1.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from
God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. A
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! Today
we’re going to be looking at the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 67. The message is entitled, “God Has Blessed Us,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
To understand how God has blessed us
as citizens of this great nation of America on this day we give thanks to God
for all He’s done for us, it would be good for us to look at an illustration on
this point. Henry Smith Leiper points to
American prosperity with some startling statistics. Imagine that we could
compress the world’s population into one town of 1,000 people, keeping
proportions right. In this town there would be only 60 Americans. These 60
Americans would receive half the income of the entire town. They would have an
average life expectancy of seventy years; the other 940 persons would have less
than forty years. The 60 Americans would own 15 times as much per person as all
of their neighbors. They would eat 72 percent more than the maximum food
requirements; many of the 940 other people would go to bed hungry every night. Of 53 telephones in the town, Americans would
have 28. The lowest-income group among the Americans would be better off by far
than the average of the other townsmen. The 60 Americans and about 200 others
representing Western Europe and a few classes in South America, Australia, and
Japan would be relatively well-off. The other 75 percent would be poor.
3.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
God has richly blessed us in this great nation of America. Even with all of the problems we deal with
here in this nation, the economy, social issues, etc. etc. we still are way
better off than much of the way the rest of the world lives. But, God hasn’t just blessed us with physical
blessings. He’s also blessed us with our
Lord and Savior Jesus who has saved us from sin, death, and the power of the
devil. Let’s listen to what the Psalmist
says in Psalm 67, “1May God be gracious to us and bless
us and make his face to shine upon us, 2that your way may be known on earth, your
saving power among all nations. 3Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the
peoples praise you! 4Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge
the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. 5Let the peoples
praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you! 6The earth has yielded its
increase; God, our God, shall bless us. 7God shall bless us; let all the ends
of the earth fear him!”
4.
Let me again quote verses 5 and 7 of
Psalm 67 together: “Let the people praise
thee, O God; let all the people praise thee…. God shall bless us; and all the
ends of the earth shall fear him” (to fear God means reverential trust in Him).
From this Psalm what do we learn about the goal of missions? “Let all the people praise thee.” The chief end of missions is to glorify God. That’s the focus to pull
the train of every mission program of the Church. It’s to glorify God, and that
which follows it is this: preach the gospel of our Savior Jesus. I wonder on
this Thanksgiving Day if we’ve lost that focus today? What’s our goal as Christians? “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy
Him forever.” That’s the purpose of man. Why do you and I exist? Are we
here only “to eat the meat and fish and
leave behind an empty dish”? Is that all man is supposed to do? No, man is
to glorify God. We glorify Him when we get His Word out. We glorify Him when we
preach the gospel. We glorify Him when people are saved.
5.
The opening words of psalm 67 sound
like a repetition of the Aaronic benediction. God wanted his name to be spoken
by his people to bless and save them. What is God’s name? God’s name is
everything that he has revealed about himself in his Word. What God has
revealed about himself centers in the way he won salvation for mankind through
his Son, Jesus Christ, and how he offers that salvation as a free gift through
faith in Jesus. This is how God is gracious to people and blesses them. These words represent the prayer that we as
God’s people offer. As we’ve received God’s grace and the blessing of
salvation, we want others to know the way of salvation through faith in Jesus
too!
6.
It’s interesting that this psalm
ends with talking about the harvest, and the harvest we may be thinking about
today is the harvest of our crops, yielding to us the blessings from God’s
green earth. And yet what’s this harvest the Psalmist is talking about? Is it
the products of the vineyard and farm field? Well, I believe that the harvest
the Psalmist is talking about is the success of the gospel message throughout
the world. One can’t help thinking about the first Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost
had been an Old Testament harvest festival. Jews throughout the world would
gather in Jerusalem to praise God for the blessing of the harvest of crops from
the land. On that first Pentecost after our Savior’s ascension, another kind of
harvest was celebrated. 3,000 souls were harvested. These souls were brought to saving faith in
Christ, through the preaching of God’s Word and the sacrament of Holy Baptism.
When those believers returned to their homelands after that first Pentecost,
the good news of salvation was taken to the ends of the earth. This is the
answer to the opening prayer of this psalm and the result of God’s saving name
being spread throughout the world.
7.
On this day we give thanks to God
for all of the bountiful blessings He has given to us the Psalmist teaches us
that when God is gracious to us and blesses us, we want to share his Word with
all people. Our praise of God will lead others to praise him. God’s blessings
to us will be a source of blessing to others. If we joyfully praise God and
tell the nations of His righteousness, the earth will yield a rich harvest of
souls won for Christ and for eternal life.
Psalms 67 teach us that we will be enriched by sharing with others how
God has blessed us physically and spiritually through our Lord and Savior Jesus.
God is just as generous with his grace in Jesus as He is with the harvest He
provides in His creation. He wants us to share His grace with others. May God
bless us and our work so that the earth yields a rich spiritual harvest. We as God’s people can have confidence that
the spread of the gospel of our Lord Jesus will bring about a harvest of souls
throughout the world. Such confidence comes from God’s own assurance in Isaiah
55:10, 11: “As the rain and the snow come
down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making
it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the
eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: it will not return to me
empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I
sent it.”
8.
Scripture teaches us plainly, “… in everything give thanks; for this is
the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess. 5:18). It’s not hard to
thank God for getting what we want, but how wonderful to learn to thank Him for
what we’d rather not experience. Sometimes we get angry because painful
circumstances invade our lives, but 1 Thessalonians 5:18 teaches us that thankfulness
is accomplished through our connection with Christ. Jesus is the Source of our
ability to thank God when we get what we don’t want. Only our union with Him
makes thankfulness possible. When we’re connected with Jesus in a vital way,
the dynamic life of Jesus in us gives us the power to give thanks. The Psalmist in Psalm 67 wants all the
nations of the earth to fear God and know that He’s blessed them, so too the
Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Thess. 5:18 to give thanks in everything. “Give thanks” is one word in Greek and it
is built from the word meaning “grace.”
Grace in the New Testament means
unmerited favor or kindness extended to those who don’t deserve it. The idea
behind giving thanks in the New Testament is gratitude that God has given us
incredible blessings that we don’t deserve. If we grasp that we deserve hell
and hell alone, because of our sinfulness against God’s holy will, then we’ll
be filled with gratitude for everything we get that we don’t deserve. From our salvation and home in heaven to the
sun and rain, our food, our house, our car, our health, our appliances, our
comforts, the people in our lives. It’s all God’s grace to us. We deserve none
of it. Anything less than overwhelming gratitude should be unthinkable. God
owes us nothing. We owe Him everything. Christ took the hell He didn’t deserve
to give us the multitude of good things we don’t deserve! Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, God has
blessed us, let’s praise Him this Thanksgiving Day and every day for all He has
given to us and let others know about the grace He has given to us. Amen.
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