Turning Point

David Michael Jeremiah: When you look back on your life, are you consumed with bitterness from a painful past? Or with thankfulness that God brought you through it? Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah explores the powerful connection between memory and thankfulness as shown in Psalm 92. With tools to help you develop an attitude of gratitude, here's David to introduce "So Why Should I be Thankful?"

David Jeremiah: Thank you for joining us today for the Thursday edition of Turning Point. One of the things you will discover as you read the New Testament is this: one of the most obvious results of being filled with the Spirit of God is gratitude. Giving thanks always for all things.

We think of a lot of things that people point to as to how you can know if you're filled with the Spirit. Here's one thing I know for sure because it's in the Bible more than once. When you're filled with the Spirit of God, you develop a gratitude in your heart, a thankful spirit.

It's awful hard to be grateful and not be the other things that the Bible tells us we should be when the Spirit of God is filling us. Today, we're going to talk about what it means to be thankful and how important it is, and why you should be thankful even sometimes when you don't feel like it.

We'll get to it in just a moment. First, I want you to have this wonderful book available during the month of May. It's *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*, and it will fill you with joy and happiness as you have a chance to read it. It's got all kinds of good truth in it, and I'd love for you to have it.

It's beautifully designed, and it's just a really beautiful book with beautiful truth. I hope you'll take advantage of the opportunity. Here's how you get your copy of this 236-page hardback book: send a gift of any size during the remaining days in the month of May.

When you do, ask for a copy of the book on Psalms and it'll be on its way to you. You can add it to your library in just a few days. Most of all, you can read it and be blessed and encouraged. Once again, the book is called *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. It's the May resource here on Turning Point, available to anyone for a gift of any size.

Well, that's something to be thankful for. Let's see what else we should be thankful for as we open our Bibles together today to the 92nd Psalm. Charles Dickens wrote a gripping tale called *The Haunted Man*. In his writing, he tells of a chemist who sat before the fire troubled with unhappy memories. As he sat there in dismal reflection, a phantom appeared and offered the haunted man the opportunity to have his memory destroyed.

He immediately closed with the offer and henceforth was a man not only without a memory, but a man who had the power to strip other men of their memories as well. But according to Dickens' story, the gift was a big disappointment. So great was the misery that he asked the phantom to come back, and the tale comes to a conclusion with the man's grateful and earnest prayer: "Oh, God, keep my memory green." Keep my memory green.

Memory is a word which is both bitter and sweet. It is a strong argument for the soul and for life and for life hereafter. Someone has said that memory is the well-stored library of the mind. Memory makes the joys of childhood live again. Memory in the night makes past days appear all over again. Memory restores the blessedness that once we knew when we saw the Lord.

And I love this definition the best: memory is the angel with the backward look. Memory is the key to gratitude. There is a disease that we treat in our culture today that goes by the name amnesia. It is an interesting word which means actually "a" (without) and "mnesia" (mind, without memory). Literally, it means without any memory.

While it is true that sometimes there are things we wish we could forget, it is also true that it would be very difficult for us to be grateful people if we could not remember, if we could not reflect on what God has done for us. And the Psalms are filled with the exhortation for each of us to take that assignment seriously.

Here in Psalm 92, we are instructed that it is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord, and to sing praises to Your name, O Most High, and to declare Your lovingkindness in the morning and Your faithfulness every night, on an instrument of ten strings, on the lute, and on the harp with harmonious sound. For You, Lord, have made me glad through Your work, and I will triumph in the work of Your hands.

The Psalmist said, "It is a good thing. It is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord." I'd like to reflect with you in three directions. I'd like to ask why it is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord. Why should I be thankful? What will it do, and what should I expect from it? First of all, I'd like for you to note with me that thanksgiving and a thankful heart cause us to look upward.

In the Word of God, we are constantly admonished to give thanks, and the Word of God usually tells us in the same paragraph of instruction where our thanksgiving is to be addressed. Here in the Psalm which we have opened to, it says, "It is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord, and to sing praises to Your name, O Most High. For You, Lord," says verse four, "have made me glad through Your work. I will triumph in the work of Your hands."

Verse five: "O Lord, how great are Your works! Your thoughts are very deep." And verse eight: "But You, Lord, You, Lord, are on high forevermore." The Psalm is an instruction to us that thanksgiving first of all takes our eyes off of the things that are around us and addresses them upward. Thanksgiving really is that which we offer back to God for what He in turn has given to us, and it is always an upward look.

Psalm 107 says, "Oh, that men would praise the Lord for His goodness and for His wonderful works to the children of men! And let them sacrifice the sacrifice of thanksgiving and declare His works with rejoicing." There have been many who have expressed a spirit of gratitude, and we have read about them both in the tales that have been written about our culture here in America and especially in England and many of the great historical writings.

And there are many men in the scripture about whom we read that they were grateful, but there is one man who stands out from all the rest, and that man is the Apostle Paul. I am constantly amazed as I read the letters of the New Testament, which are the focus of our study as New Testament believers, that Paul was a man who was inoculated with a great spirit of gratitude.

And I'm reminded as I say that he was also the man who suffered greatly, who went through many difficult things in his life, and yet at the same time was a man who was filled with gratitude. He constantly focused his attention upon God. He wrote to the Ephesians: "Giving thanks always for all things unto God."

He wrote to the Colossians: "And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him." He wrote to the Thessalonians: "We give thanks to God always for you." He wrote to young Timothy: "I thank Jesus Christ our Lord, who enabled me." He wrote to Philemon: "I thank my God, making mention of thee always in my prayers."

The Psalmist here in Psalm 92 directs our attention first of all upward. And I know that seems rather mundane, and perhaps you wonder why we would even mention such a thing. Does it not normally go with the territory that when you come to church, they tell you to think about God? I understand that the very history of the steeple that is seen in most churches is that it points to God.

And the picture is that the closer one gets to God, the smaller he sees himself to be. So thanksgiving is obviously God-directed. But isn't it interesting how easily we forget that? We thank each other, we spread thanksgiving and the spirit of gratitude throughout our home, and we never really stop to reflect upon the fact that thanksgiving first of all is an upward calling.

It's a gravitational pull in reverse, bringing our praises upward to God. Someone has given us a litany of the things for which we ought to address thanksgiving to God: for His sovereign control over our circumstances, for His gentle compassion in our sorrows, for His consistent faithfulness through our highs and our lows, for His holy character in spite of our sinfulness.

For His strong "no" when we needed to hear it, for His surprising "yes" when we had the lack of faith to believe it, for His wise wait when we were impatient and rash, for His commitment to us when we wandered away, for His understanding of us when we were confused, for His Word that gives us direction, and for His love that holds us close. And that's just a smattering of reasons why we should be thankful to God.

I have a little prayer journal that I keep, and I have a section in it for thanksgiving. I wasn't sure exactly how to write my thanksgivings. At first, I thought I would just write down the things that I was thankful for, and then I thought, no, that's not a good habit to get into. And so I began to write out, "Thank You, God, for this. Thank You, God, for this." And there are whole pages in that little journal filled with "Thank You, Gods."

Because first and foremost in our spirit of gratitude is the upward look. He is the one who is the author of every good gift that we have. But secondly, it is good to give thanks not only because it calls us to look up, but it is good to give thanks because it causes us to look around. Paul was not only grateful to God in all of his writings, but he was a man who was into relationships.

He wasn't the loner he's often painted to be. In fact, if you read his letters, he can't close out a letter without giving the names of all the people who are with him and all the people that he knows who are at the point of destination of the letter. He talks about them with fondness and he mentions their names and he usually says something about them. And if you read the letters carefully, you will see that he is always giving thanks to God for people, for friends, and for relatives and for people who have come alongside him to encourage him.

First Timothy 2:1, he says, "I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and the giving of thanks be made for all men." Paul says we're to give thanks to God for our friends and for our loved ones. If you read through his epistles, you will see him doing that often. Acts 28:15 says, "And from there, when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us: whom when Paul saw, he thanked God and took courage."

Every time Paul was next to somebody who God sent to minister to him, he was filled with gratitude. Romans chapter 6, he writes, "But God be thanked, that whereas you were servants of sin, you have obeyed from the heart." He thanks God for the people who respond to the ministry. If you go through all of his letters, I don't think you'll find one that is not salted with the spirit of gratitude for relationships.

I don't think you can undersell the importance of friendship. If you have someone you're close to, somebody who's ministering to you, somebody who's put their arm around you on occasion, someone who may cry and laugh with you, the relationship as you look around is a very important thing for which to give thanks. If you read the epistles, you will see that Paul had that kind of an incredible fondness for the people who ministered to him.

I hear him saying in Second Timothy to his friends, "I wish I could be with you. I'm sad that you can't be here. Bring my coat when you come, and especially bring my books." You get the picture as you read the letter that Paul wrote that he was very involved in relationships. When you look around, you can't help but be thankful for relationships, but could I add one other thing? You need to be thankful for circumstances too.

Would you please look back with me for a moment at Psalm 92 and notice how he addresses the subject of gratitude. He says, verse two, we are to "declare Your lovingkindness in the morning and Your faithfulness every night." He's chosen the words carefully, at least if they're any mirror of my experience. When I wake up in the morning, I feel the sense of God's presence in my life and so grateful for the night of rest, if indeed it has been such a night, and refreshed for the new day and just the sense of God's presence.

There's a Hebrew word, it's the word *hesed*, and it's the word translated lovingkindness. It's a rich, rich word that just describes the goodness and the graciousness of God. In the morning, the Psalmist is overwhelmed with God's *hesed*, His lovingkindness. But at night, it's a different word; it's His faithfulness. Who of us have not stood on the edge of a day and looking back over the day seen the many places where we could have gotten off the track?

The many places where if God had not been good to us, we could have truly walked astray, and we thank Him that He's been faithful to us. But notice, this is every day. This is day in and day out. It is God's goodness to us morning and night. And there's another place where it talks about praising and thanking God at midnight and at noontime, in all of our lives, day in and day out, we're to have a spirit of gratitude regardless of the circumstances.

It's hard to do that sometimes. Did you know the reason Thanksgiving Day is a time for us to feast is because of the courage of one man who wanted to turn adversity around into something positive? A long drought had produced the failure of crops and a solemn assembly was called for a day of fasting and prayer. And one after another, the different ones related the hardships of the new life and lamented the destructive drought and what it had done.

And finally, an old farmer got up and he started to speak freely of how they had provoked heaven with their complaints. And he reviewed the mercies they had already enjoyed, and he reminded them that they had not been as grateful as they should have been. And he suggested, in fact, he made a motion that instead of appointing a day for fasting, they should appoint a day for feasting. And this was done, and it is claimed that our Thanksgiving Day is a continuation of that. It almost was a fast and it turned out to be a feast.

Then I want to suggest to you thirdly and finally that thanksgiving causes us to look within. It causes us to look inwardly. Can you look back and chart anything that God has done in your life? Has He grown you up in any way? Has He worked you over in any way? Has He strengthened you at the core of who you are? Can you look back and say, "Boy, it hasn't been a great year for me, but I have learned so much about God during this year"?

One writer reflects the list of inward praises by saying, "Lord, thank You for the gift of good health. Thank You for eyes that see the beauty of Your creation, for ears that receive the world of sound surrounding us. Thank You for the special stimulation of taste and touch, for hands to work with and legs to walk with, for a mind that is curious and creative and competent. For memories of past pleasures, for heartaches that force me to rearrange my priorities, for broken dreams and lingering afflictions that humbled me.

For the courage to tell the truth when it really hurt, for the determination to finish a demanding task, for a sense of humor that brought healing and hope, and for the sheer delight of knowing and walking with You through another year." You know what I'm so grateful today that I'm standing behind this place we call the pulpit and still have the privilege of ministry, and still have the opportunity to open the Book of God with you every week, and still have the opportunity to share His truth and to sing His praises and to help lead in worship?

And all of that is because of what God is doing and has done in my heart. When I look inward, I see the traces of the hand of God in my life. What an incredible thing to be able to observe. I am not the same man that I was. And though I'm not what I want to be and not what I ought to be, thank God I'm not what I was. Amen? Do you ever stop to look inward and say, "God, thank You for what You've done in my life"?

First we look up, and then we look around, and then we look in, and we're grateful. Lewis Smedes is one of my favorite writers. He wrote an interesting little book—it's kind of a book that was programmed for the secular market—called *A Pretty Good Person*. And what he tried to do in this book was to sort of define: if you ran into somebody and you said, "Boy, that guy's a pretty good person," what would he be like?

What kind of a person is a pretty good person? And he has several things he talks about, courage and grit and all of this sort of thing, but right up front, interestingly enough, he talks about the fact that a pretty good person is a person with gratitude. And he tells a story about something that happened in his life, and I want you to listen carefully because I found myself caught up in the spirit of this story and feeling like I had been there a couple of times myself.

He said his wife Doris huffed back into our apartment on a frightfully cold December morning and found me collapsed on the tiled kitchen floor of our apartment. My face, she told me later, was a dirty gray, eyes open but looking nowhere, conveying to her a sure sense of death. She kept her head, checked my pulse, and listened for something breathing. When she was satisfied that I had enough breath in me to last a few minutes, she rushed out to call an ambulance.

The driver hooked me up to their oxygen tank, loaded us both aboard, skidded us down a country road into the trauma center of the hospital that serves the sturdy people of St. Cloud, Minnesota. And then he reflects. We had pushed each other out of bed early that morning, even though it was 30 degrees below zero, because we were planning to pack our things to leave Minnesota that day and get moving back to our house in Sierra Madre, California.

Doris and I had been living in Saint John's University, a stone's throw from St. Cloud, for a few months and were primed for taking off that next day for California. "I had slept poorly," wrote Lewis. "Bothered by dull aches in my right calf during the night, and I got up from bed with a feeling of unease about myself. But it being traveling day, I tried to ignore it. We pulled some clothes over our thermal knit underwear, ate bowls of hot oatmeal, drank cups of black coffee, tuned a public radio for late reports on road conditions to the south of us where it had been snowing heavily for several days.

My unsteadiness did not go away, so I decided to curl up on the couch for a few minutes before I got serious about packing. Doris told me that she was going out to get some traveling suggestions from her sister, but actually, with her intuition for things that might be going wrong, she went to ask for the name of a doctor that she might call in case I was really as sick as she was afraid I was. Having gotten the name of the doctor, she walked back into the kitchen and found me lying near the telephone that had called me off the couch, and I was looking quite dead.

My lungs, it turned out," said Lewis Smedes, "had been spattered by a buckshot of blood clots, and for a couple of days at the hospital, I tilted heavily in death's direction. On the fourth day, a Norwegian physician by the name of Hans Engman leaned over my bed and congratulated me on surviving the 20 to one odds that medical statistics had stacked up against me when they brought me in. 'Oh, yeah, that's terrific, Doc,' I said. My heart was not awash with gratitude because I suppose until he told me I was going to live, I had not thought at all about the fact that I was going to die. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep."

And then listen to this. "But a couple of nights later, in the moody hush that settles on a hospital room at 2:00 in the morning, alone and with no drugs inside of me to set me up for it, I was seized with a frenzy of gratitude. Possessed is the word. My arms rose straight up by themselves," he said. "A hundred-pound weight could not have held them to my side. My hands were open, my fingers were spread, waving and twisting while I blessed the Lord for almost unbearable goodness of being alive on this good earth in this good body at this good time," he said.

"I was flying outside of myself, high, held in weightless lightness, as if my earthly existence needed no ground to rest in, but was hung in space with only love to keep it aloft. I was so grateful. It was then," said Lewis, "that I learned that gratitude is the best feeling I would ever feel in all of my life. It was the ultimate joy of living. It was better than winning the lottery, better than watching your daughter graduate from college, better and deeper than any other feeling in the human repertoire. I am sure," he wrote, "that nothing in life can ever match the feeling of being fully, totally, completely grateful."

You don't have to promote it or force it. What you have to do is get alone with your Bible, read a Psalm, and then do three things: look upward, look around, and look in. And we're grateful. Amen. That's a good strategy, a really good strategy. I hope you'll take advantage of it. Maybe you're having a down day and you need a little pick-me-up. Well, gratitude is there. What are the things in your life that you are grateful for? Everybody has a list like that.

Why not take a moment and review that list? You'll find some things that weren't on the list when you started it, and they'll add to the list as you go along. Tell the Lord about them. Tell Him how thankful you are for a good marriage, a good home, good children, a good job, a nice church to go to, friends, whatever the list is. Be thankful. Gratitude breeds joy, and I hope you'll take advantage of that opportunity.

Tomorrow, we're going to talk about this question in this list of "God, I need some answers." The question is, "What can I do when trouble overwhelms me?" Psalm 27. Join us then and thank you so much for listening. I'm David Jeremiah. We'll see you next time right here on this good station.

David Michael Jeremiah: For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, "God, I Need Some Answers," please visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at DavidJeremiah.org/radio. That's DavidJeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's new book, *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. It'll help you abide with God, and it's yours for a gift of any amount.

You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James versions, available in your choice of attractive cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, DavidJeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we conclude "God, I Need Some Answers" on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.