Thanks Given

Well, I am, this is my favorite time of the year.

I really love Thanksgiving.

I have to remind myself every year that taking a day off from work and overeating does not make me thankful.

Then I'll have to remind myself of that again this year.

But I have a question.

What does make one thankful?

I was reading a couple of weeks ago in Luke chapter 7, and there was a horribly immoral woman who had had an encounter with Jesus and he changed her life, and her response was that she washed his feet with her tears and poured very expensive perfume on his feet.

Luke 7 · chapter mention

Now I'd say she was thankful, wouldn't you?

Jesus' takeaway was this.

She loved much.

She loved much.

It's the only time I can find in all of Scripture where Jesus said somebody loved him.

But then he went on to say this.

But he who has been forgiven little loves little.

I think our thanksgiving is always a matter of the awareness that we have of the depth of how much we've been forgiven.

It's where love comes from.

It depends on how much we are aware of how much we've been forgiven.

So how aware are you of how much Jesus loves you?

When I was in seminary, a man that I deeply respected gave me some advice that I've never forgotten.

He said, Marcus, throughout all the days of your life, you should make a habit out of reading the writings of people who've been dead for a long, long time.

And I've never forgotten that.

And so for most of my adult life now, I have read the writings of people who wrote many, many, many years ago.

One book that I came across was by a guy named Bernard of Clairvaux.

He lived in Clairvaux, France.

He was a monk.

He lived in the 12th century.

And he wrote a little book.

It's only 39 pages long.

He wrote a little book called Four Degrees of Love.

And here's what he says.

This is not a formula.

It's more of a progression.

It's the way people grow in their love.

Here's what he says.

The first degree of love is, I love me for my sake.

I love me for my sake.

It's where every person begins.

No baby ever refrained from crying because mama was tired.

Because in their world, they're the only one that really matters.

And it's where all of us begin.

But at some point, hopefully we realize that all the sustenance for our lives comes to us from outside of us.

Think about it.

The air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the relationships we have, everything that sustains us comes to us from outside of us.

And if we spend a little time there, God brings us to Himself.

We become followers of Jesus.

Bernard of Clairvaux says the second degree of love is I love God for my sake.

I love God for my sake.

You would admit with me today that there are some benefits to knowing God, wouldn't you?

God really is a good God.

And God really is full of blessing.

And so we learn how to read the Bible.

We learn how to pray a little bit.

We learn the value of obedience.

But friends, at this stage, God is useful.

The attitude is God, you've been really good.

You've blessed me a lot.

Keep up the good work.

This is where we begin to learn religious language.

We learn words like sovereign.

God is sovereign.

That's what we call him when we think he's stubborn.

But stubborn's not very religious.

So we call him sovereign.

But at some point in our Bible reading, we begin to notice a whole lot of scripture that begins to tell us that we are not the center of all things.

God is the center of all things.

One of those is Psalm 79.9, and the scripture is full of this kind of language.

Psalm 79.9 says, Help us, O God our Savior, for the glory of your name.

Deliver us and forgive our sins for your name's sake.

It's not, he forgives your sins not for you first, but for the sake of his great name.

And so the third degree of love is I love God for God's sake.

The reason God does everything God does is for the sake of his great name.

The reason God loves you, the reason God heals you, the reason God has compassion on you is for the sake of his great name first.

He, not you, is the reason for all the good things that he does.

And so when we see that, God's glory then becomes the reason for the things that we do.

Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, Philippians 3 says, do everything you do to the glory of God.

So we begin to love God for who he is, not first for what we get out of it.

We realize that if God never did one more thing for us, he is still worthy to be worshipped.

He is still worthy of praise.

The reason we're blessed is not for God's blessings to culminate on us, but so that we'll be a blessing to other people.

So when I read this little book, I thought to myself, that's it right there.

That's it.

Bernard of Clairvaux says, no, there's actually one more degree, and you mathematicians have already figured this out, haven't you?

The fourth degree is I love myself for God's sake.

Now Bernard of Clairvaux says that you and I will not be able to live in that place until we get to heaven.

But, and I think he's right here, we can dip in and out of it while we sojourn on planet earth.

God loves us for the sake of his name.

Now you remember that when Jesus was asked, teacher, what's the greatest commandment in the law?

Jesus said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Let me tell you my trouble with that.

What if I don't love myself?

See, if I don't love me, I'll never love you very well.

And so Jesus said in John 13, 34, I'll give you a new command.

You love others the way I've loved you.

And so we come to the place where we love ourselves because God loves us, and we love ourselves the way God loves us.

And we really can grow into a place where we love and tend to ourselves, not for self-protection, but for the sake of God's name.

Everything God says is lovable.

Is lovable.

God says you're lovable.

Now, here's one of the things that I keep getting stuck in is stage two.

I love God for my sake.

And I want to tell you that we will never be deeply thankful people as long as we're stuck in loving God for our sake, because we are still the center of all things.

And when you're the center of all things, all you can see is what God has not done.

How God has not blessed you.

And why has he done more for them than he's done for me?

That's stuck.

And so as we think about thanksgiving this week, I think the way we mature in our love for God is by being thankful.

And I want us to look, if you brought your Bibles, Genesis chapter 12 today, I want us to look at the way Abraham displayed thanksgiving.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

Abraham displayed thanksgiving by building altars.

And so the first altar I want us to look at is the altar of promise.

The altar of promise.

Read with me in Genesis 12, verse 6.

Genesis 12:6

Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moray at Shekem.

At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

And the Lord appeared to Abram and said, To your offspring, I will give this land.

And so he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him.

Now there's a great difference between hearing a promise and receiving a promise.

I suppose anyone can hear a promise.

But to receive a promise means that we begin to make room in our lives for that promise to take root and to be established.

It's the reason why two people can come to church.

One of them is touched by God and the other is not.

One hears the promises of God, the other makes room in life for those promises to be rooted and established.

Think about marriage.

Nineteen and a half years ago, my sweet wife Lexa and I stood before God and we stood before a preacher.

We made promises to God and we made promises to each other.

But after that day, we no longer lived like single folk.

We cleared out enough room in our lives for the promises we had just made to come to fullness.

If you believe the one who made the promise, then you make room for the promise to grow.

God has just made Abram a promise that is so large that Abram will never be able to fulfill it.

He can't make it happen.

And so what he does is he stops and he builds an altar.

Now, when I talk about an altar, I'm not talking about a pile of rocks.

You get that.

What I'm talking about is making room in your life to protect an awareness of what God said.

Let me give you a working definition of what an altar is.

An altar is a statement of your values which extends into your future and bends your life around God.

It's a statement of your values that extends into your future and it bends your life around God so that God becomes what orients everything else in your life.

An altar says, God did a work here, and I can't just move on as though it never happened.

God did this.

I didn't do this.

And so I'm going to bend everything else in my life around the word of God.

When God made Abram this great promise, I wonder if he was tempted just to go, wow, that was wild.

That's never happened before.

And what he did was he created an atmosphere in his life that protected an awareness of God's promise.

He built an altar.

It's interesting to me that in verses five and six, two verses, three times there are references to the Canaanites.

Verse 5, God says, I'm going to bring you into the land of the Canaanites.

It says, then Abraham went into the land of the Canaanites.

And then it says, and the Canaanites were in that land.

Seem a little redundant?

He's making a point.

Historians believe that the Canaanites of that day were the most evil and vile people who've ever lived.

They murdered children.

They did horrible things to each other.

They were the Satanists of the day.

And yet, right in the middle of their land, that's where God called Abram and made him a promise.

Listen, you may be thinking to yourself, I really believe God's got good stuff for me.

But there's not any way I can get it done where I am.

Friends, don't be deceived by that.

Because the fullness of what God has spoken to you is not dependent upon your geography.

It's dependent on the God who backs it up with his name and character.

God is faithful to do what he said.

God is faithful.

Here's the second altar is the altar of provision.

The altar of provision.

The very next verse, verse 8, says this.

And there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.

It's a very interesting location where Abram chose to build this altar.

It says that Bethel was on the west, Ai was on the east.

Bethel means house of God.

Ai means ruins.

Here's what I believe Abram's saying.

God, my life was headed for the ruins until you made entrance into my life and you brought me into your house.

And I cannot just move on without saying thank you.

God, everything that's good in my life is because you have made and kept promises to me.

And so, God, I'm going to stop and I'm going to say thanks.

It's interesting that when Abraham built an altar, there's a, it doesn't say this every time, but almost every time he built an altar, it says, and there he called on the name of the Lord.

Name represents character.

And to do this the way that Abraham probably did it, it is a public statement.

Here's what Abraham did.

You don't build altars inside.

These are outside, probably right in the middle of a village.

And Abram would go into this village that was filled with the Canaanites, and he would begin to call out the name and the attributes of God.

Here's what he would do in a loud voice.

He would say, God, who is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, God keeps his promises.

My God is not a man that he should lie.

My God does everything that he promises to do, and my God will make a way for me, even if I can't see it or make sense of it for myself.

My God will do everything he says.

God is faithful in all his ways.

That's what it means to call out the name of the Lord.

Now I'm not telling you to go to Starbucks and to pull the doors open and to scream out the attributes of God.

But friends, that is almost exactly what Abram did.

He went into very public places and declared who God is.

Sometimes we do this when all we've got is a promise from God.

But friends, if you've got a promise from God, that promise is never all you've got.

Because that promise is always backed up by the name and the character of God.

It's a statement of faith.

It means that we have a larger view of God's character than we have for whatever else we're going through right now.

I think it's.

I think it's just like God to make us the only people on the planet who can actually give thanks prophetically.

This is the reason why.

You can say thanks to God prophetically, even before you see God do what he says.

The reason why is because you know his name.

Because you know of the attributes of God and you know of his faithfulness.

And so we can actually say thanks to God previous to the fulfillment of the promise because we know him.

And I want to tell you that is a statement of faith that is irresistible to God.

We've got the altar of promise and the altar of provision.

The third altar is the altar of redemption.

The altar of redemption.

Now, God called Abram to Canaan.

But there was a famine in Canaan.

And the famine was so severe that Abram took everything that he had and he went south down to Egypt.

When he got to Egypt, he was fearful for his life because he thought Pharaoh would kill him because Sarah was such a beautiful woman.

And God actually brought him back out of that.

The Bible never tells us what God thought about this little plan to go south into Egypt.

But let me tell you what I believe.

I believe that everywhere God makes a promise to somebody that at some point in time there will be inside of that calling a famine-like experience.

A famine atmosphere is where all the natural resources dry up.

Things don't grow as easily as they once did.

And the test is this: will we believe God?

Or will we try to make a way for ourselves?

Abraham compromises his integrity by lying about his wife.

He shames her and he embarrasses himself.

And the farther he got away from the promise of God, the worse his life got.

So in Genesis chapter 13, beginning in verse 1, he decides he's had enough.

Genesis 13 · chapter mention

So Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev with his wife and everything he had, and Lot went with him.

Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold.

From the Negev, he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai, where his tent had been earlier, and where he had first built an altar.

And there Abram called on the name of the Lord.

God brings him back.

He returns to his altar.

And when he returned to his altar, he called there on the name of the Lord.

Here's what that means: he brought his failure to God.

And what he learned that day was that God is not deterred by our failure.

And if you read through the rest of Abraham's life, God fulfilled every promise he ever made to Abraham.

In spite of Abraham's failure.

Friends, your future is not in jeopardy because of your failure.

God still is able to bring you to the fullness of what he spoke to you, regardless of how you may have intentionally stepped outside of his will.

God is still able.

That is by definition redemption.

Your failure does not hinder God's ability when you bring it to the altar.

So Abram called on the name of God.

Of the Lord.

Here's the fourth altar is the altar of trust.

The altar of trust.

Abram and Lot, if you've read through this, they had too much stuff to live in this land.

And so one day Abram pulled Lot aside and he said, Look, we're too numerous.

The land can't sustain both of us and all of our stuff any longer.

Why don't you pick what you want and I'll take whatever's left?

Now here's what Lot should have said.

Abraham, my Lord, everything I have, I have because of you.

Please, you pick.

And I'll take what's left.

But Lot was an opportunist.

And so Lot looked around the land and he found the one fertile valley.

And he said, I'll take the best for myself.

Started walking towards it, and you gotta wonder if Abraham thought to himself, I may have just given away the store here.

But God showed up.

And I want you to look what God says to him, Genesis 13, beginning in verse 14.

It says, the Lord said to Abram, after Lot had parted from him, lift up your eyes.

Why do you suppose God told him to lift up his eyes?

He's not doing well with this, I think.

He says, Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south and east and west.

All the land that you see, I will give to you and your offspring forever.

I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

Go.

Walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.

So Abram moved his tents and went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he built an altar to the Lord.

The part that was left to Abram was the scrub.

And if you've ever been there and seen it, not much grows there.

But when everything seems lost, and what you once looked forward to has now been taken away by someone else, friends, you still have the Lord.

You may feel like your inheritance has been taken.

What in the natural will provide for you in the future?

Abraham built an altar to the Lord, and he said, I trust God to make a way for me, even when I can't see it or plan it or strategize it with anything else that I own.

I trust God.

A lifetime of being thankful.

Just a few chapters later, Genesis 22, was what caused Abraham when God, the only altar God ever told Abram to build, when he told him to sacrifice the one thing that was most precious to him, the hinge upon which all of God's promises were stayed.

God said, Will you give that to me?

And verse 3 says, early the next morning, he got up and left.

I think I could have put that trip off till the new year.

What I believe is that it was a lifetime of thanksgiving that caused Abram to say, you know what, God, why would I withhold anything from you?

I think he had come to a place where he loved God for God's sake.

And he loved himself for God's sake.

Same time he was going up that little mountain there, same vicinity where the Son of God was sacrificed for you.

The same time he's taking his son up the mountain, the provision of God is coming up the other side.

Out of his view.

He has no idea that it's there.

Ever wonder why the front of the church building is called an altar?

It's because this is where people come to do business with God.

It's not the only place.

But it's where we're invited to.

You ever wonder what an altar in Abraham's day would have looked like when it was finished with?

Blood splattered all over the place.

Ash, soot, maybe a wisp of smoke rising up.

This is not a piece of furniture.

It's not pretty.

Except to God.

Because that's where a person came and brought their hardship to God.

Now, twice in the Old Testament we're told how to build an altar.

We build altars out of, the Bible says in Exodus and in Deuteronomy, it says, we build altars out of earth and out of rock.

And just like Abraham, you and I build altars to the Lord today.

Out of very earthly experiences and hard things that we've been through.

And just like Abram, we bring these things that have been so hard for us to deal with.

Where else are we going to go with them?

And we gather these things before the Lord.

And we arrange them before Him.

It's not pretty.

But it's our life.

Where else am I going to go with my hard stuff?

God, I bring you this trial.

This divorce.

This bankruptcy.

This abortion.

The loss of my child.

Where else am I going to go, God?

I'm not proud of all this.

Some of this stuff was done to me.

Where else am I going to go with it?

God, I bring you this loss of my job.

The way my friends failed me when I needed them.

And all the unforgiveness that I've been through.

And the stuff that I thought other people should have done for me, and they didn't do.

They didn't come through for me.

Left me hanging.

Where else am I going to go with my stuff, God?

Loss of all my finances, all the stuff that I thought was going to make a way for me in the future.

Where else am I going to go with all this, God?

It's not pretty.

It's where I've been.

God, I declare that if anything can be made in my life, it sure would take a great God to do it.

Because there's nothing I can do with all this.

Friends, there are things in your life that will never be settled until they're settled with God.

And God says to you today, you bring all that hard stuff and you come home.

Let's bow our heads and close our eyes.

We are grateful this day.

God's a good God.

And if there's anything in your life that's been hard for you to deal with, and you're still lugging that thing around, we want to pray for you.

At all three campuses, we want to pray for you today.

In just a second, we're all going to stand up.

Our altar team is going to come to the front.

And if there's anything that you need prayer for, we want to pray for you.

All you've got to do is step out into the aisle, make your way down to the front.

If you want to pray alone with God today, when you get to the front, you just tell the prayer team member that you just want to pray alone today.

And they'll just step aside.

You can kneel, you can stand here at the altar, and you can pray by yourself.

We've got people in the balcony to pray with you.

If you don't want to come all the way down here, we understand that.

But we've got people in the balcony that'll pray for you if you'll go find them.

But friends, God is surrounding you right now, and you need to hear this.

God is not mad at you.

God is not disappointed in you.

God loves you and He surrounds you right now with His grace.

But there are some things that you won't settle without Him.

So, God, we bring you our hard stuff right now.

Holy Spirit, if there's something here that you want to deal with in our lives, we open our hearts to you because we trust you this day.

We thank you for your goodness in Jesus' name.

Amen.