Have you ever received an anonymous gift and wondered who to thank?
When Marilyn and I lived in community there was a strong emphasis on internal giving – people giving to each other within the community. Often people who needed money to pay school fees, or to go on outreach, or simply to buy a cup of coffee, would go to the mailboxes and find an envelope with a few bills in it. No note, just some money, or sometimes some cookies, or some coffee, or some other treat.
When we were missionaries in
The Bible is full of people giving thanks. If you just look for the word “thank” in the Bible there’s David giving thanks in 1 Chronicles 16, and Solomon in 1 Chron 29, not to mention Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah and other kings. Then there’s the book of Psalms; full of thanks in one way or another. All through the gospels and Acts, Jesus and the disciples are seen giving thanks, usually before eating. And Paul begins most of his letters by giving thanks to God for the people that he’s writing to. Giving thanks seems to be an inherent part of following God.
We talked last week about our relationship
to creation and how important it is to recognise that it’s God’s creation and
to give him credit for it. There’s an old hymn that says, “Heav’n above is softer blue, Earth around is sweeter green!
Something lives in every hue, Christless eyes have never seen; Birds with
gladder songs o’erflow, flowers with deeper beauties shine, Since I know, as
now I know, I am His, and He is mine.” Our relationship to the creator
changes our relationship to his creation, and one thing that changes is that we
now know who to thank for everything around us.
On Thanksgiving we usually think of giving thanks for food and produce. Ps 65 gives us a bunch of things to be thankful for. Groceries are in there, but there’s a whole lot more as well.
Praise awaits you, O God, in
Think about that for a moment. Anybody can come to God in prayer and he will hear them. You can’t say that about most people. With your family and friends you might be able to just turn up and expect them to hear you, to give you the time of day and listen to you. That’s what friends are for.
But what about your boss? Can you just walk into his or her office any time and unburden yourself? Or your bank manager? If I wanted to talk to my bank manager I’d have to make an appointment. I couldn’t just walk in. I know; I’ve tried.
The higher up the scale you go, the more you have to do to get a hearing. Maybe you have to call a few times to get an appointment with the mayor. You’d have to write a letter to get an appointment with the premier or the prime minister. And if you wanted an appointment with the Queen you’d have to write way ahead of time and go through a security check and all that. (And it would be called an “audience” not an appointment.) The letter you would get back from the palace would say something like “Her majesty graciously grants you an audience” on such and such a date.
And yet, God, the creator and ruler of the universe, graciously hears us whenever we pray, without us going through all kinds of hoops to get him to listen.
[Think about that. In the movie “Bruce
Almighty” Jim Carrey plays a reporter who dreams of being promoted to the news
anchor position at a
First come the prayer requests. As millions of prayers start flooding in, Bruce is overwhelmed. So, thinking out loud, he comes up with a plan. "I know, let all prayers be organized into files." Immediately, thousands of files fill up his apartment.
Bruce tries another idea. "I know. Prayer Post-its." Everything in sight is instantly covered in yellow Post-it notes. Bruce looks like a yellow mummy.
Bruce's next idea is prayer e-mail. His computer says, "You've got prayers," and begins downloading the requests. Thousands pour in. Bruce realizes this is going to take a while. The next morning the computer tells him he has 1,527,503 prayer messages. He uses his power to reply to the requests at superhuman speed.
"I had to have made a dent," he says. He checks his progress and finds that over 3 million have come in since he began.
Finally he selects “Reply all” and says “yes” which starts a whole other set of problems.]
God could ignore us if he wanted to, but he chooses to hear our prayers and respond to them out of his gracious love for us. That’s something that we can give thanks for.
What makes God hearing our prayers even more surprising is that one of the major reasons we come to him is because we’ve blown it.
What are three of the most important things you can ever say? (Not “I love you.”)
“Please,” “thank you” and “sorry.” We teach these words to our kids early on because we know that they’re what make relationships work.
Most of our prayers can be covered by one or other of those words. We just talked about “please” prayers. When we come to God with what’s on our hearts he hears us.
The whole focus of Thanksgiving is on “thank you” prayers, where we thank God for all he has given us.
But here, in verse 3, it talks about “sorry” prayers.
3 When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave our transgressions.
Overwhelmed. Ever feel that way? Not just by circumstance and events, but by your own foolishness and sin. We do stuff we know is destructive and dangerous, selfish and unloving, but we still let it control our lives.
Overwhelmed. Like a lead weight, sin wraps itself around our lives and pulls us down until we feel like we’re sinking.
Overwhelmed; by habits that we feel like we can’t break and wouldn’t know what to do to break them.
Overwhelmed.
3 When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave our transgressions.
Isn’t that something to be thankful for? When the psalmist was writing Ps 65 he was thinking about the Old Testament system of sacrifices that God setup so people could experience his forgiveness. That system pointed forward to Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice on the cross to open the way for us to come before God.
We were overwhelmed by sin, but God forgives us when we come to him.
He meets us, he forgives us, and he fills us with good things, which is what Thanksgiving is all about.
4 Blessed are those you choose and bring near to live in your courts! We are filled with the good things of your house, of your holy temple.
Some of you will know of the book “The Secret.” It’s been at the top of the New York Times best seller list for 38 weeks. I mean, who wouldn’t buy a book that promises you anything you want? That’s what “The Secret” tells me. If I want to be rich, I must think about it continually. If I want to be thin, I should decide on my ideal weight, and I’ll get there. How does this work? According to the book, “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the universe and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to the source. And that source is you.”
I know people who believe this and run their lives accordingly. They never say or think about anything negative. They’re always very confident about what they affirm, even if they are, as a friend of mine once put it, “often wrong but never in doubt,” because they believe that they are masters of their own destiny. The problem is that according to The Secret, all the bad that happens to me is also a product of my thoughts. If I’m poor, sick, or even in an accident, it’s because of my own negative thoughts.
Nothing could be further from what the Bible teaches. According to the 4000 years of experience and wisdom that is tied up in the Bible and the experience of Christians, the bad things in our lives are there because there is real evil in the world; our own sin, the sin of other people, spiritual powers of evil, and the evil that comes from living in a creation that has been twisted by sin. Anything good in our lives comes by the grace of God. That’s why we need to be thankful for it. .
4 Blessed [happy] are those you choose and bring near to live in your courts! We are filled with the good things of your house, of your holy temple.
Who does God choose to live with him? Those who respond to him in faith. In Romans 4 Paul makes it clear that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, if you respond to God in faith you are included in his people and you know who to thank. Everybody receives God’s good gifts. (Jesus says that God sends the sun and rain on everybody, including those who hate him.) But we who know him as our father can thank him for all of his good gifts.
So what are some of the gifts that God so generously gives us? What are some of those “good things” that he has given us?
He gives hope.
Are you hopeful for the future? Some people
are just more positive than others. (They’re the ones that buy “The Secret.”)
Some folks just hope against hope – whatever that means. The psalmist says, You
answer us with awesome deeds of righteousness, O God our Savior, the hope of
all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas,
The reason we can have hope for the future
is because God has shown himself faithful in the past. He has answered his
people’s prayers with “awesome deeds of righteousness.” The psalmist is probably
thinking of the time when God rescued
God may be “our Saviour”, but he’s not our
private mascot. The God we pray to and give thanks to is the maker of heaven
and earth. 6 who formed the mountains by your power,
having armed yourself with strength, 7 who stilled the roaring of
the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations.
And it’s because he is the God who made all
this that we can put our security in him. There are two images here; mountains
and seas. On the one hand God is the one who made the mountains, the biggest
things around. We’re not talking about
On the other hand there’s the sea. The sea is anything but stable. It’s always moving, almost alive! In the Psalms it’s an image of turmoil and chaos. God made the mountains, but he stilled the seas. Even in times of turmoil and chaos we can find our security in God.
God gives hope. He gives security and he
gives joy. 8 Those living far away fear your
wonders; where morning dawns and evening fades you call forth songs of joy.
Even people who don’t worship God take joy
in his provision. From the east, where morning dawns, to the west, where
evening fades, people look at creation and are blessed by it.
Finally, God provided for our physical needs.
You care for the land and water it; you enrich it
abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with
grain, for so you have ordained it. 10 You drench its furrows and
level its ridges; you soften it with showers and bless its crops. 11 You
crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance. 12 The
grasslands of the desert overflow; the hills are clothed with gladness. 13 The
meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain; they
shout for joy and sing.
He’s not just concerned about “spiritual” things. This was written in an agricultural community, where everybody was closely related to the land. I know that some of the people here keep gardens and grow their own produce, but many of us either have little or no garden space. It’s hard to keep a garden when you live in an apartment. And it’s easy to forget that all the produce that appears in the supermarket was grown by someone, somewhere, who was dependant upon God’s provision of rain and sun to make that harvest grow.
(OK, I’m not sure if Kool-aid crystals actually contain any natural ingredients but most things in the supermarket do.)
God actually takes delight in fertile soil, flowing water, overflowing carts and valleys full of grain — and well-stocked supermarket shelves! If that is our experience, we should give joyful thanks.
But, at the same time, we can’t help but remember that for many people the land is dry, the cattle are dying off and the stores are empty. These verses are a picture of what it will be like for all people when God’s kingdom comes in its fullness. We pray for that and in the meanwhile we seek to do his will and share our plenty with those who have nothing.