Your prayer life may be thriving. but it will never be fully satisfying without this key ingredient. Thankfulness. Today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah considers why a spirit of thanksgiving is the cornerstone of a vibrant and fulfilling prayer life.
From Powerful Principles from Proverbs, here's David to introduce today's message, Power Up Your Prayer Life. Proverbs about prayer. And in this message, I'm going to share six things that you should be thankful for. And I hope you will stay with us through this day and into tomorrow as we talk about Proverbs for prayer. This is the series, Powerful Principles from Proverbs, and we're gathering together these great verses of scripture in this book of God's sayings, and we're putting them together in topical format so that we can take a look at the whole picture of what Solomon is saying about this subject and that subject.
We've gone through many so far, and we still have some left to go. If you didn't get the study guide for this series, it would be especially helpful because all of these scriptures are laid out in the study guide, along with exercises for you to do to internalize this material into your own spiritual life. This study guide is beautifully designed and ready for you. If you would like to get a copy of it, you can go to davidjeremiah.org, and there you will find out how to order the study guide and the audio set of teachings on CDE. And these will help you, whether you're just reviewing it for yourself or teaching a small group or however you.
Involve yourself in the Word of God.
So Prayer is a wonderful subject to study. It's a very hard thing to master. And most of us would say when the subject is prayer, I'm already guilty before it starts. But let me just tell you, we can learn so much from the book of Proverbs that will help us as we develop our prayer life. Here's part one.
The book of Proverbs speaks only a few times about prayer. Three or four times. And the one message that it gives to us is that prayer, true prayer. Belongs to the righteous. It belongs to God's people.
How many of you know? That only God's people get their prayers answered. That's the truth. The only prayer that God hears from somebody who's not a Christian is: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And then they become Christians and then God hears their prayers.
When we pray as God's people, God hears us, and He especially. delights in the prayers of those who walk uprightly. There are three proverbs that tell us that. Proverbs 15.8 says The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright. is his delight.
God loves the prayers of those who walk uprightly. Proverbs 15:29 is an echo. It says, The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous. And Proverbs 28:9 says, One who turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination. All three of these verses from the Proverbs, the very few mentions of prayer, and as far as I know, no mention of thanksgiving in the book of Proverbs.
All remind us of one truth. That God loves the prayers of his people. And whenever we hear verses like this, or we say things like this, or we think thoughts like this, we always assume that the prayers God loves to hear are the prayers of supplication and intercession, prayers where we come to God with our needs, and He hears us and He answers us. And I'm sure that's included in the proverb. But I have to tell you that I believe God delights in the prayers of thanksgiving from his people.
How many of you, as parents, know that there is a certain kind of joy. In meeting the needs of your children when they come to you, and there's something you can do to meet that need, and you say to them, I'm glad you asked. Most of the time. But I want to tell you something. There is some kind of joy when they think about it and they come back and say, Thank you.
Can I get a witness? Or when you get a little card like I got from one of my children. Expressing gratitude for things I had forgotten that I'd even done. That is a delight. to a father's heart.
How must God Almighty delight? In the prayers of thanksgiving that come from His people. And unfortunately, I have to believe that God is more delighted in the month of Thanksgiving than He is in any other time during the year because we sort of focus our attention on it and maybe we offer our thanks to God more, but we ought to be thankful all the time. And the Bible has no mention of the holiday of thanksgiving because there is no such thing in heaven. Thanksgiving should be the heart cry of every one of God's children.
I hope that I can encourage you to make this a very special time in your life. when we couple together the delight of the Lord. with the thanksgiving of his people.
Now, if you open your Bibles and just begin to read them from the beginning to the end, you will discover that there is a priority. Of the prayer of thanksgiving in the Word of God. It's an unnatural thing for an unbeliever to be thankful. If he's thankful, it's not normal. It's unnatural.
But it is a normal, and natural, and spiritual thing for somebody who knows God through Jesus Christ to have a heart of gratitude. In fact, Our very audience with God, our very prayer to God is to be prefaced with thanksgiving. How many of you know that it says in Psalm 100 that we're to enter his gates, how? With thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise, and be thankful to him and bless his name. In the Old Testament, the expression of gratitude was given such prominence, listen now, that certain members of the priesthood were assigned the sole task of leading the congregation in thanksgiving.
That was their only duty. That's what they did. What do you do in the church?
Well, I'm in charge of Thanksgiving. And if you read in the Old Testament, the book of 1 Chronicles chapter 16 and verse 4, it says this: And he appointed some of the Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord, to commemorate, to thank, and to praise the Lord God of Israel. Later on in 2 Chronicles it says, And Hezekiah appointed the divisions of the priests and the Levites according to their divisions, each man according to his service, the priests and Levites for burnt offerings and peace offerings to serve. to give thanks and to praise in the gates of the camp of the Lord. And later on, when this was revisited in the book of Nehemiah, we see the same thing again.
Now, at the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, they sought out the Levites in all their places to bring them to Jerusalem to celebrate the dedication with gladness, both with thanksgivings and singings, with cymbals and string instruments and harps. In the Old Testament, thanksgiving was such a priority, they had a special section of the clergy that did nothing but lead people in thanksgiving. And as you look at the Old Testament, you discover. It mentions the importance and the priority of Thanksgiving in their life. For instance, let me just give you one example.
The man Daniel, who we read about in Daniel 6:10, it says, When Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went home, and in his upper room with his windows open toward Jerusalem, He knelt down on his knees three times that day, and he prayed, and he gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since the early days. We have to sort of pump everybody up every November about the importance of Thanksgiving, but I don't think that was true in the Old Testament. They had a regular regime for making sure people always were thankful before God. And in the New Testament, we are repeatedly enjoined to give thanks always for all things. This is not optional, friends.
We don't get to vote on this one. The Bible says, in everything, give thanks. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. There's no such thing as an obedient. Ungrateful Christian.
If you're a Christian and you're obedient, you will be thankful. Gratitude is the attitude of every spirit-filled believer. The Bible says, therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name. Hebrews 13, 15.
Now you can't be any clearer than this. God expects us to be thankful. And whenever you stop Becoming thankful in your spirit, you begin to push God to the perimeter of your life, and before you know it, even as a believer, you can live as a practical atheist. Living your life For the commercial things that happen, but never understanding that behind it all is the hand of Almighty God. Paul notes here that the believer should literally Excel.
In the New Testament, when you read the New Testament and you recognize what's going on in the New Testament, you realize that Paul is the one who teaches us from the New Testament perspective. How to make central the purpose of giving thanks. Let me just give you some references. And I'm going to give you a lot of scriptures today because what I want to do as the result of this message is to give you the impression. That the whole Bible is about thanksgiving.
Because it is. From the beginning to the end, it is a continual, constant theme. Colossians 2:6 and 7: As you therefore have received Christ Jesus as Lord, walk in Him, rooted and grounded in the faith as you have been taught, abounding in it with Thanksgiving. Paul is saying that we should excel in giving thanks, abounding in thanksgiving. The expression of gratitude should be always on our lips.
It should be a constant feature of the way we handle life. Thanksgiving should be one of our great strengths from the sheer amount of practice that we get every day just being thankful. What does it look like when you have that kind of a spirit?
Well, when Paul was writing to the Ephesians, he told them that that sort of a spirit was the result of being filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now, listen to these words and try to get a picture of the kind of person who's living like this verse describes. Listen carefully. Ephesians 5. And do not be drunk with wine, where is in excess. But be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, submitting one to another in the fear of God.
What does a thankful person look like? What does he act like? How can you identify him? My friends, you can pick him out of a crowd. When you walk into a room, you can tell somebody who's filled with the Spirit with a thankful heart.
Don't you just like to rub up against them? Don't you like to be in their presence? When you leave, you feel so refreshed having been with them. You feel like you want to go and do better, that you want to be more thankful. And sometimes these people, as I have been learning in the last several years, are people who have suffered greatly, who have gone through terrible, terrible times of sickness and anguish and brokenness.
And somehow, out of the brokenness, the sweet perfume of gratitude is everywhere apparent. And you just marvel, and the thing that you say is: that's not normal. And you know what? It isn't normal. It's spiritual.
It's the result of being filled with the Spirit of God. If we want to be happy. If we want to celebrate We should do it spiritually. We do this by filling our minds and our hearts with thanksgiving so that our gratitude overflows into songs of praise to the Lord. Psalm 69:30 says, I will praise the name of God with a song, and I will magnify Him with thanksgiving.
So the priority of thanksgiving is everywhere in the Bible. It's not just a few texts that God put in there so we'd have something to preach on during Thanksgiving. It's everywhere in the Bible. When I became sensitized to this, I wrote a book on the Spirit of God. I did a whole chapter on gratitude because I couldn't get over how much there was in the Bible.
There is no lack of texts for Thanksgiving Sunday, let me tell you that. Because the Bible is so pregnant with the truth. of the thankful heart. And of course, as you take this and you study it and you lay it all out on paper, you begin to see that there are certain things that God tells us to be thankful for, and we see some of the purposes of thanksgiving. Of all the people in the Bible, nobody that I know was more thankful than Paul.
In all of his letters, gratitude drips from the pages. His instruction to us is that we are to be a thankful people, and when we think about the man who wrote it, It is even more meaningful to us. How many of you know Paul didn't live in a penthouse? Paul didn't live in a palace. Paul spent most of his time.
behind bars doing time. He was always in trouble, and the words of praise are more dominant in one of his section of letters. You know what those letters are called? Listen, they're called the prison epistles. In the prison epistles, you find so much about gratitude.
And when I see that, I think, you know, this guy must have some kind of something that's different than what I notice around us today. Here he is in the midst of pain and suffering and pressure, and it's not deserved. and yet he always finds something to be thankful for. When you look at his life, it was one life of misery. He was stoned at Lystra.
He was driven out of Thessalonica. He was rejected at Athens. He was jailed in Philippi. He was apprehended at Caesarea. He was taken as a prisoner to Rome, released, and then put in prison again.
He was put in a dungeon, and ultimately, he was martyred. If you want to read an accurate account of his troubles, Go to 2 Corinthians chapter 11. This has a special meaning to me. I just need to remind you of this. 2 Corinthians chapter 11.
If you want to see what this man went through, Here's a little list. And this is what we ought to read before we read all the things for which he was thankful. And I need to tell you, some of you know this. When I was sick in the hospital, I got a card from somebody. It was made down in Greenville, North Carolina at a special greeting card company.
And this card was supposed to be a get-well card. And on the front of the card were the words of 2 Corinthians 11. It was in a stack of all of the other Get Well cards trying to encourage me, and this is what it said. Beginning at verse 24. From the Jews five times I received forty stripes, minus one.
Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I've been in the deep. I'm thinking, who sent me such a sorry card? In journeys, often in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils, this is all on the front of a get-while card. In weariness and toil and sleeplessness, often beside the other things, what comes upon me daily? Who is weak, and I am not weak.
And I read that whole thing and I thought, man, this is really sad that someone would be so sick in their thoughts that they would send somebody who's suffering a card like this. And then I opened it up. And on the inside were these words.
So how you been? Yeah. Isn't that great? I felt better immediately. And I only tell you that because while we're laughing at it, it was no laughing matter for Paul, was it?
Paul went through some very difficult times, and yet, out of the brokenness of his life and the difficulty that he faced, came this Aroma of thanksgiving that's everywhere present. And I went through his epistles and I just wrote down some of the things he was thankful for to help me know some of the things I ought to be thankful for. First of all, he was thankful for salvation in Jesus Christ. At the end of 2 Corinthians chapter 9, he says, Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. Romans 6:17, but God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered.
Maybe you can't remember that far back when you got saved. But most of us remember When we were saved, and how God came and through His wonderful Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, gave us salvation. One of the things about Paul that I've noticed is that when he's writing his epistles, they're all very logical and very sequential and very in order until he thinks about his own salvation. Then he goes off on a rabbit trail for five or six verses and talks about how wonderful it is to be a Christian. There was a hymn that was written.
And it's been wonderfully used of the Lord over the years. And I'm going to read the hymn, which you probably won't recognize, but when I read the chorus, you will. The hymn Goes like this: Some thank the Lord for friends and home. For mercies sure and sweet. But I would praise him for his grace in prayer, I would repeat.
Some thank him for the flowers that grow, some for the stars that shine. My heart is filled with joy and praise because I know he's mine. I trust in him from day to day, I prove his saving grace. I'll sing this song of praise to him until I see his face. You know what the chorus is.
Thank you, Lord, for saving my soul. Thank you, Lord, for making me whole. Thank you, Lord. For giving to me. Thy great salvation, so rich.
I'm afraid That's the greatest thing we have, isn't it? when we have Jesus Christ and we have salvation. Everything else can be fallen apart, but if it's well with our soul, oh my, are we rich. Because that's an eternal blessing no one can ever take from us. Let me hurry on.
We should be thankful for the strength that God gives us. 1 Corinthians 1:4 says, I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Jesus Christ. We should be thankful for spiritual fellowship. Over and over again in the scripture, we find this. 2 Thessalonians 1:3 says, We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is fitting.
Because your faith grows exceedingly, and the love of every one of you all abounds, each toward the other. Have you ever given thanks to the Lord for the fellowship you have with God's people? You know what you need to do is spend about six weeks on a mission field where there's only one or two other Christians and then come home and look around in church some Sunday and say, Look at all of these people who love the Lord the way I love the Lord and how blessed I am to be with them. That's why, when we put together opportunities for us to get to know one another in groups and in Sunday school classes, you ought to run toward that as Christians who love the fellowship of God's people. We have something uniquely special that you cannot describe, you can only experience.
And if you know the Lord, you are instantly grafted to everyone else who knows the Lord. And you have oneness and fellowship, and you ought to be thankful for it. You ought to be thankful for the sustenance of God's Word. The Thessalonian believers were a special group of people who loved the Word of God. For in 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, Paul wrote about them.
He said, for this reason, we also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth the word of God, which effectively works in you who believe. Do you thank God for the word of God, which effectively works in you? That believe. My friends, God's word is something that strengthens and sustains us and helps us. I preached in North Carolina.
And I wasn't feeling very well. I was starting. I thought to get the flu. And I said to my wife, I don't know how I'm going to do this. I'm going to stand up here and preach in front of all these people, and then I have to stand in line for two hours and shake hands and sign books.
I don't have the strength. This is going to be interesting.
So I went to the church and I went back in the back room and I shut the door. And I had an hour before the service started. And I just got my Bible out, and I didn't think about doing this. I just sat down and I began to read through the scripture. I start at a place where I had left off and I began to read.
I never had anything quite like this happen to me before, but during that hour, the Word of God began to nourish my soul and strengthen my life. And when I got done, I almost had forgotten that I wasn't feeling good. I went out in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the strength which God alone can give, and I had a strong night, and I signed every book and shook every hand. and went home late. And you say, can God do that?
Yeah, the Word of God strengthens you, not only spiritually, but sometimes it can even strengthen you physically. God's Word is the nourishment of our soul, and by His Spirit, He can fill us and empower us to do what we could not otherwise do. Do you ever thank God for that? Do you thank God for the word? I think that ought to be something we do once in a while.
We ought to be thankful for God's people who serve. Ephesians 1, 15 and 16 says, Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers. I wish I had time to go through all of these things that Paul was thankful for, but I'll leave that up to you. You can read his epistles and especially the prison epistles and you will find it everywhere. Just read the prison epistles.
You'll have so much stuff you won't be able to talk about it all. Because Paul was a thankful man. And he admonishes us to be thankful. It is one of his most prominent themes. He was thankful, and he used it as a platform to urge everybody else to be thankful as well.
And we have no reason. to be unthankful. And you know what you discover when you read Paul is that his thanksgiving wasn't based upon how well things were going in his life, because he had a very disciplined and difficult life. And if you read the Sections of Scripture that describe Paul in his journeys, you'll discover that he wasn't thankful because every day was a bright and happy day. He was thankful in the midst of his trouble and sometimes in spite of his trouble and sometimes for his trouble.
He was a thankful man, and he teaches us much. I hope you've been joining us as we've been talking about these things. And tomorrow we'll have part two of Power Up Your Prayer Life as we continue our discussion of prayer from this great Old Testament book. Hey, don't forget the Caribbean cruise is coming up right after Christmas. It's a conference cruise that we take each year.
The dates are the 26th of December through the 2nd of January. Get more information about it at davidjeremiah.org and plan to come and be with us. See you next time right here on this good station. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, Powerful Principles from Proverbs, please visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, Turning Points, and our daily email devotional.
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You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International and New King James Versions. complete with notes and articles from Dr. Jeremiah's decades of study. Get all the details when you visit our website, davidjeremiah.org/slash radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah.
Join us tomorrow as we continue powerful principles from Proverbs on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
