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His Name Is
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Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

Email:
Pastor Scott Carson

Secretary Patti Hall

PASTOR'S PENS 2005

Grace Church of Burlington November 27, 2005 “Most people return small favors, acknowledge medium ones and repay greater ones — with ingratitude.”     Benjamin Franklin             A young man with a bandaged hand approached the clerk at the post office. “Sir, could you please address this post card for me?” The clerk did so gladly, and then agreed to write a message on the card. He then asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” The young man looked at the card for a moment and then said, “Yes, add a P.S.: ‘Please excuse the handwriting.’”              Let’s be honest, we’re an ungrateful people. So how can we change? How can each of us learn to be thankful 365 days of the year?             We must learn to focus on God’s deliverance in our past. Our  calendar allocates one day a year to give thanks to God for His many benefits, and even that day is more consumed with gorging than with gratitude. Ancient Israel’s calendar included several annual festivals to remind the people of God’s acts of deliverance and provision so that they would renew their sense of gratitude and reliance upon the Lord. But in spite of this, they quickly forgot. The truth is that when we’re doing well, we tend to think that our prosperity is self-made. This delusion leads to pride and pride makes us forget God, and prompts us to rely on ourselves in place of our Creator. This forgetfulness always leads to ingratitude. Our propensity to forget is a mark of our fallenness. Because of this, we must view remembering and gratitude as a discipline, a daily and intentional act, a conscious choice. If it is limited to spontaneous moments of emotional gratitude, it will quickly erode and we will forget all that God has done for us and take His grace for granted.             We must learn to focus on God’s benefits in the present. As Os Guinness observed that, “Rebellion against God does not begin with the clenched fist of atheism but with the self-satisfied heart of the one for whom ‘thank you’ is redundant” Paul exposes the error of this thinking when he asks, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:7). Even as believers in Christ, it is easy to overlook the fact that all that we have and are—our health,  intelligence, abilities, our very lives—are gifts from the hand of God, and not our own creation. While we understand this, few of us actively acknowledge our utter reliance upon the Lord throughout the course of the week. We rarely review the many benefits we enjoy in the present...and so we forget.             We tend toward two extremes when we forget to remember God’s benefits in our lives. The first is presumption. When things are going “our way,” we may forget God or acknowledge Him in a shallow or mechanical manner. The other is resentment and bitterness due to difficult circumstances. When we suffer through difficulties, we wonder why we are not doing as well as others and develop a spirit of murmuring and complaining. We may attribute it to “bad luck” or not “getting the breaks,” but it really boils down to dissatisfaction with God’s provision and care. Our lack of contentment stems in part from our efforts to control the content of our lives in spite of what Christ may or may not desire for us to have. It also stems from our tendency to focus on what we do not possess rather than all the wonderful things we’ve already received. We cannot give thanks and complain at the same time. To give thanks is to remember the blessings we have received and to be content with what our loving Lord provides, even when it does not correspond to what we had in mind. Gratitude is a choice, not just a feeling, and it requires effort especially in difficult times. And the more we choose to live in the discipline of conscious thanksgiving, the more natural it becomes, and the more our eyes are opened to the little things throughout the course of a day that we previously overlooked. G. K. Chesterton had a way of acknowledging these many little benefits, “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”             We must learn to remember God’s promises for the future. If we’re not grateful for God’s deliverance in the past and His blessings in the present, we will not be grateful for His promises for the future. Scripture exhorts us to lay hold of our hope in Christ and to renew it frequently so that we will maintain God’s perspective on our present journey. His plans for His children exceed our imagination, and it is His intention to make all things new, to wipe away every tear, and to “show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” in the ages to come (Eph. 2:7).             Friend, make it a daily exercise, either at the beginning or the end of the day, to review God’s benefits in your past, present, and future. This discipline will be pleasing to God, because it will cultivate a heart of gratitude and ongoing thanksgiving.