Taking Stock

Thank you, Sabina.

Well, let me pray for us.

Loving Father, we confess in faith that your love does endure forever.

We thank you that you've gathered us here this morning in your presence

and we ask that you'd open our hearts and minds to receive what you would say to us.

We ask you to meet us at our point of need

and indeed that you would reap a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving from our lips

by people that confess your name.

We ask all these things knowing that it's the end of the year

and we thank you, Lord, for the year that has passed

and we pray that you would let us receive from your hand the year that is to come.

In Jesus' name we pray these things. Amen.

Well, how do you feel at the end of a year?

If you're a glass half full type, maybe the prospect of a new year, 218,

it's like an unwritten book.

It's like one of those mildly pretentious diaries, those moleskin diaries.

You know, the pages, the pristine pages open up and they're just waiting to be filled

and you can't wait to put pen to paper.

But if life isn't so positive for you at the moment,

you might not be feeling so eager.

You might have an inkling about how next year might pan out

and frankly it fills you with anxiety.

If this is you, then the end of the year might just bring a sigh.

For a lot of us, though, there's not much space in our lives

for these kind of emotions, feeling particularly positive or particularly negative.

Many of us are just ready to collapse on the lounge

after all the busyness and the shopping of getting ready for Christmas.

But however you're finishing up 2017,

I'd like to suggest that there is another way of seeing in the new year.

In the commercial world, it's standard practice to take stock at the end of a year.

Ledgers are sorted out, books are balanced, taxes paid.

And of course, in the commercial world, this happens in the UK in April,

something hard to discover.

In Australia, it's in the end of June.

But at the end of a calendar year, I'd like to suggest it's equally helpful,

a good exercise to take stock of our personal lives.

Psalm 136 isn't exactly about the new year specifically,

but it's a great reminder to run a green pen over the past,

to take stock of all that has happened,

to take an audit of your life.

It's a reminder to Christ's church to do this regularly.

And I think the end of a calendar year presents a perfect opportunity

for us to do just that.

Psalm 136, as many of you know,

is one of the set prayers that the people of Israel sang

in their temple and in their synagogues.

Like many of the psalms, it would have been sung as a conversation

between the cantor and the congregation.

The cantor would have sung the main lines

and the congregation would have answered with the refrain,

much in the way that we have just done now.

This call and response way of praying is actually a wonderful way,

I think, of internalizing the reminders of the psalms.

It kind of gets you to do it on the spot

rather than just hear the reminder and forget about it as you walk home.

But perhaps the best thing, I think, about this psalm

is that it doesn't just remind us to take stock.

It also provides a very simple model for how to do this.

The psalm shows us really clearly three line items

that should make up a retrospective of the year,

three line items on the stock take of our lives.

And I'd like to give some thought to these three

so that when we walk out the door, each of us will be better equipped

to do what the psalmist is telling us to do, to take stock.

First, Psalm 136 reminds us that true thanksgiving

is a confession of God's goodness.

When we cast our eyes over all the good things of the past year,

we are to regard them as a mirror

in whose reflection we see God himself.

In the gifts, we must see the giver.

And that's the very first thing we see the psalmist writes.

He says, give thanks to the Lord for he is good.

This is the first place that the psalmist's green pen stops.

And it's such an important reminder.

Thanksgiving is to be focused on the giver,

but not merely the gifts.

You see, the psalmist doesn't say,

give thanks to the Lord for his gifts are really cool.

No.

He says, give thanks to the Lord for he is good.

True thanksgiving can only properly begin

when we see the giver in his gifts.

It begins with this confession, God, you are good.

But this potentially brings an unexpected halt to the proceedings.

If you really grasp what he is saying,

it could put an end to your stock take before it even begins.

Does God seem good to you?

This might not even be a question you can fully answer

in the space of a few minutes.

It's a question, though, that you cannot ignore.

Does God seem good to you?

You cannot ignore this question because you cannot give thanks

in spirit and in truth when underneath you think

God actually isn't all that crash hot.

He might be good to others, but he's dealt me a fairly lousy hand.

In fact, this question might raise a great many deeper questions.

It might raise complicated problems that we've been wrestling with

or difficulties we've been carrying for years.

It potentially raises a bunch of questions, very serious questions,

but ultimately it forces us to consider these questions

through a very narrow lens.

Is God good?

Or is he not?

It actually forces us to bring a very simple yes or no answer.

The one answer is worship.

The other answer is a refusal to worship.

See, true thanksgiving can only properly begin

when we see the giver in his gifts

and we answer this question one way or the other.

Anything less than this falls short of true thanksgiving.

As we embark on our stock taker,

it's well worth posing this question to ourselves.

This kind of self-examination is actually a really good thing.

It can stop us from simply going through the motions,

which is so easy to do.

Not engaging with God directly and truthfully.

It can allow light to shine on some of these complicated problems

and difficulties with which we must wrestle.

True thanksgiving is a confession

and only a confession of God's goodness.

But the second thing we need to see

is that this thanksgiving then is very specific.

Thanksgiving is never in the abstract.

It's always in the concrete.

We thank God for individual things.

We call them to mind.

We number them one by one,

like the old hymn

that I'm sure many of you would remember,

Count Your Blessings.

Now if you look at verse 4 to 24 in your Bibles,

you'll see that it's just a list of stuff.

That's how the psalmist is praying.

It's all the stuff that the psalmist thanks God for.

He doesn't just say,

give thanks to the Lord,

give thanks to the God of gods,

give thanks to the Lord of lords.

No, he then moves on

to say precisely what he is thankful for.

And this is where I think a good many

of our contemporary songwriters

need to take a lesson from the psalms.

A lack of specificity is a genuine shortcoming

of many of our contemporary praise songs.

A lot of them just get stuck in verses 1 to 3

and never seem to make it to verses 4 to 25.

They say, give thanks to the Lord,

give thanks to the God of gods,

give thanks to the Lord of lords.

You are so awesome.

But then they never get on to list the benefits

of God's immense goodness toward us.

And this can be a shortcoming of our own prayers.

And there's a very important reason

why our thanksgiving must be specific.

And it's one that we actually easily forget.

Being specific in our thanksgiving

increases our enjoyment of what God has given us.

Thanking God for friends and family

makes their company more precious.

Thanking God for food and drink

makes it taste better.

Thanking God for beautiful weather

increases our pleasure in it.

And when we don't do this,

the opposite is actually true.

When we don't thank God for friends and family,

we no longer cherish them.

When we fail to thank God for food and drink,

we begin to take it for granted.

And so on and so forth.

John Calvin put his finger on what the problem is

when he wrote that every blessing that God confers upon us

perishes through our carelessness.

If we are not prompt and active in rendering thanks.

That is a real gem to think about.

Every blessing that God confers upon us

perishes through our carelessness

if we are not prompt and active in rendering thanks.

Superhero of all theologians,

Calvin makes a very simple point.

We waste much of God's goodness.

We waste it.

We don't derive the enjoyment that we could

because we don't take the care.

It's an interesting word, isn't it?

The care to thank him.

It's also a very important point

that there's a very concealed danger

in not enjoying God's goodness to us.

See, a big part of discontent

is actually carelessness in thanksgiving.

You see, we become thankless

and then we experience less and less joy

and this leads to growing discontent

and discontent is poison.

It is poison in difficulties.

Yes, there are difficulties in our lives.

In some of our lives here,

there are immense difficulties.

The Christian life is not about

an absence of difficulties,

but it is about an enjoyment of God

in the midst of those difficulties.

And carelessness in thanksgiving

is perhaps the greatest threat

to the enjoyment of God's goodness.

And that's why thanksgiving must be specific.

It must move beyond this general vibe

of thankfulness to detailed itemizing of accounts.

And that leads us to the third thing

that the psalmist shows us.

And that is that this specificity

has a very particular shape.

We see in the psalm that thanksgiving begins in creation

and that it ends in redemption.

The psalmist is just in awe of God as creator.

I think my favorite is the image in verse 6.

It's particularly powerful.

Give thanks to the Lord of Lords

who spread out the earth upon the waters.

It's an image of God as a metal worker

pounding out a sheet of bronze.

It's an amazing mental image.

He looks upon the mountains and the valleys

and pictures God hammering out the earth

like a craftsman planishing his masterpiece.

I think we should find praying like this

really easy in this part of the world.

Beauty surrounds us.

I mean, the Solisby crags are just so astonishingly beautiful

and particularly this time of year

when they're under snow

and the sun starts to fall on them in the mornings.

There's simply so much to thank God for in creation.

We don't even need to move on to some of the other good things we enjoy

from creation.

But as much as we might marvel over these things,

the crucial thing is that we follow the lead of the psalmist.

You notice that he moves very quickly then

and spends the bulk of his prayer meditating on redemption.

See, the psalmist knows that he could not enjoy God as creator

if God were not a redeemer.

As an Israelite, the psalmist's great experience of redemption

was the rescue of God's people from Egypt.

And verses 10 to 24,

they recap the elements of the story of the Exodus.

Here we can watch how the psalmist recalls

that the same hand that beat out the shape of the earth

also struck down the firstborn of the Egyptians.

The same hands that spread out the heavens

also divided the Red Sea.

Now, we might not feel particularly connected

to the Israel's rescue from Egypt,

but if we have put our faith in Christ Jesus,

we have experienced the even greater salvation

that the Exodus foreshadowed.

Through Jesus' death and resurrection,

God has brought immortality to light.

Death no longer stands in front of us as the last enemy.

Because Jesus bore the guilt and punishment for our sins,

we will be raised as he was raised.

Now, if you've put your faith in Jesus Christ,

you have part in this much greater salvation

than Israel's deliverance from Egypt.

And we marvel at this salvation because of what it costs.

Creation costs God nothing.

By the breath of his mouth, he simply commanded,

let there be light.

And there was light.

But redeeming the world cost him dearly.

Redeeming the world came at the cost of his one and only Son.

And so in the same way as the psalmist was filled with awe

at God's salvation of the people of Israel,

a pride of place in our thanksgiving will be held

by our great salvation.

In the same way the psalmist lists all the elements

of God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt

through their journey in the wilderness

into their entry into Canaan,

so too we can list what God has done for us in Christ.

We can thank God for the forgiveness of sins,

how precious that is.

For being saved from judgment,

what a terror has been taken away from us.

For being reconciled to our Heavenly Father,

what intimacy there is for us.

For the promise of the resurrection,

what hope there lies before us.

For the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,

what warmth there exists amongst us.

So in this psalm, the psalmist we see lists

these 22 separate things.

And you know what?

It took us the sum total of three minutes

to say them out loud.

His words are such depth, but they're so compact.

In our thanksgiving, we could take a leaf out

of the psalmist's book, couldn't we?

Before you go to sleep tonight, try that,

listing 22 things you've received from God's hand this year.

And discipline yourself to shape your thanksgiving

in the way that the psalmist does.

Beginning with all the good things

God's given you in creation,

you might have even enjoyed this very day.

But then moving, as he does,

to what he has given you as Redeemer.

And let your thanksgiving follow this particular shape.

The psalmist doesn't overlook the goodness of creation.

He spends most of his time dwelling on God's goodness

to him in redemption.

This is the psalmist's very simple lesson

in how to take an audit of your life.

Begin with the goodness of the giver.

Be specific in your thanks.

And worship him as your creator and as your redeemer.

Pray like this, and it will bring rich communion

with your heavenly Father.

There is, however, one last element

in the psalmist's lesson on how to use a green pen.

And this is possibly the most important reminder

of Psalm 136.

In fact, it's so important to the psalmist

that he makes the congregation repeat it

after every single thing he says.

In fact, he made a, we've got you guys

to repeat it after everything Sabina says.

With each line, the psalmist makes the congregation

remember that thanksgiving isn't just about

remembering the past.

It's not just about God's goodness to us yesterday,

last month, or even in the course of the year.

Rather, everything that God has done

in our past reminds us,

reminds us of what?

That we can have confidence for the future.

Because each instance of God's goodness,

God's goodness, yesterday, last month,

last year, it's a testimony of God's ongoing commitment

of love to us.

At the end of each line,

the psalmist makes us call to mind,

his love endures forever.

This is really big.

You need to take it in.

Each kindness of God that we celebrate in thanksgiving

is a sign of God's unyielding commitment to our future.

God's love doesn't just last until you're 64.

It doesn't just last until you've used up all your chances.

There will never come a time

when God ceases to express his kindness

towards those in Christ Jesus.

There will never come a time

when he doesn't extend his goodness

to those in the Son whom he loves.

No, God's love endures forever.

This is the great truth that lies at the heart of thanksgiving.

God's goodness in our past

is a pledge of his ongoing and never-failing faithfulness

for the future.

And if we take this to heart,

it really settles us.

When we face the unknown,

it releases whatever fears we harbour.

This is the jewel of the psalm,

and you can't leave this morning

without taking this with you.

If God is for us,

who can be against us?

He who did not spare his own Son,

but gave him up for us all,

how will he not also, along with him,

graciously give us all things?

So says the Apostle Paul,

basically saying the same thing.

Everything that God has done in our past

reminds us that we can have confidence

for the future,

because his love endures forever.

So as we come to the end of the year,

the beginning of a new one,

let's do what the psalmist says.

Let's take up a green pen.

Let's take stock.

Let's run a green pen over a year.

Let's remind ourselves of God's goodness to us.

Later today, either by yourself or as a family,

begin with the goodness of the giver.

Be specific in your thanks.

Worship him as your creator and redeemer.

Giving thanks to God like this honors him,

but more importantly,

it renews us in a confidence

that actually honors him much more.

When we thank God,

we praise him for the blessings we can see.

When we entrust ourselves to him for the future,

we praise him for blessings that remain as yet unseen.

So whether you're going to celebrate

with the Hogmanay concerts,

or you're going to watch the fireworks,

or just welcome the new year quietly at home,

take the time to recall all the kindnesses

that God has shown you this year

and bring these to God in prayer.

Do this both to kindle a joy in his blessings

and renew a confidence

that the blessings will await you in the year to come.

There will be difficulties to come,

as there are difficulties in the year that's passed,

but there will also be an enjoyment of God,

and we can be certain of this

because God's love never fails.

His love endures forever.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Loving Father, we worship you as the God

who is constant,

whose love toward us never fails.

And we ask, Lord, that you would renew us

in a fresh appreciation of this,

that you would draw our eyes

to all the benefits that you have given us, Lord,

as our creator and as our redeemer.

And we ask this, Lord,

that you would just reap a harvest of praise from our lips,

that we would be a people

who brings a sacrifice of praise to you constantly

and honours you and worships you, Lord,

with words that are fit for you,

according to your great goodness toward us.

Amen.

Amen.

guys.