An Attitude
of Gratitude—Heb. 13:11-15
He
was acting spoiled—like a basic ingrate. He was smarting off and sassing her.
He was refusing to show her respect.
My
acquaintance had had enough, so he walked over to the kid. He told the boy to
hold up his shirt. The boy obeyed. He pointed to the boy’s belly button. He
told the boy, “Tell me what that is.”
The
boy was stunned. He finally mumbled out the answer, “A belly button.”
My
acquaintance said, “I want you to know that for nine months you were connected
to that woman.” He pointed to the boy's mother. “And fluid flowed out of her
body into yours, and she kept you warm, and she kept you safe, and she kept you
alive, and she went through a great deal of pain to bring you into this world,
and she went through all of that to give you a beginning here. Now you treat
her with respect. You treat her with gratitude.”
By
the time he finished, that boy felt pretty bad. He should have; hopefully he
changed his behavior.
It
is not nice to see someone who has been the recipient of much blessing, treat
the source of great blessing with ingratitude. It is
especially not nice for God when God is the source of that blessing.
Ungratefulness
is the source of all vice. When a person does not have the recognition of a
higher source, he takes everything for granted and recognizes no authority, and
his actions are not accountable.
Back
in the 1980s, a top defense lawyer in the Northeast, was very successful taking
the cases of death row criminals and getting them off. By the mid 80s he had
gotten off 78 convicted first-degree murderers.
He
made this statement, “Though I am committed to these men, I do not admire them.
Of the 78 men that I have freed from the electric chair, I have not received so
much as a thank you card. The common factor to these murderers is they are all
natural ingrates.”
Three
decades ago, Tommy Nelson spoke about how Israel was to be an appreciative
nation. They were a highly accountable nation.
God
consistently reminded every Israelite—every day, every week, every month, every
season, every year, every seven years, every 50 years—he pounded into the
nation the essential truth that the nation of Israel created and owned nothing,
but were responsible for everything.
Do
you know how the day started in Jerusalem? With a sacrifice when the sun came
up, and it ended with a sacrifice at twilight. It showed that God gave them that
day. They thanked God that the sun came up.
Every
week Israel observed the Sabbath. They rested in recognition that the plants,
the animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, the basic creation, the heavens, the
earth, their families, and they themselves all came from God. God made it all;
therefore, they rested on the seventh day.
Six
times in the Israelite year, they had a feast. For example: you celebrated the
new year, you celebrated the independence of the Jew–the Passover, you
celebrated the first fruits of the harvest, you celebrated the end of the
harvest–Pentecost.
You
had six offerings. They included the grain offering to celebrate the harvest,
when God blessed you with financial provisions. You made a burnt offering whenever
your child was born, which meant you offered an offering to God to thank him
for this child and to tell him it was God’s child. You had a thank offering when
something good happened to you. You had offerings when your heart felt full of praise.
Every
seven years you had a sabbatical year. Anybody who owed you money was forgiven
that debt, and it was in recognition that all money and all prosperity was from
God.
Every
7x7 years, every 50 years, you had a year of Jubilee. And all land that you had
received would go back to its original owner, because God would not let anyone
in Israel have a monopoly on the prosperity, and in recognition of the fact that
the land was not yours, it was God’s.
Do
you see what I mean? Every day, every week, every month, every season, every
year, every seven years, or every 50 years, God pounded and pounded and pounded
into Israel’s brain with tithes and offerings, that “your grain, your animals,
the sun, moon, stars, your independence, your salvation, the kid from your womb”
is God’s.
The
word thankfulness is used 166 times in the Bible. There's one guy in the Bible
who every time he eats a meal, he prays. He prays eight times in Scripture for
food. You know who it is? Jesus. Eight of Jesus prayers are over a meal.
And
so this preacher is finishing up this letter to the Christians of Hebrews, and
he is trying to give these people a good motivation, a mature motivation, for
following God. He is trying to give them an attitude of gratitude for following
Jesus. He's trying to help them appreciate the grace of God. He’s telling them,
after the cross, it should be as if our gratitude is on steroids:
11 After the high priest offers the blood of animals as a
sin offering, the bodies of those animals are burned outside the camp. 12 Jesus himself suffered outside
the city gate, so that his blood would make people holy. 13 That’s why we should go
outside the camp to Jesus and share in his disgrace.
Now,
here is the gist of his encouragement. Verses 11-12 reference the sacrifices of
the Old Testament. When you were offered an animal sacrifice in the Old
Testament, your priest took the remains of the animal and took them outside the
camp and burned them.
The skin
and flesh of the bull, together with its legs, insides, and the food still in
its stomach, are to be taken outside the camp and burned on a wood fire near the
ash heap (Lev. 4:11-12.) CEV
The remains of the bull and the goat whose
blood was taken into the most holy place must be taken outside the camp and
burned (Lev. 16:27.) CEV
To
a people about to quit, the Preacher attempts to resurrect an attitude of gratitude.
He points them back to the cross. He takes them to the Old Testament teachings,
upon which the cross was based.
In Jerusalem
you would take the remains of the animal and take them out to the ash heap, the
city dump-outside the city-to a placed called Gehenna. The burning was ongoing.
Sometimes that word in the New Testament is used, and we translate it in a
different way—“hell.”
The
Preacher of Hebrews wants you to see this image of Gehenna—where the Romans
would crucify the criminals. There would be skulls and bones everywhere. It was
a place like this where the Lord was crucified.
Question:
how should you treat the Creator of the World? If the Creator of the World must
die, how should he die?
They
crucified your Lord and mine in a place that was at the crossroads where people
would come by from all directions, and they stripped him naked. They
would have taken his body and thrown it onto the trash heap to burn it: were it
not for two men with power, influence, and money, Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus.
They took that body, wrapped in a shroud, and placed it hurriedly in Joseph’s
tomb.
I
like what one writer said about all of this,
“I am recovering
the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but
on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap… at the kind of place
where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is
where he died and that is what he died about. And that is where churchmen
should be and what churchmanship is about.”
--George
McDonald
McDonald
is talking about the place where Jesus was crucified. Jesus never won “man of
the year” from the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. He never won any commendations
from the Jerusalem City Council. Jesus did not die in a cathedral. He died on a
trash heap, next to a marketplace. He died stripped naked, in shame, those were
the circumstances surrounding his death.
The
writer of Hebrews wants you to see all of the foul and decay this fallen
creation has to offer surrounding Jesus. He wants you to see the flies on the degraded
bodies. He wants you to smell the foul odors of decaying flesh.
Isn’t it
interesting that the most sacred place on this planet… was at the city dump?
We
have become so accustomed to seeing pictures of Jesus on the cross. They seem
detached from us; removed from our experiences. They are safe and distant.
I
knew a guy who went to the house of a fellow, and there was this huge painting
of Jesus on the cross. It was very vivid. It was well done; the fellow said it
was probably the best one he had ever seen. As a Christian, his the first
thought was “Praise God. That should have been me.”
Later,
he began to think himself, what if a secularist came into that guy’s house? What
would he have done when he saw that painting? Agnostic people are so far
removed from a biblical understanding, they have no appreciation of what the
Bible teaches about the cross; so what would he think?
What
if we visited the house of a Buddhist who had a giant painting of a monk
burning himself alive?
What
if we visited the house of a fundamentalist Muslim, and we saw the picture of a
Muslim man being killed by mob violence by “Christians” during the crusade? And
it was in vivid color? And all of the gruesome details were included?
How
are you going to react to that? What if the owner of the house says, “Want to
stay the night? Igor, prepare a room for our guest.” Make you feel a bit creepy,
would it not?
Our
lovely truck broke down the other day, and I was with two of my girls; we
walked about a mile back to our house. Various people offered help. It was very
nice of them. It was morning; the sun was up; it was a beautiful day.
What
if it had been at night? What if it had been pouring down rain? What if we had experienced
thunder and lightning? What if a man stopped, rolled down his window, and had
hanging on his rearview mirror a toy-like model-very precisely done-of a man
dying in electric chair? What if the precision was so detailed, we could see
the wisps of smoke coming out of little guy’s head? And what if the driver
asked, “Want a ride?”
How
do you think we would feel?
Those
are probably close to the emotions that some of these people in the cultures
surrounding these Christians of Hebrews felt as they observed this group of
people, who were dedicating themselves to following the fellow who had been
crucified. It was just flat-out weird. Jesus was just another criminal. He was
not somebody to be respected, much less love and adored.
(Ancient
graffiti details the God of the Christians being crucified on a cross. He had
the body of a man—and the head of a donkey.)
These
were some of the challenges the Christians were facing.
Jesus
died at the city death, and he bore all of the scorn and disgrace. We follow a
Savior who endured. He was reliable. He calls his people to do the same.
I
have seen evangelistic Bible studies that imploded because the CHRISTIANS were
not reliable. At times the non-Christians hung in there because they wanted to
learn something about the God. It was the Christians who were not reliable.
But
Jesus was reliable. He was not buried with a flag on his coffin. Instead, he
was faithful… despite the scorn. Verses 14-15 tell us:
14 On this earth we don’t have a city that lasts forever,
but we are waiting for such a city. 15 Our
sacrifice is to keep offering praise to God in the name of Jesus. (Heb.
13:11-15.) CEV
We
offer sacrifice and praise. We do it everyday. We have offered something well
pleasing in God's sight.
Here's
where it really comes down to it. This is the challenge. Verse 13–let us join
him outside the camp. Let us identify with him. Your will be done not my will.
That…
is… so… hard.
Jesus
says—I know. My prayer in the garden was “let this cup pass… but not my will be
done; you’re will be done.”
Can
we reach that point? Can we pray that prayer?
It
is so costly. It is so scary. It is counterintuitive. It is not what we want to
do. It forces us into a corner.
And
the Preacher of Hebrews says, “Do you want to get in or not.” It is so hard.
You
say, “I don't want to be an ingrate. But I want to grab as much as I can have in
this life.”
He
says, “You got to make a choice.”
Now,
the interesting thing is that does not necessarily mean God will not entrust us
to manage things of this world, or organizations in this world.
Our
leadership, however, will mean nothing to us if we are not serving God. There
will be no ulterior motives of grabbing all that we can out of this life. It'll
be property management—for God.
Remarkably,
all of this is very liberating. When you play for an audience of one, you are
truly free. People cannot hurt you. They cannot say anything to hurt you. Ultimately,
while you offer them basic human respect, their opinion means nothing; God’s
opinion means everything--you play for an audience of one.
That's
why Hebrews says unapologetically to devote yourself to the most important
group in the world. You're not losing anything, if you lose everything. The
great philosopher Don Meredith once said, “Them that ain’t got it can't lose.”
To
be candid, I don't lie awake at night wondering what the people of New Guinea
think about me. I don't lie awake at night worrying about what the people in
China think about me. I rarely worry about what the people of the United States
think about me.
How
about you? What if I told you that everyone in Christ is a leader. Not
necessarily in the church, but in this world.
Frankly,
some of these people did not feel positive emotions. They were called to make a
decision with the will. It was tough, but they were called to practice agape
love.
What
if we parented like we live our Christian lives? What if we did everything
based about whether or not our kids liked us? We have a term that describes
that parenting style–child abuse.
No,
we practice agape love; we seek what's best for the child. We sacrifice. We are
willing to surrender their good opinion of us, the opinion of others, and
status; we will do what it takes.
That
makes us leaders in the culture. Every Christian is a leader in the world. You
may be thinking, “No one is following me.”
The world
defines leadership by who is following;
the
Bible defines leadership by who is leading.
What
that means is if God is leading you, and no one else is following you, that
trumps somebody else who has a ton of followers but is not following God. If
you are following God, GOD is leading. By the world’s standards, Jesus was a
failure as a leader when he died on the cross, he had virtually no followers…
except for the fact he was following his Heavenly Father. Because of who he was
following, I would say this was the greatest moment of leadership in the
history of the world.
That's
how we are supposed to live for God. That's what this letter is about. We
sacrifice the opinions of others, we do what's best according to our benefactor,
God, and we live in agape love. We play for an audience of one.
Last
week I saw a movie about Margaret Thatcher—THE IRON LADY. I was stunned that
the people in the Motion Picture industry were as faithful as they were to the
events of her life, and that they treated her with respect and even admiration.
Here
was a woman, who from the very beginning had to live her professional life
surrounded by men, which meant she was a novelty. Most did not respect her or
her opinion. They certainly did not like her.
She
was isolated and marginalized in so many ways. What those experiences did, though,
was form her character. She learned to function without the admiration of those
around her. She learned to diagnosis solutions to societies problems
and proclaim them. This was unusual. All other government officials and
political leaders were posturing for position to gain a political settlement or
to gain votes. Great Britain was at an economic and cultural stalemate. It was
in a mess and falling.
So
she up and announced, “Here is what we need to do, and I want to lead.” Stunningly,
she won leadership of her party and then the nation.
She
was not flawless, but did you know that she is the first living prime minister to
have a statue in the House of Parliament?
All
of this was because she was willing to stand alone and lead. We need to offer
ourselves to lead a fallen world.
How do we
cultivate this attitude of gratitude?
How
do we summon the God-given power in our will to follow God stand out from
culture?
Well,
in Hebrews, the Preacher says–
1. We meet
with the church.
We
don't care what everybody else says, we go to the most important group in the
world and we hear them tell us once again what is most important. Because God
is speaking through them.
It
is not as hard as you might think to know whether he is pleased with us,
because
2. We get
into his Word. And we do that through the Bible. One of the reasons why we should get
into the word is because it helps us understand what God wants.
Finally,
3. We express
our concerns to the Heavenly Father. This is called prayer. We offer God our thoughts,
our yearnings, our questions, and our laments.
Doesn’t
it make you feel good to know that of all the groups on the planet, if you are
in Christ, you are part of the most important one?
I
hope that thought gives you strength for tomorrow.
Thanks
James Thompson, David De Silva, and Tommy Nelson
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