Learning to Look Beyond the Blessings

What’s the best holiday of the year? I think you could make a case for Thanksgiving. Somehow, Thanksgiving has remained untainted by the glitz and greed and just plain silliness that have polluted our other holidays. You don’t have to send greeting cards at Thanksgiving . You don’t have to send FTD flowers, or chocolate turkeys, or (thank heavens) buy presents. Santa Claus is forced to wait in the wings until Thanksgiving is over and done with. At Thanksgiving, you don’t have to party down and pretend that you’re having the time of your life, like at New Years’. At Thanksgiving., you don’t have to go to the beach - it’s too cold. Nobody expects you to have a backyard bar-b-q.

Television has never been able to take over Thanksgiving day. Sure, you have the Macy’s parade in the morning for the kids, but that’s about it, except for a couple of NFL games that almost always feature losing teams playing out the string at the end of a dismal season.

Another reason that Thanksgiving is good is because it goes against the grain of our popular culture. Thanksgiving is about as “un-yuppie” as you can get. Look at the dinner menu, for example. Turkey! What kind of health food is that? And in spite of the pictures you see in all the department store displays, nobody but nobody does turkey in the microwave. Part of the tradition of Thanksgiving is for Mom to get up real early and put the bird in the oven. And when it comes time to sit down to dinner, nobody’s thinking about low-cholesterol, all-natural, high-fiber, imported, sun-dried oat bran when you can have two or three helpings of Mom’s delicious pumpkin pie.

Thanksgiving is good because it strips away all the pretensions of modern life and gets us down to basics - home, family, good simple food, and God, who makes it all possible. It’s a holiday that helps us to put the rest of the year in perspective. It’s a holiday that takes us back to our historical and spiritual roots as a nation. Thanksgiving puts us in touch with some of the basic values of our forefathers who came to these shores three and a half centuries ago. Because of this, Thanksgiving is a holiday that is uniquely American. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

On Tuesday evening, Carolyn and I had the opportunity to help host a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for the diplomatic community at the United Nations. There we sat, elbow to elbow with ambassadors and dignitaries from all over the world. We met the ambassador from Vietnam, a man who, 20 years ago, was the bitter enemy of America. We talked with a Chinese general and his wife - people whose connections made them partly responsible for the tragic events of Tiananmen Square last June. We met the ambassador from Nigeria, a jovial man resplendent in a silver dashiki. And we became fast friends with a diplomat and his wife from Hungary, as we talked with them about the amazing things that are happening in their country.

There we sat, enjoying our pumpkin soup, turkey, and apple pie with people from over 100 countries. And then we listened after dinner to the story of Thanksgiving, told by actors in pilgrim costumes. And we silently prayed for our new friends as they heard, many of them for the very first time, that it is possible to know today the God of the pilgrims, and that there will never be peace on earth until there is peace in the human heart that only He can give.

Thanksgiving is the best holiday because it turns our hearts toward God, our heavenly father, our sustainer, our provider. Thanksgiving takes us out of ourselves and turns us heavenward, and because it does, Thanksgiving helps us to better understand ourselves as creatures of a wise and loving creator.

In order to truly appreciate Thanksgiving, we need to look beyond the blessings to the One who blesses us. According to the Bible, this is the best way to give thanks. We need to learn to express our gratitude to God not so much because of what he does for us, as because of who he is. Let me show you a few verses from the Psalms which demonstrate this:

Psalm 7:17 I will give thanks to the LORD because of his righteousness and will sing praise to the name of the LORD Most High.

Psalm 106:1 Praise the LORD. Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.

Psalm 28:7 The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song.

Psalm 75:1 We give thanks to you, O God, we give thanks, for your Name is near; men tell of your wonderful deeds.

In fact, God’s personal character is mentioned over and over again in the Psalms as being cause for us to give thanks. The climax comes in Psalm 136, which opens and closes on a note of thanksgiving. The worship leader says “Give thanks to the Lord of Lords” and the congregation repeats “for His mercy endures forever.”

So according to the book of Psalms, our thanksgiving ought to be oriented to God’s character, not to God’s gifts. Although we enjoy and appreciate the gifts and the blessings He gives us, we should give thanks to Him for who He is. Why? Why does the Bible make this point?

Well, the answer is simple, when you think about it. If we were only to give thanks to God when He gave us gifts or when He blessed us, then there would be large periods of time in our lives when we would have to be silent. Because God doesn’t bless us all the time. At least, we don’t always perceive what He’s doing as blessing. Sometimes, God disciplines us or chastens us when we need it. That, in itself, is a great blessing but we don’t often take it that way, do we? And sometimes, God allows severe pain and suffering to come into our lives because He wants to deepen our faith in Him. He wants to deepen our message and our effectiveness for Him. And that’s a great blessing too, but at the time, we seldom see it that way.

Now if we depended on God doing nice things for us all the time in order to give thanks to Him, we’d be pretty ungrateful people whenever He was disciplining us or deepening us. We’d be no better than Job’s wife. When the good things of her life were all taken away - when she had lost her children and her home, she turned to Job and said “We should curse God and die.” She had concluded that God didn’t love them anymore. But she was wrong as wrong could be. God was about to help Job and his wife develop a testimony that would last for thousands of years.

That’s why the Bible tells us to focus upon who God is, rather than what He does in this whole matter of thanksgiving. Because, if truth be told, a lot of the time, we simply do not understand what God is doing in our lives. We don’t know what He’s got in mind for us. And he doesn’t give us a detailed explanation either - He just says “Trust me, because I love you.” So while we may not understand what God is doing to us, at least we’ll know why He’s doing it. And that’s why we should focus on God’s character when we give thanks. That way, we’ll have a reason to be thankful even when our lives seem to be falling apart around us.

This nation has gone through some pretty rough times. There have been disasters, wars, famines. Many of you lived through the Great Depression and you know what it means to go without some of the things we now take for granted as necessities. I’ve always been impressed that when things get tough in America, the churches get full. It seems that when there’s a war on, or when the economy’s down and people are out of work, there are more people thinking about God and willing to give thanks to him for who He is. That’s because when the blessings are taken away, and life gets down to its bare essentials, we learn to look beyond the blessings and see God.

That’s what the pilgrims had to do. Life, for them, was down to the bare bones. Out of 102 souls who came over on the Mayflower, 47 had died that first terrible winter. The second winter, they were down to a daily ration of five kernels of corn per person. Yet still they gave thanks. And their thanksgiving was a sacrifice. There is a very important verse in

Psalm 50:23 He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.

There are times when it seems that to give thanks requires a real sacrifice. We don’t feel like giving thanks. When we look all around us, there don’t seem to be any real reasons to give thanks. But when we give thanks to God for who He is in those circumstances, the Word of God calls that a sacrifice of thanksgiving. And a sacrifice of thanksgiving not only honors the Lord, but it prepares the way for God to show us His salvation.

If you want your children to be saved, teach them how to give a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God. If you want your life to be used as a witness to others, learn how to give thanks even when it hurts. And when you give thanks, remember to look beyond the blessings. Thank God for who He is.