Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving

Psalm 100

Thanksgiving Day is coming up. What a wonderful day to THANK GOD and celebrate all He gave us! As Armenians, we do not have an equivalent day in our calendar. Thanksgiving was introduced to us by the American tradition and I think it is a very meaningful one.

Yet, too much food and preparation; unfortunately, too much of everything.

According Andy Rooney, two big sellers in any bookstore are cookbooks and diet books. Cookbooks tell you how to prepare food and diet books tell you how not to eat any of that!

A California scientist has computed that an average human being eats 16 times his or her own weight in an average year, while a horse eats only eight times its weight. This seems to prove that if you want to lose weight, you should eat like a horse! ⁽¹⁾

I wish we had the same drive for Spiritual food. I wish we learned to thank God for every day. I wish we thanked God for the many blessings we have. Some of us can thank and some of us complain about not having enough. Thanksgiving should not be based on how much we have.

We should be reminded that the Pilgrims’ situation was very different when they had their first Thanksgiving. Let me try to describe the situation in 1620. The winter was hard and bitter. Many of the Pilgrims were sick; many women stopped eating so they could feed their children. Many died; in fact, half of the 102 Pilgrims died of malnourishment and disease. They were buried in unmarked graves so the natives would not know how small their number had become.

Someone recommended that it should be called a Day of Mourning. Others said, “No, it is a Day of Thanksgiving.” After all, even though half had died, the other half had NOT. There were enough reason to thank God.

Do you have enough reason to thank God for?

What are you thankful for this morning? (Video)

Life, health, family, friends, free land…

How about for knowing God in your life? How about for the opportunity that God saved us from eternal death, SALVATION.

What can we learn from Psalm 100?

The Psalm is written for a nation that complained a lot when they were roaming in the desert. Now that they are settled and have many blessings, God reminds them to not forget Him and give Him thanks for all the blessings.

David gives five Thanksgiving commandments:

1- “Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.”

This means shout like a loud trumpet, declare God’s presence in your life. Perhaps God solved your problem, perhaps He did something special in your life, Perhaps you want to thank God for just knowing that God is in your life, although things are not as you want them to be. Perhaps there is a sickness, pain, an accident, or trouble, but you know that the Lord is there with you. Shout to the Lord with joy for HIS PRESENCE!

A missionary was telling a story about the tribe whom he served. He served in a place where there was progressive blindness. People were born with healthy vision, but there was something in that area that caused people to lose their sights as they matured.

This missionary developed a process to arrest progressive blindness. So people came to him for healing and operation. The results were good. Now, this tribe did not have the word “thank you”. So instead, they said a word that means, “I will tell your name.” Wherever they went, they would tell the missionary’s name as thank you. They proclaimed the name of their healer.

Listen now, the best way we can proclaim thanks to our Lord, is to SHOUT with Joy to the LORD, ALL the EARTH. Can you thank God by proclaiming His name?

We will continue in English.

1- Sunshine Magazine