Thanksgiving may just be the most biblical holiday of the year! Join Pastor Clark as he explores biblical examples of Thanksgiving – and how each and every one of us has more to be thankful for than we realize!

<p>Thanksgiving may just be the most biblical holiday of the year! Join Pastor Clark as he explores biblical examples of Thanksgiving – and how each and every one of us has more to be thankful for than we realize!</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

In Praise of Gratitude

You know, this is a particularly special time of year, and can you guess what happens when the preacher has a hard time deciding whether to preach his Thanksgiving sermon before Thanksgiving or after Thanksgiving?

So we'll have a Thanksgiving sermon today and next week as well.

There's just too much to be thankful for.

Today we're going to be looking at a whole host of thankfulness from the Old Testament.

And as I prepared this week, I actually became convinced that Thanksgiving may be the most biblical holiday we celebrate hands down.

Thanksgiving is a time in which we express gratitude.

Thanksgiving is a time in which we express our thanks to God and to others.

And I think this is a biblical concept and a biblical activity to be engaged in.

So this week we're gonna be looking at in praise of gratitude.

We're gonna be seeing how this has its origins in the very earliest instructions of the Old Testament.

Next week we're gonna be studying a little more about the wonderful benefits that come to us from a heart of praise, from a heart of gratitude, from spending time praising God and thanking Him.

I would invite you to bow your heads with me for an additional word of prayer.

Father in heaven, today we just realize That apart from you we are nothing that we can do nothing Lord we know that with you we can do all things And that you've promised to supply all of our needs Through Christ Jesus so today father.

We just want to pause to confess our need for your blessing during this hour.

To ask that you would send your spirit to be our teacher and our guide.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable, O Lord, in your sight.

There was a man who lived with his 6 children in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Just before the school year was to start, all of his children were in need of shoes at the same time.

Now as fate would have it, or just I guess Murphy's Law when he moves in, the washing machine broke down at the same time.

And because of the bad weather, his work as a carpenter had dwindled to next to nothing.

He was able to scrap together enough money to buy his children the shoes that they needed, But he ran an ad in the paper wanting to buy a used washing machine.

So he found a response, a reply from someone who had a used machine, a good used washing machine to sell.

He went to the home and he couldn't help but notice all the nice things they had in their home.

All the things that he wished he could get for his kids.

And after he bought the washing machine and made the arrangements for how they were to bring it home, the conversation got around to the children, and Claude, the out-of-work carpenter, began complaining about how expensive it was to keep 6 children in shoes.

All of a sudden the woman of the house burst into tears and ran out of the room crying.

Her husband quietly explained to Claude that they only had 1 child who had been paralyzed from birth and they had never had a chance to buy him shoes.

When Claude got home, he picked up the worn out shoes scattered around his house, worn out from skipping rope and jumping through mud puddles and kicking rocks.

He knelt by his bed and he gave thanks to God for the worn out shoes in His house.

You know, sometimes we think too much about the burdens and trials, the worn-out shoes, and we forget to be thankful for the feet that we have worn out shoes for.

We forget the blessings that God has given us.

And this time of year, in a special way, we remember our blessings.

I won't spend a lot of time talking about that pilgrim story of old, but in September of 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England and sailed to the New World.

After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor not far off the tip of Cape Cod, and they waited for the winter to pass by.

Through their first brutal winter, most of the would-be colonists suffered from exposure, scurvy, and outbreaks of contagious disease, and only half of the ship's occupants were still alive when the New England Spring began in 1621.

In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore and there they received an astonishing visit from an Indian who greeted them in English of all things.

Squanto, a member of the Paltexic tribe who had been kidnapped by English slave traders, or sailors at least, and sold into slavery, had later escaped into London and caught a ride back to his old home country with an exploratory trip.

And Squanto taught the Indians, I mean Squanto taught the pilgrims how to plant corn, how to extract sap from maple trees, how to avoid poisonous plants.

He also helped the settlers to forge an alliance with the local tribe of Indians, which would endure for more than 50 years, 1 of the few good stories in the relationship between the settlers and the Native Americans.

And in November of 1621, just over a year after they had arrived off the shore of Cape Cod, The Pilgrim's first corn harvest had proved successful and Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony's Native American allies, including the local chief.

It's said the local chief brought with him, or the Indians brought with them, 5 deer for the feast.

We don't know exactly what all they had on that feast.

They probably didn't have pies like we traditionally enjoy, because they hadn't yet built an oven, they had no way of baking and almost all of the Mayflower sugar was gone after more than a year of utilization.

But we do know that Governor Bradford sent some people out to hunt birds and they had corn and they had grains and they enjoyed a three-day feast of thanksgiving together.

Wouldn't it be nice to spend 3 days thinking of what we're thankful for?

Although eating for 3 days, the American style might not be the way to go.

But this became what we today consider Thanksgiving and eventually it was moved to the fourth Thursday of November.

Now, why did I make the statement that this could be perhaps the most biblical holiday, when obviously it's based in American history, it's an American cultural custom?

Well, as we look in the Word of God, we find that in fact there was precedent for what the pilgrims did.

Turn with me in your Bibles back to the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 26.

We're going to look at the instructions that were given to the Israelites after they would come into the Promised Land.

They would be celebrating their annual feasts, And 1 of their feasts was a feast commemorating the first fruits, a feast thanking God for the harvests.

And if we look in our Bibles here in Leviticus chapter, I mean, Deuteronomy chapter 26, And we'll begin with verse 1.

It says, And it shall be, when you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you possess it and dwell in it, that you shall take some of the first of the produce of the ground, which you shall bring from your land that the Lord your God is giving you, and put it in a basket, and go to the place where the Lord your God chooses to make His name abide." In other words, in most of their history, it would be to the temple.

Take your first fruits in a basket, take it to where God abides.

And it says, verse 3, Deuteronomy 26 and verse 3, and you shall go to the 1 who is priest in those days and say to him, I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the country which the Lord swore to our fathers to give us." Now what is this recital of facts to be?

This recital of facts is to not just say, I declare to you that God has blessed me with these things.

No, this feast of first fruits was to be a time for the Israelites to remember that God had brought them as He had promised to the land that had been given to them and to their descendants.

It says, I have declared today to the Lord your God that I have come to the country which the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.

Then, verse 4, the priest shall take the basket out of your hand and set it down before the altar of the Lord your God.

And you shall answer and say before the Lord your God, My father was a Syrian about to perish, and he went down to Egypt and dwelt there, few in number.

There he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.

But the Egyptians mistreated us, afflicted us, and laid hard bondage on us.

Then we cried out to the Lord God of our fathers, And the Lord heard our voice and looked on our affliction and labor and our oppression.

So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and with signs and wonders.

He has brought us to this place and has given us this land, land flowing with milk and honey.

And now behold, I have brought the firstfruits of the land which you, O Lord, have given me." Do You see what's happening here?

Oh, the firstfruits was not just a time for them to remember the goodness of God in giving them the harvest.

The firstfruits, This yearly festival was an opportunity for them to give thanks for the way God had blessed them throughout the year.

Not just throughout the year, but throughout their history.

How God had delivered them out of slavery, out of bondage.

You see, they were once in that heathen land of Egypt.

They were once enslaved, doing the will of Pharaoh, and God, through His grace, set them free.

God gave them the opportunity to come to the promised land.

God set them free from slavery and planted them in a prosperous nation.

And now they have the privilege, year by year, of reminding themselves, reminding their children, that it was God who had given them every good thing.

That it was God who had given them every good thing.

That it was God who had blessed them with the material increase and blessings that they enjoyed.

It was God who had brought them into the land and had blessed them with a bountiful harvest.

I just wonder, as we come to Thanksgiving, how often we practice this perpetual reminder.

You see, separated from an agrarian society, we no longer have that seasonal reminder that God has blessed us with first fruits.

When we go to the grocery store, we just get our fruit, Right?

We don't usually think of the first fruits or of the harvest in the same way the pilgrims did or the children of Israel did.

Today we just go to the grocery store and we get what we need and we almost forget that there is such a thing as seasons and first fruits and harvest coming ripe because it's always there, but not so in the land of Israel.

Every year when the harvest came ripe, they were to be reminded not just of God's goodness in providing for their temporal needs, They were to be reminded of God's goodness in delivering them from bondage.

You see, I believe Thanksgiving is a time of year when we can remember God's goodness to us, not just physically, but spiritually as well.

It's a perpetual reminder that God has been good to us.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote the following, he says, the reason most of us do not respond to thank you or do not say thank you is because we instinctively realize that it somehow makes us dependent on that person.

If I thank you, I am saying that I am dependent on you, and I am publicly affirming it before God and people.

Gratitude is an action that has its roots in grace, the free undeserved love action of God.

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In Praise of Gratitude

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