(upbeat music) - Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, or I guess technically it's a happy Thanksgiving Eve. On this holiday built around gratitude, we can learn a lot from the Apostle Paul, a man who loved to celebrate God's grace and others with heartfelt thanks. And as we've seen several times in this podcast, Paul says learning to speak thanks is what cleans up the mouth.

It cleans it up from using crude and vulgar language. Thanksgiving has this powerful cleansing effect on our lives and what comes out of our mouths. And Paul's life itself models this gratitude. He mentions thanks about 50 times in his epistles, leading to one of my favorite quotes, acclaimed by New Testament scholar, David Powell, who once wrote, "The Apostle Paul mentions the subject "of thanksgiving more frequently per page "than any other Hellenistic author, pagan or Christian." Wow, that's a high claim.

But it's a claim that explains a text like 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 13 to 14, where Paul writes this, "But we ought always to give thanks to God "for you, brothers, beloved by the Lord." Why? "Because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved "through sanctification by the Spirit "and belief in the truth.

"To this he called you through our gospel "so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ." Great text. In this text, we see four truths that motivate our thanksgiving. Here's Pastor John at the end of 2001 in a sermon to explain. - The first one is found in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 13.

Paul says, "We should always give thanks "to God for you, brethren." Now notice, that's prayer. Prayer is in the form of thanks. He says, "We should do this," so it's a duty. Should, duty, should. However, it's the kind of duty so that if you experience it as burden, you haven't experienced it yet.

If you experience gratitude as a burden, you don't know gratitude. Because true gratitude is not an exertion of the will, it's an overflow of a sense of being treated better than you deserve. A kid who gets black socks for Christmas from his grandmother when he wanted a firetruck might be told by his mother, "Say thank you to your grandmother." And he might say, "Thank you, grandmother, for my socks." He does not experience gratitude at that moment.

The words thank you are a burden and a duty, and it feels like hypocrisy for one simple reason, the emotion is not there. However, had he opened the firetruck, maybe that's coming next, grandmother's not dumb, opens the box, firetruck, "Oh, yes, woo-hoo! "Thank you, grandma!" That's not a burden.

That's not a burden. You don't know gratitude yet if this should here lands on you like law. You need to know Him. You need to come to the end of this year and look back over this year with all of his horror and feel something really freeing about how good He's been to you, way better than you deserve and me.

So it's a duty here, but look where it comes from. Look where gratitude comes from in verse 14. When he says, "We should always give thanks to God for you." So here is a prayer happening called thanks, but where does it come from? It comes from four reasons, which come from knowledge, which come from the Word about how God saved the Thessalonians.

Number one, you are beloved by the Lord. Number two, verse 13 at the end, "God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith." Number three, the beginning of verse 14, "He called you through our gospel." Number four, "The aim of this call was that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ." You see where his thanks is coming from?

God loved them, God chose them, God called them, God will glorify them. That's what he knows in his head and it produces the emotion of, "Oh God, how good you've been to the Thessalonians." Just bubbles up. Look what you have done for the Thessalonian church. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

That's the way I feel about Bethlehem over and over again for reason after reason. But there gotta be reasons. Why? So that that will get the glory. God will get the glory, not the Thessalonians. God has chosen you, God has called you, God is gonna glorify you, God loved you.

Praise God, thank God for you. And if you need to see where I got the essential structure of this sermon, look at verse 13 and notice the word spirit and the word truth. God saves us, it says, "Through sanctification by the spirit and faith in the truth." Now there you have spirit and truth, spirit and truth, spirit and word brought together.

How do you get changed? How do you get changed? Everybody in this room needs to change. Oughta wanna change. More like Jesus, more like Jesus. More affections like him, more behavior like him, more attitudes like him, more change. Oh, make 2002, change city. How's that gonna happen? Answer, spirit and truth, spirit and truth.

And prayer corresponds to our reliance upon the spirit and meditation corresponds to our faith in the truth and so we will bring the two together. - So good, this clip is from a sermon preached on December 30th, 2001 titled, "Hold fast to the word and pray for us, how the spirit and the word produce change." The full sermon is online at DG right now.

It's a fitting clip as we enter the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. Every day was Thanksgiving Day for Paul, I suppose. And speaking of thankfulness, thank you for listening to the podcast and engaging with it over the years. We couldn't do it without you. So on behalf of John Piper, we pray that you would enjoy a wonderful day of gratitude, of celebrating God's grace in your life and in the lives of those around you.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Pastor John and I are back in the studio on Friday. We'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)