It was a special dinner, that's for sure - roast turkey, gravey, 3 kinds of vegetables, cranberry sauce, stuffing - the whole nine yards.
        Mother spent part of the morning and the entire afternoon in preparation. Why? Why not. She just wanted to do it - a token of love for the home and family.
        Come time for the feast and the family gathers. Father is preoccupied, his mind back at the shop. Almost absent-mindedly he wolfs down his plateful before mother even has a chance to finish serving her own meal up.
        She waits for some token of appreciation, a comment, anything. Nothing comes. He pushes back from the table, and after closing devotions heads off into the living room to watch the playoffs.
        No offer to help clean up - nothing.

        How do you imagine she felt, left standing in the kitchen alone? Hurt? Angry? Terribly let down? Maybe a bit of all these?
        The least he could have done was wait till she was served up, and take his time - taste it, rather than inhaling the stuff. And even a nod of recognition, a glimmer of awareness of the extra special nature of all this would have been nice.
        I mean, she didn't do it in order to receive compliments... she did it simply out of love, a gift to him. But the gift was trampled on.

        What would your response be if you were that woman? Perhaps you've had such an experience. If so, how did you respond? Maybe it wasn't with dinner - but in some other way a gift, a token, was given from yourself to others, but when given was simply overlooked, or tossed aside, or taken without so much as a nod of recognition or any hint of gratitude.
        How did you respond?

        Now think about a slightly different setting. This time not a mother serving dinner, but a father.
        Think about your Heavenly Father, who as Creator and Keeper of life is the Great Giver of all good gifts. He doesn't give us a prepared turkey feast on our table. He doesn't do the dishes for us. But He DOES make the provisions that we can acquire food each day... and family and homes and jobs and and and...
        Now the question - do we his children appreciate this constant shower of gifts? Do we show even a faint glimmer of gratitude? Or are we like that father who sucked back his meal, tore through dessert and left, behaving like some arrogant aristocrat?
        Gratitude, do we display it in our lives? Especially towards our God - do we display gratitude?

Gratitude in life and for life - that's the focus of our meditation this morning.

        Gratitude - so how important is it? Let me ask, what happens when it is absent? What does a lack of gratitude do?
        If you have ever been in the position of the woman serving the meal you know what it can do to the giver of gifts. But what about the ungrateful person? What does a lack of gratitude do to his life?

        First, their lives tend to turn inward. They become unappreciative of others and their needs and desires. Their horizons end at the tip of their nose. They do not see, sometimes they CANNOT see, the sacrifices other make. They cannot see the love of a person who prepared a special dinner for them, or the concern of someone who sent them a card, or the interest of one paying them a compliment, or the involvement of a family member helping with the dishes or taking out the garbage or fixing a leaky faucet.
        If something doesn't affect them directly, or benefit them directly they tend not to take an interest in it, or even notice it. Their world shrinks. And that is tragic.

        Secondly, for those who tend to live without gratitude, life very quickly becomes one big grabbing game; a lust for more starts to develop, without satisfaction being found anywhere. Such people fall victim to the seductive siren calls of our commercial age encouraging us to be greedy for more gifts, telling us we need to get more, we don't have enough, we deserve more... just one more step.

        But as you soon discover, there is always another step after the last one. There is always another purchase, always another party, always another item to lust after. And when each one is attained, suddenly there is no satisfaction anymore in having it. Life without gratitude becomes a terribly restless experience.

        Much more could be said, and perhaps you can develop the thought further in your after-church coffee discussions. But let this suffice to show clearly that a lack of gratitude in life is terribly destructive.

And with that in mind, hear the Bible:
        "And be thankful" says v.15.
        "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful" says 4.2.

For just as a lack of gratitude was disruptive to the relationship of the husband and wife in our openning example, and just as lack of gratitude can be damaging in other areas of life, so also lack of gratitude can be hurtful, terribly damaging to our faith life, and our relationship with the Lord God.

        We begin to trample on God and his gifts, to abuse them. Our world shrinks, and the Lord is slowly pushed to the fringes, and perhaps eventually out altogether as we clutter our lives with the many toys and pleasures of the moment.
        And that - need I even say it - is deadly.
        So it is that for our good, our eternal good and our temporal good, in order to make life a richer and more balanced experience, we are faced with the command from God's Word:
        "And be thankful."

        It's important to understand that this is by no means the first or only time that the bible calls us to thankfulness. One only has to look through the book of Psalms, a collection of songs directed towards God. Again and again you are confronted with thanksgiving happening, and gratitude being called forth from other believers. You'll find it, in fact, on almost every page.
        Psalms 105, 106, 107 & 118 for example, begin with the call:"Give thanks to the LORD."
        And not to belabor the point, but on numerous occasions where the bible describes the activities of believers, it mentions them involved in giving thanks to God.
        In short, as far as our relationship with the Lord goes, says the Bible, gratitude is a key ingredient.

        Now, as we saw last week, one of the biggest ways we act out a relationship with our Saviour Jesus Christ is through prayer - communing with, being in the very presence of, the Almighty Lord. So it follows then that gratitude deserves a very prominent place in our prayer life. Hence:
        "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful"
Gratitude - great to have in all of life.
                - absolutely essential in our faith life...
                        in our prayer life.

Gratitude - DO IT!! says the Bible.

        Some might have trouble with the passage - how can you command me to be thankful, to show gratitude? Isn't that kind of like a parent sternly telling a child, "I paid good money to get you into this Fall Fair and now you are going to have a good time - whether you like it or not!" - isn't it the same? Isn't gratitude something that has to spring spontaneously from the heart?

        Perhaps we snicker when we think of the parent scolding the whining child inside the fair gate. But then - isn't it so that sometimes for seemingly inexplicable reasons kids sometimes get it into their heads that they aren't going to like this -- no matter what. They have an attitude problem.
        Actually, that's not just kids. Grownups have attitude problems also. For example, they develop a grudge against a person - and forever after whatever that individual says or does will invariably be wrong.
        Any rate, back to the example of the ornery kid at the fair - maybe she needs a good talking to in order to shake her free of this attitude problem and let her approach the ferris wheel and horse pulls and petting zoo with a new frame of mind. And maybe - hey you never know - maybe she will begin to enjoy herself.

        New attitudes are the beginning. New emotions follow.

        Be thankful - a command; not first of all a command to emotions, but a command to an attitude, to a mindset. And if we can develop the appropriate attitude, then emotions and expressions of gratitude will follow on their own.
        Gratitude - you need it.
        Gratitude - do it.
        Gratitude - you can do it!

        Which, of course, leaves one last question hanging - "HOW?"
        How can I get beyond that destructive "me-centred, greedily-grab, consume it all" mentality that is so prevalent and so encouraged today and develop an attitude of gratitude?

Well, look one more time at Col 4.2:
"Devote yourselves to prayer.... being watchful and thankful"

Pray.... while being watchful and thankful.
        Watchful and thankful - catch the order there. It's important. Watchful..... before thankful.
        In order to grow in gratitude, in an attitude of thankfulness, one has to watch; in other words go through life with eyes open and senses tuned -
- rather than with some sloppy take-what-comes-when-it-comes-as-it-comes-don't-worry-too-much-about-what-comes, semi-comatose attitude.
- and rather than with an attitude of zooming through life so fast and so focussed on some particular goal that everything is passed by without being noticed - sort of like the landscape alongside highway 400. I mean, how much of that do we really see and appreciate?

        Seeing the birth of three babies in this congregation over the last few months and this morning's baptism of Matthew remind me of what I experienced as a first-time parent. It was while pacing the living room in the middle of the night with that new life in my arms, or changing or feeding that baby that I realized in a way I never realized before just how much my parents had done for me.
        Stopping and watching and handling and considering this new life, being suddenly and very forcefully aware of parenting my son, was the jolt, the scene, the occasion that developed a new, keener attitude of gratitude towards my parents.

Watchful - then thankful. You can't give thanks for what you don't notice.

        Precisely the same principle holds for our faith life and our prayer life as it gives expression to our relationship with God. It is when we stop from our daily rat race or wake ourselves up from our stupefying doldrums and allow ourselves to be jolted with an awareness of ALL that our Father in heaven, and his son Jesus Christ have given us, and continue to give us through the Holy Spirit - it is then that we, suddenly watchful, find an attitude of thankfulness, deep inner gratitude beginning to grow within us.

"Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful" (Col 4.2). Another translation puts it, "Persevere in prayer, with mind awake and thankful heart."

        We need to be awake, watchful, on the lookout in order to discern the gifts in our lives and the Giver of those gifts.... savoring each moment of life, said one person, as though it were a bowl of homemade soup prepared by someone who loves us very much (Postema Space For God p.54).

        That's the approach of Psalm 104, which we read at the beginning of our service - looking at the whole of creation, allowing his senses to take it all in, and seeing underneath the externals the caring presence of God himself.

        Lord God, how great you are, clothed in majesty and glory, wrapped in light as in a robe! You stretch out the heavens like a tent, Above the rains you build your dwelling. You make the clouds your chariot, you walk on the wings of the wind, you make the winds your messengers and flashing fire your servants... You make springs gush forth to the valleys: they flow in between the hills. They give drink to all the beasts of the field;... on their banks dwell the birds of heaven... Bless the Lord, O my soul!"

        It is to this kind of a keenly aware relationship of gratitude with our Creator and Saviour that the scriptures call us.

        One colleague of mine recounted how he was driving through his hometown with his parents one day when they passed the hospital where he was born. He said, "Tell me once again mother, how was it that when I was born - how did you almost die?"
        She replied, "Oh, it wasn't I who almost died. It was you."
        That conversation jolted him. It made him stop and look and realize that life - HIS life - is a precious gift from God. It came home to him again and again as he quietly thought and repeated the phrase, "On July 3, 1934 I almost died!"
        And the verse that hit him from the bible was this:
        the living, the living give you thanks O God, as I do today. (Isaiah 38.19)

        Gratitude to God, even for life itself. I must tell you that I experience that in a keen way after visiting someone who is ill, perhaps bedridden. And at the end of the visit I am able to get up and move about freely on my own, with no pain. I can walk out and enjoy life with a smile......
                Thank you God, for this precious gift!

        As someone said, "God is the Giver; we are thanks-givers" [Postema, Space For God 54]. What has God given you?
        Life? health? friends? children? a supportive church community? freedom?
        His presence even while you were in the darkest depths of life.... Can you thank him that the one set of footprints in the sand was his, rather than yours; that you were not abandoned?

And above all, when we think of God as the Giver - do we take time to give thanks for his giving Jesus Christ to the world; do we give thanks that he - the Divine Son of God - was willing to become a man, to suffer and die to pay for all our sins, to overcome the forces of death and blaze the trail to heaven for us.
        Oh that we never begin to take this for granted as one taking a turkey banquet and wolfing it down without a second thought! Oh that we never wander into church and then out again completely untouched by the sight of the cross!

        And oh, oh, oh that we would then also take the time to not only note with gratitude these wonderful and constantly flowing gifts of God - but that we would also tell him of our gratitude. For that is the last thing - gratitude only truly begins to blossom when it is expressed.
        Gratitude to God begins to blossom when it saturates our prayer life.

Gratitude. An essential ingredient in life, in faith, and in prayer.