“Thankfulness”

Steve Corley

Given in Houston South 11-25-2006 as split sermon

Full sermon version given in Kingsport 7-5-2008

Revised, given in Knoxville 11-20-2021 (Sabbath before Thanksgiving)

Let’s suppose you are a man who has to travel a lot in your line of work – and much of the travel has been to third-world African countries, many of which have been under corrupt and sometimes tyrannical governments.  In your travels, you have been in not one, not two, but three plane crashes.  In one of these crashes you landed in the ocean, were not picked up and had to swim for 24 hours before reaching shore.  Furthermore, on these trips not only has your body been repeatedly beaten up in accidents, but you have been thrown in jail time after time after committing no crime.  Worse, five times the authorities went further than that and resorted to torture – they lashed you with a whip for 39 stripes.  Three times they went still further and beat your body with heavy wooden rods.  One time an angry mob even threw rocks at you and ended up leaving you for dead.  Does this man have much to be thankful for?  If our physical life is more comfortable than that of the man I have just described then do we have a lot to be thankful for?  Let’s compare our situation in life to that which he experienced.  Have any of us suffered in those ways?  Yet are we thankful because we have not?

We are about to observe our national day of Thanksgiving and it is a good time to reflect on just how much we have been blessed by God.  Often we do not think to realize just how much we have really been blessed.  In this sermon I would like to explore some of the ways we have been blessed by God (and for which we should be thankful), reasons that we tend to forget these blessings, and what we should do to acquire and maintain a thankful attitude.  We might title the sermon simply “Thankfulness.”

In Colossians 3:15 we are commanded to be thankful (εὐχάριστος -- Strong’s #2170).  However, often we are not thankful because:

• We have no sense of history.  We do not know, or do not realize, how people lived in the past.
• We are not calibrated.  We compare our situation in life, not with that of the average person in the world today (or yesterday), but with that of high-profile individuals who appear to us to have it much better than we do.
• We think we have been unjustly judged by God because we do not see the big picture (example of Job)
• Or – we look at the physical only and do not think of the wonderful spiritual blessings God has given us

1. We have no sense of history

We all have a human tendency to act as if history began when we were born, or perhaps even later, when we began to be conscious of the world around us.  People began to tell us about the things which had happened before we were born.  But to us they never really happened.  We never saw them, or heard about them as they were happening.  Isn’t that why children and young people have difficulty really understanding the aging process?  Yes, they see elderly people.  But those people have always been old.  The children have never known them any other way.  They have never seen a once vibrant person actually grow old and frail. 

We can have the same myopic attitude toward God’s blessings to us in this age.  Think of Ireland.  In portions of the last two decades it has been one of the most economically dynamic countries in Europe, with a thriving biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industry.  But what was the situation in Ireland 175 years ago?  Most of the potato crop failed due to a fungus.  The poor were totally dependent on potatoes.  People began to starve.  Over 1 million are believed to have starved to death.  Many others – those who were able to – migrated to this country or elsewhere.  The population of Ireland dropped by almost half.  By the way, much of the potato crop in Ireland also failed just a few years ago (this time due to drought) if I remember correctly.  But was there any suffering as a result?  Of course not.  Like any other prosperous and developed country, Ireland simply bought on the world market the food that it had been unable to grow itself.  Isn’t that a lot to be thankful for? 

How about India?   We hear that country mentioned very often in the news today as a place where the software, electronics and fine chemicals industries are booming.  Call centers are being set up in many cities.  Companies are building research and development centers there to take advantage of the large supply of low-cost educated labor.  But when I was a boy, India was also frequently in the news – and for a far different reason.  It seemed that every 2-3 years or so, there would be a major crop failure in some part of India and people would be starving.  We would see them starving on our television sets.  But then progress was made.  The economic changes that produced the booming India of today were beginning.  The last major Indian famine that I can remember occurred in the mid 1970’s.  In the 1980’s a very severe drought struck southern India.  The monsoon rains failed for multiple years.  Decades-old coconut palm trees along the coast shriveled up and died.  Wells went dry and drinking water had to be brought into many areas by truck.  But there was no famine.  The country could by then afford to buy and distribute the needed food.  Isn’t that a lot to be thankful for?  (It is true that there are still children starving in India.  But these are isolated cases – there is sufficient food available locally and the solution is simply a matter of finding the affected families and getting the food aid to them.  That situation is different from a famine.)  Sometimes we may fret over outsourcing.  Maybe my salary (back before I retired) was lower than it would have been had it not been so easy to outsource R&D to countries such as India.  However, I am thankful that large numbers of people there are no longer starving.

What about China?  During the last four decades – after the government relaxed its commitment to Marxist economic orthodoxy and started to permit much more private business – the country has made tremendous progress, with hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty.  We can see all the “Made in China” products in Wal-Mart and other stores today.  However, think of the terrible situation in China 60-65 years ago.  In the late 1950’s, in the so-called (but very misnamed) “Great Leap Forward,” the brutal Maoist regime ordered the rural people to build village industries instead of working their land.   The result was possibly the worst famine in human history.  It indeed is true that the Chinese government is not particularly friendly toward this nation today and has also provoked its Southeast Asian neighbors.  Still, however, I would much rather see the Chinese people living at a somewhat decent living standard rather than near the starvation point as they were several decades ago (cf. Proverbs 24:17 and 25:21).

How about the Church of God?  Today we have the freedom to meet on the Sabbath and worship God without having to hide from the police – not only here but in most other countries of the world.  We have the freedom to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God – not just word of mouth, person to person, but in an organized manner.  Church organizations here do not have to pay taxes.  In this country we are even allowed to deduct money contributed to God’s Church from taxable income.  We as individuals do not have to pay income taxes on it.  Currently our young men and women are not threatened with the draft.  Yes, we may sometimes lose our jobs over the Sabbath and Holy Days, or our children may sometimes get harassment from teachers and classmates, but compare that to all the persecution which our spiritual forebears suffered – often leading to martyrdom.  We can see this throughout the book of Acts.  Reflecting how common it was, we can turn to Heb. 11:35b-40.  And the persecution of the truth did not cease after the first few centuries.  It was the rule in all the world until 200-300 years ago.  And we are told in many places in the Bible that there will be persecution and martyrdom again.  We have much to be thankful for in the current span of time during which persecution is light.

2. We are not calibrated regarding our situation in life

What is my human tendency when I start comparing my situation in life with the situations of others?  Do I think of the billions of people in Third World countries who still live in hovels and for whom each day is a struggle to get enough food to feed their families?  Do I think of my own ancestors in this country, who crossed the Atlantic only to toil their lives away for generations, living in one-room log cabins or worse, losing half their children to disease before they were five years old?  (Remember that even President Lincoln lost 3 of his 4 children to childhood diseases.)  Do I think of the five-year-old over in the local hospital dying of cancer?  No.  We tend to act as if all people everywhere live, and always have lived, at the same standard we do. 

When I start to compare my situation in life – how blessed I am, at least in a physical sense – with those of others, the person I tend to use as the comparison standard is of course Bill Gates.  (If only I had seen in the 1970’s the coming PC boom and the need for an operating system!)  I suspect that other human beings also have that tendency.  And it is self-defeating.  It takes our minds off God’s blessings.  We don’t think we are blessed very much.  We start complaining.  We get the “gimme’s.”  Well maybe we don’t go all the way up to Bill Gates.  Maybe our standard is the Joneses and we want to keep up with them.  (There is no one in this congregation named Jones so I can pick on the Joneses.  By the way – the Joneses who used to live in our neighborhood (just around the bend in the street from us) lived in a house which was more than half again the size of our house and which was valued almost twice as high.  There was no point in trying to keep up with them.)  Let’s turn to 2 Cor. 10:12.  The sense in this verse is that of comparing one’s spiritual state with that of others but it can easily be applied to physical blessings also.  Psalm 73:1-17 is instructive also, although perhaps the person with whom we are comparing ourselves would not necessarily be classified as “wicked.”  For that matter, how do we know that the “very blessed” person with whom we are comparing ourselves is not undergoing severe difficulties in his own life?  How do we know that he is happy at all?  We see only the outward appearance.  Yes, Abraham was rich but would we like to face the trial of being asked to sacrifice our son?  Job was rich but would we like to undergo the trials that he went through?  Solomon “had it all” but if we were in a similar situation would we let it ruin our lives as he did?

A number of years ago I met another fellow in the Church who seemed to be “living my dream.”  He appeared to be enjoying a situation in this physical life similar to what I had long dreamed about – his family, his job and where he lived.  However, I caught myself and realized that I should not let my mind drift into envy.  All I could see was the outward appearance.  What was this man’s life really like?  Was he really blessed as much as he appeared to be?  Was he really happy?  I had no way of knowing and it was none of my business.  (I have heard that he has bounced around the country with long-distance moves at least a couple of times since then – I do not know whether any job losses may have been involved.)

What about the Israelites in the wilderness?  God was continually performing a succession of miracles to help them.  However, they seemed oblivious to what He was doing for them, fearing to go on and follow His commands.  Their “dream” seemed to be to have again what they had had in Egypt, and they seemed to forget that they had been slaves (note their complaints in Numbers 11:5).

That we should be thankful for what we have, and content in our situation, does not mean that we should not try to improve it if we see the opportunity to do so (1 Cor. 7:21).  We can be thankful for what we have and still try to better our situation.  But we still must not let ourselves drift into an unthankful attitude.

3. We think we have been unjustly punished by God because we do not see the big picture

Perhaps we are undergoing considerable trials in our own life.  Perhaps a major health problem.  Maybe a severe marriage or family problem.  Possibly great difficulties with our job situation or our financial status.  Should we let that interfere with our thankfulness for the blessings which God has given us?  We may find it easy to sink into an attitude of resenting the way that we think God is not blessing us, especially if we think we are trying to obey Him.  We know the promises of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience (Deut. 28).    Job let himself sink into this attitude (for example, Job 19:6-12, 21-22).  We see many illustrations of this type of outcry in secular art as well – if you are an opera buff like me you may remember that the aria Vissi d’arte from Puccini’s Tosca is a classic example. But do we really see the big picture?  At that time Job didn’t.  He didn’t yet realize that God was not the one who had brought the curses on him.  God had allowed Satan to test Job in order to teach him some valuable lessons (Job 1).  All this was going on behind the scenes.  When Job finally learned his lesson, God gave him twice as much as he had had before.  When we understand that the big picture exists, although we may not yet see it, we realize that we should be thankful even in trials (James 1:2-3)

4. We look at the physical only

Think of those people out in the world who seem to be on top of the world, to “have it all.”  Remember what we read earlier in Psalm 73.  How many of them are actually being called now (cf. 1 Cor. 1:26)?  What is their future?  To die in the Tribulation?  To die in spiritual ignorance and later come up in the general resurrection after the Millennium?  Remember that if that is the case we will have the opportunity to be their teachers.  We have the unique opportunity to be blessed in this age with God’s truth and His Holy Spirit and the opportunity for salvation, to be among the firstfruits – cf. 1 Cor. 15:19.  (But make sure we are not praying the prayer of the Pharisee as in Luke 18:11!)

To maintain a thankful attitude, we should keep the following points in mind:

• Maintain a sense of history – realize that our situation is generally tremendously more comfortable than that of most people living in previous ages
• Think how blessed we are compared with most of mankind even today; do not compare ourselves with a few people who seem by outward appearance to “have it all”
• Keep the big picture in mind – realize that God can even use trials to bring blessings on us
• Remember that the biggest blessings of God are not physical!

Remember the man I described at the beginning?  Well, there was one man who did fit this description (if you replace the plane crashes by shipwrecks and the African countries by provinces of the Roman Empire – I took the liberty to modernize the example).  You may have noticed that I was paraphrasing 2 Cor. 11:24-25.  The man was the Apostle Paul.  Was he a thankful man?  We merely have to read Phil. 4:11-12 for the answer.  Paul was a very thankful man despite all he had had to endure.  God used Paul to leave us a command which concerns thankfulness.  If we keep in mind these four points I have mentioned, it will be much easier for us to follow this command in Col. 3:15 (read again).  Let us all remember how God has blessed us and let us have a joyous and very thankful Thanksgiving!