Tag Archive for: Apostle Paul

How Can We ‘Give Thanks in All Circumstances’? We Remember How Blessed We Are in Christ

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In 1 Thessalonians 5:18, the Apostle Paul wrote, “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” The call to “give thanks” is repeated in over 30 instances within the book of Psalms. 1 Chronicles, Philippians, Colossians, Hebrews, Isaiah, and Ephesians, to name a few, cry out the need to express thanks to our God. It’s a clear call. It seems easy enough to live out, right? And yet, I can’t help but wonder: how easy is it, really, to “give thanks in all circumstances”? Because I’ve come to find it’s far easier to be ungrateful.

It probably doesn’t feel easy to give thanks when you or someone you love is struck with illness. Gratitude isn’t often where we turn first when we’re rejected from a job we want or by a person we care about. Thankfulness feels impossible when we face loneliness, anxiety, depression, or stress, doesn’t it? Perhaps the poor wrestle with thankfulness, and the wealthy seldom consider it. Wars break out across the globe, people are starving, children are orphaned, women are widowed, politics are like cancer, and the world is full of numerous other variables that cause us to think: What is there to be grateful for?

I’ve read the stories where people are so sick of their affliction, they “walk away from their faith.” Many blame their problems on God; others are tired of waiting on Him to reveal a reason for their suffering. It’s a tragedy — an utter tragedy. And why is it so tragic? Because, really, believers have so much to be grateful for. It’s a shame how easily we gloss over our rich blessedness in Christ, and it’s my prayer that we can begin to understand just how blessed we really are. Especially when we think we have nothing to be thankful for.

Isaiah 53:5 proclaims, “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” It’s a rich passage, yet it’s easy to neglect the proper probing it deserves. He was “pierced,” “crushed,” yet we receive “peace” and become “healed.” Just how profound this is may be what we forget to reflect on.

Whether it’s realized or not, the worst fate one could ever endure would be to be separated from Christ. Salvation is such a precious gift, and I’m afraid we often take it lightly. Because without it, we have no life, hope, peace, joy, or eternity in paradise. Life would become meaningless. All would be deprived of hope. Peace would be replaced with fear, and joy with depression. Our eternity, separate from Christ, would be spent in the fiery furnace. What grace that with salvation, we are spared from these miseries! What grace that with salvation, we have eternal life, hope, peace, and joy in Christ Jesus! Can you imagine living in this broken world without this hope and relationship with God? I certainly cannot. But, if even for a moment, Jesus did experience this.

On the cross, taking on the sin of the world, He lost the perfect union He always had with the Father from the beginning of time. How incomprehensibly devastating this is. We see Jesus ask His Father in the Gospel of Matthew to remove the cup from Him — the cup of God’s wrath He was to drink from. In Matthew 26, Jesus described His soul as “very sorrowful, even to death.” Our Lord “fell on his face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’” But it’s no wonder He was distraught.

You see, Jesus could handle the mocking, the beatings, the scorn. He could be hated, and His death could be celebrated by those who rejected Him. But to lose His relationship with the Father — to face the fierce wrath of God Almighty — was a fate far worse than any other; a pain more searing than any pain; a loss graver than any loss. It’s no wonder Jesus asked for that cup to pass. It’s no wonder He was sorrowful. But beloved, what I am wondering is this: Why would He go through that for you and for me?

It doesn’t make any sense. Why would the only perfect, spotless man to ever walk the earth voluntarily sacrifice His life and face the worst fate conceivable for the sake of sinners who only fall short of God’s glory? Why did the Father, from before the foundation of the world, establish a plan to send His one and only Son, so that whoever believes in Him, may be gifted with eternal life? Why did Jesus face a punishment that we deserve, and do so in a way that ensures we will never, ever have to face it ourselves?

Well, Hebrews 12:2 answers that question: We look to “Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” And what was that joy set before Him? It was the perfect will of a perfect, loving God. I don’t know why He did it, but it was God’s sovereign decree that Jesus would secure a people for Himself that would become co-heirs with Him in the Kingdom to come. How could this truth not evoke the most reverent gratitude?

When I think of this blessing, even just the singular blessing of being alive in Christ from now into eternity, my soul swells in praise. Suddenly, I see that we can “give thanks in all circumstances” because now, we are washed clean by the blood of the Lamb. There is nothing that can separate us from this love. “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?” the Apostle Paul asked in Romans 8. “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?” (v. 33).

Though “we are being killed all the day long” by persecutors, calamities of a broken world, and temptation to sin, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (vv. 36-37). There is nothing “in all creation” that “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v. 39b). And so, do you see? We can “give thanks in all circumstances” because there is not a single circumstance in which this truth is not relevant. No matter what we go through, it would befit us to fix our eyes on Christ, as Scripture calls us to do, because it’s in doing so that we realize we are continually blessed in Him. Regardless of our circumstances, we have received “a kingdom that cannot be shaken,” which means we can always “be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28).

But in addition to this blessing of salvation, which encompasses all of our being, it is steadfastly true that we do, indeed, serve a generous God. Does He not still provide our every need? Is He not faithful to be with us when we stumble? Does He not cause rain so that the earth is nourished? He has graciously crafted beauty all around in His creation for us to enjoy. He gifts us with the pleasures of art, music, food, and sweet fellowship. And so, my first encouragement, when tempted to wonder how we can be thankful, is to remember the cross — an unending fountain of blessing for those who hear and proclaim its message.

But secondly, I encourage you to remember that God, whether we always recognize it, is truly generous and rich in both grace and mercy. And He has in mind the eternal salvation of our soul — which is far grander than anything we’ll experience here on earth.

Pastor Charles Spurgeon put it well when he said of Christ: “As long as there is a vessel of grace not yet full to the brim, the oil shall not be stayed. He is a sun ever-shining; He is manna always falling round the camp; He is a rock in the desert, ever sending out streams of life from His smitten side; the rain of His grace is always dropping; the river of His bounty is ever-flowing, and the well-spring of His love is constantly overflowing. As the King can never die, so His grace can never fail.”

So, let us posture our hearts in continual gratitude, for our God is continuously loving, merciful, and gracious — a God who has secured our salvation forever.

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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Has God changed from when He asked men, like Noah, to do strange things?

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“As in the days of Noah,” God asked him to become the laughing stock of the world. But on Father’s Day, we might recall Noah was a better Dad than most other great men–he saved his whole family!

Abraham is another person who was willing to do strange things for God. He left home and all that he knew because he heard a voice? Later he accepted circumcision as a token of his faith, that even if amputated, he would still have children. His name meant “father of many.” And he insisted his servants be circumcised too–before the days of anesthesia! Embarrassing, but he was willing to be a fool for God.

Moses also heard voices, and life became harder for the Israelites—they had to make bricks without straw. Maybe they hated Moses with the frogs and lice, and then he asked them to kill a lamb and put its blood on their doorposts. Bizarre?

All of the above must have seemed weird. Looking back, we understand the reasons, but could God want us to do something strange?

Israel celebrated the Passover, the greatest event of Old Testament history, by eating the lamb and staying awake all night. We no longer need to kill lambs, but Christ asked His disciples to “watch and pray.” Those words are repeated throughout the New Testament and if we did them on the eve of Passover, it would commemorate the greatest events in Scripture.

Maybe Ellen White had that in mind when she wrote, “As [Christ] ate the Passover with His disciples, He instituted in its place the service that was to be the memorial of His great sacrifice.”1

We know it as “the Lord’s Supper” and we celebrate it as communion, but we haven’t done so “in its place.” on Passover. And because we don’t, we could be missing an important part that’s still enjoined, ”Watch and pray.” We spiritualize the word watch and think it means to be aware.

The Greek word for watch is gregorio, and it means to be awake. Paul wrote, “let us not sleep…let us watch.”2 and the context has several clues suggesting Passover.

  • Verses 1,2 imply a time we [should] “know perfectly.” Perhaps we’ve misunderstood something. Paul referred to the holidays like Passover as “shadows of things to come.”3
  • Writing of those times that we “know perfectly, the day of the Lord” comes as a thief. “The day of the Lord” is the Old Testament apocalyptic term and it’s linked to Passover as “the day of the Lord’s sacrifice” in Zephaniah 1:7,8 where God will punish “the king’s children clothed in strange apparel.” No wedding garment? Each wedding parable has Passover imagery, like the midnight cry in Matthew 25:6 and also in Exodus 12:29-30.
  • That cry was also the cry of childbirth. At Passover, God brought forth “my son…my firstborn.”4 “The day of the Lord comes” as travail on a woman with child and we are to know “perfectly.”

Paul kept Passover with Greek believers in Philippi and Corinth and he said, Follow me as I follow Christ. 5

Ellen White cited Christ’s death at Passover and said, “In like manner [at Passover?] the types which relate to the second advent must be fulfilled at the time pointed out in the symbolic service.”6

Perhaps we should see Passover also as when God said, “I will execute judgment.”7 Seventh-day Adventists believe in a pre-Advent judgment, but it may have three components:

1.  “the time of the dead that they should be judged”8

2.  “the nations were angry” (the rider on the red horse takes peace from the earth—a time of judgment for the living when they face life and death situations as in Daniel 1-6. “Daniel” means “God is my Judge.” But the book of Judges shows judges as deliverers, and God may deliver us as the three Hebrews who also said, “But if not…we will not worship…the image”9

3.  “thy wrath is come” on those who worship the beast or his image.10

The point is, just as Adventists believe #1, the judgment of the dead, began on the Day of Atonement, perhaps we should consider that when judgment is executed, it could begin on Passover, as in the type.

If God isn’t going to do anything without revealing it,11 shouldn’t we consider it revealed and try to understand when?

Christ’s disciples were probably thinking of Passover as a time of judgment for those events in Matthew 24,25 when He said, You don’t know the day or hour.

We overlook the meaning of the Greek word, oida—be aware, consider, understand. Christ was saying, You don’t understand, and each time He said it, He gave an example that fit a provision in their law for Passover a month later, “as in the days of Noah.” But how much “as”? Could it include timing?

The Flood came with Passover timing. Noah entered the ark on the 10th day, the same day that the sacrifice was selected in Exodus 12:3, but it was the 2nd spring month because Noah had to bury Methuselah who died as a sign of the Flood. His name meant, at his death, the sending forth of waters.12 That delay of one month is specified in Numbers 9:10,11 as a reason to observe Passover later.

Again, after five women missed the wedding, Christ said, Watch (a word linked to being awake at Passover), for the kingdom of heaven is like a man traveling to a far country.”13 Israelites didn’t travel in winter, but if they took a long journey in spring and couldn’t get back for Passover, they were to keep it in the 2nd month as specified in Numbers 9.

Could it be significant that Christ punctuated His two parables in Matthew 25 with instruction to watch and a qualification of when to watch, if we understood their law better. And didn’t Christ say, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law”?14

Could we be the “goodman” who doesn’t know when to watch [be awake] so that our house is broken by the thief? The King James has only one reference to goodman in the Old Testament. A harlot says, “The goodman…is gone a long journey…and will come home at the yom kece [full moon]. Passover comes on a full moon, but “long journey” means 2nd Passover.

Christ said, “If you shall not watch, I will come on you as a thief.” But there’s Good News as well…

“Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He comes shall find watching [another link to Passover] Verily I say unto you, that He shall gird Himself and make them sit down to meat and come forth and serve them.” Girding Himself and serving us is also Passover imagery—the Last Supper.
If we are “so doing” when He comes and “knocks…He will make [us] ruler over all that He has.” So much to gain and so little to lose!
Why we should do so this year is beyond the scope of this article, but this year, 2nd Passover (“as in the days of Noah,” falls on Wednesday evening, May 14. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our churches were filled with members seeking communion on the authentic time for Christ’s return from “a long journey”?

Our favorite author said those seeking the Lord’s return should be found in prayer meeting. Why not on May 14? We have many reasons for all night prayer vigils. “It would be well for us to spend a thoughtful hour each day in contemplation of the life of Christ. We should take it point by point, and let the imagination grasp each scene, especially the closing ones…If we would be saved at last, we must learn the lesson of penitence and humiliation at the foot of the cross.” Why not share this article with your pastor and ask if we could do something crazy?

References:

1    The Desire of Ages, p 652

2    1 Thessalonians 5:1-6

3    Colossians 2:16,17

4    Exodus 4:22

5    Acts 20:6; 1 Corinthians 5:8; 11:1

6    The Great Controversy, p 399.9

7    Exodus 12:12

8    Revelation 11:18

9    Daniel 3:18

10  Revelation 14:9,10

11  Amos 3:7

12  Genesis 5:21, King James, margin

13  Matthew 25:13,14

14  Matthew 5:18

[1]   Proverbs 7:19,20

[1]   Revelation 3:3

[1]   Luke 12:36,37

[1]   Luke 12:43-48

[1]   The Desire of Ages, p 83