Thanksgiving

December 8th, two Sundays from today,

we are gonna have a Springhouse Christmas party

and it's gonna be great and we want you to be here, okay?

So here's what's going on.

We are gonna have regular service.

It's actually gonna be the 12.

The 12 is gonna move in here,

but it'll be a regular service in the nine o'clock hour.

And then at 1030, we have a special guest

who's gonna come and do some things for us

that you won't wanna miss in the 1030 gathering.

And then immediately following that from 12 to two,

we're gonna feed you lunch, we've got games, prizes,

all types of things in store for you.

A rock climb, it's gonna be really great.

It's time for us to fellowship and hang out

and be together.

One of the reasons we do this is because

who loves to be so busy during this season?

Anybody just love packing their calendar

and every night being full, right?

One of the reasons, that was a big laugh.

Was that Vonda?

Okay, it was, she has not ashamed, right?

Here's the thing.

I know Vonda doesn't like packing her calendar out.

But what we do is instead of having

42 different Christmas parties

for all the ministries you're connected to,

we just do it all in one day and we all do it together.

And we have a great time.

Does that sound good?

So December 8th, bring a friend,

we're gonna have plenty of food.

It's gonna be a great time.

I want you to be a part of that.

And then our annual Carols by Candlelight

is going to be on Friday, December 22nd, 20th.

It's on a Friday this year.

We traditionally do it on Wednesday.

It's moving to a Friday this year.

Make plans to be a part of that.

Man, it just, it's part of the year

that really sets in getting slot in to Christmas Day.

All right, so with no further ado,

I want to, we're gonna, Thanksgiving is Thursday.

I think that's happening, right?

And Pastor Will Sevier is gonna come

bring the word this morning.

Would you guys welcome Pastor Will?

What a day!

It's good to be up here.

So praise the Lord.

Would you stand?

Stretch your feet, get ready to vocalize.

This is, you might be surprised to know,

this is my favorite part of the service each week.

When I was a kid, I have memories

of reading scripture together and also singing together

when there's not a sound system

and you can hear all the voices

and there's something powerful about that.

And that's what I love about getting

to read God's word together.

God's word, there's a lot of things that I might say today

that are finite and some of them might even be problematic.

You can just let those go.

But you know, God's word cannot return void.

So let's read together.

We're gonna read from, where's my little,

I knew I had it.

Also, I'm new at this.

So if I make a fool of myself trying to click the next thing

all the others are so good at it.

They're like ahead of time and they're making it happen.

But we're gonna read together from Matthew,

from Matthew's gospel.

And then following that up, we will read a short section

from Paul's first epistle to the church at Thessalonica.

So read with me.

Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee.

Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down.

Great crowds came to him,

bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled,

the mute and many others and laid them at his feet.

And he healed them.

The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking,

the crippled made well, the lame walking

and the blind seeing.

And they praised the God of Israel.

Jesus called his disciples to him and said,

"I have compassion for these people.

They have already been with me three days

and have nothing to eat.

I do not want to send them away hungry

or they may collapse on the way."

His disciples answered, "Where could we get enough bread

in this remote place to feed such a crowd?

How many loaves do you have?" Jesus asked.

"Seven," they replied, "and a few small fish."

He told the crowd to sit down on the ground.

Then he took the seven loaves and the fish.

And when he had given thanks,

he broke them and gave them to the disciples.

And they in turn to the people,

they all ate and were satisfied.

Afterward, the disciples picked up seven basketfuls

of broken pieces that were left over.

And we urge you, brothers and sisters,

warn those who are idle and disruptive.

Encourage the disheartened.

Help the weak.

Be patient with everyone.

Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong,

but always strive to do what is good for each other

and for everyone else.

Rejoice always, pray continually,

give thanks in all circumstances,

for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

Father, I thank you for your word.

It has power.

It brings about change in our lives.

And Lord, I ask that you speak to us

and that we would be not just hearers,

but hearers and doers,

hearers in allowing your word to take a deep root in us.

In Jesus' name, amen.

You may be seated.

Amen.

Does this hurt anything if I move a little closer?

Is that okay?

All right, I kind of want the Bible in front of me.

So who in here remembers what Pastor Justin said

about bringing a physical Bible to church

and how he likes it?

He likes to bring a physical Bible.

Did that resonate with anybody else?

This is not a shame thing.

But if you brought your Bible, can we see it?

Yeah, this is pretty cool.

Let's go is right.

Come on, Pastor.

Yeah, this is cool.

So it's not to shame anybody.

It was just a challenge.

Challenges are good.

We should be challenged.

If you're not being challenged on a regular basis,

maybe you're not listening.

Yeah, especially if you take a challenge

and you study and pray about it on your own,

and then you'll find that the Holy Spirit does the rest.

Here I am again, late pushing the button.

(laughs)

And I'm not at all saying if you use your phone

and the app on your phone or an app on a tablet is bad,

it's really not bad at all.

In fact, it's a really good thing if you read it.

But there's a nostalgia for me

about going to church with my dad.

And my dad was like, when I was young, a hero to me.

And so I remember lots of naps during the sermon

laying my head on his leather.

And my dad gave me this Bible cover,

and it's very similar to the one he used to have.

So that makes me, that's like a connection for me.

Anyway, some of our most faithful brothers and sisters

use the app on the phone.

I do it quite a lot.

And there's no judgment there.

And it's just a challenge for you right now

to dig into the Word on your own.

And if you're too busy to dig into the Word,

you should lay something down.

It's Thanksgiving week.

Anybody else excited?

I'm excited.

This holiday is not a surprise to most of you.

You're ready for Thursday or you wanna be ready.

If you're the one cooking,

raise your hand if you're the one cooking.

Yeah, there's a lot to do, right?

There's a lot to do.

But I tell you, for everyone,

we're looking forward to the food and I am with you.

There's lots of Thanksgiving scenes and tropes

or different things that we have in our mind

when it comes to Thanksgiving,

the memories and depictions of Thanksgiving meals.

But it always involves the food.

Isn't it great?

And then gathering around a table or a series of tables,

spending time with your family, the food.

Did I say the food?

Visiting with loved ones.

Yeah, this is my family.

The Severes Thanksgiving from last year,

which, yeah, you can tell which one's me,

but there's quite a few of us.

If you looked really close,

you'd recognize some other people that are in this room.

But I love my family.

I won't be able to be there this year

because what happens with family?

Sometimes you're in Tennessee

and this week we're gonna be in South Carolina.

So that's just part of life and family.

So this is my family.

But trying not to talk about politics at the table

and then finding yourself talking about politics

at the table.

The food.

You know, I am a vegetarian.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

We're gonna leave that.

You guys can talk about it later.

But turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, anybody,

all the pies.

Having to share a meal

with that one interesting family member

that is kind of strange and you don't love so much.

Of course, if you don't have somebody like that

in your family, it might be you.

Listen, I asked my family,

I learned a long time ago that I was the weird one.

And yeah, and I just embrace it

and then it doesn't hurt my feelings one bit.

Let me give you a few interesting and quirky facts

about the US holiday of Thanksgiving.

Much of what we know of the first

of what we call Thanksgiving as a meal

on this continent would have been between the pilgrims

and the natives after the first harvest in 1621.

Now, this is a relatively recent thing.

When we read the stories in scripture,

they're between 2,000 and 6,000 or more years old.

I mean, it happened a while ago.

And this first Thanksgiving meal

that we call it on this continent,

that's only 403 years ago.

That's compared comparatively.

It's kind of a, you know, it's not that long ago.

The information about this first Thanksgiving

has grown into legend.

That's not a bad thing, but sometimes we kind of,

you know, when you tell a story

and sometimes by the time you've told it three or four times

I'm like this, Tisha gives me a hard time.

That's Tisha right there.

She's my favorite human.

I'm embarrassing her.

I love you very much.

But yeah, she gives me a hard time about embellishment.

I get it from my mother and she's amazing.

So why is that a bad thing?

But when we tell stories, sometimes they grow a little bit

and it's not on purpose.

It just is.

So what we're fairly sure of from this first,

it was a harvest and they were grateful for what they had.

And they gave, they gave what they had

when they ate together and they gave thanks to God.

And apparently they did not eat turkey.

President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving

a national holiday in 1863.

Think about what was happening during that time.

There are four towns in the United States

that are named Turkey.

Yeah, yeah.

And apparently some of us are from not far from here

or have lived there and yeah,

Turkey Creek, Arizona, Turkey Creek, Louisiana,

Turkey, North Carolina.

You ever been there?

Haven't.

And the alliterative Turkey, Texas,

which Texas is kind of shaped like a turkey, right?

The feathers and all that.

It works.

It works.

My friend Melanie always called her,

referred to her sons as turkeys when they were growing up.

And she would, yeah, you've heard this, haven't you?

She would say he may be a turkey, but he's my turkey.

Very funny.

The tradition of football on Thanksgiving day,

it began only 13 years after Lincoln declared the holiday.

And they were collegiate games of course.

And professional football started in 1920

on Thanksgiving day.

It's kind of neat.

Most of us eat.

We spend time with those who are important to us.

We might even carry some gratitude in our heart,

but for the most part,

we don't actually observe Thanksgiving.

We get together and eat.

And most often we don't actually give thanks.

So that's my challenge today.

I really thought I was going somewhere else

about halfway through the week.

And then the Lord kind of rocked the boat

and I'm going in this direction.

And I was going to focus a little bit on, you know,

how thankful we are for what we've walked through

as a family.

And then I realized the story's not supposed to be about me

and about us.

It's supposed to be about the Lord

and his challenge for us today.

So that's my challenge.

Sometimes we forget the giving part of Thanksgiving.

It's a word of action.

It shouldn't be just a noun.

We should make it a verb.

Now, Ben, are you in the room?

Mr. Dudley, I do not teach grammar.

Anybody else in here teach grammar?

Anybody teach?

I do not teach grammar.

But think about it like this.

If you change Thanksgiving from a noun to a verb,

it might add some nuance to your week.

Yesterday was the Pelphrey Thanksgiving in Calhoun, Georgia.

And I can't help but think about Tisha's Pawpaw.

So I'm going to tell you a story.

And by the way, I have a story for everything.

So please forgive me.

Pawpaw's name was Bradley Pelphrey.

And he's with the Lord.

He's been deceased now for over 11 years.

But one Thanksgiving meal,

after I'd been in the family a little bit,

Tisha knows this story

'cause I tell the same stories over and over again.

And she was there too.

He asked me to pray over the Thanksgiving meal.

And it was like,

it was like finally being accepted into the Pelphrey family.

It was amazing.

And so I wanted to do it right.

I wanted to bring,

Justin, I wanted to bring the prayer.

I wanted to, you know, come on.

So I prayed this elaborate prayer.

And when I got to the amen, he had this look.

(congregation laughing)

And he was like, we're ready to eat.

So not all of us are gifted with short prayers.

And Tisha's brother, Jason,

has given me a hard time about it ever since.

And it actually took a while

before they asked me to pray again.

So that is the truth.

You might think that I'm an interesting choice

to speak to you this week on Thanksgiving.

And not just because of what Pastor Justin

has said about my stories.

And if you don't know this,

I have to tell it again because it's worth it.

Were we in the wings?

I think we were in the wings.

And I'm trying to, and I said,

I was telling him a story and it was, I was in it.

You know, it had, you know, a story has a beginning,

a middle and an end.

And it has a, it's supposed to have a punch.

It's supposed to get you somewhere.

And you're like, oh, that's why he told me the story.

And so I get all the way to the end

and I think, oh yeah, oh yeah.

And he looks at me and he goes, man,

that was a long walk for a short glass of water.

(congregation laughing)

And that's a, listen, that's a really funny way of saying,

I really wanted to listen to your story,

but afterward I don't think it was worth my time.

(congregation laughing)

I have, listen, I have served the local church,

not just here, but other places.

And I, for decades, and I studied the scriptures in school

and I've studied ever since.

And I do carry, you know, God's word in my heart, you know?

And so maybe I'm not that strange of a person,

but you don't see me up here that often.

So that's why it's a little strange.

But I worked in music ministry for 20 years.

And then for the last few years,

I've served as your arts outreach pastor.

But in those two decades, I was also for many years

working on hundreds of productions in theater.

And for over 50 of those productions,

I was an actor on the stage.

And those two parallel ministries,

and I use that word with purpose,

but those two parallel ministries

is what brought me here to this appointment

as your arts outreach pastor.

And I do so under the leadership of Pastor Kevin

and Pastor Barbie.

And in 2016, Pastor Ronnie Meek asked me

to pray about coming on staff.

And so Tisha and I started praying about that.

And some of you may not realize that Pastor Ronnie Meek

is one of the finest actors around.

And he's one of the finest actors I ever worked with.

And I've worked with Tony winners,

Tony-nominated actors, Grammy winners.

I've worked with some very talented people,

and he is absolutely incredible.

And I was talking to Michael Frazier

not long after I came on staff,

and we were backstage and just discussing.

And we were discussing a message that I saw online

where this minister was sharing with his congregation.

And I know sometimes when we take somebody's words

out of context, we weren't in that room.

I'm not, this is not degrading at all

what this pastor said or anything,

but this is what he said to his congregation.

And I was watching, and this minister said,

"Your local pastors are not professional actors."

And I said, "Speak for your own church."

(congregation laughing)

Now, the point that teacher was saying is true.

Your pastors are not pretending to believe in something

that they don't believe and hold dear deep within.

And I've seen that over the past eight years,

seen different ones of your staff members

walking through very difficulties,

very many difficult things,

and still holding true and holding to the Lord.

And I heard Kevin say one time,

"I don't know how people do it without the Lord."

And I believe that, and I hold to that.

Today, I'll share with you what the Lord's dealing with me.

Some of my favorite pastors have all said,

had this in common, that they teach on what the Lord

is teaching them.

So what that means for you is you're in for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I wanna share three main thoughts today,

and they all kind of center around this one statement.

We must learn to give thanks in all circumstances.

Now, naturally in the flesh, we're complainers.

We get bitter.

We get downhearted.

We become self-absorbed.

We think that we are the center of our story.

Like Justin said last week, you are not the center

of your story.

I love how Pastor Wayne gives us a direction

to touch your hand to your head like this and say,

"Engage."

Remember that?

I love that 'cause he wants us to think,

and he wants us to allow the Lord to speak to us

and bring our thoughts into alignment

for what God wants to tell us.

Well, to put it lightly, I'm not sure the material

I have for you today is quite as heady as that.

So if you'll put your hands over your heart,

and if it's still beating, say, "Thank you, Lord."

We must learn to give thanks or we will become bitter.

Bitterness, it doesn't seem to be able to hold

the same place in us as thankfulness or gratitude.

When one of them will choke the other one out.

Does that make sense?

Saying thanks or thank you can be a throwaway, a courtesy.

Oh, thanks.

You know, we don't even think about it.

Many times it's sarcastic.

I tell a story about when I was in high school,

and John, John, are you here?

John, my brother, who's one of my favorite people

in the world, he finds the humor in everything.

So I think he'll love this.

If you don't know my brother John well enough to know,

he is incredibly funny.

Well, I was in high school and I found this dessert

in the refrigerator that had the name Penny on it.

Now, listen, my older sister had finished college.

I'm in high school.

She had finished college and she was back home

maybe for a few days or for a few months

just finding her footing and finding a job,

that kind of thing.

And Penny would always write her name

on something that was hers.

She would write her name on her Mountain Dew.

She would write her name on a dessert

or something she saved for later.

And I can neither confirm nor deny that it was I

who ate that incredible and tasty dessert.

But when she found it missing, she said, thanks a lot

to the whole household 'cause she didn't,

I wasn't gonna give up that information.

Anyway, what information?

But actually giving thanks is way more than a token phrase.

With bitterness, it sets in deep.

And how often in the flesh we lose sight

of the blessings of the Lord and the favor of God

only to see the negatives and to focus on that.

I think about after the Exodus,

how the Hebrews so quickly said, take us back to slavery

just 'cause they were missing a meal.

And the prophet Amos says this,

do horses run on rocky crags?

Does one plow the sea with the oxen?

You've turned justice into poison

and the fruit of righteousness into bitterness.

We can do that if we allow it.

We can change that bitterness.

We can change.

Luke told us in a story in Acts,

and I believe we covered this earlier this year,

Simon the sorcerer.

Does anybody remember where the sorcerer saw that Peter

had been performing miracles in Jesus' name?

And he said, why don't I give you money

and you show me how to do those miracles?

And Peter, have you ever gotten like righteous anger in you?

Like this, you can just picture Peter

'cause the words he uses is just like out.

He just rebukes the guy like this, rebuke.

Have you ever been rebuked?

Ha ha, I have been rebuked.

She's smiling.

Listen, it's not fun, but how you respond

to the rebuke is so much more important

than what you said or how you stepped in it.

Is that, okay, all right.

So here's what Peter says to him.

He says, may your money perish with you

because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money.

You have no part or share in this ministry

because your heart is not right before God.

Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord

in the hope that he may forgive you

for having such a thought in your heart.

For I see that you are full of bitterness

and captive to sin.

Can you picture Simon's eyes?

You know what he says?

He says, pray to the Lord for me

so that nothing you've just said will happen to me.

If you have those Bibles,

or even if you have an app or a tablet,

turn to Ephesians 4, 30 through 32.

Ephesians 4, lots of you can quote this.

It's fun to hear the pages turn.

All right, I'm gonna read it from the NIV.

If you're there, say I'm there.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God

with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger,

brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.

Be kind and compassionate to one another,

forgiving each other just as in Christ, God forgave you.

What I find interesting in this set of verses

is that Paul makes a point to say,

hey, let me tell you who I'm talking to right now.

I'm talking about the believers who are saved

and searching after and living for God, right?

I'm talking about with whom you were sealed

for the day of redemption.

You guys who are saved, true believers, right?

And then what does he say?

Get rid of the bitterness.

So my question to that is, can you be a believer

and fallen after God and find yourself with bitterness?

Yeah, yeah you can.

It's right there in the scripture.

So yeah, this, excuse me, I just got off.

I fell off the horse, you'll have to bear with me.

I'm gonna get back on there.

So yeah, bitterness, it can set in, right?

It's a daily thing that we have to lay down our flesh,

take up our cross and look to the Lord.

When I was a child, I was a terrible human.

And I would often argue and instigate issues

with my siblings.

So many times that my mother would quote this last verse

at the end of her rope, like she would like close her eyes

and put her hands up like this.

And she was quoting in the, yeah, you saw,

you've seen it, John.

And she's quoting from the King's English, okay?

King James version, she says, "Be ye kind one to another,

tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God,

for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you."

And that's still in me just because of how many times

I heard her quoting.

And I think about that, I'm like, maybe for those offspring

I've got sitting back there with Tisha,

maybe I should be quoting more scripture for them.

Maybe they'll have it with them.

Makes me thankful for junior Bible quiz

and teen Bible quiz.

We have to learn to give thanks

or we will become disheartened.

So the first one is we will become bitter

if we don't learn to give thanks.

And I'm convinced that the two things,

one chokes the other one out.

So if we choose to give thanks in all circumstances,

the bitterness will go away.

Well, so will the disheartenment, okay?

Have you ever known someone who has given up?

Pastor Kevin spoke on this just a few weeks ago.

Remember the towels?

Have you ever been there?

I have.

I remembered those moments when I held that towel up.

And I know many of you have as well.

I'm not good at it, sorry, forgive me.

Okay, so when you're disheartened, you don't care anymore.

You get cold, you lose your compassion,

you lose your heart for others.

Remember that story that Pastor Bruce shared with Kevin

about the water.

You have a water and the Holy Spirit has called you

to take that water to someone.

And when you go, there are people and needs all around

while you've been called to take the water to that person

and you take the water.

This is not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about when God has given you water to give away

and you're not listening and you hold onto that water

and insert whatever.

Might I suggest that if you aren't doing something

for someone else on a regular basis,

then you're allowing yourself to become blind

to the needs around you.

There's a story that I read about this week.

In the fall of 1929, this is the year

of the great stock market crash

that started the Great Depression.

And there were these pastors who met together

on a weekly basis and they were talking about

what do we, what can we do,

how should we address Thanksgiving this year

with all of this financial devastation

and people losing everything?

And we do not, we're kind of pretty far removed

from the Great Depression now.

We don't have an internal memory of that.

But all of us in this room, our grandparents

and great-grandparents had a connection

to the Great Depression in some way.

My granddaddy who lived through the Depression era,

he used to tell this story that gave us,

gave the children an idea of what the Great Depression

was like.

There was a man who was traveling through West Tennessee

and it was in the 30s.

So he had a car and it broke down.

There's nothing you can do for a while.

You know, you have to get to a town.

And he was in between towns and he walked,

it was getting, starting to get dark.

He walked to the next farmhouse

and he knocked on the farmhouse

and the farmer came to the door and he said,

"Listen, do you mind if I just stay the night in your barn?

My car broke down."

And the farmer would have none of it.

Invited him in, he said,

"Come in and wash up and eat with us."

And he sits down to eat and the farmer said,

"Would you like some turnip greens?"

And he says, "No, thank you.

I don't care for turnip greens."

The farmer paused for a moment and said,

"Would you like some salt and pepper?"

That helped us.

It helped us realize, oh, they had what they had.

You ate what you could get.

Okay, back to the pastor's meeting, 1929.

So that was just a little insight,

reminds you of the Great Depression.

Many of the pastors suggested that it would be an insult

to their congregations to focus on Thanksgiving

during such a difficult time.

One pastor opposed this notion

after many of the others had said,

"Well, let's just not even mention it."

And he said that this was the time

to get into proper perspective

and to give thanks for blessings that are always present,

blessings that seem to get suppressed

when we're in times of hardship.

And that resonated with the other pastors.

The most intense moments of thankfulness

are not found in times of plenty.

They're find when great difficulties abound.

We must learn to give thanks

or we will become self-centered.

If you let yourself, you will be the center of your story.

If you are the most important person in your story,

you've gotten it wrong.

How many times did Jesus warn us about that?

Teaching us to be outward focused, do things for others.

A little bit of homework.

Look through just the Sermon on the Mount

and count the amount of times that Jesus warns us

to be outward focused.

Much of the Beatitudes are outward focused.

Whoever sets aside the least of these

is the least in the kingdom.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Let your light so shine before others.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Give to others in secret.

Forgive others.

And that's just from one sermon of our Lord.

Think back to the story of the first Thanksgiving

with the pilgrims and the natives.

No matter how apocryphal some of those details may be,

many of those details are quite dire.

The pilgrims had traveled here

in search of religious freedom.

And by that point, half of them had already died.

So put yourself in the story.

Think of that first meager harvest.

Half your family has died.

There's no way to return to Europe, even if you wanted to.

And things are so difficult

that you don't know who's gonna live

through the coming winter.

And what did they do?

They gave.

They shared.

They gave.

They gave thanks.

Thanks to God.

Think of President Lincoln and the choice

to declare the national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863

in the middle of the Civil War,

when the country was in the middle of losing

over 600,000 men in battle,

which is more than the country lost

in World War I and II combined.

In that conflict, he chose for the country

to give thanks to God.

Remember what Paul said,

"Give thanks in all circumstances."

We typically give thanks quickly when things are good

and when we have obvious blessings in favor.

But what about the times when our circumstances are dire?

What about when those who are close to us pass away?

What about when we share our faith

with someone we love and it is rejected?

What about when we lose our job?

What about when we pray for healing

and the Lord chooses to walk us through that sickness?

What about when our surroundings aren't lining up

with our hopes and our dreams?

Perhaps the Apostle Paul is not saying to give thanks

for all your circumstances.

Perhaps he's saying to give thanks in all circumstances.

You can be a believer, saved, born-again Christian,

and still walk around with a negative attitude,

with bitterness, complaining,

thinking you're the center of the story.

And when I say this, I'm saying this to all of us,

myself included, but I just want you to know

some of us walk around with blinders on.

It's a blind spot.

And we're thinking of the other people

that Will must be talking about and not ourselves.

It's actually up to you.

I really like what Justin said last week.

We're not the center of the story.

He is.

We're grafted into his family because of his great love.

The choice is yours.

My mother would say, she's a coach,

the ball is in your court.

You need to allow the Spirit of God

to change you from the inside out.

Your life in the kingdom begins when you believe, right?

When you make that choice.

And then you remain here in the land of the living

for whatever amount of time,

but eternity for you has begun.

So you can choose to walk in anger and hatred

and bigotry and complaining,

or you can choose to live a life of giving thanks.

Now, how does this happen?

What do we do about this?

And I'm gonna say some things

that are gonna sound pretty duh,

but we call them spiritual disciplines.

It's how you grow as an eternal being

while you're right here in the land of the living.

Spiritual disciplines.

I'll list three.

Spending time reading God's word.

Spending time in prayer.

At the feet.

Spending time in fellowship with other believers.

Now, what's the recurring theme?

It takes time.

If you ever tell yourself,

oh, I don't have time for that,

you need to lay something down.

I lost one of my best friends last year,

and Danny taught me a lot.

Yeah, you guys come on out.

Oh, you're already out, okay.

I'm so good at this.

And losing Danny was tough,

but in this last year plus,

as I remember the things that he told me over the years,

one time afterward, he had been running the lyrics,

and he came down after the service.

I went over there and I was talking to him,

and I said, man, I meant to call you back during the week,

but I had so much going on, I didn't have time.

And he said, well, you make time for what's important.

(gentle music)

If these three things aren't a core of who you are,

then you're being discipled by something or someone else.

The enemy is sly.

'Cause you are being discipled,

even if you don't realize it.

And only godly spiritual disciplines

will change who you are for the better.

I'm asking you to be challenged

with the giving part of Thanksgiving.

I want you to pray about it.

I'm not telling you exactly what it means for you.

I want you to pray about it.

In the feeding of the 4,000 that we read,

Jesus gave thanks.

And in giving thanks for what,

in giving thanks for what we have been blessed with,

God takes it and multiplies it

to go so much further than it would have been

if we had kept it for ourselves.

If you remember one thing from today,

I want you to remember this quote from Dr. Timothy Keller.

And it's one thing to be grateful,

it's another to give thanks.

Gratitude is what you feel.

Thanksgiving is what you do.

Would you stand?

It's less of an altar call type situation.

It's more of a you've been challenged, you have homework.

This is a go home and do things, okay?

But if you have prayer needs this morning,

there are elders in the room who are gonna come forward,

are able to pray for you.

It's very important that we're there

for each other spiritually.

So these that are here that are ready to pray with you

will stand there with you and pray with you.

If you're going through a difficult time,

please come forward.