The Escape of Thanksgiving

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

But here we are Week by week we get to do this. It is a gift We get to gather in the name of Jesus Christ and behold him on purpose together Sundays are a gift and our worship is effectual. It is doing something by God’s design and Sure, the minister matters, but he’s a facilitator in the work that we are doing together together. The enemies of God hate us as well. And our worship actually is warfare. We take up the battering ram of worship today and take yet another swing at the gates of the citadels of unbelief. Doing so, we remember that our help is in the name of the Lord. We make that in earth. Oh, give thanks to the Lord. Call upon His name. Make known his deeds among the peoples. Sing to him, sing praises to him. Tell of all his wondrous works. Glory in his holy name. Let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. Seek the Lord and his strength. Seek his presence continually.

Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles and the judgments that he has uttered. O offspring of Israel, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen ones. He is the Lord our God. His judgments are in all the earth. Let’s pray together. Father it is our joy to declare to the cosmos your work. You made the cosmos, all of creation, from nothing by your word. You keep our molecular particles from slamming into one another and you have called us by name. You have redeemed us, undeserving sinners. You suffer the wicked who hates you for a little while before you exercise your just and holy wrath on them.

but we are yours. Our thanksgiving serves as a vehicle to invite more of your blessings on us, as well as inviting them to the feast. May that thanksgiving spring forth in our worship this morning and we pray this in Jesus name, amen. In a few days most of our nation will gather to celebrate Thanksgiving Day, but what will they be giving thanks for? And more importantly, to whom will they be giving thanks? When it comes to thankfulness there are at least three ways to get it wrong. First there is simply not being thankful at all. Failing to recognize how blessed we are or becoming upset because blessings don’t come in the shape, size, or color that we prefer is wrong. Being grabby, grumbly and glum are some of the ways an unthankful heart shows itself. A second way to get thankfulness, Ron, is undirected Thanksgiving. For the many who will express gratitude this Thursday in a vague, undefined way, it makes as much sense as bowing down to an empty throne or warming your hands over a a non-existent fire or applauding an empty stage.

Undirected thanks is a failure to render what is owed. The third and worst way to distort thankfulness is by refusing to give thanks to the one from whom all blessings flow. Romans 1, 21 describes those who will not honor God or give him thanks. Jonathan will be drooling into this during his sermon. But this one verse stands at the root of man’s sin problem. When our hearts fail to thank God often, they do not remain neutral. They become self-deceived. We begin to treat his gifts as entitlements, his patience as tolerance, and his glory as optional. Thanklessness diminishes our view of God, and it inflates our view of ourselves.

It is a poison that erodes reverence, dependence, humility, and joy. Left unchecked, it invites the wrath of God as he brings judgment upon those who refuse to acknowledge him. So if the Spirit is convicting you of the sin of thanklessness, or if any other sin is keeping you from proper worship, now is the time to confess it. And I invite you now, if you are able and willing, to kneel in humble confession before the Lord as we continue in our corporate, before we continue. Father, we confess that we are not as thankful as we ought to be. We go through most of our day without being mindful that every breath is a gift, every step is sovereignly directed, and every outcome intended for our good.

So much of our daily demeanor is tied to our circumstances instead of you who supplies every good and perfect gift and are the Father of Lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. We ask your forgiveness for the sins we have not diligently resisted. We do not take the admonition to be holy as you are holy seriously enough. Despite all this, your mercy knows no end, and you graciously forgive us when we confess our sins. We come before you in soul reliance on Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, grateful for its power to cleanse us from sin. Let me pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen, and you’re invited to stand.

And our assurance of forgiveness reminder comes from Psalm 32.5, which says, I acknowledge my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. So having confessed our sins lets us really show our thankfulness then to him as we lift up our voices in song again. Today’s scripture reading is Romans 1, 18 through 25. Romans 1, 18 through 25. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.

For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore, God gave them up in their lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies amongst themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Father according to your Your word, giving thanks to you, keeps us from all sorts of sins of presumption, and of course, thanklessness is itself a sin.

We pray that this morning, as we have opportunity to open your word together, that it would orient us and that it would convict us, and it would also cause us to be appropriately grateful for your graces to us that you evidently have not shown to everybody. So bless our time together. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen. What is the point of everything? It’s often the case that the Sunday school answer is simplest and usually correct. And that’s the case again right now. The point of everything is the glory of God. That is the ultimate telos of the universe. In the Westminster shorter catechism, it’s man’s chief end to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Everything exists for the glory of God. Creation exhibits his genius. I mean, who would think all of this up? It showcases his handiwork. When he extends mercy to sinners, He displays loving kindness. Wrath unleashed on the ungodly who reject him manifests his perfect and holy justice. The God of Scripture, the infinite holy God of the universe, the uncreated creator, has made man as the pinnacle of his creation, uniquely in his image and likeness. And man exists for the same reason as the angels and the flowers and the pine trees, for the glory of God. Nevertheless, the vast majority of men refuse to glorify him or give him thanks, and by doing so they miss the whole point of existence.

When they fail to honor him as God or give thanks to him, natural men reap the ridiculous consequences of this rejection. It’s a bad deal for them. It’s a terrible exchange. They actually get nothing out of it except a little bit of the illusion of autonomy. Along the way, they forfeit joy, blessing, and the very satisfying experience of doing what they were made to do. It’s bad. Humanity is in a mess of our own making. And our culture is not exempt from this. this. I may be using the first person plural here, but it is as a Christian who is part of a culture that hates God. Christians cannot take part in this debauchery. We cannot be the characters of Romans 1, and yet we are living in a culture that very much does.

I mean, is it possible these days and times to belabor Romans 1? Yes and no. I don’t know that it needs meditation or clarification in order to convince anybody that we’re seeing it every day among us right now. And while we destroy ourselves as a culture, we destroy ourselves while we do that, we actually flatter ourselves that it’s getting better. Progress, people. We are on the right side of history. Culturally, we know neither the word of God nor history. These are our problems. Culturally, we must repent of them culturally. Aside from dramatic divine intervention, say a flood, the only way for our current cultural predicament to escape is through repentance that results in Thanksgiving. And I don’t just think this, I know this because of this passage. And just like the man who wears inverting goggles long enough, his mind begins to convince him that he’s seen the world rightly when he is not. Since the late 19th century, scientists have experimented with inversion goggles. Some of us who were at a special presentation

on Thursday here at the school saw one of these examples, one of these experiments that was conducted in the 60s, but it’s been happening since the late 19th century. And what happens, you’re probably aware that your brain actually inverts the image that comes through your eyes and then writes it so that you’re able to see the world correctly. And the reverse is also true. If you put on inversion goggles initially, you will see the world upside down. But after a matter of days that are uncomfortable, you don’t just learn to navigate, you actually see the world right side up. Now that is an experiment to testify to the elasticity of the marvelous human brain.

Of course, the ingenuity of God is remarkable, and secularists even should look at that and marvel at creation. But it also serves as a helpful illustration for something else, an illustration of a spiritual nature. And just like the man who wears goggles long enough begins to see the world a certain way while convinced that he is not, likewise, a man wearing those goggles cannot see the world rightly, even though he may be fully functional and absolutely convinced that what he sees is accurate, and that is where we are spiritually as a culture. And if the man were born wearing those goggles, it would be of little use to try to convince him that he’s wearing them, to try to convince him that he is not seeing the world rightly.

It’s all he’s ever known, and he’s fully functional, and he thinks he’s just fine.

Natural men are wearing spiritual and virgin goggles, completely convinced that they’re rightly oriented, evidencing all the while that God has given them over to the full consequence of the refusal to honor him as God or give thanks to him. This is all full of ironies. I told you it was a bad exchange. It’s a bad deal for the natural man. Men choose to worship the creation rather than the Creator. Men consider themselves to be wise, but they were actually shown to be fools. Perhaps most ironically, is that their insistence is on the refusal to glorify God and what did they do along the way? They become a vehicle for his glory, nevertheless. They end up bringing him glory regardless, but rather than being vessels of mercy, men who refuse honor God become vessels of wrath fit for destruction. Paul speaks about that eight chapters later. To be sure, man’s natural state is a bad one and culturally it is ours. And Paul catalogs his problems in it from chapter one of Romans verses 22 all the way through 32. It’s bad, but what has gotten

man to this point? It happened pretty quick, but in a word, pride. Pride is no little white lie. I’m not talking about dignity, I’m talking about arrogance. ascribing to yourself what ought to be ascribed to God. Pride is the primal sin that gives way to all other categories of sins and ultimately the abandoning wrath of God. This is bad news, but in His kindness God doesn’t leave us there. My particular focus this morning is Romans 1 21. The whole passage must be read in order to understand verse 21. It is another discussion of context in Romans chapter 1 that was illuminating for Martin Luther. Understanding verse 21 can only happen if you consider it where it is, but like a Puritan I’m going to take one verse and try to expound on it though we will be touching on others. And so Dave did read the whole context for us and there’s even more after that.

But this letter from Paul to the Romans, the Christians at Rome in the first century, helps us to better understand where we are and how we got here. It, I think, addresses for us three questions, namely these. Where are we? How do we get here and how do we get out? So we’re gonna talk some about each of those.

Where are we? Culturally, where are we? That’s number one. Well, never before has Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 32 so accurately described our culture as it does right now. And the way things are going we’ll be saying the same thing next year at this time as well. Every single part of this passage has some sort of resemblance to our culture today in micro or macro. And I’ll return to the first half of verse 21 in a little while, but the second half of verse 21 and all of verse 22 say this, they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise they became fools. Futility is the ridiculous theme of the day and it is a motif in this passage, a motif is something that keeps popping up, a literary element. Through this passage there are echoes of futility everywhere.

The word that is here, render feudal, is rendered vain in several other translations and foolish in other translations. Feudal is then a good rendering. Feudal is pretty easy to understand, but the definition is this, incapable of producing any useful result. Pointless. There you have it. That is the right word to describe how well-ordered our cultural lives have become, or not. It seems that everywhere you look, Christianity is regarded as some backwater religion, as some primitive, irrelevant belief system whose adherents need to get with the times or move out of the way. And the people who believe this are blinded by the centuries of gospel fruit that they enjoy.

This is to say, the reasoning of natural men is actually broken. The reasoning of natural men is actually broken. There is no way to make sense of the nonsense that is going on in our world today unless you conclude that their reasoning is broken, their foolish hearts are darkened. They cannot see the world rightly and we must understand that they will only ever gain wisdom through repentance. Now, realizing that the only difference between natural men and Christians is the grace of God, we have something that we have been given. It is not something that we should be arrogant about, and it is something that if we don’t boast in the giver of that good thing, we are disobedient.

Our boasting is righteous. Our boasting is God glorifying, and our boasting is not because of us. is boasting in the God who has given us good things. The Christian cannot then be arrogant or patronizing, but must be gracious, compelling, wise, and patient. There is a great temptation for those who have been given new hearts to look down on those who have not, for those who can see clearly to be annoyed with those who cannot, forgetting that they can do no better with darkened hearts and a broken reasoning. That’s the best that they can do.

At our school, for instance, when we are reading Marx or Hitler or Darwin, which yes we do, we insist that the students not set up straw men incapable of defending themselves, but rather show respect for the image of God in their opponents. Even though their opponents’ spiritual hearts may be darkened, we ask what was so compelling about what Marx was proposing in the Communist Manifesto that it took hold? What was so compelling about it that these people who are no more naturally wiser, foolish than we are naturally thought this is a good idea, that it is still so widely represented in the world today even though So at the hands of communist dictators, tens of millions of people have died.

Their own political leaders have killed them. And still, it’s a thing today. So why? Why? What kind of judgment must a people be under for their leaders to embrace a culture of death?

their leaders to embrace an ideology that does not presuppose the fallenness of man. What sort of judgment must the people be under to think that what Hitler is suggesting in Mein Kampf is actually a good idea? The people who thought that was a great idea are no dumber than you are. The difference is the grace of God. And so are we just going to tell them, well you’re just blind. Well, even if it is true, that doesn’t tell the whole story. And how do we get out of that? Well, we’ll get to that in a few moments. What sort of judgment must a people be under to be given over the to the full consequences of a life of sexual liberation or homosexuality? What will get them out? In popular culture, in mainstream media, in academia, and many other public spheres, There is almost no interest in, let alone reference to or submission to, the Bible, to God’s Word.

The orienting, directing manual for our lives that has remained unchanged since it was codified nearly two millennia ago is regarded as outdated and, according to some, even dangerous. Even Christian liberals will say, it is fantastic for sake of suggestions. It is not binding. Without then a fixed standard to govern their lives, natural men are unsurprisingly frustrated. They are reduced to trying to figure out a lot of things on their own, and it ain’t working. Further, they’re doing a terrible job, because they’re doing a job they’re not supposed to do. For instance, when you self-identify as whatever, how scary is that?

If your identity comes from you, what kind of distorted view of yourself must you have to think you’re even capable of that, let alone that you would do a good job? When you self-identify, rather than embracing the identity that comes from God and is bought by Christ, you take on a burden that you cannot bear. When you make up the rules of morality or suggest that morality is fluid, rather than submitting to the unchanging standard of scripture, you jump on a slippery slope with roller skates. Yes, it’s gotten silly. In verse 24, we have the first mention of God giving men up to the full fruit of their own desires. There’s a trifecta of giving them up. This passage speaks of a self-destructive idolatry that is all too familiar. Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen.

The language that Paul uses here is typically reserved for sexual sins, which are especially destructive, but it has application across a host of different categories and sins as well. When men give full expression to the lusts of their hearts, the consequences are dire. It’s bad. When you give a toddler everything he wants, it’s really bad for The same thing is true of grown-ups too, apart from the grace of God. Verses 26 and 27 talk about the unnatural and fruitless sins of homosexuality. Men who exchange the union of husband and wife for man and man are doing something that is profoundly disordered and unnatural.

And it is not blessed by God but the fruit of the womb that is a normal feature of the marriage union. It’s gross. But the homosexual community has leaned into this vile practice so enthusiastically that they successfully co-opted the word pride. Think about that. They’re proud of it. This is not surprising given Paul’s language in verse 27. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. Well, these are actually shameful acts, but they’re shameless when you have a seared conscience. or when you’ve been given over to the consequence of your sin. The characters in these verses are like the Jews in Jeremiah’s day who had lost the capacity to blush.

They were not ashamed of their iniquity. How could men be so proud to celebrate this unnatural behavior? It’s only possible if God has left them alone to reap the consequences of their behavior. And now we have parades. We are proud to have the biggest pride celebration in the country right down in Seattle. We have parades, an absolute celebration of something that God will not bless. Verses 28 through 32 is sort of a catch-all list of additional sins that natural men love. Verse 28 says that God gave them over to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. The modern culture of death is actually insane. It feels like I’m using superlatives, I’m actually just using words in their proper context.

It is futile, it is insane. The casual murder of the unborn is a blight on our culture and God is judging us for it. We become desensitized to death. And if we kill our own offspring for inconvenience in utero, It’s at least as outrageous as the killing of people who think differently from us. In my lifetime, our culture has been forced to deal with this a few times. Most recently, Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’ve listened to enough of his talks to reasonably conclude that he was not actually guilty of white supremacy, homophobia, racism, fascism, or misogyny. All of which he’s been accused of. He did speak unapologetically about how the Christian ethic is a formula for human flourishing across cultures and throughout its history.

That is offensive to the characters of Romans 1, 21 to 32, which includes much in our society today. And so he had to be silenced. So the only part that was actually surprising about the way his enemy celebrated his death was how open, proud, brazen, and shameless they were in doing so. Unfortunately, there are too many examples to list, but just citing one. At the November 10th Turning Point event on the campus of UC Berkeley, there are mass a couple hundred protestors outside, many of whom were masked, fitting, but those who weren’t masked looked pretty angry, and they chanted a number of things, but among them was this little gem.

When fascists come and cause a wreck, they get a bullet in their neck. My, their parents must be proud. Send your darlings to the premier research university on the west coast and watch them glorifying the murder of someone who loved them and then threatening those who think differently from them with a similar fate. It’s not unique. This is not unique in our culture. It is not unique in history. We glory in sin that is destroying us and we glory in death and we are depending on a Christian ethic and a Christian worldview to actually pull it off. Is that not ironic? Only in a highly blessed culture like our own would people as blessed as ours be allowed to chant with impunity death to America as happened at that same protest death to America See the insanity it is the illustration of Romans 1 Romans 1 is no longer illustrating us. We’re illustrating it It’s happening before our eyes and in our lifetime men honor the creation above the Creator and they call this intelligence.

Men have demanded that we take God out of the public sphere and they call it a separation of church and state, which is not in the Constitution. Men suppress the truth and unrighteousness insisting that God does not exist, though the alternative is ridiculous. Believing in evolution requires more faith than Christianity. Still, they call this denial of God’s existence scientific, intellectual, progressive. Men insist on protecting the rights of women to kill their own babies and they dub it health care. Men have replaced wives with husbands and they still want to reproduce. They call this love or marriage equality, weird term, or family planning. Men celebrate the public assassination of a man who loved his opponents enough to point out the folly of their beliefs and their beliefs implications. They call this taking a stand against fascism. Fascism. Don’t get me started on that. I want to I want to channel in Ivo Montoya. You use that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Women mock the widow of that same man for her heartbreak

because they have never experienced love. They call this standing against repression of women. Women demand full access to combat roles in the armed forces in the name of equality. If that were not enough, there’s a little gem there at the back end of Romans 1 where he describes men as inventors of evil. And as the inventors of evil that we are, we are not satisfied with this terrible list. Instead, we generate new ways to spurn God all the time. And we could go on, but you get the point. You see the patterns?

with the revolutionaries playbook they demand that we don’t just tolerate these perversions of nature but we must celebrate them. This we cannot do. These are evidences of God’s abandoning wrath. They don’t just have the potential to destroy a society. They’re evidence that this destruction is underway. This is madness. This is the height of futility. I suppose it could get it can always get worse. But we know from history that the only useful result of this sort of folly is that it can break a people and bring them to repentance. Of course, there is nothing quite as futile as trying to convince a spiritually dead person that he is dead, or trying to convince a man who has been wearing those inversion goggles that he has actually seen the world incorrectly. These people have been given over to the natural consequence of their sin, and that is itself a judgment. Still, this is where we are. And this begs the second question, how did we get here? So again, number two, how did we get here? In a sobering bombshell, Paul explains what happened in the first half

of Romans 1 verse 21. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. In a word, this is pride. Our pride has gotten us here. Is there anything is completely wrong-headed, is refusing to acknowledge the God who made us and who made everything else, the God who keeps our hearts beating, and then try to invent ways to free ourselves of any responsibility or allegiance to Him. God has given us intelligence and volition, and owing to our sinful natures, we have abused His gifts and His graces. When it comes to our culture in particular, there are secondary means to have brought us to where we are.

who say that the United States is not a Christian nation are depending on Christian principles that are embedded in the Constitution every day. This is not to say that every American is a Christian. It is to say that our nation was founded on Christian principles and the biblical morality. If this were not the case, things would look quite different. I’m fond of saying that where grace is present, grace is abused. But where grace is abused, at least grace is present. That’s a good thing. The checks and balances system is born out of a right understanding of the human condition. If you direct too much power one direction, corruption is sure to follow.

You may say that our nation is corrupt now. You’re not wrong. But as I’ve already said, it could be worse. You know what we know? History. There is more power at present in the hands of the President of the United States and the Supreme Court and Congress. like all of them, have way more power than the most central government-loving founding fathers could have possibly imagined. But why is this? It’s because we love somebody taking care of us. For as long as we’ve been a nation, we’ve been happy to let the state do that, and we have given it more and more and more power and control. Right now, today, a battle royale rages in Congress over Obamacare subsidies that many Americans have come to depend upon.

And interestingly, the battle is over whether government-subsidized health insurance should fund abortions. Of course, I mean, the answer is no, even legally. According to the Hyde Amendment, no, that should not be the case. But right now, the Democrats are unwilling to sign off on anything that will not, and the Republicans are unwilling to sign off on anything that will. got to give. And food stamp corruption is rampant, as well as taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants. Public-funded education is regarded as a basic human right today and must be paid for by the taxpayer even if he disagrees with what’s being taught.

Why? Because we want the state to take care of us and we won’t take care of ourselves. And we’ve begun to listen to their narrative. It is for your own good that we are doing this because what would happen if parents actually educated their own kids? Like, God help us. That is the narrative that is out there. And we’ve begun to listen. What’s been lost in all of this is that our basic assumptions, don’t miss this, regarding healthcare education, they stem from a biblical understanding that image bearers are valuable.

Granted, this is perverted when it comes to distortion, but even then we justify it by saying that it is essential for the health of the mother. If any of you have read the book The Major World, this is not my notes, but there’s a powerful passage in there where Vishal Mangalwadi and his wife were in America on a speaking tour and they’re from India, And they’re driving down the freeway. And one of the most normal things in the world happens. An ambulance with a siren and lights is on the freeway and everybody pulls over. And his wife starts to break down and says, oh, how they love their people. Hmm. Come to think of it, yeah.

The godless people who are pulling over are operating on an assumption that, let’s say, it’s the law. It’s the law. But why is that the law? because humans bear God’s image and likeness and preserving their lives is a good thing.

And he said in India, when there’s a siren, it means watch out. And the person who’s driving, that first response vehicle is at the mercy of the people who are in the way, who may or may not get out of the way. Well, do you see the pattern? For as long as men have been men. God has been gracious to us and ever since Genesis 3 we’ve been abusing that grace. Today we receive an embarrassment of blessings from the sovereign creator of the universe yet we have the arrogance to say he doesn’t exist. We act like our blessings are our own doing. I love the illustration that Jim gave in the confession meditation. We try to warm our hands over a non-existent fire or applaud an empty stage when we give thanks or have an attitude of gratitude to the cosmos, when we stubbornly insist that God does not exist. And maybe the case that modern America is an excellent example and that that is particularly helpful for us, but this indictment on mankind is actually not limited to our borders. It is universal. No man has an excuse for refusing to bow the knee to

his Creator. We’ve gotten here because we’ve been blessed in countless ways starting with natural revelation where God’s invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made. So they are without excuse says Paul we have been blessed and still we refuse to honor him as God and give thanks to him we have refused Thanksgiving and that has gotten us into this mess so where do we go from here that is to say how do we get out that is our third question how do we get out in a refusal to honor him as God or give thanks to him, we’ve gotten where we are, and if that is the case, then honoring him as God and giving thanks to him would absolutely, positively get us out of this as a culture. It’s a pretty simple thought experiment to run. If the culture were marked by glorifying God and giving him thanks, it wouldn’t look like it does. The key to escaping our current judgment is the reverse of what

got us here in the first place. If pride has gotten us out, only humility will get us out that leads to thanksgiving. Man’s pride was evidenced in his refusal to honor him as God or give thanks to him, and that pride then was the soil from which a host of other sins have sprung. Repentance will kill that foliage like a torch to a dandelion in your driveway. But the soil of pride must be replaced with a new soil of humility from which growth from from sorry from which new growth and fruit will emerge. A people who are ready to humble themselves and bow to the Creator to consciously glorify Him as the gracious giver of all things as the loving Father who has also given us a formula for flourishing and blessing, that people will be blessed. While obedient Christians give thanks in all circumstances, putting it on the calendar is a good thing for us. We do that this week. Lest we miss the value of Thanksgiving, I want to finish with three quick benefits of Thanksgiving in light of Romans 1. Now, you can make your own list. You can search the web.

benefits of Thanksgiving enter and it’s actually not hard to come up with some pretty good ones but in light of Romans 1 particularly verse 21 I want to suggest three things thanksgiving grows humility thanksgiving grows humility when we give God thanks we acknowledge that our blessings are gifts not wages they’re things that he has given freely not things that we have earned it is a kindness that God does not give us what we have earned and we have not earned our blessings we have been given them blessings are graces and grace is unmerited favor so a person cannot rightly give God thanks while being presumptuous it doesn’t work if you are fighting pride repent and give thanks if it doesn’t work do it again do it some more you cannot keep recognizing your blessings and remain proud. Second, thanksgiving glorifies God. There’s some significant overlap with these. When we give God thanks, it is an acknowledgement that he is the giver of the gifts that we enjoy. We have not manufactured our

own blessings. It is true that some of us are blessed in ways that others are not, but every one of us is blessed beyond what he deserves. When we give thanks, we are rightly oriented which enables us to honor God. Today, God gives us blessings that are intended to teach us about himself, and we instead insist that not only did those gifts not come from him, but he doesn’t exist in the first place. That angers God. Thanking him glorifies him. At this time of the year, as Jim mentioned as well, people try to remove God from the equation Thanksgiving, which is its own kind of futility. Like whom are you thinking? Even Thanksgiving Day is sometimes called Turkey Day. Don’t do that. I mean enjoy your turkey as a gift from the one who made the turkey. It’s more about food and football and maybe even family than it is about honoring the God who has given all of those things as gifts. This is silly and sad because those blessings came from somewhere and it was not the universe. It was the God who made the universe.

Third, Thanksgiving invites blessing. When we give God thanks, we invite further blessing from Him. And again, when we run Romans 1 in reverse, what we see are people, marked by humility and gratefulness, and God continues to keep them from destroying themselves. With With the grateful, God stays involved. With the grateful, God stays involved. Conversely, God distances Himself from the ungrateful, and they destroy themselves. The grateful are blessed, and they flourish. And in a very real sense, one benefit of thanksgiving is that it keeps God involved with you. You do not want to be left alone by God. You do not want to be abandoned by God.

You do not want to be left to the consequences of your own decision-making and devices. That is bad. That is a fruit of ingratitude. The first way to convince people who have been abandoned by God that they are in trouble is for God to grab hold of their hearts. That must ultimately happen. What are intermediates? What are ways that He may prepare their hearts for that heart-grabbing that He performs? How does He prepare their hearts? by humbling them with the consequences of their sin. But that’s not the only way he convinces natural men that they’re seeing the world upside down. He also uses the testimony of blessed saints.

If you would be used by God to transfer the characters of Romans 1, your neighbors, your leaders, from darkness to light, begin with thanksgiving. I’m drawing a straight line here between, you give thanks, You will be blessed, you will be jealousable. You give thanks, you invite the blessing of God, and that gets the attention of people who have those spiritual inversion goggles on. A world that wants what we have can have it if they repent. It is a gift, it is grace, but they must repent to have it, and they can. It is offered freely to all who would believe, to all who will receive it. I’ve already remarked that where grace is present, grace is abused, I’ll share with you another maxim.

Grateful people are more fun to bless. On the micro level, on the macro level. From little toddlers to entire cultures. If you would be blessed by God unto the jealousy of the watching world, give thanks to God, honor him as God, and give thanks to him. Mercifully, the judgment that God has put us under right now, the judgment that is unfolding around us as a natural consequence for our own sin and God giving us over to that, is not the final judgment. It is a judgment that is meant to lead us to repentance. So there remains opportunity yet for our culture to repent. Though he would be just in doing so, he has not destroyed us yet.

If we would ward off his abandoning wrath and invite God’s blessing, give thanks merrily and heartily. Make a big deal of it. Don’t make a scene of it. But glory and the giver of the good gifts you enjoy. Feast and celebrate the grace of God. Let your tables be adorned with love, as you help others to give thanks as well. May the wine be rich, the potatoes be salty, the turkey be moist, and the whipped cream be deep. And remember in your thanksgiving that you are getting ready to practice the same discipline in heaven. Let’s pray together. Father, please give us a right understanding as to the dire consequence of our grumbling.

Whether it is that we didn’t get a close enough parking space to the building, or that we don’t have as big a house as we would like, or we don’t have enough money to make us happy. We know that there are infinite ways for our people who have been blessed to still grumble nevertheless. And we plead with you not to leave us alone. And we know that you won’t because we love you, and we do want to give you thanks. We pray that as we do, just that, that it would grab the attention of the watching world around us, that while things are going from bad to worse, we can rejoice in you, the giver of the good things that we enjoy.

And so we recognize that every Sunday we practice this. Worship is a feast. And Thursday will be a special kind of feast. And we just have so many reasons to give you thanks. Please help us to do that well on purpose. and then out of genuinely grateful hearts. And we ask this in Christ’s name, amen. At the communion table, we remember what Christ has accomplished for us and we give him thanks. This is the Eucharist, the table of thanksgiving. We partake in the bread and the wine as we remember Christ’s broken body and spilled blood.

But what has Christ accomplished? What are we giving him thanks for? Yes, Christ paid the price for our sins and restored us into fellowship with our maker. He is our savior, our propitiation for our sins. He took God’s wrath upon himself in our stead and gave us life. He brought us into the house of joy and peace. But what do we do in that house? We don’t simply sit on the couch meditating forevermore on how great it is to be there.

In the house of joy and peace that Christ brought us into, we live. We work, we laugh, we cry, we pursue, we wait, we sing, we feast. Our life in God’s house is full and overflowing with all sorts of flavors and aromas. And for all of it, we give thanks to our Savior and our Lord. Our thanksgiving to God does not stop at salvation. We don’t only say thank you to Him for opening the door for us and bringing us in. We say thank you for every moment that happens forevermore. So, triology does not set the boundary for our thanksgiving because it does not set the boundary for what Jesus has and is redeeming and is and will be ruling over.

Jesus is Lord of all things and is redeeming all things, including the things we find and do here on earth. So our gratitude must not be limited to our thoughts of the mechanics of salvation. When we smell the aroma of baked bread, or pour gravy on our mashed potatoes, or listen to our kids laugh and sing and stampede down the hall. When our business endeavors are not submitting to our efforts, or the chaos of the kids at home is testing our patients. When we’re putting a shovel in the soil with some of the dirt stained into the creases of our palms or laying down a weld bead like butter on bread or actually spreading butter on bread. When we groan inwardly in our weakness and our suffering as we wait for the redemption of our bodies or we enjoy the health and energy that God bestows.

If we’re rebalancing our company’s accounting books to create order out of chaos, or struggling through a math problem with ink stains on the side of our hand. If we’re toiling in search for the right words to say, or learning to hold our tongue. When there are clear opportunities in front of us that we push forward to, or when we We plead with God every day and wait on Him to open the door. In and for all of these things we thank the Maker of heaven and earth. For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. First Timothy 4.4. Gratitude enables our hearts to honor our Maker.

Being created by God is good, and we are not to reject any of it if we receive it with thanksgiving. Receiving God’s gift by faith and being thankful for every smile and for every tear is how we honor our Maker, from salvation to all of life, including bread and wine. Saints of Trinity Evangel Church, your charge today is this. Honor God by giving him thanks, not just during your Norman Rockwell holiday moments, not just in your success, not just because things aren’t as bad as they could be. Submit to God in whatever moment he has for you today. him in all circumstances and for all things. He has crafted every moment for you. Honor him in all of it and thank him for all of it. Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the Eternal Covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.