Thankfulness and being thankful in good times and bad is aptly displayed in the 1940's Americana art of Norman Rockwell. With the little gallery below I now would like to offer my address for Thanksgiving Day 2020:
“Giving Thanks to Jesus Glorifies God” Text - Luke 17:11-19
11) Now it happened as He went to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. 12) Then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off. 13) And they lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” 14) So when He saw them, He said to them, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And so it was that as they were went, they were cleansed. 15) And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God, 16) and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan. 17) So Jesus answered and said, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? 18) “Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?” 19) And He said to him, “Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well.” NKJV
My Christian friends: This Thanksgiving Day is especially important to observe since the world is so set against being thankful for anything during this pandemic. Nevertheless, showing gratitude for what we have glorifies God. Being grateful is recorded in the Bible, such as the offering Noah gave to the Lord after the flood. Noah, the “preacher of righteousness,” built an altar to the Lord immediately after he and seven of his family came off the Ark after the great, universal flood.
After the landing of the Mayflower at the Plymouth rock in 1620, prayers of thankfulness that glorifying God was most notably held in America’s history of 1621, “after the ingathering of the first harvest in the new world,” Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony invited the pilgrims to keep “a day of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.” It may surprise some people to know that our Thanksgiving Day was neither a religious holiday declared by the Church nor by the Church’s Head, Jesus Christ, but it is a holiday legislated by civil governments in this world.
By an act of congress, November 1, 1777, it declared that the third Thursday in December would be a national Day of Thanksgiving. Later, on October 3, 1863, President Lincoln, by an act of congress, set aside the last Thursday in November to be our National Day of Thanksgiving. Nevertheless our United States Government nowhere states and should never command that anyone is to render worship or gratitude to any god, or even the true God, our Savior Jesus Christ, who is the One who has given us every blessing we have both physical and spiritual.
Colossians 1:16, simply declares that “by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him.” True gratitude, friends, cannot be legislated but only comes by faith! It is faith, faith by hearing the Word of God, that brings people to Jesus. It is that faith that makes people come to worship Jesus on a regular basis simply out of gratitude for what He has done and still does!
Faith will even move people to come to Jesus and the heavenly Father in order to receive some special blessing, such as the ten lepers who came for healing of the body, crying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” But the test of genuine faith comes from the fact that a person is so humbled that not only he begs for mercy but that he would come back to the source of mercy to render thanksgiving. This type of grateful faith is received also from the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God. It is a faith that not just humbles the heart but also lifts up the heart in order to render sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
St. Ambrose said it best when he stated that no duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks. What a shame it was for the Church in Jesus’ day that only one of the ten lepers was so moved with gratitude to return and offer thanks to Jesus, his healer and redeemer. What a shame for the Jews that it had been the Samaritan, a half-breed of the dispersed ten tribes of Israel, despised of the Jews, who displayed such gratitude. It is not surprising that Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah (29:13), saying, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.”
Today, in most cases, people don’t even honor Jesus with their lips (with the exception of the mainline Christian churches who do so only for the sake of tradition.). Case in point: In years past, the NEA (National Education Association), one of the most powerful union groups in the U.S., issued a letter in which was said that Thanksgiving Day is a time to reflect and give thanks for our multi-culturalism. What’s even worse is the Marxist-socialists are bent on what is now commonly known as Cancel Culture (Kultur abbrechen, for you German pilgrims). And this Cancel Culture is directed against Christianity in particular this Thanksgiving.
Luther, however, believed that true thankfulness, which glorifies God the Father, is rendered through Jesus Christ. Dr. Luther, in lecturing on Galatians 1:3-5 said:
“In their writings the Hebrews make it a custom to mingle praise and thanksgiving, a custom observed both by the Hebrews and by the apostles, as is evident very often in Paul. For the name of the Lord should be held in great reverence and should never be mentioned without praise and thanksgiving, which are a certain kind of worship and divine service. In secular matters, when we speak the name of a king or a prince, we make it a custom to do so with some nice gesture, reverence, and genuflection. Much more should we bow the knee of our heart when we speak about God, and we should mention the name of God with gratitude and the greatest reverence.”
Many people today only bow the knee in an act of defiance and hatred and if they feigned any reverence to our Lord, it would certainly be rejected by our Sovereign. As it is written in Romans 1:21, “For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him.”
Maybe Jesus was thinking along these lines when he asked the Samaritan, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” We need to be ever mindful of Jesus’ question when we start to become negligent of our worship practices. Have we not been healed and delivered from sin, death, and the devil? Would we not then want, out of a thankful heart, to worship as often as we can with other believers? It is not enough to assemble only on the appointed holidays such as Thanksgiving Day, Easter and Christmas.
Many don’t understand the real significance of Christ. It is like the morning of December 18th 1903, when the Dayton Journal (Ohio) carried bold headline letters on the front page, “STORES FILLED WITH CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS!” But there was not even one word concerning the historic flight of their two local boys, Orville and Wilbur Wright that took place at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Lorine, the youngest brother of the fliers, had tried to inform the Dayton press, upon receipt of a telegram. “Fifty-seven seconds, eh?” yawned Journal staffer Frank Tunison. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes it might be a news item.” Such was the clueless, ingratitude of good news displayed upon receipt of the historic flight.
Just think of how insignificant the birth of Christ was to the worldly people at that time. Now think how insignificant this particular Day of Thanksgiving is to all those who feel they don’t owe God any gratitude for the lives they still live in this day of grace. Gratitude, as defined by Henry Ward Beecher, is the most painful thing to bear, next to ingratitude. Reason may tell you that you have worked hard to get what you have and God had nothing to do with the work and progress you have made. You might just continue to accumulate even more before you die. But then what? What does it profit you, then, as Scripture says, if you have all that and yet lose your own soul? “Then beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage” (Deut. 6:12).
Luther defines gratitude this way:
Gratitude always merits the receipt of more; ingratitude drains the fountain of divine goodness. Gratitude consists of more than the expression “I thank you, Lord God.” It also involves acknowledging first that it is a gift of God, that a person knows that peace, which today holds sway here in Germany, a type of government, and the security that allows one to marry are pure gifts of God. It is a gift of God to have a king and a state and the pest without poison, etc. After all, Satan wants the air polluted, all the land burdened with pestilence and death. That this does not occur is a gift of God. We have so many kings and peoples, so much produce, food, and property, purely out of His goodness. This gratitude consists not only in our words alone but principally in our acknowledgment of the blessing we have received. Those people are rare who make such an acknowledgment. Thus no one gives thanks, nor do people pray. Even those who pray with their mouth do not make this acknowledgment. Gratitude must be involved with prayers because one must confess the gifts he has received. ( Lectures on 1 Timothy 2).
But let’s look to the more cheerful side of the subject. We all have seen the beautiful autumn colors God has given us. Inside, we can smell the aromas coming from the kitchens, which remind us that God has indeed given us a bountiful harvest. For all that, and for the farmers and ranchers of our land, we also owe a debt of gratitude and continually give thanks to the Lord. For our spouses, for good children, for good friends and a godly government we should give thanks. But most of all we should be grateful to Jesus for gathering His church family together who have trusted in their Savior; for all that they have and for heaven itself when we must part ways; or until Jesus comes again to take us to our harvest home.
Lastly, look to the amazing saying of Jesus to the prostrate, worshiping Samaritan: “Rise and go, your faith has made you well!” Again, were not all ten lepers healed? This miracle was done for them specifically to show them that Jesus was the promised Messiah and that God was among them bringing salvation to the world. Yet the other nine were so involved with formalism, in such a hurry to show themselves to the priests (even as Jesus had directed) in order that they could soon be reinstated into society.
The gang of nine refused to understand the significance of the Healer; the gang of nine failed to see what saving faith meant to them. The Lutheran Commentator, R.C.H. Lenski, postured that “Whatever outward arguments this one (leper) had with the other nine (lepers), the decisions were due to something inward. In the heart of the one, out of the faith that made him too, cry to Jesus for mercy, and out of the word of Jesus that had healed him, something was born that was not born in the hearts of the others, something that drew him back to Jesus in spite of the decision of the other nine to go on, something that could not draw the others because it was not born in them because they grasped only at the healing and not also at the Healer.” The other nine could see nothing else but the precepts of the law and therefore refused to return to give thanks out of gratitude to the Healer Himself! The majority isn’t always right, you know. Lord, save us from such a heart as theirs.
2 Timothy 2:13 says, “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.” In those words we should draw some comfort since one to actually become ungrateful to the real source of all blessings. Dear friends, remember that all people, good and bad, benefit from the blessings of God. All ten were healed...but! Jesus did all His works to glorify His Father, and just as the Son and the Father are One, it is our place to give all honor and glory to the Father through His Son our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless, the ones who are truly thankful are the ones who have felt the weight of their sins lifted from their shoulders through knowing the forgiveness of sin freely given them in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This is the true thank offering rendered by FAITH unto God; this is the FAITH which continues to heal the soul until the last Day when Jesus takes us to be with Him in our Father’s heavenly home. This faith, indeed, makes the believers well. Amen.
