Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Thanksgiving

Today’s sermon text is found in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. This will be more of a topical sermon, but we’ll start with this verse and move on from there to consider this wondrous season that God has provided to us. This season of thanksgiving. Please stand as we hear the word of our King. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for these wondrous commands. We thank you for the joy of this season. We thank you, Lord God, for the absolute reasonableness, joy as well as obligation of thanksgiving to you. We pray now, Father, that you would take your word and transform us. Make us an increasingly thankful, joyous, praying people. Help us, Lord God, to move into this season of thanksgiving and Advent with hearts filled with delight, joy, and wonder at what you have accomplished. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

It’s a wondrous image we were given, was it not? The psalm that we just recited responsively and then sang to this beautiful tune setting that we used. Wondrous image of God coming to the earth and as he moves through the earth things spring forth, life happens. Transition from the fall to recovery. Transition from the wilderness to a garden with the advent of Jesus Christ.

And this season that God has in our country provided us—Thanksgiving. This is the Sunday closest preceding the Thanksgiving holiday itself for us. Thanksgiving always just precedes Advent, of course, the four Sundays leading up to the celebration of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is just a wondrous time, a delightful time, a time I think that in some conservative circles there’s unfortunately not a full apprehension of what God has given to us and the very essentially Christian nature of particularly the holiday that we celebrate on Thursday.

Thanksgiving. So I, more often than not, will use the Sunday closest to Thanksgiving to talk specifically on this topic. And I’ve preached from this particular text before. I just want to use it today as essentially a jumping off place to talk about Thanksgiving. And specifically, I don’t usually do this, but I’ve given you an alliterated outline. Three C’s. Thanksgiving for circumstances, thanksgiving for community, and thanksgiving for conquest.

So I want to talk about this now. On the announcements last week and again this week, the tentative title I had for this sermon was “Thanksgiving Obligation”—I think is what I had. Let’s see, yeah, “the duty, reasonableness and joy of thanksgiving.” And I felt bad about that title as I thought about it over this last week, that it started with duty and moved to joy. And you know, as I’ve tried to self-consciously do from the pulpit, the gospel is not something that we earn.

The gospel is the proclamation of the blessings of God upon his people. You’ve been gathered together today to hear Jesus speak peace to you. Not first and foremost to call you to duty, not to speak of the obligation. Now, 1 Thessalonians does give us a command, right? We’ll talk about that in a minute. There is this command aspect to thanksgiving. But thanksgiving first and foremost is absolutely reasonable.

Given the great news of the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has accomplished for us. Given the creation of the world and the beauty of creation, the beauty of what is accomplished and that we see around us. Given the beauty of the redemption of mankind through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, as we’ve seen in John’s gospel, as we see throughout the Bible, we move from wilderness back to garden and delightfully so.

And not just garden—the Bible starts in the garden but ends with the city. A development and maturation of culture. This is what reality is. This is the gift of God to the people that he’s prepared as a bride for him. And so it’s a delight. The gospel is a delightful proclamation, a trumpeting forth of the blessings of God to his people. It has attendant with it the proper response. Then is to do what he tells us to do.

But that’s a response to the grace of God. So you know, on your outlines I’ve got the introduction: “It’s thanksgiving. It’s reasonable. It’s a joyful thing to enter into and it is obligatory as well. But it is reasonable.”

And the scriptures, you know, we know this, but in Psalm 92:1-2, we read, “It is good to give thanks to the Lord and sing praises to your name, O Most High, to declare your loving kindness in the morning.” It’s good. It’s reasonable. It’s the right thing to do in light of the many blessings that God has given to us. And this is a period of a season of our year here in America, at least, that we focus on these things. We take the focus on the great gifts. We plow the field, scatter seed, and God creates increase and abundance, and we will celebrate that this coming Thursday in our homes with family members and friends. We celebrate this season of the great gift of God, the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So there’s an absolute reasonableness to give God thanks in everything. There’s a reasonableness that understands that the Lord God indeed is sovereign and that he’s in control of everything. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes. “Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms” is what Psalm 95 says. We sang that last week—that beautiful through-composed setting we have on Psalm 95.

We come before his presence with thanksgiving and we shout joyfully. Thanksgiving should be done in the context of joy, right? It’s a reasonable thing to do given all the blessings of our lives, given what Christ has accomplished. And it should be a joyful thing for us to do as well. We come before God with thanksgiving. And that thanksgiving is expressed in a shout of joy before him in the worship service.

So it is reasonable. It’s a joyful thing that we’re to enter into. And it is also a command given to us by God. In 1 Thessalonians 5, we read this essentially command that “in everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” This command nature is given to us in Philippians 4:6 as well. “Be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

So we have a positive command to pray in the context of our lives just like in 1 Thessalonians 5, and those prayers are to have as a component element thanksgiving in everything. So there’s a command aspect to this, but it’s reasonable, right? I mean, we don’t have to be commanded, but God says yeah, you probably do have to be commanded sometimes to be thankful in certain circumstances, but it is essentially first a proper response to the great news of what Christ has accomplished.

Now this text in 1 Thessalonians 5, it’s an interesting text. It essentially, you know, there are three things that are mentioned in verses 16, 17, and 18. Rejoice, pray, and give thanks. And that’s, you know, we sort of think of that and that’s not that unusual to hear those commands. But what’s different about the text are the adverbs applied to each of those three things that we’re supposed to do. We are to rejoice always. There’s a joy to the Christian life that is perpetual and ongoing. We are to pray without ceasing.

You know, I know there’s been a lot of coughs around the church lately and some families have suffered a little bit with the whooping cough. I guess this is coming back somewhat. It kind of goes through five or six year cycles in the community. Lots of cough. I know some families you’ve heard a lot of coughing. Well, this word “without ceasing”—Greek word—comes from the word that meant to have a hacking cough. So you know, it’s like the same pertussis. If you got, you want prayer pertussis is what you want in your life. You want to be praying all at all times.

Now that doesn’t mean you’re in formal prayer. But it does mean that your life is essentially lived in communication with God. You know, prayer—R.J. Rushdoony in his systematic theology. I just love his section on prayer. He opens up by saying, you know, there’s a lot of books about prayer, and they’re good. It’s good to have books on prayer. We’ll probably make some books available, by the way, to the congregation this next year to try to help you think through prayer and be more effective in your prayers in your homes.

But he said really, ultimately, you know, at its core, prayer is simply communication with God. And he said that when he got married to his wife, when he fell in love with her, nobody needed to tell him how to tell her, how to speak to his wife and to communicate his love for her. You know, it’s not like there are books written about that, but essentially he said, you know, so it’s like that if we love God, if we understand what he’s done, we’re going to be talking to him all the time.

And so prayer at its essential element is that it’s an ongoing conversation with God. You know, when you have something great happen in your life, you want to tell your wife and you should want to tell God about it. If you have some problem in your life, you’re going to tell your wife or your husband as a way to, you know, get support. And if you have a problem in your life, you share it with God. So as you go through your day, you’re in this communication with God that’s not formal.

And it doesn’t always involve sentences or stopping or verbalizing, but there’s this relationship, a continual communion you have with God that the text calls us to be doing. We’re to pray pertussively—without ceasing. And then “in everything, give thanks.” So it’s not just giving thanks sometimes, but we’re to give thanks in the context of everything. So we have this positive obligation given to us here in 1 Thessalonians 5:18.

It is a command, but it’s a command that should be set in its proper place. That, you know, if we just look around us, we’re going to give thanks for all kinds of things this Thursday, right? That’s what we’re going to do in our homes. It’s a reasonable thing to thank God for the beauty of the earth, for life. Life is a good thing. We’re putting out a PAC mailing in the next week or two, our annual fundraising letter.

And you know how they have these—usually they want you to put out on your envelope some kind of teaser on the front. “Open immediately. Urgent advice. This is really important.” What I decided to put on the outside of the PAC envelope is “open at your leisure” because, you know, we’re always being pushed by people that this is important, this is important. But you know, this time of year what’s really important is to understand that thanksgiving should be at the bottom of who we are.

It fulfills—it fills rather—our reality to understand the providence of God, his sovereign provision of our circumstances, of our community, his conquest. As we think about these things, this is a time when we want to rejoice and give thanks. Now it’s important that people attend to some small aspect of political action, sending in their political action tax credit. Got to do that by the end of December.

But you know, I just think it’s important for us to say life is good. Life is good. And what we want to do in this season is not move through it so quickly that somehow we don’t stop along the way and look at our wives and look at our husbands and look at our kids and at our parents, look at the kids coming back from school. What a delight that is. Several families in this church this past weekend, coming back from Moscow.

Look at the friends and families that’ll assemble. Look at the blessings of the place that God has placed you in the context of and have a life of thanksgiving and joy. A leisurely, you know, life lived attending to the duties you got to do, but not in such a rapid fashion as to forget to stop and have thanksgiving underlie everything else that you’re called to do. You know, it’s exact when we’re told the reason why people become real rebels against God.

You know, there’s this Supreme Court decision last week about homosexual marriage and, you know, that’s an affront of course to the scriptures and what God says. But before you get to homosexuality in Romans 1, you begin with unthankfulness. The very beginning of the stream of things that happens in a person’s life before they are moved into the kind of abomination that many in our culture are now either participating in or encouraging or at least permitting.

The very beginning of that whole process in Romans 1:21 is “though they knew God, they do not glorify him as God nor were thankful but became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened.” The beginning of the process of rebellion against God is a refusal to give thanks. So thanksgiving is one of these core Christian life practices that is absolutely critical for defining who we are and its absence defines the evil people in our land who do abominable things.

It all starts with an unthankfulness to God. So you can either engage in practical Calvinism acknowledging the sovereignty of God and giving thanks in everything reasonably and joyfully, or if you’re unthankful, you can think of it almost as a practical homosexuality, a practical rebellion against authority, which is also included in the list in Romans 1. You’re moving that way, you see, when you don’t give thanks to God for what he has provided.

So it’s important and I want to talk about three particular things—nothing you know real earth-shattering. These are common things that are talked about, but I think it’s important to focus on them and I think it’s important to look at what the scriptures have to say. First thing is thanksgiving should be given for the gift of circumstances. The gift of circumstances is what we go through in our lives, the specific events and activities, the things that happen around us, our cars breaking down, our appliances not working correctly, the leaky roof, a bad day at work, maybe no work.

The circumstances around us are what I’m talking about here. We should be giving God thanks because these are really gifts from God to us even though it doesn’t seem like it. And here, the sub-theme is loving the sovereign Father. Again, this picks up on what we said last week, Thomas’s confession. We’re restored back to seeing God as Yahweh, the Father, the loving father over us, as well as the sovereign God.

And so, Yahweh Elohim was the name of God used in the creation account that Adam and Eve moved away from. They didn’t believe that the circumstances were falling out for their well-being. They were tempted by the devil to question the circumstances in which they found themselves, the particular law that God had established for them. So first, under this category then of giving God thanks for the gift of circumstances.

We do delight in the blessed circumstances of our lives, right? This is what we do. We give thanks to the Lord. Psalm 136, we just sang a few verses of it with that refrain. It’s one of those praise choruses in the psalter. Aren’t very many, but there’s this one because every verse, the second half of it says, “For his mercy endures forever.” And the first three verses of Psalm 136 say, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever. Give thanks to the God of gods, for his mercy endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of Lords, for his mercy endures forever.” Three-fold repetition calling us to give thanks.

And notice that the first verse reminds us of Yahweh. The second verse reminds us of Elohim. We’re to give thanks to Yahweh, the heavenly Father. We’re to give thanks to the God of God, Elohim, the strong one. He’s the sovereign Father. And our thanksgiving for circumstances has that as its base. We know that God is sovereign and controls all things that happen. And you know, for most of us, our lives are filled with all kinds of circumstantial blessings to us, right? I mean, we shouldn’t take for granted that we have food to eat.

We’re going to go downstairs here in a little while and have a great feast together. The circumstances of our day, beautiful weather outside, beautiful place to gather. We can gather in warmth in the midst of a cold setting. God got you all here in your cars. These are circumstances of your lives that you should give blessings, or thanksgiving rather, to God. They are blessings from God. So God wants us to thank him for the circumstances of our lives because his mercy endures forever. It is continually working in the context of our life. He provides wondrous things for us.

Psalm 107 has four repeated verses in it in verses 8, 15, 21, and 30. There’s a description of God’s salvation, his provision that occurs in Psalm 107. And then the repeated refrain is, “Oh, that men would give thanks to the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works to the children of men.” Your life is filled with wonderful works from God and the goodness of God showered to you, and all that we would give thanks to God on a regular basis.

That’s what we want to first talk about—that we usually do delight in those blessed circumstances. But the other side of it is there are circumstances that happened to me this last week and to you that aren’t, on the overt nature of them, necessarily seem like blessings to us. We should be thankful not just in these blessed circumstances but in difficult circumstances, knowing that no matter how bad that they may look or feel, we may perceive them as not being good.

They may feel difficult for us. Nonetheless, our heavenly Father is indeed caring for us. Psalm 131, many of you that I’ve talked to about problems in your lives, circumstances that fall out apparently not for good to you, I’ve urged you to meditate on Psalm 131. You know, David says, “Lord, my heart is not haughty or my eyes lofty.” Now, he’s not prideful, he says. And he, the demonstration of this is that he does not concern himself with great matters or with things too profound for me.

Great matters are matters that belong to an authority higher than us. And things too high for us or profound things that we can’t understand. So David says, the Psalmist says that he composes his soul when circumstances arise that he can’t control, right? Something too great for him or that he can’t understand, things too ponderous, too high for him. So we have circumstances happen. You know, I had a whole raft full of them this last week.

You know, my son’s car breaks down on the way back from Moscow, even though he diligently tried to keep the thing in good shape and had done all the work he could do and nonetheless the problem that was fixed twice on its axle resurfaces its ugly head and so we get a call that night earlier in the week. You know, Victor had this circumstance happen where he had a flat tire on his way home from our house and had to wake up Dan and go get him. Circumstances that don’t seem good. We don’t know why they’re happening and we have no control over them. So these things happen. They happen in all of our lives, and what we’re supposed to do is give thanks in the midst of those difficult circumstances and understanding that we cannot control all the circumstances of our lives and that we cannot understand why particular things are happening.

We don’t know why God does the things he does. Job had all kinds of circumstances happen difficultly to him. And at the end of the day, he never was given an explanation of why. He was just called to acknowledge that God is sovereign. He’s sovereign over the affairs of life. And he’s even sovereign over the devil. That’s when Job turns—at the end of the book—is when God declares his sovereignty over Leviathan. And Leviathan is a picture in the scriptures of the devil.

Now, that was demonstrated. We knew that at the very beginning of the story because Satan has to get permission from God. And God even brings Job up to Satan as an example of what a great person he is. And Satan has to get permission from God. Even the evil affairs that Satan does in the context of Job’s life, God brings Job to his senses by saying, “I’m in control of Satan. I control Leviathan. No problem for me.” And so God controls the most difficult circumstances of our lives.

And we don’t know why. We don’t have to know why. What we do know and can trust is the character of God that he is our loving heavenly Father who controls all things. May we give thanks. May our lives be filled with thanksgiving for the difficult circumstances of our lives. Psalm 35:17-19. Now verse 18 of Psalm 35 says this: “I will give you thanks in the great assembly. I will praise you among many people.”

Now, the verse just before that puts this in the context of difficulties. “Lord, how long will you look on? Rescue me from their destructions, my precious life from the lion.” And then he says, “I’ll give you thanks.” Now, we could assume there if we stop there that this means he’s now been delivered and now he’s being returned to the assembly and giving thanks. The difficulty with that is verse 19, which says this: “Let them not rejoice over me who are wrongfully my enemies, nor let them wink with the eye who hate me without cause.”

Now we see that in Psalm 35, the thanksgiving given to God in the context of the assembly is in the immediate context, bookends before and after, of oppression, distress, horrible circumstances where people are seeking the Psalmist’s life. And in the midst of those difficult circumstances, the Psalmist gives thanks for those very things happening to him.

He gives thanks to God because he acknowledges God’s sovereignty. 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Cast all your care upon him, knowing he cares for you.” Not the best of translations. What better way to put it is: cast your care upon him. You got a difficult circumstance. You’re prone to unthankfulness. Cast your care upon him because he is continually thinking on you. That’s what the word means in 1 Peter 5:7. God’s thoughts are always upon you.

And so the cares that you’re giving, you’re casting upon him. You see, you can be thankful for those problems of difficult circumstances because they’re part of God’s provision. Always having his eye upon you. You see, we’re out in the middle of the lake again in the boat with the disciples. Horrible storm. Jesus isn’t there. But we find out that Jesus is on the shore the whole time and his eye is upon them.

And that text reminded us in John that indeed they were out there alone because he wanted them to be out there alone. He deliberately set them across that lake in the middle of the night without him being with them. He deliberately removes himself from them. So our trials and difficulties are difficult. They’re trials. They’re cares, but they are the result of your sovereign heavenly Father with his eye constantly upon you and controlling the wind and the storms and the sea.

You see, so all the difficult circumstances of life are part of the provision of your sovereign, all-powerful Elohim Father, Yahweh. We got to keep that in mind. This is essential to give thanks in the midst of these difficult circumstances. Jesus says, “Don’t care.” In Matthew 6, don’t be anxious about your food or your clothes. Your heavenly Father, he says, knows you need these things. Your heavenly Father, Jesus reminds them as I’m reminding you and reminding myself, when the car breaks, the pipes break in your house, you get fired or lose your job, you don’t seem to have enough money, you can’t develop relationships with people that you’d like to—the difficult circumstances happen in life to you.

And in the midst of all of that, remember that your heavenly Father is actively involved in caring for you and bringing you through these difficult circumstances of life. Give thanks in all things. It’s a reasonable thing to do if we recognize that each of those things is falling out for God’s purposes. Paul in his epistles said that I want you to know that my afflictions fell out for the good of the gospel.

Now Paul was given an understanding of certain difficulties or circumstances that were difficult to give thanks in, that they were related to his, he could see the pattern that it would help his proclamation of the gospel of Christ. We don’t always see that pattern, but what we want to keep in mind is this is the reality. God our heavenly Father is sovereign. “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”

It’s not a passiveness. We want to have things fixed. We want the circumstances changed, but we do it in the context of difficulties. We do it with the accompanying character attribute of patience. Patience. When bad things happen, when difficult circumstances occur, our response should be patience. Children, your parents had you memorize this verse hopefully: “Do all things without complaining or disputing that you may be blameless and harmless children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom ye shine as lights in the world.”

This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine. I’m not going to grumble or dispute. I’m going to be thankful in the midst of all the circumstances that God has placed me in the context of. And I’m going to be patient waiting for it to resolve correctly. It’s to say bad things happen. Our response is to become impatient. We want the car fixed now. We want the job now. We want money in the bank account now. We want the plumbing done now. Whatever it is in your life, think about your circumstances that you stumbled at this last week. I’m sure there were plenty of difficulties.

Whatever it is, see God in—when those things happen—is calling us to exercise this attribute of patience. Adam didn’t have patience. Circumstances were that this serpent was there and he was accusing God of giving a bad circumstance, a bad set of affairs to Adam. Now, that was the circumstance of Adam’s life. And he wasn’t patient saying, “Well, I got to trust my heavenly Father. Eventually, I’ll be able to discern good and evil. I’ll train my senses as Hebrews say.” No, he wasn’t patient. He grasped for that ruling authority before he was mature because he was impatient with the prohibitions God set upon him.

It’s so important. Timothy says to pray for our civil leaders that we might live quiet and peaceable lives. And we know that he goes on to say God desires the salvation of all men. So we think, well, let’s pray for the salvation of our rulers. And you know, that is essentially informing our prayers. And that’s good. God wants the civil government to reflect his order. But 1 Timothy 2 also says to give thanks in these prayers for all men, particularly authorities.

God says to the Christians that received the epistle to Timothy of the churches he pastored, “Give thanks for Caesar.” Right? Kings ruled as an authority. Caesar was ruling them. Give thanks for Caesar. Give thanks for the prohibitions that seem to you to be unreasonable. The laws that God has established, for instance, patiently endure what you have to go through. Have a submissive spirit. Give thanks in the context of these circumstances that look bad but do so with this attribute of patience.

Abraham, Hebrews says, patiently endured. He waited a long time for the various promises that God had promised to him. And that is—it’s people that are patient in difficult circumstances like Abraham was—that then are the ones who receive the blessing. So give thanks this week in difficult circumstances by remembering that it’s your heavenly Father who is causing everything to happen in your life. Cast your care upon him. Pray that things might change, but do so with an attitude of thanksgiving and patience, staying under the difficulty or trial until it is resolved.

I wear my Jonah tie today again. Wonderful verse from the book of Jonah here. He’s the other example to us, besides Adam and Abraham, is Jonah. Jonah says, “I’ll sacrifice to you at the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay what I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.” Jonah is a picture of thanksgiving to God. And he gives him thanks after he’s out of the belly of the whale, right? No. He gives that prayer. That’s the end of the turning of repentance of Jonah. And he prays that from the midst of the belly of the fish, the great fish.

So in bad circumstances, ones that you and I won’t have to go through this week in the intestinal tract of some great fish, whatever that was—I mean, can you imagine a more difficult circumstance? No. In the midst of that, Jonah then gives thanks to God for what has fallen out. And then the very next verse, in verse 10, says, “So the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah unto dry land.” God brings them out of that trial when the trial has lasted just long enough to bring Jonah to thanksgiving in the midst of trials and difficulties. And then God brings Jonah out of the belly of the whale.

So kids, when you look at this tie today: bad things happen to you, things you don’t get. You can’t understand why parents won’t want you this or that or the other thing. You can’t understand why you stubbed your toe or hurt yourself somehow. You can’t understand why your favorite toy broke this week or you lost it, whatever it is. Jonah, in the midst of the whale, patiently waits as God to bring him forth. And in his waiting for God to deliver him, he gives thanks for the circumstances. May God grant us thanksgiving this Thursday that includes with it thanks for difficult circumstances.

Secondly, thanksgiving for the gift of community. You know, we give thanks for all the things that happened to us, even the bad things. And we give thanks for the people in our lives. What a delightful thing that is this Thursday, right? Friends and family and people get together. You know, we have these wonderful rejoicing Thanksgiving meals. We’ll do it this afternoon here in a couple of hours. We’re going to rejoice together with people. People are such a delightful thing. Delightful gift of God is this gift of community.

Every circumstance he brings into our lives is a gift from him to do something for us. And every person he brings into our lives is also a gift from him to cause us to be thankful for community. We do delight in the community of friends and families. The season, you know, clearly we do this. Psalm 133: “How wonderful it is when brethren, brethren get together in unity. It’s like the precious oil that comes down, a blessing to his people.” So, what a wonderful thing it is this afternoon to rejoice together with the community here that God has given to us.

This is the gospel, right? That God has restored us not just to the heavenly Father who works with us individually in our circumstances, but God has connected us again and reconciled us to peace. People to the community of people that we love in the context of the church and our families. We do delight, we do give thanks for friends, relatives and the blessing that is to us in the context of our day today and then as we move into this week.

At the very center of the Song of Solomon is this great wedding scene and the wedding scene, you know, it describes the wonderful thing that these people are getting married—Solomon and Mrs. Solomon. Schlommo and Mrs. Schlommo in the midst. They’re getting together. They’re getting married at the center of this book. And then the very last line of this middle section of their marriage says, “Eat, O friends. Drink. Yay. Drink deeply, O beloved ones. The rejoicing of wedding happens in the context of community.”

We give thanks in community. And marriage, the joy of marriage is placed in the context of community as well. So we give thanks for people. Paul talked about this over and over again. He gave thanks for the people that God had put into his lives. In 2 Corinthians 9:11-15, he says, “You know, you’ve given us some great gifts that increases our thanksgiving to God.” Paul loved the community of people that God had him minister in the context of. And he gives them thanks over and over again in different epistles. I thank God for you. I thank God for what he’s doing in your life. I thank you for your gift of benevolence to other people. And what you’re doing results in more thanksgivings being lifted up to God. That’s what he says here in this text in 2 Corinthians 9.

People. Not only do we give God thanks for our communities, but that thanksgiving in the context of each other causes thanksgiving to be multiplied. As we see other people, we give thanks for them and for their work to God, and it increases our thankfulness to God as well. That’s what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9. So, we certainly will get together on Thursday. And boy, I just pray to God that it is a day of great joy for you as you get together with family and friends. Don’t let the little things that happen—whether the turkey burns or the stuffing doesn’t come out right. None of that stuff. Don’t let it get in the way of your joy and thanksgiving on Thursday.

Give thanks for the people that are around you, for the church today, for the friends and family that’ll be gathered with. But there’s a second element of this that’s natural, that’s the gospel. God has blessed us with community. We do delight in that. But we should also self-consciously open ourselves up to each other. You know, to exist in community means not just giving thanks for others, but it means not to isolate ourselves and it means to open ourselves up for relationship.

There’s something to this that is beyond comprehension ultimately. But in John 10:38, Jesus says this. He says that you might believe the works that you may know and believe that the Father is in me and I in him. And then in John 14:10, he says, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” And then in John 17:20-23 in his prayer he says this. “I do not pray for these alone but also for those who will believe in me through your word that they all may be one as you Father are in me and I in you and they also may be one in us that the world may believe that you sent me and the glory which you gave me I have given them that they may be one just as we are one I and them you and me that they may be made perfect in one and that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them as you have loved me.”

It’s not just that we have the same kind of relationship as non-Christians or that you might have had before you came to faith in Christ. It’s not just friendly relationships that we have in the context of the body of Christ. There is an integration of one another’s lives that’s described here by our Savior. Remember we said that our community is a reflection of the community of the Trinity and we enter into that relationship.

And there is this mysterious, very powerful doctrine that there is an interpenetration—that’s the way that some theologians put it. There’s technical term for this where the Father is in Christ and Christ is in the Father and the Spirit is in Christ and that is going on. And the same thing is to characterize our relationships to one another. What it means is it’s not just a surface friendship we’re to have with one another.

We’re to open ourselves up so to speak to allow deeper relationship. So there’s an integration of each other that there’s a wholeness to the community that is, as I say, somewhat beyond comprehension but nonetheless is true. It means we must be open with one another, seek out deeper relationships in the context of our families and our community. There’s something mysterious that goes on. The body of Christ is referred to as a body—different parts of one person, right?

There’s one God with three persons in it and there’s one body of believers here and yet you know, we’re all distinct persons and families, but there’s an inner penetration of each other’s lives that occurs as we open ourselves up to each other, as we perhaps, you know, show vulnerabilities or fears or concerns and joy as we share some of those things that we that we wouldn’t normally do at normal friendship.

I think that God, in response to this truth that he has given us the gift of community, the proper response to that is to open ourselves up to act in the context of community. Here, the accompanying character attribute is kindness. We’re to have patience in circumstances and we’re to be positively kind or good to one another. The word kindness in 1 Corinthians 13 describes love. Love is patient and kind. And kind means useful to each other. We open ourselves up to receive usefulness from each other and to be useful one to the other.

So if we’re going to be thankful for community, the community that God has blessed us with, it implies a going out of our way to both give and receive gifts of goodness or assistance from each other. Usually, it’s easier for people to give gifts than to receive gifts. And that’s why I say a proper response to this great truth of community is to open up ourselves to receive gifts of goodness from one another.

1 Corinthians 13:4 tells us what love is. And it says it’s two things. It’s patience and it’s kindness. And then it gives us some specifics about how that works out. But those—that’s the header verse. That’s the head or two designations—is we’re patient with each other, patient with circumstances. Now we’re patient with each other and we’re useful to one another. We live in community. And you know what we have to be concerned about here is that we don’t separate.

We don’t want to grumble against circumstances and we don’t want to get offended and cut off relationships and separate one from the other. There’s a continual interaction with each other in the Trinity. And that’s what we want to do in the context of the church. This builds on what I said last week. We’re to be on each other’s side. We’re on each other’s team whether we like it or not and we can try to cut ourselves off that hurts the team and it hurts us.

So giving God thanks for the community and remember this in your Thanksgiving celebrations. Remember it downstairs means a giving to one another of goodness and kindness and receiving those gifts from one another as well. Don’t separate and don’t separate friends, right? Proverbs, you know this verse, I’ve talked about it, that “the man who isolates himself seeks his own desire. He rages against all wise judgment.”

In America, we see rugged individualism as a virtue. It’s not. It’s a horrible perversion of a biblical truth that we are individuals. But to do that in the removal from community, this is bad. We, you know, we were kind of given a vaccine against community by communism. Communism was a liberal, unbiblical, atheistic way to create community. And what we thought was the answer to that is a radical reaction of individualism, right?

So if you show Ayn Rand’s movie or her books to people, they think she’s pretty good because she believes in self-interest. She’s against the collective, but it’s just the other side of the coin of sin. Communism was an immunization against true biblical community. There is a sense in which Christian community is somewhat socialistic. That doesn’t scare you there. I don’t mean in a political way that it’s enforced, but the scriptures are quite clear that people that have more goods and services are supposed to be encouraged by the deacons and by the elders of the church to share that with others that there may be some degree of more of a balance in the context of community.

I mean, that’s plain in the scriptures. So you know, here what we want to do is we don’t want to separate. We don’t want to isolate and we also don’t want to cause other people to be isolated from one another. One of the great things that God hates is people that sow dissension among brothers because what he wants us to do is give thanks for one another to give thanks for the gift of restored relationships and community.

Here the example is Cain on the one hand who strikes out and kills his brother and Jacob on the other in the book of Genesis who is kind to Esau. Yes, he is. Esau wants to kill him. That’s why he has to leave. He doesn’t fight. He doesn’t try to kill Esau. He flees and gives enough time and then sends gifts to Esau as he comes back to the land. He’s kind to him. He’s good toward Esau. And Jacob works it out.

By the end of the Jacob story, they’re living okay again. It looks like Esau might even have come to faith. We don’t know. But certainly Jacob is the picture for us of being kind and not striking out at someone. Cain struck out at a completely innocent man. Jacob refrains from striking out at a wicked man and instead tries as best as he can to build relationship back with his brother and he succeeds in doing that.

Paul is another example of this of course. In Acts 28:15, he says, “From there when the brethren heard about us, they came to meet us as far as Appii Forum and Three Inns. When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.” When we see each other, we should thank God for one another for community, right? And we should be encouraged by the body of Christ. So, you know, we thank God for circumstances, not grumbling, but being patient like Jonah in the midst of difficulties.

We thank God for the community of people that he’s bound us together with—other Christians, friends, and family. And we give thanks. We don’t separate. We don’t do things that might hurt people’s relationship with others. We’re all on each other’s side and we don’t want to split each other apart. And instead, we want to give thanks for one another in the context of the great gift of community God has given to us.

And then third, we’re to give thanks for the gift of conquest, loving the victorious spirit. So, the heavenly Father is producing circumstances and we’re to be patient and thankful for those things. Jesus has restored relationships. He is the son of man. He’s who we all are. We’re all Christians. Christ indwells us through the Spirit. And we’re to have community, emphasizing the second person of the Trinity.

And we’re to give God thanks for victory, for conquest. Remember a couple of weeks ago, I talked about Ezekiel 37. The Spirit, you know, breathes into the dead bones and creates an army, a host of people. The people of God empowered by the Holy Spirit are an army on the march for God, victorious army. When Jesus breathes on his disciples, it’s a picture of a new creation. It’s also a picture that we are now the conquering host of God.

The way the image from Ezekiel 37 gave us that. And we here, the great truth is—and it’s not a truth we think about very often—but the great truth is that Jesus Christ has conquered the gods of groves and grotto. That’s a truth. We don’t think of it much, but how many nations today engage in ritual prostitution. How many cultures or civilizations have ongoing human sacrifice? How many temples of Diana are still inhabited?

Right? How many, how many of these—now there are strange people, one of the strange ones this last week who was arrested and booked—that I don’t know these public figures but apparently does some ritual weird things with blood and voodoo and stuff. But I mean, that is the dark corners now of the world, right? That happens in weird little groups, completely isolated from any acceptance on the part of civil governments.

The Lord Jesus Christ has conquered all those gods that were in existence when he comes and is incarnate. You understand what I’m saying? The world has ratcheted forward. There is not ongoing human sacrifice approved of anymore by any culture. And there is not ritual prostitution approved of by any culture. And there was no longer the taking of babies and burning them up and immolating them in flames so that the state will continue to be powerful and God will bless the harvest or whatever it was.

There’s no longer taking people and killing them so that God will give us great crops or the gods will shine upon us again. You see what happened? Did history just evolve and things got better? No. What happened was that stone, the altar stone of Christ came into the world and it’s destroyed every other of these religious systems that were raised up in opposition to it. We should be thankful that there’s not human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, the destruction of children, that kind of stuff, right?

I mean, this is good news. This is good news that was predicted, of course, in the book of Acts. I’ve mentioned this text before, but in the book of Acts, I don’t seem to have it here—Acts 17:30. Yeah, you know, Paul is there and these guys that consider him as a god come down from heaven and they take him. They’re going to install him as gods in their city or their culture. And he says truly these times of ignorance God has overlooked.

But now commands all men everywhere to repent. He says things have been like this up to now where you’ve got gods that you worship and human sacrifices and weird stuff going on all the time. But now that Jesus has come, it’s all over. The gospel is he’s going to conquer all those things. And he did, in just the first couple of centuries of the church. They all went away. You see, the temples of Diana are abandoned.

The gods found in groves or in forest places, Saturnalia celebrations, etc., they’re all gone. Now, people still, you know, engage in some form of idolatry. But as one writer read recently put it, the gods that people worship today are not found in groves or glades, but in gift shops. I mean, they’re that trivial. Stupid little, you know, crystals and stuff. Nobody really believes that there’s much going on there anymore.

You see why? This wasn’t just the natural evolution of history. This was the work of the gospel, the good news that Jesus Christ reigns. And we’re to give God thanks for that. In 2 Corinthians 2:14-16, it says, Paul says, “Thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ and through us diffuses the fragrance of his knowledge in every place. We are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.

To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death and to the other the aroma of life leading to life.” Paul knew what was happening. He knew that when Messiah came that all the false gods of the world would be shattered and that as the church went forward as a mighty host, those things would all disappear from the face of the earth. Jesus would conquer and he has. Revelation 11:17, the elders saying, “We give you thanks, O Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was and who is to come because you have taken your great power and reigned.”

Jesus comes, it stalls—is then installed at the right hand of the Father and all his enemies are made his footstool. The temple of Diana is made his footstool. The Asherah groves in the Middle East are made his footstool. You see, they all are abandoned by their followers. And we should give God thanks for that. Every day of our lives, we should thank God that the world has moved, been moved definitively forward through the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, the other shoe to drop here is that we are also to speak peace to a world right now enthralled by the idolatry of nothingness. The task clearly is not complete yet. Temples of Diana are now absent. Children are no longer literally sacrificed in the context of the state culture approving that kind of a thing. But we have this horrific fact of children being sacrificed in the womb on a massive scale. So it’s not as if all enemies have been dealt with yet.

We have been left with one great enemy and that enemy is this nothingness, as one recent article I read put it. Men now believe that there’s nothing transcendent, no weird gods they have to placate anymore. There’s really no meaning. If they reject Christ, Christ has made all the other gods foolish. Christianity makes all of them foolish. And so the only thing to do in rejecting Christianity is to embrace nothingness. And that’s what the Western world has done. That’s what America has done. There’s no meaning. There’s no standards.

It’s just whatever is right for me or for you. Now, we want to speak peace to our culture. We want to continue the work for the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I don’t mean peace here in the sense of saying that there is peace when there is no peace. The scriptures make it clear that’s the wrong way. That’s what the false church does is to speak peace when there is no peace. But remember that Jesus in the new creation in John 20 says that’s what we’re supposed to do.

We’re supposed to go out and retain and remit sins. What that means is we’re to remind our culture that there is a transcendent God that they are required to give thanks to. They must join in the thanksgiving to God or they are enemies to God under his wrath and condemnation. Our job as Christians is to proclaim peace through the proclamation of set standards that God has at work at place in the world.

Now this is a difficult task. You know, if you’ve got somebody who is fearfully serving the goddess Diana because he thinks he’s going to get off by her or horrible things will happen if he doesn’t do this that or the other thing. Well, you know, it’s a relatively easy task to talk to him about Jesus Christ. And when we go to the table of Christ, you don’t got to go there and kill yourself for him. God sent his son to die for us and raised him back up.

Not to die and then go away as if somehow the transaction of the world has been satisfied through a human sacrifice and things get better. No, Jesus died and came back. You see? Well, that’s, you see, if you’re fearful of these gods in the world that you know control things or you think control things, the God presented at the table of the Lord Jesus Christ is a wondrous thing. Hey, that’s a wonderful thing.

Relatively easy to bring that kind of conversion. But what we have today is an enemy who believes in nothing. And how do you speak peace to those people? Well, as I say, I think it’s an obligation we have to give thanks for this mission, right? We’re to give thanks for the victory of Christ and we’re to give thanks for the fact that our task is much harder than the earlier church. We have to go now to individual people who think they’re God in essence and who have willed up some kind of worldview or ethic and system out of nothing.

And what we want to do to those people is to tell them first of all they’re required to give thanks to God. And secondly, I think probably one of the things we must do—you know, maybe one of the most significant ways to talk to our culture about their rejection of God—is to point to this 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of our national dining room. That’s abortion. That culture, the culture of nothingness and a belief in nothing but will-filling up—you know, I’m okay. You’re okay. Whatever each person decides is what is okay with them.

Yeah, a Christian. That’s great. I believe in angels, too. I believe in God, too. I believe in Jesus, constant conscious communion with this Christ image of whatever it might be in my soul. Yeah, everything’s fine. No, everything’s not fine because that rejection of Christ has led to the slaughter of millions of pre-born infants. And so, maybe that’s one of the ways that we speak to people of the result of their rejection of Christ and the other is command them to give thanks to God for whatever he has provided, that he needs to be worshiped and served, that is reality.

So we give thanks to God by for this task we have of speaking peace in the context of our particular culture and community. Now here the accompanying character attitude is holiness. We have patience with circumstances, kindness to people and as we go about our work in the world we are to be holy people.

The Sethites, sons of God, married the wrong gals. They didn’t care enough about their profession of faith in the context of a community like we live in today to have their marriages line up with God’s will. Joseph, on the other hand, when allured by Potiphar’s wife, resists that. He has a holiness, a consecration to God in the midst of empire, and he serves God explicitly. Here again, another example to us is Daniel.

Daniel 6:10-11. Daniel knew that the writing was signed. He couldn’t do this prayer if you got to worship Nebuchadnezzar now. And in his upper room with his windows open toward Jerusalem, he fell down on his knees three times that day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as was his custom since early days. Then these men assembled and found Daniel praying and making supplication before his God.

He was forbidden to do it, but he did it anyway. In his holiness, he gave God thanks in the midst of difficult circumstances, but he did it openly before the people, asserting that Yahweh, God that he was praying to is the only God who should be worshiped and served. Daniel was willing to be thrown into the lion’s den for the sake of holiness and consecration to God. As you go about your thanksgiving on Thursday, as you move toward it through your places of work, do so with a renewed sense of holiness, thanking God for the mission you have.

Right? John 20 wasn’t just about the pastor’s remitting and retaining sins. It was about all of us, all of his disciples having this responsibility to go out, convince people that they’re in violation of God’s word, they’re sinning, and if they repent, they’ll be forgiven. But if they don’t, their sins are retained and they’re going to hell. That’s your job, too. And you fulfill that job by having a holiness of witness in your place of work.

And again, explicitly making statements of the Lord Jesus Christ and his claims upon our culture and pointing people to the death culture that comes from the opposite world view. So, we should be thankful this week. We’re going to be thankful today. We’re going to be thankful for circumstances, good circumstances downstairs, delicious circumstances surrounding our day. Great people. And we’re going to rejoice in the victory of Christ that already has done so much in changing world history.

But we also want to be thankful for the bad circumstances that are going to happen this week. In the midst of those, trust the Father in heaven. Have patience in difficult circumstances. Give God thanks in them. And we’re going to thank God not just by rejoicing in our community together, but by opening ourselves up more and more to be part of that community and being careful not to drive wedges between community members in our family or in our church or whatever it might be.

We’re going to commit ourselves to a thanksgiving that results in a further growth of community. We’re going to give God thanks for the victory of Christ and the Spirit’s victory, but we’re also going to commit ourselves afresh to be thankful to God for the mission we have of somehow going into this strange reality we live in where people no longer are fearful of any God and where they don’t believe in God at all and have willed up some sort of existence out of nothingness.

We want to bring to those people the message of the Lord Jesus Christ. We want to speak peace. Jesus has come not to condemn the world but to save the world. But he saves it through bringing people to an understanding of their sin and to repentance for that sin. We want to be thankful for the gifts of patience, kindness, holiness. That’s what Christ gives you today. He comes not to demand things of you. He comes to give you his patience, his kindness and goodness, and his holiness.

And God says we should rejoice in those great gifts. And as a result of those gifts, when you come forward now, resolve today, make a decision as you come forward and bring your offerings and your tithes. Resolve to give thanks to God. The Psalmist does this in Psalm 18. He says, “You’ve delivered me. Therefore, I will give thanks to you.” He resolves to give thanks to God. Will you resolve today as you come forward in the offering in response to the great gifts of God, blessed circumstances, wonderful community, the victory of Christ.

Will you respond by saying, “Yes, I will give thanks in difficult circumstances. I will build and not destroy community, and I will engage in the holiness of witness that extends the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ.” May God grant us the grace to make and keep the resolution of thanksgiving today. Let’s pray.

Father, we do rejoice in this wondrous season that opens up in front of us. And we do pray that in the midst of these wonderful blessings that we focus on at this time of the year, we would resolve to give you thanks even unnaturally when times are difficult.

That we would resolve to try to build community, not destroy. That we would resolve to try to live a spirit-empowered witness to Jesus in our places of work and in their communities. Give us, God, the gift of Christ—patience, kindness, and holiness—that we may be patient, kind, and holy. In his name we ask it. Amen.