I'm thankful for each and every one of you!
I am so blessed to have the honor, privilege and opportunity to share the Word of God with you.
Heavenly Father,
In this day we will give thanks to You Lord!
We give You praise and thanksgiving because You have forgiven our sins and healed our diseases. We praise You because You have redeemed our souls from the pit of hell and crowned us with Your compassion and righteousness. Father, we thank You in Jesus’ name, that our children and families are protected from harm, as it written in Your word, that Your angels are encamped about them.
We are thankful for our families, our homes, for abundance in our lives,
We give You all the glory and the praise! For You alone, are worthy to praised!
Amen
Thanksgiving Day - Giving Thanks Always...
The day has absolutely no liturgical significance as far as the church is concerned. It isn't the beginning of a new season in the church's calendar; no saints were martyred; no waters were parted; no miracles performed.
But every November, on the fourth Thursday, we make a pretty big deal out of celebrating nothing special. We get in our cars and travel for hours to gather with family members for a Thanksgiving Day feast.
Recipes that have been passed on for generations get dug out of file boxes, the china and silverware gets retrieved from the china cabinet and a huge table is covered with a nice tablecloth. Special trips are made to the grocery store just to buy the ingredients needed for the holiday feast.
By Wednesday evening, most of our refrigerators are packed so full of food that it will be hard to find whatever you are looking for. Practically all of Thursday will be spent in the kitchen cooking turkey and stuffing and ham and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce and homemade pumpkin pies.
Even the poor make out pretty well on Thanksgiving Day. Instead of a bowl of soup and a slice of bread at a mission, several area churches treat whoever shows up to a bountiful meal. Some agencies supply big food baskets.
It's the one night of the year when we make sure that most everyone goes to bed with a full belly and most have leftovers waiting in the refrigerator.
Tomorrow we will make a pretty big deal out of celebrating a day when nothing special ever happened! That's really unusual when you stop to think about it, and yet it also seems strangely appropriate.
The fact that we have arbitrarily chosen a day to give thanks says something significant about the people of the United States of America!
There really isn't anything special that we are obligated to be thankful for this week. Thanksgiving is a day that reminds us that gratitude is a condition of the heart. It is not necessarily a response to anything special that happens in our lives; but for Christians, it is a lifestyle that we are called to live.
The Bible says, “Be ye thankful”.
"For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy; giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love."
Colossians 1:9-13
This passage contains an incredible vault of wealth. It is obvious that we simply won’t get to everything in this passage in one message.
We are exhorted to “give thanks unto the Father.”
There is no question about the great need for thankfulness in our day.
I firmly believe that much of society’s ills today are the result of a lack of gratitude.
I am not just talking about lip service, but I am talking about an attitude of the heart from within.
What should we be grateful for?
First of all, we should be grateful for the wonderful cross and His work for us there.
We are compelled to depend upon the Holy Spirit every day and be led by him.
We ought to be grateful for His willingness to lead us each and every day.
Can I get a witness?
I couldn't make it through a single day, without the Holy Spirit!
We give thanks because He abides with us as a present and personal Comforter and Counselor.
We give thanks because He has made our heart His temple.
We give thanks because He works in us all that is gracious, virtuous, and well-pleasing in the sight of God.
God wants us to first be thankful for His Present and Future Blessings every day!
It is vital that we realize that not all His blessings for us are strictly future, but that we have been given blessings that we can now enjoy.
Sometimes when we don’t know something is available, we then won’t use it.
There are blessings in our hand right now! The mercies in the covenant of which we now have the earnest, while we wait for the full possession, right now they are just as rich as any good thing from God that we have ever received in the past.
Thank God for the past blessings, but what about right now? Is not the power of God that brought us through everything to where we are right now just as real at this very moment? It is in fact!
The mercy we have in store, and in hand is after all, the main source of our present comfort.
That alone is a blessing worth celebrating!
The true believer is prepared for Heaven, and to be a partaker of the inheritance, and that inheritance has its very beginning right here in our hearts and lives, and it will be fully realized when time shall be no more.
Does our current purpose for giving thanks mean that we are currently perfect? No!
We all have many faults and we are sadly mistaken if we ever get the idea that we must wait for personal perfection to be thankful.
Giving thanks in our imperfection will in turn help us to want to be more like Christ anyway!
If only perfect people could be thankful believers, than what would those people believe in?
Because we are believing in a Savior who died for sinners!
He knew we were a mess, yet He loved us enough to die for us!
There is nobody sitting here today, who has a right to eternal life as the result of their own works. We are saved by grace through faith in Him. Once we get saved, then the necessary changes begin as the direct result of the work of that grace in our lives.
That is something to be thankful for always!
In fact, that is something to shout about!
The Scriptural side of Thanksgiving Day reaches back well beyond the Pilgrim years and into our earliest religious roots thousands of years ago. It reflects God's reminder to his people to give thanks for the many blessings of life.
I think this religious face is best captured in a passage from Deuteronomy 8.
It represents a time in the history of the Hebrew nation very much like the time in history of our early American Pilgrims. After suffering and struggling in the desert for 40 years to reach the Promised Land of Israel, they had finally made it to a fruitful land flowing with milk and honey. And so they gathered together to celebrate but even more important, to remember who gave them their freedom and their blessings and to whom they owed devoted praise and service.
"So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord."
Deuteronomy 8:3
"When you have eaten and are full, then you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you. “Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments, His judgments, and His statutes which I command you today."
Deuteronomy 8:10-11
If you are feeling low this season, how is it possible to give thanks? No matter what the Pilgrims had or the Israelites had, they paused at Thanksgiving to affirm that what they had was "enough" regardless of what they did not have or in spite of what they had lost.
On that day they expressed gratitude with a feeling that they had abundance in their lives. It's only when we believe we have enough that we are truly grateful. Having enough is a matter determined by one’s heart and soul, not by how much money we have or by or what others have. Godliness with contentment is great gain.
The difference between people who operate from the principle of abundance and those who live by the principle of scarcity is that some people approach life with an attitude that says, "There is never enough. There is not enough esteem, not enough money, there is not enough love.
Therefore, I must grasp and compete and hoard."
Truly grateful people approach life with an attitude that assumes there is more than enough for everyone. There is more than enough money. There is more than enough love. There is more than enough esteem. We can decide to be openhanded and openhearted as an act of faithfulness rather than comparing ourselves to anyone else. Instead of being tight fisted and self-protective, we can be free, generous and grateful.
"Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!"
2 Corinthians 9:15
Our thanks is to be unto God!
We have a lot for which to be thankful, not just tomorrow, but every day
One of the greatest ways that we can bring out the best in each of us is to make it a constant and consistent habit to Give Thanks Always!
And now may the the Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.
Now and forever, in Jesus' name
Amen
Brian Monzon Ministries