Thanksgiving and a Super-Sized God 

“But I am afflicted and in pain; let your salvation, O God, set me on high! I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving.” Psalm 69: 29-30 

Happy Thanksgiving to you!   

I heard a great suggestion last night.  We should have 364 days of Thanksgiving and one day of griping.   As people who are so blessed we get spoiled.  One of the best ways to deal with discouragement is to obey the commands to be thankful.  Stop thinking about what you do not have, and appreciate what you do have!  

Think about the Psalm portion that I have quoted above.  It begins with the author in pain and affliction.  He is calling out for help.  There is plenty for us to call out for help about.  It is good and obedient to call for help.  But notice that the author immediately goes into singing.  He wants to meditate on the name of God with a song.  Music is purposely repetitive and memorable.  God made us to be able to sing.  Music moves the body, soul, and spirit, even more so than does speech.  God endorses music for worship.  It must be good!  

The next phrase is what brought me to this Psalm.  “I will magnify him with thanksgiving.”   Is that not a fantastic thought?  We can make God bigger with thanksgiving.  Certainly we make him bigger in our own minds.  Obviously he is “larger” than we can ever even imagine.  So to magnify him certainly means to appreciate his inherent immense size.   This makes perfect sense.  When we begin to list all the reasons we have to be thankful we begin to appreciate how good God is.  To hold the magnifying glass up to God, be thankful.  Look at him through thanksgiving and he looks bigger.  As he looks bigger our afflictions will shrink in size.  

Ephesians 5:20 “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”  

If we obey this command “…thanks always and for everything…”  it will do us a world of good.  We will acknowledge that God is all sovereign and deserves praise all the time.  Thanksgiving brings God back to his proper size in our hearts and minds.  

‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: This is what you shall say to your masters:  “It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the men and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomever it seems right to me. Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and I have given him also the beasts of the field to serve him. All the nations shall serve him and his son and his grandson, until the time of his own land comes. Then many nations and great kings shall make him their slave."  This is from Jeremiah 27

There you have the wonderful bold statement of Scripture that God is fully sovereign over everything and everyone.   He created the earth and he gives it to whomever it seems right to him.   In the days of Jeremiah this meant that Nebuchadnezzar was given political power.  He is called God's servant.  He would be in power doing the sovereign will of God as long as God pleased.  In this case God was showing his extreme displeasure toward his precious people for their wicked rebellion.  He was using the evil of Nebuchadnezzar to bring his holy judgment on his people.  The wicked king would be responsible for his own actions, but God was working his predetermined will through Nebuchadnezzar.  

It was God's pleasure to select Barack Obama as the leader of the United States.  While I do not think President Obama will be another Nebuchadnezzar, I do want to point out that President Obama has been given this post by God Almighty.  With the views of Biden and Obama on the sanctity of life and their dangerous economic theories, we may be in for further decline as a nation.  From the history of Israel we know that God uses political turmoil, military defeat, and economic distress to reveal his displeasure over sin.   God's call is for all people to return to him.  He is the God for all people everywhere. 

As the church of Jesus Christ this will give us more opportunities to faithfully witness to our culture.  Let us hold forth the Word of Life in these dark times.