You can't always control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. Do you respond with hope and thankfulness? Today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah takes a closer look at fostering a rich prayer life. one that's marked by a spirit of hope and thanksgiving.
With the conclusion of his message, power up your prayer life, Proverbs about prayer. Here's David. And thank you for joining us. Hey, friends, have you ever noticed? How prominent the subject of gratitude is, especially in the New Testament.
It is one of the pictures of what a Christian should be like. Full of gratitude, full of thanksgiving. Have you ever known anybody like that? Surely, we all have examples we can think of of people who just, whenever you are with them, they just seem to be so grateful for everything that has happened to them and is happening to them, even the hard things. And don't we want to be like that?
Yes. I always told people, I don't want to grow up and be a grumpy old man. I want to be a grateful man, a man who's thankful for all the blessings of God, even in spite of the trouble that comes periodically.
So here's some motivation for that. Here in the book of Proverbs is some motivation for living a grateful, thankful prayer life. And I hope you will. Yeah. Observe all of these wonderful principles and put them into your life.
We are so very excited about this book that we are making available during the month of August. It's brand new from the Turning Point Press, and it's called God's Heart for Israel, a beautiful hardback gift book, over 100 pages of teaching on what the Bible says about Israel and what our attitude toward them ought to be. Really important information for everybody right now because anti-Semitism is on the rise in our nation. We must not let that happen as Christians. We need to dig into the Word of God and be prepared to stand with our brothers and sisters who occupy that little postage stamp place we know is Israel in the Middle East.
We will make this book available to you when you send a gift of any size to Turning Point during the month of August. The month is getting away from us, so don't wait too much longer before you write that letter and send your gift and just say, please send me the book on Israel, and it'll be on its way before you know it. It's our joy to do this because it will add value to your life as a Christian and give you perspective. and direction right straight from God's Word.
Now let's get to our discussion today. Open your Bibles. the word of god and here we are with power up your prayer life proverbs about prayer 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.
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 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-wow 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? 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 to 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 in 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 started 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? 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. The Bible says that whatever we do in word or in deed, we are to do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him. And in the same prison epistle, Colossians 4:2, he says, continue in prayer and watch in the same with thanksgiving.
In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. Pastor Jack Hinton was on a short-term missions trip some years ago, and he was leading a worship at a leper colony. On the island of Tobago. A woman who had been facing away from the pulpit. turned around.
And he said it was the most hideous face he had ever seen. The woman's nose and ears were entirely gone, and she lifted a fingerless hand in the air and she asked. Can we sing? Count your many blessings. Overcome with emotion.
Jack Hinton left the service. He was followed by a team member who said, I guess you'll never be able to sing that song again, will you? And he said, no, he said, that's not true. I'll just never be able to sing it again the same way. We have so much.
We are such Recipients of the grace and goodness of God, how thankful we ought to be. Not out of guilt because we have more than others, but out of gratitude because God has been so gracious. Dale Carnegie. used to recommend to people that came to his seminars. That they take out a pencil and paper and make a list of every good thing in their life.
Then, in their mind, they were told to imagine that each one of these things had been taken away. and to imagine what life would be like without them. And when they had fully realized the emptiness without all of these things, they were to gradually give them back to themselves one by one. counting their blessing. and being thankful.
What an exercise. Make a list of everything that's good in your life. And then one by one, Take them away. And then give them back to yourself with a spirit of thanksgiving.
Well, I need to wrap all of this up, but I want to give you three thoughts about Thanksgiving: some principles that will help us in these next days. As we take the idea that God delights in the prayer of His people and especially in the thanksgiving of His people, notice, first of all, that thanksgiving is a choice. Henry Nguyen once wrote that where there is reason for gratitude, there can also be a reason for bitterness. It is here that we are faced with the freedom to make a decision. We can decide to be grateful or we can decide to be bitter.
Everything that happens in life, we can either be better from it or bitter from it. Isn't that true? I ran into a woman who said she had read the introduction to the book, The Bend in the Road, that my wife Donna had written. And Donna made the comment in this book that when we went through this experience of illness. She made the decision of hope.
She chose hope. How many of you know you can choose hope? How many of you know you can choose gratitude? And it is a choice. You can look at life and you can talk about the things that have happened, but if you do that, you need to take a full picture.
I had a young woman come up to me after I had spoken, and she said, I want you to know, Pastor Jeremiah, that I feel cheated. And then she told me a very sad story. about finding out that she had a very, very bad kind of cancer. And that she had just given birth to their first child, and she said, I feel cheated because I don't think I'll ever get to see this child grow up. And I looked at her with all the love in my heart, and I.
Wanted to say some trivial thing, you know, some pious platitude that the Lord loves you. All I could say was, you know. God has given you these days with this child. God has given you these days on this earth. God has given you the love of this man.
And in the midst of it all, there's this pain and anguish. And let me remind you also that the doctors can tell you what they think, but only God makes the final decision. I have a little thing written in one of my books that says this. You can't deny the diagnosis, but you can defy the verdict. Amen.
And you can choose hope just as you can choose Thanksgiving. It's a choice. Matthew Henry, a well-known Bible teacher, one day said he was robbed. And the evening after that, he was making an entry into his diary about his Thanksgiving. He had been robbed.
And this is what he wrote down. First, I am thankful because I was never robbed before. Secondly, I am thankful because they only took my wallet and they didn't take my life. And thirdly, I'm thankful because they took my all, but it wasn't very much. And fourthly, I am thankful because it was I who was robbed and not I who robbed.
I mean, it's a matter of perspective. It's a choice, isn't it? Alexander White, the famous Scottish preacher, invariably began his public prayers with an expression of thanksgiving. And one cold and rainy day, when his people wondered who he could be grateful for and how he could be grateful for the weather, he began by saying, And we thank thee, O Lord, that it is not always like this. Always just a matter of choice.
Not only is Thanksgiving a choice, but Thanksgiving is a catalyst. Let me tell you what that means. A catalyst is something that we hear sometimes. I don't know if we know what it is, but it comes from the Greek word pronounced exactly as it is in English. And in chemistry, it is a substance that is added to the chemical solution to accelerate the desired effect.
It can be removed at the end of the process without affecting the final product.
Now, watch carefully. Thanksgiving is that kind of an agent. Add it to anything you are doing and it accelerates the desired outcome. Make it a part of any formula in your life and it will have a dramatic effect. Add it to your prayers.
Paul said, in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Add it to your memories. Paul said, I thank God, whom I serve with a pure conscience. As my forefathers did, as without ceasing, I remember you in my prayers night and day. Add thanksgiving to your life.
And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him. When you put Thanksgiving, everything changes. Add it to everything you do. You have to be conscious about this, proactive about it. It won't just happen naturally.
You have to pray that God, some of you need to pray a lot about this. Because you don't have a naturally thankful spirit. You have a tendency to always see the glass. Half empty instead of half full. Ask God to give you this ability to add thanksgiving to your life.
Finally, I need to remind you as we started that Thanksgiving is a command. It's not only a choice and a catalyst, it's a command. In everything, give thanks. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. If you choose to be ungrateful, you have chosen to be disobedient.
That's just simply the way the Word of God reads. In the Old Testament, the prophet Samuel exhorted the people of God with these words. Listen to this verse in 1 Samuel 12:24. Only fear the Lord and serve him in truth. With all your heart.
Four. Consider what great things he has done. for you. Consider that. What great things God has done.
for you. I want to remind you at the end of this message that I have an assignment for you. And to give you this assignment, let me tell you this story. When William Stiger taught at Boston University, he once reflected upon the great number of unthanked people in his life. people who had helped nurture him, inspire him, people that had cared for him.
People that had left a lasting impression on his life. One of these people was a school teacher he'd not heard from in many years, but he remembered that she had gone out of her way to put the love of poetry in his life. And will Stidger loved poetry all of his life.
So one day, when he was in a thankful mode, he sat down and he wrote her a letter. The reply he received Written in feeble scrawl of the aged, began, My dear Willie. He was delighted. He was now over 50 years old and going bald, and a professor, and he didn't think there was one person left in the world who ever knew that his name had once been Willie. Here is what that letter said.
My dear Willie, I cannot tell you how much your note meant to me. I am in my 80s, living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely and like the last leaf of autumn lingering behind. You will be interested to know that I taught school for 50 years, and yours is the first note of appreciation I ever received. It came on a blue cold morning, and it cheered me as nothing has in many years. Not prone to cry easily.
Will wept over that note. She was one of the great unthanked people from his past. You know them, and we all do, and even now, as I speak, you're thinking of some of those people who have touched your life in a special way. The teacher who made a difference, the coach you can't forget. The music instructor or the Sunday school worker who helped you believe in yourself and in the Lord.
We all remember those people who shaped our lives in various ways, people who influenced us. and helped us along. Will Stiger found a way. to show his appreciation. He wrote them a letter.
And I want you to write some letters this week. to people in your life. who have touched you. with a spirit of thankfulness. Maybe you haven't thought of them in years.
You might have to do some research to find out where they are. Write them a note. That will prime the pump of thanksgiving in your heart. That's the first assignment, but here's the most important one. I want you to write a letter to Almighty God.
A letter that spells out in detail why you are thankful to Him. You say, Well, Pastor, I can just pray that. Oh, yes, you can, but let me tell you what I've learned now from about eight years of journaling. When you journal, you say it clearer and you say it more powerfully, and you say it in a way that you will never say it if you just let it flow from your mouth. Sit down.
with your computer men, because that's macho. with your journal women because that's mystic and feminine. And write God a letter. and simply began, Dear God, This particular time in my life, I want to express my gratitude to you for all that you mean to me. First of all, I want to thank you for that day when I was a teenager.
And I finally came to understand that Jesus Christ was my Savior. They might stand. I won't finish my letter because it's mine. And I want you to write yours. It may take two or three pages, or it may just be one page, but write until you can't write anymore.
Sign your name to it. Then stick it in the back of your Bible. And every once in a while, when you're prone to a spirit of ingratitude. Pull out your letter to God. and read it out loud.
And you will be reminded. we have a lot to be thankful for. Amen, and we surely do. We surely do. God's perspective is that, and that's what we need to make it through life.
Hey, tomorrow we're going to talk about the power of words. The power of words, the power of the tongue. That's another prevalent subject in the book of Proverbs. I was surprised when I study this book to discover how much Solomon has to say about the use of the tongue. And our words And we'll have a couple of days of discussion tomorrow and then again on Monday as we continue our journey through this Old Testament book of wisdom.
I hope you're enjoying this as we've worked together. And if you haven't already done so, you need to get the study guide. We always tell you about the study guide, but in this particular series, it's more important than ever because this is not one where you stay in the same passage. You move from passage to passage in the study guide. has all that information.
You can find out about it at davidjeremiah.org. And I am David Jeremiah, and I'll see you right here tomorrow on this good station. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and senior pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life.
Right to Turning Point, PO Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. Visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org/slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org slash radio or by calling 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's new book, God's Heart for Israel. It's yours for a gift of any amount.
You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your smartphone or tablet. or search in your app store for Turning Point Ministries to access our content. Visit davidjeremiah.org slash radio for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue powerful principles from Proverbs on Turning Point with Dr.
David Jeremiah.
