Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Thanksgiving

Sermon scripture is Revelation 19:1-9. Please stand.

And after these things, I heard a great voice of much people in heaven saying, “Alleluia. Salvation and glory and honor and power unto the Lord our God. For true and righteous are his judgments. For he hath judged the great whore which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.

And again they said, Alleluia. And her smoke rose up forever and ever. And the four and twenty elders and the four beasts fell down and worshiped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen. Alleluia. And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him both small and great. And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thundering, saying, Hallelujah! For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white. For the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.

May be seated.

Picture for us a scene of holy worship. It paints a picture with the focal point of that worship being thanksgiving to God. And it frames that at the end of the verses we read in terms of the marriage supper of the Lamb. Thanksgiving in this time of year has a central significance to those who are believers, because we have accepted and come to understand through the grace of God the meaning of holy communion—Eucharist—which word means thanksgiving.

So I’ve decided this past week to put aside for yet another week the Thessalonian series we could be considering, and instead to consider holy communion and thanksgiving in the context of this Thanksgiving season in 1991. This is a topical approach. I’ll be speaking on unnatural thanksgiving, commanded thanksgiving, reconstructed thanksgiving, and then joyous thanksgiving.

**Unnatural Thanksgiving**

Ephesians 5:20 says, “Give thanks always for all things unto God.” Philippians 4:6 says, “Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.” 1 Thessalonians 5:18, which we spoke on a year ago, says, “In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”

The holiday seasons frequently are difficult times for people. Right at the very opening of the season, that causes us as Christians to think about the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, to think of the great blessings and harvest that Thanksgiving reminds us of, to correlate that to the gospel harvest, the times we live in now. These are times that can be filled with great thanksgiving and joy and gladness, and these can also be times occasioned by sorrow and occasioned by a feeling of lack of thankfulness and a lack of joy in our lives.

They can be occasioned by difficulties because of the crush of the season, the change of weather, flu season approaching. Any of a number of problems may crop up in our lives. Dealing with extended family members who are not believers, taking the high days in which we want to really focus upon the thanksgiving we give to God and the joy we feel in the advent of his Son Jesus Christ and instead turning those into sort of secularized days because of our desire to correctly honor our parents and honor our extended family members that God has brought us in the context of, in terms of his providence—these things can cause thanksgiving to fade in our lives in this season.

Other events, events that are peculiar to this church and at this time, can also cause thanksgiving to fade in our hearts. And so I thought that for a while we’d talk this afternoon about unnatural Thanksgiving. This phrase is not unique to me, or genuinely to something I came up with. I heard it earlier this afternoon from Greg Bahnsen. I’ve remembered it from years ago when he gave a whole sermon entitled “Unnatural Thanksgiving.”

My life has been filled with concerns and cares that potentially have brought, and in many cases properly so, grief and sorrow in various ways these past few weeks, these past few months. Anxiety—sinful anxiety—can crush in. And so to speak on Thanksgiving for me today is somewhat unnatural. And yet I think it’s important to do it.

This past week in our household, we thought that maybe one way to relax a little bit and bring the family together was around a movie. A couple here at church recommended a movie called The Field to us. And as usual, I should have previewed it first before showing it to my family. But it’s a very interesting movie and I want to talk about it just a little bit because I think it has correlation to things that I’m going through and you may be going through as well.

In this movie, the main actor, played by Richard Harris, is set in Ireland, I guess, and he has taken a piece of land that he rents from a landowner that is essentially a rocky valley. And over the years, he has dug out all the rocks and stones, and he has hauled seaweed from the ocean over hills with him and his son on their backs day after day to provide fertilizer for this field. And he has turned a rocky place into paradise. He has created a beautiful green oasis, couple acres of a field.

He doesn’t own the field though. He rents it. And the man who owns it has died by the time the movie opens. There’s a widow, and she decides that she wants to sell the field. And the man, of course, hopes that she will follow the tradition of the city, that she would sell it to him. Of course, because of all his great work, he turned it into a field after all from a rocky place.

There’s another man who comes along, however, a man who had left Ireland, or at least whose ancestors had, and who is a Yankee from America. And he ends up buying the field. And he buys the field by having simply more money than the other fellow has. And he can beat any offer that this poor tenant farmer, as it were, could come up with. That seems incredibly unjust that this would happen.

Additionally, this man’s plans for the field are real interesting too. He doesn’t want to leave it as a nice green valley, a nice grazing pasture or things to grow things in the land. He wants to take the land and cover it up. He wants to put in a parking lot, asphalt, cement. He wants to cement the whole thing over so he can get to the limestone in the hills, haul them back out through the valley, and sell it so that roads can be built throughout Ireland. He wants to pave paradise, in the words of Joni Mitchell, for those of you who are familiar with that reference. And so you don’t have a lot of sympathy for this man.

You also find out that while this old man, Richard Harris, the fellow who wants to keep it as paradise, is gruff and obviously has sin problems in his life, yet he’s sort of a moral man in many ways. His son, without his knowing it, has terrorized a widow for ten years. He gets extremely irate when he finds out about it. They have always treated women with respect in Ireland over the generations, and he has that sense of morality with him.

Well, to make a long story short, this man ends up trying to teach the Yank a lesson by beating him up, him and his son, and instead kills him—manslaughter. And by the end of the movie, the old man who wanted to keep paradise instead of a lousy parking lot ends up going mad, starts to drive his cows over the hill. His son tries to stop him and goes over the hill with the cows and his own sheep—very much a symbol, of course, of sacrificial death of the Lamb, etc.

You know, it’s a depressing movie. It really is a depressing movie. And you have a hard time finding any good guys in the movie, and you sympathize with this rugged old man for not being thankful when a new owner comes along and buys it from him. But you know, he wasn’t thankful. And his thanklessness, his absence of thankfulness, showed a lack of respect for God.

He failed to acknowledge that we are always stewards over what God has given to us. And we are to be thankful for what God has given to us, recognizing that it can change at any point in time. And it may change for the worse. Paradise may become a parking lot. But this man failed in his thanksgiving. And he failed to acknowledge directly in the film God’s Law—Law that’s very important for understanding thanksgiving.

It’s related to the Law of God. And when you reject the Law of God, you reject the source of thanksgiving. And the only thing that can properly bring you to unnatural thanksgiving is understanding God’s providence. And you know, as it turned out in the movie, really it wasn’t really a dominion man, the old man, versus a proud young Yankee. If you think about it, what was the Yankee going to do? He was going to expand, go from glory to glory. He was going to turn it into a productive piece of property to make it productive for all of the nation.

See, and frequently the things that we are upset about and that we have a hard time thanking God for can in fact be the very providence of God to extend dominion, to bring about the expansion of his kingdom, etc. And so The Field has a lesson to us of what happens to unthankful men.

David the psalmist, in Psalm 13, cries out, “How long, O Lord, will you fail to hear me? Do my cries go up to you?” David was set about by enemies unfairly and unjustly accused. These were not dominion men after him. They were really the picture of fallen man, man become a beast, in the form of the wicked King Saul. By that time, David cries out, “How long?” But by the end of Psalm 13, David thanks God unnaturally in terms of his circumstances. David by doing that manifests genuine piety—the kind of piety that the world knows nothing about. The kind of thanksgiving that is not natural, that is difficult and absolutely impossible apart from either an insanity or apart from the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit.

The Psalms, almost every psalm of lament, ends with thanksgiving or praise to God on the part of the lamenting psalmist. And so we have a model given to us in the Psalms of unnatural thanksgiving. We have a model as well of the Apostle Paul. We just read from Philippians 4, written by the Apostle Paul when he’s in jail. And the Philippian church are bickering with one another and ready to bust up. And what does he write them? “Get yourselves in order.” No, he says, “Be joyful. Rejoice.” He’s in prison. The church is in trouble. And Paul says, “Don’t be anxious. Be anxious in nothing. But in everything, with prayer and supplication, you don’t ignore problems. You pray, you petition God for the problems you see. Prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God.”

Greg Bahnsen, in his sermon on unnatural thanksgiving, closed it with an illustration of how God, and the psalmist as exemplified by the psalmist, and the Apostle Paul as well—if you follow God’s spirit, your sorrow becomes a song. It’s the way Greg put that. And then he gave an illustration of Mr. Horatio Stafford who lived in the 1860s. Some of you have probably heard this story.

He was in America and he sent his wife and his two daughters on an ocean ship. They didn’t have planes back then—to England. And there was a storm that came up in the middle of the ocean. And there was a shipwreck. And the man found out that his wife had survived as the ship went down, but his two daughters didn’t. In this way, he got a telegram from his wife from England, which so the story goes, was comprised of two words: “Safe, alone.” Signed, his wife. His two daughters had died.

The man boarded another ship to go be with his wife in England and to comfort her. And he asked the people working on the boat to awaken him at sea when they got to the place where the storm had been and where his two daughters had been lost to the sea. And in the middle of the night, they came to that place and they woke him up. They said, “This is it.” And he went up on the deck and he wrote this song:

“When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
The sea billows that had taken his two daughters—
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.”

He wrote that song on that occasion. He understood unnatural thanksgiving. And he demonstrated his true piety to God by thanking God in incredibly difficult circumstances that none of us have had to go through these past few weeks.

We can thank God for this because we have behind the commands of Scripture to be thankful, and behind the example of the psalmist, and behind the example of Paul, we have the greater David, the greater Paul. The model for unnatural thanksgiving is what we’re about to partake of. Our Savior thanked God for the cup. He took the cup, Matthew 26 says, and gave thanks and gave it to them, saying, “Drink ye all of it.”

He provides us at communion a model of unnatural thanksgiving from the world’s point of view, but completely natural if we understand God’s providence and what he is causing to come about in our lives—the very difficult times he brings us through.

So this is a time of year when we may not feel particularly good and we may have difficult problems and we may have anxieties and cares, but God calls us to give him thanksgiving—albeit unnatural thanks—as a mark of our true piety before him. This is because we, as a result of our Savior’s work, have been delivered by God from our sin, from natural griping, from natural disputing, from natural worrying, and from natural anxiety. We’ve been delivered.

Romans 6:17 says, “That God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered unto you.” We’ve been delivered by what our Savior did. We’ve been delivered from the sin of anger, the sin of impatience, the sin of complaining, the sin of worry, etc. We’ve been delivered from those sins. And so we can give God thanksgiving based upon what our Savior does.

**Commanded Thanksgiving**

Now, from unnatural thanksgiving, let’s turn to, and we’ve made reference to it already, commanded thanksgiving. Psalm 92, which we read at our household this morning, is a psalm specifically written for the Sabbath day. And that psalm begins saying, “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord and sing praises unto thy name, O most High.”

Psalm 95:2 says, “Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.” Deuteronomy 12:18 and Deuteronomy 16:11 command us to go to the presence of God in the Old Testament and to rejoice before him. We come here today commanded by God to come for the purpose of giving thanks.

Psalm 100:4—”Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Be thankful unto him. Bless his name.”

God, in his great grace to us, knows the weakness of our souls. He knows how hard it is for us to give him thanks in times of trouble. So he gives us a command. He gives us a law and his mercy. He says, “You’ve got to come forward today. You’ve got to give thanks, and you’ve got to, as a result of that, get your perspective straight in terms of God’s eternal decree and in terms of what God is accomplishing in the world.” So he calls us to come here and he commands us to give him thanks.

He actually gives us men—that’s why we’re here. Ministers of the church are to exhort and to lead in thanksgiving. 1 Chronicles 16:4 appointed certain of the Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord and to record and to thank and praise the Lord God of Israel. Nehemiah 11:17 gives a list of some of these Levites—Mataniah, the son of Micah, the son of Zabdi, the son of Asaf, was the principal to begin the thanksgiving in prayer. It goes on to list other people.

He actually gives us men. He’s appointed us officers in the church to bring us, to command us, to lead us, and to be thankful on behalf of the congregation. And so we have a command by God, in his great grace, to bring us out of our anxieties and our concerns and our worries and to bring us forward to give thanks to him. And that’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to partake of the body and blood of our Lord. We’re here to celebrate the Eucharist. We’re here to have a thanksgiving.

He then reminds us here in 1991 of the need to see the correlation between what we do here with the Lord’s supper, with the Eucharist, and the thanksgiving, the things we end up giving God thanks for.

**Reconstructed Thanksgiving**

We have the third part of the outline: reconstructed thanksgiving. If the wine is a picture to us of unnatural thanksgiving—first in the part of our Savior and secondly on our part in that as well, that we suffer the sufferings of Jesus Christ as long as we walk in this world, we suffer persecution from enemies of the gospel, and we suffer persecution which our own sin brings upon us more often than not—and if the wine’s a model of that, then the bread sitting over there is certainly a picture of the reconstruction that this church has attempted to bring to our celebration of the Lord’s supper and to our understanding of what we’re giving thanks for.

We’re not somehow flying away from the reality of the world that God has given to us to achieve unnatural thanksgiving. We don’t deny what God has done. We celebrate what God has done. We celebrate a historic act, and we do it in very distinctive ways because it’s part of what God has called us to be thankful for.

The bread is a picture of the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians 10:11 makes it real clear that to be thankful for the bread is to be thankful as well for the body in terms of the church of Jesus Christ. To properly discern the body of the Lord Jesus Christ is to properly understand the composition of the covenant people of God.

And in this church, one of the things that we’re commanded to give thanks for, and which we should gladly give thanks for, is the fact that our children are not somehow excommunicated from the table until they reach some sort of level of understanding and ability to recite a number of questions and answers. There are good churches across this land who demand that the children of covenant members of the church memorize 150 questions or more complicated questions and be able to recite those in public before they’re given communion.

Now, they have reasons for that. I think they’re wrong. But you’ve got to realize that if you’re thankful that your children partake of the body and blood of the Lord and be nourished, and that because of that we are correctly discerning the body of Jesus Christ, and so avoiding God’s judgment that he says quite clearly comes upon those churches in 1 Corinthians 11 that fail to discern the body—if you’re thankful for that, recognize that this is one of the few churches in this country that allow you to do that.

I was talking to Howard L. a couple of weeks ago. He said that someone had told him, “Why do you go to a church that won’t let your kids take communion until they learn this catechism and stuff?” And he said, “Well, you know, there’s no church like RCC out there.” See, we should be real thankful that we’re in the context of a church here in a work in which God is causing us to reconstruct communion, to understand what that bread pictures in terms of the inclusion of our children. We’re properly discerning the body.

And secondly, as Revelation 19 makes very clear, the composition of that body are the linen-clad saints. To properly discern the covenantal body of Jesus Christ is to recognize their limitations on who comes to the table. Saints must be linen-clad. And Revelation 19 says in this great picture of this Thanksgiving celebration, it says of her—that is the church—was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white. For the fine linen is the righteousness of saints—the work of the saints, the deeds that you bring to the temple door.

Now, we know that we’re only accepted in the person and work of our Savior Jesus Christ. It is God’s sovereignty that has mantled us, as it were, judicially, with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. But this passage makes real clear, as does a whole number of other scriptures—the Jeremiah passage we read earlier, etc.—that there are manifestations of that life of Jesus in our lives. There are deeds of righteousness. There are linens, in that sense as well, that we must have as we come to the table of Jesus Christ.

So thanksgiving is thanksgiving for the composition of the covenantal body of Christ in terms of the local church—the inclusion of children, the exclusion of those who are not clad in the linen of the saints, the righteousness of Jesus Christ and the manifestation of that righteousness, how they live their lives up.

We give thanks to God for this corporate body. In 1 Thessalonians 1:2, “We give thanks to God always for you all.” If we thank God for the work of salvation, deliverance in Jesus Christ, if we thank God for the body that is pictured on that plate, we also thank God for the composition of the local body of Jesus Christ. And as we look around us at the communion table—usually downstairs today, up here—as we look around, we should be thankful in our hearts for the manifestation of the work of the Spirit in each and every life, each and every one of the lives of the people that we sit at this table with.

I am, you know, I’ve been graciously blessed. Several years ago, you all—or those that were here then, save one—made a quilt, and every night when I go to bed, I have this quilt laid over me, and it’s a reminder of the families of this church, and it’s a reminder to me to pray, making petition, but also giving Thanksgiving for the people that are here and the growth in grace I’ve seen over the years in each one, every one of you, each and every one of you, your lives. And we should be doing that, each of us, not just me. Think of a way to do it. The prayer sheets that Roy is providing on the calendar is a good way to do that. And your petition for the families of this church—be thankful to God as well that he has brought you, first of all, and he’s manifested things in your life.

You know, if you walk in the light of God and in his blessing, it’s not because you’re a good person. It’s because of the work of Jesus Christ in you. And be thankful for that. And be thankful to God for his Law.

To be thankful, as Psalm 119 says over and over again—that the way to discern the linen, as it were, is by understanding and rejoicing in the Law of God. First Kings 8:56, “Blessed be the Lord that hath given rest unto his people Israel according to all that he hath promised. There hath not failed one word of all his good promise which he promised by the hand of Moses his servant.” Those are the blessings of the Law that he’s talking about.

And as we see those blessings manifested in our lives and growth in grace, we’re to be thankful for God.

I want to turn to 1 John 3 just a minute here. Please turn there.

Last week we had a communion talk exhorting us to, as we are able, examine ourselves, and that’s good and proper. It’s important that we do that. It’s important in a church that sees the necessity of reconstructing communion on a weekly basis, obeying the command of God to give him thanks on the Sabbath day, and certainly focusing that thanksgiving on the Holy Eucharist, the communion, the thanksgiving that we give for the body and blood of our Lord. It’s important that a church that does this in obedience to God’s Law doesn’t become some kind of empty ritual and that we get complacent the way that the people of Jeremiah’s time did. I think we can just come forward without thinking about what we’ve done this past week. We must think about what we’ve done.

But on the other hand, there’s a mechanism. There’s a standard. There’s a measure so that we don’t have to come to the table wondering somehow we’ve missed the mark, wondering if somehow there’s something we left undone and God’s going to curse us and so be afraid of drinking it. It’s not foolish. It happens. George Washington apparently didn’t take communion for years because he was afraid of being damned by it.

See, 1 John 3 says “no.” No. Says in verse 18, “Let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And thereby we know that we are of the truth and shall assure our hearts before him. For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.

“And this is the commandment: that ye should believe on the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he gave us commandment.” A summation of the ten commandments and the case laws as well is what he’s saying here. “And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him, and thereby we know that he abideth in us by the Spirit which he hath given us.”

It doesn’t have to lead to some sort of unmeasured, vague, or numinous feeling of dread on our part. God writes these things to give us confidence to approach the table of our Lord. And if you are here and know of no violation of God’s Law Word this past week in your life, and if nobody has come to you to work out a violation of God’s Law Word in your life, your heart doesn’t condemn you because you’re keeping God’s commandments, because you’re trying to apply God’s commandments to your life, then God says, “Be thankful. Don’t be worried.”

God says we have confidence toward him to approach this table. We have confidence. It’s important that we know that, and it’s important that we’re thankful for that confidence given to us by the sure Word of God.

Psalm 119, which we’re going through in our family too right now, over and over and over again—”Thank you for your Law. Thank you for your Law. Thank you for your Law. Thank you. You’ve turned my feet toward your judgments.” From what? From sin. It’s why he’s turned. That’s what repentance is.

And if God gives us a stand that we can turn to and assure our hearts before him that we’re at peace with him—praise be to God. Thank God in spite of the difficulties and problems we have in our life, or concerns, or whatever, and relatives and thanksgiving pressures and whatever. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God for the maturation of our lives that has happened. The person and work of our Savior Jesus Christ as it’s worked out in our own lives.

Communion to be reconstructed means we come forward confidently, boldly, as we do in prayer to the throne of grace, and boldly to the communion table, thanking God that our children are coming with us. And thanking God that in this church we recognize that this is a picture of, among other things, the victory accomplished through Jesus Christ our Savior. And another picture we have is the bread, again leavened.

Now it doesn’t have to be that, but it’s a good picture of what God says the kingdom of God is all about. The kingdom of God is like a little leaven put in a lump, and it leavens the whole lump. You see, the kingdom expands and grows. Unleavened—Old Testament deliverance from Egypt, running out, staff in hand, ready to hit the road because they’re in fear. In the Promised Land, now this side of the cross, deliverance—victory accomplished in Jesus Christ. And a picture is the risen bread.

And when we think of that risen bread, we should think victory. That we thank God when we come to the table, not unnaturally in the sense of forgetting the great blessings that these things picture—the blessings of our children included in the covenant community of God, the blessings of the linen-clad saints that we sit at the table with according to his Law Word, the blessings of the victory in Jesus Christ that’s pictured to us in what we partake.

And so communion isn’t, you know, a dirge. It’s solemn. It’s a remembrance—that of the wine, the unnaturalness of it—but it’s also remembrance of the bread, the victory of it, the blessings that come forward.

Revelation 11:17—Revelation builds on the rest of the Scriptures in developing this theme of thanksgiving. They’re saying, “We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come, because thou hast taken to thee thy great power and hast reigned.” Thanksgiving in the Eucharist must be a picture of the victory of Jesus Christ—past tense, you have reigned. Jesus reigns at the right hand of the Father now until all enemies are made his footstool. Then he comes back to conquer the final enemy, death.

God calls us to be thankful for the victory of Jesus Christ. And he calls us to be thankful that we have received deliverance, as we said in terms of the wine, deliverance from our sins, deliverance from oppressors. But that deliverance is to establishment. It’s not simply getting away from hell. It’s going to heaven. It’s not simply being delivered out of jail. It’s being established as the ekklesia, the ruling body of the land and of the community that we see depicted in the book of Acts.

Psalm 105 says, “Give thanks unto the Lord. Call upon his name. Make known his deeds among the people.” It talks about Joseph, whose feet they hurt with fetters. He was laid in iron. The context of Revelation or Psalm 105 says, “Give thanks for his works.” Then it gives us a picture of those works to prepare us to give proper thanksgiving to God, and the works are, among others, that Joseph’s feet were in setters, he was laid in iron, until the time that his word came. The Word of the Lord tried him.

Are you being tried today? I ask you, I ask myself. Are we being tried? Don’t fail to be thankful for the trial because look what happens to Joseph as he’s tried. Verse 20: “The king sent and loosed him, even the ruler of the people, and let him go free. He made him lord of his house and ruler of all his substance, to bind his princes at his pleasure and teach his senators wisdom.”

Israel also came into Egypt and Jacob’s sojourn in the land of Ham. He increased his people greatly and made them stronger than their enemies. Test after test after test is recorded. And the evaluation at the end of the test is always that God’s people are delivered, but not simply let out of jail. They are established in power.

And the communion meal is a reminder of that. That Jesus Christ laid down his life for us and took upon himself the pangs of hell to the end that he might be enthroned at the right hand of the Father in heaven and reign. And if that’s what we’re talking about—death to our sin, deliverance from sin through Jesus Christ according to his Law Word—and we’re talking about that to the end that we might reign with him now—and that’s what history is all about. It’s test and evaluation. As you come through the test, recognize that much of the evaluation comes from your thankfulness or lack of thankfulness for what God has accomplished in bringing you to that situation and preparing you for not just deliverance but for establishment.

Throughout this altar we read, “Give thanks to God, for he is good. His mercy endureth forever.” Give thanks. His mercy endureth forever. God’s mercy pervades history toward his people. And as we come forward, forget, leave the haunts of gloomy sadness, and come to this place and rejoice and give thanks that even those haunts of sadness are part of the mercy of God extended to you and part of the administration of God to bring you to establishment and to bring you to perfection and maturation in the person and work of our Savior.

Give thanks to the Lord of Hosts, to the Lord of lords, for his mercy endureth forever. To him who alone doeth great wonders, for his mercy endureth forever. We give thanksgiving for this reconstructed understanding we have, based upon the Word of God, of what this pictures to us—the centrality, the thing that teaches us what thanksgiving is about in every aspect of our lives. And it’s thanksgiving for establishment. And beyond that, it’s thanksgiving for dominion.

For dominion, it’s preparation as well. Thanksgiving is for doing appropriate works of dominion in the callings that God has given to us to do on a day-by-day basis. It’s preparation for the rest of the week.

I was down in Salem this last week. I took my one son, my older son Elijah, with me, and we were sitting at McDonald’s after I’d been doing some stuff at the Capitol. We looked out the window and there was a big crane working out there. We got the food and we prayed for it and gave God thanks, of course. And I said, “You know, Elijah, animals can’t talk. You know, they can’t talk. They can’t speak words of thanksgiving to God like we can. We’re made in God’s image. And animals can’t build trains out there. They don’t build big buildings. They don’t change the world. They don’t take a green valley and sometimes appropriately turn it into a parking lot. They don’t do that kind of stuff. We do. We’re made in God’s image. We’re made in God’s image to speak words, to give words of thanksgiving to God for the task that he has called us to do. And we’re called in God’s image to exercise dominion, to change the world. To change the world. That’s what we’re here for. To have the world go from glory to glory. To extract the substance out of the sea—one of God’s blessings upon us.”

See, and communion is the picture of that to us. You know, in Psalm 92:4, for instance, “For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work. I will triumph in the works of thy hands.” Psalm 92, verse 2, “To show forth thy loving kindness in the morning and thy faithfulness every night.” Our job, according to Psalm 92, which I quoted earlier in terms of thanksgiving, is to start the day and end the day with thanksgiving—brackets of thanksgiving around a day that, apart from the Sabbath day, is a day that we are called to exercise dominion. Every day it says, not just simply every Sabbath day—every day you should begin and end the day with thanksgiving in your heart to God. Good idea to formalize it. Good idea to do it literally and make a prayer of thanksgiving with your family in the morning—to simply take hold of the day according to God’s means and see it in that way.

Dom Gregory Dix wrote a massive work on the shape of the liturgy, discussing the implications of communion and what our Savior did as the model for our thanksgiving in all things. James B. Jordan has taken that work and made it very helpful and applied what Dom Gregory Dix has done and helped us to see the implications of thanksgiving in terms of establishment and dominion, in terms of our everyday calling in life.

Jesus took hold of some bread. He gave thanks to God for it. He broke it apart. He then gave the broken pieces to his disciples. They ate it. They took wine. They gave thanks. He gave it to them again, and they drank it. And all of this, Dom Gregory Dix said, can be reduced to a four-fold action. Now, Jim Jordan likes five. It doesn’t make much difference, but it is a picture—just a picture—of what we do with our dominion tasks and the necessity of, see, thanksgiving involved in them.

Here’s the deal. You take hold of the bread. You give God thanks for it. You receive it from God’s hand. You give God thanks. And then you work the bread. You do something with it. You change it. You break it apart in terms of holy communion. And I give it to you. We distribute that work. Then we taste the bread and we rest in the blessings that God says accompanies the sacrament correctly taken. We rest then in that blessing from God.

Jim Jordan points out that’s much of what God did in terms of the original creation. God gives us the model where he took hold of the created order in the days of creation. He breaks it down. He separates things—day from night, waters from land. He restructures the world according to Genesis, the opening chapters of it. He distributes various portions of what he has broken up to various kingdoms of creatures—sea creatures, land creatures, air creatures, etc. And God evaluates his work. Remember he said it was good. It was good. It was good. Repeatedly, he evaluates his work.

And then on the seventh day, God rests. He rests in the blessings of what he has done. And so our lives are the same way. We’re supposed to give thanks to God. We’re supposed to realize that he has given us work to do. Tomorrow, you’re going to take hold of something—mentally, physically, whatever it is. And you’re going to restructure it. You’re going to make it go from glory to glory. You’re going to do it in relationship to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. You’re going to distribute that work to others. That work will be evaluated. That work will then be rested, and you come back here next Lord’s day. And at the end of six days of labor, you rest the way that God gives us the model to.

And here’s the point. Everybody does that. Pagan man does that too. He goes and works too. He separates things. You know, he does this, that, and the other thing. And he evaluates his work. But what doesn’t he do? Romans 1 tells us what he doesn’t do. And for this, he comes under the judgment of Almighty God. He doesn’t give thanks. He doesn’t give thanks for what God gives him to work with. And so when we thank God for the bread and the wine here in a couple of minutes, that’s a model. That’s a picture. And it is a command from God that we be thankful in everything that we put our hand to do this coming week.

And at the opening of the day, we should tell our children, “Let’s pray that God that we are thankful. We take this day from God’s hand gratefully and thankfully. We break it up. We work with it. And we distribute that work. We evaluate it. We let God’s Word evaluate the goodness of our work and the community we’re in, in context with as well. And then at the end of the week, we rest.”

And so thanksgiving is for establishment and deliverance and dominion. It is specifically related to the tasks of dominion that God has given us to do. And God says that at the end of all this, that thanksgiving is the vital element that sorts out sheep and goats. Are we thankful for what God has given to us? And if we’re not, then we’re cast out. And if we are, then we’re received in the person and work of our Savior.

And of course, that thanksgiving of course comes from him. We wouldn’t be thankful in and of ourselves if we were unregenerate. Okay? So the same thing happens to us every Sunday, apart from communion. The Word is preached. The Word cuts us up. The Word is sharper than any two-edged sword. And God brings us back to wholeness at the end of the worship day, having stricken our consciences many times from his Word, having us come to repentance for our sins. He brings us back to wholeness in the person and work of our Savior Jesus Christ. And we’ve got to be thankful for that process.

We got to be thankful that we’re having the stones ripped out of our stony heart and that God, through other means, brings that seaweed—the fertilizer, whatever it is—from his Word into our hearts and creates green, beautiful pastures there. We got to be thankful. It’s hard. You know, when he plucks stones out of your heart, it’s a hard thing to go through. But it’s to be thanked. God’s to be thanked when he does it.

**Joyous Thanksgiving**

Finally, joyous thanksgiving. We’ve looked at commanded thanksgiving. We’ve looked at reconstructed thanksgiving. And again, in Revelation 19, we see joyous thanksgiving. And here the picture for all of this—the unnatural thanksgiving we’re commanded to do, the commanded thanksgiving—it’s all really summarized in Revelation 19 as the marriage supper of the Lamb.

And here is the very focal point of our thanksgiving. We are thankful for the coming of the Groom. We are thankful because he is fairer than ten thousand. And when we come to the Lord’s supper, the primary thing we’re focusing upon is the presence of Jesus Christ with us through the elements of communion—the real presence, that he is here amongst us.

Remember, Revelation 3, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Some of you think it sounds a little funny when we say it as we open the door to let him enter. Let us remember that he himself is the true doorkeeper. What’s not funny is what Revelation 3 says really happens. Jesus’s parousia, his advent, his revelation of himself as Lord and King, is manifested in some special sense in terms of the communion service.

And so when we celebrate and we give thanksgiving here on Thursday, it’s a—the model is not Thursday. The model is Sunday. The model is this meal. And this meal spells victory. This meal spells community with the linen-clad saints. This meal spells unnatural thanksgiving. And this meal spells joyous thanksgiving because we are meeting our Bridegroom.

For those of you who’ve been married, you know what a special day that was. You know what joy there is to that. Why? Because God is taking your isolation and bringing you into fellowship with another person. And then he, in most cases, graciously and super abundantly gives us a gift of life through that process. He has these little children running around our houses. We take them for granted. We get mad at them. We get impatient. But at the bottom of our being, I hope that we’re all thankful for these children—these pictures of blessing, these pictures that God has graciously added to our marriages, the gift of life in the context of our homes. What a beautiful thing. What a beautiful thing that is.

And so, if the Lord compares what we’re doing now in terms of Eucharist to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the King of Kings with the Queen of Queens, the church, then don’t you see how joyous we should be when we come to the table? Don’t you see what a wonderful time this should be to us as we meditate upon the Song of Solomon, for instance, and read those lines about how he’s fairer than ten thousand? And he is the one we approach now.

He’s also the one we approach when we’re tested and we’re tried and evaluated. He’s also the one we approach. He’s the one who gives us the command to give him unnatural thanksgiving, and he brings us through the unnaturalness of that to the natural beauty of it, to the joy of it, to the recognition that it is his presence with us who is pulling the stones out of our heart and changing us into his people, conforming us and molding us into the image of the beloved Son.

It’s a joyous and wondrous thing that God has accomplished for us. And all these things are involved in our Thanksgiving season. This is a wonderful time of year. It’s a wonderful time of the year to focus on thanksgiving and to change our unnatural thanksgiving through the process of obedience to him into joyous thanksgiving, into a recognition of what this season is all about, and then to have that spirit pervade all the rest of our lives.

We do this weekly, every week. We’re trained to give thanks to God for these tremendous blessings. Job said he would give thanks to God. He’d pay his vows to God most high. And as you come forward in the processional now and as we prepare to take the Lord’s supper and meet with him for this model of the marriage supper of the Lamb, have joy in your hearts. Recognize the command to be thankful. Recognize the great blessings that he gives you to thank him for. Recognize that those blessings are centered upon the person and work of the Savior Jesus Christ.

The wine symbolizing his unnatural thanksgiving, his—our deliverance as a result from our sins, and our satisfaction of our sins being made through his shed blood. The bread picturing the gift of his body, the creation of the corporate body of the church, establishment and deliverance to dominion, and the preparation for all the tasks that we’re called to do and giving us grateful hearts to receive the King of Kings now in this time of holy worship as our Bridegroom, and to rejoice in his presence as we’re called to come forward.