Thanksgiving Day October 7, 2018 1 Thessalonians 5:18
Give Thanks in All Situations!
PRAYER
“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
That couldn’t be any clearer instruction for us could it? Give thanks (to God) for everything that happens to you or doesn’t happen to you for that’s God’s will for you. What He knows and allows too happen to you or not to happen to you is the best for you and will be the greatest blessing to you in your life!
On this Thanksgiving Sunday morning as we consider this bible passage, when traditionally our brains and stomachs think about the foods we’ll eat or the football we hope to watch, it’s seemingly not all that hard to be thankful.
“Thank you God for all the food you have brought forth from the earth, for all the rain you have blessed us with this summer and the sun you allowed to shine in order to bring forth the harvest. Thank you for how you have protected us this year from all the stuff that Satan and the world used to attack us, even the things we have no idea about! Oh, and we wish you would have held off a little longer on the snow, but thank you for that as well, I think.”
And there’s the rub. It is easy to thank God for those things we like, those blessings, the things that make us feel good or brought us joy, BUT what about the cold weather? What about a cold or the flu or gall stones or a broken leg? Why thank God for those?
Why thank God in general? Why? (Pause) BECAUSE He alone is worthy of our thanks! He? Why do we say He! Aren’t there multitudes of gods out there in the universe? NO there aren’t! There is only One God. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit alone is the one true God. He tells us He is three persons in One God. A mystery! But that’s ok! If we could fully understand Him He wouldn’t be much of a God! The truth is that there is no other God! All the Hindu gods are not God. Buddha, Confucius and Allah are not God. That’s quite the statement in our pluralistic, polytheistic culture. And I believe it!
But just because I believe it doesn’t make it the truth. Rather because it’s the Truth it’s worth believing! All other, so called god’s, are puppets that Satan dangles in front of humanity to keep people from seeing the truth about the One true God who created us for a blessed relationship with Himself. He’s the One who sent His Son to save us after we had garbaged our relationship with Him! And who together with Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to lead every human being into that relationship once again. But Satan doesn’t want anyone to be loved! So true to his character, he deceives! That’s who Satan is, a deceiver, who invests all in keeping people from seeing the One to whom all of us own all thanks for all things.
Why thank God in all situations? Firstly because God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the only One there is! He’s the One who fully takes care of us even when we think he’s not! The Bible says, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip—he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” Israel is not the present nation of Israel over there in the Holy Land. Rather it’s the name given to God’s people. All people in the past who believed that the Father was going to keep his Word about sending someone to pay for our thankless rebellion in the Garden of Eden, encouraged so by a deceiving Satan, and all people in the past 2000 years who have simply seen and believed that Jesus is that promised One! These are Israel, God’s kids!
Secondly, nothing we have and are is our own. All things graciously come from God to us. We own nothing! All is a gift from God! You and I cannot come up with one thing, one thing, that we have or desire that does not have its origins in God? Go ahead try and think of just one. There is one! It is fully us! Our rebellion against God Almighty. And what does he do about it? He comes to save us from ourselves and sins eternal consequences.
Life? No! He designed that. Formed Adam and Eve and placed in them all the workings to bring forth life. Therefore your life and mine are not our own. We did not give ourselves life! Therefore things like Euthanasia, mercy killing and suicide are all a part of the Deceivers evil and cunning plan! Money? God made the trees, the ore deposits and all things that make up the inks. Work? He made our bodies and gave us life and daily brings forth food to feed us from the earth he created using the sun he created and the seeds he placed in the trees and plants of every kind!
I could go on and on and on! You and I will never find a single thing (save that one) that we have or are or desire that doesn’t come from God to us. This is a tough one for us humanoids to swallow! Because we and the world we live in, do not in any way shape or form naturally think this way or live this way. We think and so often believe Satan’s lies, who daily tempts us to selfishly forsake God’s good and perfect ways, encouraging us to think that we are owners rather than managers of all that God gives us to manage for Him. But we work hard, we do so much to get and keep what we have, especially in this city/area that never sleeps as it seeks the riches of God’s black gold! Don’t get me wrong! Work is a blessing. But guess who gave the blessing? God!
Without the life we have (gift from God), oxygen we breathe (gift from God), materials we use daily (gift from God), food we eat, bed we sleep in, home we have, car we drive, music we listen to, footballs we throw, ALL OF IT, without these gifts well, were dead! Everything is a gift from the One True loving and caring God of the universe. A gift to you from the God who made you and cares for you in every way no matter the situation!
Please take a look at the poster (Oct Jumbo Tron screen). One of the things God gives us, or places us into is our families, our family as a congregation and the biological family you are a part of. What a blessing we so often take for granted! Forgive us Lord and give us great joy in those you give to help us give thanks in all circumstances.
Thirdly, why thank God in all situations? If God says give thanks in all circumstances and tells us that this is his will for us then we are to give thanks! Why? Because God an said so! But that answer wasn’t an answer that went over all that well when we were kids and it doesn’t go over with people (though true) even today!
So why give thanks in all situations? Because no matter the situation, God is there with you to walk with you in it! Whether it’s a joyful circumstance (the ones we like) or a painful circumstance (the ones we’d rather do without) God is there with you and for you. In fact in all situations he is there with you to bless you!
How is he there? Jesus came from heaven above, to live perfectly so that he could die in order to forgive each and every one of our rebellious acts against him. When he rose from the grave, never to die again, he said he would be with us to the end of the age!
Even though he ascended to the right hand of the Father in heaven he is yet with us in his Word which the Holy Spirit was sent to remind us of and lead us into daily, and weekly he is with us in worship to feed us at his table of forgiveness.
Question. In which situations have you learned the most in life? In the joyous and easy ones?! Or, in the painful and difficult ones?! We know the answer. The most learning, the greatest blessings, come our way when we walk a difficult path and come out the other side knowing God was with us all along, walking with us and almost always totally carrying us!
As I wrote this sermon my mind kept going back over and over again to a women by the name of Corrie ten Boon. Why? Because Corrie is one who had every reason to take a pass on thanking God in every situation. But the One true God helped her, blessed her, in seeing that Jesus never left her but rather held her close through all the atrocities she faced. Here’s a portion of her story!
Corrie ten Boom was born in 1892 to a working class family in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Named after her mother but known as “Corrie” all her life, she was the youngest child of Casper ten Boom, a jeweler and watchmaker. Corrie trained to be a watchmaker herself and in 1922 became the first woman licensed as a watchmaker in The Netherlands. Over the next decade, in addition to working in her father’s shop, she established a youth club for teenage girls, which provided religious instruction as well as classes in the performing arts, sewing and handicrafts. She and her family were Christians and their faith inspired them to serve their society, offering shelter, food, and money to those in need.
In May 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. One of the first things to be illuminated was her youth club. In May 1942 a well-dressed woman came to the ten Booms’ with a suitcase in hand and told them that she was a Jew, her husband had been arrested several months before, her son had gone into hiding, and the Occupation authorities had recently visited her, so she was afraid to go back.
She had heard that the ten Booms had helped their Jewish neighbors and asked if they might help her also. Casper ten Boom, Corrie’s father, readily agreed that she could stay with them, despite the police headquarters being only half a block away. The family then became very active in the hiding refugees.
Thus the ten Booms began “The Hiding Place”. Corrie and her sister Betsie opened their home to refugees — both Jews and others who were members of the resistance movement — being sought by the Gestapo and its Dutch counterpart. They had plenty of room, although wartime shortages meant that food was scarce. Every non-Jewish Dutch person had received a ration card, the requirement for obtaining weekly food coupons. Through her charitable work, Ten Boom knew many people and remembered a couple who had a disabled daughter. The father was a civil servant who by then was in charge of the local ration-card office. She went to his house one evening, and when he asked how many ration cards she needed, she writes in her book, The Hiding Place, “I opened my mouth to say five but the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was: ‘One hundred.'” He gave them to her and she provided cards to every Jew she met.
The refugee work done by the ten Boom sisters became known by the Dutch Resistance. The Resistance sent an architect to the ten Boom home to build a secret room adjacent to ten Boom’s room for the Jews in hiding, as well as an alert buzzer to warn the refugees to get into the room as quickly as possible.
In February of 1944, a Dutch informant told the Nazis about the ten Booms’ work and the Nazis arrested the entire ten Boom family. They were sent to prison when Resistance materials and extra ration cards were found at the home. However, the six persons hid by the ten Booms on the day of the families arrest, among whom were both Jews and resistance workers, remained undiscovered: Corrie ten Boom received a letter one day in prison reading “All the watches in your cabinet are safe,” meaning the refugees had managed to escape and were safe. Four days after the raid, resistance workers transferred them to other locations.
Corrie was initially held in solitary confinement. After three months, she was taken to her first hearing. On trial, ten Boom spoke about her work with the mentally disabled; the Nazi lieutenant scoffed, as the Nazis had been killing mentally disabled individuals for years based on their evolutionary eugenics ideologies. Ten Boom defended her work, saying that in the eyes of God, a mentally disabled person might be more valuable “than a watchmaker or even a lieutenant.”
Corrie and Betsie were finally transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, a notorious women’s labor camp in Germany. There they held worship services, after the hard days at work, using a Bible that they had managed to sneak in. While there, Betsie began to discuss plans with her sister after the war for a place of healing. Betsie’s health continued to deteriorate and she died in 1944 at the age of 59. Before she died, she told Corrie, “There is no pit so deep that He [God] is not deeper still.”
Fifteen days later, Corrie was released. Afterwards, she was told that her release was due to a clerical error and that a week later all the women in her age group were sent to the gas chamber. Corrie ten Boom returned home in the midst of the “hunger winter.” She opened her doors still to the mentally disabled who were in hiding for fear of execution.
After the war, ten Boom set up a rehabilitation center. The refuge housed concentration-camp survivors and the jobless Dutch who previously collaborated with Germans during the Occupation. The center accepted anyone in need of care. There Corrie met with and forgave Germans who had been employed at Ravensbruck, one of whom who was particularly cruel to Betsie. Our sister died 90 years to the day of her birth. A women thankful to God for his forgiveness to her and the strength to live as his agent of love to others no matter the situation.
When we live life believing the truth that the One true God is with us no matter the situation, we are way more than ok, we are blessed beyond our comprehension.
The Lord neither slumbers nor sleeps, He has you! Give thanks and call upon his name!
“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Amen!
Text – 1 Thessalonians 5:18
18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.