Happy Thanksgiving...Here is the message I will give this morning...NO TA here, just straight talk...
All right, look at your hands for a second. I am told that when you were just an infant, you came out with your hands closed. And every time somebody, when you were an infant, tried to get their little finger by yours... And you would wrap your hands around them and hold on tight and not let them go. And then when you became a toddler and you started grabbing rattles and little toys and so and other kids came in your direction and wanted to take them away from you, you said, "Mine." And you held on tight. And I am told when you were in junior high school, you were hanging on to bicycle handle bars and ski poles and batons and other things. And I am told when you were in high school, you were hanging on to the hand of Betty Lou and not about to let that go. I am told you were hanging on to a lot of different stuff in college that we don't need to even talk about here. But when you left college, you were hanging on to a diploma with two hands. Then I am told that you started out a career, and you grabbed the lowest rung on that ladder of your vocation and you hung on to it. And then you reached for the second one and you hung on to that and reached for the next one. And you have been just climbing ladders, hanging on to rungs. And then there comes that time that you move into retirement and you hang on to golf clubs or gardening tools. And then, when you get near the end of your life, you start hanging on to canes. And then you hang on to walkers. Then you hang on to the edges of wheelchairs. And then, you know what happens to some in the final moments of their life? They hang on to the edge of a hospital bed, and then they die. And sometimes when people die and their grip relaxes a little bit, it is the very first time they have ever really opened their hands.
What a difference in our hands and the hands of God. Because the Bible tells us that in creation God forms and fashions and then releases and opens up His hands. And throughout the history of God's people, He has opened His hands and lavishly provided them with food and drink and protection and favor and blessing and love. And when His people wandered away from Him and then repented and returned, He offered open hands of forgiveness. When Jesus came and He saw the needs of people, He opened His hands to them, to teach, to heal, to love, to feed, to free. And when He was about to be nailed to the cross as a sin payment for all of us, He did not shake His fists at those who were going to nail Him to the cross; He opened His hands. And when doubting Thomas came and said, "I don't believe it is true," Jesus opened His hands and said, "It's okay, but look at My hands." Friends, the open hands of God are merely the outward manifestation of an inner reality which is this thing we are talking about today, God's generosity.. "What a God. What an outlandishly generous God."
And it is the lavishness of God that so distinguishes His hands from ours. Our text says, “The eyes of all look to you, O Lord, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hands and satisfy the desires of every living thing. When our God created this universe, he did not simply hand us the keys and say, Ok, I’m out of here, you take care of it. He still has a hand in what happens in this world. He is the one responsible for keeping us alive, and not just us, but the animal world as well. The eyes of all look to the Lord. He causes the crops to grow in the ground. He causes the sun to rise and set. He causes rain to fall from the heaven. He has given us all the ability to work and make the most of his many blessings. The population of the United States is well over 200 million. According to the encyclopedia, the average person consumes 4 pounds of food a day. That means we need 800,000,000 pounds a day, or 300,000,000,000 billion pounds of food a year in our country alone. We are less than 1/6 of the world’s population. It’s a staggering figure. Now you might say, well Pastor Schulz there are people starving in the world. God is to blame. Now wait a minute. Starvation in our world is not the fault of God, but rather man’s own sinfulness. If the wealthy were more willing to share their blessings and just keep enough for basic needs, would there be starvation in the world? If nations rotated their crops properly instead of burning out the land, would there be starvation? If governments took the entire assistance that was given them by other nations and use it for food supplies for their needy rather than build weapons of mass destruction, and lavish palaces for its rulers, would there be starvation? The hands of man are too often closed tight. However the hands of our God are open. Our God is outlandishly generous.
His most generous act of all was the sending of his son Jesus into the world. The Bible says, “though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, that we through his poverty might be rich. The Son of God left the mansions of heaven, where the angels sang their hallelujahs to him, where he had all possible comforts, and came to this earth and lived the poorest of poor life. He then went and died upon a cross to make payment for all our sins of selfishness and greed, for every harsh word or deed we have ever done. All so that we could be part of the family of God once again. All so we could be assured of his abiding help and provision.
One thing God knows about us is that we live in a world of lack, and many of us have experienced a shortage of something-or-other our whole life long(a shortage of nurture, a shortage of understanding, a shortage of people who would listen to us, a shortage of people who would come up close to us and love us the way we needed to be loved, a shortage of finances, a shortage of opportunity. He says, "I will not treat you that way. I will treat you with a kind of generousness, a kind of lavishness that will just fill you up to overflowing."
And you know God has truly filled the United States to overflowing, because its foundation was based upon the Word of God, and its desire to promote Jesus as the Savior of the world. In 1621 pilgrims sailed from England to America after enduring years of religious persecution. They rested their lives in the providence of God that He was leading them to a land of religious freedom to promote the message of a Savior from sin, named Jesus Christ. The voyage of that Mayflower took twice as long as Christopher Columbus’ voyage, enduring several wintry storms. After arriving they faced disease, famine and bitter cold. However, when the Mayflower made its return voyage, none of the Pilgrims returned with it. Their first harvest occurred in the autumn of 1621. Their own seed had barely grown, but the Indians had shown them how to plant corn which yielded a huge harvest. On the first Thanksgiving they celebrated God’s goodness to them with a party of ninety Indians. Their Thanksgiving feast lasted for 3 days and included a festival of sports. From that day friend, consider how God has blessed America. Consider the choice of foods we have to eat. If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the people in this world. If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are head of 500 million people in the world. If you can read the bulletin today, you are more blessed than over 2 billion people in the world that cannot read at all. If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week. I am thankful for health, for those who had the foresight to make health care available If you can worship freely without fear of persecution, you are more blessed than 3 billion people in our world. If you are an immigrant, you are truly blessed to be one of over 220 million Americans. We are thankful to live in a country that has a free press, provides universal public education, supports individual entrpreneurship, enjoys a competitive economic system, values charity and volunteerism and guarantees our right to express ourselves, and cast our vote for a chosen candidate. God has certainly blessed America, the land that I love.
And what is our reaction to our extremely generous God. Well our tightly clenched hands begin to open up. We now praise our God. We worship Him. We freely share of what we have to promote his kingdom work. If you want a case and point, look at the story of Zacchaeus. Now we do not know all that much about him, but we know he was a "clutcher." In fact, he didn't just have an iron grip on his own stuff, he wrenched whatever he could from the hands of other people, and he held on to that too. Tax collectors in those days were like legal extortioners. They could charge you what the government wanted to charge you for taxes and add whatever percentage they thought they could get out of you. And if you did not pay it, you went to jail. But it could be said that this guy named Zacchaeus made a career out of acquiring and hanging on to stuff. He had permanent white knuckles, because he was a clutcher... till he had dinner with Jesus Christ. And when that happened, he changed.
Now we are not given all the details of what went on in the conversation, but it is not all that difficult to put the pieces together. He comes out on the other side of the dinner with transformed hands. But Jesus did not start there. It is pretty clear, if you look at the story closely in Luke 19, that Jesus started with Zacchaeus' heart. And I think He probably just said to Zacchaeus over dinner, "Hey Zach. What your heart yearns for will never be satisfied by that which you are hanging on to so tightly. Your heart, you see, was meant to be in deep communion with God the Father and in deep loving communion with other people in the Family of God. And you have walked away from that kind of communion, and you are settling for something far less than is due you. You are settling for just trying to satiate the needs of your heart by grabbing stuff and holding on to it." And I think Jesus said, "You know what I am going to do for you? In the not too distant future, Zacchaeus, I am going to open up My hands, and they are going to receive steel spikes so that guys like you, with hands like yours (all clutched up and grabbing on to stuff) can be changed. I am going to be so generous to you, Zacchaeus, beyond your wildest imagination. I am going to take your sin and your greed and your lack of love, and I am going to pay for it on the cross and present salvation to you as a gift. And I am not even going to stop there. I am going to give you redemption as a gift, forgiveness from sin. I am going to adopt you into My family. I am going to answer your prayers. I am going to give you strength through the storms of life. And I am going to give you Heaven on top of all of it, because I am an outrageously generous God." And I think at a certain point in the conversation, the enormity of Jesus' generosity melted the heart of Zacchaeus to the point where he sensed something was changing on the inside. I think he just got transformed by that generous grace. And the same thing happens to us as we consider the generosity of our God. "Your mercies are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness." Today, I give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endures forever. Amen… |
