Latest / Pastor John Piper's answers / How Thanksgiving Shapes Your Life Story

Transcript

How Thanksgiving Shapes Your Life Story · Pastor John Piper's answers

• 0:04
  Happy Thanksgiving to all of you here in the States. Thanksgiving is a pallline
• 0:09
  theme that we read about all over in the New Testament, ever relevant for
• 0:14
  all of us on any day of the week, any day of the year.
• 0:17
  But this national holiday is a fitting time for question on Romans chapter one,
• 0:24
  verse twenty one, and how godward thanksgiving or a lack of Thanksgiving shapes
• 0:31
  the trajectory of our whole lives. How is the story of your life told
• 0:37
  by your thanksgiving or its absence? This is a great question from a listener
• 0:42
  who likely isn't celebrating Thanksgiving Day today, James, because he lives in the
• 0:48
  beautiful, rugged peninsula of Cornwall, England. Here's his email, Pastor John,
• 0:53
  thank you for your ministry and for this podcast. I was wondering if
• 0:57
  you can explain the logic of the trajectory Paul talks about in Romans chapter one.
• 1:03
  Specifically, I want to better understand the role of God centered thanksgiving in
• 1:07
  verse twenty one quote for although they knew God, they did not honor him
• 1:11
  as God or give thanks to him. This failure to think leads to a
• 1:21
  deeper and deeper sin bondage and greater and greater judgments from God on sinners.
• 1:26
  So my question is, negatively, how does thanklessness help us understand what sin
• 1:32
  is? And positively how does thanksgiving shape the trajectory of our lives? This
• 1:38
  really is an astonishing text, I thought all over again. I mean,
• 1:44
  I spent a lot of time just soaking in the amazing statements of this text,
• 1:49
  especially because of its claim that every human being knows God. They know
• 1:57
  his eternity, they know his power, they know his being creator of all,
• 2:04
  they know his deity. Everyone knows God. Atheists no God, Agnostics
• 2:10
  no God, Animists, no God. Every person you meet on the street
• 2:16
  knows God, and apart from God's saving grace, it says, every human
• 2:23
  being suppresses that knowledge. And the reason we do is that every human being
• 2:31
  finds other things preferable to God, which is the very essence of evil,
• 2:39
  the essence of sin. My people have committed two evils, Jeremiah says.
• 2:46
  They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters and dugout cisterns for themselves,
• 2:53
  broken cisterns that can hold no water. Jeremiah two thirteen. This is the
• 2:59
  art evil, the primal sin, the root of all other evils. Humans
• 3:07
  find things, people, the creation preferable to God, even though those other
• 3:16
  things are like dirt by comparison. We don't prefer God. We don't find
• 3:22
  God attractive, We don't find God desirable, beautiful, satisfying. That's the
• 3:28
  evil of all evils, and that's why, Paul says, we suppress the
• 3:35
  knowledge of God that we have because that knowledge shows him as preferable to all
• 3:42
  things. So we claim not to know God. We claim not to know
• 3:46
  him, but we do know him. We get angry at him for not
• 3:51
  making himself more plain, But Paul says, God made himself perfectly plain to
• 3:58
  everyone. The problem is not lack of revelation. Our problem is that we
• 4:02
  don't want to see. We don't want to see, and so we suppress
• 4:09
  and pretend that we don't see. So, Paul says, that's our darkness,
• 4:15
  that's our foolishness, that's the futility of our minds. We find God
• 4:20
  unattractive, distasteful, offensive, even abhorrent, and then in all kinds of
• 4:28
  ways, we exchange his infinitely beautiful, all satisfying glory for pitiful substitutes like
• 4:38
  images, ourselves, cultural artifacts that exalt our ingenuity and intelligence. And creativity
• 4:46
  and vaunted independence, with the result that humankind is under the just wrath of
• 4:55
  God, so that he hands us over to more and more and great and
• 5:00
  greater degradation, which we see happening all around us. And in the middle
• 5:06
  of this dreadful description of our human condition, Paul mentions the positive alternative to
• 5:15
  that darkness and foolishness and futility and suppression of the truth, namely glorifying and
• 5:24
  thanking God precisely as God. That's what's missing, glorifying and thanking God,
• 5:33
  and that would change everything. So let me read the text so that people
• 5:39
  can hear for themselves everything I just said. The wrath of God is revealed
• 5:44
  from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the
• 5:50
  truth. So I'm just reading the text now, for what can be known
• 5:56
  about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them, made
• 6:00
  it plain. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature,
• 6:08
  have been clearly perceived since the creation of the world in the things that
• 6:14
  have been made. He's a maker and they know it. We know it.
• 6:18
  So they are without excuse for although they knew God. That's probably the
• 6:25
  most amazing statement in the text. Although they knew God, they did not
• 6:30
  glorify him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in
• 6:35
  their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise,
• 6:40
  they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal
• 6:47
  man and birds and animals and creeping things. So James's right. James is
• 6:55
  asking about the place and the function of thankfulness in this text. For although
• 7:00
  they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks to
• 7:03
  him. And I think when Paul mentioned both glorify and give thanks, he
• 7:12
  knew that they were overlapping realities. When we thank God, we are showing
• 7:20
  him to be glorious, and no one can truly glorify God with a heart
• 7:28
  of ingratitude. So they are overlapping realities. But they're not the same,
• 7:35
  are they. There are ways to feel and think and act that glorify God,
• 7:43
  but we wouldn't call them thankfulness. So the reality of glorifying God is
• 7:49
  wider, it's bigger. It's a bigger reality than thanking God. Thanking God
• 7:57
  is a subset, subspecies of glorifying God. And yet Paul, of all
• 8:03
  the ways he could have mentioned that glorify God, he chooses to mention thankfulness
• 8:11
  alongside glorifying God. Now why is that? First? I think it relates
• 8:18
  to the fact that Paul has just said that what can be known about God
• 8:24
  is known through the things He has made. In other words, everywhere a
• 8:30
  human being looks, the sky, the forest, the mountains, the rivers,
• 8:35
  the sea, the land, family, the mirror, all of it,
• 8:43
  everywhere you look, is made by God and is a gift of God,
• 8:50
  the Maker, to humanity. Every single thing that gives us any pleasure
• 8:56
  at all in this world is a gift of God. And the heart response
• 9:05
  that God created for glorifying Him for his gifts is thankfulness. That's what he
• 9:13
  created, That's what he designed in the human heart as a response to this
• 9:16
  vast, vast array of made things gifts. Is not wrong to speak of
• 9:26
  being thankful to God for God, That's not wrong. But mostly in the
• 9:33
  Bible, thankfulness relates to God's gifts and his deeds to bless us. For
• 9:41
  sure, God himself is the gift. And if we don't arrive there.
• 9:46
  We haven't arrived, but it is right and good that our hearts brim.
• 9:54
  They just brim with thankfulness that God is a maker. Everything that is not
• 10:03
  God was made by God. Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look,
• 10:11
  all the time twenty four to seven, we should feel profoundly, continually,
• 10:16
  earnestly thankful for God's gifts. I think that's one of the reasons why
• 10:24
  he listed thankfulness as the counterpart to glorify in this text. Secondly, I
• 10:31
  think Paul called out being thankful to God alongside glorifying God because there is built
• 10:39
  into thankfulness humility, a sense of dependence and gladness in needy receiving. So
• 10:50
  humility, dependence, glad, neediness, which not surprisingly, sounds a lot
• 11:00
  like faith. I think if you pressed Paul, he would say truth,
• 11:07
  thankfulness toward our all glorious, all powerful, all providing Creator includes humble,
• 11:16
  dependent, glad trust. They may not be the same thing, but they
• 11:22
  are so intimately and integally connected that Paul thinks thankfulness is a good thing to
• 11:30
  mention here when he also wants to call attention to trust. Can anyone truly
• 11:35
  say I am joyfully thankful to God for his all satisfying beauty, and his
• 11:43
  all governing power, and his all providing goodness to me. But I don't
• 11:48
  trust him. Nobody can talk like that. It's something's inauthentic if that kind
• 11:54
  of sentence is spoken. Thankfulness, when oriented on God is a deep and
• 12:01
  powerful experience, and so Paul describes its absence like this. When thankfulness failed
• 12:11
  quote, they became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened,
• 12:18
  their claim to be wise was shown to be foolishness, and they fell into
• 12:24
  the sacrilege of exchanging God for images, especially the one in the mirror.
• 12:30
  That's the absence of thankfulness. It's a horrible, horrible description. So yes,
• 12:35
  I think James is right. The absence of thankfulness as the absence of
• 12:41
  humility and dependence and glad, neediness and trust, is one way of describing
• 12:50
  the darkness and folly and futility of our own times. It's the opposite,
• 12:58
  you could say, of pride, pride with a capital P, the very
• 13:07
  pride that calls our shame glory, exactly the way romans One describes it when
• 13:15
  they exchange God for the person in the mirror. Because the exchange of the
• 13:20
  opposite sex for the same sex in our passions is an outflow, Paul says,
• 13:30
  of that very exchange of God for the person in the mirror. So
• 13:37
  there are many ways to describe the desperate need of the world, and one,
• 13:43
  according to Romans, one is repentance from pride and independence and self sufficiency
• 13:52
  toward a humble, dependent, happy, trustful neediness for God as he has
• 14:01
  revealed himself in Jesus, which we call thankfulness, wonderful, thank you best.
• 14:07
  For John, it is right and good that our hearts brim with thankfulness.
• 14:13
  That God is a maker. Everything that is not God was made by
• 14:18
  God. Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look, all the time
• 14:22
  twenty four to seven, we should feel profoundly, continually, earnestly thankful for
• 14:30
  God's gifts. Amen, May the course of our lives be charted by our
• 14:35
  God Word thanksgiving. Thanks for joining us on this Thanksgiving Day, or maybe
• 14:41
  the day after, a couple days after, or whenever you catch up on
• 14:45
  the podcast. In either case, we pray that your Thanksgiving is or was
• 14:48
  a wonderful day filled with godward thanks. I'm your host, Tony Rank.
• 14:54
  We'll see you Monday.