Thanksgiving: The Power of Gratitude & Baptisms
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
I've told this joke before, but I'm gonna jump in and say it again. I think I need to share it this morning. It was Johnny's first Thanksgiving that he felt old enough to be able to want to pray before the meal. And so the family all gathered around, he got ready to pray and he asked mom and dad, he said, "Hey, can I pray for the meal?" And he said, "Sure, sure, Johnny, go ahead and say the prayer." And so he starts thinking Jesus for his friends and for his family and for the turkey and the mashed potatoes and the mac and cheese and all the stuffing and the pies and the desserts and everything. And he gets to the end and he kind of pauses. And you're in that mall where you're like, "Is Johnny still here? Did he leave?" It's like that awkward pause. And then he turns to his mom and says, "Mom, if I thank God for the green bean casserole, do you think God will know that I'm lying?”
We love Thanksgiving around here at Spring Valley. It's one of our favorite times of the year. And this year we just like supercharge it with baptisms. And it's gonna be a great Sunday. I'm not gonna talk long 'cause I know everybody can smell the food. Everybody's hungry. Everybody's excited to see the Jesus jacuzzi get used and to get going here today. And so Thanksgiving is this amazing time. And I love it because I think God specifically created it for us to pause before the holidays. For us to take this moment, and I already have neighbors that got decorations up, it's decorations I feel like have been in the stores since like 4th of July. Like I think 4th of July got passed up with Christmas decorations this year. Like it is crazy. But Thanksgiving is this moment for us to pause. Before the chaos of parties, before the chaos of presence, before the chaos of family drama, Oh, before the chaos of life that is the holidays, Thanksgiving just sits here and it causes us to pause.
And I got a couple of things I wanna share this morning on gratitude and honestly, the power of gratitude. Gratitude is actually one of the most healthy emotions we can experience. There is so much scientific study on the physical effects of being grateful. the physical effects that honestly nothing is better for our health than gratitude. Studies have shown that almost 90% of all doctors visits are linked to stress and gratitude is a stress buster. Gratitude causes us to pause in a moment and to reflect on what's really happening in our lives. Not what we think is happening, not this perspective we've put together in our own minds, but for us to truly pause and to look at the world around us and to see how amazingly blessed that we are. Even if we might feel like we aren't as blessed as the neighbors or the other person down the street or someone else that we know in our life, we are still blessed, right? We are so, so blessed here in our life. And gratitude is actually even linked to being an immune booster. Studies have shown that people who are grateful on a regular basis had a higher number of blood cells to help protect their immune system. That those who were recovering from surgery or fighting a disease or a sickness, they actually had better outcomes when they had a heart of gratitude. Gratitude actually rewires our brains. Studies have shown this where they've literally hooked up all like that cap with all the wires and the gizmos and the gadgets, and had people think on things that they were grateful for. And they literally saw the brain being rewired down to the molecular level, the neurons, and things actually changed our physical brain when being grateful. That's pretty powerful. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think God created that for us and this way that our brain works better and our life is better and we're healthier and we have a greater perspective and all of this is brought together through the power of gratitude. It's pretty amazing. Self-help author and addictions behavior writer, Melody Beattie says, "Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life." I don't find it a coincidence that the Bible talks over 200 times on thankfulness, being thankful, gratitude, and having a mind of thanksgiving. It is throughout scripture from the moment you open your Bible in Genesis, all the way through the end of Revelation. There is gratitude all throughout scripture. And I wanna run through four key verses today that talk on gratitude and how the power of gratitude actually changes who we are.
Philippians 4,:4-7 says, "Rejoice in the Lord always, I will say it again, rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all, the Lord is dear. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation by prayer, petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understandings will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." I love this word, guard. The Greek here actually for guard is, how do we say it? Through AO. And it's actually translated as protect by a military guard to either prevent hostile invasion or to keep the inhabitants of a besieged city from flight. When I think of that, I think of the top of the top. Whether that's the secret service, whether that's a Navy seal, maybe that's the Green Beret, I think of this elite military force bringing protection. And this is what Thanksgiving does to us. Thanksgiving guards our hearts and our minds in Christ. But that's external. What about the internal? Is there still protection? Is there still a guarding of our heart internally? I was reading a book recently, I haven't finished it, so if the book ends bad, I'll let you guys know. But this book is by John Eldredge, He's a great Christian author. And the book is about getting your life back. And there's this book that it talks about all the things in life that are clamoring at our attention, that are trying to take our lives away from us. And I'm going through the book and it's really good. They're like all this external stuff. I'm like, oh man, yeah, I need to work on that. We're gonna fix that, I gotta figure that out. And then he goes, you're not gonna like this next chapter. And I was like, what? He goes, "The greatest enemy we have "of anything in our life is ourselves." And he shifts into this chapter that's all about the self. And he goes on and he says this, and this hit me like a ton of bricks. The self is the greatest enemy of our own gratitude or thankfulness in our hearts and our minds. The enemy has a secret hold on each of us. an access point from within. The devil doesn't particularly care what your personal sins are or what gets you to stumble or how you fail in life. What the enemy delights in is his unfettered internal access that he has through ourself. Whoa. I think one of the greatest enemies to our gratitude is ourself.
I hear so many people will say, "Well, pastor, you don't know what they did to me. You don't know what happened there with all this other stuff. You don't know what went down in my life." You're right, I don't. And we can't control that, can we? No, there's no way we can control that. But what we can control is who? Ourselves. We can control ourselves. we can control how we respond in our choices. We can control how we respond to those moments. Will it be one with gratitude or without? And if scripture is true, which we believe that it is, it says that God will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus with gratitude. So it's for us, as we're walking around this world with a real enemy that is out to try to get us, not just a cartoon or a figment of our imagination, but an enemy that wants us to forget our blessings, to forget our forgiveness, to forget the financial gifts we've been given, to forget the food that is on our table, to forget the freedoms we have in life, to forget the blessings of the family that we have and wants us to focus on what we do not have. That's how he gets at us. We have to keep our attention on Christ and to keep ourself in check. Because if not, we'll get caught in the spiraling cycle of envy that only causes pain and suffering. And when we get caught in this comparison game, it is just a dark, dark trap that strips any hope of gratitude in our lives away from us. But Christ Jesus guards us, protects us, has a special forces unit of angels for our lives with us 24/7 through the power of Jesus Christ.
The second thought on thankfulness is that it aligns our souls. First Thessalonians 5:16-18 says, "Always be joyful, always keep on praying. "No matter what happens, always be thankful. "For this is God's will for you "who belong to Christ Jesus." Have you ever been driving in a car at fast speeds that needs an alignment? You might be okay going through the neighborhood, 25, 35, down the road, 40 max, but you cross over that 65 mark and you can barely hang on for life, right? That's life for some of us right now. Life's coming at us so fast and you're just looking down the road going, here come the holidays. Oh, Lord Jesus. Thankfulness realigns our hearts and our minds in Christ. Thankfulness and gratitude is actually a spiritual language. It's the language of heaven. There's no complaining in heaven. There's no asking for stuff in heaven. There's no, well, I hope that this would work out this way. No, no, no. It's just worship and gratitude to Jesus and God on the throne, right? And so here on earth, God wants us to learn this language of heaven. So when we get up to heaven, we don't sound like a newbie walking and going, I don't know what this is all about. God wants to align us into His language, His culture, His life, His world, and His eternal world through gratitude and thanksgiving. Some of us need an alignment in our lives. Some of us really need to get into alignment with who God is, not who the little God that we think we are in our own lives. Everything in life is trying to pull us in different directions at all times. Frustrations, struggles, horrible attitudes, things happening in life that we don't expect to ever happen to us are happening, and it is pulling us out of alignment with God, and gratitude puts us right back into the place where we're supposed to be.
Thankfulness understands that God redeems everything in our lives. This idea of redeeming, to make right, the original intent, original design and purpose. If you wanna hear anything this morning, I want you to hear this. Listen to me. God can redeem anything in your life right here, right now, today. I want you to hear that. 'Cause some of us have walked in here carrying some heavy burdens. We walked in with so many things on our shoulders that we are so tired and worn out, and we're thinking, I don't even know how I'm gonna make it through the holidays. And I want you to know that God is ready to step into your life and redeem that for his glory. We're gonna hear some stories today of redemption and God's glory in some of our lives and our family today through baptism. It's gonna be amazing. But I love what it says in Isaiah 51. It says, "The Lord will surely comfort Zion "and will look with compassion on all her ruins. "He will make her deserts like Eden, like the garden, "her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. "Joy and gladness will be found in her thanksgiving "and the sound of singing." Another translation of the original Hebrew puts it like this, it says, "Likewise, I, God, will comfort Zion, "comfort all of her mounds of ruins, "all transform her dead ground into Eden, "her moonscape into the garden of God, "a place filled with exuberance and laughter, thankful voices and melodic songs. Some of us got dry places in our lives, right? Some of us got some dry, dry places in our lives and we're walking around, we feel like we're just lost in the desert.
But God wants to restore that. He wants to redeem it. He doesn't wanna just like bring back some greenery here and there. He wants to turn that desert into like a greenhouse with all the beautiful flowers and the succulents and the trees and everything amazing that comes along with that. God wants to redeem that in your life. Where are you dry? Where are the waste places in your life? Maybe it's school, maybe it's work, it's relationships, it's a spouse. These are often filled with struggles and suffering and burdens. But what if God would bring redemption to all those dry areas in your life? What would your life look like? Look different, wouldn't it? It would look completely different than it does right now. And this transformation that wants to take place, God wants to redeem our lives. He wants to turn our struggles into an opportunity for His glory. He wants to transform our weakness into moments for His strength. He wants to change our failures into spaces for his triumph. He wants to overcome our battles into spaces for his victory. That's what God wants to do in your life. We create opportunities for him to be glorified and to redeem everything in our lives. 'Cause I feel like we're the ones that hold God back.
One final thought if you're taking notes this morning, thankfulness reveals Jesus everywhere. Psalm 69:30, I love this verse. “I will promise God's name in song and glorify Him with thanksgiving.” Another translation says this, “Let me shout God's name with a praising song. Let me shout God's name with a praising song. Let me tell his greatness in a prayer of thanks.” Or maybe this way, “I will praise the name of God with a song and I will magnify him with thanksgiving." I love that image of magnification. This idea of taking something that might be small or might be minuscule or maybe less significant than we think and just blowing it up. Really, really expanding that in our lives. This idea of magnify to enlarge, to boost, enhance, maximize, increase, augment, extend, expand, amplify, intensify, blow up. It is impossible to make God any bigger. Let me say that right here, right now, okay? It is impossible to make God any bigger than He is. However, it is so easy that every day we forget how big God is. 'Cause what happens? This big, big God starts shrinking down when our problems start getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, right? It's the scale. As our problems get bigger, God gets smaller. God wants to go the other way with it. God wants to take these big, big problems and smash them back down to their proper right size. That is probably mostly minuscule, if we're gonna be honest here, right? He wants to smash those down because he wants to get bigger. He wants to get bigger in our lives to a place where we go, man, I didn't think God could get that big. And God's like, you ain't seen nothing yet, man. That's what he wants to do. And the gratitude in that is like the supercharger of that.
Supercharger, it makes me think of Tesla. I saw a Cybertruck on the road the other day. It was kind of cool. Elon Musk, his new Cybertruck thing, it looks like a floating tank. It's so weird. But their superchargers that they have for these cars is phenomenal of how quickly they can recharge a battery. It's mind boggling. I feel like he somehow bent the laws of physics. That's what God wants to do in our lives. He wants to take what we think who God is in our lives and bend those laws of physics to go, this is who I am. This is who I am and this is what I want to do in our life. He wants to take our distractions, our busyness, our life that happens and make it all itty bitty tiny, minuscule to where it just don't matter anymore that we completely even forget about it because all that we can see around us is God moving and transforming our lives. That's what he wants to do. And when we do that, we're left, but the only response is to worship. There's nothing else that you can do in that moment, except to turn our thankful hearts back to God in what I would call thanks singing. And you say, well pastor, you know, I just, I can't sing. I can't carry a tune in a bucket. That ain't no problem. God's got auto-tune as you sing. It fixes itself on the way up to heaven and it's just a beautiful sound. Amen. That's it. That's what it's about. God's got it fixed. That's not for us to worry about. It's for us just to praise Him. That's what we're supposed to focus in on. And when God minimizes these problems that are alive and He expands who He is, we have no other response, but to start singing a song and live a life of gratitude.
Do people hear the song of Jesus in your life? Do people hear you sing that song? Okay, you don't gotta be singing all the time. You can be, got some theatrical people in the room that love singing at all times. Exactly. “I'm doing the dishes” It's like, okay, just you're doing the dishes, just calm down. We don't need to sing about it, okay? But the idea of singing a song of gratitude in our life is our witness, is our testimony. You're gonna hear some testimonies this morning of what God has done in people's lives. And they here today want to tell you that Jesus is Lord and leader of their life, that God has saved them from their hurt and their pain and their sin and their lost struggles. And He has redeemed them. And He wants you to be the witness to that. He wants you, they want you today in front of God, in front of heaven to share what God has done in their lives. But for those of us who aren't getting baptized today, what does God want to redeem in your life? What does God want to restore? How does God want to realign your hearts and your minds in Thanksgiving today? How will you to survive these holidays tap into God's supercharger to keep our spiritual batteries of gratitude fully charged so we don't turn into that person every single holiday that we know. How will we do that? Will we begin to be filled up with the language of gratitude, with the power of gratitude, with the language of heaven, with thankfulness, how will God's power of gratitude be shared with those around us this holiday season? That's my challenge for you today. I wanna pray, I wanna invite the worship team up, and we're gonna move into our time of baptisms this morning.
Jesus, we thank you for today. God, we are so grateful. We are so thankful for who you are. God, for your power that came that very first Christmas that we're gonna celebrate starting next week, God. That ultimately led to a place on the cross where we were able to have this broken relationship with you that all hope seemed to be lost was restored through your son, Jesus Christ. God, we're gonna hear these stories of what you've done in people's lives today, God, and we worship with gratitude with them. We worship with thankfulness. We worship with just this outpouring of praise, God, for what you did in their lives, reminding you what you've done in our lives, reminding us of this amplification, this magnification of gratitude that needs to happen through each and every one of our lives. Because if we don't share God, who will? So Jesus, we're so looking forward to this moment and this time. God, we praise you, we worship you, we thank you for who you are. Everybody said. Amen.