As always, these are only notes. They are not a manuscript of what I say on Sunday morning. Oftentimes my notes are fairly close to what I say on Sunday morning. However, this week I made some major changes. Check out the audio file for further details and illustrations that communicate this idea of how to be filled with joy through active thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away. So I’d like to start out with a question that, hopefully, will prepare us for not only a great day, but hopefully give us a great way to live.  My question is this, “Are you thankful?”

I find that many of us are passive in our thankfulness. We’re thankful but we don’t spend much time in that department. That is, if I asked you if you were thankful, you’d say, “Yes.” And If I asked you what you were thankful for, you’d be able to name 10 things fairly easily, 20 things with a little difficulty, and you’d maybe struggle with a list of 30 things. Listing 50 things in 10 minutes would be very difficult for most of us, because we are passive in our thanksgiving.

How many of you have enough joy? How many of you wouldn’t want more joy? How many of you are just busting out at the seams when it comes to joy? Joy is a by-product of thanksgiving. Joy fills us when we see that we are blessed and seeing that we are blessed comes when we stop taking many of the things in life for granted and begin to see them as something that God has given us in love.

Now, it is one thing to be thankful. It is yet another to live out of a thankful heart, where I am constantly naming things in my life that I am thankful for as they come to me. What does this look like?

Someone once asked me the primary difference between this church and most other churches. I said, “That’s easy.” Most churches are primarily about programs and they have small groups as one of their programs. Small groups are secondary most churches. New Community is primarily about small groups and everything that we do feeds into and out of community and our small groups.

If you are a thankful person, then thanksgiving is secondary to living. Living is primary and occasionally you stop and give thanks. What we’re going to be talking about today is about living primarily out of a thankful heart. How thankful are you in an aggressive or forward kind of way?

In thanksgiving, we are called to not just be thankful, but to live out of a deep sense of gratitude and thanksgiving.

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Leading Christian psychologist Larry Craab wrote in his book Connecting the following:

We’ve been asking the question, “Who am I?” What identifies who I am? Am I identified by what others say about me? Do I find my value and my worth my purpose or my identity, my sense of belonging from others, by what they say or do to me. Am I emotionally healthy when people are patting me on the back and saying, “Atta boy” and does my world fall apart when I mess up or somehow don’t live up to somebody’s will for me? Do I take my report card to my husband or my wife and receive my value and my sense of self worth from them or do I get it from somewhere else. Do I go to my husband or my wife, my parents or my friends and at some basic level ask the question, “Am I worthwhile? Am I valuable? Do I belong?” Or do I go to my husband or my wife, my parents or my friend knowing who I am, knowing that I’m worthwhile, knowing that I’m valuable, knowing who I am when I go to them? Depending on which way you approach people in your life, it makes a huge difference on the level of confidence and maturity that you display. The former will always lead to times of deep anxiety, the later towards much peace.

We said that just as a building inspector requires a firm foundation for your house, so that your house will weather all the storms Mother Nature throws at it, so it is that your Creator created you to have a firm foundation, which is Christ. As long as you and I build our identity on anything that moves, on anything that can be taken away, on anything that is dependent upon sinful people, your foundation, and therefore your value and worth will always be unstable and you will always have a shifting foundation, which will cause anxiety, fear, and stress at the very core of your being. God created you to know who you are and you can only know who you are when you understand at the heart level whose you are. We can only answer the question “Who am I?” when we come to know the Great I AM.

We said that we cannot find our identity from anything on the outside. We cannot allow anything or anyone else to define us. We cannot be defined, we cannot find our value, we cannot know our worth apart from our Creator and our Lord Jesus Christ. You are so valuable to him that he was willing to die in order that you might have life, life abundant. We must find our value and our worth in him, because in him our world no longer shakes, but becomes firm. The storms in life the value and worth and sense of belonging that he gives us, but our house, our identity stands firm.

This morning I’d like to continue probing the question, “Who am I?”

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The people of New Community go into Lawton and the surrounding communities on the 3rd Saturday of each month and serve the people and businesses there. We regularly meet legitimate needs in our communities and sometimes, just for the goodness of it, give things away to bless people. There’s enough bad in the world. Each month, as a community, we strive to bring a bit of good back into our world. We usually meet at 10:00 in the parking lot on the North side of Adam’s hardware.

Our high school and middle school youth generally meet the 1st and 3rd Sunday of each month from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. for a time of fun, food, and spiritual engagement.