daily java

Daily Java:

Open for me the gates where the righteous enter, and I will go in and thank the Lord.
These gates lead to the presence of the Lord, and the godly enter there.
I thank you for answering my prayer and giving me victory!
The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing, and it is wonderful to see.
This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.
Please, Lord, please save us. Please, Lord, please give us success.
Bless the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord.
The Lord is God, shining upon us. Take the sacrifice and bind it with cords on the altar.
You are my God, and I will praise you! You are my God, and I will exalt you!
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever. (Psalm 118:19-29)

I want to go meet God, but not just going in. I want to go with the other righteous. I want a crowd with me when I enter praising. I want a band with dancing and singing and jumping. I want holy noise.

We thank God for all he has done, event he things which surprise us. He gave us victory in the midst of defeat. He gives us usefulness when no one else thinks we are any good anymore. he makes the day and brings the light when all around us seems to be night and darkness.

His grace and his face shine on us and he is able to use what we bring, even though in the eyes of the world it is small and useless.

He is my God and I will ever praise him.

Thanks be to the Lord all year, but especially in this season. Thank you, Lord!

daily java

Daily Java:

Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. (Psalm 100:4)

It is Thanksgiving week. Thanksgiving kind of snuck up on me this year. It is next Thursday and I had forgotten until someone reminded me last Thursday.

Christmas is next, of course. I will probably remember it. I don’t think I am that far gone.

But Thanksgiving is an odd day to the world. More and more I hear it called Turkey Day, a day in which for some arcane reason we eat turkey. No one knows why, goes back to the Pilgrims, a bunch of guys with buckles on their hats. They were weird anyway. Indians came for some reason to dinner.

Or at least you would think that listening to the media people. They really have no concept of what the real reason is for Thanksgiving.

I remember reading of some guy that was an unbeliever who was saying that we stop for a moment and think about all the good stuff we have to be thankful for. I guess he would thank the universe (the default god of the world) for giving him a turkey and stuff for dinner. Then he would glut himself and then watch football or something, with no other thought for the day or any more goofiness like giving thanks for stuff he bought himself.

The world just cannot figure out Thanksgiving in general. It is so easy to feel entitled, like someone owes us something. We do not feel the need to thank people for stuff. After all, we probably deserve it or something. We bought it with our own money.

But we don’t deserve it. God gave us those things and the money to buy them with and even the jobs we work. And we need to remember to be thankful for all we have, even when things do not go our way. And they don’t a lot of the time.

Remember that next Thursday when you stagger from the table to a comfortable chair, overloaded with pie and all. Be thankful to your God for more than a multitude of food. Be thankful for all we have as Americans, for all we have as Children of God, for all we have just in general.

Praise be to the One who gave it all to us. May he give us even more.

And he will when we are thankful. After all, who wants to give anything to a bunch of whiny ingrates that clamor for more? I barely want to talk to those kind of people much less give them good things. It would seem to me to be a waste. But of course, he loves us. And we praise him.

Happy Thanksgiving from Sister Ella and me here in Longton, Kansas. May your hearts be full of his grace and his love in all you do, and may the upcoming Christmas season be a good one for you and your family.

daily java

Daily Java:

They sang, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and strength belong to our God forever and ever! Amen.” (Revelation 7:12)

Today is Thanksgiving Day. It is a day in which we typically get together and try our level best to eat each other under the table.

But, of course, and we all know this – as we sit belching – there is more to it than that.

The first Thanksgiving followed a brutal winter in the new world. More people died than lived among the colonists from England during that first winter. But at the end of the harvest, the settlers gave thanks. Different legends are around, but it seems they invited their Indian friends who had helped them learn to plant corn, a native North American dish.

Above all else, they were grateful. And their leadership led them in a number of Thanksgiving prayers. They were grateful that they had made it through that first winter and wanted the Lord to know it.

The point was not the food, the point was the thanks.

That is why the designation Turkey Day is so grating. It denigrates the whole point of Thanksgiving in the first place.

We give thanks. We thank God who is the Source of all that is good and holy.

And if we don’t, all we become are gluttons.

And I do thank my God. Above all, I thank him for my wife, Ella, who has been with me though so much. I love her and cannot imagine life without her.

I thank God for my children. I know they love me and I love them and their families.

I thank God for my church. Life as a pastor in the past few years has been tumultuous at best, but the church we attend right now has accepted us and loved us. I thank God for them.

I thank God that I live in America with our freedoms of belief and life in general.

And above all else, I thank God for his Son, Jesus, who gave me life and joy and peace.

If I did not eat another thing, I would still thank him.

Thank you, Lord.

daily java

Daily Java: 

Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. (Psalm 100:4)

And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father. (Colossians 3:17)

This week is Thanksgiving. It is hard to believe that it can already be here. And you can tell. A sure sign is that the Halloween stuff is gone and the Christmas stuff is up at the stores.

And it is a shame, because Thanksgiving is a holiday that should be imperative for people to celebrate. I guess the main problem is that there isn’t a Thanksgiving tree with Thanksgiving presents that we give to each other which are, handily enough, sold at the stores.

That is the problem. It just isn’t commercial enough. So it tends to be ignored.

And we ignore it at our peril. It is a stone fact that no one appreciates an ungrateful person. There is nothing worse than a kid that just takes things without any attitude of being grateful.

Someone called it the attitude of gratitude. And as trite as that sounds, it is absolutely true.

And you can imagine God as he views us in our ingratitude in life. We take all he gives to us and ignore the Source.

The word says to be thankful for everything. Of course, that is a little hard for the bad things, but I suppose you are grateful for them that they make you stronger. Sure, that’s it.

I used to ask my mother things, and she was a master at the quick answer. Once I asked her why God made mosquitoes. Her answer: so we will be grateful when they’re gone. Although it was a goofy answer, there is a lot of truth in that.

We should be known as a grateful people. I suppose that it is a mark of a lot of the demonstrations going on today in the US that those demonstrating are mad that they do not have more. They live in a country that is unbelievably blessed with a standard of living that is in the extreme top tier in the world and they are mad because it is not higher.

Yes, things are not as they should be, and I for one know that. But even so, we, as Christians (or representatives of the Lord Jesus as Paul called us), should be thankful.

And I try to be, even when things come short. I refuse to fall into the pattern of griping about what I do not have. I would like a motorcycle, but still I am grateful. Yes, I would be more grateful with a motorcycle and a new Martin guitar.

But I am grateful for what I have. I praise him and I praise his name. Thank you, Lord for your blessings and for Jesus. Make me grateful. Amen.

daily java

Daily Java: So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.  (Colossians 2:6-7)

It is Thanksgiving. A lot of memories around this day, as is the case with most Americans.

I remember in school the emphasis on the origin of the day. Pilgrims had gone through a rough winter and had a good harvest so they invited the Indians to come and have dinner with them. The picture was that of a long table with a few Pilgrims, white people in tall black hats and bonnets on one side and a few Indians with feathers and breech clouts on the other, all of them eating turkey and corn and stuff.

The reality was very different, of course. The Pilgrims, thinking they had come to a new land of plenty almost starved that first winter. I have read that they just didn’t realize the severity of a New England winter and lost almost 2/3 of their colony to exposure and starvation. They came, after all, from England where it is a Seattle style climate: never really hot or really cold.

The Indians evidently helped them through it and they had some kind of common meal to show appreciation.

We did that scene on each Thanksgiving as a play. One year, I remember I played the governor of the group, I forget his name. The Indians wore construction paper feathers and the Pilgrims wore construction paper hats and bonnets. It was always a bit strange – the whole concept of the first Thanksgiving – but it was always fun.

And it helped to cement the idea of Thanksgiving being not just food but the realization of others helping us survive and being grateful to God for what we had.

Of course, there were the myriad Thanksgivings that I had growing up, always with relatives somewhere with tables groaning with food. The Thanksgiving I spent away from my family in Germany in the army, the Thanksgiving I spent away from my wife and children while I was being a fool. Simple Thanksgivings with just my family and raucous Thanksgivings with everybody else.  

In this passage, the apostle Paul says that if Jesus is running through us and moving through us, we are not only strengthened but made aware of gratitude.

Because of the removal of religion from the schools, our children do not have that same idea of gratitude. The popular convention now is the white people coming to America and oppressing the Indians and Thanksgiving gets overshadowed by foolish political concerns.

It is the same way in the upcoming Christmas season. This whole generation does not know the great Christmas carols that we learned in school and sang each year.

Much of our culture is being lost because of our lack of gratitude and common sense.

Thanksgiving has to be a great part of our makeup as Christians or we are not really Christians. Even Jesus was thankful to God in many of his comments and prayers. He knew what his source was. He knew it was only through the power of God that we have anything at all.

I thank you Lord, for all you have given me. My family, my wife, my life in your service, for making me a minister of your gospel, for giving me two good children, for my and my wife’s parents who raised us up in your knowledge and your word, for all of those things that I take so much for granted. I thank you. I thank you for your grace and your love and for your forgiveness and acceptance. I thank you, Lord. Amen.

thanksgiving

Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:5-7)

Thanksgiving is this week. It is a holiday that is received with such mixed feelings by the world.

On the one hand, they love the getting together and having dinner with their family and friends is great. There is all of the traditional Thanksgiving stuff to eat and it is almost always a good time.

I can remember Thanksgivings from when I was a little boy. It was always exciting and there was always a ton of food (a definite plus to a little boy) complete with pies and cakes and cookies. Not only that, but it opened the Christmas season. After Thanksgiving came all of the holidays with more food and presents and stuff, then Christmas eve and Christmas morning with more presents and food.

By the time we were through with it all, we were 10 pounds heavier and we had had a good time.

I got to see relatives that I hadn’t seen in a long time (sometimes that was good, sometimes not) but in general, Thanksgiving was fun.

On the other hand, the world doesn’t know quite what to do with the Thanksgiving part of the Thanksgiving season. In an increasingly secular society, who do they give thanks to?

One of the most grating things in our modern world is the term “Turkey Day.” It reduces the whole thing to food and eating and such. When you have Turkey Day, you don’t have to worry about thanking anyone except the people who made the food.

But like Christmas without Jesus, Thanksgiving without Thanksgiving is worthless. It is just another season like Halloween or Valentine’s Day for the commercial world to make money.

They key is to remember the thanksgiving. Remember what you have and where it came from. Certainly not yourself. In my own life, I know for a fact that all of my blessings are God-given. I am certainly not good enough to have a wife like I have or other things in my life.

As the psalmist says, Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his mercies endure forever.

This Thanksgiving, I am going to thank him for all he has done and for all he will do. praise be to his name.