A Month of Thanks

October is waning and the colors of the trees are quickly being relegated to being the colors of the ground; November is fast approaching.  With November comes one of my favorite holidays: Thanksgiving.

I really love Thanksgiving.  Christmas and Easter have much more meaning and much better meanings, but Thanksgiving occupies a warm spot in my heart.  Thanksgiving itself is a day of eating with people I love with no gifts, few distractions and many conversations.

Another reason I love Thanksgiving is that I love the feeling of being thankful.  I love how I feel when I am appreciative.  In past Novembers I have done and I have seen others do a daily list of things for which to be thankful.  This is an excellent exercise that helps cultivate thankfulness.  But this November I suggest trying something else.

This November will be a month of thanksgiving.

If you are a Christian I assume that you want a thankful heart toward your Savior.  If you are a Christian you want to be perpetually thankful to God for what He has done, and you should want this.  But how can we be thankful to the God we cannot see when we've ungrateful toward people that we can see?

"If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, who he has not seen." 1 John 4:20

As Les Misérables says, "To love another person is to see the face of God."

Well, to be thankful to God, whom we cannot see, is difficult to do if we cannot be thankful toward people, who we can see.  To be thankful to another person is a way to be thankful to the God who made them and put them exactly where He wanted them to be in that given moment.

I think of the "Unforgiving Debtor" parable in Matthew 18.  We've got much for which to be thankful.  When we allow little inconveniences to keep us from being grateful to those around us it screams that we don't really appreciate the great, glorious reasons we have to be thankful for from God.  When we aren't grateful to the people around us it is because we forget to see the very image of our great God written on their faces and we forget the sovereign power of God that blesses us through His creations.

So, how thankful are you toward your wife or husband?  Your waitresses or waiter?  Your clerks?  Your postman or woman?  How have you shown them your gratitude?

November will be a month of thanksgiving. 

How will you show it to the people God has placed around you, many of whom are literally serving you?  Are you going to flash a big smile?  Are you going to leave a gift in the mailbox?  Are you going to (I know, this is a pretty radical idea) say "Thank you"?  I'm not asking for anything radical.  What I'm proposing is a month of a concerted effort to be conscience to the fact that you need to be thankful to so many people and then acting on that in a multitude of very small ways.  Smiles and "Thank yous" will cost you nothing, but I guarantee they will richly reward your soul and theirs.

November is fast approaching.  Will you join me in making November a month of thanks?  If so, think of how you will do this today.

Pillow Talk and Praying

Many reading this don't remember a landline phone let alone a party line.  The other day while discussing something in youth group a young lady made a comment that reminded me of growing up with a landline. 

The kids listened in disbelief as we told how calling a girl to ask her to homecoming was nerve racking for all the reasons it is for them and for the reason that mom or dad might just be listening with another receiver pressed to their ear with the other end flipped up so you couldn't hear them breathing.  The kids couldn't believe that anyone else in the house could listen in on their conversation if they simply had the gall to do that.

Then I talked about party lines.  Now, I never had a party line, but believe it or not when we lived in Missouri there were a couple of rural areas that still had party lines.  I told the students about my favorite Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie called "Pillow Talk".  They again listened in disbelief and laughed at the idea that you had to coordinate calling times with neighbors or that someone in another house could eavesdrop on your call.

What got me thinking about party lines was that one young lady mentioned that 1 Thessalonians 5:17 reminded her that God can always hear what we're thinking.

"pray continually," 1 Thessalonians 5:17

That got me thinking about how my conversations would be different if I remembered that God was on my party line.  The Apostle Paul urged us to pray continually (or without ceasing if you grew up with the K.J.V. in your head like me).  We should direct our thoughts to God always; but let's not kid ourselves, God hears all of our thoughts all of the time. God is on our party line 24/7.

How would your thoughts be different if you remembered that God was on your party line?

What thoughts would you quickly ask forgiveness for?

What thoughts would you all-together like to remove?

When we remember that God is on our party line we pray continuously.  Praying without ceasing isn't to have one's head bowed and eyes closed at all times; no one can or should do that.  Praying without ceasing is in part having a constant awareness that God can and does see and hear us at all times and we can take advantage of that and live in fear of that.

Remember that God is on your party line today.

Walls and Hurdles

I'm helping teach the adult discipleship class at Grace.  Getting to be one of the teachers for this class is a great joy.  Teaching adults is such a source of learning for me.  There is in that room a great wealth of wisdom and I, being a young man, often get much more than I could ever give.

I also learn so much from my time teaching that class because I put myself under the Word and under the guidance of great teachers.  Currently we are going through the book of Acts.  This means I learn from the teacher's guide materials written by a group led by Tim Keller and John Stott's commentary on Acts.

The book of Acts can be split into two main parts.  Part one is chapters 1-12 and highlights the growth of the early church and part two is chapters 13-28 and it follows the ministry of Paul.  We've just finished part one of Acts.

Throughout the first section of Acts we see God working mightily.  In this portion of Dr. Luke's book we see several cultural/racial walls and several hurdles placed before the church.  We read of God smashing through every wall and jumping every hurdle to grow His Church.

I've often said that much of the first twelve chapters of Acts can be summarized like this: "They can be Christians, too?!"  In the first part of Acts we see God at Pentecost bursting through the dividing wall of language to get His Gospel to His people.  We read as God sends people to bring the Gospel even to those the Jews hated: the Samaritans.  We read as God brings the Gospel to a seeking Ethiopian and a rebelling Saul.  We see God grant repentance that leads to life "even to the Gentiles" (Acts 11:18).  And we read as brave, maverick missionaries go to cosmopolitan Antioch to bring Christ to so diverse a group that when those who want to describe them place a label on them they call them Christians because Christ was their only unifying characteristic. 

There wasn't a type of person that the Gospel wasn't for and there isn't a type of person that the Gospel isn't for today.  This isn't a statement of universalism or one that speaks against the idea of limited atonement, it is plainly to say that God has ransomed every type of person in the world to Himself.

In Acts we see many hurdles jumped in the first twelve chapters.  God not only scaled hurdles in the book of Acts, but He used them as part of His master plan.  We see God scaling the hurdles of disease, injury, hypocrisy, selfishness, massive persecution, institutional unfairness in food distribution, stoning and beheadings.  Through all this mad raging of Satan and the other opponents of the Gospel Acts 12:24 tells us: "But the Word of God continued to increase and spread."

Walls and hurdles.

What walls have you set up in your heart that God must break through?  What barriers of culture or race have you erected in your mind?  What types of people do you have a hard time believing the Gospel is for?

What hurdles do you have in your life that you think are too difficult for God to scale?  What obstacle have you decided was a hindrance to your walk with God?  What prayer seems too big for you to pray?

Every wall can and must be broken down.  Every hurdle can most definitely be scaled and will certainly be used for His glory and your good.  Section one of the book of Acts tells us that God is in the business of hurdle jumping and wall smashing.  Join with Him is smashing the walls of division and praying for the hurdles in your life to be scaled and used for His glory today.