Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

As I was getting everything ready for this morning I was thinking about a story Dad told us about one of the Continuing Education classes he taught for schoolteachers.

(In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, schoolteachers are required to satisfy a certain number of Continuing Education requirements every five years, and Dad taught courses through Performance Learning Systems to help teachers get their Act 48 requirements completed—lifelong learning is an essential part of being a teacher.)

In every class he taught, he would have a mix of teachers in different grades, and sometimes they would rib each other about what “grade” each other was in.

At one point everyone was joking about the kindergarten teacher in the room, who responded, “Hey—I have the most important job in all of education!

I teach all of the things that you need the kids to know in order to teach at your level!

When you tell your class to ‘Put your chairs in a circle’, who do you think taught them what a circle was?!?”

There is no way to progress in education until you’ve mastered the basics!

I want to suggest to you this morning that as Christians, we are also engaged in lifelong learning, aren’t we?

We are called to

2 Peter 3:18 (ESV)

18 ...grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

To be a Christian is to continually seek to grow in grace and knowledge of our Savior—not only to grow more like Him in grace, but to continue learning about Him.

And the way Peter ties these two things together—grow in grace and knowledge—indicates that our knowledge of Jesus must not just stay “in our heads”—all of our Christian sentences in the right order.

Our lifelong learning about Christ is to impact the way we live our lives as Christians—that the knowledge of Jesus we gain in our minds will translate to the grace of Jesus in the way we live our lives.

And since next week is Thanksgiving, I thought it would be appropriate to look specifically at how we are to grow in the grace of gratitude as Christians.

What I want to show you from the Scriptures this morning is that

Learning to grow in gratitude is a LIFELONG PURSUIT of the Christian

When you read our text this morning, you can’t escape how much importance the Apostle Paul put on living in gratitude:

Colossians 3:15–17 (ESV)

15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.

And be thankful.

16 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. 17 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.

Three times in the space of three verses, Paul exhorts his readers to cultivate thankfulness—gratitude—in their lives.

Now, one of the reasons that I believe gratitude is so important in the life of a Christian is because ingratitude is one of the chief marks of those who reject God and deny His existence.

Romans 1:21 says

Romans 1:21 (ESV)

21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

So if ingratitude is a characteristic of those who deny God, then gratitude must be the hallmark of those who love God.

Lord willing, we will examine more of the power of gratitude in the battles we face in our current day, but for today I want us to examine the ways that we are to grow in the grace of gratitude as Christians.

And in keeping with the theme of our opening illustration, I want to talk about our lifelong pursuit of gratitude (as our sermon title suggests) in terms of a curriculum of gratitude.

And like any curriculum, you always start off with the basics.

The “ABC’s” of gratitude, the kindergarten of gratitude, if you will, takes place in relationship to

I. The THINGS God gives us (Deuteronomy 8:7-10)

Just like that kindergarten teacher that enables the high school teachers to instruct their students to put their chairs in a circle, so the way we thank God about our material blessings is the first step—the “grammar school”, if you will, of our lifelong learning in pursuit of gratitude.

In Deuteronomy, Moses made it clear that when God brought His people into the physical blessings of the Promised Land, that they were to thank Him:

Deuteronomy 8:7–10 (ESV)

7 For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, 8 a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9 a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper.

10 And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless (i.e., thank) the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.

The very foundation of gratitude—the “ABC’s” of this spiritual discipline—consists of

RECOGNIZING your DEPENDENCE on God (Matthew 6:11; Philippians 4:6-7)

The very essence of being thankful means that there is someone to thank!

Gratitude acknowledges that you are a contingent being—you depend on someone else for your existence.

This is the pattern that Jesus lays out for us in the Lord’s Prayer, isn’t it?

In Matthew 6:11, Jesus teaches us to pray

Matthew 6:11 (ESV)

11 Give us this day our daily bread,

By teaching us that we need to ask God for our daily needs every day, Jesus is reminding us that we totally depend on Him—and dependence on Him is the first step towards gratitude towards Him for supplying our needs!

When you start off by recognizing that you are totally dependent on God for everything in your life—for your food, your shelter, your health, your safety, your income, your vehicle, your clothing, your medicine, your possessions, all of it—you are on your way to mastering the “ABC’s”—the kindergarten, if you will, of gratitude.

The foundation of gratitude is recognizing your dependence on God, and the next step in the kindergarten of gratitude is

EXPRESSING your THANKS to God (John 6:11; Luke 22:19)

Jesus gives us the pattern as well to thank God for His blessings: In John 6, when He fed the five thousand with the loaves and fishes, we read

John 6:11 (ESV)

11 Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.

So also the fish, as much as they wanted.

And on the night He was betrayed, we read about Him instituting the meal we call communion or The Lord’s Supper:

Luke 22:19 (ESV)

19 And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.”

This is why Christians always say “grace” over our meals—because Jesus taught us to!

We thank God for our food because we believe that if it hadn’t been for Him, we wouldn’t have any!

We thank Him for our food because He is gracious and kind—not just for the nutrition that our meals provide us, but also for the delight that we take in eating!

It’s true that “saying grace” before our meals can become kind of automatic, a rote repetition that can come perilously close to being emptied of meaning.

But what if some time, in the middle of the meal, someone were to say, “You know, this is such a particularly delicious supper, let’s stop and thank God again for giving it to us!”—that would say a whole lot about our gratitude and dependence on God, wouldn’t it?

The absolute basics of the curriculum of gratitude is learning to say thank you for the things God has given us.

Just as we teach our kids to say “Thank You” for the good things they receive from others, so Jesus teaches us the “ABC’s”, the “kindergarten” of gratitude by teaching us to remember our dependence on Him, and teaching us to develop the habit of thanking God at every opportunity for the material blessings He showers on us every day.

Learning to grow in gratitude is the lifelong pursuit of the Christian—and once you get out of kindergarten and grammar school, the next step in your curriculum is high school.

And in our curriculum of gratitude, the “high school” level of thankfulness is found in the way we show gratitude for

II.

The PEOPLE God gives us (1 Corinthians 1:4-7)

One of the homeschool co-ops that our family belongs to takes its organization from the old classical education model—grammar, logic and rhetoric (some of you may have grown up referring to elementary school as “grammar school”—the place where you learn the “elements” of your education).

So the basic building blocks of gratitude—the “kindergarten” of learning to be grateful for the things in our lives—is the way we prepare for the logic of gratitude.

Logic is the step of putting the building blocks together in the right way, learning how to handle them so they don’t fall down, so they go where you want them to.

For our curriculum of gratitude, we take the next step from learning how to be grateful for things to learning how to be grateful for people.

If saying grace before a meal God has given you is the “kindergarten” of gratitude, the “high school” of gratitude is being grateful for the people God has given you!

The Apostle Paul’s letters show us how important it is to be grateful for the people in your life.

At the beginning of his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes

1 Corinthians 1:4–7 (ESV)

4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, 5 that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge— 6 even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you— 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ,

As messed-up as the church in Corinth was, Paul did not neglect expressing his gratitude to God for his brothers and sisters in Christ there (even when they were a pain in the neck!)

Throughout his letters, Paul demonstrates this same habit of gratitude for the people in his life:

Philippians 1:3 (ESV)

3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,

Colossians 1:3 (ESV)

3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you,

1 Thessalonians 1:2 (ESV)

2 We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers,

2 Thessalonians 1:3 (ESV)

3 We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.

2 Timothy 1:3 (ESV)

3 I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.

Philippians 1:4 (ESV)

4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy,

I think there are two principles we can draw out of Paul’s example of gratitude for the blessings of fellowship with other believers.

First,

Don’t take for GRANTED people who BLESS you (Romans 16:3-4)

At the end of the book of Romans, Paul is greeting and thanking a whole list of people, among whom are

Romans 16:3–4 (ESV)

3 ...Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, 4 who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well.

Here’s what this shows you—be thankful to the people who bless you!