Sacrifice of Thanksgiving

Did any of you look in the bulletin and see where the sermon text is this morning? I know you did because you print it. When was the last time you had a sermon from Leviticus? You don't remember? I don't think I've ever preached from Leviticus. And this morning I'm going to be talking about Thanksgiving. And we're going to be studying a text in Leviticus 7. The sermon title is, The sacrifice of thanksgiving. And we're going to look at what the law in Leviticus has to say about these sacrifices that the people of God would offer. Before we get right into it, I want to talk a little bit about our conception of thanksgiving, the notion of it. When you think of thanksgiving, I'm convinced that we think of offering thanks or being thankful as primarily something we feel.

It's something that happens inside of us. We feel gratitude. We feel thankful. And what I want you to see from this text, by the end of it, is that thanksgiving is absolutely practical. It's absolutely you doing stuff. That thankfulness requires, not promotes or encourages or allows, but requires action. And Thanksgiving is a strange thing because you know there are sins in your life where if it just gets mentioned, you're just like, yeah, I stink at that. I'm not good at that. I'm guilty of that sin. You know, someone talks about selfishness. I mean, is there anyone who would stand up and say, I'm not selfish? Or we talk about, someone says, they start talking about pride and you go, no, I'm not proud.

Or laziness. There's this category of sins that we always admit in our hearts. We just go, yeah, that's a real struggle for me. And I think thankfulness is one of those things. There are very few people I've met in my life that if I said something about struggling with thankfulness, that they'd actually say, no, you know what, I actually don't. I actually really am thankful. I just am thankful. And so what I want to do is I want to talk about this. this topic. And I want us to get away from this sort of latent guilt about it. You know, we think, okay, well, Thanksgiving's coming, and so you're a Christian, and there's all these things you're supposed to be thankful for, and so you strap on a happy face, and I'm thankful. Isn't all this so wonderful? And yet, I want us to have a more robust understanding of thankfulness. And I don't want our thankfulness to simply be for the Lord's salvation? It must be. But I actually want to push beyond that because none of you would argue about that. Say, are you thankful for the Lord's provision of his son, Jesus Christ, to forgive you for your sins and to seat you in the heavenly places with him for all eternity? You all say, yes, I'm thankful. And I say, praise God and amen. Good. Now, about your life. Before we get to all of that, are you thankful now?

for the things that you have now. And all of a sudden we're like, well, I don't know about all that. This world's sinful and life's hard and not really. No, I struggle with it. I know I should be. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. I want us to talk about thankfulness and what thankfulness looks like in real life. Thankfulness, as I've said already, requires action of us. Thankfulness demonstrates itself. It's not simply a feeling or a sentiment. Thankfulness is visible. It's something you should be able to see in yourself by your actions, and you ought to be able to see in others by their actions. Would you please stand now for the reading of God's word from Leviticus chapter 7, verses 11 through 15. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true.

Now this is the law of the sacrifice of peace offerings which shall be presented to the Lord. If he offers it by way of thanksgiving, then along with the sacrifice of thanksgiving, he shall offer unleavened cakes mixed with oil, and unleavened wafers spread with oil, and cakes of well-stirred fine flour mixed with oil. With the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving, he shall present his offering with cakes of leavened bread. Of this he shall present one of every offering as a contribution to the Lord, It shall belong to the priest who sprinkles the blood of the peace offerings. Now as for the flesh of the sacrifice of his thanksgiving peace offerings, it shall be eaten on the day of his offering. He shall not leave any of it over until morning. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I want to give you a little bit of context right now. Leviticus is, in general, the book, it's one of the first five books of the Bible, which are commonly referred to as the Pentateuch. This is where God is giving his law to his people.

Okay. And Leviticus is, the particular emphasis of Leviticus is God, through Moses, instructing both his priests in their service, the Levites, the tribe of Levi, were set apart to be the priests to intercede on behalf of the people of God to God. And so we learn about their work and their clothing and how they're to do all of their... their service before the Lord. We also learn in the book of Leviticus what the Lord requires of us in terms of sacrifices. The whole sacrificial system is set up in there. And it says this is when you sacrifice, this is how you sacrifice, this is what you sacrifice, this is what you have to do before, during, after. There's all these sorts of instructions about how we're to approach God. And so Leviticus is a, it can be a heavy book because it spends a lot of time talking about It's almost like a butcher's manual, the book of Leviticus, because it's all about what animals and how to cut them up and how to serve them and how to kill them and burn them and do all of this stuff. And really, the priests of the Old Testament really were butchers. This is what they spent their time doing, was just slaughtering animals and cutting them up. And so Leviticus can be a really heavy book. And the point of all of these sacrifices in the Old Testament was really to point forward to...

the ultimate sacrifice that was to come, that was the son of God, that was Jesus Christ. And so Leviticus, the whole book could, you know, you could say the whole thing is a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ coming in the flesh. And yet the book of Leviticus can be really heavy because it's talking about our sins and it's talking about the sacrifices and all of the, and the guilt and all of these, their sin offerings and guilt offerings and all these different kinds of offerings, all to make atonement for their sin. And yet we know that none of those sacrifices actually made atonement for sin, and yet this system was so robust and so overwhelming of what they were to do that you just can kind of get lost in the pages of Leviticus. And so this section that we're studying is sort of an aside from that. Moses has been going on saying, here's what you have to do. Here's how you offer sin offerings. Here's how you offer guilt offerings. Here's the types of animals. Here's what you do with the different portions of the animals.

Here's why it's important. And then in verse 11 it says, well, now this is the law of the sacrifice of peace offerings. And so you have to get in your mind from the very beginning that a peace offering is sort of an umbrella category. And there are different types of offerings that exist under peace offerings. So there's free will offerings. There's votive offerings, neither of which are we studying today. And there's Thanksgiving offerings. That's what we're studying today. And that's really what our text focuses on. If you were to continue on, through the rest of chapter 7 in Leviticus, you'd read about those other offerings and their particular rules. But what they're being instructed on is how peace offerings work, and specifically right now, one type of peace offering is an offering of thanksgiving. And what I want to do is I want to demonstrate to you, show you how the sacrifice of thanksgivings that they were being instructed about were different than the normal sacrifices. That's where we're going to begin.

And so the first thing I want you to know about peace offerings, thanksgiving offerings, is that these were not mandatory. These were not mandatory. The other offerings, guilt offerings, sin offerings, the offerings for atonement, these grain offerings, all these things they were supposed to do, these were mandatory. There was no way that you could be faithful and not do these things. And yet when you come to peace offerings, these are a voluntary offering that the people of God would offer up of their own volition. You read in verse 12, it says, if he offers it by way of thanksgiving, if he offers a peace offering. He's not required to, if he does it. These sacrifices were spontaneous. As opposed to all of the other categories of sacrifices, these were something that we would do, that the people of God would do because they wanted to. And that's a big difference. This is not something they're required to do. Another unique thing about the...

these Thanksgiving offerings, is that they required leavened bread. None of the other offerings required leavened bread. And you think, well, I don't understand why that even matters. And we're going to get to why that matters later. But I want you for now to bear in mind that this one requires leavened bread. And it's significant that a few chapters earlier in Leviticus 2, they're told, you can't use leavened bread. It can't be offered on the altar. It's an abomination if you do. And so when they come with their offerings, depending on what kind of offering it was, they'd come with the animal, they'd come with the grain or the bread or whatever it was that they had to offer. And all of that stuff was apportioned out, depending on the type of offering. If it was a burnt offering, the whole thing gets burnt up. But if it was a different type of offering, some of it was held back to be given to the priests for their food. But never were they allowed to use leavened bread.

And even in this offering, we see that they have all kinds of unleavened bread. There's three different types, and it doesn't say what the differences of them are. You have unleavened cakes with oil, unleavened wafers spread with oil, and cakes of well-stirred flour mixed with oil. These were, that along with the meat, were a part of the sacrifice, and that would have been normal to the people of God, that you would bring meat for sacrifice and that you would bring some sort of unleavened bread as a sacrifice. Now, when you think of unleavened bread, think of flavorless kind of, Like matzah. What? Yeah, I mean, crackers is the easiest thing, but like cheap Kroger low-sodium saltines. Not like these really nice, flavorful Triscuits or something. We're talking really boring, bland, not particularly appetizing things that were to be offered up. But leavened bread, no, you can't have leavened bread.

It's an abomination if you offer it. In Leviticus 2.11, it says, No grain offering which you bring to the Lord shall be made with leaven, for you shall not offer up in the smoke any leaven or any honey as an offering by fire to the Lord. And yet they're told to bring leavened bread, and don't you wonder why? Why were they supposed to have leavened bread? We're going to come to that. So the first difference is Thanksgiving offerings were not mandatory. The second one was they had to bring leavened bread in addition to the unleavened bread. The third thing, that was unique about this sacrifice is that the worshipers actually got a portion of the food back to eat themselves. In every other offering, they bring the offering and they present the whole offering to the Lord, or maybe it's divided between the Lord and the priest, but they never get any of the food back. But in this section, this he that's being spoken of, when he brings his peace offerings, when he brings his offerings, when he eats his offerings, this is the worshiper that is being referenced.

when he does these things. And he's told at the very end how he's supposed to eat it. You only can eat it today. You can't eat it tomorrow. You only eat it today. And so these are instructions for the worshiper and how he's supposed to handle the food. Moses instructs the worshiper in how to bring the sacrifice. How is he supposed to consume it? Moses goes on in the following verses beyond our text this morning. In Leviticus 18, he says that it shall be an offensive thing if the person who eats of it will bear his own iniquity if they eat it beyond the appointed time to eat it. With Thanksgiving offerings, it was the same day. With the free will offerings, they had two days. But they were said, you have to eat the food within this amount of time. If you hold on to it and save it, it's an offensive thing. It's sinful. You have to burn it if there's leftover. And so the peace offerings were voluntary. The Thanksgiving offerings were required unleavened bread.

The worshipers partook of the food. They got some of the food back. The fourth thing and the unique thing was that the worshiper actually brought the sacrifice themselves before the Lord. It wasn't something that they presented to the priests and then were all hands off. It was something they did themselves. Now, what were the priests supposed to do? The priests were supposed to stand as an intermediary between God, who's holy, and between man, who's sinful. And the priest stood in between, and he was the conduit between the two. The people of God would bring their sacrifice, and they would present it, and then the priest would slaughter it, the priest would cut it up, the priest would offer it to the Lord. But not in this case. The worshiper is the one to bring it. Later on down in the chapter, Leviticus chapter 30, speaking to the worshiper, he says, His own hands are to bring the offerings by fire to the Lord. He shall bring the fat with the breast.

that the breast may be presented as a wave offering before the Lord. Now, what's a wave offering? Does anyone want to venture a guess what a wave offering is? Levi does? Kind of? No, this is not it. I thought you were raising your hand. He was just waving. No. A wave offering or a heave offering. Have you ever been somewhere where someone's presented you with something formal and they offer it to you? They hold it up and they give it. Here, this is for you. They present you with it. This is how they would have offered. This is a wave offering. It's like, have you ever had just a little taste of something to get your attention? Your wife's cooking dinner and you smell it. She says, come in here and smell this. And you smell it. It's like she's enticing you. She's getting your attention. She's saying, look at this good thing that I have for you soon. This is what a wave offering is. The worshiper would have come in with the breast and with the fat portions and they would have offered them up here.

Lord, for you. And they would have presented them themselves. Whereas with all the other offerings, they couldn't do that. They couldn't come into the presence of God directly. They had to have an intercessor, someone in between them. The priest still offered the fat portions. He still was the one of the wave offering. He took the fat portions. He offered them on the altar. But the worshiper brought the offering to the Lord, and he gave the meat to the priest to eat the fat for them to burn. And it's really important that we realize with this offering, God doesn't require an intercessor. He doesn't require someone to be in between himself and his people. That they're able to come directly to him. There was an intimate transaction between God and his people. Yes, they were sinners. And the whole rest of the sacrificial system bore witness to that. That they couldn't come into God's presence. That there were portions of the temple they couldn't get near. They were not allowed. But with this particular offering, they have a direct line to God. They're able to interact with him.

When they're thankful, they're able to have direct access to him. They're able to express their gratitude for his provision. Now I want to talk a little bit about, so what are the four ways that it's different? One is that the offerings are voluntary. The second is it requires leavened bread. The third is that the worshiper actually got to eat some of the food. And the fourth is that they offer the sacrifice themselves. Okay, four things. Now I want to open up and say, To this point, we say, okay, here are the rules, here are the laws, here's what they're supposed to do, and it's like being handed an instruction manual. Okay, well, if you're going to do this, you do it like this. You do it when you want to do it, and you have to bring this sort of bread with you, and you get a portion. It's all just very formulaic. But I want you to see that there's so much more to the law of God, not just here, really everywhere, but we're going to use this text to realize that God has more written into the law than simply how to.

And so now we're going to start asking some questions, why? Or what assumptions can be made? And so let's start with this. If thanksgiving offerings are voluntary, what does that assume about the people of God? That they will have things that they will be thankful for. Particular things in this life that they would be thankful for. If God was, if he wasn't intending to give them good things, why would he give them a law that tells them how to express their gratitude? And so you see in this text from the very beginning that the simple fact that there is a way for his people to express thankfulness presupposes that they're going to want to, that they're going to say, God's been good to us. How can we express our thankfulness to the Lord for his goodness? And really practically in their life.

David and I were talking earlier this week about Thanksgiving in America. And do you know that we celebrate Thanksgiving as it was the third Thursday of November now? But did you know that historically in America, I mean, we've settled on that as a national holiday. But if you go back in our history, the president used to be able to appoint days of Thanksgiving for the whole land. Something good would happen and the president could say, next Thursday, we're going to observe a day of Thanksgiving. And what that meant for the people in our country was that we, as a corporate body, were going to give thanks to God for his provision in some particular way. And since that time, it's settled down into just a Thanksgiving at harvest time, which to a lot of us is even strange because who's a farmer? We don't even do that sort of thing anymore. We have gardens, and they're cute little things that we like to do.

but we go to the store for our food. And so thankfulness is something that you recognize. When you're just going through your life and you go, oh, look at what the Lord did. Even in our country, we used to observe thankfulness in that way where the leader of the country would say, we need to thank God for his kindness and his mercy to us. It was voluntary. It wasn't mandatory. The people would have wanted to. How can we express our thankfulness? And so God gives them a way. Another strange thing here is that they have to eat all the food in one day, all the meat. And so when you think, okay, so I'm thankful and I want to express that to the Lord. If you lived in this time, what would you think would be a sufficient sacrifice? What kind of animal? Just throw out an animal. Okay, a goat. Can your family eat a whole goat in one day?

Can your family eat a whole cow in one day? I mean, the priests get their part, but could you eat half a cow in one day? But then you have to burn it all. Is that strange to you? Now, what if you were really thankful, and let's just say it was cows, big cows, and you were really thankful, what might you be inclined to do? Well, what if you were inclined to offer more than one cow? What if you wanted to offer ten cows? Then what? All this food goes to waste, doesn't it? I mean, you can't eat it. So what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to share it. You're supposed to bless other people. Your thankfulness ought to be evident. The feast that you have, and it ought to be a feast. It's like, well, the priest gets their portion and the Lord gets his portion. I say, okay, you get your portion. Let's just say, I can tell you, I just put a deer in our freezer. We cut it all up. And if we only took half of it,

Got rid of the other half. We would have had close to 25 pounds of meat. Just from half of it. Now, can my family eat that much meat in one day? No. Not yet, says John. Maybe someday. But you realize you have a problem here. Because can you feel the tension? You programmer people. Can you think and say, okay, I'm really, really thankful. I really want to offer to God. But then there's this little stipulation where you have to eat it all today. And what's your temptation going to be to do? No, you can't eat all of it. It's hopeless. You just can't. You're going to offer less. Well, I wouldn't want all this to go to waste. I want to be a good steward of what I've got. I don't want to burn all this food up. I want to offer less. And isn't that completely contrary to the essence of thanksgiving? I'm so thankful I'm going to be stingy because stewardship. No, you're supposed to share your gratitude with others. You're supposed to have a feast.

You're supposed to invite all your friends and all your family and all the strangers and the poor, anyone you can bless. So what's going to happen if you invite a stranger to your house? We're having a feast. You come on over here, you poor people. You dirty people, you strangers. What are they going to want to know? Why are you inviting me to your house? Oh, because we have too much food. Well, that's true, but what more should you say to them? You should say, why you have all this food? We have all this food because look at what the Lord did. Here's what he did. And my response to his goodness was for me to offer this sacrifice. And I want it to be a blessing to you. I want you to partake in the goodness of God. They couldn't be stingy. They couldn't be stingy. It goes on after he explains the three different types of peace offerings. The Lord addresses directly saying, it's sinful for you.

To withhold and to take and keep for yourself. Because what's really going on, if you say, I'm so glad and I'm so thankful to the Lord, but I don't want to waste this food. What really is going on? What's really going on is that even in your thankfulness, you don't trust that the Lord's going to continue to provide for you. You remember when the Israelites needed food and they needed manna, what were they supposed to do? Go out and get how much? enough, enough for you for one day, except the day before the Sabbath, you get two, two days worth. And there's no quantity given. He says, go get enough for you. And if you get too much, what were you demonstrating? Well, you were demonstrating that you didn't trust that the Lord was going to send bread from heaven tomorrow. And what would happen to the stuff that you hoarded? It rotted. It became foul, got maggots, was nasty.

And it required that you say, we need food. The Lord says, I'll give you food, but just get enough for today and there'll be more tomorrow. And you realize that when the Israelites were tempted to hoard, they weren't thankful. And their lack of thankfulness, their ungratefulness or thanklessness was precipitated or built upon their lack of faith. They didn't trust God would provide for them. And so they had to take care of themselves. And the same principles at work in this offering. And it's especially important because here we are giving thanks to the Lord. We're thankful. Voluntarily, here we come. And we give you praise. We thank you for these things you've done for us, these things you've given to us. Now, we're going to do it in such a way as to make sure that we have enough for later. And these two things, they don't fit together. It's antithetical.

So what does biblical thanksgiving look like for us? Well, the first thing I want you to see is that biblical thanksgiving requires sacrifice. It actually requires you to give up something that the Lord's given you, but it does require you to give something up. Now you give that up voluntarily. It's not torn from your hands. It's not required of you, but it is something you have to give up. If you decide I'm, you know, in their time, if they decide I'm going to take 10, 10 fattened calves and we're going to offer them up. Well, then you're short 10 fattened calves. They're not here anymore. It is a sacrifice. You do lose, in some senses, the material. And there's a real temptation when you realize that when you sacrifice something, you don't get it back. There's a temptation not to offer it. I think I could do better with this. I could be a better steward of this than...

wasting it like that. I wouldn't want to waste it. This is how we think of our money. I know how to take care of money. I wouldn't want to give it to someone who doesn't know how to take care of money. Because once it's gone, it's gone. And so you have to realize with Thanksgiving, with demonstrating Thanksgiving, it is a sacrifice of Thanksgiving. It's an offering. It's something you let go of and you don't get back in the same form. And that's scary to us. Because we think, well, what if I don't get more? The second thing that it looks like is generosity, as I've said already. Biblical thanksgiving requires that you be generous. You can't be stingy and be thankful. I wish Taylor was here. When Taylor was younger, he went to Africa with his family. And so they're there, and they're in this poor country. And these people don't have food. They don't have an abundance of food.

And they don't ever eat meat. Like having fish is a thing for them. Well, I don't know if it's still true, but at the time, Taylor didn't like fish. And these people have given of their best food. And there's these little fish. And they cook them. Well, they don't cook fish like we cook fish. We cut the meat off and we cut the skin off and we put yummy seasoning. That's not how they cook fish. They cook fish, they cut them, and they get the guts out of them, and they put a stick, you know, and they turn them on the fire. And there are the eyes and the mouth and the fins and the scales, and yum, right? Well, Taylor doesn't like fish. And here are these poor people. They give Taylor fish. And what's he to do? You better eat the fish. You had better eat the fish because they don't have an abundance, right?

And even with the little that they have, they're giving you the best. They're being generous. And so I don't want you to think that being thankful to God requires you having an abundance. That's not what it requires. In fact, having an abundance often leads to the exact opposite of thankfulness. It's incredible to get around. People who don't have the things that we have. And you think their life is simple and their life is easy. And the strange thing is they're happy. They're happy living in their little thing and they're happy driving there or not driving, not having two cars. They're happy without internet. They're happy with flip phones if they even have a cell phone. They're happy. They're not frustrated. You know, I just opened a letter today, this morning before I came here as mail.

And it was from our insurance company. And it says, we've got some benefits that you might not know about that you might not like. And you know what? One of the things my insurance company, and this letter is for you, Joseph. It was his insurance, right? Anthem. And they say, we've got these benefits you might not know about. You know what one of them was? A cell phone with 350 minutes on it. Yeah, that's what I thought when I looked. I'm like, why is our health insurance company? providing us with cell phones and a Weight Watchers membership if you want it. And it's just, you know, they just send them out to all their people. We have these benefits, and part of it's because the premiums, you know, they're going up so high that they're like, well, look at all these other things, of course, you need, that we as your insurance company are going to provide for you. We're going to give you a cell phone. And I'm thinking, why in the world, like, how does it even come to be that our insurance companies have to offer us cell phones? We just, it's because we just have to have, I mean, how could you live without a cell phone?

I mean, could you function in life without one? I mean, without a nice one, too. You have a smartphone. I need maps. I get lost. You know, people used to get around this big old city without them. Some people still do. Yeah, they had real maps. Used to go in the gas station and say, how do you get to, you know? And so Thanksgiving requires generosity, but generosity does not require an abundance. And if you think you have to have an abundance before you can be generous, before you can be thankful, you'll never be thankful. You'll never be thankful. You'll consume and consume and consume. Remember that generosity has to do with other people. Biblical thanksgiving requires sacrifice. It requires generosity. And that generosity is aimed at other people. You remember the wedding feast in the gospel?

The rich guy is getting married, and he says, go tell all my friends to come to my wedding. And what do all the friends say? I'm busy. I bought a piece of land, and I need to go look at it. I can't make it. And so all these people don't want to come to the wedding because they've got better things to do. But the feast has been prepared, and so what's the host to do? What's he tell his messenger to go do? Go out into the streets. Go out into the byways. Go find strangers and poor people and bring them here so that I can feed them because the feast has been prepared. And I want you to see that being thankful doesn't mean only blessing the people that are in your little inner circle. That's not what it means. It means being generous and liberal with all. And if you have more blessing than you can...

reasonably give to your children, give it to other people. And it shouldn't be an offense to your children. The final thing about biblical thanksgiving I want to say to you is so far I've told you that you have to invite, you should invite other people into your joy. But now I want to flip it around and say, you have to enter into other people's joy. You can't be a Scrooge or a curmudgeon. When you see people who are thankful or who are generous, there's this thing that goes on inside of you where at the same time, you admire them and you despise them. You admire them because you think, I should be more like that. And you despise them because they're pointing out that you should be more like that. And then when they come to you and they say, come and be a part of what we have, you're required by faith to enter into their joy.

And to not covet it. Not to see the blessing in someone else's life in a particular way. And to become angry at God because he hasn't given you that same thing. No, your place is to rejoice in God's goodness to them. And the thing that will kill that is if you can't see God's goodness to you. And his mercy to you and his kindness to you. You think, God, you have to prove it to me. You have to prove it to me. I was talking to a guy recently. And that's what he wanted God to do. He had asked me previous to this conversation, he said, I'm a spiritual man, but I don't go to church. Do you think God cares if we go to church? And I said, yeah, he does. I think there's real benefits to fellowshipping and worshiping with the people of God and sitting under the preaching of his word. Absolutely. I think that you're putting your soul in harm by refusing that. And so that was kind of the end of that part of the conversation.

And then later, I told the men's group about this. This was a guy I met hunting. And so he wanted to kill a big deer for his dad who recently passed away. He and his dad used to hunt together. It's a sweet thing. It helps him bring closure. It's fine. And so he shoots a deer, but it's a bad shot. I won't bore you with the details, but everything about the story that he tells me, like where it was, how he shot it, how the deer responded, how far it ran, how much blood there was, it was a bad shot. It's just he maimed the deer. He didn't kill it. And it was this big buck that he wanted. And so he's texting with me, and he's angry. I abide by all the rules. I do all the right things. Why didn't I get the deer? And I said to him, I'm sorry you didn't get it. I understand what it means for your dad. You should go to church and talk to someone about the grief that you have. This is not here locally. It's in Bloomington. And I said, you really, they can help you process this kind of thing and help you bear your grief. But as far as the deer goes, God's not obligated to give you this thing. The reality is, bud, you made a bad shot. And if you make a bad shot, you don't get the fruit of it. If you make a good shot,

that deer will die soon. And that's good. And if you make a bad shot, they won't. And it's not on God to prove, which is what he said. He said, I wish he would just prove that he's here. And I said, look around you. Look around you. And you want God to prove to you by giving you this thing you demand of him. So that you can trust him and love him and all of that. And they say, I only tell you the story of that man to say, And the reason I could speak to him is because I understood what was going on inside of him. He thought, if I do this and follow all the rules and play by the, you know, do all the right stuff, I'll get what I want. And then I'll be thankful because I'll get what I want. And then the conflict comes when he does everything he thinks he should, and then he doesn't get what he wants. And he says, well, God must, he's not good. My dad died, my friend died. God's not good. And I say, no, God's good. He is good.

And you ought to be thankful. But he couldn't see his way clear to be thankful because he hadn't been given exactly what he wanted. And I say that's a way of life for some of us. That we live our whole life thinking, if I only could get that, have that, be that, think that, whatever it is, then I'd be thankful. And I want you to know about thankfulness. Thankfulness is like contentment. that we're commanded to do. The husband in Proverbs is commanded to be content with the wife of his youth. He's not told, well, if you happen to be content with your wife, that'd be good. No, he's told, you are to be content with the wife of your youth. It's something he's to proactively do. And thanksgiving, we're told to praise God, to thank him, to rejoice in his goodness. Not without the clause, if you feel like it.

or if it comes naturally out of you. And thankfulness is something that, the lie about thankfulness that I'm convinced that we believe is that it's something that will naturally come out of us. In the same way that this hunter thinks he would naturally be thankful if he had gotten what he wanted, I think that's how we live. I would naturally be thankful if this happened, and that's a lie. No, you wouldn't. because the next idol, the next desire, the next lust will just spring right up. Well, you've got to have this too. Then you can be thankful, and that will never end. And thankfulness is something that we're not to wait for. It's something we have to learn to see. The Israelites had some really rough patches and difficulties in the history of Israel, and yet there was this way for them to express thankfulness.

You think of Paul being in prison in the New Testament. And is he thankful? Oh, absolutely he's thankful. And here he is in prison, worried he's going to die. And joy and thankfulness. If I could just get out of prison, then I'd be thankful. No, thankfulness now. So what about thankfulness? How do you express thankfulness to the Lord now? You don't have to cut up animals and bring unleavened bread. Oh, by the way, why did they have to have leavened bread? Because it tastes better. It's more pleasant to eat and they're having a feast and rejoicing. Unleavened, you know, you want a cheap cracker or do you want some really good yummy bread? You'd rather have bread. That's why it wasn't part of the offering. It was like, it was just here, have some, have dessert with your meal. Have something extra special and nice and good as a part of your thankfulness. So I want to leave you with saying that thankfulness is something you have to seek.

And the way that you seek thankfulness is not by seeking your desires necessarily or lusts. The way you seek thankfulness is by opening your eyes and looking at God's goodness already to you in your life. If you live as though he has to always be proving that you have reason to be thankful, you'll never be thankful. And it'll be a bummer of a life to live too if you don't see his kindness and his goodness to you. Because what will you do when real difficulty comes? And we all face real difficulties. We all have hardships that come into our life and we go, I don't know what to do now. My way of thinking about God and his work in my life doesn't provide for how to handle this difficulty. And I say that we have to learn to cultivate thankfulness. You have to learn to cultivate your knowledge of your dependence on God. Because when you see your need of God and your dependence on him,

then you begin to see his provision. You see his care and his love and his mercy towards you. But I still don't have the, I know, you might not ever get that. I don't know if you will or not. Will you be thankful if you don't get it? Will you live this life? Has God given you good things? Not just salvation, but has he given you good things? Do you thank him for it or do you take them for granted? When you thank God for your food, are you thankful for it? You know, when your kids eat before you pray, their snitch, you know how kids do? That's not thankful. That's greedy. Your kid has never been so hungry in their life that they can't put their hands on their lap for five more minutes while you finish getting the food on the table. It never once has your kid been that hungry, I promise you, because you live in America.

Your child needs to learn thankfulness. You need to teach them thankfulness. Where'd they learn to snitch? I'm wondering what Ian said. We'll talk about it at small group. From Adam, not from Daniel. And so listen, God's given his people, in this passage, he's given them a way to express their gratitude and their thankfulness. And he is good to his people, not just in eternal things, but in temporal things. He's good to us. That doesn't mean that everything's easy. It's not. But he has been good to us. And there's not a person in this room that shouldn't be able to say, in this world, in this life, right now, I'm thankful for God providing this for me. And as you consider that, I want you to think about it. What are you thankful for? When you go to Thanksgiving, especially if it's a Christian home, you ought to go around the table and say, what are you thankful for?

And you ought to give glory to God for what you're thankful for. And then that's where you start with saying, here's what I'm thankful for. Then you ought to think, how am I going to demonstrate that thankfulness to God? And how am I going to share it with others? This is what thankfulness is. Thankfulness isn't private. Thankfulness is public. Thankfulness for them was having a feast with as many people as they needed to eat all the food because they couldn't have it tomorrow. Don't wait to be thankful. Don't wait to share it with others. Rejoice in God's goodness to you and his kindness to you and his provision for you here and now. And you'll find that that's a wonderful help against the hardships of life. When you begin to see that he's been good to you and given you kind things now and not just hard things. Jesus said that even evil fathers knew how to give good gifts to their children, how much more so our Father in heaven. And if you live your life as though he hasn't given you any good things, then you've believed a lie of Satan about the character of God.

He is good and he does give us good things. And it's your work to figure out what they are. If you don't know what they are, if you think, I really think God's just given me nothing but hardship and heartache and difficulty, come talk to me and I'll help you figure out how God's been good to you. I'd be glad to. I don't want you believing a lie that God hasn't been good to you and that you shouldn't be giving thanks to him. You ought to be. It's your privilege. It's your privilege. Let's pray. Father, you have been good to us and you've given us so many good things, so many blessings and mercies in this life as precursors or teasers for the life to come. Father, I pray that you'd open our eyes to see them. I pray that you'd open our mouths and our homes and our wallets to demonstrate it.

Father, I pray that the abundance that you have showered us with, that we would in turn share it with others. And I pray that all of this would result in you receiving glory and praise and honor. And I pray that you'd use our thankfulness to build your church. I pray that we would speak to others about your goodness, that we wouldn't hide our joy under a basket. but that we would set it up on a hill and let it shine and provide light to all men. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.