Categories: Old Testament, Psalms, Word of SalvationPublished On: December 25, 2024
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Word of Salvation – Vol.42 No.36 – September 1997

 

Gratitude And Godliness

 

A Sermon by Rev. H. De Waard on Psalm 100:4-5, & 1Thessalonians 5:18

Scripture Readings: Psalm 100; 1Thessalonians 5:12-24

Suggested Hymns: BoW 148; 469; 214; 369; 309:5

 

Beloved Congregation in the Lord Jesus Christ.

You all know the hymn,
“Now Thank we all our God.
Who wondrous things has done…
Who from our mothers’ arms,
has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love…!”
Who would write a hymn like that?  Someone in whose life everything is going smoothly, for whom the sun is shining, whose children are all doing the right thing and all are healthy and well.  Right?  Not quite.

The man who wrote that hymn was a German preacher, Martin Rinkert who ministered during the devastating 30-year war in the 17th century.  He held funerals for up to 50 people a day.  His wife also died.  Yet, he wrote this magnificent hymn, “Now Thank we all our God,” as a song of thanksgiving to the God who rules the universe and supervises our personal lives.  He wrote it at a time when everything around him seemed to be falling apart.  With death staring him in the face daily and the horror of war all around him, he was still counting his blessings.

That, my brothers and sisters, is the kind of faith required by our text.  “Give thanks in all circumstances.”

That is an imperative.  It is one of eight instructions the apostle gives us here:

rejoice always
pray always
don’t forget to be grateful
don’t squash the Spirit
don’t treat the Word of God lightly
be discerning
hang on to what is good
get rid of everything tainted with evil.

Are all these instructions just like a shotgun with pellets flying all over the place?  What holds all these instructions together?  I think the answer is found in verse 23:

            “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.”

God’s intention is for us to be holy, and that holiness is expressed by way of these instructions.  This is what Christians do!  This is the way they live!  This is how they get their spiritual energy!  Christians always pray and always give thanks.

We want to focus on the exhortation to give thanks.  From the moment we wake to the moment we go to sleep at night, we are to thank God.

Our theme for this sermon is:

GRATITUDE IS A SURE SIGN OF GODLINESS.

We will first look at:
The reason for gratitude,
and secondly,
Gratitude as the essence of worship.

  1. What is the Reason for Gratitude?

Psalm 100 was probably written as an anthem when the restored temple was dedicated.  When God’s people returned from exile, they rebuilt the temple and called upon the whole earth to join in worship, acknowledging Jehovah as the only true God.  God is not a tribal deity – He is God of all the earth.  Israel’s fresh experience of the goodness and faithfulness of Jehovah is an argument which should win all the nations to His service.

There is every reason to thank God, for whenever God’s plan of redemption seemed to flounder, God showed himself faithful.  He remembered His promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  God, time and again, delivered His people from their enemies.  But an even greater reason for gratitude is deliverance from the power of sin, the devil and death.

We can see that so much better than the Old Testament saints.  Though every Old Testament sacrifice expressed the principle that God is gracious, we see it so clearly expressed in the all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ.  He is the reason why we enter His courts with praise.  Songs of thanks well up in the hearts of God’s people when they remember what God has done.

As we look back through history, the church has often floundered through corruption, heresy and apathy.  That was so at the time of the Reformation, when the Gospel was buried under the rubble of centuries of tradition.  The Gospel was obscured, yet God remained faithful.

Later when zeal for the Gospel grew dim, God raised up men and women who were used to bring about revival and awakening.  Think of the revival under the Wesleys.  Today, the Bible is attacked, Christianity undermined, morality questioned at every point, yet I may say to you: be thankful!  Your God is in control!

But what, when bad things happen?  Some of you are very familiar with the circumstances of life when everything goes wrong.  Am I to be grateful for everything?  Am I to thank God for all circumstances?  Am I to thank him for Alzheimer’s?  And cancer?  For depression?  And child abuse?  No…!

I must thank him in every circumstance, for there is nothing in our lives in which God is absent.  Everything is attended by God in person.  The very hairs of our heads are numbered.  I do not have to thank God for evil, sin and injustice, but I must be thankful even in those circumstances, because even these circumstances He penetrates with His grace.

Adoniram Judson, missionary to Burma, suffered enormously.  One day, as he was taken captive and trudged along the hot roads of Burma, he was tempted to jump off a high bridge and kill himself.  Later, both his wife and children died.  He retreated to the jungle, made himself a hut and lived in total isolation and despair.  He wrote: God is the great unknown to me, I believe in Him but I find him not.  Yet grace penetrated that utter darkness and Judson lived out his days in useful service.

We can only be really grateful when we accept our lives as a gift of God’s grace.  Whatever it is, food and clothing, friends who encourage us, goals we achieve, the blessings of marriage and family, God’s forgiveness and the surprise of a new start in life – all of these things are gifts, and we thank the Giver.  That is the way to happiness.  People who give thanks to God are people who have stopped looking inwards.  They are lifted beyond and above themselves.

At this point we are on a collision course with our culture.  Our culture has turned in on itself.  It indulges in ongoing navel-gazing, encouraged by popular psychology.  People think about themselves, their need and pains and their rights to be happy and fulfilled.  The more we focus on self and our right to be happy, the unhappier we will become.  As we focus on self, we are not living up to our purpose, namely, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

To give thanks is to be fixed on God.  To see life in its gift-dimension enables us to give thanks.  The happiest people and the healthiest are those who understand what it means to give thanks.

Jesus knew it.  When Satan launched his most vicious attack on the Saviour, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn of praise to God (Matthew 26:30).  At the point of his deepest sufferings, Jesus praised God for His great redemptive acts.  He and his disciples would have sung psalms like Psalm 116:
“How can I repay the Lord for all His goodness to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.”

This text, by the way, was the text on which the first sermon ever preached in this country was based.  After a long and dangerous journey from England to Australia, the first fleet arrived in 1788 and the following Sunday the new arrivals expressed their thanks to God by recalling Psalm 116.

And Paul thanked and praised God in persecution, from sinking ships and from prison.

John Calvin knew what it meant to be thankful.  He wrote about his pre-conversion days as follows:
“I was obstinately devoted to superstition
and not easily extricated from the mire…!”
But God took him out of the mire and in gratitude he made this his life’s motto: My heart I offer to thee Lord, promptly and sincerely.

Or, an example from recent history – missionaries among the Turks early this century were surrounded by furious, angry hordes shouting: “Allah is great” and “Death to the Christians!”  The missionaries knelt and broke out in song:
“Peace, our future is unknown,
But Jesus we know and He is on the throne.”

These missionaries died, grateful that they were counted worthy to suffer for Christ.

Are you grateful?  Is there a song of gratitude in your heart?  Or are you constantly focussing on self, and perhaps feel badly done by?  Think about it and consider how your worship is affected.

  1. Gratitude is the Essence of Worship

We find that expressed throughout Scripture.  “Enter God’s gates with thanksgiving in your heart and enter His courts with praise.”  For the Lord is good.

What we adore in God is what we are moved to thank him for.  In doing so, we worship him.  That kind of grateful worship should penetrate every moment and aspect of our lives.  When Abraham Kuyper wrote about what it means to enter into the courts of God, he wrote:

“It means every morning, noon and night to be so clearly conscious of our fellowship with the Living God, that our thoughts go out to Him, that we hear the sound of His voice in our soul, that we are aware of His sacred presence round about us, that we experience His operation upon our heart and conscience and shun everything we would not dare to do in His immediate presence.”

On the Lord’s Day we give communal expression of our gratitude to God.  If worship is our expression of gratitude we ought not to talk about our worship experience.  How we liked it or why we did not like it.  When we speak like that we focus on our feelings.  Worship is not a tool to lift me up or make me happy (though I would hope it does that most of the time!).  Worship is adoring God in thankful praise.

Thanksgiving leads to our contentment.  Those who are not grateful are not content.  They tend to covet and violate every commandment of God.  At least that is what Martin Luther said: “To violate the tenth commandment (do not covet) is to break them all.”

How do we avoid being covetous in order to become thankful?  Through a new orientation.  Let me illustrate from the life of John Claypool, as related in one of his sermons.

John Claypool is an Anglican minister who lost a ten year old daughter to leukaemia.  How do you cope with that?  Shall I simply resign myself to the fact that this is God’s will?  Shall I aim to understand why God did this to me?  No, the way to deal with it is to walk the road of gratitude, based on the notion that life is a gift.  And now I quote:

“I am learning the discipline of learning to be grateful that we shared life, even if it was only 10 years.  The way of gratitude does not take away the pain, but it puts some light around the darkness.  The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is a gift – every last particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful.  You can really help me if you will never let me forget this fact, just as I hope maybe I may have helped you by reminding you of the same thing.  As I see it now, there is only one way out of the darkness- the way of gratitude.  Will you join me in trying to learn how to travel that way?”

It begins with gratitude to God for the gifts He continues to shower on us.  Focus on those gifts rather than on what other people have!  Be aware of the gift-dimension in every aspect of life.  There is no single day or hour when that gift-dimension is absent.  Therefore, praise God and let discontent and covetousness flee!

Thanksgiving gives us confidence for the future.  As God has cared in the past, so He will continue to provide in the future.  Gratitude will always be at the heart of worship.  It will encourage us to sing the song of redemption.  Christianity is not simply a matter of sombre duty.  If that is all it is, it will not attract anybody.  The Ten Commandments are not an abstract code.  They describe the pattern, direction and gratitude of the person who knows that God has rescued him from the power of sin.  We will love God in proportion to our gratitude.

Why is it that we can be grateful and rejoice?  Ironically, it is because of Jesus.  Jesus, the man of Sorrows, has filled the life of the church with grateful songs and the laughter of thanksgiving!

Gratitude to God calls for our response.  When you receive a gift, you respond with a note of thanks, a hug, a touch of the arm.  In that act, giver and receiver are united in love.  So it is with us.  If we respond to Christ in gratitude, we are united to him in the bond of faith.

I would like to encourage you all to express your gratitude to God both in your character and conduct.  Present yourself to God with the fervent prayer: Here I am.  Take me as lam.  Make me a grateful Christian.  And then enter His courts with thanksgiving in your heart.  As you do, you will find yourself, your family and your church transformed by the presence of God.  That is God’s will for your life.

“The one who calls you is faithful and He will do it!” (vs.24).

Amen.