Brown's Daily Word 11-24-09

Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this season of Thanksgiving. One of my dear friends calls it ""The season of gratitude". We are so grateful to the Lord for all His manifold blessings. We thank the Lord for you. Laureen landed safely here in Binghamton last night after a ten-hour flight (including stops in San Antonio and Washington, DC). It is a great thrill to have her home. Sunita called yesterday and shared with me that she has been invited by the White House for a reception at the White House for the Prime Minister of India, who is on a state Visit to Washington.
In two days we will celebrate the Thanksgiving here in the United States. However, Thanksgiving has become less and less about gratitude and more and more about gluttony. Thanksgiving has become a day where prayer and praise have been replaced by the uniquely American trinity of food, family, and football. (The family part is good, because the Lord has given us to live in families.) In spite of what the holiday has become, there is great value in remembering why the holiday began. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a day in which we stop and give thanks to our God.
I have been reading from Jonah 2:1-9. Admittedly, the book of Jonah is not the first book you think of when you think of thankfulness. Yet, in Jonah 2, that is exactly what we find. In verse nine we find that the rebellious prophet is no longer running from God, and is now reaching up to God with gratitude. Jonah says, “But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.”
Jonah's was by no means the traditional thanksgiving. As we prepare to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, I want us to look at Jonah’s statement in verse 9, and see what we can learn about true thanksgiving.
First, we must consider the Situation in which Jonah found himself and was Thankful. Normally, we equate thankfulness with times of blessing and prosperity but at the moment Jonah uttered his thanksgiving to God, he was imprisoned somewhere inside a giant fish. This setting reminds us of the words of the Apostle Paul in I Thessalonians 5:18, when he wrote, “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
Let consider a couple of things about Jonah's day of thanks.
He was in a Deep Place. Jonah was literally inside the fish. It was deep, dark, and difficult. While none of us can fully relate to the inside of a fish, we can all relate to the deep, difficult, and dark places of life. Life is often lived in these places.
It was a dark place. Jonah reminds us that God is to be thanked and praised, not just in the light, but in the dark as well. God is good all the time, and therefore God is worthy to be praised all the time as well. Thank Him in the darkness, as well as the daylight. Thank Him for the battles, as well as for the blessings.
It was a difficult place, but it was a Divine Place. Jonah 1:17 says, “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah…” Jonah himself said, “Thou hadst cast me into the deep". The reality is that Jonah could be thankful in the deep place, because the deep place was a part of the divine plan of God for his life. As hard as the experience of the fish was for Jonah, the reality is that God was using that fish to work in the life of His wayward prophet.
Some may wonder, “How can I be thankful in the dark times?” It is hard to be thankful standing by the casket of a loved one. It is hard to be thankful facing the horrors of cancer. It is hard to be thankful when you lose your job. Still, Jonah reminds us that we can be thankful in the dark times, knowing that our God is ultimately in control.
The great Scottish preacher, Alexander Whyte, was known for his uplifting prayers from the pulpit. Each and every Sunday, Whyte would lift his prayer of thanksgiving to God. One particular Sunday, the weather was so gloomy that one church member thought, “Certainly the preacher won’t think of anything for which to thank the Lord on a day like this.” When Whyte came to the pulpit, and began his prayer, he said, “We thank Thee, O God, that it is not always like this.”
No matter where we are in life, in the hard times, or joyful times, let us trust that it is a divine place, and that in it, there is something for which we can be thankful!
It was a Place of Deliverance. Jonah learned something liberating while he was contemplating his situation in the dark, stinky stomach of the fish. He learned that giving thanks in everything would set him free. See verse 10. It is after thanksgiving that Jonah is set free from the whale.
Paul and Silas learned this truth in the Philippian jail (Acts 16:25,26). Praise and thanksgiving has a way of setting us free. Praising has a way of setting us free from what binds us. I shared from Psalm 103, last Sunday noting that the opposite of praise is forgetfulness. Praising the Lord delivers us from that which binds us.
May we cultivate an attitude of gratitude! It is amazing what praising will do!

In Christ,
Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcyUMT7uhzE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNbLtiG2dWU