Word of Salvation – May 07, 2023

 

THANK YOU! 

 

Sermon by Rev. S. Voorwinde on 1Thessalonians 5:18

Scripture Readings: 1Thessalonians 5:12-22; Ephesians 5:15-21

Scripture Texts: 

1Thessalonians 5:18: “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (ESV).

Ephesians 5:20: “[Give] thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (ESV).

 

Introduction

I want to plunge right into this sermon with a very direct question to everybody here, to every individual, whether you are young or old or somewhere in between. And my question is simply this: Are you a thankful person? Is your life characterised by an attitude of gratitude?

Or are you the kind of person that complains and grizzles and grumbles almost every day? Say if at the end of a typical day all your words could be put on a balance, on a pair of scales, what side would it come down on – on the side of complaining or on the side of gratitude?

At the gym I used to go to, there was a man my age who always seemed to wear the same T-shirt. On the front it said in big letters, “Grumpy old man.” It was a present from his wife. 

Walking in town one day, I noticed a parked car with an interesting bumper sticker: “Sometimes I wake up grumpy. Other times I let him sleep.”

We smile, but the underlying question is an important one: Do other people know us as grateful or grumpy?

And when it comes to your prayer life, are your prayers just a shopping list of requests or are there lots of thankyous as well? Of Charles Spurgeon, that famous Baptist preacher in London in the nineteenth century, it was said that his public prayers were made up mainly of thanksgiving. How does that compare to your prayers, whether public or private?

No doubt we have all heard that simple little children’s chorus:

Count your blessings,

Name them one by one,

And it will surprise you,

What the Lord has done.

When was the last time you did that? To list each of your blessings and to thank God for them? Have you even ever done it since childhood? How often do you engage in that healthy spiritual exercise and thank God for all the specific blessings he has put in your life?

And, my friends, I ask these questions not to be nosy or overly personal, but because gratitude lies at the very heart of Christian living. The Bible says, “Do all things without grumbling or complaining” (Phil 2:14), and it also says, “In everything give thanks” (1 Thess 5:18). In other words, when you become a Christian, grumbling is out and gratitude is in. You begin to live a life of thanksgiving. In fact, your life and mine is to be one big thankyou to God – one big thankyou to the one who made us, who saved us and who loves us.

And this is a truth that our church’s catechism has always taught so well. The Heidelberg Catechism is divided into three main parts: (a) our sin and misery, (b) our deliverance, and (c) our gratitude. Or to put even more simply and memorably, let me use some alliteration. The catechism’s three big themes are guilt, grace and gratitude or, to put it another way, sin, salvation and service. 

The logic here is absolutely simple. God saves us from our sin and misery, and our response is a life of gratitude and service. And it is under the heading of gratitude that the catechism considers the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. So why do we strive to keep the Ten Commandments and why do we take the trouble to pray? Is it to somehow earn our way to heaven so that in the end we have deserved our salvation? Not at all. Far from it. But rather by our obedience and by our prayer life we are saying thankyou to God for delivering us from our sin and misery. Our whole Christian life is to be one grand thank offering to God.

If we embrace this biblical view of the Christian life, if we have a proper appreciation of what God has done for us, then gratitude will be a driving force in our lives, it will urge us on, it will motivate us to live more and more for him.

But what does this look like on the ground? How does it all translate into everyday life? To answer these questions, I would like to tackle the subject of thankfulness under three headings: When? Why? And What?

1. When are we to give thanks to God?
2. Why are we to give thanks to God?
3. What happens when we give thanks to God?

 

1. Firstly then, when are we to give thanks to God?

 

Our catechism says that we are to be thankful in prosperity (Lord’s Day 10). And that would seem to be the easiest thing in the world. There doesn’t seem to be much of an art to being thankful when everything’s going your way. You’re healthy, you’re prosperous, and there’s hardly a cloud in the sky of your life. So it’s easy to be thankful, isn’t it?

Well, if that’s what you think, you probably haven’t reckoned with human nature. Remember the story of the ten lepers whom Jesus healed? Only one came back to thank him. And before you start throwing stones at the other nine, look at your own life. How many times didn’t you pray for something, and God gave you what you wanted, and yet it took hours or even days before you remembered to thank him.

“To be thankful in prosperity” – it’s harder than it sounds. And sometimes it’s only when we lose our health or our possessions or our freedom, only then do we realise how ungrateful we have been, and how much we took it all for granted.

But is it only in prosperity that we are to be thankful? What if adversity strikes? What then? Do we then have a right to complain? 

How does our text in 1 Thess 5 answer that question? What does it say? 

“Give thanks in all circumstances.” Or to render it more literally, “In everything give thanks.” No matter what happens, no matter what the circumstances may be, no matter how dire your situation, give thanks. Not just in prosperity, not just during pleasant times, but also in adversity and during times of hardship. “Give thanks in all circumstances.” 

And why should we do this? Paul gives a straightforward answer: “For this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” As Christians we all want to do God’s will, and sometimes we may wonder what his will for us is. Well, here it’s as clear as a bell. His will for us is to give thanks in all circumstances.

Many of us probably know that classic hymn Now Thank We All Our God. It’s the kind of hymn you might sing on Mother’s Day or at the close of a Sunday service. The first stanza goes like this:

Now thank we all our God

With heart and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things has done,

In whom his world rejoices;

Who from our mothers’ arms 

Has blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love, 

And still is ours today.

It’s a great hymn that overflows with gratitude. But how many of us know the historical setting in which these words were written? 

The hymn comes from one of the darkest periods of German history, perhaps even darker than WW2. I am thinking of the Thirty Years War that raged from 1618 till 1648. Before that war began Germany had an estimated population of 15 million. At the end of the war it was left with a population of only four million.

It was a ghastly conflict that seemed to grind on endlessly. People died of starvation. During the winter they froze to death. In spring and summer they were wiped out by plague and disease. Law and order crumbled into chaos. In the countryside men formed marauding outlaw gangs that killed for food.

In this context imagine a servant of God by the name of Martin Rinkert. He was the only surviving preacher in his hometown of Eilenberg in Saxony. At one point he was holding up to fifty funerals a day. Even his wife died of disease.

In the book Someone’s Singing, Lord James Schaap continues the story:

But sometime during those years – during the groaning persistence of war’s evil – Martin Rinkert sat and wrote this magnificent, stately tribute of thanksgiving to his God, the ruler of a world that appeared to be crumbling.

Thanksgiving! In the middle of all that!

‘Now thank we all our God,’ he wrote, his nostrils full of the stench of death. In spite of all the horror that surrounded him, the man was still counting his blessings.

Now that’s a testimony! That’s faith! (p. 35).

But then in our text in Ephesians 5 Paul takes matters even further than this. He tells his readers to be filled with the Spirit, “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 20 ESV). Now did you notice the change of preposition? To the Thessalonians Paul had written, “In everything give thanks.” Now to the Ephesians he writes, “Always give thanks for everything.” Do you see the difference? It’s one thing to say, “Give thanks in everything, i.e., in all circumstances.” It’s quite another to say, “Always give thanks for everything.” 

Now between the writing of 1 Thessalonians and Ephesians there was time span of about ten years. Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians during his second missionary journey, which was around 50-52 A.D. He wrote to the Ephesians probably during his imprisonment in Rome, which was most likely from 60 to 62 A.D. So in the intervening decade had Paul himself grown spiritually from giving thanks in everything to giving thanks foreverything? Could he now actually be giving thanks not only in his imprisonment but also giving thanks for his imprisonment?

But is that what Paul really meant? Did he literally mean for the Ephesians “to give thanks for all things”? And by implication does God really want us to thank him for all things? Over the past few weeks these questions have greatly disturbed me. I so much wanted the answer to be “No!” I wanted to dodge the full force of what Paul is saying. So I wriggled and squirmed, and thrashed about. I checked my old Greek grammars and dictionaries. I looked up fifteen different English Bible translations. Did the word for ‘for’ in “for all things” really mean that? According to fourteen of the fifteen translations, yes it did. And even the fifteenth had “Give thanks for all things” in another passage. So yes, Paul meant what he said. We are to give thanks for all things. You just can’t get around it.

Now let me hasten to add some qualifications:

• You can’t press Paul’s words so as to make him say something absurd. I remember one incident when our kids were in primary school. It was dinner time, and our daughter was in a hurry to get to a sporting match she was in. So we asked our son to say grace. He always had a good appetite, so his graces were usually pretty short. But this time, sensing that his sister was running late, he thanked God for everything – from the food to the stove to the fridge. I think even the kitchen sink may have got a mention. And he did not say “Amen” till his sister had given him a swift kick under the kitchen table. That was not the kind of prayer Paul had in mind when he wrote about giving thanks for everything!
• Secondly, we can hardly give thanks for things that are patently evil. It would be pure perversion to give thanks for the Holocaust or for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Acts of man’s inhumanity to man which in Scripture are clearly condemned as sinful should never be the cause of thanksgiving to God. You can hardly thank him for the things that he himself hates. John Stott has explained it like this:

Although the text reads that we are to give thanks always and for everything, we must not press these words literally. For we cannot thank God for absolutely ‘everything’, including blatant evil. The strange notion is gaining popularity in some Christian circles that the major secret of Christian freedom and victory is unconditional praise; . . . and that even the most appalling calamities of life should become subjects for thanksgiving and praise. Such a suggestion is at best a dangerous half-truth, and at worst ludicrous, even blasphemous. (The Message of Ephesians, 207)

• And thirdly, we should never give thanks for the misfortunes of other people, no matter how good we think these misfortunes might be for their sanctification. It’s true that a bout of illness may be used by God for someone’s spiritual growth, but surely in such a situation we would be praying for their physical recovery and not for continued illness. That would come close to gloating over someone else’s miseries and hardships. If they have come to the point in their spiritual lives where they can thank God for their hardships, that’s great, but we should never think that we have to do it for them.

So what did Paul mean by “giving thanks for everything”? It means that we can thank God for whatever is beyond our control and which by his wise providence he allows to come our way.

• It can be prosperity, but it can also be adversity. 
• It can be health, but it can also be sickness. 
• It can be wealth, but it can also be financial hardship.
• It can be success, but it can also be failure.

So what do you do if you are at the negative end of any of these contrasts? How do you thank God if you are in the midst of adversity or sickness or poverty or failure? From our two texts I think the lesson is plain. If you cannot thank God for everything in your life, then begin by at least thanking God in all circumstances. That’s the first step. Make a point of thanking him for the things for which you are grateful. Then that will put the difficult item in its proper perspective, and then perhaps over time you can take that next step of even thanking God for that as well. Thank God in everything, and thank God for all things. That should always be our aspiration.

Again, Stott gives us some wise counsel here:

God’s children learn not to argue with him in their suffering, but to trust him, and indeed to thank him for his loving providence by which he can turn even evil to good purposes (e.g. Rom. 8:28). But that is praising God for being God; it is not praising him for evil. (Stott, Ephesians, 207)

Now I want to give you an example of this in a way I think you will never forget. It comes from Corrie ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place. Corrie and her sister Betsie had been hiding Jews in their house in Holland during WW2. For their courageous efforts they were arrested and deported deep into Nazi Germany. Finally they were settled into the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. For me one of the most moving scenes in the book was when they were shifted from their temporary to their permanent barracks. To Corrie’s horror the place was swarming with fleas. As they prayed for God’s presence in this awful situation, Corrie couldn’t believe her ears when she heard Betsie thanking God for the fleas.

Suddenly Corrie interrupted Betsie’s prayer: “The fleas! This is too much. Betsie, there’s no way even God can make me grateful for a flea!”

“’Give thanks in all circumstances,’” she quoted. “It doesn’t say, ‘in pleasant circumstances.’ Fleas are part of this place where God has put us.”

“And so,” Corrie wrote, “we stood between tiers of bunks and gave thanks for fleas. But this time I was sure that Betsie was wrong” (p. 181).

But was Betsie wrong? I doubt it, because the fleas in those barracks kept the guards out, and so the Bible that the sisters had smuggled into the barracks was never discovered. In that foul place they even held worship services without being molested. And it was all because of those fleas!

So that answers the first of our major questions: When should we give thanks to God? We should thank God always, in all circumstances, and “for all things.”

1. But now we come to the second main question: Why should we give thanks for all things?

 

1. Because the “all things” for which we give thanks are the same as the “all things” mentioned in Romans 8:28: “For we know that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.” 

This means that, if you are a Christian, everything that happens to you will turn out for your good. That’s what the “all things” refers to. It’s anything that happens to us that’s beyond our control, but within the wise providence of God.

 It includes the happy days, the prosperity and the blessings. It also includes what Paul mentions later in Romans 8: “tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and sword” (v. 35). 

And no doubt we can add our troubles to this list. Whatever it is that God in his providence allows to happen to us works together for our good.

And what is our good? In Romans 8 we are told that it is to be conformed to the image of God’s Son (v. 29). The ultimate good in our lives is that we might be like Christ, and all things work together so that this may happen in our lives. 

1. And when we look at Jesus Christ, we see an amazing life of thankfulness. Think of the Last Supper that he had with his disciples. 

• He gave thanks – and then he gave them the cup.
• He gave thanks – and then he passed around the bread.

The cup symbolised the new covenant in his blood, and the bread symbolised his broken body. Jesus was giving thanks for the physical bread and wine. He was following the Jewish Passover tradition of thanksgiving. But he wasn’t just thanking God for the material bread and wine. It went far deeper than that. His mind didn’t stop there.

At the Last Supper Jesus was giving thanks even for the ordeal that awaited him – the offering up of his body and blood on the cross. As he gave thanks, he could see the awful gruesomeness of it all. He could feel the dastardly cruelty of a Roman crucifixion. He could sense the God-forsakenness that would envelop him. The scourging, the torture, the flogging – he could picture it all in his mind’s eye. He saw it all coming and yet, and yet he gave thanks. Can you believe that?

He gave thanks, but that did not mean that there was no struggle. Gethsemane came after the Supper. And it may be so in our lives. We can give thanks and mean it, we can be genuinely grateful, but still we have our trials and our problems and our wrestling with God. When we give thanks, it doesn’t necessarily take away our problems, but we do learn to see them in a new light and from a different perspective. 

And that’s what we’re going to do when we receive the bread and the wine a little later in the service – we are going to give thanks to God. Now sometimes we refer to that celebration as the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion, but in some other Christian traditions it is known as the Eucharist. And that word for the Supper comes from the Greek word meaning “to give thanks”. Jesus gave thanks and now we give thanks in return. Thanksgiving can hardly be any more profound than that, when we give thanks to God for what he has given us in Christ and for what he is doing in our lives. The Lord’s Supper is a feast of thanksgiving, a joyful occasion, as well as a time for deep reflection.

• And now my final question for the sermon is this (and I can answer it briefly): What happens when we give thanks?

The first thing that God promises us is peace. In Philippians 4:6-7 Paul wrote: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. 

So, do you want the peace of God? Then not only pray but pray with thanksgiving!

Say you’re lying awake at night with all kinds of troubled thoughts. Why not try to give thanks? Chances are that before you’ve given thanks for ten or twenty blessings, you’ll be sound asleep. You’ll have received the promised peace of God.

The second result we can expect is joy. Did you notice those three crisp, punchy little commands in 1 Thessalonians 5?

• Rejoice always.
• Pray without ceasing.
• Give thanks in all circumstances.

These commands come in a tight logical order:

• How do you always rejoice? By praying without ceasing.
• And how do you pray without ceasing? By giving thanks in all circumstances.

Therefore if you always give thanks the inevitable result will be joy. Even if you have had a depressing day, and you still manage to give thanks for all the good things, you’ll be surprised how cheerful that can make you. It can give you a sunny outlook on life.

Now the Bible has been speaking about the benefits of gratitude for millennia, and modern science is finally beginning to catch on. The researcher Brené Brown has this to say in her recent book, Atlas of the Heart:

There is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically, emotionally, and mentally. There’s research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressure – the list goes on. (p. 211)

Robert Emmons is a professor of psychology at the University of California. He has been hailed as the “world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude.” He has observed that “gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. (Brown, Atlas, 213)

Some scientists will even tell you that gratitude is good for the neural circuitry in your brain!

Conclusion

So let me come back for a moment to the three main questions of this sermon:

1. When should we give thanks? Always, in all circumstances and “for all things”.
2. And why should we give thanks for all things? Because God is in control of all things and because Christ gave thanks even in the face of the cross.
3. What results can we expect from giving thanks? The Bible promises peace and joy, and recent science has claimed there could be some health benefits as well.

So, “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thess 5:18)

AND

“Be filled with the Spirit . . . giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Eph 5:20)

So what is God’s will for you? To “give thanks in all circumstances.”

And what does being filled with the Spirit look like? Always thanking God for everything.

To get you started I want to give you a very simple homework exercise. Before you go to sleep tonight, thank God for at least three things that happened today for which you are truly grateful. It’s a great spiritual discipline, a great habit to get into. Then after you have thanked God for three things tonight, keep doing it every night for the rest of your life. 

A life of gratitude – it pleases God and it’s good for us too. Amen.