The pilgrims were thankful for the blessing their great God had given them – but when we look at the hardship they’d been through, it’s hard to see what they were so thankful for! What is it that gives Christians the ability to abound with thanksgiving, even when things are hard, and the going is tough?

<p>The pilgrims were thankful for the blessing their great God had given them – but when we look at the hardship they’d been through, it’s hard to see what they were so thankful for! What is it that gives Christians the ability to abound with thanksgiving, even when things are hard, and the going is tough?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

Abounding with Thanksgiving

When you think of that word, what do you think of?

Most people might think of, yeah, food perhaps.

Some people think of abundance, and in fact the scripture we're looking at today uses those thoughts, thanksgiving and abundance.

And yet I think that perhaps we've been amiss as we've associated too closely abundance with Thanksgiving.

What happens in years when we don't have abundance?

What happens when things aren't going so well?

Is it still possible for us to experience the joy of Thanksgiving?

You know, if we look at the first Thanksgiving some 392 years ago or so, it was a time when, yes, they were thankful for the abundance, but that abundance isn't probably what we would consider abundance.

William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, gave a proclamation that read as follows, Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forest to abound with game, and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience, now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting-house on ye hill between the hours of 9 and 12 in the daytime on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord, 1623, and the third year since ye pilgrims landed on ye pilgrim rock.

There to listen to ye, pastor, and render thanksgiving to ye, Almighty God, for all his blessings.

Now I have to say that as I read this, I'm amazed at the gratitude and the gratefulness and the thanksgiving that seems to just ooze out of William Bradford's proclamation.

He's thankful for so many things, And he lists them, he delineates them here and he shares with his audience and with us now today the many things they were grateful for.

They were grateful for the harvest, they were grateful for health.

Did you notice he said, inasmuch as God has spared us the ravages of disease and pestilence.

Oh, it's what an amazing heart of gratitude it is to be thankful for to be spared from disease and pestilence when half of them had died of disease and pestilence.

Abundance does not necessarily mean everything we want.

You see, William Bradford knew something about grief and pain and loss.

He was born actually to a family of privilege in Yorkshire, England.

And they were landholders, they had a large piece of property, which tells you what kind of class and society they were in.

But when William was only 1 year old, his father died.

When his mother remarried, she either couldn't or didn't want to raise him, and so he went, was sent to live with his grandmother.

2 years later, he returned to his mother, but that only lasted for about a year before his mother died.

And he began to be cared for by 2 of his uncles.

Already as just a very, very young child, William has had a turbulent life.

He was needed to work on the farm, but his uncle's diary suggests that William was too sick and too weak of a boy to be of any use as a farm worker.

There was Not much that William could do except stay inside.

And he perhaps was blessed to be able to learn to read and enjoy reading.

And William, not able to work in physical employment, began a lifelong voracious appetite for all things intellectual.

He read the Bible, he read religious works.

And his reading eventually led him to be counted among the separatists.

Now the separatists were those in England who decided that the Church of England was too hopelessly intertwined with the customs and traditions of the Roman Church to ever stand a chance to be properly reformed.

So unlike the Puritans who wanted to purify the church, the separatists wanted to separate from the church.

Now the only problem was that that was illegal.

This was before the time, even though the Church of England was technically a Protestant movement, it was before the time when Protestantism championed religious liberty, especially in England.

And so when King James I of the King James Bible fame came to the throne in 1603, he began a crackdown on anyone who was dissident, anyone who was critical of the church, and that of course included the separatists.

William Bradford, along with many of his church members from a small group of believers that had banded together as separatists there in his locale, they fled to Holland.

It was difficult for them to maintain their language and their customs with their children growing up.

And although William Bradford had married by this time and had a three-year-old boy, when the pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower to the New World to find freedom and the ability to follow their own consciences.

William and his wife on the Mayflower sent to their three-year-old son to live with his in-laws.

After they arrived at Plymouth Harbor, William was part of an expedition to go and to scout out the territory.

And while he was gone on 1 of his fact-finding expeditions, his wife fell overboard and drowned.

And William was still 1 of the thankful ones, 1 of the leaders.

Now, to make a long story short, as the fall set in and disease began to affect the pilgrims, it started first while they were still living on the Mayflower in tight quarters, and soon it spread to the new colony that was being built on the shore.

Bradford, who was 1 of the healthy ones, had been 1 of the healthy ones, was helping to build a house, and all of a sudden, 1 afternoon, he was struck with severe pain in his hip, and he was taken, carted off, like the rest of them.

And he, however, miraculously, he would say, was able to survive while 50% of the pilgrims died from the ravages of the disease there on that, in those first few years.

Well, as this proclamation we read about was sent out, the pilgrims gathered together to celebrate God's goodness.

Even though they had lost so much, even though they had suffered so much, even though many of their loved ones were on that day missing, they still said, we're going to give thanks to our great God because God is still good.

How can someone have that kind of gratitude?

How can someone go through difficult times and yet have an intentionality about giving thanks.

How can it be, not just when everything is abounding, abundant in our lives, that we can, even in times of scarcity or suffering, abound in thanksgiving?

The scripture here, or scripture today, Colossians chapter 2 and verses 6 and 7 says, as you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, root it and built up in him, and establish in the faith as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.

1 thing we do know, I think we can be confident of this today my friends, I believe that God wants us to be happy.

I believe that God wants us to have grateful hearts, no matter the situation that we find ourselves in.

I think I'm fair in saying this, that it is in fact in the times of suffering, in the times of hardship, that that grateful heart and that attitude of gratitude and that spirit of thanksgiving is the greatest testimony of the power of God to change a human heart.

You see, I believe that God has, in this passage for today, a lesson for us to learn about how we can be thankful, how we can have gratitude.

This passage gives us 5 steps we're going to look at today.

First of all, it says in verse 6, chapter 2 of Colossians and verse 6, it says, as you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord.

So as we receive Christ Jesus, we continue, it says walk in him, rooted and built up in him, some translations say grounded in him, established in the faith as you have been taught, it says, and it says abounding in it with thanksgiving.

So what we're gonna do over the next few minutes, we're just going to take these 5 principles and we're going to look at them 1 by 1.

And because we want to end with abounding in gratitude, we're going to work backwards from that, okay?

We're going to start with as you have been taught and work backward so that by the time we finish, hopefully, we can understand how even in times of adversity and hardship, we may, yes, you and I may, like William Bradford and those early pilgrims, be able to abound with thanksgiving.

Let's begin here as we start, as you have been taught.

Now I think this is interesting because it implies that there's teaching that takes place, right?

As you have been taught, somebody had to teach, somebody had to share and it's perhaps the work of the church to mentor and to teach and to share 1 another, with 1 another.

Now you might think, well that's particularly true of new believers, right?

And somehow, you and I, as members of the body of Christ, we need to get over the idea that we have arrived in our knowledge, and in fact, you know, sometimes, I'll be honest with you, it's the members, not in this church of course, but in other places I've been, it's the members that sort of annoy me or get under my skin that God tells me, look, they're the ones you need to learn from.

And I need to learn, and we learn not only from the Lord, we learn also from 1 another.

There's a teaching ministry in the church, a mentoring ministry that we each have a responsibility for.

But it's not good enough for us to just think, well, I want to mentor those other people.

Have a spirit of a learner, the attitude of a learner.

As you have been taught, let's look in our Bibles to what Paul said to the Ephesians.

There's a bunch of parallel passages to Paul's writings.

Paul often sort of gave the same type of counsel to different believers in different places I suppose because they all shared the same human nature that we until 2, 000 years ago share as well.

Ephesians 4 in verse 20 it begins this way, but you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard him and been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conduct the old man which grows corrupt, according to the deceitful lesson, be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man, which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.

What we see is we have been taught something very important And perhaps the most important thing is this very simple principle of the old man dying to self.

And the new man, that man which is recreated in Christ Jesus being the way we live our lives.

So first of all, he says here to the Ephesians, you've been taught and you've learned of Jesus, the truth as it is in Jesus.

You know, sometimes, sometimes we might be tempted to think of the truth as an abstraction.

We might be able to sort of rest it out of its context and believe that truth should be, you know, something that's just intellectual, something that's just academic.

Back to Menu

Abounding with Thanksgiving

Transcript

Description

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

The Book of Romans

Unexplainable Ways

36m

Why We’re Still Here

53m

Self Forgetfulness

36m

Bible As the Center of Academic Curricula

1. The Bible: The Basis for True Education

1h

Dead Sea Christianity

42m

The Unhindered Gospel

God’s Sustaining Power

47m

Unlock Revelation

How to Rejoice in the Midst of Trials

38m

The School with No Graduation

39m

Beginning with Eternity in Mind

53m

The Cross and the Super Bowl

40m

Unveiling the Ultimate Love Triangle

46m

Sound Doctrine