Thanks & Giving

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. We are doing this series, Thank Gord, and it is a cheeky kind of take on our culture in contrast to how the Bible understands the whole idea of thankfulness. Our society, we say we thank God, but we don't even know who we're talking about anymore. It's kind of a generic term, a title, God. You might as well be saying thank Gord. Until you connect it to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, until you attach it to the history of God's people and how he has worked with them throughout the great narrative of both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, until you understand that it is the God who has created you, the God who has redeemed you, the God who has come alongside of us, the God who has sent his own son into this world, until you see that, there's not much to really thank. Thanks becomes just satisfaction or smugness even in our society. We're thankful when we've got a lot, and then we kind of sit there with it. Today we're going to look at the connection between thanks and giving. Thanksgiving. You think, because thankfulness is not just giving thanks, it's also actually giving. So Paul writes, remember this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. By the way, that word for cheerful is hilaritas in the Greek, it's where we get the word hilarious, so I think it's appropriate to wear a hilarious shirt today. I'm trying to justify this, okay? I am, okay? And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. As it is written, they have freely scattered their gifts to the poor, their righteousness endures forever. Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed, and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way, so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord's people, but also is overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, others will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. And in their prayers for you, their hearts will go out to you because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift. All right, there's a lot in this. Andrew Delbanco, you may have never heard of him. He teaches at Columbia University, and he wrote a book a while back called The Real American Dream, a meditation on hope. And Delbanco himself is not a Christian, and he has spent much of his career, though, studying religion, and he understands the role of religion in our society, and he seems to be drawn in his research to religious questions. And he writes that the human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days, that is, these disparate things that happen in our lives, just one thing after another. We need to organize the pain and the pleasure, the desire, the fear into a story. And when that story leads somewhere, it gives us hope. Now when he says the American Dream, he does not believe the American Dream is that three-bedroom house with a two-car garage. That's not really the American Dream. That's not even really American. The American Dream that he comes up with, that he thinks that's really going on, is that we are trying to satisfy something, and he calls it the unquenchable human need to feel connected to something larger than the insular self. In our founding documents, it's said that we should have that pursuit of happiness. But what was really meant by that document was not to try to find pleasure, but to find something other than, something greater than, some greater story, some greater good that I can get caught up in, that I can be a part of and make something and make a difference in this world by how I'm caught up into it. Happiness itself is not what you're really pursuing, but you are pursuing what you believe is your purpose, your meaning, your destiny, and then the happiness comes along. That's what he's talking about. We need something bigger, and a lot of people right now, their lives are pretty small. They're pretty small, and they're struggling. They're struggling not finding that bigger meaning. And he says what they're really finding is that they're just kind of going from one thing to the next, trying to kind of stave off what he calls the lurking suspicion...