Thanksgiving to God Various Texts

Thanksgiving as a Call to Give Thanks to God

This Thursday, they'll round a table and eat turkey and other food with their family. This holiday of Thanksgiving started early on in the history of our country. The United States officially became a country in 1776, but our roots go back further than that.

The first colony was Jamestown, which is in present-day Virginia, in 1609. Our early pilgrims landed up the coast in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621. The Plymouth colonists shared a feast with the local Native Americans there.

These colonists were Christians who knew that God guided them to the New World and was protecting and providing for them in their new country. For the next 200-plus years, different days of Thanksgiving were celebrated by separate colonists and states.

It was not until 1864 when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Thanksgiving Day to be held in America on the last Thursday of November. It was later changed to the fourth Thursday. He proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

Some people wonder, what is the meaning of Thanksgiving? As Lincoln said, the focus is on thanks to God. This is what people often overlook. So much of the Thanksgiving is horizontal, from person to person, but this holiday was established as thanks vertically to God.

I thought it would be appropriate this morning to preach a sermon on the topic of Thanksgiving. For those of you who are visiting, we've been going through Genesis, verse by verse, and we're in Genesis chapter 8 right now, but we're actually taking a little break today to focus on Thanksgiving as this holiday looms.

So I'm not going to have you turn in your Bible anywhere today. The verses are in your outline, in your bulletin, for those of you who have a bulletin. And our big idea this morning, what this sermon is calling you to do, is to strive always to thank God.

Thanking God for His Character and Deeds

Strive always to thank God. We're going to look at four different areas. The first is his attributes and deeds toward us. In our summer sermon series, we looked at the attributes of God. That was an 11 or 12 week series when we looked at each attribute of the Lord.

We looked at all the ways God is worthy of our praise. There is a little difference between prayers of praise and prayers of thanks. Praise is focused on adoration to God. You're focusing on something specifically that we can adore about the Lord.

Prayers of thanks, on the other hand, is focused on something wonderful about God and how this directly benefits your life. I'm going to show you from scripture a number of places where the Bible highlights God's character and we should thank him for it.

The first one is Psalm 7, 17, where King David highlights God's righteous character. He says, We should be grateful that the Lord is righteous. Otherwise, he would not be worthy of our worship. Can you imagine a world with a God that ruled it who was not righteous?

That would be horrible. We live in a world with a righteous God who rules it. In Psalm 28, David highlights the Lord's strength that strengthens us. So David is giving thanks to the Lord for his strength.

In our life, we should never be self-sufficient. Oh, how tempting it is to rely on ourselves. It's a battle we face every day. Our strength is weak. And as you live long enough, you realize that that is the case.

If we trust in an all-powerful one, then we are strong. And that's what we must do. David also underscores God's holiness in Psalm 30, verse 4, where he writes,. What we saw this past summer is that holiness means that one is set apart from sin.

God is completely set apart from all evil. And we should thank him for it. We are blessed to worship a God who is holy and calls us to be holy. What we should also thank God for is his goodness. Psalm 54, 6,.

And then in Psalm 107, 1,. As his children, we experience his goodness and his steadfast love toward us. We should thank him for it. God is good in his nature and also in his deeds toward us. That brings us to the next piece of this.

Since God is good, he always does good to us. He always does. Romans 8, 28 says,. If you are a child of God, every circumstance that you face is ultimately for your good. And that can be hard to see sometimes.

We have the narrow picture of everything that is happening in our lives. And it may not seem that way. But God has the big picture. And in his infinite wisdom, he knows what he is doing with the details of your life.

So we should always give thanks to him for every circumstance that we face. Throughout the Psalms, the psalmist thanks the Lord for his wonderful deeds. In Psalm 9, 1, David says, I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart.

I will recount all your wonderful deeds. In Psalm 26, 6, and 7, he says the same thing. Do you ever do that? You think about your life, and you look back at it, and you look at what he is doing in the present, and you say, Lord, thank you for the deeds that you are doing in my life.

If you are here today, and you belong to Jesus, you can tell of his great works in your life. God has always been for you. And how do we know this? We know this because of what happened at Golgotha 2 ,000 years ago.

God sent his son to die for your sins. Romans 8, 32 says,. So if you ever wonder, is God for me? Well, absolutely he is, because his son, Jesus Christ, paid the ultimate price 2 ,000 years ago. And that's what that verse is saying, Romans 8, 32.

He did not spare his son, so he's going to be with us every step of the way. So not only is God for you in the past, but he's also for you in the present. He is always for you if you belong to Jesus. In the early 1970s, Chuck Colson, that rings a bell for some of you, he was known as the hatchet man for Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

And the Watergate scandal was, of course, when Nixon had his men steal things from the Democratic headquarters, which was known as Watergate. And during this time, Chuck Colson was not a Christian, but he was sent to prison for his crimes and spent some time there.

And during that time, he became a believer in Christ. And when he came out, he was a changed man. And when you ask the question, what was God for Chuck Colson when he got caught? The answer is yes. Because that gave him an opportunity to actually seek after the Lord.

Where before this, he was on this track of advancing himself. He actually said that if his mom got in his way, he was going to step on her. In other words, he would do anything at all costs to get where he wanted to be.

But the Lord intervened in his life, completely changed his life, and for the rest of his life, for about four decades, he was a man of God. Now when people think of Chuck Colson, they don't think about the Watergate scandal.

They think of all the work that he did for the Lord in the last several decades of his life. And God intervened in his life and did him good, even through this painful trial of sending him to prison, because he was for him in the past.

Because Jesus died for his sins. He is over the details of your life, working them for good. God's final plan is to make you a glorified person, dwelling in a new heaven and a new earth, where you will be with him forever.

People often ask the question, what is the will of God for my life? Have you ever asked that question? What is the will of God for my life? And typically the intention of this question is, what am I supposed to do?

I'm in this perplexing situation, and I don't know what to do. So what is the will of God in this? Does he have a roadmap for me? Now, God is so much more concerned about your character than the actual path that you go down.

He is concerned about you becoming like him, reflecting him in holiness. The road you will go down is not always clear. But what he is going to do to you on this road is clear. In the letter of 1 Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul tells you what the will of the Lord is for your life in two places.

1 Thessalonians 4 .3, this is the will of God, your sanctification. That's a fancy theological term. What does that mean? Sanctification means becoming holy. It means growing in holiness. The Lord's will for you is to be holy.

One of the ways you can be holy is to trust God in what he is doing in your life. This means being thankful even in the midst of difficult circumstances, even in the midst of trials. This is what Paul said a chapter later in 1 Thessalonians 5 .18.

He wrote, Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. So if someone ever comes up to you and asks you, what is the will of God for my life? You say, well, his will is your sanctification to make you holy.

And his will is for you to give thanks in all circumstances. You might say, this trial I'm going through is difficult. Many of you in this room are facing a challenge right now. Everybody is facing challenges of different kinds.

But through this, God is calling you to be thankful. Because he is sending this trial your way not to harm you, but to produce something in you. Namely holiness. I mean, think about that. The trial you're facing isn't meaningless.

And that should encourage you saying, okay, God's doing something here. God's at work. And you can rejoice in that. When we are tempted to be anxious, the Bible calls us to go to him in prayer. And you will notice what kind of prayers we should make.

In Philippians 4 .6, Paul again says, Do not be anxious at anything, but in everything, by prayers and supplication, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Supplication means requests. Requests to God that we make. So we should make requests. But we should not stop there. Mixed in with our prayers should be prayers of thanksgiving. Those two little words.

With thanksgiving. We need to have prayers of thanksgiving with the circumstances in our lives. And even though you are tempted to be anxious, thank God. As you thank him, you will be reminded of his provision in your life.

The good he has done for you and the good he is doing for you right now. And this will help you from becoming anxious. Because when we are thankful people, when we think about having these prayers of thanksgiving toward God, it makes us not as anxious, doesn't it?

We're like, wow, look at all the Lord has done for me. I should be thankful. And then that takes away the anxiety. So we must thank God in all circumstances. And this is the first area. You must strive to thank him.

For his character and his deeds toward you. The second area you must strive to thank God is for his earthly blessings. A lot of these were mentioned during our time of thanksgiving prayers earlier in the service.

As we look at God's daily provision for us and the details of our earthly lives, we have so much to be thankful for. Actually, Ephesians 5 .20 says, Giving thanks always and for everything to God. In your present life, we know this.

God cares for you. Matthew 5 .45, He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. Every day is a gift from God. We don't deserve to have the sun. As sinners, we don't deserve to have the sun rise every day.

We don't deserve to have rain so that crops can grow, so that we can have food. But God is gracious to us. He is so merciful in that he does this for us. John 15 .5 says that, Apart from Christ, we can do nothing.

And people who have been through a lot of suffering know this verse best. Now this verse, in its context, is referring specifically towards, Apart from Christ, we can do nothing spiritually. But it's certainly true that we can do nothing physically apart from Jesus.

Several months ago, I got to know a gentleman very well who has Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS, which is really a horrible disease where your muscles start to fail. And you have about a five-year life expectancy where all the voluntary muscles in your body shut down.

So you can't talk eventually. You can't eat. You can't walk. You can't lift your arm. I mean, this is simple things that we take for granted every day you can't do with this. But this gentleman, he's had it for eight years.

And it's really a miracle what God's done in his life because he can still walk. He can still talk. He can still eat. But he said that 95 of his strength has gone from where it was. He said he used to be a very strong man, was able to lift so much, but all the strength pretty much has gone away except for a little bit.

And he told me when I talked to him a couple months ago that he said, Seth, this verse where Jesus says, Apart from me you can do nothing, it really means a lot to me because I've experienced this. Apart from his grace in my life, I can do nothing.

And when you think about it, we can't hear. We can't talk. We can't taste anything. We can't see unless God gives us that gift. And there's people all over the world who don't have that gift right now, but so many of us do.

And we need to be thankful to God to say, Thank you, Lord, that you've been gracious to me to give me the ability to do these things. And if you haven't experienced a difficult loss in your life, you might not understand the thanksgiving that needs to be there.

But this man that I met, he understands that because he's been through it himself. And many of you have been through something where you can say, I once took this for granted. I don't anymore. I'm so thankful for you giving me this in my life.

And how tragic it is if we do not thank him. So let's thank the Lord for his earthly blessings. We should be thanking him daily. The clear teaching of Scripture is that everything God created is good, so we should enjoy what he has given us.

First Timothy 4 .4 says, Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. You see that? God's saying, all these things I've given you, I want you to enjoy them.

I've created them. I've created them for you to enjoy, but to enjoy with thanksgiving. That's a horrible thing to do if we enjoy God's gifts without ever giving him thanks. We should always be giving thanks to him for everything that he has given us.

I try to thank God every day for my family. I am so blessed to have Brianna and Alethea who's in the annex right now. Sometimes it's like you can't even put into words how thankful you are. I try to thank God for this church.

I am blessed to be your pastor. What an honor. And God is the one who put me in this situation to be your shepherd. Actually, it was about a year ago, Thanksgiving, when I was talking to Larry. I think it was November 15th was the first contact I got from him.

And Thanksgiving was about 10 days later. And Brianna's parents live about 30 miles from here, and we were actually visiting over Thanksgiving. And I told Brianna, I said, Brianna, let's go drive up to Eureka Baptist to see what everything looks like.

And we drove up here. And at that time, obviously nothing was a guarantee. We didn't know if this was going to be our church at that time. And we drove up here, and we saw it. It's just interesting how it was over Thanksgiving weekend that we saw this place for the first time.

And now I'm thinking about how thankful I am that it all worked out. And so, yeah, I just want you to know I'm thankful to be your pastor, and I thank God for that. This is the second area you must strive to thank God.

Thank him for his earthly blessings. The third area you must strive to thank God is for transferring you from darkness to light. From darkness to light, he transferred you if you belong to Christ. This third area is the most important of all, and we cannot forget this one.

It's so important. Everyone comes into this world as a sinner in need of a Savior. No one on planet Earth is immune from this fundamental problem that we are sinners by nature and by choice. We need someone to step in as our mediator, or we have no hope.

And Jesus has done that. 1 Timothy 2, 5, and 6 says there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself up for us all as a ransom. Jesus brings you to God.

He's this bridge. It's like man is here, God is here. And Jesus makes a way for us to have this relationship with God. You came into this world in darkness, but he transfers you to light. I remember reading this verse in Colossians several years ago and just being blown away by it.

This reminded me that I need to be most thankful for this. Colossians 1, 12 -14, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

That's a good verse to have at your house on Thanksgiving, isn't it? Colossians 1, 12 -14. He's transferred us from darkness to light through Jesus Christ. And you have been set free from your sin. When you come into this world, Satan rules your life.

You're in bondage to your own sin and you go with the flow of the world. Anyone who does not know Christ, that's their experience every single day. And that's everyone's experience when they come into this world.

But you have been set free from sin in Christ. And this is what the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 6 -17. He says, No one in this room and no one in this world has the ability to save themselves. It's kind of our default mode.

We think, okay, if I just do enough, then I'll stand before God, okay. But the Bible says, no, you can't do it. That's the consistent teaching of Scripture. You can't do it on your own. Only God can do this for you.

It's only His grace that you are saved. Ephesians 2 -8 and 9, God saves you and gets the glory. And what we must do on Thanksgiving and every day, 365 days a year, is thank the Lord for His salvation.

Thank Him that He sent Jesus to die for your sins and to give you eternal life. And in this room, I don't want to assume that every one of you has this, which is why I try most weeks to present the Gospel to you so that if you have not trusted in Christ, that you would trust in Him.

The Bible says that if you sincerely believe in Him, you will be saved. And don't lose sight of how wonderful this is. And the best part about being saved is not that your sins are forgiven, that you're not going to go to hell, that you get to go to a wonderful place with streets of gold and a shining sea, reunited with loved ones, and all those things are wonderful.

But the best part about being saved is that you have fellowship with the one for whom you were created. You were created for God. Every one of us has this God-size void inside of us that can only be filled by Him.

That's why Jesus says, I am the bread of life. Anybody who comes to me will never go hungry. Anyone who comes to me will never go thirsty. All these other things that we want to satisfy us, that we think are going to satisfy us, never do.

But God does. That's the best part about being saved, is you know God. You have this fellowship with Him. And it cannot be broken. Every day is Thanksgiving. But when this holiday rolls around once a year, what a great reminder that we should always be thankful for our salvation.

This is the third area that you must always strive to thank God. Thank Him for transferring you from darkness to light. The fourth area that you must strive to thank God is for the other believers that He has placed in your life.

Thanking God for Other Believers

What we do vertically with God will always impact what we do horizontally with other people. The greatest commandment of the Bible is to love God with everything you have, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.

The second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. If we are thanking God, then we will thank God for others. It just flows out of you. So it starts with God. But then this is just an overflow of that.

Thanking God for God's people is a pattern that you see in the Bible, and you see it most clearly in the Bible, in Paul's ministry. He does this over and over again. Romans 1 .8, he writes, Ephesians 1 .16, this is the church in Ephesus.

Okay, so he's talking to the church in Rome, the first one. Now he's talking to a different church. He says,. And then he says this to the church in Philippi. You can see the affection that Paul had for the churches.

You can see the thanksgiving that he had for other believers. And do you have this thanks for the believers in your life? This is something we must have. We should be so thankful for people. And this brings up this application that we must do this.

I set aside time every week to pray for this church. I try to follow the model of Jesus. It's that Jesus went to a nice, quiet place to pray. And I usually go to Interstate Park because it's so beautiful there.

And I look over the cliff, down the river, down towards Taylor's Falls, and I pray for the church. I pray for every one of you individually just about every week. And as I pray, I often find myself thanking God for this person or for that person.

And I want to live out this in my own life. And so that's one type of prayer I try to do when I pray for this church. And as you do this, people will know you as a thankful person. As we give thanks to God for other people, there is an extension of this.

Now, this sermon is focused on our thanksgiving to God in these four areas. But we must also thank others. If someone does something kind to you, do you thank them? That just comes with the territory of thanking God.

You're going to be a thankful person. And what a powerful testimony it is when people know you as that, as one who thanks God and, by extension, always thanks other people. We've all come across people like this, people who are not thankful for anything.

And you wonder, I mean, how do you live with yourself? Not being a person of thanksgiving. So this fourth area, that we should always strive to thank God, thanking for the other believers that he has placed in your life.

So what we have seen here is strive to thank God always for his character and deeds toward us, for his earthly blessings, for transferring you from darkness to light, and for the other believers that he has placed in your life.

Thanksgiving as a Public Witness and Daniel’s Example

As we approach Thanksgiving in a few days, reflect on this. I hope when you leave today that this doesn't just go in one ear and out the other. Reflect, just like every week, on the sermon, on what the Word of God is saying.

This holiday is meant to be thanksgiving toward God. And as I mentioned above, yes, we should thank other people, but that always flows out of our thankfulness to God. This week is a reminder to be thankful to him.

It is why this holiday was established in the first place. It's remarkable how we live in a country that has a specific holiday where we give thanks to the one true God, the God of the Bible. We are very blessed to live in this country.

And maybe you'll have a conversation with someone who doesn't know the Lord this week, and you might say, you know what the purpose of Thanksgiving is? Abraham Lincoln even said it's for prayers to our beneficent Father.

That's the purpose of this holiday. And believers in Christ stand out from unbelievers in Thanksgiving. Romans 121 says that unbelievers do not give thanks to God, but believers are known for this. And I'm going to close with this final illustration here from Scripture.

In the Old Testament, there was a man named Daniel, who is most known as the man who was in the lion's den. But he should be known for his godly character. Daniel was a man who was thankful to God. Daniel knew that if he prayed publicly, he would be thrown into the lion's den.

Because they made this edict that if he did this, if he prayed publicly like he was known to do, that he was going to get thrown into the lion's den. They couldn't find anything in his life that would possibly get him punished, so they had to find something about his godly character that would go against the pagan king's wishes.

And so Daniel knew that he was going to be thrown into the lion's den, and even though he knew this, Daniel still prayed. And this is what Daniel 6 .10 said about him. When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.

He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as he had done previously. So he knows, I'm going to get punished for this, I might die. But he still prays to God, and he specifically prayed prayers of thanksgiving.

And this is what he was known for, as it says here, as he had done previously. This was a regular pattern in his life. And may we reflect Daniel in this way, by giving thanks to the Lord. Now as I mentioned at the beginning, last week we were in Genesis, next week we'll be in Genesis.

We talked about the flood last week, and next Sunday we're going to talk about the waters subsiding during the flood. Let's pray. Father in heaven, I pray that we would be thankful to you, above all, in every area in our life.

These four areas that I laid out, that are in scripture. Father, I pray that Eureka Baptists, when people in this community look at this church, they would say those people are thankful people. They're thankful to their God.

And that would be a powerful witness to this community. That we would reflect you in this way, by giving thanks to you, by showing our trust in you. So help us to do this. Lord, we have so much to be thankful for.

In Jesus' name, Amen.