Give Thanks to the Lord

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

• Introduction: Thanksgiving Presumes a Personal God
• Give Thanks Because He Is Good
• Give Thanks Because He Is Transcendent
• Give Thanks Because of His Wonders
• Application: Give Thanks, Don’t Wait to Feel Thankful

Introduction: Thanksgiving Presumes a Personal God

Good morning, how are you? Open your Bibles if you would to Psalm 136. God is good, amen. So today my sermon is very simple. Thanksgiving. We’re giving thanks. It’s the same word backwards. Get it? Thanksgiving, giving thanks. By way of introduction, I want to talk very briefly about the very idea of thanksgiving. And I don’t mean the tradition of Thanksgiving, the idea of giving thanks.

I saw a YouTube video recently. I was wasting time one night. I confess. Actually, one of my favorite YouTube channels is about, it’s all recordings of Jewish people who are converting to Christ. And it’s their testimonies, and these are powerful testimonies, I mean, really powerful. But you know how the internet is. Once you’re on there, you can kind of drift places, you know. So anyway, the YouTube video, I watched YouTube of this young woman, and she’s just talking about her life. And she’s kind of teary-eyed. She’s like, you know, I just, I used to think this, and now I’m beginning to think this, and I was this way, and now I’m beginning to be this way. And I’m like, I’m watching, and I’m realizing what’s happening is she’s being converted. God’s dealing with this person. Now at the time she said some things about this and that which kind of struck me like she was kind of into some Far East stuff. I’m not sure what, it wasn’t clear. So you know I felt sorry for her, I prayed for her. Then months later I went to her channel and watched another video. And you could see how she was coming closer and closer to the truth. And how she was trying to figure stuff out. And one of the things she said in one of her videos was she came to a place of gratitude. And it really struck me because when you think about a non-believer, they may be able to thank a person for doing a kind act, but the idea of thanksgiving, of having an attitude of gratitude for the cosmos is not possible. You can’t be thankful even to be alive in an impersonal universe. Why? Because gratitude and thanksgiving presume a personal universe. It presumes a person to whom you are thankful. Are we going to thank the primordial soup? Are you going to thank the whole Big Bang? Thank you. I mean, who do you thank? There’s no one to thank. So when we talk about giving thanks and being thankful, we are presuming that the universe is personal. We’re presuming that there is a God.

And actually when you talk about Thanksgiving as a holiday, it was originally both a holiday and a holy day. The original thanksgivings, and there were many in our founding, were days set aside for feasting for sure, right? But they were days set aside for prayer and worship. And on the original thanksgivings, they were not celebrated primarily at home, they were celebrated at church. So Christians gathered, they prayed, they gave thanks, they worshiped, and then they feasted. Now the tradition has morphed into a family holiday, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but provided that we still understand that it’s still a holy day. It’s a holy day because what we’re doing at Thanksgiving is we are offering to the God of heaven our gratitude, our thanks and our praise for all the gifts and the bounty He has given us. It’s easy to make fun of just like how Thanksgiving is kind of almost like a glutton day, we eat so much food. But the point of the feast is to display in public God’s bounty to us. That’s what we’re really doing. We’re laying it out. And so the family table on Thanksgiving becomes an altar. We are displaying specimens, if you will, of all the good things that God provides. And then you thank Him, you worship Him, because He is good. But it also presumes another idea. Not only that God is and that God is good, but it presumes that we are dependent upon Him. We are acknowledging that what we have, what we’ve received, we have received as a gift. It’s a gift, it’s not earned. In other words, that all that we have is really by grace or by hesed, His love, His kindness, His mercy. So we’re told here in this text that we are to give thanks to the Lord. And there’s really three reasons mentioned here throughout this text broadly. One, we are to give thanks because He is good. In other words, for His character. Secondly, we are to give thanks for His transcendence, or we could say His position. And thirdly, we’re to give thanks for His wonders, or His actions. So let’s review these quickly.

Give Thanks Because He Is Good

First, we’re told, “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.” That’s in verse 1, right? Give thanks to God for He is good. And in many ways, the rest of the psalm is merely an exposition of that. So when we say that God is good, what are we saying? We’re saying that God is gracious, God is merciful, God is benevolent, God is loving, God is just, God is faithful, and many, many, many other attributes. The term here, good, is simply a term that sums up all of these other attributes of God. There’s a famous work on the attributes of God by the Puritan Stephen Charnock. And when I first got the book, I looked at the table of contents and there was, you know, God is eternal and God is, you know, omniscient and God is this. And there was no chapter that said God is love. It’s like, what? That’s weird. But there was a chapter on God’s goodness. And in that chapter, he unfolds what goodness really means. And he talks about how when we say that God is good, we are saying that God is love. We’re saying that God cares for His creation, that He has regard for His creation, that He wishes well for His creation. But goodness means also that God is gracious, meaning God gives to us what we do not deserve, right?

Do you ever have a bad day? Raise your hand. Maybe you had a bad day today. I don’t know, before you even got here. But sometimes when things aren’t going my way, I don’t say it, but I know what happens in my head. And I’m like, I don’t deserve this. That’s what I’m really thinking when I’m grumbling. When I’m grumbling, I’m like, I don’t deserve this. The truth of the matter is, what we deserve is a lot worse than we think. A lot worse. According to Scripture, because according to Scripture, what we deserve is not just that things go okay. What we deserve is that things do not go okay. What we deserve for our sin, the Scripture says, is actually hell. That’s what we deserve. So when your day’s going bad, remember, yeah, you don’t deserve that, what you deserve is a lot worse. But it’s true. But God’s grace means God gives us what we don’t deserve. He gives us that which really we have forfeited by our sin. And I’m not just talking about Christians. I’m talking about how God treats the world in general. God blesses people that don’t know Him. God even blesses people that defy Him and curse Him. And that’s because God is gracious. God is also merciful. That’s also what hesed means, right? Merciful. This means God has sympathy or compassion on those who are suffering, on those who are suffering. Grace focuses on desert. Mercy focuses on pain, if you will. So God sees us in our pain. He sees us struggling. He sees us in our weakness. And yet He has hesed. He has mercy, and He has compassion for us.

So one of the most beautiful things about the gospel as you read about the life of Jesus, isn’t it? It says He looks at the multitude like sheep without a shepherd, and it says that He was moved with compassion. That literally means His bowels were rumbling. Now I know some of you are having that problem right now, but I don’t think that’s the same kind of rumbling. On December 2nd, a lot of you have had that problem, because that’s chili cook-off day. The point is, His feeling, His regard, His love was so deep, it was like it was causing Him an inner pain. It was visceral, if you will, as we say today. His compassion on the multitudes. So God looks out at His creation and He has compassion, and that compassion moves Him. It moves Him to act for their benefit. God is also just. God is also faithful. We sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” today, right? If we have time, maybe we’ll sing it again at the end. God is faithful to keep His word, faithful to keep His promises to us. When God gives a promise in His Word, if we believe it, God will perform it. Why? Because God cannot lie. He cannot say something and then go back on it. Now true, there’s two kinds of promises. There’s a conditional promise. There’s an if promise. If you do this, I will do this. But many promises are unconditional. I will do this. And the only condition often not stated is that we believe. We have to believe. Jesus said, according to your faith, so be it. Not according to My power, so be it. Not according to My goodness, so be it. But according to your faith, so be it. So God is faithful to His Word. And we could listen to other attributes of God. But we don’t have time. So the psalmist tells us here to give thanks to God for His being, who He is, who He is. So as we head into this Thanksgiving season, let us remember that at the center of the universe is goodness, is love, is compassion, is mercy, is justice, faithfulness. Amen?

Give Thanks Because He Is Transcendent

But the second reason we’re told to give thanks is because of God’s transcendence. He says here in verse 2, he says, “Oh, give thanks to the God of gods.” And then he concludes the psalm with saying, “Oh, give thanks to the God of heaven.” He’s the God of gods, the Lord of lords, the God of heaven. In other words, give thanks to Yahweh, which is the Hebrew name, because He is transcendent over all. Amen. Transcendent over all. He’s transcendent in the sense that He is majestic. He is glorious. He is exalted on His throne. And that is a fact. It’s a fact. And He’s also exalted in the sense that He is the best being, the Holy One, the good One. So He is exalted supremely as the only true God, the Lord of lords, the God of gods, the King of kings, the God of heaven. [audio unclear] This really means that God is sovereign over all. It is comforting to me to know that God is sovereign. That although things look like they’re out of control, it looks like people are literally going mad in the streets at times. It’s reassuring to know that God is sovereign. And that what is happening is not beyond His control. As a matter of fact, if we had a divine perspective, what we would see is that in some way the things that are happening are actually happening according to a purpose that we cannot currently understand. We can’t understand. We don’t know what God is doing because we don’t even have a historical perspective, not to mention a divine perspective, to really see. But God is, the Word tells us repeatedly, that God is the ruler of the nations, that God is sovereign, that God is working, because even though He’s transcendent over all, He’s also immanent in history. You know, it’s not enough to say God is sovereign and He’s on a throne and He’s way out there somewhere and we’re kind of down here trying to figure all the stuff out by ourselves. That’s not comforting, is it? But rather, even though He’s exalted and transcendent and sovereign, yet God is immanent within history. God is working in history. He’s working right now to bring about His purposes. He’s working right now to draw men and women to Jesus Christ. He’s working right now ultimately to exalt His Son and bless His church. Those are two main goals in history. Exalt His Son and bless His church. And He’s working this way now.

Part of the problem is we have a very, very, very narrow perspective. And what I mean by that is for many of us our perspective is basically ourselves and our family. Maybe our job. Maybe our church. Maybe our community, right? But we don’t have the broad perspective of what’s really going on. I think Americans especially have a very narrow view of things. I’m reading a book, The Triumph of Faith. It’s amazing. This is a book about the growth of the church around the world in our day. It’s astounding. Christianity right now is the fastest growing faith in the world. I know you may have heard Islam is, but it’s not true. Christianity is. And in Africa and in South America and in China, the church is growing phenomenally. Thousands of people per day are being saved. Thousands per day. So God is at work in history. He’s at work right now fulfilling His purposes. And the Scripture tells us that when the time of the Gentiles is ended, the Lord will return. The time of the Gentiles meaning that window of mercy that God gave to the Gentile world to gather in His elect, if you will, and then at that point God will give His mercies again to Israel. God is working immanently, sovereignly in our world. And so the psalmist says to give thanks for that, to be grateful, and in spite of what’s going on in your life, things are not out of control. Despite what you see in the headlines, things are not out of God’s control. Amen.

Give Thanks Because of His Wonders

The third reason he gives us is that God is a God of wonders, if you will. In other words, God’s goodness in action. And really the rest of this psalm, as we read, from verse 4 on through verse 25, are all statements expounding what he means when he says God is good. So why is God good? He says because He created the world, because He redeemed His people, and because He provides. That sums up the entire psalm, those three things.

First, he says God is good because of creation. That’s verses 5 through 9. He talks about the creation of the world. He made the heavens, He laid out the earth above the waters, He made the great lights, the sun to rule the day, the moon and the stars to rule the night. So the creation of God is good, amen? Remember in Genesis when it says that God created, after each day it said what? And God looked at everything and said, it is good. So the biblical view of creation is that creation is a good thing, not a bad thing. I mean that might be obvious to some of you, but there’s a strong strain in Christianity historically of what’s called Gnosticism, which is a view of nature and a view of the material realm which denigrates the material realm. It says that the material is evil, that sin inheres in matter. See, what’s the matter? It’s matter. The problem is matter. The problem isn’t matter. Sin does not inhere in matter. Sin inheres in the soul and the human soul. So nature is good. Nature is to be celebrated. When we celebrate Thanksgiving, we’re celebrating nature. We’re celebrating the gifts that God gives us through nature, right? Whether you have a turkey or a ham or mashed potatoes and all the things you feast on. These are, this is nature you are celebrating. And we celebrate, we’re able to celebrate them because we recognize that the creation is good and that the God who gave these things is good. So God created the world and the world is—of course, there’s an implied responsibility there that if God made the world and it’s good we have a duty to care for the world, right, not, if you will, abuse it, to take care of it.

Secondly, he says, the psalmist points out redemption in verses 10 through 24. I won’t read through these again, but what we have here is the story of Israel’s redemption. He took them out of Egypt. He defeated some of their enemies through the wilderness. So we have the redemption story here in this psalm, and he’s telling his people to give thanks to the Lord for redemption. Now we have a greater redemption, amen? We have not only been redeemed, although we’ve not been redeemed in the physical sense, I was never a slave. I was never in slavery in a different country, so I wasn’t delivered in that sense, but I was a slave to sin. I was a slave to the law. I was under the curse of the law. But God redeemed me. And so the redemption that we celebrate is more than a physical redemption, it’s a spiritual and a moral redemption, amen?

We’re going to come back to the psalm in a minute, go to Romans 3, just look at a couple verses quickly. In the New Testament, where it talks about redemption. In Romans 3, it says this, it says in verse 23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Now look at Galatians 3. And these are just a few samples. There are many Scriptures about redemption, of course. Verse 10, it says of Galatians 3, “For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse”—those who are trying to be justified before God, he says, they’re under the curse—“for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.’” In other words, if you’re going to try to be saved by the law, then you have to do it all. Not some of it, all of it. But notice he says in verse 11, “But that no one is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for ‘the just shall live by faith.’” Again, quoting the Old Testament. “Yet the law is not of faith, but ‘the man who does them shall live by them.’” Verse 13: “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law.” Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. Amen. “Having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”

So Jesus Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. We in our natural state are obligated to keep the law before God to be right with God, yet we fail to do it, every one of us. We fail and the result is what’s called the curse of the law, the penalty of the law. Romans tells us the wages of sin is what? The wages of sin is death. The wages of sin is not good works. The wages of sin is not giving. The wages of sin is not prayer. The wages of sin is not Bible reading. The wages of sin is not communion. The wages of sin is death. So someone has to die. So who’s it going to be? Is it going to be you or is it going to be Jesus? Someone has to die because those are the wages. Jesus, when He died, He died to pay those wages. He died in our place as our substitute so that we don’t have to die for our sins. He makes the payment that we are obligated to make, but He makes it in our place. And so then He redeems us because that death is a ransom. It’s a ransom payment to free those that were indebted, those who were obligated. Do you know there’s a lot of people in prison today who can’t pay their debts? Do you know that? We say we don’t have debtor prisons, but in fact people are in prison because they can’t pay their debts. But the problem is, if you go to— [audio unclear] payment and freedom. Payment and freedom, ransom and liberty. So, Jesus is our ransom. Amen. His death is the payment that we were to make, but couldn’t afford to make. And then as we appropriate that payment by faith in Him, that payment becomes ours. And then we are free. We are free from the curse of the law. We don’t have to pay it. Not only that, but being freed we are restored to favor with God. We are taken out of bondage and we are now set at liberty. That’s why you’re here today. You’re set at liberty.

So we’re told to give thanks to God. [audio unclear] the hungry lion. How basically everything in nature looks to God for provision, how God is the provider of all. Jesus talks about this in Matthew 6, and I want to read this before we close. In Matthew 6 Jesus talks about the fact that we should serve the kingdom. Turn to Matthew 6 with me in your digital Bible. So he says in verse 19, don’t lay up treasures for yourself on earth, but rather lay up treasures in heaven, right? For where your treasure is, verse 21, your heart will be also. Then he says in 24, you cannot serve two masters. Of course, he’s talking about serving things versus serving God, money versus God, mammon versus God. And then he says in 25, therefore I say to you, do not worry or be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry, or why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin; yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

As we give thanks, we’re giving thanks to God for His provision of all the things in our life. And of course, to be grateful for provisions requires that we truly believe that He is sovereign. If He’s not sovereign, then we can say, well, I did this and I did this and God wasn’t part of it. But the worldview really, the picture in Scripture is that God is sovereign and that our jobs and our incomes and our friends and our family and all the things we have are under His providential care. It’s providential care. [audio unclear] and He will care for you.

Application: Give Thanks, Don’t Wait to Feel Thankful

In conclusion, why do we give thanks? Because number one, of who God is, because He is good, because He is loving, because He is kind, because He’s merciful, etc. And secondly, because of what He does, because of His provision for us, really daily, and thirdly, because of His inherent goodness, His majesty and His sovereignty. But I will say this as an application note. We’re told to give thanks. We’re not told to be thankful. Because you can’t command somebody to have a feeling. It’s not possible. It doesn’t work that way. If you say to me, be sad. I don’t feel sad. That doesn’t work. And we say, be happy. Well, that doesn’t work either. When we’re told to give thanks to the Lord, it means to give thanks. Okay, it means to express thanks. Not necessarily to feel thankful. Now, I know some of you are like, well, then that’s being hypocritical. If I give thanks and I’m not feeling thankful then I’m being hypocritical. No, because that way of thinking leads to subjectivism, which means I live my life based on what I feel. But we don’t live our lives that way, do we? A Christian lives his life according to the Word of God. A Christian lives his life according to what the Word says because the Word is true, God cannot lie. And so we believe His Word and we live according to His Word and our feelings eventually will line up. Part of what happens as you mature spiritually is that your feelings do line up. It may take a while. In different areas, you know, one area you may be great, another area you’re still growing. You are being aligned with the Word, not the other way around. The transformation that goes on in the Christian life is a growth into conformity to the image of Jesus who was the incarnate Word. So we are being conformed to the image of Jesus, which also means we’re being conformed to the image, or the truths, if you will, of the written Word, because they do not contradict one another.

So we give thanks to God. And I believe that the more that we discipline ourselves to be thankful, the more thankful we actually feel. Why? Because you are remembering. You are remembering. When you read Scripture, it’s amazing in the Old Testament especially, how many times it talks about remembering or forgetting. Remembering or forgetting. So we forget. We forget that when we were having a difficult time how God provided, we forget. But as you go on in the Christian life, you have more and more and more stories, more and more memories of God’s provision, of God’s intervention in your life. And then you’re like, when you hit a difficult time, you’re able to go through it with grace, with faith. Why? Because you remember. You remember all the times. We should be a people not filled with fear, but a people filled with faith, amen? Not anxiety, not worry, because we know that God is sovereign, and therefore, and God is good, therefore we know that we can be thankful regardless of our emotions. We can give Him thanks and we can praise Him. And that’s what the psalmist is calling us to do. Give thanks to God for He is good, amen? For His hesed endures forever.

Let’s stand up together. Lord, we thank You that You have given us Your Word. We thank You, Lord, that You are good. We thank You, Lord, that You are transcendent and immanent. You are above all the turmoil and strife we see in the world, but You are immanent in the world working out Your will and Your purposes. We thank You, Lord, that You are good in Your actions toward Your people. We thank You, Lord, for our redemption in Your Son Jesus. We thank You for the provision that You give us on a daily basis. We thank You that we can pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” because You are a personal God and You hear us and You work in our lives. We are so grateful for that, Lord. I pray that as we celebrate Thanksgiving this year and even into the Christmas season that we would have an attitude of gratitude. That we would be a people that are thankful, that we would be a people that do not murmur, do not complain, do not worry, do not fear, but rather, God, that we would walk strongly in faith and we would do that to bring You honor and glory and glory to Your Son Jesus, and we pray in His name. Amen. God is good.