Abounding in Thanksgiving | Colossians 1:3, 12-14; 2:6-7; 3:15-17; 4:2
Brian Hedges | November 27, 2016
Good morning! Well this morning we are continuing in our series on discipleship. We’re going to be in the book of Colossians if you want to turn there. While you’re turning there let me mention a book that I’ve been reading in recent weeks by David Brooks. David Brooks you might recognize as a New York Times columnist and a journalist who has been published in New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers and journals. His work became of particular interest to me in the last year as I was reading his op eds during the election cycle and found them very insightful. And so I decided to read his new book called The Road to Character.
In this book David Brooks contrasts what he calls résumé virtues with eulogy virtues. And you can immediately discern the difference between the two. Résumé virtues are those outward accomplishments and achievements that we put on our résumés in order to sell ourselves, to promote ourselves, to advance our careers. The eulogy virtues, in contrast, are those things that people remember us for when we have died. Those are the quieter virtues. The self-sacrifice, the integrity, the honesty, the love, the kinds of things that only friends and close family members are likely to know very well. And David Brooks says that we live in a culture that has shifted away from the focus on the eulogy virtues to a focus on the résumé virtues. And then as he develops this book, he chooses a number of these virtues to build his chapters around. These virtues include things like self-conquest, struggle, self-mastery, self-examination, love. And interestingly enough he builds these chapters around vignettes of historical figures who exemplify these virtues. So each chapter is something like a mini biography. And he chooses such people, as for example, the sociologist and US Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins. The World War II General and later US President, Dwight Eisenhower. The Catholic Social worker, Dorothy Day. The 19th Century novelist Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot. And the NFL quarterback Johnny Unitas. But of special interest to me, and I didn’t know this when I bought the book, there is a chapter in The Road to Character on the theologian and church father, Augustine. Or sometimes we say Augustine. Augustine of Hippo. And this chapter is called Ordered Love; and it both recounts the basic facts of Augustine’s life, especially his conversion, and also examines some of the key features of Augustine’s teaching on grace and virtue.
And as I was reading that chapter a few days ago I was struck by a passage where Brooks seems to recognize the difference between Augustine’s character transformation and some of the other subjects in his book. Now I don’t know if David Brooks is a Christian or not. There are reasons in the book that make me think that perhaps he is not. But he certainly has recognized something distinctive about Christian virtue formation. Or Christian transformation. So I want to read this statement to you because it so perfectly introduces the main idea of today’s message.
So here is David Brooks: “Augustine’s thought and much of Christian teaching generally challenges the code of the self-cultivator in a crucial way. In Augustine’s view people did not get what they deserve. Life would be hellish if they did. Instead people get much better than they deserve. God offers to us grace, which is his unmerited love. The ultimate conquest of self in this view is not won by self-discipline or an awful battle within self. It is won by going out of self by establishing communion with God and by doing the things that feel natural in order to return God’s love. This is the process that produces an inner transformation. One day you turn around and notice that everything inside has been re-aligned. The old loves no longer thrill. You love different things and are oriented in different directions. You’ve become a different sort of person. We have arrived therefore at a different theory of motivation. It starts with the dive inside to see the vastness of the inner cosmos. The inward dive leads outward towards an awareness of external truth in God. That leads to humility as one feels small in contrast to the Almighty. That leads to a posture of surrender, of self-emptying as one makes space for God. That opens the way for you to receive God’s grace. That gift arouses an immense feeling of gratitude, a desire to love back, to give back and to delight. That in turn awakens vast energies. The genius of this conception, is that as people become more dependent on God, their capacity for ambition and action increases. Dependency doesn’t breed passivity, it breeds energy and accomplishment.”
Now Brooks is tapping into something very crucial for the life of the Christian, for the life of the disciple. That our whole life, all of our energy in serving God, in loving God, all of it is born from a reflective response to what God himself has done for us. The experience of grace leads to gratitude and that gratitude is the motivational center and force in the Christian life.
Well of course we just celebrated a holiday that is devoted to the giving of thanks. But this morning I want us to look very specifically at a book in the Bible that develops this theme of gratitude and shows how such gratitude is rooted in God’s grace, as we think about the formation of gratitude in our lives as Christians. So we are going to be in the book of Colossians. And I’m going to read four passages from this letter. It’s interesting that in all four chapters of Colossians, Paul discusses in some way or another gratitude or thankfulness or thanksgiving as it is in this translation. So I’m going to read these four passages and then lead us through a brief exposition of these passages as we think about the application of this to our lives.
So Colossians 1: 3, 12-14: "We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you . . . giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you[e] to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."
Then in Chapter 2: verses 6-7: "Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving."
Chapter 3, verses 15-17: "And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."
And then finally in Chapter 4: verse 2: "Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving."
So this is God’s Word.
And three things I want us to notice this morning, very simply:
I. The Nature of Gratitude
II. The Source of Gratitude
III. The Practice of Gratitude
So we are going to be asking: What is it? Where does it come from? And then how do we cultivate the practice of it in our lives?
So first of all,
I. The Nature of Gratitude
What is gratitude? Let me just show you several characteristics from the text.
(1) First of all, gratitude or thankfulness, thanksgiving, is a continual practice.
Notice chapter 1:3. “I always give thanks”. I always give thanks. This is Paul’s continual practice. In chapter 2 he tells us to abound in thanksgiving. There in chapter 1 verse 12, when he is describing the giving of thanks, in chapter 1:12-14, it is in the present tense, and this is just reinforced by other passages of scripture where Paul tells us to give thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:20).
The interesting thing to remember as we read this is that Paul was imprisoned when he wrote it. He ends the letter by saying remember my chains, grace be to you. He is in prison. And yet he says “I always give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I always give thanks. He lived in thanksgiving even when his circumstances were obviously less than ideal.
Paul views the life of thanksgiving as something that is not dependent on our earthly blessings. Now when we celebrate the holiday of thanksgiving and when we give thanks, we often begin, as we should, with our earthly blessings. We thank God for the blessings of family and friends and wonderful food and times of celebration, the freedoms that we enjoy. That’s wonderful, that’s great.
But what if you don’t have those things? Is there nothing then to be thankful for? Well not in Paul’s understanding. In Paul’s understanding gratitude is a constant continual practice. There is always reason for thanksgiving even when freedoms are stripped away. Even when separated from family and friends and loved ones. Even when he is in chains. In other words, we should have that heart that’s described by the Puritan poet George Herbert in his poem Gratefulness:
Not thankful, when it pleaseth me;
As if thy blessings had spare days:
But such a heart, whose pulse may be Thy praise.
He’s saying my very heartbeat is a heartbeat of gratitude and praise. Not just occasionally, not hit-or-miss, not off-and-on, but the continual practice of gratitude. My pulse is thy praise.
That’s the first thing to note about gratitude in this passage.
(2) Here’s the second: there is a Godward focus to this gratitude. Now this is the interesting thing in scripture. Thanksgiving in the bible is almost always directed to God. Almost always! It’s directed to God. It’s Godward. Now much of the time when we think about gratitude, we think about expressing gratitude on the horizontal level. When someone gives you a gift you send them a thank you note. If someone does something nice – they shovel your driveway, they mow your yard, they surprise you with hot soup on a cold evening when you are sick, you say "thank you." And of course we should express gratitude on that horizontal level. But in Scripture the gratitude is usually focused towards God himself.
That leads a new testament scholar named David Pao to say this: “For Paul to give thanks in all circumstances is not a call for us to remain in a certain emotional state all the time, it is a call to live a God-centered life.”
To give thanks in all circumstances is to live under the lordship of Christ in all that we do. A God-centered focus, because the Christian recognizes that every breath we breathe, not to mention all the blessings of grace and salvation come to us as gifts from the Fathers good hand. And so our whole life is to be lived in gratitude towards God.
So a constant continual practice with a Godward focus. And then here’s the third thing about gratitude:
(3) It is a reflective instinctive response. It’s a response. Gratitude is responding to something. You say “thank you” to someone who’s done something for you. Gratitude is responsive. And I actually debated a little over how to word this. Is it a reflective response or is it an instinctive response? And so I decided to say “well, it’s both”.
It’s reflective because sometimes it does require that we actually stop and think. We have to think. What is it that God has done. And when we begin to grasp what God has done for us, then of course we’re going to be grateful.
But it’s an instinctive response for the heart that has felt and been touched by God’s grace. So that if you’ve really been grasped by the grace of God, you cannot help but be grateful. And that’s why gratitude is, or should be, the heartbeat of the Christian. When that’s not the case, when gratitude is not our instinctive response, do you know why it’s not the case? Because we’ve forgotten. We have forgotten the desperate plight we were in, and we’ve forgotten the amazing grace that God has shown to us.
Now you see that in the text in verse 12-14 which we’re going to dig into in just a moment. But I want to give you this wonderful quote from the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, and he is using the Greek words for grace and thanksgiving. And these two words are related in Greek. And he says, “The only answer to charis is eucharistia. Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice of an echo. Gratitude follows grace, like thunder and lightning.”
So it’s a responsive thing. Gratitude is our reflective instinctive response to God’s grace in our lives. Now that leads then to the next point.
II. The Source of Gratitude
Where does gratitude come from? The short answer is it comes from grace. Gratitude is our response to God’s grace.
In fact, some of you may remember the structure of that old Heidelberg Catechism. The whole document is framed around guilt, grace, and gratitude. And that’s really the heart of the gospel. We understand the gospel when we understand the guilt from which we’ve been rescued, the grace which God has given to us, and then the grateful response which we then make to God.
And you see that at work here in this passage, in verses especially 12-14. They are a rich expression of gratitude to God for grace that powerfully unfold the heart of the gospel. Now in its context, and this was somewhat obscured in the way I arranged the reading of the text, but in this passage, what Paul is actually doing is praying for the Colossians. And he is praying for them that they would live a life that pleases God. That they would walk worthy of the calling by which they’ve been called. And then he defines that worthy walk he defines that God pleasing life with a series of statements. And this statement giving thanks to the Father is the last of those.
So what this means is that a life of gratitude pleases God and that’s what Paul is praying for. And I want you to see specifically then how he unfolds this statement about gratitude. And I’m just going to summarize it in two statements. You might think of these as a summary of what we have been saved from and what we have been saved to. And you put those two things together and you have that guilt, grace structure that leads to gratitude.
(1) Deliverance from the dominion of sin and darkness. This is what we are saved from. Notice this in vv 12-14: "giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."
And do you see what is implicit there? We are saved from the domain of darkness and we are saved from sin.
What is the domain of darkness? Well it’s the domain of the enemy. Darkness represents the kingdom of the evil one. We were once, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, the children of disobedience, we were the children of wrath, we were the children of the enemy. We weren’t children of God. And Paul is saying here that God has delivered us from this. We once were citizens of this kingdom of darkness and now we’ve been transferred and made citizens of a new kingdom. So we were enslaved to darkness and then we were also enslaved to sin. And that is clear in v. 14: we have in Christ, redemption, the forgiveness of sins. We needed to be set free from our sins and forgiven of our sins. We needed to be set free. That’s implicit in this word redemption. What is redemption? It’s to set free prisoners through the payment of a ransom.
In fact, what Paul is doing here is reworking the story of the Exodus in the Old Testament. Do you remember how the children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt? They were enslaved in Egypt to the Pharaoh. They were in bondage as these slaves. They were making the bricks without straw. And only through the sacrifice of a lamb in that first Passover were they set free and delivered from this bondage, this slavery in Egypt. Paul’s using that language. And he is saying that you and I, as believers in Christ, have become a part of the new exodus and we have been set free from our slavery to sin and to Satan, and to darkness. And we have been delivered through the redemptive work of Christ into the kingdom of God.
So deliverance from the domain of sin and darkness.
(2) This is what we have been saved to: we have been given all the rights and privileges of belonging to the kingdom of God’s Son. And again the language is right there in the text, “God has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, and he has transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.”
He has forgiven our sins. It’s not just that he delivered us so that we’re now left on our own. It’s that he actually made us citizens of the new kingdom. It’s one thing to escape a nation that enslaved you and find amnesty or find asylum in another nation. It’s another thing to actually become a citizen of a new kingdom. And that’s what’s happened to us. We’ve become citizens of this new kingdom and what kingdom is it? It’s the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. And not only are we citizens of this kingdom but we share in the inheritance because, we’re not only citizens, we’ve been made members of the family. We are sons and daughters ourselves.
The language here is just almost overwhelming. Now I know it’s theological language, but what Paul is doing here is unpacking for us the richness of the gospel. And he is showing us that we have been delivered from guilt, the domain of darkness, and we have been transferred into grace. The kingdom of God’s Son. And that’s the source of gratitude. That’s what we are to give thanks to the Father for. And our whole life, and everything practical that Paul will later say in this letter, springs out of this decisive saving reality.
J.I. Packer has put it well in saying: “It’s been said that in the NT doctrine is grace and ethics is gratitude. And something is wrong with any form of Christianity in which experimentally and practically this saying is not being verified.” Doctrine is grace. Ethics is gratitude.
Now here’s the problem. So often when we talk about gratitude, all we do is talk about the ethics. It’s just exhortation. Christian be more thankful. Be more thankful. And you are left feeling like you’ve got to work it up. Somehow I should become a more thankful person.
But you see gratitude is a response. And it’s a response to grace. You don’t become thankful by focusing on the feelings of thankfulness. You become thankful by focusing on the amazing, wondrous, immeasurable grace that God has given to you in Christ. Henry Lyte had it right in those wonderful words:
Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven;
To His feet thy tribute bring.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Evermore His praises sing!
This is the source of our gratitude: the grace of God.
III. The Practice of Gratitude
How do we cultivate it? I’ve already essentially given you the answer. We practice gratitude, or we cultivate gratitude as we focus on the grace of God. But Paul has more to teach us here. He has more to teach us here. So as we look at the practice of gratitude, I want you to notice in Colossians, three practices that actually form the connections and show us how we get from the gospel to actually living out grateful Christian lives. And there are connections between the gospel and our Christian lives. Those connections are in the actual practices, the spiritual practices that we observe. The kinds of things we’ve been talking about in this series on discipleship. I want to give you three of them.
(1) God centered watchful prayer
Again you see the focus on prayer in Chapter 1, Paul is thanking God in v. 3. He is giving thanks to God in v. 12-14. And then in Chapter 4 verse 2 he tells us to “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.”
I never even noticed this until I was preparing this sermon (and I just wrote a book on Colossians!) and I didn’t notice it until this week. “Being watchful in it with thanksgiving”.
Now I think what he means by that is that the practice of thanksgiving helps us be watchful. We watch over our hearts and our lives in prayer, through the practice of thanksgiving. I think that’s what he means.
And I was just reflecting on how does this work. And I think I've experienced how this works. And probably you have to. Have you ever had those times when you were really anxious? You feel really stressed. You have bills coming in and you don’t know how you’re going to meet ends. You have house problems going on right and left. And this is where I’ve been living the last month. I’ve had heat problems, plumbing problems, and electrical problems, all in the same week. And two of the problems still aren’t fixed, after three visits from repair men. That’s stressful. I don’t want to deal with that stuff. You know how that is. You feel stressed. You’re dealing with all this stuff. You feel anxious and maybe you have much bigger problems than that. Those are minor and trivial by comparison. You feel deeply concern about a sick family member. Someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease. These things just become overwhelming.
And then, you go to prayer. And maybe you’ve experienced this. You go to prayer, and as you go, you remind yourself of who you are talking to. You’re talking to God. You’re talking to the Creator of heaven and earth. You’re talking to the Judge of all the earth. You are reminded of your sins. I have no right to talk to this God because of the way I’ve lived, because of the things I’ve thought, because of the things that I’ve said. And so you remember your sins, and then you think about God as gracious Redeemer. You start holding on to the promises of the gospel. You’re confessing your sins in the light of his majesty, and your clinging to the promises of his word, and something changes in your heart when you do that. Something changes. Something actually changes internally as you begin to reflect on what God has done for you. And all of a sudden the grace of God that has given you life and has given you forgiveness and has given you salvation. So that even if everything this side of heaven doesn’t turn out perfectly (and it’s not going to!), you know that your eternal destiny is secure. You have a fresh assurance of his grace and his pardon. You have a fresh understanding that you are a son or daughter of God. And something changes in your heart and it begins to filter out those other concerns and suddenly they don’t’ seem as big as they did. Because you’ve reflected on grace.
You see I think that’s how it works. Now if you haven’t experienced that, I would just suggest that maybe you haven’t spent the kind of time in prayer, that will help you get to that place. But this is reality. That as we work through the gospel in our prayer lives, reminding ourselves of our guilt and of God’s grace something changes in the heart that produces gratitude that then filters out the complaints, that begins to cause the anxieties to diminish, and they can actually bring us to peace and to rest and to joy and to fresh gratitude towards God. So God centered watchful Prayer. That’s the first thing.
(2) Here’s the second: a gospel-rooted persevering walk. A gospel-rooted persevering walk. And you see this in verses 6-7 in Chapter 2: "Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving."
This is really the core to the whole book of Colossians. These two verses summarize the whole point of the letter. Just as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him. You started in Christ, now continue in Christ. You started in the gospel now keep on living in the light of the gospel.
And I love how Paul uses these metaphors. We read over these too quickly. He says “rooted in him” that’s the realm of agriculture. You think of a tree. A tree is only as strong as it’s root system. And Paul is telling us to be rooted in Christ.
Built up in him. That’s the picture of a building. That’s architecture. A building that’s being constructed, built up, progressively growing. And we are to be progressively being built up in Christ and then established in the faith. And he means here not the subjective experience of faith. But "the faith," the Christian faith, established in the gospel.
And then notice as these things are happening, as you are walking in him, rooted in him, built up in him, established in him, that’s when you are abounding in thanksgiving. You know what that tells me? It tells me that the focus of our personal walk with Christ should never be ourselves, it should be Christ. I’ve said it probably a dozen times, Robert Murray M’Cheyennes’ great line, “For every one look at self, take ten looks at Christ.” That’s what Paul is telling us to do here. So that our focus isn’t to be always checking our spiritual pulse, it’s not always to be our behavior, it’s to be growing in Christ. Remembering what he has done for you. That should be the focus, the center of your walk with him. And it’s when you do that that you will be abounding in thanksgiving.
(3) And then finally here’s the third practice, that leads to a life of gratitude, or that expresses a life of gratitude: Christ-oriented corporate worship. You see this in verses 15-17 of Chapter 3: "And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."
So you can see right there, thankfulness in each of those verses. Now what I want you to see is that there is a Christ-oriented focus to those verses. And there is a corporate dimension to those verses. So the next slide you see that Christ-orientation to the verses: He says let the peaceof Christ rule in your hearts. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. And then live for the name of the Lord Jesus. Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through Him. So again it’s Christ-centered in its whole approach.
But then here’s the other thing to notice is the focus on the body of Christ. So there is a corporate dimension to this. And you see this in the third slide, “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (that’s plural) “to which indeed you were called in one body.” He’s talking about the body of Christ. Then in verse 16: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another.” Do you know what that is? That’s a reciprocal thing. That’s something that we do to one another. “We teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in our hearts to God”. And I think this shows us the vital importance of the church.
That’s going to be our whole focus next week. We’re going to talk about the corporate dimensions to discipleship. But you see it right here. To be a thankful person, to be a Christian disciple whose life is marked with gratitude, you can’t do it by yourself. You need one another. You need the body of Christ. It’s something we do together. I have a book on my shelves on worship. And the book is called Rhythms of Grace. And that’s what we try to do when we gather for worship week by week. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this before, but in the course of a worship service there is a rhythm. There are certain things that we do virtually every week. We are called to worship God. We are called to confess our sins. We use the Lord’s prayer and we are led in a pastoral prayer of confession and intercession. Then once we’ve confessed our sins, we are assured of pardon. We receive the good news, a fresh gospel word, to remind us that those sins are covered. They are forgiven. We’ve been renewed. We’ve been received and forgiven by God in Christ. And then in response to the proclamation of the word of God’s grace, what do we do? We observe the Eucharist. What is the Eucharist? It’s the Lord’s table. And that word Eucharist comes from the Greek word eucharistia which is the word for thanksgiving. So the Lord’s table is a thanksgiving meal. It’s a meal in which we give thanks to God for Christ who has broken his body and shed his blood for us. And then we are freshly commissioned by a benediction that sends us out into the world under the blessing of God.
You know what this is? It’s a rhythm. And the rhythm is meant to train us in the same way that daily practice of a musical instrument will help you play the instrument well. So the rhythms of worship are meant to form and shape our hearts so that we’re regularly constantly moving through his rhythm of guilt, grace, gratitude. Called by God. Forgiven by God. Sent by God into the world. There is a rhythm to it. And what I’m trying to say here is simply this, that the rhythms of weekly worship are absolutely crucial to the formation of a thankful heart. So that if you want to grow in thankfulness, you will do so as you become more and more intentionally engaged in corporate worship as we gather with God’s people and we observe these rhythms of grace.
So we’ve seen this morning the nature of gratitude: Godward continual practice of thanks to God. We’ve seen the source of it in God’s grace given to us in Christ in what he has saved us from and what he has saved us to. And now we have seen the practice of gratitude in prayer, in our personal walk, and in worship.
So let’s pray and then we will celebrate and express our gratitude at the table.
Gracious heavenly Father, we thank you that you have saved us and redeemed us because of your grace shown to us in Christ. Father we were under the dominion of darkness. We were slaves to sin. We didn’t deserve anything. We didn’t deserve life and breath. We didn’t deserve family and friends. Much less did we deserve forgiveness and a share in the inheritance of Christ. But this is what you’ve done for us. This is what you have given to us. So thank you for this rescue. Thank you for this deliverance, this redemption. And our prayer this morning, Father, is that the realities of the gospel would so grasp our hearts, that the instinctive response of our hearts would be to say “Thank you”. Thank you for what you have done. We deserve to be in hell at this moment. And we’re not. We are seated at the table of the Lord. So thank you for your grace. Now continue with us as we worship at the table in expressing our gratitude to you. We pray it in Jesus Name. Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
