Grace, Mercy, and Peace to
you from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord,
Psalm 65 is an expression of praise and thanks by
the church to God. In the first verse, worshippers respond with David to God’s
goodness by telling him that we’re ready to praise him and give him thanks.
Thanks and praise are important features of
worship for all Christians and every Christian community. God appreciate thanks
from the people he blesses. God’s people behave courteously to him. We make
sure to say thank you, just as we do when friends and relatives help us. Not
everyone thanks God, but there will always be thankful people. Observation has
shown me that the folks at Trinity are thankful people. The church and
individual Christians are constantly thanking the Lord, for along with faith
and good works, our thanks and praise please him.
Psalm 65 is a good guide for our thanks this
morning. It gives us many reasons for thanking our maker and redeemer. As we
examine this psalm, let’s keep in mind that it’s our thanks now that matters to
God. We won’t fret about past failures to give thanks or be concerned about the
state of our hearts tomorrow. What matters now is the praise and thanks we
offer the Lord at the present moment.
So we listen carefully as God speaks to us in this
old psalm of King David’s. We let it fill our hearts with a spirit of
thanksgiving. The most profound reasons for giving thanks appear in the first
verses of our psalm. First, David wrote that God hears prayer. Prayer is a sign
of trust in him. When we talk to God about our joys and needs and sorrows, we
confess to him our conviction that he is our only reliable resource.
Our trust delights him, and so he hears our
prayers. Sometimes in our prayers, as in our speech, we can’t find the words to
express everything that’s in our minds and hearts. This difficulty needn’t
trouble us, though, because God hears the words we’re searching for as well as
the ones we speak. The Lord’s willingness to hear prayer moves us to seek him.
We thank him for his openness to us. The important thing is to spend time with
him in prayer. A good Thanksgiving resolution would be to spend a few more
minutes a day at prayer than we normally do.
We trust that many people will turn to him and
that he will accept them. David says that all men and women will come to the
Lord. We can find the same prophesy in Psalm 86. “All the nation you have made
will come and worship before you, O Lord; they will bring glory to your
Name.” This is different from other
messages in the Bible and what may be our own observation that many people and
nations reject the God of the Bible. Those who reject God now with stubborn
hearts will be condemned on the Day of Judgment. This verse reminds us that
judgment is in God’s hands. It holds out the hope willingness to receive and
the hope for the world that’s part of his promise. His disposition is to save,
not to condemn. We thank him that he includes us among the people who come to
him.
David wrote about forgiveness in the next verse.
Sin has the power to overwhelm, but God’s mercy is greater than sin. His
forgiveness washes us clean every day. He accepted Jesus’ death as payment in
full for all the debts we owe him, and so he keeps no record of our sins. He
declares us to be righteous in his sight and calls us his daughters and sons.
His forgiveness builds up our confidence so that we feel inferior to no one and
it awakens hope that life will go well for us. God’s forgiveness guarantees our
salvation. Our part is to take hold if it. We thank him for reaching out to us
in love and compassion.
David wrote in verse 4 about the blessedness of
those whom God has chosen. He doesn’t mean especially priests or professional
church workers. He means all Christians, whom he blesses with sturdy love and
loyalty to him. He draws us to his church so that he may bless us with right
understanding about ourselves and him and so that he may guide us through the
perils of a troubling world. We thank him, then, for the opportunity to live
close to him and the hope that he will keep us with him.
David says as well that God speaks with awesome
deeds of righteousness. Evil doesn’t stand forever. Nations are strong and
powerful, but God removes their power if they grow arrogant. No empire is
permanent. Jesus was born when the ancient Romans were at the height of their
power, when the Emperor Augustus established a reign international peace after
a period of terrible civil wars. Many people were grateful to the empire for
creating order and stability. Many put their hopes in the efficiency of the
Roman bureaucracy. But where is the Roman Empire now? And what’s become of all
other empires before or since? In our own day, even the mighty Soviet empire
crumbled. God wishes people everywhere to put their hope in him, and only in
him, for he is trustworthy, almighty, and full of love and mercy. We thank him
that he is the hope of every corner of the earth and that he has given us the
opportunity for sturdy hope.
David then goes on to praise and thank God for the
strength that created mountains and for the power that quiets roaring seas and
ends turmoil among nations. Storms come and some highly memorable ones, but
they’re the exception rather than the rule. Strife among nations also occurs.
We sometimes hear people say that the violence of our times has caused some
folks to lose their faith. At the same time, the stress of modern living has
caused others to seek safety and consolation in the God of Scripture. It’s
human beings who cause turmoil, not the Lord. Jesus calls us away from violence
to peace and rest in him. He quiets the ambitions of rulers and nations. We
thank him that Canada is at peace this Thanksgiving. We ask him to bring peace
to those parts of the world where fighting is now taking place. We’re grateful
for his steadying hand. Without him, the turbulence of the world would be much
greater than it is.
David praises God as well for the care he gives to
the land and the abundance he brings from the earth – a traditional reason for
thanks at this time of the year. We thank the Lord for the riches with which he
has blessed Canada. I suspect we all marvel at times that Canada is prosperous
while other nations endure never-ending poverty and instability. We thank God
for making Canada strong and for the hope that the country’s prosperity will continue.
Besides all this, David finds still another reason
to praise God. David describes the
prosperity of his own nation – an abundance of rain, plentiful harvests, plenty
of grazing land for livestock. The meadows are covered with flocks, he writes,
and the valleys with grain. Then he makes a remarkable statement – that these
speechless parts of creation shout for joy and sing. The same occurs in other
places in the Psalms. Psalm 96, for example: “Let the sea resound…let the
fields be jubilant...then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy.” Psalm
148 invites the sun and moon and shining stars to praise God “Praise the Lord from the earth, you great
sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy
winds that do his bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all
cedars, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds…let them
praise the name of the Lord.”
If David were to write a psalm like that for
Toronto, he might include trees and parks, rivers and streams, Lake Ontario,
our four seasons, fascinating cloud formations that I like to study sometimes,
our variety of people, and the nearby resources of the rest of Ontario. To the
eyes of faith, all God’s creatures praise him and give a witness to his
creative power.
You see, although the world is fractured and full
of sin, God sees it as unified under his rule. The whole earth exists because
of his wonderful power to create and sustain, and God sees in the unity he’s
made a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to him. All creation joins God’s
faithful people in a chorus of thanksgiving. There is joy at the center of
creation, and the Lord invites you and me, all Christians everywhere, to take
part in it.
Think of it, we may find fault with ourselves for
not thanking God enough, but God hears the thanks we offer him as a lusty
heavenly chorus. He delights in our praise and worship of him. Because of
Jesus, he is pleased with us. He delights in our faith, in our obedience, in
the joy we take in the world he’s given us. We thank him for including Trinity
Lutheran in the heavenly chorus and for letting us see glimpses of the unity of
his creation. We thank him for claiming us as his daughters and sons and for
taking delight in us, and for giving us the opportunity to thank and praise
him.
Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, set aside by
the government for all people to count their blessings. You and I and other
Christians may not have much impact on the society around us but we have a
deeper insight than others into the meaning of this holiday, for we know why we
give thanks – for the gifts God has given us and we know to whom thanks are
given to God our Savior.
Christian people have many different reasons for
giving thanks. We remember, too, that life is more than what we can count or
see, so we especially thank God for the gifts he sends us that we can’t measure
– the love of Jesus that gives us many reasons for wanting to live and divine
protection that preserves us from evil now and from the coldness of the grave
later on. In other words, we thank God for salvation in Christ. Like King
David, we thank him for including us in his kingdom and for allowing us to
taste the joys of life in a Christian community and for the hope that these
blessings will continue and grow until we reach our rest in eternity. In Jesus.
Name we give thanks. AMEN
