Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. – Psalm 100:4-5
Praying God’s Blessings and Peace over you this Thanksgiving and always.
Your LOOP Friends
Thanksgiving (The Blessings That Follow a Grateful Heart)
All Scripture taken from the New Living Translation
As we head into the holiday season… We have Thanksgiving coming up in a few weeks, then Christmas, and finally the New Year…
This is a time of year that can bring all the emotions… Stress, joy, happiness, depression, loneliness, and the topic for the next few weeks is thankfulness…
No matter where we are in the range of emotions during the holiday season.
I think there’s something all of us can glean out of these next two Sundays that will help us in the season… And even beyond.
Today, we’re starting a two-part series on being thankful, having a heart of gratitude…
Depending on what version you read from… The word “Thankful” is found about 200 times in the Bible… The word “Gratitude” can be found about 150 times… And the words “Thanks” or “Thanksgiving” is used about 70 times in the Bible…
And… Look what we are told in…
1 Thessalonians 5:18 – Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.
It is God’s will for us to be thankful in all circumstances… Sometimes that’s a tall order with what we deal with at times…
But it’s a heart posture… God wants gratitude to be the primary motive behind everything we do…
Notice in that verse, it says, “For this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.”
There are two reasons for that… It is a witness to the world, to those around us…
But also, a heart posture of thankfulness, of gratitude…
Is connected to biblical principles God as place around the character traits of thankfulness, and gratitude.
How does a biblical principle work? Just like any other law or principle… there is a reaction to an action (laws of science, math, nature… Gravity)
Deuteronomy 28:1-8a – “If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully keep all his commands that I am giving you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the world. 2 You will experience all these blessings if you obey the Lord your God: 3Your towns and your fields will be blessed. 4Your children and your crops will be blessed. The offspring of your herds and flocks will be blessed. 5Your fruit baskets and breadboards will be blessed. 6Wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be blessed.
7“The Lord will conquer your enemies when they attack you. They will attack you from one direction, but they will scatter from you in seven! 8“The Lord will guarantee a blessing on everything you do and will fill your storehouses with grain. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.”
So, if we take what Moses is teaching the Israelites here, and we fully obey God and carefully keep all His commands it looks like we reap some pretty good benefits
Very good benefits if we’re being honest…
If being thankful in all circumstances is God’s will for us who belong to Jesus…
Then I think it’s safe to say that we can connect God’s will for us to the blessings He has for those who keep His commands.
Another reason why being thankful is something God wants us to cultivate in our hearts, is the health benefits that come with this lifestyle…
UCLA Health did a study about health benefits of gratitude, and they found that it improves our brain and physical health… It reduces stress levels, depression and anxiety… Improves relationships and helps us sleep better…
A thankful heart defeats things like anger, depression, and anxiety…
People with a grateful mindset find more satisfaction in life… The have strong social relationships, and higher self-esteem…
Gratitude calms the nervous system and lowers blood pressure…
And finally, the study concluded that people who are thankful tend to pursue goals that keep them feeling good…
Proverbs 17:22 – A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.
Gratitude develops a cheerful heart… So, how do we get there?
How do we promote a heart posture of genuine thankfulness?
It starts by opening the dialogue with Jesus… And if we’re serious about this, then tell Him you are serious about getting your heart and mind in the right place so you can feel better…
And it will take some time… And for some of us, it may even be a battle to get there, but trust me, it’s worth fighting for!!
Let’s look at a few passages that can get us started on the journey to a thankful heart…
Psalm 139:13-14 – You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous, how well I know it.
The fact that you are sitting here today is a miracle… Each life on this planet is a sacred human being created by God at the very moment of conception…
God created us the moment conception took place… And had plans for us long before we were even born…
Ephesians 1:4 – Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.
Even before the world began God had plans for us… This is a big deal… Thank Him for that!
Psalm 13:5-6 – But I trust in your unfailing love. I will rejoice because You have rescued me. I will sing to the Lord because He is good to me.
I will rejoice and I will be thankful because You love me, God… I will rejoice because you rescued from my mistakes… You kept me from the pit!
I will sing songs of joy because God is good to me!
Think of the times God’s love did not fail you, and thank Him for that… Think of the times God rescued you from something stupid and thank Him for that…
Think of the times God’s goodness changed the course of your life and thank Him!
Psalm 120:1 – I took my troubles to the Lord; I cried out to him, and He answered my prayer.
Thank Him for always being there… Thank Him for hearing our prayers and answering… Think of the times He was there for you and thank Him for that!
1 Peter 5:7 – Give all your worries and cares to God, for He cares about you.
I took my troubles to God, and He answered me… I gave my worries to God, because He cares for me…
Think of the times He brought an answer to those prayers and thank Him for that!
Instead of focusing on what’s causing the worry… Learn to give it to God… Learn to talk to Him about it… Tell Him what is needed…
Keep that dialogue going, and thank Him for all the times in the past He has helped, knowing He will continue to offer the help needed…
And most importantly… When we keep our thoughts on things that are trustworthy, honorable, pure, and lovely…
When we are thinking about the Kingdom of God and praising Him for all He has done in our favor!
These are habits that keep our mind and spirit centered on the things of the Kingdom…
And when we find ourselves doing this on a regular basis… Every day…
The healing benefits of the blessings of God will be something we experience as we cultivate a heart of thankfulness!
Now that we’ve covered what I’m calling the starter pack for a thankful heart…
Cultivating a heart of thankfulness involves meditating, praying to, and talking to God…
Are ways that will help us focus on the things that will align us with the blessings God wants to pour into us….
Now, let’s move into the outward focusing part of the equation by looking at some ways we can express our gratitude to God.
The Bible speaks of many ways we can express our thanks to God, but I want to touch on three…
The first habit to cultivate is singing to God… Giving God our praise, our worship…
Worship is something that is woven into the fabric of the Vineyard Movement…
Here at our church, we are intentional on creating an atmosphere of worship where heaven can meet our earthly realm for a bit…
Singing to God is not only biblical… It’s personal… And it takes our focus off what may be a distraction… And it draws us closer to God as we focus on who He is!
Psalm 95:1-2 – Come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come to Him with thanksgiving. Let us sing psalms of praise to Him.
Let us come to Him with thanksgiving… Singing and shouting joyfully psalms of praise to Him.
This defines the importance of Sunday mornings… Coming together as a body of believers and singing to God with thanksgiving!
Colossians 3:16-17 – 16 Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom he gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts. 17 And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.
All throughout the Scriptures we see the importance of cultivating a heart of thankfulness and how it is connected to God’s will for us…
As we let the message of Jesus fill our lives in all we do… It becomes who we are… It’s where our identity is found… This is what Sunday services are for…
Teaching and counseling each other with all the wisdom Jesus gives… This defines the importance of life groups!
Sing to God… All types of songs… With what kind of hearts? Thankful hearts!
As we go through life representing Jesus, we are to give thanks in all we do!
It only seems fitting that we should be singing praises to God as we think of all the things He’s done that we are thankful for!
Psalm 63:6-8 – 6 I lie awake thinking of you, meditating on you through the night. 7 Because you are my helper, I sing for joy in the shadow of your wings. 8 I cling to you; your strong right hand holds me securely.
When I have restless nights… Or nights my brain won’t turn off… I think of all the things I’m thankful for… All the things God has done for me…
I meditate on His goodness… And before I know it, the peace that transcends all understanding has filled my spirit and I sleep peacefully from that point on…
This is a habit that has cultivated a thankful heart within me… It’s not just conjuring up something in the hopes God will appear with blessings…
It’s an honest to goodness sincere relationship with my Creator… As it has become part of my thought process as I go from day to day!
The next area that cultivates a thankful heart is giving.
Let me clear up a misconception of giving… Giving is not giving what is mine to the church…
Giving, is giving what God has already provided, back to His Kingdom… None of what we have is ours!
Listen to this…
Proverbs 3:9-10 – Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the best part of everything you produce. Then He will fill your barns with grain, and your vats will overflow with good wine.
Giving is what we do out of our obedience to God…
We are required to tithe… And that is 10% of our income… To the place we are fed spiritually… This Proverb is connected to the tithe…
But look what this Proverb says… Give the best part of what you produce (This is the tithe) … Don’t give God the leftovers… Give Him the best of what you have…
And when we do… He will pour so much into our lives we won’t know what to do with it…
Malachi 3:10 – Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, “I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in! Try it! Put me to the test!
God tells us to put Him to the test in the area of tithing… Test me in this He says!
When God pours into our lives in abundance… We can’t help but to be thankful for all He does!!
This is a biblical principle in giving that is seen over and over in the Scriptures… Jesus taught on it in Luke chapter 6 and the Apostle Paul teaches on it as well.
When we develop a character of generosity… It creates within us a heart of gratitude for what we have and how good God is…
And in turn, it opens the windows of heaven and God’s blessings will be upon us!
And the last area that cultivates a heart of gratitude we’ll talk about is communion.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 – 23 For I pass on to you what I received from the Lord himself. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread 24 and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and said, “This is my body, which is given for you.[a] Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it.” 26 For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again.
The night Jesus was betrayed He instituted the act of communion…
He broke the bread and gave thanks to God… And in the same way He took the wine…
The bread represents His body which was broken on the Cross… His broken body is what gives us access to His healing abundance through God’s Holy Spirit…
And the wine represents His blood that was shed for the sins of all…
Jesus instituted a new covenant between God and His people…
Every time we partake in communion, we are doing it in remembrance of what Jesus did for us on the Cross…
Communion is what brings healing and forgiveness… Communion is what brings us closer to God…
We should never do it nonchalantly… But in reverence and in remembrance of what Jesus did for us….
As we think about the ultimate sacrifice Jesus offered Himself up as…
A heart of thankfulness ought to be produced out of the act of communion…
It is telling God how thankful we are that He gave us His Son to reveal the love of the Father to mankind!
Communion draws us closer to God… While producing a thankful heart
Closing…
The bible tells us that as the message of Jesus and the resurrection is preached…
God’s grace will reach more and more people…
And as God’s grace reaches more people… There will be great thanksgiving…
Church, as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday… Let us cultivate within us an attitude of thankfulness…
Thankfulness because God’s grace is received, and thankfulness for all that God does for us…
Because nothing in life is about us… It’s about the Kingdom…
As Jesus went about doing His Father’s business, so should we…
Sharing our story… Sharing our testimony… Sharing Jesus in all we do…
And ultimately, we should never forget about the importance of remembering what Jesus did for us on the Cross…
This in and of itself should generate a thankful heart!!
Indian Aid and a Blessed Thanksgiving
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
If it weren’t for Indian deaths, the Pilgrims would have been hard-pressed to settle in Plymouth that cold winter of 1620. In a brief skirmish, the Pilgrim’s muskets had slain no natives, nor had any arrows struck Englishmen. Disease had been the killer. The Pilgrims discovered corn fields cleared in the forests, now deserted. What had once been a bustling village of Patuxet Indians nearby, stood empty, ravaged by disease four years earlier, leaving but a single survivor.
Survivors
The Pilgrims, themselves, lived on the edge of survival that first winter. They had begun well enough. After 66 days crossing the stormy Atlantic, 104 Pilgrims beheld the New World, including a baby boy, Oceanus, born at sea.
“Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land,” wrote Governor William Bradford, “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.”
But within four months, scurvy, pneumonia, and a virulent strain of tuberculosis had cut down whole families of Pilgrims. As the sickness raged, only six or seven persons in the whole company were strong enough to tend the sick and comfort the dying.
Six died in December, then eight in January, seventeen in February. Of March, Bradford wrote, “This month thirteen of our number die … scarce fifty remain, the living scarce able to bury the dead.” Of eighteen married women, only three remained. Baby Oceanus died.
Indian Aid
But in April, when it was time to put in gardens, the Indians whom they feared came to their aid. One day, unannounced, the tall, powerful warrior Samoset strode into their camp, armed with a bow and arrows, nearly naked except for a leather string around his waist “with a fringe about a span long, or a little more,” the embarrassed Bradford recorded. To the Pilgrims’ surprise, Samoset greeted them with the word, “Welcome!” He had learned some English from fishermen in his native Maine. Later, he introduced the Pilgrims to Massasoit, chief of the neighboring Wampanoag tribe, and to Squanto, last known survivor of the Patuxets.
Though the Wampanoag braves towered over the short Englishmen, and outnumbered their tiny militia 60 to 20, they reached a treaty of peace that stood for forty years until Massasoit’s death.
Squanto, who had been kidnapped and lived for a while in England, spoke their language, too. He taught the Pilgrims where to trap eels and how to plant corn. The Pilgrims, who had pilfered Indian corn the previous December, may not have been deserving. But this unexpected help made the difference for them between survival and starvation. Settler Edward Winslow described it thus:
“We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.”
Nevertheless, the harvest was good and the Pilgrims’ food ration increased substantially. By fall, eleven houses lined the street of Plymouth Colony, seven private homes and four common buildings. The dying had stopped, and trade had begun with the Indians.
A Thanksgiving Celebration
To celebrate, the Pilgrims invited Massasoit to a harvest festival, and a hunting party shot enough waterfowl to feed the company for a week. But when Massasoit arrived, he was joined by ninety ravenous braves. For their contribution the Indians went out and returned five deer. It was a three-day feast of venison, roast duck, roast goose, clams and other shellfish, succulent eels, white bread, corn bread, leeks and watercress, with wild plums and dried berries — all enjoyed with wine newly made from grapes that grew wild in the forest.
It was a feast of thanksgiving, of thankfulness to God. Edward Winslow wrote to friends in December, “Although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”
The goodness of God was often on their minds. Though the Pilgrims had suffered great loss and hardship, they also were aware of God’s great blessing: the produce of the land, peace with the natives, the joy of life, and homes snug for winter.
“Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,
and into his courts with praise.
Be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting;
and his truth endures to all generations.” (Psalm 100:4-5)
Quotations are from Governor William Bradford’s manuscript Of Plimoth Plantation (Boston, 1856), and Edward Winslow in Mourts Relation: A Relation or Journal of the English Plantation settled at Plymouth in New England, by certain English adventurers both merchants and others (London, 1622). Wordings have been changed to modern spellings. I also relied heavily on George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945), a scholarly and popular retelling of the history of Plymouth Colony.