How Thanksgiving Shapes Your Life Story
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Happy Thanksgiving to all of you here in the States.
00:00:07.900 | Thanksgiving is a Pauline theme that we read about
00:00:11.400 | all over in the New Testament, ever relevant for all of us
00:00:15.020 | on any day of the week, any day of the year.
00:00:17.820 | But this national holiday is a fitting time for a question
00:00:22.180 | on Romans chapter one, verse 21,
00:00:25.460 | and how Godward Thanksgiving,
00:00:28.080 | or a lack of Godward Thanksgiving,
00:00:31.280 | shapes the trajectory of our whole lives.
00:00:34.160 | How is the story of your life told by your Thanksgiving
00:00:39.160 | or its absence?
00:00:41.220 | This is a great question from a listener
00:00:42.480 | who likely isn't celebrating Thanksgiving Day today, James,
00:00:47.480 | because he lives in the beautiful, rugged peninsula
00:00:50.360 | of Cornwall, England.
00:00:52.040 | Here's his email.
00:00:53.440 | Pastor John, thank you for your ministry
00:00:54.960 | and for this podcast.
00:00:56.340 | I was wondering if you can explain the logic
00:00:59.140 | of the trajectory Paul talks about in Romans chapter one.
00:01:03.040 | Specifically, I wanna better understand
00:01:04.640 | the role of God-centered thanksgiving in verse 21.
00:01:09.060 | Quote, "For although they knew God,
00:01:11.000 | "they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him."
00:01:16.000 | End quote.
00:01:17.800 | This failure to thank leads to a deeper and deeper
00:01:22.040 | sin bondage and greater and greater judgments
00:01:24.880 | from God on sinners.
00:01:27.640 | So my question is, negatively,
00:01:29.120 | how does thanklessness help us understand what sin is?
00:01:32.960 | And positively, how does thanksgiving
00:01:36.280 | shape the trajectory of our lives?
00:01:39.040 | - This really is an astonishing text.
00:01:42.080 | I thought all over again, I mean, I spent a lot of time
00:01:45.460 | just soaking in the amazing statements of this text,
00:01:50.640 | especially because of its claim
00:01:52.920 | that every human being knows God.
00:01:57.920 | They know his eternity, they know his power,
00:02:01.320 | they know his being creator of all, they know his deity.
00:02:06.320 | Everyone knows God.
00:02:08.440 | Atheists know God.
00:02:10.880 | Agnostics know God.
00:02:12.640 | Animists know God.
00:02:15.040 | Every person you meet on the street knows God.
00:02:19.360 | And apart from God's saving grace, it says,
00:02:23.640 | every human being suppresses that knowledge.
00:02:28.640 | And the reason we do is that every human being
00:02:32.740 | finds other things preferable to God,
00:02:37.260 | which is the very essence of evil, the essence of sin.
00:02:42.260 | "My people have committed two evils," Jeremiah says.
00:02:46.700 | "They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters,
00:02:51.700 | and dug out cisterns for themselves,
00:02:54.040 | broken cisterns that can hold no water," Jeremiah 2:13.
00:02:58.740 | This is the arch evil, the primal sin,
00:03:03.740 | the root of all other evils.
00:03:07.440 | Humans find things, people,
00:03:12.180 | the creation preferable to God,
00:03:16.040 | even though those other things are like dirt by comparison.
00:03:20.120 | We don't prefer God.
00:03:21.400 | We don't find God attractive.
00:03:23.320 | We don't find God desirable, beautiful, satisfying.
00:03:27.960 | That's the evil of all evils.
00:03:31.320 | And that's why Paul says we suppress
00:03:35.040 | the knowledge of God that we have,
00:03:37.680 | because that knowledge shows him
00:03:40.320 | as preferable to all things.
00:03:43.620 | So we claim not to know God.
00:03:46.680 | We claim not to know him, but we do know him.
00:03:49.920 | We get angry at him for not making himself more plain.
00:03:54.160 | But Paul says God made himself perfectly plain to everyone.
00:03:59.160 | Our problem is not lack of revelation.
00:04:02.520 | Our problem is that we don't want to see.
00:04:04.600 | We don't want to see.
00:04:07.120 | And so we suppress and pretend that we don't see.
00:04:13.360 | So Paul says that's our darkness.
00:04:15.440 | That's our foolishness.
00:04:17.040 | That's the futility of our minds.
00:04:20.520 | We find God unattractive, distasteful,
00:04:24.080 | offensive, even abhorrent.
00:04:26.800 | And then in all kinds of ways,
00:04:30.000 | we exchange his infinitely beautiful,
00:04:33.260 | all satisfying glory for pitiful substitutes,
00:04:38.160 | like images of ourselves,
00:04:40.880 | cultural artifacts that exalt our ingenuity
00:04:44.760 | and intelligence and creativity and vaunted independence,
00:04:49.760 | with the result that humankind is under
00:04:54.680 | the just wrath of God so that he hands us over
00:04:57.960 | to more and more and greater and greater degradation,
00:05:02.960 | which we see happening all around us.
00:05:06.680 | And in the middle of this dreadful description
00:05:09.640 | of our human condition,
00:05:11.120 | Paul mentions the positive alternative
00:05:15.320 | to that darkness and foolishness and futility
00:05:18.400 | and suppression of the truth,
00:05:20.480 | namely glorifying and thanking God,
00:05:25.480 | precisely as God.
00:05:29.200 | That's what's missing, glorifying and thanking God.
00:05:33.760 | And that would change everything.
00:05:36.560 | So let me read the text so that people can hear
00:05:40.040 | for themselves everything I just said.
00:05:43.000 | The wrath of God is revealed from heaven
00:05:44.920 | against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men
00:05:48.560 | who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
00:05:52.160 | So I'm just reading the text now.
00:05:54.440 | For what can be known about God is plain to them
00:05:59.200 | because God has shown it to them, made it plain.
00:06:02.880 | For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power
00:06:06.840 | and divine nature have been clearly perceived
00:06:10.960 | since the creation of the world
00:06:12.800 | in the things that have been made.
00:06:16.080 | He's a maker and they know it, we know it.
00:06:19.000 | So they are without excuse for although they knew God,
00:06:24.000 | that's probably the most amazing statement in the text.
00:06:26.960 | Although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God
00:06:32.720 | or give thanks to him.
00:06:34.680 | But they became futile in their thinking
00:06:36.840 | and their foolish hearts were darkened.
00:06:39.440 | Claiming to be wise, they became fools
00:06:41.920 | and exchanged the glory of the immortal God
00:06:45.080 | for images resembling mortal man
00:06:49.560 | and birds and animals and creeping things.
00:06:52.400 | So James is right.
00:06:54.480 | James is asking about the place
00:06:56.680 | and the function of thankfulness in this text.
00:07:00.520 | For although they knew God,
00:07:01.560 | they did not glorify him as God or give thanks to him.
00:07:05.800 | And I think when Paul mentioned both glorify
00:07:10.840 | and give thanks, he knew that they were overlapping realities.
00:07:15.840 | When we thank God, we are showing him to be glorious
00:07:23.200 | and no one can truly glorify God
00:07:28.160 | with a heart of ingratitude.
00:07:30.560 | So they are overlapping realities,
00:07:34.600 | but they're not the same, are they?
00:07:37.440 | There are ways to feel and think and act that glorify God,
00:07:42.440 | but we wouldn't call them thankfulness.
00:07:47.200 | So the reality of glorifying God is wider, it's bigger.
00:07:52.200 | It's a bigger reality than thanking God.
00:07:56.440 | Thanking God is a subset, subspecies of glorifying God.
00:08:01.440 | And yet Paul, of all the ways he could have mentioned
00:08:06.600 | that glorify God, he chooses to mention thankfulness
00:08:11.640 | alongside glorifying God.
00:08:14.720 | Now, why is that?
00:08:16.000 | First, I think it relates to the fact
00:08:20.280 | that Paul has just said that what can be known about God
00:08:25.520 | is known through the things he has made.
00:08:29.080 | In other words, everywhere a human being looks,
00:08:32.840 | the sky, the forest, the mountains, the rivers, the sea,
00:08:37.840 | the land, family, the mirror, all of it,
00:08:43.040 | everywhere you look is made by God
00:08:47.640 | and is a gift of God, the maker to humanity.
00:08:53.840 | Every single thing that gives us any pleasure at all
00:08:58.840 | in this world is a gift of God.
00:09:02.320 | And the heart response that God created for glorifying him
00:09:08.680 | for his gifts is thankfulness.
00:09:12.960 | That's what he created.
00:09:13.920 | That's what he designed in the human heart
00:09:16.240 | as a response to this vast, vast array of made things,
00:09:22.480 | gifts.
00:09:23.840 | It's not wrong to speak of being thankful to God for God.
00:09:28.840 | That's not wrong, but mostly in the Bible,
00:09:33.760 | thankfulness relates to God's gifts
00:09:37.520 | and his deeds to bless us.
00:09:41.200 | For sure, God himself is the gift.
00:09:46.200 | And if we don't arrive there, we haven't arrived,
00:09:49.360 | but it is right and good that our hearts brim,
00:09:54.360 | they just brim with thankfulness that God is a maker.
00:09:59.400 | Everything that is not God was made by God.
00:10:05.840 | Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look,
00:10:11.120 | all the time, 24/7, we should feel profoundly,
00:10:16.080 | continually, earnestly thankful for God's gifts.
00:10:21.080 | I think that's one of the reasons why he listed thankfulness
00:10:26.680 | as the counterpart to glorify in this text.
00:10:30.240 | Secondly, I think Paul called out being thankful to God
00:10:35.240 | alongside glorifying God,
00:10:38.280 | because there is built into thankfulness,
00:10:43.280 | humility, a sense of dependence,
00:10:47.840 | and gladness in needy receiving.
00:10:51.200 | So humility, dependence, glad neediness,
00:10:56.200 | which not surprisingly sounds a lot like faith.
00:11:01.960 | I think if you pressed Paul,
00:11:05.880 | he would say true thankfulness toward our all glorious,
00:11:11.480 | all powerful, all providing creator
00:11:14.920 | includes humble, dependent, glad trust.
00:11:19.920 | They may not be the same thing,
00:11:22.280 | but they are so intimately and integrally connected
00:11:26.880 | that Paul thinks thankfulness is a good thing
00:11:29.880 | to mention here when he also wants to call attention
00:11:33.320 | to trust.
00:11:34.360 | Can anyone truly say,
00:11:37.440 | I am joyfully thankful to God
00:11:41.040 | for his all satisfying beauty and his all governing power
00:11:45.720 | and his all providing goodness to me,
00:11:49.240 | but I don't trust him.
00:11:50.400 | Nobody can talk like that.
00:11:52.120 | It's something's inauthentic
00:11:54.720 | if that kind of sentence is spoken.
00:11:57.760 | Thankfulness when oriented on God
00:12:00.840 | is a deep and powerful experience.
00:12:04.920 | And so Paul describes its absence like this.
00:12:09.920 | When thankfulness failed, quote,
00:12:13.200 | they became futile in their thinking,
00:12:16.800 | their foolish hearts were darkened,
00:12:19.620 | their claim to be wise was shown to be foolishness,
00:12:23.740 | and they fell into the sacrilege of exchanging God
00:12:27.300 | for images, especially the one in the mirror.
00:12:30.480 | That's the absence of thankfulness.
00:12:33.040 | It's a horrible, horrible description.
00:12:35.840 | So yes, I think James is right.
00:12:38.040 | The absence of thankfulness
00:12:40.800 | as the absence of humility and dependence
00:12:45.280 | and glad neediness and trust
00:12:49.120 | is one way of describing the darkness and folly
00:12:53.200 | and futility of our own times.
00:12:56.220 | It's the opposite, you could say,
00:13:00.680 | of pride, pride with a capital P.
00:13:05.680 | The very pride that calls our shame glory,
00:13:11.560 | exactly the way Romans 1 describes it
00:13:14.920 | when they exchange God for the person in the mirror,
00:13:19.920 | because the exchange of the opposite sex
00:13:24.140 | for the same sex in our passions is an outflow,
00:13:30.000 | Paul says, of that very exchange of God
00:13:33.440 | for the person in the mirror.
00:13:36.400 | So there are many ways to describe
00:13:40.000 | the desperate need of the world.
00:13:43.280 | And one, according to Romans 1,
00:13:45.680 | is repentance from pride and independence
00:13:50.680 | and self-sufficiency toward a humble, dependent,
00:13:55.920 | happy, trustful neediness for God
00:14:00.920 | as he has revealed himself in Jesus,
00:14:03.320 | which we call thankfulness.
00:14:06.400 | - Wonderful, thank you, Pastor John.
00:14:09.520 | It is right and good that our hearts brim with thankfulness,
00:14:13.600 | that God is a maker.
00:14:15.480 | Everything that is not God was made by God.
00:14:19.560 | Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look,
00:14:22.640 | all the time, 24/7, we should feel profoundly,
00:14:26.960 | continually, earnestly thankful for God's gifts, amen.
00:14:31.960 | May the course of our lives be charted
00:14:36.280 | by our Godward thanksgiving.
00:14:39.560 | Thanks for joining us on this Thanksgiving day,
00:14:42.280 | or maybe the day after, a couple days after,
00:14:44.320 | or whenever you catch up on the podcast.
00:14:45.840 | In either case, we pray that your Thanksgiving
00:14:48.640 | is or was a wonderful day filled with Godward thanks.
00:14:53.520 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:14:55.040 | We'll see you Monday.
00:14:56.040 | (upbeat music)
00:14:58.620 | (upbeat music)
00:15:01.200 | (upbeat music)
00:15:03.780 | (Thanks for watching)