Life's too short to be... Ungrateful

Message Outline: Life's too Short to Be... Ungrateful

26 November 2006 - Jacob's Well - Greg Meyer

 

"Give thanks in all circumstances: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." 1 Thessalonians 5.18

Being grateful isn’t just being _____________,

it builds ________________________.

 

The Story of Jesus and the 10 Lepers

Luke 17.11-19

 

 

GRATEFUL FOR THE GOOD IN LIFE.

 

Why did Jesus heal the 10? _______________

 

 

How many thanked Jesus? _______________

 

 

How many kept the gift? _______________

 

 

This tells us God is serious about__________.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. Ephesians 2.8

 

 

 

What was difference between those who didn’t return to thank, and the one who did?

 

The one who gave thanks grew in ____________________ with the giver!

 

 

Relationships ______________ us.

 

For God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey him and the power to do what pleases him. Philippians 2.13 NLT

 

 

 

Sharkey’s VIP – Very Important Point!

“Don’t forget, always give thanks!”

 

 

GRATEFUL FOR THE BAD IN LIFE?

God doesn’t expect you to _______________.

 

 

God shares our _______________________.

 

 

“Give thanks IN all circumstances;

for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thessalonians 5.18

Being grateful changes what matters most.

 

Then Jesus said to the one leper, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well." Luke 17.19

 

 

MESSAGE TEXT - Life’s too short to be… Ungrateful

26 November 2006 - Jacob's Well – Greg Meyer

 

You get one shot at life. You can’t relive or replay anything. When a minute, day, year or decade is over… it’s over! Life is a treasure and I bet that just like me, you want yours to count. But how do you do that? Make the biggest flash in the pan? End up with the most money, the biggest house or the most toys? I don’t think so, but I do think most people want their life to count, they just never figure out how to do it.

 

Sometimes we follow our instincts, our impulses. But that means letting emotions like anger, resentment, fear and insecurity decide what we do, and when they are in charge they burn bridges and back us into corners we don’t want to be in.

 

Other times we let society set our direction. But guess what? Society doesn’t care about you, only what helps it. And society’s path usually looks like the path of power, prestige and wealth. Attractive, yes. But of all the bedsides I’ve had the privilege to be at in the last days of someone’s life I’ve never heard one person talk about those things.

 

There is a third choice. It isn’t something we do naturally, or that we can figure out ourselves. It is bigger and better than that. Something that might not seem to make a lot of sense right off. Something that would take a leap of faith to actually do. But it is the only one that has us spending our lives on things worthy of us. It’s the way God proposes.

 

We’ve been talking about all the things that life is too short to be spending our lives on. Caribou Coffee says “Life is short. Stay awake for it!” And they are right. But what you stay awake for makes a lot of difference. If it is for being selfish, negative, untruthful or envious, you would have been better off staying asleep. Likewise ungrateful. That’s what we are talking about today.

 

You see being grateful isn’t just being POLITE, it builds COMMUNITY.

Here is what happens when we are ungrateful. Rather than acknowledging that someone else contributed something to me that I needed, I dismiss it. “Why should I thank someone for helping me, wasn’t it her job?” Or “I would have come up with that myself just fine if I needed to. Why should I thank him?” We miss the fact that we are a team and that is how we need to live, and we make ourselves islands.

Being ungrateful says, “I’m responsible for all I am and have.”

Being grateful says, “I’m in relationship.”

 

We were made for relationships.

 

But don’t take my word for it. There is a story from Jesus’ life that tells this best. Heidi, our H₂O leader, that’s our children’s ministry, is here she’ll tell us this story.

THE STORY OF THE 10 LEPERS – Luke 17.11-19.

¹¹ On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. ¹² As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, ¹³ they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" ¹⁴ When he saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were made clean. ¹⁵ Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. ¹⁶ He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. ¹⁷ Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? ¹⁸ Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" ¹⁹ Then he said to him, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well."

 

Now it is easy to hear this story and just think it is saying that we should be thankful more often. And it certainly does say that, but it says a lot more. There are a few very important twists in this story.

 

On your outline you’ll find a few questions. In your groups that you talked in during Sara’s broadcast from the Recycle Center take a look at the 3 questions under the title, “Grateful for the good in life.” Answer them together, they are easy. And then a question that isn’t there, but it’ll be up on the screen, that I want you to wrestle with a bit is “How come?” Why did they all get to keep the gift of Jesus’ healing even if they didn’t come back to thank him? And, if you don’t have to give thanks to keep the gift, why bother? Go ahead and talk, and I’ll bring you back in a couple of minutes.

 

<<DISCUSSION: Why did they all get to keep the gift of Jesus’ healing even if they didn’t come back to thank him? And, if you don’t have to give thanks to keep the gift, why bother?

 

Quick review.

Why did Jesus heal the 10? They asked him to and Jesus cared enough to want to help them. Pretty simple.

How many thanked Jesus? Real easy. 1!

How many kept the gift? All 10. Gratitude didn’t seem to be a requirement.

Now the tough question. Why did they all get to keep the gift? My sense of justice is violated. I want the ungrateful lepers to wake up the next day to discover that their disease had returned. But that’s not what happened. But it isn’t what God does. Jesus wants to surprise us here. Jesus wants to grab our attention and make us think, “Gee, this isn’t the way the world I know works.”

 

What’s the message? This tells us that God is serious about GRACE.

 

“Grace,” what is it? Grace is what we call it when we get what we don’t deserve. We are products of grace. We have a crazy God. God has a huge problem with proportion and common sense. And boy, are we lucky! Extravagant and generous are good words for God’s habits.

 

That’s why all 10 got to keep the gift, Jesus didn’t do it to be thanked. He didn’t do it to get them to be or behave any certain way. It may sound trite, but Jesus loved them!

In Ephesians 2 Paul talks about it this way.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. Ephesians 2.8

 

Get it? Paul is as redundant as he can be to get the point across. “Grace,” “not your own doing,” and just in case you missed it, “the gift of God.” Can it get much clearer? You don’t deserve it, you won’t deserve it, you can’t deserve it. You can be grateful though. And while that gratitude doesn’t change God’s mind about anything, it does change you. It makes you remember that you need God.

 

That’s why give thanks, even when it isn’t required to get the gift. You see, there was something different about the one ex-leper.

 

The one who gave thanks grew in RELATIONSHIP with the giver!

 

If we just get the goodies and run, we have the goodies. When we get the goodies and get to know the giver we have open ourselves to a lot more. When I make a lunch for one of my kids in the morning – not that I do, and this doesn’t mean I’m making your lunch tomorrow, Natalie and Jordan, okay, this is totally theoretical. But if I were to make their lunch and they run out the door with it, that’s fine. They get fed and that is what it was all about. But if they stop, look me in the eyes and say, “Thanks Dad,” something happens. We realize our connectedness. And somewhere in the midst of it all we know each other a little better and trust each other a little more. Our future together is different.

 

That’s the next point, at the top of the 2^nd column of your outline. Relationships MOLD us. That’s what God is up to. God, and only God, knows what you life could be like, and God wants to help you become that, so God uses the relationship that you can develop through thanksgiving to do that.

In Philippians 2.13 we read,

For God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey him and the power to do what pleases him. Philippians 2.13 NLT

God wants to mold your life that way. It is for your good. For your enjoyment. For your sense of meaning and fulfillment. For the good of the whole world. And God knows that it will happen better when you are grateful.

Take a look at the verse at the top of your outline,

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

But that is a little troublesome, isn’t it? Being thankful for gifts is one thing. But for everything? That’s not so easy. Several of you have lost parents in the past few weeks. One just Friday. Others of you are struggling with employment, broken marriages, you name it. That is forgetting about global warming and Iraq. Give thanks for that too? Come on.

I’m not going to explain this whole problem of God and the presence of evil and suffering – as if I could… But two important things need to be said here.

The first is that God doesn’t expect you to PRETEND. Pretend that bad things aren’t really bad things. That somehow they are really good things in disguise. One of the reasons you may not have connected with a church before is that you assumed that Christians are just supposed to believe that bad things don’t really happen; that they are just good things in disguise. And you couldn’t accept that. It isn’t true. God isn’t pretending that all bad things are somehow really good, and you don’t have to either.

That takes us to the second. God shares our SADNESS. This world not only isn’t everything you want it to be, it isn’t everything God wants it to be. Bad things are bad things, and they hurt the heart of God just like they hurt our hearts.

Notice something about that phrase, “Give thanks in all circumstances.” It doesn’t say, “Give thanks FOR all circumstances,” but “IN all circumstances.” I know it is already in caps, but circle the word, “IN.” That little preposition makes an enormous difference. God knows that there is a lot that we cannot be thankful FOR. But God says that there is nothing IN which we cannot find something to give thanks.

 

What the Bible is telling us is that while God may not protect us from everything bad happening, God doesn’t let it have the last word. It may not make it worth what we suffered, it may not justify it, but the last word will be life. And there is no death or sign of it that God will not breath some life into. There is no situation in which you will not find something to give thanks for, there is no situation in which you will not find reason to trust God even more than you did before. Promise!

 

In the story of the 10 lepers Jesus gives us a hint of this. Read the last verse with me,

Then Jesus said to the one leper, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” Luke 17.19.

What does Jesus mean, “his faith has made him well?” I didn’t know we were even talking about faith… I thought this was about gratitude. And he didn’t show any faith that made him get healed, neither did the others. They just asked.

Jesus isn’t talking about healing his leprosy. He has already moved to something bigger and more important. He is talking about the decay of his heart, not of his flesh. Jesus is saying that there is a bigger healing that needs to take place. This is true about you and me too. You are stuck on the condition of your life, because it hurts. And God cares about that and wants to help. But God is concerned with something that is even bigger and more important in your life. Something, that when it is well, can fill you with joy and meaning even when things on the outside of your life are hurting.

And God wants to help you open up to God through your gratefulness.

 

What has God given you? Health? Home? Family? Skills? Education? Friends? Money?

Why? If you don’t know… ask! Run back to God before you run out into the world with your abundance. Fall down on your knees, thank God, and ask God.

 

Would you pray this prayer with me.

God, I know you didn’t give this to me as a reward or because I am such a great person. I know you didn’t stand by me through the worst of what life has thrown at me for nothing. You gave this to me because you love me. Now let me see how I can use this gift so that it doesn’t just fill up my life, but fulfills my purpose, and gives glory to you! Amen.