So, more happy Thanksgiving everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. Yeah. I’m I’m going I think we’re going to start with a Thanksgiving responsive reading. So, I just ask you all to stand and I’m going to make this section the blue section and this section the black section. And uh you have to be on your toes because it shifts around a little bit. But let’s just start this responsive reading. Who’s black? The black section over here. Okay, you guys get us going. Thanks to the Lord for he is good. For his steadfast love endures forever. Oh come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our sacrifice and call on the name of the Lord. Let us shout for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. As of all, look to you, O Lord, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. The gift of this day, the opportunity to give you praise. Glory to you, O Lord, for the love and warmth of family and friends, both those gathered here and those gathered elsewhere, and most of all for those gathered to our eternal home. Glory to you, O Lord, for the good gift parents, children, and grandchildren to nurture in your love and fear for the blessing of our homes. Glory to you, O Lord, for the food you so graciously provide us and for the joy of feasting and playing together. Glory to you, O Lord, for the sufferings you are pleased to send us, for they purify us from selfishness and remind us of the one thing needful, your eternal kingdom. Glory to you, O Lord. And finally, for those things for which we are most thankful, the sweet comfort of your gospel, the forgiveness of all our sins by the blood of our Lord Jesus, the promise of our resurrection to eternal life, for the joyful companionship afforded by the church. For your word that is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. Glory to you, O Lord. Give thanks to the Lord for he is good. For his steadfast love endures forever. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you. You may be seated. So, we’re going to take some time this morning to think about Thanksgiving. not not so much the day as the actual act the behavior of thanksgiving what it means to give thanks. So we can start just by considering how regularly that courtesy of gratitude is woven into our society. And saying thank you is something we all do very reflexively frequently every day. We’re handed food at the drive-thru window. We say thank you. And when a server brings us our coffee, we say thank you. We renew our license at the registry. They hand us back our little folder and even though we were the ones who just shelled out the money to pay for the thing, we still say thank you to them. It’s a really annoying to do something for someone that merits a thank you when you don’t get it. You hold a door for someone, they walk through as if they own the place or you let someone in in a line of traffic and they don’t give you that little wave at the end. It’s infuriating when it merits thanksgiving and we don’t get it. Giving, receiving thanks is automatically done. It’s a social lubricant. It makes our city a nicer place to live. Can you imagine living in a place where no thank yous were ever exchanged among people? That would be pretty hellish. So where does this ingrained habit of giving thanks come from? Is it just something our parents taught us and their parents taught them? Is it just a social habit? Or does it tell us something a little more essential about the way humans are formed and and how our creator views us and how we are meant to respond to our creator? You know, we think about prayer. We often put prayer prayer into four different categories. And there’s adoration where we extol God. We praise God. We’ve been doing that together this morning. Then we have confession. We admit the truth about ourselves. As as more of our sin bubbles up to the surface in our lives, we become aware of what a wreck we are. We confess our sins to God. And then intercession, we know all about that about making requests and uh to God on behalf of ourselves and others. Thanksgiving as a fourth category of prayer. It might seem less necessary than the other three. It’s something we do maybe as a brief obligation, a sentence or two before we really get down to the business of prayer. But God would have us know that thanksgiving is actually far more essential to us than that. One of the uh better known passages in scripture, Philippians 4 6 and 7 says, “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” I left two words out of that reading. This is the actual reading. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So thanksgiving is in there, but if you blink, you’ll miss it. But its placement in that sentence uh show suggests that thanksgiving is an essential link in the chain. We take our anxious requests to God. We offer thanksgiving. We receive the peace that transcends understanding of our circumstances. You know, one of the most startling narratives in the gospels, I think, is Luke 17 where Jesus healed a group of 10 people who were all together suffering from that horrible, disfiguring social ostracizing disease of leprosy. They were all cleansed. Jesus told them to run, show themselves to the priests, be declared clean so they could reenter society. And only one of them who wasn’t even Jewish, he was a foreigner, a Samaritan, he had the presence of mind, the internal motivation to run back to Jesus and fall at his feet and thank him. And Jesus access expressed surprise that although 10 were healed, the other nine hadn’t bothered to come back to praise God. Jesus expected that thanksgiving would be like a reflex action for anyone whose life had been so dramatically changed that day. So why does that reflex action of thanksgiving get broken in our lives? Why doesn’t it function the way it should? Does the spring get worn out after a while and and then it stops working? Romans chapter 1 details how God’s creation provides crystal clear evidence of his existence of his invisible attributes. It says of his eternal power, his divine nature obviously displayed through creation. But then the tragic line spoken in verse 21 is although they knew God, they ne neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. But their thinking became futile. Their foolish hearts were darkened. So you follow that progression. There’s this uninterrupted stream of God’s self-revelation pouring down on earth every day. But when people don’t glorify God and that mainspring of thanksgiving fails, the light begins to dim in our souls. Our hearts get darkened. Our desires become distorted. We begin to fall into addictive, self-destructive patterns of sin and lostness. So yet, put those passages together. Philippians 4, Luke 17, Romans 1, they all emphasize that thanksgiving, it’s not an option for us. It’s an essential for us. If we need to keep that spring oiled and maintained so we can respond reflexively with thanksgiving to the circumstances of our lives around us. In the book of Deuteronomy, we’re looking at a couple of passages this morning that enforces a rhythm or a habit of thanksgiving in the lives of God’s people. The book of Deuteronomy finds its place in the Bible following the deliverance of God’s people from 400 years of slavery in Egypt. God’s people had just completed 40 years of wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses. Now they’re finally on the brink of entering the promised land that God had for them. Their longtime leader, Moses, he wasn’t going to make it in. He was going to die. His his acolyte, his apprentice, Joshua, would become the nation’s new leader. But before he died, Moses preached Deuteronomy as his final sermon, his word to the nation. And in Deuteronomy, he told them what to expect in their future lives, how to proceed together, how to obey God, how to remain faithful in the new land they were about to enter. In his sermon, Moses foresaw a potential problem that he wanted to nip in the bud. So, he issued this exhortation to them in Deuteronomy chapter 8. He says, ‘ Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes which I command you today, lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slaves. slavery. Beware lest you say in your heart, “My power, the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.” You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth. Potential problem for the Israelites was the same one all of us struggle with in our lives. We receive the blessings, but we also see a lot of problems in our lives and we get worried and we get anxious. We don’t follow the blessings back to their source. CS Lewis put this in interesting way in a little book he wrote called letters to Malcolm. It’s an interesting book. It’s focused mostly on prayer and it’s written in a style of letters to a fictitious friend named Malcolm. And in letter 17 to Malcolm, Lewis talks about thanksgiving. He describes the many pleasures of life that we experience as shafts of glory. And he says he is learning gradually to see every pleasure as a channel of adoration. So what Lewis says is pleasure comes our way whatever it is it’s marriage it’s family it’s a new job it’s finances a home something more basic like a sunset or a beautiful mountain something that strikes us as beautiful music art the wonders of biology and chemistry mathematics riding a bike reading a good book or a poem the pleasure arrives it arrests our senses Lewis talks then about tracing the pleasure back to its source the heavenly ly fruit, he says, should turn to the orchard where it grew. The gentle breeze whispers of the country where it originates. He says, “We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures forever more.” Gratitude exclaims very properly, “How good of God to give me this?” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that being whose faroff and momentary coruscations?” You use coruscations a lot in your your normal Coruscations are like this. One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. So he’s saying we first experience the pleasure and the blessing. Next natural step is to say how good of God to give me this. That’s thanksgiving. But then thanksgiving turns into adoration and praise when we think what kind of God who is the God like who would give me such a blessing. Lewis says it’s like tracing the sunbeam back to the sun. Blessing leads to thanksgiving, which leads to adoration. When we think about what kind of God would give us such a thing, how generous he is, and how beautiful and how friendly, how fatherly, how tender, how compassionate. If you’ve ever written a thank you note, we’ve all written thank you notes. It can be pretty prefuncter obligation, merely expressing gratitude for some gift that’s been given. Maybe it’s a wedding present or a Christmas gift from an uncle or an aunt. Thanksgiving done right becomes adoration when we start to think how kind that uncle must think of me to scout out the universe of Amazon Prime and hover his mouse over something and click on it and something that brings me great pleasure and joy. Or maybe that uncle went out into his workshop and he works with wood or metal or in his art studio and he’s customized this artifact designed especially for our enjoyment. God is constantly clicking the mouse or he’s out in his workshop fashioning and sending us gifts that are customized just for us. And thanksgiving done right will always lead back to praise and adoration as we follow the sunbeam back to the sun or we trace the gift back to the giver. So back to Deuteronomy 8, the potential problem is we achieve success, we achieve abundance, we pat ourselves on our back for having gained that success. And to guard against that, Moses instituted a little ceremony in Deuteronomy chapter 26. Something that he wanted people to do once they began to settle in the new land. He says, “When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, and you’ve taken possession of it and you live in it, take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which the you harvest from your land that the Lord your God has given you. Put it in a basket and then go to the place where the Lord shall choose to make his name to dwell there. and you shall go to the priest who’s in office at the time and say to him, “I declare today that the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our fathers to give to us.” Then the priest shall take your basket from your hand and set it down before the altar of the Lord. So these are rural people, agricultural society, were to gather up a small token, just an insignificant amount of their harvest, just enough to put in a little basket, carry that basket to the worship center, which originally was uh located at Shiloh. That’s where the tabernacle was situated. And the farmers and the owners of vineyards, the growers of gardens were to take the produce, make a formal kind of statement about their farms being part of the land that God had given to them to the people. It was their first step in tracing the sunbeam back to the sun. It wasn’t to be done mechanically. It wasn’t just a mumbled thanks like we give to people every day all day. Their act of thanksgiving wasn’t complete unless it involved their emotions. It wasn’t cerebral. It was to engage their affections. The Deuteronomy passage goes on, “Place the basket before the Lord your God. Bow down before him, and you and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household. Bow down. Rejoice.” So, you picture those farmers carrying their little baskets of produce to the tabernacle. It’s filled with samples of grapes and grain and apples. And they handed their baskets to the minister and the minister put it before the altar of God. Then the farmers slowly went down to their knees and their faces crinkled into smiles. They experienced a warmth or a joy that came from tracing the sunbeam back to the sun, considering what kind of God must he be to scatter such generosity my way. How warm and how full of compassion his thoughts must be toward me. And if their basket didn’t trigger an emotional response of worship and rejoicing, they simply weren’t doing it right. Thanksgiving is never done right. It’s never complete unless it results in worshiping God with smiles on our faces. I read an article a week or so ago entitled the secret prayers of gamblers. And if you watch sports on TV, hockey games, football, the baseball playoffs, you’ll have noticed that fairly recently, just really in the last couple of years, we’ve been inundated and saturated by companies wanting us to download their sports betting apps on our phones. Ontario was the first province to allow for regulated sports betting platforms. Wasn’t long before Alberta wanted a piece of the action as well. And we began to see celebrities like Wayne Gretzky and Conor McDave and Austin Matthews sponsoring the fun and the challenge of sports betting. Current Edmonton Oilers wear the Play Alberta logo on their jerseys advertises our provincial online gambling site. FanDuel and DraftKings and Bet MGM and a slew of other mobile apps. and they’re turbocharged by AI and by big data to entice players not just to bet on games, but in all the little mini events that occur uh during a sports contest. In-game betting grew twice as fast as pregame betting between 2023 and 2024. So fueled by big data unprecedented speed, instead of just having a single bet on the outcome of the game, you can make 200 bets during a two-hour contest. You can bet on the coin flip and bet whether the next play will be a pass or a run, or how many catches a particular player will make, which team will see the next basket, the speed of a baseball pitch, whether the point total at halftime will be odd or even. You can bet on every serve in a tennis match, highly personalized betting. Sit on your couch, you have a whole casino at your fingertips. Micro betting provides a gambling product that’s far stickier than traditional gambling. It’s a unique new emotional experience. Gets people watching things that they’d otherwise have no emotional interest in whatsoever, such as tabby European Eastern European ping pong games, you know, and that’s a real thing. In Oregon, that’s one of the states that actually uh tracks the betting statistics. Sports bers wagered more than a 100red million on in-game pingpong games, second only to professional baseball in terms of betting. Broadcasters love it because people watch marginalized sports retains the interest of viewers for the whole game. They’re not tuning in, they’re not tuning out, they’re concentrating, which increased revenues and media rights fees. And it’s not surprising that for a certain segment of people who do that, there’s incalculable financial and family and personal damage, particularly among vulnerable young men who just end up broke. Writer and Christian Daniel Sllon has investigated the spread of casinos and sports betting. And he’s come to the conclusion that to be sure, there are moral and public policy questions to ask about all this gambling. But walking into the casino less than an hour from where I live, I’m seized by the more basic question of human desire. What do people want exactly when they gamble? I suspect the answer is spiritual. To me at least, all this gambling sounds like wild misdirected prayer. Wild misdirected prayer. You know, the ancient African bishop Augustine, he wrote at length about how we want God. We just don’t know where to look for him. We look around and see stuff, but uh stuff is always changing. It’s mutable. It’s restless. We’re that way, too. We look inside and we see our longings and our lusts and our desires. Even our wants aren’t very stable. We think we know what we want, but then the shift of a shadow or the flip of a card, it slips away. Daniel Silman writes, “It’s easy for us to get lost in longing.” There’s been a lot of that recently. People stretching wide their spiritual nets and catching all kinds of things that aren’t Jesus. Observing the life in a casino, he says he pulled out his phone to take some notes, and he realized he was the only one in the place with his phone out. Everyone else was so deeply focused on what they were doing. None of them even had a phone face down on the table to glance at between term uh turns. Their meditation, he says, was complete. Noticed a group group of three friends in their 20s and they were playing blackjack. And one of them, a short, muscular guy in a t-shirt won a hand and his buddies slapped his shoulders and they all yelled Kyle and congratulations. He played another hand and he doubled his money and they exploded in hollers and one almost shoved him off his stool and he just smiled. It’s the smile, Stillman says, of someone who feels he’s been chosen. He’s found his resonance with the universe. He grins like someone who’s confident that his election is sure. Historian Jackson Lear comments that the longing for grace remains at the heart of the culture of chance. Hope persists that maybe we’ll get lucky. Now, if Sllon’s right, and if gambling does tend to be wildly misdirected prayer, who is there to thank for any success? And who is there to lean on when it all comes crashing down? A kind of anti-thanksgiving is all we’re left with. With chance or luck, there’s no tracing the sunbeam back to the sun. At best, there’s just a vague sense that the universe is either smiling at us or it’s furious at us, and we don’t know why. So, we acknowledge this morning that thanksgiving may not be our strong suit in prayer, but God wants us to know that it’s essential for our well-being. I’m not sure that giving thanks to God is so much for his benefit as it is for our own. We need our desires and our spiritual awareness calibrated and connected to the path that leads up the sunbeam to the sun. We need all of our wildly distorted longings and prayers to be channeled to the true source of all our blessings. You know, thinking of those ancient farmers uh filling their baskets with the first fruits of their harvest reminds us of how Jesus came and he caught us up and he tucked us into his harvest basket. On the cross, that transaction was completed. Our sinfulness, our punishment was transferred to him, deserved on him. His righteousness was transferred to us as a gift that would shine on all who would believe in him and put their faith and trust in him for salvation. If you’re trusting in Jesus Christ alone for salvation this morning, it’s because Jesus determined to send into your life those who would help reap you for his kingdom. To Jesus, we were not chaff to be disposed of. He told his disciples in Matthew 9, “The harvest was plentiful, the workers were few.” He told them to pray to the Lord of the harvest that he’d send more workers out to reap the bumper crop. And Paul goes on in Romans 14 to say, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on him in whom they’ve not believed? How are they to believe in whom they have not heard? How are they to hear without someone preaching? How are they to preach unless they’re sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news. Through Jesus suffering on the cross, he created this chain reaction of harvesters sent out so that eventually 2,000 years later, he could scoop us up into his basket to be part of his harvest. You know, if we ever had the ability, if there was some kind of telescope that we could look back through time, we could trace, every one of us could trace our conversion and our spiritual life back to one of those people on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago because one of them told someone else the gospel, who told someone else the gospel, and on and on it went until a harvester, a proclaimer was sent to us. May maybe your parents were the primary ones who reaped you for God’s kingdom. Maybe it was a friend, some complete stranger who preached the gospel indiscriminately. They don’t even know the impact it’s had on you. But Jesus sent someone to us to collect us, be part of his great harvest. What greater thing could we ever be thankful for? That sunbeam that gave us our salvation traces back to that crucified and risen son of God. And we’ll close with this. In his book, Everything is Never Enough. It develops themes of Ecclesiastes. It’s a great book. Bobby Jameson writes, “To be an atheist, the universe has no view of you. It can’t view you. An indifference infinitely vaster than anything a mere human could muster lies at the frozen base of all reality. For the universe to have a view of you, any view, either hostile or hilarious, there has to be someone doing the viewing. If God is exclusively responsible for the existence of the universe, then there is someone capable of viewing you and of saying what he sees. If not, you’re just on your own. Meaning, enjoyment, consolation, resonance, happiness. It’s up to you to make it all yourself in the face of deafening cosmic indifference. How satisfying is that? If you hold that the nature of ultimate reality is impersonal and purposeless, you work hard not to think of such things while you try to construct some meaning for your life. If you believe there’s no ultimate purpose, you must keep that thought a safe distance from all the smaller, fragile purposes that you’re trying to cultivate. If you want a meaningful life, you must not let the universe’s meaninglessness ruin your party. But if you believe that life is good because life is a gift and life is a gift because God gives it and life is full of good things because the creator is constantly flinging gifts at you faster than you can catch them. Then any meaning you discover is catching up with the meaning that God has already built in. Any goodness you enjoy is scratching the surface of the goodness that life is. Any happiness you experience is a glimpse of the one who is happiness himself. What gifts has God flung at you lately? What gifts is he flinging at you right now? So, the the application from this uh message is dead easy. All we want to do is just give thanks. And we’re going to take a few minutes just personally for you to give thanks to God. And if you want to, there’s no obligation here. If you want to bow down and if you want to put a smile on your face and rejoice, you’re welcome to do that. just make sure you can get up again afterwards cuz we we don’t we don’t want to have to do that ourselves. So, just take take the next five minutes, four or five minutes, and just thank God. Trace some of the gifts back to the giver that uh that go up the sunbeam all the way to the sun and give thanks to God for all that he’s given you. I’ll close us off then.