All The Way Whole

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. It should be a little tongue-in-cheek when we're saying thank Gord. You should be going like, huh, what? What does it mean to be thankful these days? Do you understand what I mean? People say they're thankful, but what does it mean? Is it just, I'm content, I'm satisfied, I've got everything that I need? I have a feeling, really, if it comes down to it, I'm smug. You know, I'm feeling good. That's what thankfulness has turned into. And so what we're looking at in this series is how the Bible talks about thankfulness is not just about feeling good or realizing you've got everything that you need, but it's always a relationship with the one who has given. That it's not just about the gifts that you get, but the giver. So it's thank God, and we're going to even get more specifically, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the promise, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It gets specific. And without, I'll be honest, without that connection to God in that specific way, thankfulness is just smugness. And we've got a lot of that going on. So today we're going to start with that. But I want to say a couple of things. First of all, thank you to this congregation. We made an appeal to just let you know where we were at financially this fall. Things have been, summer's always kind of that low season. And we just kind of shared where we were at, and you all responded greatly. And we are so thankful for that. In the newsletter this week, you'll see more specifics on that. But we do want to say thank you. We thank God for you. Now you have partnered with us for the sake of the gospel. And, yes, we get to do a lot of thanksgiving in the month of November. And I'm not going with the no-shave November myself. Some of you can, but myself, if I do no-shave November, you know what it looks like? Santa Claus. Yeah, this turned totally white. But anyways, today we begin this series. And I think this text in the Gospel of Luke is going to do the best to kind of set the tone for what we're talking about when we're talking thank God. Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, Jesus, Master, have pity on us. When he saw them, he said, Go, show yourselves to the priests. And as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Jesus asked, Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner? Then he said to him, Rise and go, your faith has made you well. Now often I think in the Bible, and especially in the Gospels, when a story like this happens, we are invited actually into a house, more or less, to sit down in this story, to explore it from the inside, and just to kind of let it see how it all is set up, figure out what's going on, live inside of it, inhabit that story to really get the most out of it. So we might be sitting in the living room or over in the kitchen or wherever you need to go, but in this story, that's what we're going to try to do. And I think when we do that, there are three points that I came up with as I was working through this story this week. And they are simply this. When bad things happen, when good things happen, how to become all the way whole. So the last line of the story is kind of a key to the whole thing. We'll get to there. We're going to start with the first point, when bad things happen. I mean, I'd say, wouldn't you consider it bad if you were one of the ten having leprosy? They're living as well. Did you notice how it's between Samaria and Galilee, kind of in a no-man's land? Not really how... They can't be anywhere with leprosy, by the way. They're unwanted by any community, and yet these ten seem to form their own community. Is that interesting? The ten are together, and they've formed a community. And you can also find out that it doesn't really matter where you're from or who you are. All of a sudden, when you come to a situation when bad things happen, there are no borders, just like the border between Galilee and Samaria. It doesn't matter anymore. As Ben Wetherington III and Amy Levine write in their commentary on Luke, illness does not stop at political borders, neither need healing stop at the borders. So it's really not about the fact that these men are from or here or there, but they are in need. You know, all the divisions that we have today in our society and across the world are similar, I think, to the division between Jews and Samaritans. We're kind of in that alienated state. We've got things clearly demarcated. We know who's in our group and who's in that...