Jim Van Gelderen: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Jim Van Gelderen, podcasting from Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Currently, we’re in between meetings, having just finished at a Christian school located at Calvary Baptist Church in Fort Walton Beach. On Friday, we’ll be heading to Miami for our next War of Special Forces at Westwood Christian Schools.

Well, anyway, it is Thanksgiving week, and I want to address the issue of Thanksgiving. I know we hear a lot about Thanksgiving at this time, but what I want you to see, especially in regard to Thee Generation, is how important Thanksgiving is to a walk of faith.

Actually, you are not walking by faith if you are not living in gratitude to God. It is an expression of faith. It’s almost, how do I say this, the breath of faith. If you are walking by faith, there will be a spirit of gratitude. And gratitude is, in many ways, an expression of faith.

You might say, “Well, isn’t it an expression of sight and not faith?” And that would be certainly one aspect of gratitude. Sometimes it’s not a faith statement. God does something or somebody does something for us. We see God’s hand in something. “Thank you, God.” We’ve all been saved. I trust everybody listening to this is, and “Thank you, Lord, for saving my soul.” We sing that, okay. Certainly, that’s thanking God for something that’s tangible and visible. And that certainly ought to be a part of our Christian life.

But I mean faith is a faith statement on a couple of things that maybe you don’t think of often. One is this: the Bible says, “In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” Notice it does not say for everything. Clearly, we can’t thank God for sin. We can’t thank God for our own sin, and we can’t thank God for the sin of others that ill affects our life. But we can thank God that in other people’s sin or even our own sin, we can trust God to work it together for good.

Many times, I’m talking to some of you, that you get discouraged, and many times that comes from failure. And that’s the wrong window; we’ve talked about that before. But actually, one of the ways out of that is gratitude. The moment we fail God and begin to feel guilty about that, obviously we need the cleansing power of the blood, and that can be obtained by simply getting honest with God and confessing our sin before him.

But we ought to recognize that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. In other words, God wants to take even our failures and work them together for good and grace us so that we see his supernatural hand working in our lives, teaching us, admonishing us, encouraging us, and helping us so that we grow.

Can we say this? Failure turns into a stepping stone instead of being a continuing stumbling block. And for many people, that’s what happens. They fail, they get discouraged, they get down on themselves, instead of getting it right with God, accepting the cleansing power of the blood, and thanking him for that, by the way, but also thanking him that even in our failure, he can work it together for good and will as we trust him.

So it is with other people’s failure that ill affects our life. We can trust God to work it together for good. And the way we know we’re trusting God to work it together for good is expressing gratitude to God. “God, I’m thanking you that right now, in spite of these difficult circumstances that other people brought into my life by their sinful choices, you are working this together for good. It’s not caught you by surprise, and it’s not hindering what you want to do in my life. It’s a part of it if I’ll just trust you.”

So gratitude is a part of faith on those situations where we are thanking God in situations that are difficult, hard, even our own failures. We’re thanking God.

Now there’s another way that gratitude can be an expression of faith. The Bible tells us, “And this is the confidence that we have in him if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us. And if we know that he hears whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him” (1 John 5:14-15). Now in those verses, God tells us we can pray with confidence.

Now I’ve spoken on this a lot but clearly, when you pray according to God’s will, and know it’s God’s will, you know God’s heard you and you know you got the answer. That’s when we can thank God, and that’s faith because it’s not sight yet. Now God says it’s gonna happen, it shall be given unto you, but at that point, it’s an expression of faith. Okay God, thank you. I’ve prayed according to your will. You told me that you’ve heard me, I believe that, and you tell me that I have the answer. Well, I believe in that, I’m thanking you for your will being done in my life.

Now, you may at that point not know it experientially, but you’re thanking God by faith. It could be like this. Let’s imagine you desperately need wisdom, and there’s an important decision, there’s no way out of not making the decision. You’ve gotta, even no decision is a decision. You and I have been at crossroads like that. Well, the Bible does say, “If any man lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him” (James 1:5). So you and I can come, and say, “God, I’m desperate, I need wisdom, and I’m asking you for wisdom to know what to do in this very setting.” And you know what God says? He’s gonna give you the wisdom. You oughta praise God even when you don’t know yet what that wisdom might be. “God, thank you for the wisdom you’re gonna give, or the wisdom you’ve given. It may not be manifested to me yet, but I’m thanking you for the wisdom that you have given me and that will soon be understanding in my heart.” Wow, that’s a step of faith.

When you and I will praise God for answered prayer, that’s not yet, but because we know we have a Bible ground for it, that is an expression of faith. So gratitude is something that we all need to inculcate because it is a part of our walk of faith.

Now this is, I’ll be honest with you, challenging to me. This is something that’s not intuitive. It is not natural to the human heart for us just to praise God. In difficult circumstances when we don’t see anything to praise or when we ask for something and we yet not have the answer, but because it’s based, it’s God’s will, based on a prayer that we can have confidence about because we’re praying according to God’s will knowing he heard us, 1 John 5 there, 14, 15, we can praise him for an answer that we don’t yet have. And those are very important times in our life because they’re times of inculcating our faith in believing God by praising him, by thanking him, by expressing gratitude to him for what he says he is going to do.

In a certain sense, he’s already done it, we just haven’t had it manifested yet when it comes to answered prayer. Or in the difficult circumstances, we are praising God that he’s promised to work things together for good and he’s doing it at this very moment even though I may not see any evidence of it. And these are very important expressions of faith. So in a life of total surrender and in a life of total dependence, there has got to be the breath of gratitude.

And this is challenging for us because again, like I mentioned just seconds ago, it’s not natural. I know it’s not natural in my own heart and I certainly have been convicted by the message Sunday here at Calvary Baptist Church by Pastor Stevens about thanksgiving, convicted about the need to really nurture in my heart in the walk of faith far more gratitude for things I can’t see, for things that I believe God’s doing or who God is. Sometimes we just need to praise God for who he is, even though we may not be experiencing that characteristic at the moment. We believe it because God says it and believe that he actually is extending that characteristic to us at this very moment, even though we may not be sensing it, so to speak.

So that’s all faith, and we all need to ask God in this Thanksgiving time to give us another level of gratitude this coming year, and that it would express faith in him. And I believe it will nurture our faith. It will stir our faith because it is faith and it’s an expression of faith. So Thanksgiving is a very important time because it is reminding us of a very important part of the Christian life. God bless you, young people. I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and continue to walk by faith, surrendered to God’s will, and again, depending on him, and let’s in that dependence express gratitude to God for things we perhaps at that point can’t yet see. But we know they’re coming because they’re promised of God. God bless.