Bless the Lord, O My Soul

If you have a Bible, get it out.

If you don't, follow along in the app or on the screens, but we're gonna be reading Psalm 103 this morning.

It says this Bless the Lord, O my soul of David.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.

Bless His holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems you from the life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed.

He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

As a father who shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

For he knows our frame.

As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it's gone, and his place knows it no more.

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.

The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.

Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word.

Bless the Lord all his hosts, his ministers who do his will, bless the Lord all his works in all places of his dominion.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.

This is the word of the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises this morning.

If we're looking at this kind of emotions in the Psalms, right?

This is kind of the theme that we've been working with through the summer.

And really, the Psalms are these collections of songs and poetry and liturgical movements that were used for the people of Israel in their worship or in their personal devotion time.

If we look at this passage, I think that what we can see as the major theme or emotion that the psalmist is stirring within us is this of gratitude.

Gratitude.

And he's trying to remind Israel of all the benefits of God, all the benefits of having a relationship with God and what that looks like for them.

And we can really find ourselves in the same place as Israel, a rem a needed reminder of how good God is to us so that we're full of gratitude.

If you are like me, you can understand how easy it is to lose gratitude.

It's so easy, right?

Especially if you're like, if you're a parent and your kids, like you understand how quick it is to lose gratitude.

You could take them out on the most wonderful day, right?

You could go to King's Island, you could buy them the blue ice cream, they could ride every ride they wanted to, you can lavish, you know, hundreds of dollars of souvenirs on them, everything that you possibly could think of.

And then that night, in the instant, in the in the blinking of an eye, they will flow a fit.

They will flip their lid, they will say, You don't love me, or you don't care, or you're so mean to me.

And you're sitting here thinking, wait a second, let me check my bank account because I think I just lost like a thousand dollars to make you yell at me.

And we do the same thing with our spouses, don't we?

Right?

If you're married and you understand gratitude, and you understand the way that gratitude affects your relationship with your spouse.

Like when I ask my spouse to get me a drink from the fridge and she's angry at me, like her pleasure and joy is not there doing it.

She might not even actually get it for me.

She might just tell me, get my own rear end up and get it yourself.

When we have love and communion and we're grateful for one another, it's not a labor or kind of act of servanthood.

It's something of joy and gift giving that she gets to serve me and I get to serve her, this mutual gratitude for one another.

You can even think of it in a way of, again, our relationships.

How many times have you been maybe angry at someone?

Maybe it's your spouse, or maybe it's a good friend, maybe it's your own children.

And as you reminisce through pictures on your phone, or maybe you open up your scrapbook from your wedding, or maybe you kind of think through your past relationship with them, it helps to actually inform gratitude.

You might understand that right now what you're experiencing is hardship and trial and trouble, but if you really look at the overarching story of your relationship with this person, gratitude might be built up in your heart.

We can do the same thing with God.

We can become extremely ungrateful people.

Because we can forget all of his benefits toward us.

We can forget all of his loving kindness, all of his goodness, all of his mercy.

We can forget, and we often do when we find ourselves more in grumbling and moaning and complaining than we do in blessing and praising and thanksgiving.

Some of you have hard lives.

Some of you have faced great trials and troubles.

And it's hard in the midst of it to get your focus off of those and onto the goodness of God.

I get it.

I understand.

And what the psalm is trying to tell us this morning is forget not the benefits of God.

So verses one through two start off with this proclamation of bless the Lord.

And we're gonna see this statement, bless the Lord, oh my soul, be both the beginning and the resolve of this psalm.

And what we're really seeing is that we praise the Lord for his name and benefits are inseparable.

We praise the Lord for his name and his benefits are inseparable.

The benefits of God are rooted in his promises to his covenant people, and his name is the guarantor of the promises he has made.

Let me try and break that down a little bit for us.

So the benefits of God are rooted in his promises to his covenant people.

Let's start with that.

First is this that God has made a people for himself, and he is making a people for himself.

That's us as the church.

We actually become active participants in seeing people be brought into the family of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and we get to see the unfolding of God himself making a people for his name.

And so from eternity past, he has looked upon his people of whom he would save and those he would bring into the family of God, and he has made promises to them.

And the benefits of these promises are seen in the lives of his people.

You see, God cannot break his promise.

The promises of God are yes and amen.

They are things that do not return to us void.

Every single one of them will come to pass, and we as his people get to be great beneficiaries of those promises.

And his name is the guarantor of the promises that he's made.

You see, God has looked out across the earth and all of time and all of creation to find a name of which was greater than his, of which he could make these promises.

And he found none.

And so he put his own name on the line.

He put his own name on the line that says that if any of these promises of which I make for my people does not come to pass, then I am no longer God.

You see, that's how much is at stake.

It's not at stake of your well-being or your happiness or how much you enjoy your life.

That thing that is at most at stake is not your pleasure, it is the very name and being of God Himself.

If he fails to come through with one single promise that he has made to his people, he fails to be God himself.

All eternity is at stake for God to fulfill his promises of which he's made to his people.

And we as his people get to be great beneficiaries of it.

Verses three through six, we see this that God is faithful to his promises despite the condition of the people that he's made them to.

When we look at this uh passage of scripture, when we look at this section of the text, we have to look at the position of us in it, right?

When we see ourselves in verses three through six, what we see is that we are the ones with the iniquities, right?

The ones with sin in our lives.

We are the ones with the disease, we are the ones who have made our life in the pit.

We are the ones who are described here as the one needing redemption, help, and rescue.

But then we look at the promises of God.

And we look at his glorious benefits poured out to his children.

So, in stark contrast to us who are the ones full of sin, who have riddled with disease, and whose life has been made in the pit of despair, God is the one who forgives all of our offenses, who heals all our spiritual and physical disease, and he brings us into glory with himself, raising us from our place and seating us with him on high next to Christ our Savior.

Look at the majesty of God compared to the rebellion and fallness of man.

And then we see the last two benefits that the psalmist recalls for the purpose of his praise.

It's this one is that he crowns us with steadfast love and mercy.

It is God's unchanging love, and it is God's mercy that becomes our crown.

It is not the merits of our work, but the majesty of his kindness to us, which are jewels set upon our head.

Do you understand that?

Yeah, even in glory, even when we are raised up by the mercy of Christ, not the efforts of our striving and work, that when we are in glory with him, what is set upon our head as jewels to be adorned is not our own merits and work, but it is his steadfast love.

It is his unchanging mercy for us.

And then he says, Who satisfies you with good so that, so that our life can be renewed.

So our youth is renewed like the eagles.

God pours out his goodness to us to put a fresh step, a burst of life, joy unspeakable into our lives.

This is the benefits of God in spite of ourselves.

You see, God's love, God's mercy, God's kindness, it absolutely has nothing to do with you.

Isn't that freeing?

There's nothing good that you can do to earn it, and there is nothing so evil you could do to lose it.

But God chooses to pour out his goodness on you as his people in spite of both your good and your bad.

Praise God.

Bless the Lord, oh my soul.

To sum up the benefits of God to his people, we're shown that God is compassionate to those who are experiencing injustice.

Even if that injustice is the result of our own decisions and choices.

You see, we kind of find ourselves in a tension here as people who might be under the weight of sin or under this life of sin.

It is twofold.

It is both an oppressive taskmaster who rules over us, and it is also one of free choice of which we have given ourselves into.

And that's a hard tension to understand.

You see, all of us, we look at the garden and we look at Adam and we say, Man, if that was me in the garden, I wouldn't have bit the fruit.

That's a lie.

Each and every single one of you would have, because each and every single one of us do day by day.

We bite the fruit, the intoxication, the enticement, the lore, the lust of something greater.

We seek it and it leaves us empty and unfulfilled.

So not only do we choose sin in our lives, but we also are under an unjust taskmaster of sin over us.

You see, that's the whole thing with idols.

That's the whole thing with sin.

We approach the worship of things, we approach sin, believing that it's going to serve us.

We believe that we are above it and that it will be our servant of fulfillment and joy and pleasure.

And every single time the tables turn, and at some point sin starts to rule you.

You thought you could control it, you thought that you could be uh uh it could be a servant unto you for what you desired, but quickly we found it that it actually enslaves us and masters us.

One of the easiest ways to see this is with drugs.

When we look at the epidemic of heroin that's going on in our city, most people have approached using to have that drug serve them, whether it was pain, physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain, and they wanted relief.

They wanted out of it, they wanted some type of escape from which they suffered.

They thought that they could use it to serve them.

And in an instant, they serve it.

It becomes their taskmaster.

We are much like that.

It might not be through the end of a needle, it might be through your job, your relationships, your children, your looks, whatever it might be that you think that will serve you, if approached in sin, you'll find that you are forced at some point to serve it.

But God is gracious, and God is compassionate even to us who experience injustice, even if that injustice is the result of our own decisions and choices.

Verses 7 through 10 declare that God always demonstrates mercy to the people of his promises.

When we look what the Psalm is writing there, he's saying that he made known his way to Moses.

He's recalling this old story of historical event of God delivering the people of Israel out of the hand of the Egyptians, out from the oppressive rulers of Egypt, of Pharaoh.

And as God demonstrated himself through the deliverance of his people in Egypt from the oppressive master Pharaoh, so God demonstrates himself to us through our deliverance of the oppressive master of our sin.

You see, God demonstrates mercy to the people of his promises.

If God wanted to, to be fully just, to allow himself to uh uh uh uh to execute righteous judgment upon all of our sin, then we would be crushed under the weight of his punishment.

We would not be able to stand before him, we would be downtrodden and stick uh uh pummeled to the ground through his wrath.

You see, he could leave us where we are.

But he shows compassion and mercy to us.

And as he delivered the the Israelites out of Egypt through Moses, so does God deliver us out of the oppressive master of our sin through his son Jesus.

God's love for us is beyond our rebellion toward him.

God's love for us is beyond our rebellion toward him.

You see, he does not punish us for our sin.

Because Christ has borne the punishment in our place.

And we have to understand this as a church.

And I was actually during family worship this uh a couple weeks ago as our children.

Family worship is awesome.

If you if you don't do family worship, do family worship.

And if you need help on what that means and looks like, come and talk to me.

I'd love to help you do that.

Every morning, my children and I go through this devotion called New City Catechism, and it's a series of answer, questions, and answers about who is God and what does the Bible say.

And then every Monday night we do songs and reading in the scriptures and praying together, and it gets silly and fun, but also we try to foster a genuine affection for Jesus and his word.

And we were talking about punishment versus discipline.

And my children had some great questions on that, and it caused me to think about my own life and relationship with God.

You see, there's a difference between the two.

If you're a child of God, you will experience his discipline because he loves you.

What you will never experience if you are one of his children is his punishment.

You see, punishment is very different from discipline, and that punishment has no hope for a better future.

But discipline is small corrections to guide us to the path of better.

Christ bore our punishment so that we might feel and experience the loving discipline of God the Father.

In Christ, you will never experience his punishment.

He will not always chide, he will not keep his anger forever.

And he, by God's grace and mercy, does not deal with us according to our sins.

Verses 11 through 14 says that God's gracious love toward us is humanly unfathomable.

Look at the psalmist and how he does his best to try and get us to comprehend the love of God that he has for his people.

But ultimately, if we kind of work through 11 through 14, we'll see that we're unable to truly grasp it, for his love is as high as the heavens.

His forgiveness is as far as the east is from the west, and his care for us is as a perfect father.

We cannot humanly fathom the reaches of his love for us.

We cannot fathom the mercy he extends for us, where he takes all of our sin and iniquity and he removes it as far as from the east is to the west.

What the psalmist is really saying is his love and his mercy toward us are eternal.

You cannot reach the end of it.

If you're a Christian and you are struggling still with sin in your life, you cannot reach the end of God's mercy.

You cannot reach the end of his love for you.

There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that we have in Christ Jesus.

Nothing, not even yourself.

We can't comprehend his love for us or his mercy for us.

And for many of us, we can't even comprehend him as a father who shows compassion.

The psalmist tries to give us the most earthly thing possible to try and understand God.

And because me and you, many of us in this room, have had bad fathers, that seems insanely unattainable.

Doesn't it?

For some of us.

When the psalmist says that his love is as high as the heavens, I can't understand the eternal expanse of space to know that.

When he says that his forgiveness is as far as the east is from the west, I can't fathom what that would look like to stretch so wide.

But then he says, I'll give you the most humanly thing I can to help you understand God's love and mercy.

He's a compassionate father.

And because of sin and brokenness, even many of us can't grasp that.

But he is.

No, God is a father who, when he made man, he got down on his hands and knees and he formed him.

He made him in the dust and then he intimately breathed his life into him.

God knows us.

He knows our frame.

And so God shows his love and his mercy and his kindness to us.

Because he knows us.

He sees our frailty in the midst of our hard hardenedness.

And he chooses us to lavish us with his benefits.

He sees our frailty in the midst of our hard-heartedness.

And he chooses to lavish us with his benefits.

Bless the Lord, oh my soul.

God is good.

Verses 15 through 19, we see that we cannot compare to the eternal majesty of the Lord.

He goes into this knowing our frame and what that looks like, that we're just like grass, right?

What a great comparison.

The Lord is majestic, as high as the heavens, his infinite expanse of kindness and mercy.

You man, you're like grass.

You see, when set side by side with God, we're so pathetic.

It's true.

I hear the resound of the first half of Romans 9.20 when Paul's writing to the Christians who are in Rome and he says this simple statement, but who are you, O man?

Who are you?

We are finite, frail, and at the end of our life we're forgotten once again.

Any legacy that we seek to leave is only one or two generations away from being completely forgotten.

But God.

But God.

It is only through God, eternal, powerful, and glorious, that we're able to put our hope in his benefits, for his steadfast love is everlasting.

It is not frail, it is not finite, it finds itself no end.

It is eternally given to us.

What a pleasure it becomes to fear him, what a joy it becomes to keep his commandments, what life we find in his covenant.

You see, how can we look at the promises of God to his people and then turn to find ourselves delighting in the filth and emptiness of this world?

But we do it all the time.

You see, he's saying, Man, you're nothing.

You're like a flower.

You'll you'll you'll flourish, but then you're just fade, and then the wind just gently takes you away to where you're forgotten once again.

But not me.

I'm eternal, I'm everlasting, I'm unfailing, I'm all powerful.

And this isn't some kind of like domineering, egocentric uh uh uh statement from God.

This is him saying, stop looking at the things that are as finite or even more finite than yourself.

Stop looking at the things that are more frail than your own frame.

Stop looking at the things that'll keep you forgotten.

Look to me.

You are stored in my eternal memory.

I will never forget your name.

I have it scribed on my very hand.

Look to me who pours out his pleasure and benefits on you.

Look to me who gives you joy unspeakable, peace beyond your circumstance.

Look to me.

And we as a people often find ourselves looking at the promises of God, and then we turn the other way and we look at the filth and emptiness of this world, and we try to delight in it.

We try to delight in it.

And what's it do?

It leaves us empty.

Because its promises are vain, its promises are empty.

And you know what the beauty of God is?

He's right there.

Because his mercy is everlasting.

And he draws us in and he pulls us close like a compassionate father and says, Delight in me.

Verses 20 through 22 say that the praise of God stretches through the cosmos but overwhelms even the heart of the individual.

If we look at it, it says, hosts of angels, praise him, bless him.

All those who are his ministers and do his will, bless him.

In all places of the stretch of his ruling dominion, praise him.

And oh, bless the Lord, my soul.

As his benefits are remembered, there is a rightful response of praise from his people.

He is so majestic that all creation will join in the blessing of his name, yet he is so intimate with his people that we will personally find reason to praise him.

What a great God we serve, one who holds the cosmos by his very being, but yet knows us so intimately that you and I have personal reason to praise him.

What God has done in your life is different than what God has done in my life.

That's the craziness about God and who he is, that he can speak and all of creation is made, that by the power of his strength, everything has life and is sustained, but yet each and every single one of us in this room can narrate and talk and reminisce about the things that God has done for us.

So not only does his praise demand all of creation in the cosmos to respond, but it causes us personally to respond to him as well.

And so, what's the main idea for us this morning?

It's this that our hearts are filled with gratitude when we recount his goodness to us.

Our hearts are filled with gratitude when we recount his goodness to us.

How can we not overflow with blessing when we're reminded of his goodness to us?

When we reflect on our former state and bear witness to our redeemed life, we can only respond in blessing his name.

Does your heart lack gratitude?

Begin remembering all of his benefits.

It is then that we're filled with gratitude when we count.

It's like it it's it's it's it this falls short, and I understand analogies are only uh so good, but it's it's like the married couple who are bitter and fighting with one another, and one of them starts going through their book of pictures of when they were married, or they start opening up that treasure of love letters that they were writing to them in when they were dating, or if you're frustrated with your kids, but you start going through that Instagram scroll of all the good times that you've had with them, you start to change, you start to be filled with gratitude, your posture towards that individual starts to soften.

And that's with two wicked, sinful people.

But God, when we recount his goodness to us, a perfect, compassionate Father, eternal God, steadfast love, mercy that has no end, we should be full of gratitude.

But our story is this that we live absent of gratitude because we are forgetful of his benefits.

This is me and this is you.

We live absent of gratitude because we are forgetful of his benefits.

Some of us dwell on our trials and struggles in place of his goodness.

Like I said, there's many of us who have gone through hard things in our life.

There are many of us in this room who are going through hard things in our life.

And what we have the propensity to do is to dwell on our trials and struggles in place of his goodness.

But if you are a Christian, if you are a child of God by faith in the Son of Jesus and His finished work, then this for us is quite a contradiction.

Because in Christ, even our trials and struggles are a demonstration of his goodness to us.

You see, God promises that all things are for our good.

No, because we don't understand that He is allowing us and causing us to go through certain things that we might have a clearer vision of Him.

And our joy should not be robbed in the midst of suffering, it should be strengthened because we know that in the fire we're being purified to know and love Him more.

But we dwell on the hardships of our life.

And we don't look at it first off as God's goodness to us, and we don't look at God's goodness at all in the midst of it.

And often what this kind of plays itself out as is that our hearts become so cold because we find them overwhelmed with entitlement.

Our hearts can become so cold because we find them overwhelmed with entitlement.

You see, often we face hardships, and when we face them, we become convinced that we deserve better.

When you're going through trials of your life, when you're going through hardships, when you're going through uh suffering in your life, you and I can so quickly become convinced that we deserve better.

I don't deserve this disease, I don't deserve this sickness, I don't deserve this relationship, I don't deserve this turmoil in my home, I don't deserve this God.

I thought you were good.

But we have forgotten that we deser what we truly did deserve.

And we have forgotten what his mercy gave to us.

You see, we're right in thinking that we do deserve something, but we're wrong when we think that we deserve better.

Twofold reasons for that.

Number one, God cannot give you better than Christ.

And number two, you deserved far worse.

But because of Christ and His mercy, you're being relieved of your punishment.

You see, we need to foster a posture of humility, and that will help us to remember his benefits.

Pride will always cause us to fathom that we deserve better.

I'm reading this book by Richard Sibs.

He's an old Puritan, uh, and he wrote a book called The Bruised Reed, and it's talking about us being the bruised reed.

I've been sharing this because it was such an impactful quote, but he's talking about Christians who experience suffering and hardships and trials.

And he says that our first posture, I'm going to paraphrase, right?

Because I'm not as eloquent or educated as the Puritans were, but I will say this that he says that our first thought when we experience suffering and hardships in our life should not be, God, I thought you were good.

It should be, God, how hard-hearted am I, and how stubborn is my soul that it would take such measures to correct me.

If all things are for our good, as according to what the apostle Paul writes to the Christians in Romans, and we can have bank that that is our guarantee and promise that all things are working for our good.

When we spake, when we face hardships, when we face sufferings in our life, our first thought should be, God, why am I so stiff-necked and hard-hearted that it would take such measures to grab my attention?

Not, I thought you were good.

I deserve better.

Everything God does in our lives is to try and cause us to effectively gaze upon Him where we can only be fulfilled by His person.

And we get to be beneficiaries of His promises.

And the beauty of the gospel is this for us this morning: that Jesus is the fulfillment of the benefits of God to his people.

Jesus is the fulfillment of the benefits of God to his people.

It is only because of Jesus that we can be beneficiaries of God.

Without Jesus' sinless life and substitutionary death, God would have only been left to deal with us according to our sin.

Right?

The passage of Psalm that you will not be angry forever.

You will not always chide.

You will not continually discipline me or punish me for my sin.

That statement that the psalmist writes is only true because of Christ.

God can only have relief from his anger.

God can only relieve us from his punishment.

God can only be satisfied with justice because Christ stood under the weight of his punishment for us.

So as the psalmist declares, he will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.

You see, the benefit has come to us, church, at a great cost.

This benefit.

When the psalmist opens up and says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not his benefits.

We can only be beneficiaries of God because Christ stood in our place.

The one, Christ Jesus, who deserved all the benefits of God because he was perfect and holy.

He lived sinlessly under his commandments.

He perfectly fulfilled every dot and measure of the law of God, was treated according to our sin.

And he paid the cost for our iniquity.

And because of him, our sin has been removed from us as far as the east is from the west.

And we can be in relationship to our gracious Father and enjoy all of his benefits.

This is the beauty of the gospel.

Psalm 103 can only be true to us because of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.

If it were not for Christ, he would punish us forever.

But Christ bore our punishment in our place so that we might live to the eternal benefits of God our Father.

So what does this mean for us?

If we were to try and live this out, and what would this change about us as a people?

I think it's this.

That we would be a people of blessing as we were filled with his gratitude, with gratitude for his goodness to us.

We would be a people of blessing as we are filled with gratitude.

Think about it.

When you're full of gratitude, when your heart is overflowing with gratitude about your circumstance, don't you become more generous?

Generous?

Right?

Sound like the rabbit on um uh Winnie the Pooh.

Don't you become more generous?

Isn't your hand more open to bless when you're full of gratitude?

Think about how our culture would change, how our homes would change if we were filled with gratitude because we had not forgotten his benefits.

But if we ponder and reminisce and reflect on the goodness of God and our hearts are overflowing with gratitude, then our city would change because we'd be a people of blessing.

We would see that we have all that we need in Christ Jesus.

And so we would walk with open hands.

We wouldn't try to guard and hoard our possessions for safekeeping, for that we might be protected and safeguarded.

No, we would live with open arms because we have all that we could ever need in Jesus alone.

Our city would change, our neighborhoods would change, our homes would be open, our tables would be set with placemats for our neighbors to come and feast and dine with us.

We would truly be able to love others as Christ has loved us.

That is our call.

We can't when we're sitting here full of pride, believing we deserve better, believing God is not good, ungrateful people don't bless people.

But grateful people, they are radically generous.

And we have the ability to be the most grateful people in all of creation.

We have the ability to be the most grateful people in all of creation because our hearts can be filled with gratitude for what Christ has done for us.

Imagine what your home would be like.

Imagine what your home would be like if your gratitude was not based on the way your spouse was living, but on the ways of which you reminisced about God's goodness to you.

Imagine what your job would look like.

If your job wasn't the root source of your joy and peace and gratitude, but Christ was enough.

Christ was sufficient.

Imagine what your family would look like, what your neighborhood would look like, what this city would look like if we weren't a people who were terrified and afraid to engage the culture of which we lived in, but because we were so full of gratitude of the goodness of God that we engaged our city with blessing and open hands and arms and saying, I have enough in Christ, come and take what you need.

And imagine if this culture who is so ungrateful of God grasped even a measure of our gratitude that we have for Him.

You want to win the culture?

You think bickering and moaning and complaining and being ungrateful for God is ever gonna cause someone to want what you have?

You see, our gratitude in and of itself should be missional.

The way in which we live with one another should be missional.

The way in which we do life together should be missional.

The world should look from the outside into the church and declare and grasp for what we have.

I want that.

What they're doing is different.

It's unique.

There's nothing I've ever seen like this.

They care for one another, they serve one another, they hold help and uphold one another, they have this love for one another that I've never seen before in my life, I've never experienced before in my life.

Look how grateful they are.

I want that.

In church, we would be a people of blessing.

As we are filled with gratitude for his goodness to us.

Let's pray.