Thanksgiving and the Peace That Guards (Pastor Aaron Trelfa, 11/26/22)

However you spend your Thanksgiving,

I do hope it was a blessing.

And as we will get into shortly,

I hope you emphasized giving thanks.

Thanking your family for maybe putting up with you.

Thanking your friends for being there and supporting you

when they had reasons to not.

Thanking your God for loving you

as if you were the only person alive.

Thanking Christ for giving himself

so you can have hope and salvation.

Not just then, but now.

Did you give thanks this week?

I hope so.

I really do.

We're gonna get into that a little bit more.

I am grateful.

If you haven't met him, my oldest brother is here.

This is the one, I've been kind of sharing this.

This is the famed brother from all of my backpacking stories.

So he says that his job is to either affirm

or correct those stories.

And I'm sure he will do a great job,

but I'm glad to see that he is being made to feel welcome.

We're glad to have him.

Most of my family is here.

My oldest son was down last weekend,

but he had to go back for this weekend.

So I hope you were able to see some of your loved ones.

I wanted to share a little bit.

I don't actually think I have a very exciting life,

but what I do share with you are the highlights.

I share a lot about my backpacking

because those are very adventurous for me,

but I've also shared a little bit about my dog.

My dog has brought a lot of energy into the household.

She's brought a lot of cuddles.

She's brought a lot of whatever puppies bring,

hair and so forth.

The last time I mentioned her might've been

maybe when she was biting or she was eating the whole pie

off of the counter or something like that.

This time it has to do with how big she's getting.

And I have an object lesson with this.

So we have a Newfoundland puppy.

She is six and a half months old.

And a while ago, maybe three,

probably moving on four or five weeks or so,

she was about 63 pounds, something like that.

So a month passes.

I weighed her last week and she was 74.2.

I expect that she is north of 75 from last week to now.

And it's pretty obvious.

She can cruise along the kitchen counters

and she doesn't even have to really stretch

to get her nose up onto the counter.

She's getting there.

We are expecting her to get rather big.

Well, I mentioned that not just because I wanna share

a little bit about my dog,

but she's very different than the last set of dogs

that we had in our household.

The puppies that my wife and I had before Willow

were Chinese Cresteds.

One of them at full grown was about 11 pounds,

maybe 11 and a half.

The other one at full grown, I think was six or seven,

somewhere in that I'm getting affirmation from the back.

Six or seven pounds, full grown.

If they were ever had a haircut,

they might lose a few ounces, very small.

And it took them a little bit to get

to their still very small size.

And so I wondered about that.

This is very new for us to have such a large animal

in our house.

All the food, all of the walks,

all of the, when she jumps or bumps into you, you feel it.

I was amazed.

Boy, she's really growing very fast.

And we know that for Newfoundland,

somewhere around seven to nine months

is a significant growth spurt

where we expect her to break that century mark in pounds.

She'll be well above a hundred pounds.

Well, it got me thinking.

Why is this standing out to me quite so much?

Maybe you have thought of this

or maybe you have had conversations with someone.

I've had multiple conversations that went something like,

I have a faith in Christ.

I read my Bible.

I pray.

I just feel like I'm not growing like,

and they might name a person that they see.

Someone that just oozes faith and peace,

and they seem to always have the right words to say.

Or someone is new in the church and they're on fire

and they're growing and they're learning

and they're like a sponge absorbing it all in.

And just like that, they can start reciting things

and we're happy for that.

But then someone else might tell the story,

I'm going on 30 years

and I feel like I still have the same struggles

and I still, have any of us ever had these kinds of thoughts

either on the one side or maybe on the other,

somewhere in between?

I want to encourage you.

When I was considering our experience

with the dogs in our house,

I had to remind myself that they are,

all of them are dogs, but they're different.

And in their uniqueness,

some are going to grow much, much, much faster

than others, take a little longer to reach their maturity.

But that doesn't mean that either one of them are wrong

or failing or are going to ultimately come up short.

You know, in your spiritual walk

and your relationship with Christ

and your growth in sanctification,

if you think you're here or you think you're there

and you wonder why maybe mountain top experiences

are so far apart, God's with you.

You don't have to compare yourself to someone else.

God knows for you, uniquely and individually,

what is best for you.

And if you had the same kind of divine insight that he has,

you would not ask for any other growth experience

other than what he is leading you through.

So if you happen to be the Newfoundland,

don't compare yourself to the Chihuahuas.

If you feel like a toy poodle,

don't compare yourself to the Rottweilers

or the Great Things.

I'm not calling you dogs, but I think you get the point.

With that being said, a little bit of encouragement.

Let's have one more brief word of prayer

we'll get into our message for today.

Loving Heavenly Father, we thank you for Jesus.

We thank you, we thank you for loving us.

We thank you for creating us.

We thank you for sustaining us

and we thank you for your inspired word,

preserved through the ages so that it wasn't only

for your people in history past,

but it's also for us, your people today

and your people soon to come.

So we pray that you would bless us, inspire us,

help us to learn and grow from what we consider.

From your word, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

And amen.

Did you say thanksgiving this past week?

What did you give thanks for?

Maybe you said, I'm thankful that I got to celebrate

another rotation around the sun.

Whether you're having a birthday

or you just marked that calendar and said,

it's thanksgiving in 2022 and that's one year

after thanksgiving in 2021 and so forth.

Praise God for another year of life, right?

Maybe you are thankful that family came and traveled

or you got to go see someone.

Maybe you went to your in-laws and it's normally not there.

Maybe someone came from out of state

and you don't see them often and you get to catch up

and share stories and laugh.

And maybe you got to enjoy the beautiful weather.

It was beautiful this week.

The rain, I think we had rain yesterday

but it was kind of done and then it was beautiful

and it's gorgeous today.

Did you say thank you that we had beautiful weather?

Did you say thank you that you have health?

Whether it's good and improving or you're alive

and praise God that air filled your lungs in the morning.

Praise God that your eyes open.

Praise God that you could walk or you had family

and friends that could help you be mobile.

Did you praise God that, I don't know,

did you thank God for something this week?

Did you remember to thank your family

for again, what they put up with?

All of us have our little thorns.

All of us bite sometimes.

All of us lash out and sometimes we are grateful

that the family and the friends still love us

regardless of that.

Did you thank them for that?

Did you give them a big hug and say,

I know I can be difficult.

Thank you for loving me anyways.

Did you thank your spouse for committing themselves

to you in that union?

Did you thank your husband or your wife

for adding and complimenting and affirming

and uplifting you when you needed those kind

of words or supporting you in your career

or helping raise the kids together?

Did you thank your spouse?

Did you thank the community that supports you?

Did you offer something up on the broader networks

and just say, thank you everyone for being a part

of my life or thank you everyone

for your charitable contribution

or thank you for whatever the case may be?

Did you say thank you?

Or were your holidays a little bit more anxiety ridden?

Maybe a little bit more stressful

because we all know that the statistics bear this out

from middle of November-ish until a little

after New Year's-ish is the most stressful time in America.

Men and women, boys and girls, it's tough.

Pretty much across our coast to coast.

Getting together with family is not always a blessing

for everyone and I think we need to remember that.

For those of us that could affirm, yes, I said thank you

to my parents or thank you to my siblings.

There are others who will just go,

can I survive without losing it?

Or can they make it and then they go home

and what is spinning around in their head

is that much harder?

It's a real problem.

I wondered a little bit about what the ER might experience

going into Thanksgiving.

Are you going to have people coming in

because of some of these concerns?

Do you struggle with the anxiety?

The last time I was here, we talked about anxiety

and we talked about what the Bible has to say

and I wanna propose one reason why there seems

to be extra anxiety when it comes to the family

and why this might segue into what we can be thankful for

is because the idea about the nuclear family

is being undermined and the more you go after that idea,

the more anxiety it causes.

If you look at husbands and wives, men and women,

and you start with the idea that either

there are no differences between them,

they're perfectly the same in all things,

which also means why do I need one or the other?

Famously, it was quoted by a leading lady in this field

that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Well, if you start with there's no difference

between the two, well then maybe that would be

a logical conclusion.

Well, if you follow that train along,

then you might say, why have the husband or the wife,

the mom or the dad in the household?

You can just do it alone as a single parent.

And since that thinking has become more and more popular,

single parent households have just grown,

really skyrocketed, that has not borne out to be good

in our society, increased crime rates

and depression and so on.

If you keep on going and you take that idea

and then it goes into, well, if there's no difference

between men and women, then what's the difference

in marriage?

All of a sudden you have that type of redefinition.

Well, then it can go even farther if you chase this

and many, many years ago, some would have said,

this is starting off on a slope that seems a little slippery.

And when people argue back, that's a fallacy.

I just go, no, that's a prediction.

You start with the one thought,

you might end with the other.

We now have things like this.

A author and teacher who has written many books,

Sophie Lewis, she is considered an expert in this field.

She spoke at UMass Boston on November 16

at an event named after her most recent book titled,

Abolish the Family, a Manifesto for Care and Liberation.

Abolish the family.

We don't need it, get rid of it.

Wholesale, let it go.

Lewis, Sophie Lewis has said in her various writing

and interviews that her goal through abolishing the family

is to reimagine the notion of the family past fatherhood

and motherhood into a more universal sense

where children are not quote property of parents,

but raised by society as a whole.

That idea is shared in other parts of our society.

For example, parents shouldn't have a say

in the education of their child.

Children feed them, house them,

but then when they send them to the six to eight hours

at a school, parents have no say

and teachers have all the say.

That's built on this idea.

She goes on, one online description for her speeches say,

let us overthrow in short the family.

She has become something of an expert on this.

We all deserve better than the family, Lewis argues,

and it's up to all of us to build new forms of solidarity

and care that reach beyond biology or even kin,

even if we don't know quite what they'll look like.

So she's saying she doesn't have a replacement,

she's just starting with abolish it

and we'll find out along the way.

What's she saying?

Abolish the family will make you want to find out.

To abolish the family is not to destroy relationships

of care and nurturance, but on the contrary,

to expand and proliferate them,

meaning that it is then taken into a utopia kind of idea.

She further describes children as being likened

to property in modern culture,

which is a facet of her rationale

for utopia style familial ideal with no sense

of individual parental relationships.

Maybe some people are having anxiety over their families

because they bought into this.

I don't need my mom and my dad,

I don't need the support system that comes

with what has been understood for millennia

as the core social unit, the family.

Maybe you just go home and you visit mom and dad

or the grandparents and you go,

I don't know what I'm thankful for with them

because I don't really need them,

I have been told by the experts.

Maybe Thanksgiving is just simply how's the food

and how's the parade and how's all those other things

and what should be knitting us together as a family

is no longer something people are thankful for.

I think Paul speaks to this in the book of Romans

if you're wanting to look at it, it's Romans chapter one.

Leading up to it, he talks about how God's wrath comes

because he himself is imprinted in nature.

He's revealed himself through a natural revelation

in his created world.

In other words, the complexity, the detail, the order,

the fact that certain organisms and certain mechanisms

don't work if you remove one element out of it

speaks of at minimum an intelligent design

but most accurately a loving creator

because that's all over everything

but men and women have chosen to deny it, reject it.

Then God's wrath is directed towards them

because we read in Romans one and 21,

for although they knew God, in other words,

they perceived in the creation of the world

that there was a God, although they knew God,

they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him

but they became futile in their thinking

and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Even though they knew God, they failed to honor him as God

and then thank him as God

and so they were then given up to their futile thinking.

They believed their wisdom to be greater and higher

than that of God's.

Famed economist Thomas Sowell speaks to this

when he says, quote,

some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity

are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering

that they are not God.

When you don't remember that you are not God

and you don't give credence and gratitude to God,

then you flip things out of order and out of sync

and when you don't give credit to God,

you ultimately don't give credit

to what God has set in place, things like the family

and you start to disrupt it, break it down, tear it apart.

Rather than being progressive in your thoughts,

you are transgressive in your attitude

and that leads to anxiety.

God in his wisdom and his love knew exactly

what you and I needed in our lives

and he speaks to that repeatedly throughout scripture.

Male and female, he created them.

In his image, he shaped them, formed them,

breathed life into them and then he gave them a purpose.

God knew that we needed a purpose in life.

We weren't just supposed to sit around and do nothing.

He gave them work.

For the man, name those animals.

Adam noticed that something was amiss.

He was alone, they had pairs.

Here comes the woman.

But then the two of them go and tend the garden,

take care of the plants, maybe shape the vines

or order the roses in a particular way.

Weave the branches and the leaves together

to make your coverings and so on.

He gave them a work because he knew that men in our mankind,

in our intellect and in our desire to be active,

it was for our better good to have a purpose in life.

You have increased anxiety

if you don't know your purpose in life.

Well, he also knew that what was best for our health

was a less processed, more natural, simplistic diet.

You know, I fully believe that the longer

the ingredient list with words you cannot pronounce,

the less healthy it is for you.

If you can simplify that and get it back

to maybe six or seven ingredients, probably better for you.

Find a little balance in your spices

and your sugars and your fats and your,

find some balance to it and you will be healthier for it.

God knew that after the fall,

that there needed to be the introduction of herbs.

I have been reliably told by a New Zealander

that you do say the H, herbs.

You introduce the vegetables,

you introduce the herbs of the ground, why?

Well, we have since learned that in vegetables

and the herbs and some of the other spices,

different than fruits and nuts,

you get minerals and vitamins that affect your brain

in a way that lets you discern right and wrong

a little bit more clearly.

You didn't need perhaps some of that

before sin's introduction, but now we do.

God said, now they need something, I'm gonna benefit them.

After the flood, we saw a different type of element

added to the diet because they didn't have all of the crops

and the vineyards and the fields,

so there was an introduction of the clean meats.

Nothing wrong with that, Jesus ate fish,

we know this, probably ate lamb,

he probably had a typical Mediterranean diet,

olives and the like.

God knows what you need,

God knew that it was not good for man to be alone

and so God performed the first marriage ceremony

and then he knew that we needed babies,

so he encouraged babies.

Have young ones, pass on the lineage, share with them.

He knew that the family unit was critical for humanity.

We are social creatures, we need it.

He knew that at some point we would need revelation

from him to us.

Now that sin had separated us from him

in a literal physical sense,

we can't walk with Christ

through the cool of the evening anymore.

He needed to reveal himself in other ways.

We have inspired writings, we have miracles,

we have divine appearances recorded in the Bible.

We have these other accounts that we know and hear and read

and that's God yearning to let himself be known to us.

He knows that we need that

and I believe that when we start to reject it,

it leads to anxiety, it leads to stress,

it leads to a lot of the problems

that we find ourselves in the middle of.

Well Jesus touched on that when he says,

don't worry about your food or your clothing

or your shelter.

God takes care of the sparrows,

he takes care of the lilies,

will he not take care of you

because aren't you more valuable to him

than a flower or a bird?

We get down to Paul and Philippians

and if you want to join me there, Philippians 4.

Paul after a lengthy discourse about the hope he has

in the resurrection from the dead,

that gift of eternal life,

we covered this last time,

he no longer considers his identity to be the old man.

He forgets what was behind

but now he presses towards the goal,

he is a new creature in Christ.

That's his identity,

that's the hook he hangs his faith and hope on.

Now that is moving him towards something.

And in chapter four and verse four, rejoice.

We have a lot to rejoice in the Lord for.

We have a lot to be joyful over.

Let your reasonableness or your meekness

be known to everyone, be a witness,

that's for your good.

Be a witness to others.

Do not be anxious about anything

but in everything by prayer and supplication.

We touched on that last time.

You don't have a reason for common anxiety in life

because God has said I'm taking care of you

and I'm giving you a hope of a world better than this.

You don't have a reason for just common,

just letting the anxieties get in your head

and not letting them go.

We understand that stress has happened

and we're not talking about that.

We're talking about an unreasonable approach to anxieties

when God has said you don't have to worry about it.

And the solution, prayer helps.

Prayer, supplication.

But that fulcrum that those sit on

and are balanced with is the thanksgiving.

With thanksgiving, if all you're doing

is just pressing in your wants and your desires,

if all you're doing is thinking of God

as some lottery machine and you put your prayers in

and you pull the handle and maybe you get

the answer you're looking for,

I can only imagine that will lead to more anxiety.

Maybe you get the jackpot, amen.

Maybe you get snake eyes and then you think what?

I failed God or he doesn't listen to me

or whatever the case may be.

God is not a vending machine.

He is not a gambling machine.

He is not any of that.

God is faithful.

And that faithfulness we remember when we offer up

our prayers and our supplications with thanksgiving.

That thanksgiving is so important.

Why do we give thanks?

Why do we give thanks?

I'd like to propose three reasons why we give thanks.

One, the connection with Romans is we give thanks

and in giving thanks we acknowledge God for who he is.

We don't get caught up in that mistaken identity crisis

where we think we are God and he is not.

When we give him a thanks and we say thank you

for who you are, for shaping Orion

and putting the solar systems in place

and sparking light at the far distant corners

that we're only now getting to see

on the James Webb Telescope.

I told you I'm fascinated by that.

Thank you for being all of that and you still love me.

That's acknowledging him for who he is and who you are.

We don't get caught up in that identity crisis.

That can bring some peace to your life.

When it's bigger than you, when it's harder

than what you can handle, when it seems insurmountable,

when you are weak and exhausted and frustrated

and impatient and angry and anxiety ridden.

But you remember that there is a God

bigger than all of that combined plus some.

That can bring peace into your life.

I was one of the follies of the Romans

that Paul was addressing.

They didn't acknowledge God for who he is.

When we give him thanks, we acknowledge him

as our creator and our God and our sovereign Lord.

Two, when we give him thanks, we recognize

where he has already blessed us in our lives.

Too often we walk around and we either take things

for granted, that's just nature.

It's just the revolving of the hours and the minutes.

When we hesitate on giving God thanks,

when we just go through life and say these are

the mundane steps of Sunday through Sabbath,

then you become tempted to think that God

doesn't have a hand in my life.

He is not a personal God who draws close to me

and blesses me and has a hand in gifting me.

And God wants to do that.

He does bless us.

He does make himself known to us.

He does reveal himself in the natural world

but also in inspiration.

He reveals himself to us in a changed heart

and corrected in a healthy attitude.

He reveals himself to us in a victory over sin.

He reveals himself to us in many ways

and when we take it for granted,

then we run the risk of excluding him out of our lives

when he very much wants us to acknowledge

his inclusion in our lives.

Give thanks for what he has done already for you.

Because number three, when you acknowledge

what he has already done for you,

then that adds weight to your prayer and supplication.

You can then ask and seek,

believing by faith that you will find.

When you lift up your words of prayer heavenward,

because you've already acknowledged

where he's already made himself present,

you know he will listen.

You know he will turn his ear towards you.

You know it's not falling on cosmic emptiness

but rather on an attentive, loving, personal,

caring, gracious, merciful and long-suffering God.

When you give him thanks,

it then bolsters your faith

to lean ever closer into his presence.

And that can dispel a lot of the anxieties.

Will he listen?

Yes, he will.

You've already mentioned that he has before.

Do it again.

Does God love me?

Yes, he does, because you've already acknowledged

that he's given Christ to you.

Seek him again.

This thanksgiving, giving thanks is very important

because with all of those things in mind,

we can avoid a lot of the anxieties in life.

When we first go to God, acknowledging him for who he is

and offering him thanks for what he's done

and we have the faith and the assurance

that he'll continue to do it,

what does that do with our anxiety?

Can it help alleviate it?

Can it help soften it?

Can it help take it from a 10, if not a zero,

maybe a six or a four or a two?

Can it help some of that and can it at times

be something you don't understand?

Because when you go to God with your anxieties

and you press into him with your prayer

and you offer up your thanksgiving,

the promise is that the peace of God is given to you.

This world will only give you tribulation and stress

and pain and disappointment and hurt.

If you are looking for peace in this world,

they have been screaming peace for how many years?

Peace through strength, peace through diplomacy,

peace through open trades, peace through,

I mean they have peace attached

to all these different attempts at solving

our global anxieties, our social anxieties.

How much of that has actually worked?

Not a whole lot, have you looked at any amount of news?

But from on high, outside of ourselves,

above and beyond what we can comprehend,

surpassing our understanding, the divine peace

from God himself is gifted to us.

This world can't offer it but he surely can

and when we thank him,

then that allows a perfect opportunity

for peace from on high.

And it's that peace that guards us,

guards our hearts, guards our minds,

guards our responses and our reactions

because when we have a peace from God

and we've given up our anxieties about things,

then he will bring us back into harmony.

You will have a better improvement

on the peace in your life when you,

different than this scholar,

different than many of the experts in life,

when you acknowledge that God knows what's best for you

and you stop fighting him and you accept

that what he has created is good for you,

you'll have a peace.

When you acknowledge him as a God who creates you

and loves you, you will have a peace.

When you have the thanksgiving in your heart

wherever you go, it will protect you

from so many of the lies that we face ourselves with.

It will protect you from the lie

that there is not a God who shaped things,

you're just an accident.

It will protect you from the lie

that anything male associated is purely toxic

from its inception.

Or anything overtly female should be bent

towards a more masculine approach

and they should, I don't know,

there's different ways that that's encouraged.

Or your parents only want to control and coerce

and they aren't really there for your betterment

and we should abolish that whole structure

and instead let other outside forces decide

what's best for our young ones.

Those are lies.

How do I know they're lies?

Well, because when I open up God's word

and I see that he formed and shaped a particular way

and then he said, trust me,

I know that everything else is a lie.

If you want to be guarded from anxieties in life,

rejoice in the Lord always.

Be a witness to others about what he has done in your life.

Don't stress about the common things

because Jesus says, I will take care of you.

Press into his presence with prayer and supplication

and don't forget the thanksgiving.

Don't forget offering up your gratitude

to your heavenly father.

When that gratitude is expressed,

we have a promise of peace.

It surpasses what we know.

It will guard your heart from the lies

that the enemy wants to throw your ways.

My friends, I pray that the rest of this season

find you blessed.

I pray that the rest of this season find God in your homes.

I pray that the rest of this season,

you will remember continuously to offer up thanksgiving

and then I pray that the peace of God

be found abundantly in every one of our lives.

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you again for hearing our prayers

and we thank you so much for speaking to us.

Lord, I pray that when the shadows are especially dark,

that Christ would be that light streaming through us

streaming through into our lives.

I pray that you would peel back the shadows

and I pray that you would lift our burdens

and I pray that you would walk beside us

and yoke up with us and be our loving savior

every step of this challenging life

that we live right now.

Lord, we look so forward to a time

when all of these challenges are a part of history past.

We look forward to a reunion with our heavenly family.

We look forward to a time

when there is no longer pain or tears or sorrow or loss

and we look forward to a time where we get to live

in the presence of your glory and your love

and your righteousness forevermore.

Lord, I pray that here now we might experience a snippet

of it as you draw close to us.

We pray all of these things not because we are worthy,

but you have said we can pray them in Jesus' name

so all of His saints do say in Jesus' name, amen.