From Hope Church, Pastor Mike Sadlers words on being thankful this Thanksgiving Day! Good Afternoon! I hope you had a great weekend…its getting kind of chilly out there; I love it! We had a great breakfast Friday morning; kudos to our fantastic cooks! For our devotion we looked at Psalm 100, “Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. 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.” One of the most amazing things about the 100th Psalm is that it stands alone as the only psalm identified explicitly as ‘a psalm for giving thanks.’ There are many psalms used to give thanks, but Psalm 100 is specifically identified as a psalm of ‘thanksgiving!’ It is an awesome psalm…one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. I’ve chosen it today as Thanksgiving Day is right around the corner. I don’t know about you, but every year when Thanksgiving is upon us, I’m almost overwhelmed with how much I have to be thankful for. My health, my family, my job, my house, and most importantly my Savior! Psalm 100 contains a statement of ‘how to give thanks,’ ‘an explanation of why we must give thanks’, an invitation to give thanks, and ‘a final great expression of praise and thanksgiving.’ It is a fairly common response when someone does something nice for us, to consider what we might do in return, to show our appreciation. A person I worked with once gave me a really nice gift and I was almost haunted with coming up with how I could show my appreciation. It got me to thinking…If we sometimes have difficulty showing appreciation to other human beings, how much more difficult is to genuinely show our appreciation to God? We can’t thank God by giving him something…he has everything, and he needs nothing from us, so what can we do to express our thanks? The psalmist says we can ‘shout.’ When we think of shouting we think of loud, right. The psalmist may have been thinking of loud too, but he was also thinking about ‘glad!’ The idea of joy appears three times here. We should not be ashamed to shout about Gods goodness. It would be accurate to say that the people of God should praise God loudly…because they are happy with him! One of the great preachers of the 20th century put it this way, “Our happy God should be worshipped by a happy people; a cheerful spirit is in keeping with his nature…’ Then, we can serve. He says, Worship the Lord with gladness…which could also be translated, serve the Lord with gladness! This psalm suggests that we serve God by our worship. We help and serve others… you remember the great story that Jesus told… he said, when I was hungry you fed me, and when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink… He concluded the story by saying that, ‘whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ So, how can we give thanks? Jesus said that we give thanks when we meet the needs of others. We thank God by feeding the hungry, by welcoming strangers, by clothing those who have no clothes, by caring for the sick, and by visiting those who are in prison. Then, we can ‘come.’ This more refers to actual participation in formal worship. The gathering together of God’s people to give praise to him…corporately! So, we thank God by serving others, but we worship God for who he is, as well. This is the joining together of faith and works. These three words: shout, serve, and come, define three necessary parts of our faith; our verbal witness, our humanitarian activity, and our praise and worship. The psalmist then moves into talking about why we should give God thanks. We need to know who we are thanking. What is it about God that we should know? Verse three gives two answers, (1) he is our Creator, and (2) he is our redeemer. When we don’t understand God as our creator, we begin to imagine that we are our own creators. When this is the case we have no one to thank but ourselves. It is the sad state of the world in which we live! God is our creator! Then, we should know God as our redeemer. He writes about this in the context being the sheep of his pasture. Jesus said,I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep…’ He laid down his life to redeem us... If we have no other reason to be thankful this morning, we can be thankful that God has both made us and redeemed us. But we must also learn to be thankful for his generosity and his faithfulness. We are blessed; we live in the most prosperous country in the world. In good times and bad times God is always there. Paul wrote to the Philippians, ‘I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret to being content in every situation…’ I want to know that secret, don’t you? Here is the secret...It is simply being thankful! He goes on to say, we are his, that we belong to him. Regardless of what is happening in the moment. No matter what, we are his! Trouble will inevitably come our way. But, we are his! Sickness may come…we are his! We may lose our job…we are his! Death may come to a family member or friend…we are still his! Hebrews 13 says, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ He closes by pointing us to the character of God. He tells us three things about him… 1) He is good! Psalm 34 says, ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good; Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.’ 2) He is ‘love.’ God is many things, but nothing lies at the heart of who God is like ‘love.’ 3) He is faithful. We live in an ever changing world. But God himself, is unchanging. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever! Can you think of any greater reasons to thank God…we are his redeemed people; created, loved, and cared for by the God of the whole universe! Now, thats something worth shouting about! Go ahead…shout a little praise to our good and faithful God! Happy Thanksgiving! Peace, Mike Hope Church Respects Your Privacy. View Our Privacy Policy. Click to Unsubscribe from Men@Hope© 2013 Hope Church/Hope Church Communications/Hope Church IT - All Rights Reserved hopepres
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 19:32:09 +0000
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