and we've farmed and we've fished this old earth for 5,000 years, it appears that we have not yet exhausted our capacity to produce food. And for most of us therefore here in this country anyhow, eating is not just a necessity, eating for us is a pleasure. Are you thankful for God's gift of food? Meal time, I hope is a habit. It's such an obvious time for you and I to give thanks to God. But beyond saying thanks, if we're really grateful for food, we have a responsibility, I think, to share that food with those who don't have very much or maybe none at all. I have visited our missionaries in places like Ukraine and Mexico and South Africa and I've been struck on those visits to these other countries in so many ways, so many different ways, with how much we have as Americans compared with everybody else on the face of the earth. God has poured out his blessings on this land. I don't know about you, but I didn't deserve to be here, to be born here and I don't think you did either. Jesus predicts famines, we find famines in the book of Revelation, but nowhere do we find a worldwide famine in that the whole world is going to starve to death. And so the problem, until the Lord returns, is going to be one of distribution and I'm not talking about some kind of worldwide regulation to distribute everything evenly. I'm talking about distribution by individual initiative. Are we grateful enough for our food to give some of it away? Most of the Christians I've known, most of the churches I've served in, this one being no exception, have had efforts, particularly during the holidays, to give food away. I think the White Christmas program, at least here, is an example of that. I'm sure we do more than that. Are we thankful for God's common grace, his gifts of a framework and family and food? Things that are so basic, things that we might tend to overlook and to take for granted and yet we can't imagine living without them. And these things were established way back then, in the day of Noah, and they have been faithfully extended down through the centuries to all people everywhere. Whether they're saints or sinners, God's showers of blessing have fallen on everyone. But God's common grace is not all that we see in this first Thanksgiving. As we look further together at this passage, we see that Noah's first, his Thanksgiving was expressed because you see he'd been delivered from destruction. He'd been saved along with his family in the ark. He was thankful for God's common grace, but so much more for God's saving grace. Saving grace consisted for Noah, first of all, of God's protection. We read at verse 18 that Noah came out of the ark, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. He had been protected, they had been protected in that ark for probably the better part of a year from this great worldwide flood. Noah and his family were saved, but they were the only ones. The only ones who were left on the earth. Genesis 723, we read that every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out. God had destroyed all the rest of the human race because of their sin and only Noah and his family were left.
Sometimes we think things have gotten pretty bad in our day, but can you imagine the scene when Noah came out of that ark for the first time. He had been closed up, they had been closed up inside of that ark, and just the bright sunshine would have been much brighter than these TV lights. But just that bright sunshine, when he opened the window to the first time and went up on the deck, he would have been blinded by that sunshine. But I wonder, have you ever wondered when the thought first hit Noah, were the only ones left. Were the only ones who have been saved, the only ones who have been protected by God. Why me? Why me Lord? Wonder whether that thought has ever struck you. Why me? Why have you saved me? I still remember my experience in a motel room in California, it's now almost 40 years ago. I've been a Christian for about a year and I was out there on a business trip and all the way out on the airplane I've been reading a book that my pastor had given to me. It was a book about the grace of God and our salvation and it was there in that motel room that I realized, I guess, I don't think it was for the first time, but it was in a deeper way that my sin was a whole lot worse than I thought it was. But I also realized that God's grace was far greater than all my sin. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt on that day that he saved me not because he saw any good in me, but only because of his mercy and his grace. He had chosen me in Christ before the foundation of the world and I dropped my knees beside that bed, the first words out of my mouth were why me Lord. And those words have come through the years over and over again as I have grown in my understanding of his grace which I did not and I still do not deserve. Hebrews 11 at verse 17 tells us that Noah was protected because by faith, by faith in holy fear, he built an ark. Are you thankful this morning for God's protection, protection from all of the evils of this life but also even more so in the life to come. Destruction in the world came in Noah's day because of sin. But I wonder if you noticed here in the verses that we read that sin still remained after the flood. Notice the Lord's words at verse 21. He says, never again will I curse the ground because of man even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. You ever stop and think there were only eight people that that was being addressed to at that particular time. Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives. Noah was not that ark because he was a good guy. Noah was on that ark because of the mercy of Almighty God. It's talking about Noah's heart when it's talking about every inclination of his heart with evil from childhood. You see, many sinful men and women have been destroyed by the flood but our propensity towards sin, the evil inclination of our hearts remains. Remained in Noah remains in us to this day and so more of saving grace was needed than just protection. God's protection pointed Noah in the second place here to God's payment. Verse 20, Noah built an altar to the Lord and taking some of all of the chosen clean animals and clean birds he sacrificed burned offerings on it. These were animal sacrifices and they were symbols of the fact that sin, Noah's sin in this case needed to be paid for. Noah realized in the midst of his thanksgiving for God's protection that he was still a sinful man and so he built an altar and he made a sacrifice. But of course this was only a temporary fix. God would finally deal with the evil inclination of our hearts, didn't he? Our propensity towards sin would be dealt with in a final way in Jesus Christ. Jesus would come to be God's final once for all payment. God sacrificed to pay for our sins with his own blood on the cross. If you've been the recipient of God's payment, are you thankful? If you've been bought with a price, you have and Paul says glorify God in your body. There's one word for that called obedience. I'm thankful for God's payment. I give myself back to him in faithful service with no reservations and no excuses. God's saving grace consists of his protection, his payment, and finally his patience. You and I live at a particular time in history. We live in what the Bible calls the day of salvation. This is the day of God's patience. It is the day in which the offer of his salvation is extended to everyone everywhere. And his framework that we talked about a few minutes ago continues as long as the earth endures. And as I understand it, the earth is enduring today with one primary purpose. God is letting time go on with a view toward the salvation of people. Listen to 2 Peter 3, verse 9, where it says the Lord is not slow in keeping his promise. He's patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. But don't go on forever. The next verse says the day of the Lord will come, like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar. The elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. This earth continues on today by the patience of Almighty God. Where are you this morning with respect to God's patience? Are you in a very particular and personal way, an object this morning of his patience? Is he being patient with you, not wanting you to perish outside of the Lord Jesus Christ, but wanting you to come to him, to come to Christ in repentance and faith? Let me invite you if that's your situation today. Let me invite you to turn to the Lord Jesus Christ. Today, this day can be a day of salvation for you, a day of real lasting eternal thanksgiving. Put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith for living is brought to you by your friends at the historic first Presbyterian Church in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, through expository Bible preaching, living worship, loving fellowship, and compassionate outreach. We want to be a ministry of God's grace, with lives transformed through the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have programs and opportunities for every age level, from the youngest to teens to 30 something to retirees. Join us for Sunday morning worship at 8.30 and 11. We're located at 554 Macaulay Avenue across from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus. Visit us in person or on the web at faithforliving.net or call 423-648-7914. Now January 11, 2009 will be the final faith for living television broadcast. For a DVD copy of this and future services, please contact April Gordon at 423-648-7919. Until then, we invite you back again next week at the same time, for another edition of Faith for Living.