Title: Secret of Gratitude
secret of gratitude
October 3, 2009 (Sat) Thanksgiving Service, Tel Aviv Joppa Church
Habakkuk 3:17-19
Today is Chuseok, our own holiday. During Chuseok, in the case of Korea, isn't there a great migration of the people?
I got a phone call from any grandmother's house telling me that my grandchildren would come and stay for a few days on Chuseok. This grandmother was so happy that she gave a thank-you offering of 50,000 won. Now, Chuseok is over, and a few days later, all of the grandchildren are gone. How much gratitude did this grandmother give after she had gone home? One hundred thousand won. Do you understand what I mean?
Today, we are offering thanksgiving services for Chuseok, one of the three major festivals in Israel, Sukot, and the Feast of Tabernacles. What kind of thanks are you giving to God?
Yesterday, we had a family worship service with our children and talked about it. I asked them to tell me what to thank God for. Thank you for making me believe in Jesus, for protecting me, for giving me a happy family, for giving me daily bread...
In addition, the amount of the thank-you offering was determined. So, it became a gift of thanks to the whole family. It may be difficult every week, but please share the Thanksgiving Offering with the whole family. It's great that children know the meaning of gratitude, too.
As we look back over the past year, there are so many things to thank God for. If you take out a piece of paper and write a thank-you note, I think most will be full. But here we can ask a question. Gratitude is a condition or something else. When you say that gratitude is a condition, isn't that something to be thankful for depending on the circumstances? What do I have? So I can thank you.
For example, take care of your family's health, make sure your children do well in school, go to a good school, make your husband work well... etc. We can be grateful when there is a condition for being grateful for something visible. Thank you. There are a lot of people who can't even do this properly. There are many people who do not have gratitude even if they have it or God has given it to them. Of course you should be grateful.
But what if there were no such conditions of gratitude? As in today's text of Habakkuk, "the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, the olive crops produce no crops, the fields produce no food, there are no sheep in the pen, and there are no cattle in the stalls."
Don't think of it as someone else's story, and tell me that such a case has come to me, and then what do I think I would do? In that situation, what kind of reaction can I really show God?
For example, there were financial difficulties. Life itself became difficult. My children have a problem. Difficulties arose in what I was doing. I'm having trouble with my business. I have a health problem. To make matters worse, a difficult task or situation follows the tail in the face of a disaster. There's really nothing. It feels like my whole life is in vain.
When such a situation comes, what kind of reaction can I have? Some of these people have actually been in a similar situation or have been through it, and some of them may not have had that experience. Really think about it. In such a situation, or a series of such situations, what kind of reaction can I really show to God?
The reason I'm asking this question is because more people than you think are stuck with this problem. Most of the time, we give thanks when something goes well, or when something goes well, or when something is given to us in our hands. As a result, gratitude became a condition. When all these conditions are gone, what can we really do?
Like Habakkuk, like Job, when everything in me has problems and everything disappears, the question is, how can I respond to God? So, at this point of giving thanks for the year of thanksgiving, we need to think about whether our gratitude is a condition or something else.
As we read the Bible, we discover that gratitude is not conditional. Of course, there are many things that I am grateful for, that is, for what God has given me. However, thanksgiving throughout the Bible is not a condition. In other words, I am not grateful for the conditions given to me.
This can be seen in the original Hebrew. A typical Hebrew word used in the Bible to mean thanks is '