This week we celebrate Thanksgiving—one day we set apart for the purpose of thanking God for his many blessings in our lives.   Being thankful doesn’t just come naturally.  It’s something we need to learn and work at.  And most of us need to keep relearning the meaning of being thankful.

          There’s a wonderful passage in the book of Philippians that has some helpful hints for helping us become more like Christ in our attitudes.  This is a favorite passage of many people, and it includes several verses that I hope many of you know by memory.  If you don’t know them, you might want to choose one of these verses to memorize this Thanksgiving week.

          I want to encourage you to open your Bible and follow along—if you don’t have a Bible with you, there is one in the pew. 

          Philippians 4

⁴Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! ⁵Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.

          Notice that Paul writes these instructions as commands, not suggestions.  Most of us don’t much like taking orders—we would rather listen to suggestions.  The problem with suggestions is that we can take them or leave them.  But these are written as commands, and that tells us they are not to be taken lightly. 

          In fact, in the first sentence, Paul repeats himself, just in case we might have missed its importance.  “Rejoice in the Lord always.  I will say it again:  Rejoice!”  God wants us to be happy!  You can’t rejoice if you have a frown on your face, can you?

          Why do you think God cares?  And what if we’re just not happy?  The fact that this command is in the Bible tells us that we are to exercise control over our attitudes and our emotions.  Attitude is a choice, and we are in control.

          We know that there are people who struggle with clinical depression, and this command is not at all simple for them.  However, even for those who really struggle with depression, there is a great deal that falls within the power of choice.  All of us were born with certain inborn characteristics that influence how we behave. We have innate personalities.  And since our birth, we have been influenced by many things.  Some of us have, for one reason or another, very difficult lives.

          Still, we have here this command to rejoice in the Lord always.  I don’t want to suggest that we should paste on a fake smile and pretend there’s never anything wrong.  But each of us needs to begin where we are and work diligently to become the people God wants us to be. 

          It’s sort of like exercise.  We all know we need to exercise in order to keep our bodies healthy.  But of course we don’t start on an even playing ground.  Even if you watch small children at play, you will notice that some kids are much more athletically adept.  Some of us are just not athletes, right from the beginning.  But would we tell a child who isn’t very athletic to just forget it and sit in a chair for the rest of his or her life?  I certainly hope not!

          As we age, the playing ground gets even more uneven.  That’s because some of us barely move, and eat all the wrong foods, while other people run marathons and eat very carefully.  Most of us fall somewhere in between.  But we all need to start wherever we are and work with what we have.

          It’s the same with our attitude of joy.  Whether we are naturally cheerful people or not, we need to start where we are and work at rejoicing in the Lord.  Rejoice always, it says.

          He goes on to say, “⁵Let your gentleness be evident to all.”  We can all grow in our gentleness in the way we treat other people.  Here again, some of us learned gentleness as children, and some of us didn’t.  We start where we are and work at it. 

          To me, gentleness means caring about the physical and emotional well-being of other people.  I will treat them gently, so as not to damage another person’s body, but also not to damage their emotional well-being.  A gentle manner guards the feelings of another person.

          Then Paul gives us a little hint as to how and why:  “The Lord is near.”  We can rejoice, and we can be gentle, because the Lord is in our lives.  God is our strength.  But when we come to Jesus, he does not just zap us into perfection.  That might be nice, but it’s not the way God generally works.  Instead, he strengthens us, but we have to exercise our will in order to change.  We can do it, with God’s help, but we need to consciously choose our attitude.

          Paul gives us another command that is also difficult:

 ⁶Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

          This certainly challenges all of us.  Most of the time, we would much rather worry and be anxious than bring it to God in prayer.  Worry is what comes naturally.  And most of the time, even if we do bring our concerns to God in prayer, we don’t do it with thanksgiving, and it doesn’t stop us from worrying.

          Paul tells us to take our anxious concerns and give them to God, not with complaints, but with thanksgiving.  And leave them with God.  That’s difficult, isn’t it?  Now, I do not think Paul means to suggest that we never go to God in despair or agony or even anger.  God wants us to come freely to him with whatever is on our hearts and to be able to speak to him in all honesty.

          But I think what Paul would say is that we need to remain in prayer until we can come to a place of being thankful, if not for the circumstance we are facing, at least for God’s presence with us in that circumstance.  And if we truly trust God to act, we will not be anxious, but instead we will trust God to work, and we will thank God for the way he chooses to work it out.

          Paul goes on to tell us the benefit we will reap if we do these things:

⁷And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

          As we learn to bring our concerns to God in prayer and leave them to God, we are rewarded with the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, and which will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.  What an amazing gift this is!  It transcends human understanding because it brings God into play in our lives. 

When we put our trust in God, impossible, amazing things happen in our hearts and our minds.

          In the next section, Paul tells us we are responsible for taking care of our minds.  Can you even imagine what Paul would think if he were to suddenly pop into our time and see what the average American watches on television in an average week?  Here’s what Paul says:

 ⁸Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

          How many of us think more about what we are willing to put into our mouths than what we allow into our minds?  What we think about matters.  It seems to me that in this media-saturated world in which we live today, most of us have become very careless about what we allow ourselves to see and hear.  Most of us still have some sense about what we want our children exposed to, but what about ourselves? 

          It’s good for us to recognize the fact that we are, in many ways, products of our culture.  As products of our culture, we have at least two problems we need to recognize.

First, unless one lives in a cell with no outside communication, all of us are daily inundated by the messages of mass media.  Some of us, from the time we awake in the morning until the time we fall asleep at night are seeing and hearing messages from radio, television, computers, I-pods, and more.  In order to escape that barrage of media messages, we need to be quite intentional.  And even then, we can’t tune out everything.  Nor would we want to.  It is the culture in which we live.  But we need to begin with a recognition of the situation.

          Second, I suspect we have all been influenced by the rating system used by the movie industry.  The rating is age based.  So movies are classified from “G,” meaning they are appropriate for all ages, to “NC-17,” meaning no one under seventeen is allowed to see the movie.  Let me say first, that I am glad there is a rating system, because it forces people to at least give some thought to what their children are viewing and it gives an adult some warning as to what to expect.  However, I think the message it has given adults is that it’s okay for them to watch anything whatsoever, now that they have passed the age of sixteen. 

          I’m not going to tell you what you should or should not watch or listen to.  I’m not even going to discuss pornography and extreme violence, except to say that it is addictive, and if you are dabbling in these areas, please know that it will be addictive and if you are dealing with this addiction, you can get help.

          Paul sets the bar high for all of us:  “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”  Take care of your mind.  It’s your responsibility.

In the next few verses, Paul becomes personal.  This was originally written as a letter to a specific church in the Greek city of Philippi.   He wrote this:

 ⁹Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

 ¹⁰I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. ¹¹I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. ¹²I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

          Paul is a missionary, and it is apparent from this letter that the church at Philippi supported him financially.  But more important, he uses his own contentment to reinforce what he is teaching them.

          Paul wants us to learn, as he has, the secret of being content, regardless of our situation.  That’s not always easy, is it?  But as we set our minds and our hearts on Christ Jesus, depending on God to care for us, we can learn to be content.  And what a gift it is, both to ourselves and to those who have to live with us, when we learn the secret of being content in any and every situation.

          Paul finishes this great passage with a verse that many, many Christians have memorized:

¹³I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

          I think it might be good to qualify the word “everything.”  God does not give us strength to be super people.  By everything, I think this means everything that God calls us to do.  That may be a lot, but it’s not necessarily everything that everyone else thinks we ought to do or everything that we ourselves think we should do.  We’re not meant to be superman or superwoman.

          When I was a kid, I lived here on Queen Anne.  A friend lived in a house that had a garage facing the street with a flat roof just like the ones right across the street from this church.  One day, my friend’s mom gave him and his sister a new cereal called “Sugar Jets.”  This was in the early days of TV ads selling their goods to children.  There was an ad on TV that said something like this:  “Eat Sugar Jets!  They will make you fly like superman!”

          Well, my friend’s little sister ate her bowl of Sugar Jets, and went outside to play.  Thinking she would now be able to fly, since she had eaten a bowl of Sugar Jets cereal, she jumped off the roof of their garage.  Fortunately, all she ended up with was a broken arm and a hard lesson learned.

          So take this little verse, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength,” and memorize it.  But don’t think you can fly!  What you can do, with God’s strength, is learn to be thankful and joyful and gentle and content.  You can learn to guard your heart and your mind by thinking about things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy.

          These words from Paul are a beautiful Thanksgiving Blessing to us.  I really want to encourage you to think about these things this week as we look forward to Thanksgiving.  Let God help you to truly be thankful from the bottom of your heart this Thanksgiving.

Prayer:

Thank you, God, for these beautiful words of instruction in your Word.  Help us to take them to heart today, to meditate on them, and to make them a part of our lives.  We rejoice in you, and in your invitation to us to live lives of goodness and purity.  God, you know that all of us struggle with some of these things we have been talking about today.  Lord, I ask that you would give us the will to do what you ask us to do.  And I ask that you would encourage each one of us with these words: “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”

May each one of us determine in our hearts today that we will give thanks to you in every circumstance.   And may the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen