Thanksgiving 91

Most of us did not learn how to pray in church. And we didn’t learn how in school, either. Nor did we learn how to pray in pajamas beside our bed at night.

No, to be quite honest, we’ve probably done more praying around the dinner table than anywhere else on earth. Those of us who had the privilege of growing up in a Christian home remember from our earliest years: If you don’t pray, you don’t eat.

You can call it by many names: Asking the blessing, saying grace, giving thanks. But whatever you call it, that simple moment of prayer before a meal is actually a communications lab where many of us learned for the very first time how to talk to God.

You may have enrolled in that Prayer Lab while you were still in your highchair, with Pablum smeared all over your face. You peeked and gurgled while everybody else sat silent and still. You may have tried to make your older siblings giggle by your antics. Then you yourself learned how to fold your hands and close your eyes. Pretty soon, you picked up the cue to add your own “Amen” at the end of the prayer, bringing smiles and praise from the grown-ups.

Then came the great day when you were old enough to solo. You mumbled earnestly about giving thanks for the food, got mixed up, looked around, then quickly closed with a relieved Amen as you looked at Mom and Dad’s face for approval.

Over the next few years, as you continue in the curriculum of prayer, you may go through several stages - stages that are quite common in Christian families.

Stage one: snickering. For some strange reason known only to God, prayer before the meal can, for a normal healthy child, become the comedy hour. Things which aren’t the least bit funny when everyone has their eyes open, for some reason become absolutely hysterical when the family is praying.

I can still remember an embarrassing moment from my childhood. I had secretly gulped a mouthful of milk just before my father started to say grace. During his long solemn prayer, which seemed to last for an eternity, my brother made me giggle. The prayer ended with me exploding in laughter with milk running out my nose and mouth and all down the front of me. That was not one of my better moments!

Stage Two: performing. After a few years of listening to the prayers of others, you finally begin to get the hang of it yourself. You begin to imitate their prayers - the language, the tone of voice, the posture - and you occasionally add a few wrinkles of your own, just to impress those who are listening. But the overall impression you’re trying to make is just that - an impression. Your begin to use prayer as a vehicle for showing off. “Look at me!” you shout. “Look at how spiritual I am!” That spontaneous and natural communication with God becomes a self-conscious performance for an audience.

Some people, tragically, never get beyond this stage. Jesus spoke of the Pharisees when he said: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.” Their prayer has become a performance to build up their own ego.

A person who giggles during prayer time is better off spiritually than one who prays so as to impress people. The person who giggles at least has the awareness that he is disrupting a sacred moment. But the person who performs has lost sight of the sacredness of the moment altogether. He has turned the sacred into the selfish.

There’s a third stage that you may go through: Doubting. This is a tough one, and it’s a stage at which many people drop out of the Prayer Lab altogether. You begin to wonder about prayer. You begin to ask questions about it.

What does it matter if you don’t pray before a meal? God knows you’re grateful, so why just go through the motions? You may find it tempting, especially when you are out in public, to just skip giving thanks before a meal. It’s not very sophisticated, and it certainly reveals more about you than you may want the casual onlooker to know.

The whole scene of bowing your head and closing your eyes and saying “religious” words seems somehow childish and unnecessary. If you spend long enough at this stage - the stage of doubting - you soon become cynical. After a certain number of prayerless meals, after enough thanklessness, you soon begin to conclude that God really isn’t necessary. He doesn’t matter after all.

In a recent episode of the Simpsons, Bart, who was asked by his father to give thanks before a meal, said “Dear God, we bought this food, so thanks for nothing.”

Bart Simpson’s prayer may be where most Americans find themselves today. Everywhere you look, people are talking about how bad things are this year. The media is full of stories about the sluggish economy, and about the many people who are out of work. Retailers are wringing their hands at the prospects of this being the worst Christmas in more than a decade. Everyone is cutting back on their spending. Giving to charitable organizations has plunged.

It seems as if, at Thanksgiving 1991, everyone is saying “Thanks for nothing, God.” That’s a symptom of stage four in the Prayer Lab: Focusing on the gift instead of focusing on the giver.

Now in order to get to Stage Four, you have to get past Stages 1,2, and 3. You have to believe that God matters. You have to believe in the importance of prayer. You have to believe in giving thanks.

But there’s one more question you still need to ask: What am I giving thanks for? It’s so easy for us to focus so much on the blessing that we lose sight of the blesser. Our thanksgiving so easily becomes a function of how much we have. If we have a lot, we can be very thankful. But if we have little, or if we have less than we had last year, we are not so thankful.

In order to truly appreciate Thanksgiving, we need to look beyond the blessings to the God 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.

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 his gifts and the blessings He gives us, we should give thanks to Him primarily 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 long 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 depend 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 should 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 things don’t seem to be as good as we would wish them to be.

The Pilgrims, from whom we learned the tradition of Thanksgiving, were men and women of faith. They learned to look beyond the blessings. Life, for them, was down to the bare bones. Out of 102 Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower, 47 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. 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 tangible 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.