Hey Thanks – The Cycle of Gratitude

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Well, let's get to work together today.

We're starting a brand new series of messages called, Hey, thanks.

And so, as we approach this Thanksgiving holiday that some of you maliciously skipped over, today I want to make sure that we call our attention to what it means to be people of gratitude.

We'll talk about that in a moment.

This week, for some reason, I landed on psychologytoday.com.

I don't recommend it, but I landed there.

And as I was there, I was clicking around and I saw a headline that just captured my attention.

Here was the simple headline.

Does it feel like time is moving incredibly fast?

Does anybody else feel like this year it's hard to believe that we've we woke up in January and we blinked and all of a sudden Thanksgiving is upon us?

If you feel like that, there's a psychological reason that experts say is the reason.

Here's what it is.

COVID somehow in that weird season rewired our brains to cause us to assume the way time should move in a different way.

We experience time differently.

Here's the reason.

The experts say that the way that we mark our time and we mark our schedules is by milestone events.

So if you think about a normal year, you have a birthday and you have holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving and July 4th, and you have moments that you celebrate with people.

You also have highlight moments.

You have moments that she said yes to a date or she said yes to your proposal.

You got the promotion at work.

We have highlight moments.

And what we tend to do is we think back across the span of time is we tend to remember years by those big moments.

The problem for all of us is COVID and that weird year of isolation rewired our brain.

It's the reason I have thought to myself, 2020 felt like the longest year of my life, and also like I don't remember any of it.

It was like the weirdest, shortest year of my life.

It rewired our minds.

And if time is truly flying by, and if it feels to you like you go to bed one night and you wake up and like 30 minutes later, it feels like you're back in bed again.

I want to make sure that as a church, we don't miss the intentionality, the beauty of the season, the season of Thanksgiving.

You see, this started a couple hundred years ago when some settlers came across the ocean to establish a new land.

And they they were thankful to God for his provision, for keeping them alive and for the freedom that they experience.

And what started small, with just some families and friends, grew to be something that the colonies celebrated.

And then it became something that our nation celebrated and eventually became a full-blown national holiday.

And the reason we all like this holiday, and the reason we all experience this holiday, the reason this holiday for us is usually so beautiful, is because all of us at one point or another we feel thankful, don't we?

And if you're a Christian, you might say, thank you, God.

If you're not a believer, you might say, thank goodness.

And I don't know who goodness is, but we thank something.

We all feel thankful.

But here's the problem with thankfulness.

Thankfulness was never intended to be something that we just feel.

It was always intended to be something that is expressed.

And for so many of us, we feel thankful to God and we feel thankful to others, but we hoard our words and we hold on to our words of gratitude and we keep it to ourselves.

And here's what happens.

When someone or something is done for you that is nice, it is a gift, it is kind.

When someone blesses you, when someone thinks of the perfect gift, when someone has your back, when someone says something kind and beautiful about you, if we don't express our gratitude, here's what happens: the relationship circle starts to feel like there's a gap in it.

And here's the funny thing.

All of us have experienced this before.

Many of us have been on the giving end of this unintentionally.

It's simply the term ingratitude.

Ingratitude is when you've done something for me and I don't express my gratitude, I don't give my thanks to you.

All of us have experienced this, and honestly, for me, this is one of the worst frustrations in my life.

I want to be one of the most giving, generous people, but when I give and there's that gap in the relationship that isn't reciprocated with words of gratitude, it does something to me.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, if I'm not careful, I tend to write people off that write off the things that I do for them.

Conversely, when someone is grateful to what I do, I literally want to live open-handedly.

I want to bless people.

I know this is something that I need to work on, but the truth is all of us are wired this way, aren't we?

Haven't you done something for someone?

Haven't you blessed someone and you see them and it's like they're oblivious to it?

They don't say any words, they don't feel anything.

Here's the funny thing about ingratitude.

With ingratitude, the only person who feels it is the person who's on the receiving end of the ingratitude.

The person who is guilty of ingratitude is often completely blinded to the fact that they didn't express their thanks.

Why?

Because they feel thanks, but they didn't express thanks.

And again, the thing about gratitude is if you call someone out, they're, oh, of course, I'm so sorry, of course I feel thankful.

But when it comes to gratitude, I love you, but your feelings don't count.

They don't matter.

Gratitude only counts when it's expressed and given.

Some years ago, I had a cool miracle happen.

Um I had been saving money to buy myself a new car, and it was the end of the year, and I had shopped around, and long story short, a whole bunch of little miracles happen.

I go to the dealership on December 31st, towards the end of the day, and the guy says, Look, here's where we're at.

We're at the end of the year.

I have to sell four more cars in order to close out this year and to meet our goal.

We'll literally do anything you like, make us the dumbest offer you can even imagine.

And I made a really dumb offer, and they said, Yes, I should have made a dumber offer, is what I should have done.

But I was so surprised by this that they took this low-ball offer from me that I called my wife and I was like, babe, we should do something.

Like, this is this is out of the blue for us.

Why don't we give my current car away to bless someone else?

Car was it was a good car, it was still in pretty good condition, didn't have tons of miles on it.

I just needed something bigger as my family grew.

So I was like, why don't we bless someone with this?

And so we found a person that we wanted to bless and we gave it to them, and I felt like a million bucks.

I got to live open-handedly and give.

And guess what I got back?

Radio silence.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, when this happened, my heart was broken.

But then somehow it got worse for me.

Um, I texted the husband, I was like, dude, I know the car has a little bit of like some deferred maintenance on it.

Let us pick that up for you.

Let us let us pay for that for you, we'll take care of it.

So he takes it to the mechanic, the mechanic does it up.

It's like$1,000 or$1,200 or something.

And he sent me the total, and I said, No problem, I'll mail you a check.

And he literally texted back two words.

Okay, great.

And when I got those two words, I'm gonna just admit my issues, I'm gonna admit my problems.

This is like free therapy for me.

Are you ready?

I wanted to go take a potato and shove it in the tailpipe of the car, and I wanted to put firecrackers inside of the engine just to mess with them.

Why?

Because I did something that felt to me in that season like extravagant giving and generosity, and it was met with radio silence.

Here's the thing, all of us understand that unexpressed gratitude is experienced as ingratitude.

And the funny thing is only the person who's on the receiving end of ingratitude can see it.

If you're the person who's not expressed gratitude, you can't see it.

The funny thing for me about preaching about this is I know that in a church of our size, that is now several thousand people who come over the course of a month, that certainly along the way someone has done something kind for me and Liz.

You've blessed me with a gift or with kind words or some sort of act of kindness and affection.

And unintentionally, I didn't do it on purpose, but unintentionally, I'm sure that I've been guilty of not expressing gratitude in the way that I felt it.

But we all know this.

Unexpressed gratitude communicates ingratitude.

So, what do we do with that?

What do we do as we approach this week of Thanksgiving relationally?

And here's maybe a more important question when it comes to gratitude, what is our responsibility to God for all that He has done?

Now, to get us there, I want to take us to the book of Luke, chapter 17.

Luke 17 · chapter mention

I love the book of Luke.

Luke is one of four accounts of Jesus' life that we call the Gospels.

What I like about Luke so much is two details.

Number one, Luke was a physician.

So when he writes, he adds more detail, which adds more color to the stories, in my opinion.

But also Luke, if you read the whole book of Luke in context, what's fascinating is Luke likes to point out that Jesus enjoyed being with people, loving people, and ministering to people who were nothing like him, who thought nothing like him, who were morally nothing like him.

Jesus just enjoyed being with people who didn't believe what he believed and knew to be true.

And you'll see that in the story, Luke chapter 17, verse 11.

Luke 17:11

Now, on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

Let's just hit pause here for just a moment.

If we had a biblical map of the ancient Near East, you would see that this area was kind of like two neighboring sections that came together, and where Jesus would have been traveling through was this incredibly remote area between two provinces or territories.

And as Jesus is traveling through this remote area, he had to feel the tension.

Because literally he's walking between two different groups of people that despised each other.

On one hand, there's the Galileans, the Jewish people, which is what Jesus was.

And then there was the Samaritans, and each one thought less of the other one in a world that we experience bigotry and racism.

You can't even imagine the outspokenness of the bigotry and race of racism that they experienced towards each other.

So Jesus walks through this land, and as he was going into a village, ten men, if you have your message notes, pull those out, encircle this word, you're going to need this in a moment.

Ten men who had leprosy met him.

This is a terrible disease, and we'll talk about this in just a few minutes.

But there's these ten men that meet him.

They stood at a distance and they called out in a loud voice, Jesus, master, have pity on us.

That's such interesting language that Jesus chooses to, I mean, that they use to experience and to meet with Jesus.

It says they shout in a loud voice.

You need to understand this about lepers.

In Jesus' day, leprosy was incurable and it was seen as highly contagious.

So people with leprosy would often be pushed to the outskirts of the city where no one was.

That explains why they're in this remote region between Galilee and Samaria.

Jesus is walking through and they shout in a loud voice.

Well, in Jesus' day, if a person had leprosy and someone was approaching them, they had to yell out, unclean, unclean, to protect those from that from getting that terrible disease.

But at this point they shout at Jesus and they don't say unclean, they say Jesus, Master.

This word in Greek is an interesting word.

This is a word that Jesus' disciples and his followers would have used to show their love, admiration, respect for him.

And they use this word, Jesus, master, have pity on us.

Then Jesus saw them and he said, Go.

Now certainly these men have heard this for so long.

For as long as they've had this terrible disease, they've heard go, but it's always go away.

Leave me alone.

Don't get near me.

Go.

But Jesus lays a different context on them.

He says, Go and show yourselves to the priest.

They need to understand in Jesus' day, if you had leprosy, you were outcast, excommunicated to the outskirts of the city where nobody else would be.

And Jesus says to these guys, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to go show yourself to the priest.

Here's why.

In Jesus' day, if you had a skin disease like leprosy, the only way to re-enter into humanity, the only way to re-enter back into community or re-enter into your family was to have a priest declare you as clean.

But here's what you need to understand: these men aren't clean.

They're suffering with this terrible, atrocious disease of leprosy.

And Jesus says to them, I want you to go show yourself to the priest.

Like three things are happening in this moment.

The first thing for them is they're not healed.

They're not clean.

They're literally going to have to make the decision to trust him and to take a step of faith before they even know how the story's going to unfold, if this is going to happen.

The second thing is no priest is going to want to see them because they're not healed yet.

So Jesus is saying to them, I want you to trust me and I want you to do something.

And the third thing is Jesus' reputation is completely on the line in this moment.

If this goes like Jesus can make it happen.

If Jesus does the miracle, word of Jesus and the fame and popularity of Jesus will skyrocket through the roof.

And Jesus' whole reputation is on the line.

And he says to them, here's what I want you to do.

I know you're not healed yet.

I know you've got this terrible disease.

Go, but not go away.

Go show yourself to the priests, and I want you to see these three words.

And it says, as they went.

As they went, they were cleansed.

Now, why does this matter?

In churches, sometimes I think we throw around phrases that I don't think we think about.

We don't understand the meaning of them.

One of the phrases that churches tend to throw around is walk by faith and not by sight.

For these men, ten men afflicted with leprosy, the only way for them to experience the miracle, the cleansing, was for them to obey.

So they're literally walking to the priest saying, I don't know what's going to happen.

It's kind of weird.

I don't know how this is all gonna play out.

And as they went, as they walked by faith, another translation, as they obeyed Jesus' words, they were cleansed.

They were healed.

Okay, now I want to do some math with you, okay?

Remember there was ten.

Ten afflicted by leprosy.

Pay attention to the next word.

It says, one of them.

There was ten, but it says, one of them, when he saw that he was healed, came back praising God in a loud voice, celebrating the fact that his life has been changed, his life has been like restored again.

It says he threw himself at Jesus' feet and he thanked him.

Isn't this beautiful?

Isn't this amazing?

There were ten of them, all of them healed.

One of them experienced the miracle and did something about it.

Here's what he did.

He went back to thank the one who enabled him to move forward.

He went back to the one who enabled him to move forward.

He takes his gratitude, and instead of holding on to it as a feeling, he expresses his gratitude.

And then Luke, I told you this earlier.

I love how Luke writes because Luke's writing often includes details that show that Jesus was all about people who were nothing like him.

And in Luke's account, it says this.

It says he threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him.

And he was a Samaritan.

Why does this matter?

Because it infers that if one was a Samaritan, the other nine were Galilean and Jewish like Jesus.

It's fascinating.

And Jesus sees this.

He knows the miracle has happened for all ten.

So Jesus asked, were not all ten cleansed?

Where are the other nine?

In the ancient Greek language, the interrogative word of where would actually be found at the end of the sentence, not the beginning of the sentence.

So Jesus would have responded, like we would uh do an aggressive translation like this.

The nine?

Where?

Where are they?

Where are those nine?

Weren't all of you healed?

The nine?

Where?

And Jesus says, has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?

Like the one who has nothing in common with me?

Has no one returned except for him?

Then he said to him, Rise and go.

And here's this word again.

But this go is different than the first word.

This go is like go get your life back again.

If he was married, go see your wife again.

Go put your kids to bed at night again.

Go relive your life.

Your faith has made you well.

This phrase in Greek is the word sozo.

It's the same word that we would translate in Romans 10, chapter Romans chapter 10, verse 13, which literally means to save your soul.

Romans 10:13

It's a beautiful, powerful word.

And he says to the man, because you came back, because you expressed your gratitude, because you thanked me for the miracle, something else is even that's even more profound is happening in you.

Go, but walk in a different kind of healing.

Your soul is healed.

Your soul is made right with God.

Now I love this story for so many reasons.

Jesus does a miracle.

In Jesus, we have recorded in scripture a lot of miracles that he does, but this one is fascinating because he heals ten people.

But of the ten, only one respond with gratitude.

The other nine didn't.

And I kind of have this feeling like if we could go back in time somehow, if we could corner those nine people who were healed but didn't express it, they would say, Oh no, no, no, no.

I'm so grateful.

I'm so thankful to Jesus.

He healed me, he changed my whole life.

I could summarize it like this they felt it, they didn't express it.

They felt gratitude in their hearts, sure they're thankful, but they didn't express their gratitude.

And here's what you need to get unexpressed gratitude communicates ingratitude.

And here's what you need to understand when it comes to God.

Gratitude to God is worship.

What?

Gratitude to God, thanking him for all he's done.

It's expressing worship to him.

This matters to God.

So either when it comes to your gratitude, either you hold on to it to yourself and you feel in your heart like you love God, or you express it to him, and there's only two choices.

And God receives the worship that we express to him.

God's desire is that we would worship him through our gratitude for all he's done and all he continues to do.

So as I'm looking at this story, it's interesting.

It feels like there's this pathway.

There's almost like this cycle of what gratitude and worship should look like together.

If you're a note taker, write this down.

Number one, gratitude produces worship.

Gratitude, thankfulness, is what produces worship.

Why does this matter?

Well, because think about the story for a moment.

There is this man, one of the ten, he's healed.

He comes back and he shouts his praise and his gratitude to Jesus in a loud voice.

It says that he fell at his feet and thanked him.

If that happened to you, wouldn't you think that's appropriate?

Of course.

Of course.

Imagine you were falsely accused of a crime you had not done at all.

You were falsely imprisoned for what's going to be a life sentence.

And someone on your behalf goes on your behalf and researches all the details and discovers that the whole thing was wrong and you were set free.

Wouldn't you do anything?

Wouldn't you give freely?

Wouldn't you hug?

Wouldn't you shout?

Wouldn't you be thankful for them?

I know I would.

Even play this out.

Like this isn't a part of the story.

But imagine for this man that Jesus heals him.

Okay, now think about what this implies.

In that ancient world, if you had leprosy, you were excommunicated.

If you were married and had kids, you literally could no longer put your children to bed.

This week, my daughter Ella went away for a sleepover at one of her little school classmate girlfriend's house.

And they spent the night and the next morning they had had such a good time that the girl's mom texted my wife Liz and said, Hey, we're having such a good time.

Do you want me to drop Ella off?

Or is it okay if she stays for a few more hours and stays through lunch?

And before consulting me, my wife said, Oh, that's totally fine.

And she came to me and I said, What?

No! Like, what are you talking about?

Like, I want to be with my kids every moment that I have the opportunity to.

And for this man with the diagnosis of leprosy, he would never get to put his little daughter to bed at night.

He would never be at his son's football game cheering them on and yelling at the refs.

He wouldn't be there for high school graduations.

He wouldn't be there for the best moments.

He wouldn't be there to console them when the girl broke up with them.

He wouldn't get to experience all of these moments.

He wouldn't get to walk his daughter down the aisle someday.

He wouldn't get to hold his own grandchild someday.

All of life's moments would pass him by and he would have missed all of it.

And Jesus gives him the miracle of healing and he shouts and throws himself at the person at Jesus' feet.

If that happened to you, wouldn't that be okay?

And what if what if you ran into Jesus 30 years later?

40 years later, you're just walking downtown and you see Jesus.

Would it still be appropriate for you to do that?

I think yes.

I think yes.

And here's the funny thing.

My favorite Christians, that's a weird sentence to say, but my favorite Christians are the Christians who are brand new in their faith.

The reason they're my favorites is simply this.

New followers of Jesus are so excited, and everything is so new and genuine, and they know all that Jesus has saved them from.

And because of that, they're the most expressive with their thanks, they're the most expressive with their worship, and they're the most generous in using their words to invite other people to experience what they've experienced.

What if, like 40 years later, from your moment of salvation, you remembered Jesus saved you?

What if 40 years go by and you remember that in the same way that a leper would have to yell unclean to keep other people away from contracting what they've contracted?

What if you realize that at one point in your life, because of your sin, if you were to stand before God, you too would have to yell unclean, because it is the condition of your soul.

Because of God's love.

And you unclean.

It would make perfect sense if you got your life back.

To throw yourself at Jesus' feet, to worship him, to adore him, to praise him, to thank him.

It made perfect sense to do it 40 years later.

I came to remind somebody today that no matter how long you've been saved, it's still appropriate to throw yourself at the feet of Jesus and to say, thank you for saving me.

I was unclean, but now I'm not.

In the Old Testament, there's 11 words used for praise, 11 Hebrew words.

Seven of them are the predominant words that you find all throughout the Old Testament.

I want you to see these words.

The first one is the word Todah, which is a Thanksgiving choir.

The second word is Barak, which is the 44th president.

Never mind.

It's to kneel in Thanksgiving.

Number three is the word tahila, which means to sing a song of thanksgiving, not to be confused with tequila, which would sing a different song.

Number four is halal.

It is the root of the word hallelujah, which means praise, extravagant praise to God.

Halal means to give thanks by being clamorously foolish.

Number five is the word yada, which means to give thanks with hands that are extended.

Number six is the word zamar, which means to give thanks with a musical instrument.

That's what our worship team did this morning.

They didn't just play music for you to stand and listen to.

They were giving worship to God through their instruments.

And number seven is the word Shabbat, which means to give thanks in a loud tone.

Often it's translated to shout.

You can find four of these seven words in one verse alone in the book of Psalm, chapter 100.

Psalms 100 · chapter mention

It's talking about the tabernacle, and it says this.

It says, enter into his gates with thanksgiving, Todah, a thanksgiving choir, and into his courts with praise, to heal, to sing a song of thanksgiving.

Be thankful.

The word thankful is yada, which is to give thanks with extended hands.

Give thanks to him and bless Barak or to kneel in thanksgiving, his name.

This isn't an official translation, but this is a paraphrase of that verse, taking into account the literal translations of those words.

Enter into his gates with thanks with a thanksgiving choir and into his courts with singing praises.

Be thankful by extending your hands to him and bless him by bowing before his name.

He inhabits the praises of his people.

He longs for us to experience him, to worship him through our gratitude.

If God did nothing else for you, he's already done everything for you.

Number two, miracles produce gratitude.

So this man experiences a healing and it leads to gratitude.

Let's talk about leprosy for a moment.

In Jesus' day, leprosy was seen as incurable.

If you grew up going to Sunday school, it was probably taught to you that leprosy was the disease of the skin.

And that's kind of true.

But really what we've discovered about leprosy is leprosy is actually a disease of the nerves.

So what would happen is the nerves in your hands and your feet and your legs and your hands and your bodies, it would literally go numb, which means you couldn't feel things.

You couldn't feel pain the way you were intended to feel pain.

And so often people would have it and just feel like, ah, something's going on, but they wouldn't notice it.

And then what would happen is they would get a cut somewhere, but they didn't feel or experience the pain.

And because they didn't experience the pain, that the wound healed, but it didn't heal, it got infected and it began to spread.

This is why there was a skin issue attached to it.

And I've said this all day, and people are always grossed out, and I apologize.

But there's historical studies that show that people would lay outside of the gates of the city in a leper colony.

And because there was blood and exposed wounds, animals like rats would come up and eat at them when they were asleep, and the person couldn't feel it.

It's disgusting.

It's terrible.

It was incurable.

It was a death sentence.

And I actually think that what might have been worse than the physical pain was the emotional turmoil of losing relationship, of losing that connection with your husband or your wife, of losing those moments with your children, of losing the the years of your parents' life, like losing all that, losing all of it.

Miracles produce gratitude.

The verse that we read just a moment ago says he threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him.

Of course he did.

Here's the final one.

This is the final in this cycle.

It's that obedience produces miracles.

It's their obedience that produces the miracle.

Jesus says to them, I want you to go show yourselves to the priest.

And the verse we read says, and it was as they went.

A loose translation was as they obeyed, as they did what Jesus asked them to do, it was then that they were healed.

So I say this thing probably six or eight times a year, and every time I say it, somebody gets upset at me, and I've never understood why.

The mark of a mature Christian, the mark of a fully devoted follower of Jesus is not how much you know.

And I'm all for education.

Did a doctorate.

I'm all for it.

I love it.

I want you to know everything that we can understand with our finite minds about God.

I'm all for knowing stuff about God.

But the mark of a fully devoted follower of Jesus is not how much you know, it's how much you're willing to obey.

For these lepers with the incurable disease of leprosy attacking their nervous system, for these lepers to trust Jesus, they would literally have to walk by faith.

They would literally have to say, Jesus, I take you at your word.

And here's what happens: because they obey, they experience the miracle.

And this cycle is really the cycle that I invite all of us into.

Where we begin to turn the blessings of God into worship.

Our gratitude produces worship.

And then what should happen out of that is we begin to experience the miracles of Jesus, and it's it's those miracles that matter, and then it's our obedience that matters.

The funny thing about my observation about a lot of Christians is we actually get into the negative cycle, which is the opposite of it, which is we say things like, Well, I'll obey when Jesus does this, or well, I'll I'll be grateful if Jesus will just come through.

That misses the point.

Walking by faith says, Jesus, I trust you.

Therefore, Jesus, I'll obey you regardless of the outcome.

Jesus, I love you.

You've done everything for me already, and because of everything you've already done, you have my full trust, you have my full attention.

I'll do whatever you ask me to do.

So here's the message in a nutshell.

There's two practical applications for everyone in the room as we approach Thanksgiving this week.

The first thing is this in all of your relationships, are you expressing your gratitude, or do you just feel thankful?

Unexpressed gratitude communicates ingratitude.

Some of us need to examine our hearts.

Some of us need to use our words to express what we feel in our hearts.

May talk to all the kids, middle and high school students in the room.

Be the most grateful kids you've ever met.

Your parents take care of you.

And you may feel like you're entitled to your house, your room, your car, your clothes, your food, all the stuff that they provide for you.

Be grateful for it.

You want more freedom and privilege?

Be grateful for it.

Let me talk to every husband in the room because I am one.

To every husband in the room, never let your wife hear beautiful, kind things you've said about her to other people behind her back without first having said it directly to her.

Nothing wrong with saying good things about your wife behind her back.

But she should hear those words from your mouth.

Kill expectation.

Expectation in relationships is cancer.

Kills relationships.

It robs people of the opportunity to bless you.

So kill expectation and treat everything your spouse does for you as a reason to express your love and your gratitude to them.

At your job, express gratitude.

In your friendships, express gratitude.

Be the most grateful person.

Another way to say it, don't let anyone out grateful you personally.

And then, secondly, when it comes to God, as we approach this Thanksgiving, I challenge all of you to stop feeling grateful and to start expressing your gratitude.

Stop feeling thankful for all he's done and actually express it.

Can I tell you what happens to my soul when I remind myself that I was once lost but now I'm found?

I was once blind, but now I see.

My heart gets flooded with emotions, and my heart tends to realign itself with that which what God wants for me.

What would it look like?

If the results of today and the results of this week, as we approach Thursday, the day where we pause to say thank you, where it's not just the day where we eat so much that our back hurts.

Though don't get me wrong, go hard.

You hear me on this?

But what if it was a day where we paused, where we remembered what this day is all about?

We have so much to be grateful for, for the friendships, for the relationships, but most importantly, to the Son of God who gave his life for you and for me.

That were it not for the blood of Jesus spilled for you, and were it not for the blood of Jesus spilled for me, our lives would be damned to an eternity away from him.

So what if we just said thanks?

What if we just expressed it?

What would change?

Is our gratitude produce worship?

We'd experience miracles, which lead our hearts of gratitude and our obedience is what changes everything.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes with me all across this room?

We pray for you.

So, Lord, this is one of those messages that's way easier to talk about than it is to do.

It's easy for us to save, but the truth is a lot of us we felt gratitude, but we haven't expressed it.

God, give us the courage this week to express our gratitude to those in our lives.

May we not buy into the lie, oh, they know my heart.

I feel gratitude.

No, no.

May we express it.

But God, most of all, as we approach this holiday, may we remind our souls that if it's because of what Jesus did for us on the cross that we get our lives back.

We get eternity with you, we get to experience the fullness of life that Jesus promised.

So, Jesus, today we stop and we say thank you.

Thank you for all you've done.

If you never did another thing for us, you've already done so much more than we ever deserve.

Thank you for coming into this world.

Thank you for dying and rising again for us.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And may we never stop using our voice, using our words, throwing ourselves at the feet of Jesus to express our gratitude, our worship, our love to you because you're worthy of it in Jesus' name.