Sermon
Thankless Receiving
November 28, 2004
Pastor Donald Sheley

I've been thinking about this whole matter of thanksgiving, and I read early this morning...it says that Governor Bradford of Massachusetts made this first Thanksgiving proclamation three years after the Pilgrims had settled at Plymouth. And this is what he said: Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings. Signed - William Bradford,Ye Governor of Ye Colony of Massachusetts.

So since that day in 1623, Thanksgiving has been celebrated in our nation. But I was thinking of the contrast. There is such a thing as gratitude and also there is ingratitude. There is thanksgiving and there can be complaining. And so today our message is very simple. I've selected two portions of Scripture; one to illustrate ingratitude, and the other to illustrate gratitude.

It's Luke chapter 17, beginning to read at verse 11 through 19. It says: Now it happened as He (speaking of Christ) went to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.

Now let me take just a moment and explain so we have the setting of our story. If we had a map before us, a map of Palestine, it would be a little nation about 120 miles from top to bottom, which would be about the distance from here to Sacramento. And in its widest part it would be about 70 miles wide.

In the times of Christ it was divided into three sections. There was the southern section known as Judea. It was in this part that the little city of Jerusalem existed. In the middle part was an area known as the Samaria. It was a very small square mileage piece of real estate. And then up near the Sea of Galilee, which is about 35 or 40 miles from Jerusalem, we have the area known as Galilee. So those are the three sections. But when we read the Scriptures we pick up some of the stories, that there was a great animosity, a great feeling of hatred between the Samaritans and the rest of the Jewish people, both in the south and in the north. Let me explain to you how that happened.

Seven hundred and twenty years before Christ Assyrians came across from what we today would know as Iraq or Iran and they scooped down on this little piece of real estate known as Palestine, and they took away many of its inhabitants, and most of them they took out of the area which was known as Samaria. Now in ancient times when they did that they would take those people out and transplant them back to their land and make servants out of them, and then they would reach out in their various lands that they occupied and they would bring in certain people to start occupying this new land.

And the book of 2 Kings 17 tells us that they had reached out from four different countries of the world and brought people and settled them there in the area known as Samaria. And the result was...and those people married into the little families that were left behind such as the peasants and the slaves and the people who worked the fields, and the result was that in that intermarriage they formed a mixed group of people. That is, the Jewish people prided themselves on purity of race, and when anybody married outside the Jewish race, in an Orthodox Jewish home, they had a funeral for them.

And here are these Samaritans, people made up from mixed races from all over that known world, and the Jewish people did not want to have relationships with them. Now it got a little worse because what happened Nehemiah comes back a couple hundred years later from captivity from Babylon and he is sent there to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem because they are all broken down. Well the Samaritans want to come down and help him, but they reject the Samaritans, and of course there is great hatred and there is bickering that's going on and even it could have resulted in a little war. And this of course antagonized the Samaritans. They won't even let us come down and help them. They were a rejected people.

Now they did not believe in all the writings of the prophets. The only religious writings that they believed in were the first five books of the Bible; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That's all they believed in. They rejected everything else that the Jewish people believed were the old sacred text.

But then something else happened...you go down a little further in the pages of history and in the year about 450 years before Christ again this thing erupted between Samaria and the Jews, and the Jewish people just go in and just wipe out all of their centers of worship and just tear down their temple. And that created tremendous bitterness so deep that 400 years later when Jesus Christ arrives on the scene of history that feuding and that bitterness still exist between this little nucleus of people known as the Samaritans.

As Jewish people when they would make their journey up to the Sea of Galilee, the easiest way to go was from Jerusalem right straight up through Samaria, but they rejected that route. They would go east, go down the hill, down to Jericho, which was just north of the Dead Sea, cross over the Jordan River, walk up the eastern side of the river until they got the Sea of Galilee. That way they could bypass these people known as the Samaritans that they did not like. They had no dealings with them. Now that's the setting of our story.

Let's go back to it. Now it happened as He went up to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. And then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off.

Let's stop. Leprosy is something that is a disease that most of us know little about because it's fairly well been wiped out in our part of the world, but there are parts of the world where leprosy still exists.

Back in 1956, I was in the city of Calcutta India with a crusade and after a service one night I noticed this little lady standing out in front of the missionary's home, and her hands were gone, and with the stubs she is cradling this little baby and she's crying out for help. And I said to the missionary, could you tell me about this lady? He said, yes pastor. She has leprosy. It's a very loathsome disease. What actually happens is that portions of the body begin to decay and die, and they drop off. So you'll find in some of the lepers bodies the thumbs have dropped off, and the fingers have dropped off, and the ear has dropped off, and the nose...over a long period of time, it's a living death. You're living in a body that's decaying and rotting and just wilting away.

And this little mother standing there had no hands to cradle her little one. Leprosy - it's a terrible disease. And the Bible has much to say about leprosy. Take your Bible and go back with me to page 77 or 78 in the passage in Leviticus, and here we have the instructions that God gives to Moses as to how the nation of Israel is to handle this loathsome disease. And this is what it says in chapter 13: The LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: "When a man has on the skin of his body a swelling, a scab, or a bright spot, and it becomes on the skin of his body like a leprous sore, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. The priest shall examine the sore on the skin of the body; and if the hair on the sore has turned white, and the sore appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous sore. Then the priest shall examine him, and pronounce him unclean.

But if the bright spot is white on the skin of his body, and does not appear to be deeper than the skin, and its hair has not turned white, then the priest shall isolate the one who has the sore seven days. And the priest shall examine him on the seventh day; and indeed if the sore appears to be as it was, and the sore has not spread on the skin, then the priest shall isolate him another seven days. Then the priest shall examine him again on the seventh day; and indeed if the sore has faded, and the sore has not spread on the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him clean; it is only a scab, and he shall wash his clothes and be clean.

But if the scab should at all spread over the skin, after he has been seen by the priest for his cleansing, he shall be seen by the priest again. And if the priest sees that the scab has indeed spread on the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean. It is leprosy.

When the leprous sore is on a person, then he shall be brought to the priest. And the priest shall examine him; and indeed if the swelling on the skin is white, and it has turned the hair white, and there is a spot of raw flesh in the swelling, it is an old leprosy on the skin of his body. The priest shall pronounce him unclean, and shall not isolate him, for he is unclean."

So that's the way they detected this loathsome disease by sores on the body. And go with me to chapter 14. If perchance there was a healing - it was very rare - but if the leprosy healed this is the way they were to be treated. Notice chapter 14 of Leviticus. Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "This shall be the law of the leper for the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought to the priest. And the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall examine him; and indeed, if the leprosy is healed in the leper, then the priest shall command to take for him who is to be cleansed two living and clean birds, cedar wood, scarlet, and hyssop. And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water.

As for the living bird, he shall take it, the cedar wood and the scarlet and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water. And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed from the leprosy, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose in the open field. He who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean. After that he shall come into the camp, and shall stay outside his tent seven days. But on the seventh day he shall shave all the hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows--all his hair he shall shave off. He shall wash his clothes and wash his body in water, and he shall be clean.

And on the eighth day he shall take two male lambs without blemish, one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish, three-tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil as a grain offering, and one log of oil. Then the priest who makes him clean shall present the man who is to be made clean, and those things, before the LORD, at the door of the tabernacle of meeting."

So you see God is very precise. If there is a healing then there' a procedure that brings that healed leper back into society and back into acceptance. Now let's go back to our story, back in Luke.

It says that as Jesus entered this village there met Him ten men who were lepers and they stood afar off. Why did they do that? Well, because it had been pronounced that they were unclean and because leprosy was very contagious they did not let them get near the people on the streets. They always...they had to be at a distance. The priest told them that it had to be 50 paces, or the equivalent of 150 feet, and they would have to stand away from the crowd and say Unclean! Unclean! That's the way they identified themselves and no one came near them, and they could not come near anyone. They stood afar off. And in that situation we have ten men crying out unclean, unclean.

And finally they know that Jesus...and it says they lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" So when He saw them, He said to them, "Go, show yourselves to the priests."

Now we understand why He told them that. They understood in the Old Testament law that's what they had to do if they were cleansed. The first person they went to find was the priest so he could go through this procedure of declaring that person clean. It says, "Go, show yourselves to the priests."

Now they believed that what Jesus said was true. They trusted in Him and His authority, and so believing what He said they started to make their journey to go find a priest to pronounce them clean. Now it's an interesting crowd because in that group there are nine Jewish men and one Samaritan. Now if they were not within the situation of misery, if it were just a normal situation, these were the two that didn't have fellowship with each other, but their misery had brought them together, and they are the ones that are crying together.

And so these men who understand their Jewish faith, they immediately take off to find a priest. Now this Samaritan he is...it seems by the text that they are leaving Jesus and maybe even Jesus is out of their sight and all of a sudden this Samaritan looks at his body and he realizes - the sores are gone, the white spots have disappeared, my skin is new again! And he quickly turns around and comes back to Jesus and says, Jesus, I want to thank you. I want to thank you.

And then a very interesting moment - Jesus says to that Samaritan, because the Bible identifies him as a Samaritan, he says to the Samaritan, "Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?" Where are the nine? You know it's interesting when you study the ministry of Jesus on various occasions He asks questions that were very deep and very penetrating.

He had preached up in Capernaum in a synagogue and John records it in John 6, and His message is where He says I am the bread of life; I am the bread that came down from heaven. And as Jesus is preaching this great sermon on the bread of life, His crowd walks out on Him. All He's got left when He finishes are His disciples. He lost His crowd. One of the greatest sermons of time and eternity and they didn't stay around to listen, and then Jesus asks this question of His disciples - Will you also go away?

I sense in that a deep pain. Here's the Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of the world telling us that He is the bread of life. They all walk out on Him and He turns to His disciples and says, Will you also go away?

There was another occasion where He was talking with His disciples and He asked the question, Who do men say that I am? And they say, well Jesus, some say that You are Elijah and some say You are a prophet - John the Baptist - but then Jesus gets very personal and makes it very penetrating, but who do you, who do you say that I am?

Ten men, all of them healed; they are on their way, nine of them, in ingratitude. They didn't even come back to say thank you.

Think with me for a moment folks. Here are men that have been separated from society, from their families, from their children, from their jobs, from everything; they were isolated. And Jesus heals them, and now they are going to come back to their homes, back to society, back to their jobs; life is going on as usual, and they don't even have enough appreciation to say thank you Jesus. And Jesus asks the question, Where are the nine? And what He defined which is so characteristic of us as human beings, oft time we are so quick to ask Jesus for things in our prayers, just like they all voiced their supplication, but too frequently we don't thank Him for the answers.

When we were gathering together on Thursday at the service, this sermon, this question kept going in my mind: Where are the nine? And I felt like saying, Jesus, right here we are. We've come to say thank you. We've come to express our gratitude. And I could answer that, Lord, here we are. We're here on Sunday morning. We came on this Thanksgiving weekend because we wanted to say thank you.

We live in a world filled with a lot of ingratitude, and may God help us not to be marked with those nine, but with the Samaritan who returned.

Now let's take another side of the picture. Let's go and find a man whose heart is really filled with gratitude, who loves to say thank you. Go with me to Psalm 103. Here is one of the beautiful Psalms written by a man with a grateful heart. Listen to it.

He says: Bless the LORD, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: Who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction, who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.

David starts threading on the string of memory the great pearls of blessings that had come to his life and he drapes them around the neck of gratitude. He starts this beautiful Psalm, and if we were reading this in the Hebrew there is so much more color to it, but when he says 'bless the Lord', he uses a title for God, Yahweh, which defines his personal relationship with God. What he is saying is the God of the universe, the God who created, the God who loves, the God of mercy, He is my personal God. There is the personal identification with the God of the universe.

It's when he wrote...remember the 23rd Psalm, he says, the Lord is - not the shepherd - he said the Lord is my shepherd. He identifies with God as his shepherd.

Do you remember when Thomas, after Jesus had been raised from the dead, he had rejected the testimony, but when Jesus came the week later and Jesus said Thomas it's Me. You can put your hand in My side. And Thomas fell down and said, my Lord and my God. You know it's a wonderful thing to know God personally, and that's made possible as we put our trust in Jesus Christ. God becomes very real and very personal and we can say, my Father, my God, my Lord.

So when David's heart begins to pour forth in thanksgiving and praise, he starts with his identification with the God of the universe as his personal God, and then he adds, bless His holy name. Now in the Old Testament when that reference is made to the name of someone, it always marked or spoke of the character of that person. And thus when David prays bless His holy name, what he is thinking of is the character of God; the God of justice, the God of mercy, the God of love, the God of patience, the God of judgment, the God who was always just, the God who was always fair, the God who was always, the God who was always patient.

When he says blessed be Your holy name, he's putting in his mind all of the great characteristics of the God who is his God. Bless the Lord my God. Bless His holy name. And he's thanking God for the rich attributes of his eternal character. Then he goes on to say, and forget not all His benefits.

David realized that we have a tendency as mortal people to forget the good things and often remember the bad. That's interesting. You say, Why is that so pastor? It's because of our very fallen nature. We have a tendency to remember the pains and the hurts, and the difficult times of life and we set aside the rich blessings. He's praying I don't want to forget all of these blessings.

During our Thanksgiving day we had all of our family, my three boys and their lovely wives and our nine grandchildren were there, and the girls decided that they would start going through the pictures because we are going to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary next February. And so my wife loves to take pictures and so she's pulled out her million pictures laid out on the table and they are going through these pictures. And I'll tell you folks, boy, when you start seeing what's happened in 50 years there's a lot of water runs under the bridge in 50 years, but I was sitting there with the grandchildren and on occasions the girls would bring over one of the pictures and one of the pictures that was brought to me was the big album of our wedding. I hadn't seen it for years. And I opened that album and I'll tell you it just absolutely exploded a lot of memories that were there.

I sat there in the chair and I started doing what David suggested - don't forget all the good benefits of life and I remember we had been married for two or three years and we desired a family, and my wife went to the doctor and it seemed to be that that possibility was beyond us and that we would not have the joy of having children. And we prayed, and God in time after operations and various procedures, God started blessing us with children. And now I am surrounded with these nine grandchildren hugging me and loving me, and I'm thinking God, I haven't thanked You for years for the gift of my children. I love my children but I mean how they came about in the sense that almost an impossibility, and now we have this lovely family. And in my mind I traced a lot of the blessings.

David said remember the positive things of life. It's too quick to just concentrate on the negative things.

I had a father walk up to me after the first service at seven o'clock this morning and he said, you know pastor, you're so right. We have a tendency to give much more attention to the negative than we do the positive. He said my little boy had been struggling in school but he's just doing fine now and he came home with his report card, and he said, Daddy, see my report card. And he said A, A, A, A, B, A, A, A. And he said you know what pastor, the first thing I asked my son is, Why the B?

And he said once I said that I realized all of a sudden, here he's got all these A's and I could be praising him and rejoicing in his success, and yet my natural character is, What about that B?

I don't know if you are like me but one regret I have after 70 plus years of living, I wish I could go back and say thank you more times than I have in the past. But I have a tendency when I want to say something, I just kind of, you know, close it off. And yet, if I would say thank you or express appreciation or gratitude it would mean so much to that person, and we subdue it.

You know William Law, the great mystic, said it's not people who are great saints who pray a lot, it's people who praise God a lot that are great saints. David said, God, help me to go back when I see all the negative piling up around me and may I start counting my blessings and naming them one by one and not forget what You've done.

Then he goes to his next line, he said, Who forgiveth all your iniquities. I really think, ladies and gentlemen, that David and must have written that line with tears. I'll tell you why. He is saying, God, I've been a terrible sinner - you know David was a murderer. He arranged for Uriah to be put out in the battlefront to be killed. David was guilty of murder. He's got blood dripping from his hands because he wanted Uriah's wife Bathsheba.

He broke up that home. He robbed little children, most likely, of their daddy who would never come back from the battle. He is a sinner and then he commits adultery with her and sin after sin and when he...he's writing this line and he didn't say some of my iniquities, he said all of them.

You know I like that word all. It appears so frequently in the Bible. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength. In other words, our love for God is total and David realized that that love was a love that wiped out all those terrible transgressions, and he tells us how far they were wiped out in verse 11. He says, as far as the East is from the West, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us. And I've used this illustration over and over again, but if you take out a globe and put your finger on the North Pole and you go south it's 12,500 some odd miles then you go north again. So there is a limited distance between the North Pole and the South Pole. But you put your finger on the equator and you start going east, it's endless.

And interesting to me, David said He forgives all of our iniquities and He casts them from us as far as the East is from the West, never, never to be remembered against us anymore.

My time is gone...But what David had learned in life and what made him such a great man, even though he had sinned deeply, he was a man who knew how to rejoice and to thank God, even for the forgiveness of all of his sins. And he goes on to say as a father pities his children so the Lord pities us. And I've often thought that sometimes we are too hard on ourselves. David says God, You look upon us as just simply dust. We can from dust, to dust we shall return, and sometimes we are too critical of ourselves. We've got a God whose mercy and whose love and whose patience is from everlasting to everlasting. And David said because of that, I can take all of my energies, all that I am, and all that's within me and I want to say thank you almighty God.

I pray that our thoughts today will help you turn from the negative sides of life. There are plenty of them out there. Start rejoicing and be grateful for the benefits, the blessings that God has surrounded you with. You're going to find the more you praise, the smaller the pile of the negative becomes. There's something about praise. The Bible says the Lord inhabits the praises of His people. You start praising God and He becomes very near and very real to you. Let's pray.

Father, we ever want to be marked with those nine who walked off with the blessings and didn't say thanks. We don't want to be like that. We want to be people known as people who are grateful and who express our gratitude and say thanks to those and to You who deserve that, dear God. May we be a people that bring joy and encouragement and blessing to others by thinking them and encouraging them with words of appreciation and gratitude. Fill our hearts with gratitude, dear God, today, in Jesus' name. Amen.