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When you think of Thanksgiving, what do you think about, do you think about the landing of the pilgrims in 16 20 on this shore after a long hard trip across the Atlantic?
Or do you think about the landing of Turkey and dressing on your plate at your house on Thanksgiving morning?
Well, either one would be ok.
But don’t you know that they were grateful beyond all measure, leaving their land of difficulty and hardship, especially about their religion and their faith and coming to a new land, unknown adventurous, uncertain, probably lots of hardships, but they were free, they were free to worship God the way they intended.
And when I think about Thanksgiving, I think about what they must have thought about on that first Thanksgiving that they’ve observed and probably they would have read the 100th psalm.
So I want us to read this 100th psalm.
And then I want to talk about what God is saying to us in it.
Shout joyfully to the Lord. All the earth serve the Lord with gladness.
Come before him with joyful singing. Know that the Lord himself is God.
It is He who has made us and we not, we ourselves.
We are his people and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with Thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him.
Bless his name for the Lord is good. His kindness is everlasting and his faithfulness to all generations.
What an awesome song.
And if you think about it for a moment, that is not a single negative note in that whole song, it’s all positive.
It’s all about God. It’s all about who he is and what he does.
And it certainly ought to be our attitude.
And though our circumstances today were probably like theirs, they left because they were afraid, uh they left because they didn’t have religious freedom.
They left the continent because they wanted a new beginning and a new start and a new life.
And every time a person trust the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they’re born again.
It’s the beginning of a new life. Does that mean the end of problems and heartaches and burdens? No.
And neither did that mean that for them because there were Indians to face and co winners and all the rest.
And so life was new, but it was the beginning of a whole new perspective on life.
And when I read this psalm, I think about how positive it is in every single way.
And I think about all the things we have to be grateful for.
So I want us to look at this psalm in the light of what God is saying to us and what our attitude ought to be toward Him, in spite of all the things that we see today.
So I want us to look at it in the light.
First of all, of how positive it is. Look at this, shout joyful to the Lord.
Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before him with joyful singing. Know that the Lord himself is God.
Enter his gates for thanksgiving. Give thanks to him. Bless his name for the Lord is good.
His kindness is everlasting and his faith fill in all generations. Think about all that God has said.
In those few verses, we have to shout, serve, come know, enter his gates into his courts, give him thanks and bless his name.
Think about it. Look back over all the weeks of this year.
How good God has been to you in all the kind of ways he’s been good.
What does he say? Shout about him, serve him. Come before him, know him.
Enter his gates in his court of praise, give thanks and bless his name.
We have lots to be grateful for.
And then I think about in this passage, the Lord is a key figure in this song.
He’s our creator. He’s the good shepherd, the provider, the protector. He’s good to us.
Loving kindness is everlasting faithful forever. When you think about God.
Think about how awesome He is, how good He is to you every day.
You could go to sleep and he could have gone to sleep last night.
And I woke up this morning. You could have who woke you up?
You said I woke myself up. No, you didn’t let me tell you something.
God wakes us up every morning.
You may have to have an alarm, but God still is the one who wakes you up.
He’s the one who gives you a good attitude about the day.
He’s the one who enables you to love someone whom you’re married to love your Children, love your husband, love your wife.
You are blessed and we have, we have much to be grateful for, to God and this psalm is all about giving thanks to God.
So I wonder how often in a given week or a month you just stop and give thanks to God.
Just say Lord, I just wanna thank you. I wanna thank you. Thank you. Thank you Jesus.
I wanna thank you that I can talk to you. I wanna thank you that you hear me.
And Lord, there’s a lot of things going on in this world I don’t like but you’re God and you’re gonna make it turn out to suit you no matter what you’re Jehovah God.
We have him to praise and the same praises too.
And I love this song because it’s all about him. Now.
Many times in the Psalms, we had managed to, uh make a joyful noise and often times we forget that moan and groan and talk about how bad things are the world watch this.
The world is always gonna be bad that watch this.
You and I, no matter what the world does, we live in this awesome capsule of the grace of God almighty God is in our life, protecting us, watching others and caring for us.
And even when we go through times of sickness and heartache, disappointment, he hasn’t changed.
Think about this, your friends come and go and sometimes the friends you think are the most faithful and loyal are not there when you need them.
I love it because God’s name is mentioned at 31 times in the first book of the Bible.
This book is all about God. And when we come to Thanksgiving, he’s the object of our thanksgiving.
And so when I think about the Psalms, so I want you to turn to several of them and just read them uh together.
And if you look in Psalm 66 1st, Psalms 66 1st.
And uh I want us to read it and look at it and see what God is saying because He says the same thing in every one of them.
Psalms 66 verse one and two. Look at this. Shout, how, oh that’s not very good.
Shout how joyfully to God. All the earth sing the glory of his name. Make his praise glorious.
That is when he says, shout joyfully cheerfully, happily, lighthearted, thrilled and excited about the fact that we love God, shout joyfully to God all the earth and then go to if you will to Psalm 81.
And let’s look at that for a moment. Psalm 81. And look at these verses again.
The scripture says, sing for joy to God. Our strength, shout joyfully to the God of Jacob.
Raise a song, strike the temporal blow, the trumpet. These people made a noise serving God.
And oftentimes we think about being reverent, what the ways to be reverent.
And I think about churches, for example, where you’re supposed to walk in and be quiet.
Don’t say anything and everybody is quiet.
The so the choir sings a quiet hymn and the pastor gets up and very quietly reads the pastors scriptures and says a few things quiet and you go out quietly listen.
He says, shout joyfully. Then if you will turn to the 95th song, 95th Psalm verse one and two.
Look at that. Oh, come, let us sing for joy to the Lord.
Let us shout Jo to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with Thanksgiving.
Let us shout joyfully to him with Psalms.
Isn’t it interesting that the Psalmist says every time we to shout joyfully, you can’t shout joyfully and be quiet.
You said, well, I thought you should come to church and be reverent. Reverence doesn’t always mean quietness.
It means an attitude of, of a reverence, an attitude about the one I’m, I’m serving rev I can reverence for God and shout to the ends of the earth.
I can reverence God and be absolutely quiet.
Reverencing God speaks of our acknowledgment of Him who he is and all that is.
And think about what He’s done in your life.
Every single one of us has a reason to be grateful to God and to shout His praises.
And yet we are taught to be reverent, be quiet when you go to church and reverence God.
But when I look at the psalms, there’s nothing quiet about that. Listen to it.
Shout joly shout joyfully, shout, joyful, shout joyfully in this 98 psalm shout joyfully to the Lord. All.
Break, listen to break forth and sing for joy and sing praises. That’s what the choir does.
And we sing with them sing praises to the Lord with the liar.
That’s a string instrument with a liar and the sound of melody with trumpets and the sound of the horn.
Shout joyfully but the Lord, the king and the Lord.
And when I read those passages, I think there should be such a joy in our hearts and listen.
If you’re not joyful in a joyful church, you’re not gonna be joyful in a quiet house.
And I think God has us meet weekly to be reminded of the truth of God’s word.
To reminded, to be reminded of who he is and what he’s doing in our life.
We all have to be reminded because we can all get caught up in what we do day after day and week after week.
And once in a while when I’m sitting home studying, I’ve been studying for a long time that day.
I just find myself thinking, well, I’ll be getting down in all of this.
So I just walk through my house and praise God. You ask me, what do I say?
Whatever comes to my mind? Thank you, Jesus. Thank you that I’ve learned something new.
Thank you that you’re in my heart. Thank you, that you get me ready for this. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, God. Who hears me? Nobody.
But God doesn’t make any difference because I’m not talking to anybody by God.
You have a right to be quiet and worshiping.
You have the right, the privilege and the biblical, the biblical reason to shout as loud as necessary.
If that’s the expression of your heart, that is we are to make a holy noise before God praising him and thanking him.
And so these verses, these are just a few verses in the Psalms.
And then let’s think about this and listening to these psalms and how God speaks to us.
And there are many other verses, but there’s seven reasons for our joyful thanksgiving.
If you think about all these verses that we’ve read. And the first one is this, he’s our God.
To think that, listen, there are many gods created by many people down through the ages, many gods and they worship them.
They are gods that do not exist.
They’re gods that are in their mind, they’re gods that they’ve been taught and that it’s, it’s a, but we have a reason to shout to holy God.
And so if you think about this, that the first chapter of the first book of the Bible is all about who.
It’s all about God. It is an expression of God. What’s the expression of God?
It’s creation in the beginning, God created. It’s all about God, the creator.
And sometimes we forget that and think about all the things He created.
But he intends for us to know that He’s the source of all creation. He’s still the creator.
He’s the one who created a new life within you.
You were born again, almighty God, sovereign Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ, his son.
We have so much to be grateful for He is our God.
Secondly, he made us, we didn’t make ourselves. He gave, listen, he gave you life.
He gave you the privilege to live. He gave you gifts and talents and skills.
You compare yourself with somebody else. You can’t do that.
God didn’t make him and you like, he made us all differently. He made us all for a purpose.
He’s the God who has created us and he’s the God who’s made us and he’s not made any mistakes, anything and everything in our life, God has allowed for a reason.
So think he’s our God. He made us and we are his people. That’s what the scripture says.
We are His people. We’re the people of God.
You’re not just somebody, you’re a child of God.
And we have a reason to shout to the world that and then of course, he says, we’re the sheep of his pasture.
Think about that. Think about how intimate this is. He says he’s made us and he’s made us for himself.
We’re his people. We belong to Him. We’re the sheep of his pasture.
What a beautiful way of speaking about our relationship to him.
Think about all the other animals and so forth in the world. Sheep and a shepherd.
Doesn’t that sound like God? Why, why, why is it? Why did God choose that relationship in the scripture?
Because He loves us? And because he wants us to know that his attitude toward us is he shepherds us, watches over us, cares for us, protects us, guides us.
That’s what shepherds do. And I will never forget this.
My first trip to the holy land and we were sitting in this restaurant and uh eating and I was sitting next to the window and I saw three shepherds bring their sheep together at, at a, at a whale and everything else is going on.
And I just happened to be watching this and I was watching out of curiosity because all the sheep mixed up with each other.
And I thought what a mess that’s gonna be.
I couldn’t hear what we’re saying, but I did see this shepherd.
One of these shepherds lifted up his, uh, his rod and said a few things.
I can’t tell what he was saying.
I watched those sheep separate according to the voice of that shepherd until they were all going in a different direction.
And what brought them away from the water to follow.
A shepherd was the voice that they knew their shepherd. They knew which to follow.
And I’ll never forget that thinking God, I hope I’m like that.
I hope I can live such a life that whenever your voice comes, I’ll know.
It’s you, it’s not the devil’s not somebody else, it’s you.
And when he says we’re the sheep of his pasture and he didn’t just say we’re his sheep of his pasture, which means he’s the provider, he’s the provider of the shepherd.
We’re his sheep. Now, sometimes we may act like goats, but we, we, we are not goats, we are sheep and if a person is lost, they fit the goat attitude probably.
But we’re the sheep of his pasture. We have a shepherd.
We have somebody to protect us, to provide for us, to guide us, to lead us shepherds, protect their sheep shepherds provide for them shepherds watch over them.
And it’s interesting, sheep know their shepherd’s voice.
And I wonder if you know the voice of God in your life, do you know when God is speaking to you?
It’s not just your attitude, it’s not just something you’ve thought of.
Can you say that you can identify the voice of God when he speaks to you?
I think there’s one thing that I learned very early in life and it probably was my Pentecostal background a little bit because somehow the emphasis on prayer made me conscious of the fact that God would God would speak to me if I would listen to him.
And I was saved when I was 12.
And so one of the first things I wanted to do is to learn how to listen to Him didn’t take me long.
And I remember saying, Lord, I don’t, I don’t know uh what all that means, but I do want to learn to be able to listen to you and, and to know that you’re the one who’s speaking to me.
And if you think about it for a moment, what more valuable lesson can you learn than to listen to the shepherd?
He said, I don’t think God speaks to me. Yes, he does. You may not listen.
That’s your fault. Does God speak to you? Yes, he does.
And God intends for us to listen to Him. We’re the sheep of his pasture.
Not just sheep, the sheep of his pasture.
We have a shepherd, not two shepherds, just one shepherd, the Lord Jesus.
When you trusted him as your savior, he did an awesome thing.
He came into your life, into your spirit and to live his life through you.
So we have his voice, we have his protection. We have his provision.
We have the pathway that he wants us to walk.
When I think about how intimately loving and personal God is, we should never feel like a stranger.
You, you should never have to feel alone.
Now, I know there’s a certain amount of aloneness when you’re by yourself.
If, if you have to live by yourself or whatever it might be, but not alone.
Once you, once you receive Jesus Christ as your savior, he’s in you.
He is this, watch this, watch this carefully.
He is the shepherd who has created every single thing that exists and he’s your shepherd.
Do you acknowledge him as that? Do you see him as that?
Do you think of Him as being your personal shepherd? He is?
And we’re his sheep now, we don’t always obey the shepherd. You know what he does?
That’s why He has a rod. Well, you know, God still has a rod. Thank God.
He doesn’t let us get. But so far.
And why do you think there’s a hook on the other end of that road?
Pull them back? How many times has God pulled you and me back in times of trial or temptation or whatever it might be by His grace and love and mercy, an awesome God he is.
And when you read Genesis chapter one, it’s all about God. The watch this.
The rest of the Bible is about God dealing with his sheep and He loves us.
He loves us eternally completely, absolutely enough to cause us the fellowship of Him, to praise Him, to shout His glory and his praises and to give him thanks.
He’s our God. He made us where his people, the scripture says with the sheep of his pasture.
God is good. And if you had to sit down this morning and write out a little biographical sketch of the good things God’s done in your life throughout your life.
You could fill up probably half a book at least 20 or 30 or 40 pages, maybe of how God’s been good to you.
Now, you could take another pen, another book and write down all the things that’s happened to you that were not so good.
I assure you when you count correctly, the good things that God has done in your life far outweighs the difficulty, hardship and pain that you’ve suffered.
But somehow we forget that we forget how good He’s been because we’ve all been through difficult times.
We’ve all heard we’ve suffered physically, we heard suffered emotionally.
We’ve all been through difficult times, but we all listen to this we all live in Godly Times because you are filled with the spirit of God.
Your name has been written in the lamb’s book of life.
You’re on your way to heaven no matter what the world does, the whole thing can blow up.
It’s not gonna affect your eternal life. We forget how good God is.
We can sing about it once or twice a year but think about how good he’s been to you.
You say well, but you just don’t know how bad it’s been for me.
No, you don’t know how bad it’s been for people around you.
But the truth is He’s been good to you because even in the difficult times, God showed up when you were in need.
God showed up when you were sick. He showed up when you were lonely.
He showed up when you were going through times that you couldn’t share with anybody else and you were lonely and you were fed up with life and you thought about it and he showed up why?
Because he’s an awesome good God. And the bible says his loving kindness endures forever.
Think about this when you and I going through a tough time, we have his loving kindness.
Now, we may not recognize it, but we have his loving kindness.
Sometimes you say, well, what does God chastise us because He loves us?
And if a sheep gets a stray, the shepherd goes after the sheep depends upon him with the sheep.
How far, what he may have to tap him a little bit to remind him not to do that again.
Watch this carefully. Can you honestly say that you’re happy when God chastises you?
Can you say that a man? I didn’t think I’d get much on that.
Think about this. If God never chastise us, what would we do? We keep going through?
We went over the hill, fall off the mountain.
It is God’s loving hand that chastises us to remind us, don’t walk out of his will.
There’s danger of that. You, you’re gonna regret it. You, you, you’re gonna find yourself in trouble.
Just stay with the pack. Follow the shepherd, listen to his voice because the shepherd’s always gonna provide what we need when we need it, how we need it.
Does that mean there’ll never be rainy days, hard days, difficult days, rocky days to work on.
No, but the good shepherd is that a protective un to goddess?
This psalm is all about God’s goodness and our worship of Him and our recognition of who he is.
And so his faithfulness continues with us throughout all generations that is watch this.
You will never have a moment of your life.
When God ceases to be faithful, he will always be faithful. He will always be who He says he is.
He will always do what he says he’ll do.
And when I think about our heavenly father, always being who he is always doing what he says, always providing what He promised, always being with us through any and every circumstance of life, we should shout.
Hallelujah, praise to God continually. This is the God whom we serve.
Not the God, the world serves because the, the the the God, the world serves as all confused.
It’s mixed up with good, bad and indifferent and they pacify themselves saying, well, God understands the, the the God the world serves is not the God of the Bible.
It’s the God of the devil that compromises sin and makes sin acceptable and misleads people to do evil, to think evil, to become evil.
That’s not the God of the Bible. You.
And I have a God who cares so much for us that He loves us enough to chastise us to keep us in the center of his will, which is the place we understand and experience the love of God most.
So when I think about it and think about all of that, this says to us, it speaks to me of His, of his untiring goodness, continuous goodness to us.
Always his sacrificial love for us. Think about the cross and his eternal faithfulness to us.
Think of those three things. His un towering goodness is always there, his sacrificial love for us, always there His eternal faithfulness to us.
We don’t ever have to worry about him changing.
That’s the awesome God we serve, we should praise him and thank him and glorify his name.
You say, well, I believe he’s forgotten me. No, you may have forgotten him.
You may be one of those sheep that’s gone astray.
But if you’ll notice in the scripture, watch this, are you listening? Say, amen.
Jesus never whipped a sheep, never beat a sheep, but he went after the sheep and brought them back.
And so you may feel like, well, I know I was saved back on to somewhere, but God’s sort of forgotten me because I backs and got into this and got into that.
No, I’ll tell you what the situation is.
You’re living in sin and the good shepherd is waiting for you to come home.
He said, well, how do I come home by asking him to forgive you of your sins, asking him to help you, get your life back together, asking him to encourage you and show you the way and thank him for his forgiveness and thank him for his goodness to you.
The good shepherd doesn’t beat his sheep.
It’s the sheep who go astray and he comes after us to bring us home.
When I think about God’s awesome love. And I think about this awesome psalm.
Shout joy to the Lord, the good shepherd and the good shepherd will be your shepherd to guide you.
Lead you protect you, watch over you through the last moment of your life.
When you breathe your last breath, you’ll see him for the first time.
What an awesome eternal thought that is if you have never trusted Jesus Christ as your savior, you won’t see Him, you will be eternal, separated from you.
So that’s not fair. He’s warned you.
He’s told you he sent the message to you over and over and over again.
And why have you rejected him?
The one person you need in your life above everybody else is Jesus.
Come on to me or you labor in the heavy laden, I’ll give you a rest for God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life.
If you confess your sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.
Why fight God wait, you can receive the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior. Everything changes.
Your name is written instantly in the Lamb’s book of Life from which there are no erasures.
And when you breathe your last breath, first person you will see is the good shepherd.
The Lord Jesus. Is that not worth praising God for amen. Let’s give God a hand.
Praise God Father.
We thank you and praise you for your goodness and love and mercy.
Told us that’s indescribable, praise, thanksgiving and blessing to you. Thank you for loving us.
Thank you for putting up with us. Thank you for forgiving us.
Thank you for being here for us 24 hours a day.
Knowing everything about us, know how to heal us for me and everything and know how to bless us.
We just bless you this morning in Jesus. Name.
Amen.