The Glorious Duty of Thanksgiving
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Happy Thanksgiving, everyone,
00:00:05.880 | or I guess technically it's a happy Thanksgiving Eve.
00:00:09.760 | On this holiday built around gratitude,
00:00:12.880 | we can learn a lot from the Apostle Paul,
00:00:14.400 | a man who loved to celebrate God's grace
00:00:16.260 | and others with heartfelt thanks.
00:00:18.980 | And as we've seen several times in this podcast,
00:00:21.280 | Paul says learning to speak thanks
00:00:23.400 | is what cleans up the mouth.
00:00:25.080 | It cleans it up from using crude and vulgar language.
00:00:28.440 | Thanksgiving has this powerful cleansing effect
00:00:31.480 | on our lives and what comes out of our mouths.
00:00:33.520 | And Paul's life itself models this gratitude.
00:00:36.520 | He mentions thanks about 50 times in his epistles,
00:00:40.340 | leading to one of my favorite quotes,
00:00:41.920 | acclaimed by New Testament scholar, David Powell,
00:00:44.960 | who once wrote, "The Apostle Paul mentions the subject
00:00:47.840 | "of thanksgiving more frequently per page
00:00:51.300 | "than any other Hellenistic author, pagan or Christian."
00:00:57.200 | Wow, that's a high claim.
00:00:59.440 | But it's a claim that explains a text
00:01:01.120 | like 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 13 to 14,
00:01:04.840 | where Paul writes this,
00:01:06.400 | "But we ought always to give thanks to God
00:01:08.580 | "for you, brothers, beloved by the Lord."
00:01:10.760 | Why?
00:01:11.700 | "Because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved
00:01:15.620 | "through sanctification by the Spirit
00:01:18.000 | "and belief in the truth.
00:01:19.800 | "To this he called you through our gospel
00:01:22.680 | "so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ."
00:01:27.540 | Great text.
00:01:28.620 | In this text, we see four truths
00:01:30.580 | that motivate our thanksgiving.
00:01:33.300 | Here's Pastor John at the end of 2001
00:01:35.180 | in a sermon to explain.
00:01:37.580 | - The first one is found in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 13.
00:01:40.740 | Paul says, "We should always give thanks
00:01:44.340 | "to God for you, brethren."
00:01:46.420 | Now notice, that's prayer.
00:01:48.860 | Prayer is in the form of thanks.
00:01:50.580 | He says, "We should do this," so it's a duty.
00:01:53.580 | Should, duty, should.
00:01:56.780 | However, it's the kind of duty
00:02:01.420 | so that if you experience it as burden,
00:02:04.940 | you haven't experienced it yet.
00:02:07.560 | If you experience gratitude as a burden,
00:02:13.820 | you don't know gratitude.
00:02:17.220 | Because true gratitude is not an exertion of the will,
00:02:22.560 | it's an overflow of a sense of being treated
00:02:25.460 | better than you deserve.
00:02:27.500 | A kid who gets black socks for Christmas
00:02:29.720 | from his grandmother when he wanted a firetruck
00:02:32.020 | might be told by his mother,
00:02:33.380 | "Say thank you to your grandmother."
00:02:35.660 | And he might say, "Thank you, grandmother, for my socks."
00:02:38.460 | He does not experience gratitude at that moment.
00:02:41.340 | The words thank you are a burden and a duty,
00:02:46.460 | and it feels like hypocrisy for one simple reason,
00:02:49.140 | the emotion is not there.
00:02:52.700 | However, had he opened the firetruck,
00:02:56.540 | maybe that's coming next, grandmother's not dumb,
00:02:59.780 | opens the box, firetruck, "Oh, yes, woo-hoo!
00:03:06.740 | "Thank you, grandma!"
00:03:09.300 | That's not a burden.
00:03:10.360 | That's not a burden.
00:03:14.740 | You don't know gratitude yet
00:03:17.420 | if this should here lands on you like law.
00:03:21.940 | You need to know Him.
00:03:23.020 | You need to come to the end of this year
00:03:25.620 | and look back over this year with all of his horror
00:03:28.460 | and feel something really freeing
00:03:33.100 | about how good He's been to you,
00:03:35.620 | way better than you deserve and me.
00:03:38.040 | So it's a duty here, but look where it comes from.
00:03:44.100 | Look where gratitude comes from in verse 14.
00:03:48.500 | When he says, "We should always give thanks to God for you."
00:03:52.220 | So here is a prayer happening called thanks,
00:03:55.540 | but where does it come from?
00:03:57.980 | It comes from four reasons,
00:04:02.980 | which come from knowledge, which come from the Word
00:04:06.860 | about how God saved the Thessalonians.
00:04:10.180 | Number one, you are beloved by the Lord.
00:04:15.020 | Number two, verse 13 at the end,
00:04:17.780 | "God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation
00:04:22.300 | through sanctification by the Spirit and faith."
00:04:25.100 | Number three, the beginning of verse 14,
00:04:28.120 | "He called you through our gospel."
00:04:30.700 | Number four, "The aim of this call was that you may obtain
00:04:34.460 | the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ."
00:04:36.240 | You see where his thanks is coming from?
00:04:39.820 | God loved them, God chose them, God called them,
00:04:43.180 | God will glorify them.
00:04:44.540 | That's what he knows in his head
00:04:46.340 | and it produces the emotion of,
00:04:48.140 | "Oh God, how good you've been to the Thessalonians."
00:04:52.380 | Just bubbles up.
00:04:55.180 | Look what you have done for the Thessalonian church.
00:04:58.820 | Thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:05:00.940 | That's the way I feel about Bethlehem
00:05:02.780 | over and over again for reason after reason.
00:05:06.100 | But there gotta be reasons.
00:05:09.460 | Why?
00:05:10.980 | So that that will get the glory.
00:05:13.100 | God will get the glory, not the Thessalonians.
00:05:16.260 | God has chosen you, God has called you,
00:05:20.380 | God is gonna glorify you, God loved you.
00:05:24.420 | Praise God, thank God for you.
00:05:27.580 | And if you need to see where I got
00:05:31.260 | the essential structure of this sermon,
00:05:33.100 | look at verse 13 and notice the word spirit
00:05:36.340 | and the word truth.
00:05:38.380 | God saves us, it says, "Through sanctification
00:05:41.460 | by the spirit and faith in the truth."
00:05:44.380 | Now there you have spirit and truth,
00:05:45.740 | spirit and truth, spirit and word brought together.
00:05:48.860 | How do you get changed?
00:05:50.460 | How do you get changed?
00:05:52.820 | Everybody in this room needs to change.
00:05:54.860 | Oughta wanna change.
00:05:58.060 | More like Jesus, more like Jesus.
00:06:00.540 | More affections like him, more behavior like him,
00:06:02.980 | more attitudes like him, more change.
00:06:05.740 | Oh, make 2002, change city.
00:06:09.820 | How's that gonna happen?
00:06:10.940 | Answer, spirit and truth, spirit and truth.
00:06:15.940 | And prayer corresponds to our reliance upon the spirit
00:06:20.300 | and meditation corresponds to our faith in the truth
00:06:23.540 | and so we will bring the two together.
00:06:26.380 | - So good, this clip is from a sermon preached
00:06:28.780 | on December 30th, 2001 titled,
00:06:30.700 | "Hold fast to the word and pray for us,
00:06:32.940 | how the spirit and the word produce change."
00:06:35.660 | The full sermon is online at DG right now.
00:06:37.780 | It's a fitting clip as we enter the Thanksgiving holiday
00:06:40.500 | here in the States.
00:06:41.740 | Every day was Thanksgiving Day for Paul, I suppose.
00:06:44.940 | And speaking of thankfulness,
00:06:46.460 | thank you for listening to the podcast
00:06:48.060 | and engaging with it over the years.
00:06:49.420 | We couldn't do it without you.
00:06:51.140 | So on behalf of John Piper,
00:06:53.260 | we pray that you would enjoy a wonderful day of gratitude,
00:06:56.340 | of celebrating God's grace in your life
00:06:58.060 | and in the lives of those around you.
00:07:00.300 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:07:01.600 | Pastor John and I are back in the studio on Friday.
00:07:04.300 | We'll see you then.
00:07:05.200 | (upbeat music)
00:07:07.780 | (upbeat music)
00:07:10.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]