Thankfulness: A Mark of Grace (Part 2 of 2)

The Apostle Paul frequently exhorted believers to give thanks to God continually in every circumstance. But genuine gratitude isn't merely driven by good habits or self-endeavor.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll find out how we become truly thankful. Alistair Begg is teaching from 1 Thessalonians Chapter 5. We're focusing on verse 18.

The cry of ethics is simply this. Be what you are not. The call of Christianity is to become what you are. Now, let me illustrate that by the verses I said I'd return to in Colossians chapter 2.

Colossians chapter 2 and verse 6. So then, says Paul, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord… I want you to stop there. So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord… The tense here is not simply the past tense. It is a tense in the Greek language which conveys a completed action in the past with continuing results or conditions. The completed action in the past is that this individual has come to receive Christ Jesus as Lord.

Now, let me ask you a question this morning. Have you ever received Christ Jesus as Lord? You see, the call to thankfulness is not a call which is issued, as it were, Paul going out onto the streets and gathering up a crowd of people and saying to them, Listen, I think that since you live in such a nice place and you seem to be fairly well put together, I think you all ought to be a far more thankful group of people than you are.

Now, go on and try and be far more thankful than you've been, and go on with you now and see if you can do much better than you've been doing. But that's the call of all kinds of religion. And that, you see, is what many of you have only come as far as, because you are not Christians. Oh, you say, What do you mean I'm not a Christian? I'm in the lineage of Lincoln. That's a long time ago, and I'm here in America, you know. I'm certainly Christian. Oh, does Christianity pass to you with national status?

That you get the freedom to work, the freedom to vote, the opportunity to serve in the military, and you become a Christian as well, by dint of being born here. No, you say, Well, no, I didn't really mean that at all, but I mean, I come to the church, and I have been coming to the church for some time now. I understand. You could also have been spending your afternoon sitting in your garage.

But sitting in your garage wouldn't have turned you into a Ford Mustang, you know. The very fact that you're in a place that is related to the event does not necessarily mean that the event is uniquely yours. And the reason I point this out to you this morning is because it is so crucial. Why is it that so many people are absolutely stalled at this time of year?

I'll tell you why. Because the directive comes to them, but there is no dynamic within them. They are not Christians. They do not have the power of Christ within them. They have never received Jesus. They do not know what it means to bow beneath his lordship. All that they have done is assimilate various religious ideas, and they have added them then to the package of their existence.

And so what you have is some kind of ethical call. And so they've come through these last few days, and they haven't been particularly thankful at all. And when they got into the church on the Sunday morning, if there isn't some alien and stranger haranguing them about the fact that they ought to be thankful, when thankfulness is the last thing from their minds. And you say to yourself, there's no way I'm going to be thankful.

No, there isn't. You're stuck. You're stuck with any endeavor to try and pull yourself out of the spirit of debasement? And I want to tell you that unless you receive Christ Jesus as Lord, you have no dynamic with which to be able to fulfill the directive.

Did you ever consider that? You see, you could give me a play by Shakespeare and put part of the soliloquies up on the screen and then ask me to write such a play. I can't do it. You could put up over here a painting by Turner and say, now do one of those wonderful landscapes like Turner, and I can't do it. You could put up before us all the life of Jesus Christ and say, now live a life like Jesus Christ, and I can't do it. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could pen words like that.

And if the genius of Turner could come and live in me, then I could paint a landscape like that. And if the power of Jesus could come and live in me, then I might live a life like that. You see, the message of Christianity is not become what you are not. The message of Christianity is admit what you are. And there's the rub, you see. For the average well-heeled businessman, the average put-together family that comes to an event such as this, the one thing in the world that you don't ever want to do is to admit what you are.

I mean that if people could really see what you are, if they could see what you really like, if they could know the kind of things you see in your car, if they could understand the sort of stuff that you are prepared to tolerate and live with. And after all, they think you're an outstanding person. They commend you.

They talk about you in the office and they say, you know, he gave so much to the such and such project and the people down on East whatever street, they are so thankful because he did this and she was down there the other night and took blankets and all of these wonderful things, which of course pagans can do, can't they? And which anybody can do. These are all external to ourselves. We may do them simply as a result of guilt.

We may do them as a result of pragmatism. But the kind of thankfulness which overflows here, which Paul calls for, is a thankfulness that only comes as a result of understanding what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Is there an event in your life? Has there come a time in your life where you received Christ Jesus as Lord?

And if there is not, then I put it to you that there is really little point in going much further with the exhortation, because you have no way to complete the project, except by human endeavor. A completed action in the past with continuing results and conditions. It was some twenty-five years ago I said to my wife, you know, Yeah, I love you for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health and so on. What if she asked me about it in the last week and I said, Oh, that was twenty-five years ago. We're not dealing with that still, are we? That was a long time ago. What's that got to do with now? That would be a ridiculous answer, wouldn't it?

Because the event that took place then in the past has abiding conditions in the present. And having received Christ Jesus as Lord, so then, as I abide in him, rooted and built up in him, as he says there, studying my Bible, learning to pray, fellowshiping with God's people, making much of who Jesus is, telling others about him, as I'm rooted and grounded in these things, then I grow up into him, and then I overflow with thankfulness. So, if you see that an absence of thankfulness will then be diagnosed by a spiritual doctor, either as a result of lifelessness—for unless we have received Christ Jesus as Lord, we cannot overflow with thanksgiving—so whether there's an absence of thankfulness, then either the person has ceased to be rooted and grounded and built up in Christ, so they've just become a miserable rascal, or that beyond that they have never, ever received Jesus. Now, mercifully, it's the work of the Spirit of God to do the diagnosis and not me or anybody else. I'm not going amongst a congregation to find out just exactly where you are. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't be able to find out. How could I ever diagnose such things?

You couldn't diagnose it in me. I could be up here and preach for a month on Sundays, and you would still never know the difference. But the Spirit of God does. Now, you see—and let me go to my final word, the directive, thankful in all circumstances, the dynamic, having received Christ as Lord, we are rooted and grounded in him. And what is the doctrine that underpins this?

Well, it's the doctrine of providence, that God is completely in charge of his world and that although his hand may be hidden, his rule is absolute. You don't have to sit by your televisions counting down to five o'clock this afternoon, no matter how interested in it you are, with some great spirit of anxiety and panic and worry. They're counting it down now on CNN, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, down to the great moment, to the great five o'clock moment. There will be another moment after the five o'clock moment. And they'll have to get another clock out, and they'll set that up again. But let me tell you the clock that is ticking.

It is the clock of which we read in 1 Thessalonians 5. "'Do not live,' he says, as children of the night, but as children of the day, who are paying attention to the fact that the real clock that is ticking is a clock that is ticking, as it were, on the portal of eternity. And it is clicking down to the time when the trumpet will sound, and Christ will appear, and he will bring to fruition all that he has planned from all of eternity."

And that is the real issue. And God reigns and rules concerning this. And everything else may be subsumed under the vastness of that plan. God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year. He is in all things working for the good of those who love him. He is in everything conforming the events of our lives to the purpose of his will.

He is separating and transforming his people into the likeness of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is why, incidentally, loved ones, there are things in your life and mine that do not immediately go in the category of good that God has brought into our lives in recent days, because his transforming things for our good to create a spirit of thankfulness is not about giving us the government we think is best. It's not about making sure that our family life is always intact. It's not about making sure that everybody lives for a hundred years and that we all go on fine together. If it were, then frankly, we have nothing of which to speak, because our congregation is riddled with pain and with disappointment and collapse and confusion and all manner of things. And yet we're going to declare that God is good in all circumstances.

How could this ever be? Because the ultimate goodness to which he works is to conform us to the image of his Son and to prepare us for the day when we will stand with him in glory and all the affairs of time and the things that ravage our minds now will then be seen to have fallen away like scaffolding, having been raised around a vast structure so that all of the glory and beauty of it may now be seen. And he will kick all the scaffolding away. It will fall away! You say to yourself, Well, that is a shame for me, because I'm only involved in the scaffolding.

I hope not. If you doubt this, and some of you are teenagers here, and you listen to music and you lie on your bed at night and you say, Who am I? What am I? Where did I come from?

Where am I going? It doesn't even make one stinking bit of difference. And everything that you read and everything that you listen to and everything that gushes your way confirms the fact that you are just some piece of plankton soup, that you are adrift in the universe. Well, go home and get a Bible and take one with you, Psalm 139, and read there about how God has created you, put you intricately together in your mother's womb, given you the eyes that he gave you and the color of your hair and your nose and the exact place, and given you your own DNA and established all the days of your life. He wrote them in his book ever before one of them came to be. Do you see how vastly different this is?

You might as well believe there is no God, as believe that he doesn't see, or he doesn't hear, or he doesn't care, or he doesn't act in human affairs. You see, this is in direct contrast to the worldview of many, and I draw this to a close in just a moment here. In the Glasgow Herald in Scotland, they have a poem every day, and this is the one from, I think, the 4th of June or the 6th of June. I can't remember.

But I tore it out. It's by Thomas Hardy. You know Thomas Hardy, far from the madding crowd, Tess of the Durables, Jude the Obscure, etc. This is his poem, which everybody woke up to in Glasgow if they take the Glasgow Herald on either the 4th or the 6th of June this year, and as they were having their conflicts, this is what they read, if but some vengeful God would call to me from up the sky and laugh, thou suffering thing, know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, that thy love's loss is my hate's profiting? Then would I bear it, clench myself and die, steeled by the sense of ire unmerited, half-eased in that a power fuller than I had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain? And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain, and dicing time for gladness casts a moan. These purblind doomsters had as readily strong blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. And underneath the heading daily poem the editor has written not a happy poem but a thoughtful one, lamenting the effect of sheer chance on human affairs.

Not a happy poem but a thoughtful one. In other words, Hardy says I'm just a cog in the machinery. We're just individual cells in that single global organism that constitutes the earth. Or to go back twenty years and put it right down at the lowest of levels we are in the words of Pink Floyd, hey, teacher, leave those kids alone. They're just another brick in the wall.

There's no significance, no intrinsic individual meaning to life. Just another brick. We're simply a collection of fifteen hundred bricks seated here at the moment, about to disengage ourselves from the other bricks and go out and find a building site on which to spend the rest of our lives—hopefully some in a grand building, others in a poorer building, but whatever.

We'll just be another brick in the wall. Is it any wonder that there's such a thing as road rage when people get up and then they have this with their cornflakes? You know you get up in the morning and you read this. You say to your wife, well, I have to get out on the road now. You get out on like a total maniac because you feel completely trapped.

Or alternatively, you feel completely toyed with. This is the fifth of June from the same newspaper. Truly mankind is the son of blob, and you theory on the origin of life suggests that we are descendants of bubbles of oily fat. The new theory of life proposes that we are related to microscopic lipids, chemicals which still exist in our cells today, and our megadistant ancestors were not formed.

Rather, they dribbled together slowly. Loved ones, these are the alternatives that are up for grabs right now in our culture. This is the war that is being raged.

It's a war that is far more significant than any political machinations. It's actually about a view of the world. It's about the intrinsic nature of man. It is about whether we are created by an interpersonal creator God. It is about all of these things. And to think that people can grow up believing that they're the son of blob, or believing that they're simply being toyed with, or believing that there's no difference between up and down, that there is only void, that with Nietzsche it has become chilly and the dark night is closing in. Take your choice. Is that how you want to live your life?

Trapped, toyed with for trusting God? Let me finish with another piece from my files from dear Diane Circelli, whose memory we revere. What a great girl. A cheerleader in her early teens, and then that encroaching skin disease took over and closed her down, made her so unlike her early pictures, so unlike the cheerleading pictures. I only knew her post-cheerleader. I only knew her, as many of you did, when the illness had begun to close in upon her. And yet, those who knew her best would testify to the fact that it in no way made her a creature of self-pity. She did not find herself morose and waiting for people to come and serve her. Indeed, the testimonies about her all had to do with the fact that she still loved to make the meals for her dad. She still loved to have the family come over for Thanksgiving.

She still loved to be the one who, despite the difficulties of her life, was putting the operation together for others. Therefore, it was no surprise when on the 4th of July 1995, she wrote to her mom and to her dad and to her family to say that in prospect of her soon-to-be demise, she had certain requests for them because she was going to die and leave them, and she wanted to make sure that they were okay. And in the course of her telling them how much she loves them and how grateful she was for their love and care, how difficult it was to think of leaving them, she says, I have these requests for you. And then she gives them, and then she says this, It's difficult expressing all that this life and my future eternal life mean to me. This verse expresses a little of my feelings and my gratitude to God for the life, the family, and the friends he has given me. And then she quotes Job 10 12, You gave me life and showed kindness, and in your providence watched over my spirit. Now, I put it to you that it is impossible to write this letter, to live this life of thankfulness, simply as a result of determining that by self-endeavor I will respond to the directive of the time of the season, and I will just try and become a thankful person.

No, it's going to take far more than that. It's going to come to the fact that I am a person of ingratitude, that I have never been grateful to God for the fact that he gave me the gift of his Son, that I've never bowed down and acknowledged that I needed the gift that he came to give, that I've never held up my hands like this and said, Lord Jesus Christ, I receive the gift of your salvation, and I welcome you as Lord and Savior of my life. And I pray that thou be enrooted and built up in him. I may actually overflow with thankfulness. Some of you are still tied up on the fact that if you just try a little harder, you're going to be there. You're going to frustrate yourselves dreadfully. When Jesus came, the people who thought they were really good found that Jesus had little time for them at all, and the people who knew themselves to be really bad found that Jesus loved spending time with them.

Why was that? Because Jesus knew that it was going to be by his death on the cross that all of the problem of our sin and our rebellion and our unbelief would be dealt with, and that therefore what was necessary was not for people to put themselves in a position of goodness, but it was for people to take all of their goodness, everything that they felt was good that they could offer up to God, all of their righteous deeds, all of the things that made them them, all of the things that made them walk out in the street. They were going to have to strip down to the buff, metaphorically. And he would then give them the royal robes they don't deserve. To the extent that you or I believe ourselves to be deservedly in Christ, we have never understood the gospel. For those of us who know that he has dressed us up in finery for kings and priests, that given what we know about ourselves is an amazing grace. Then we say, hey, we bow before your majesty, and we thank you. Oh, do we thank you. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.

Alistair will be back in just a minute. As the holiday shopping season quickly approaches, let me point you to a selection of gospel sharing gifts available on our website at truthforlife.org slash gifts. You will find their high quality biblically sound books you can buy for preschoolers, older children, even adults, and they're all available at our cost.

Shipping in the US is free. Christmas is a perfect time to give gifts that introduce people to Jesus. And that's why we sell these books at our cost. Our hope is you'll take the opportunity to share the gospel widely this holiday season by stocking up with meaningful gifts at very affordable prices. Again, go to truthforlife.org slash gifts. And if you are kind enough to add a year end donation when you make a purchase, we will say thank you by offering you a fun family devotional for Christmas titled Promises Made, Promises Kept. This is a colorfully illustrated hardcover book with 14 short stories.

It's perfect for reading with school-aged children. The first part of the book explores the promise of a savior. The prophets who foretold these promises longed to see them come to pass, but did not live long enough to celebrate the first Christmas morning. After reading about God's promises in the first half of the book, you flip the book over and learn how God fulfilled his promises by sending Jesus. Ask for the devotional today when you donate to Truth for Life at truthforlife.org slash donate.

Now here's Alistair with a closing prayer. Father, we thank you for your love and your goodness expressed to us in Jesus. Words run away from us to try and crystallize these truths. Grant that anything that is said that is wrong may be forgotten. Anything that is said that is unclear may be clarified.

Anything that is said that just confuses the issue may be banished from our minds. And I pray that from the tiniest child to the oldest person here, you will give us a baptism of clear seeing who we are, what Christ has come to do, and what it means to overflow with thankfulness. May we bow before the greatness of your majesty today and all our days, for Jesus' sake we ask it. Amen. What does it mean for us to be in Christ? Tomorrow we'll explore the answer in another encouraging thanksgiving message. I hope you can join us. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.