A Sermon Based Upon Romans 1: 18-25.
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Sunday, August 24th, 2014
“…For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. (Rom 1:21 NAU).
Back in 2009, on YOU TUBE, there was a segment from Conan
O'Brien's show entitled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy," which
featured with guest comedian Louis C.K. In it, Louis talks about how he was on a
plane that offered in flight Wi-Fi access to the Internet, one of the first planes
to do so. But when it broke down in a
few minutes, the man sitting next to him swore in disgust. Louis was amazed, and said to O'Brien,
"How quickly the world owes him something that he didn't know existed 10
seconds ago."
Louis then talked about how many of us describe less-than perfect
airline flights as if they were experiences from a horror film: "It was
the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for 20 minutes! And
then we get on the plane and they made us sit there in the runway for 40
minutes!" Then he said mockingly,
"Oh really. Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you
partake in the miracle of human flight? … Everybody on every plane should be
going, 'O my God, wow!' … You're sitting in a chair in the sky!" And then
he mocks a passenger who, trying to push his seat back, complains, "It
doesn't go back a lot!" (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/novemberweb-only/147-31.0.html?paging=off).
That segment is humorous because we recognize ourselves in it. It’s human nature to take things granted so
quickly, and easily fall out of a state of gratefulness.
LIFE
AS A GIFT
Before we get into today’s Scripture
text, we need to understand something
most of us take for granted most every day, and probably took for granted as
recently as this morning. Your life is
a gift. You did not bring yourself into
the world. Everything about being born
and being alive today is mostly out of your control. Whether your believe in God, or not, your life
is, for the most part, is something you received as a gift to be valued,
treasured, made use of, and appreciated.
Along that same line, your good health,
if you have it, is a gift too. Last week
I walked into the hospital room of a good man, a neighbor from my childhood, who
has been healthy most of his life. He
has been a farmer. He probably owns and
farms more land than any other farmer I know.
Now, at age 65 he has cancer that
has invaded his body. It is
inoperable. He is undergoing radiation,
but it is only to ease his pain and give him a day or two extra. When I walked into his room to see him, I
told him how sorry I was to hear the news about his illness. Do you know what where the first words out of
his mouth? He told me, “The
Lord has blessed me. I can’t
complain. It’s good to see you, Joey,”
he continued. “You are more like your Father every day.” To me that man understood something. In
spite of his illness, in spite of his misfortune, and in spite of his pain, suffering,
and even his obvious death sentence, he had a sense of perspective. He understood that life is a gift.
Do you realize that how many have died
at birth, died too young, died on battle fields, or had illness all their life
long? You shouldn’t take your life or your health
for granted, but most of us do, don’t we?
We mistakenly think that we are entitled to have the life we have, but
there is no guarantee. We mistakenly take for granted the good health
that we have, but there is no promise for tomorrow. Life has been and will always be, for us,
and for everyone, a gift we are not, as Scripture says, able to add a single
inch nor a single moment. And because our life is a gift, we ought to
have a continual attitude of gratitude or spirit of thankfulness.
THE SENSE OF THANKFULNESS
While you do not have to be a Christian
to be thankful, you cannot be a true Christian without being thankful to God
for the gift of your own life.
Do you recall that powerful story the
gospels tell about the 10 lepers who were cured of their leprosy by Jesus. The story goes that 10 were told to go and
to show themselves as cured and to be called “clean” by the priests. Only one out of the ten, returned back to give
praise to God and thank Jesus for being cured.
The Scripture goes on to say that only this one leper, who returned with
thankfulness, was fully made ‘whole’ (KJV) or ‘well’ (NRSV, Luke 17: 11-19).
Thankfulness is part of what it means to
be well adjusted, healthy human being.
We can be human without being thankful, but we are not ‘whole’. Without such a ‘sense’ or practice of thankfulness
there is no such thing as a true Christian faith nor a real Christian
life. Christianity is founded upon a people
who are thankful for the ‘salvation’
(Rom. 1.16) God has made available Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul opens his letter to the
Romans saying, “I thank my God through
Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the
world…..(1.8), and he continues by saying, “I am (in the debt) of both Greeks and barbarians, the wise and
to the foolish….” (1.14) because he
is “eager to preach the good news” (1.15). Like any true Christian, Paul is thankful
for all God has done for him and is
doing through him. Thankfulness is at the center of his life,
work and faith.
We can read about this Christian sense
of thankfulness through the rest of Paul’s letters and throughout the entire
New Testament. The call to Christian
thankfulness is rooted in Israel’s worship as stated repeatedly in the Psalms (especially Psalm 100, 105; 107 and 136), but
it comes to it’s highest crescendo in the Christian response to God’s saving
work in Jesus Christ. As in the letter
to the Ephesians, Paul writes, “Do
not get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord
in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for
everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5.18-20). This encouragement to live lives of
Thanksgiving is encourage in most all of Paul letters, including the in his
letter to the Thessalonians, where Paul adds,
“Give thanks in all
circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ for you. Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thess. 5:
18-19). Perhaps the most beloved encouragement for
living a thankful life comes in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, as Paul writes, “Do
not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
(Phil. 4: 6-7). For the apostle Paul, the attitude of
gratitude, that is, having a continual spirit of thankfulness toward God is not
merely one of the many virtues of the Christian life, but it is the primary characteristic of the
Christian life. As Mark Galli writes: “Paul is a thanksgiving junkie”. For Paul the life a Christian finds its sole
motivation because the Christian is grateful to God and expresses that thanks
through song, worship, prayer and through a life of obedience to doing God’s
will. In other words, the Christian
Life is a life that is lived to give thanks to God in both word and deed.
But what is a life of giving thanks, and
what does that look like? Let me tell
you a true and funny story. When I was a working in Germany among youth
back in the 1990s, most of those youth had been raised communist and atheistic. One of my brightest youth was the son of a
surgeon, named Benjamin. Benjamin developed
a relationship with one of the young Christian boys from America, who had come
to Germany on a mission trip from Georgia.
Benjamin was excited that he had been invited to come to America to
visit his new friend and to experience the so called, “Christian” American
culture first hand. He told me he would
get to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend with his host family and that would
let me know what he experienced when he returned.
Upon returning to Germany, the first week in December, I ask Benjamin how things went. He loved it.
He thought the family he visited was wonderful and he enjoyed America very
much. But he did have one question for
me. He wondered why that family called it
Thanks GIVING, when all they did on that day was get up, hang around house, eat
a Turkey Dinner, and watch American Football on Television. They
didn’t even go to church, he said. How
was that an act of “giving” thanks? It took
me a moment to think of some kind of ‘good’ answer.
I think Benjamin was right to question
why we call it Thanksgiving, when it’s much more like “Turkey Day”? But in all fairness to that family, or the
way we ourselves might spend our own ‘thanksgiving’, I told Benjamin that giving thanks is not
merely an activity for one day a year, as much as it should be the attitude and
perspective we take each and every day of our lives. As
Christians, we are to live our lives each day, in the spirit of thankfulness. Paul told the Colossians: “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. (Col 3:17 NRS).
In other words, we are to measure our thankfulness, not simply
on what we do one day a year on “Thanksgiving”, but we are to measure our
thankfulness in how we live our lives each day, and how we should do ‘everything’ we do ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus….”
Giving thanks is about the
perspective of our whole lives.
Thanksgiving ought to be the motivation for being a Christian---that is,
being a follower of Jesus Christ. Our
whole posture of life should be ‘thanks’, because both our life and our
salvation is a ‘gift’ of God’s grace; not something we could ever do for
ourselves.
THE FUTILITY OF UNGRATEFULNESS
But of course, in our text today, Paul reminds us that some people, possibly
even many people, (too many) don’t see life this way. What happens to a world that does not worship
or ‘give thanks’ to God and becomes so ungrateful that it feels nothing but
entitlement and greed? Do you really
want to know? Paul writes in our text
today: “….for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to
him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were
darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; (Rom 1:21-22 NRS).
This is certainly not a
pretty picture, but it gets worse. Ungrateful people end up useless in their
thinking and clueless in their minds, so that they live dark, foolish
lives. This happens because, because
they are ungrateful, they follow the ‘lusts
of their hearts’, ‘degrading their bodies’, and they end up “worshipping and serving the creature rather than their Creator….” And it even gets worse than this, as Paul
says, “Women and Men commit shameless acts” because they are consumed
with ‘un-natural passion’ so that as
a result, “God gives them up to a debased (depraved) mind that does ‘things
that should not be done’.
Can you follow Paul’s
logic? All of this downward spiral of wickedness, the darkening of the mind, the degrading
of the body and debasing passions, is all because ‘though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to
him….” (1.21). Everything Paul goes on to list and categorize
as ‘wicked’ and ‘evil’---the foolish, the faithless, the heartless, and the
ruthless (1.31); it all stems from an ungrateful and unappreciative heart.
Can you remember the time when you left
your doors unlocked and had never imagined anything like a home invasion? Can you remember the time when children
could play in the streets, walk to school, even talk to a stranger and parents
would never worry about their child being abducted? Can you recall a time when families were
close together and came together often to share stories of their life and bear
each other’s burdens? Can you recall a
time when almost everyone came to church, the sanctuaries were full and the
Sunday School classes and worship were filled with excitement? Even today, it should be clear to us, that when
the culture fails to ‘honor God as God’ or ‘give thanks’ to him, that we become
‘foolish’ and ‘senseless’ and the greatest problem, is that we don’t even
realize just how far and how quick we have fallen.
A few years ago, a pastor friend and
myself, used to design Bible Studies around some of the Old Andy Griffith TV
shows. You could take those shows, and
the moral values they taught, and relate them to good, practical, biblical
morality. When I was doing research, I
read how the Andy Griffith Show was not based on the morals of the 1950’s, when
the Show was Broadcasted, but in reality the values of the show went further
back, to the 1920’s and 30’s, a times that was already lost, and had already
become nostalgic for its viewers. My
point is this: It doesn’t take long for
a culture to decline when it starts exchanging ‘its worship of the Creator for worshipping the creature and the
creation.’ Do you see how this
could happen, and how dark, degrading and debased the world can become when
life becomes more about entitlements than obligations, about privileges than
obedience, and about rights than righteousness?
The way to stop the downward spiral
begins with reminding ourselves and our children to simply say ‘thanks’. Thankfulness is how you stop the decay of a
culture. You start by saying thanks to
God by worshipping him. You start by thinking
pure thoughts and respecting your body.
You start by appreciating the body you have, the person you are, the
gender you are, and the way you are created.
You start by getting rid of every kind of wickedness from your life, like
coveting, envy, slander, selfish pride and rebellion. And you start by trying to be sensible, to be
faithful, caring and kind. This is
where you start, but this is not where you end.
The best way
to intercept the problems of our culture, or of any culture for that matter, is
for a group of people to begin to not just ‘give’ thanks, but to begin to ‘live’
their thanks. I like the analogy Mark Galli gave when he
wrote: “Most
of us remember what it was like as children to look under the Christmas tree,
and see our first bicycle—shiny, new, sparkling with possibilities. We were so
excited we didn't even want to unwrap our other gifts. We rushed up to our
parents and said, "Can I go ride it now? Can I? Please, please?" Even
it was 10 below, and snow was piled on the streets—"Can I go ride it now,
Can I? Can I?"
Sometimes we Christians get the bicycle of grace under
the Christmas tree of the Cross, and we too marvel at how it shines and
sparkles. But rather than jump on it and enjoy the ride of new life, we
sometimes just marvel at it and take pictures of it. We write books about this
bicycle, how it's mean and wild, and great and terrible, and yet so beautiful!
We create special services and conferences to discuss its wonders! But God gave
us the bicycle with a note saying, "Enjoy; there's more where this came from."
Or it's like some of us rush up to our parents and
thank them for the bicycle and then say, "What can I do to thank you for
this wonderful gift?" Can I do the dishes every day for a month? Can I
take out the garbage? Can I tithe back my allowance to you? Can I do something
righteous, moral, good, and religious to show that I'm thankful?" When all
the time the parents are saying, "No, the way to be thankful is to get on
the bike and enjoy it!" (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/novemberweb-only/147-31.0.html?paging=off).
The
gift of life in Christ is a grace which we are called to live and enjoy
24/7/365 days a year. Thankgiving is not
merely a matter of verbally saying thanks to God, but of thanks-living---living
and breathing gratefulness to God in how we live our faith and our thanks. As the Scripture says, “We love because
Christ first loved us.” And as Christians,
followers of Jesus, we are to live in a spirit of gratefulness because, “there's
so much more where that came from.”
Amen.
No comments :
Post a Comment