Be the One

Well, good morning and again welcome to church whether you're joining us here in the auditorium watching on Facebook live over in venue. It is just super great to have all these different congregations plugged in and studying God's Word. In the next few minutes, grab your message notes that look like this. These are in the bulletin to help you follow along follow my crazy train of thought this morning.

Next weekend we actually wrap up this richer life series that we've been doing and you know what I'd love to do? I would love to do kind of a what have we discovered? message. So here's what I'm gonna ask you to do this week. Please send pictures, send videos, send your stories to my email, René, R e n e at TLC org and let me know about generosity projects you guys might have done during this series or things you've learned or how this has changed you. Things your group did, your family did. I've already gotten tons of great material from people, but keep it coming because next weekend I want us to come ready to celebrate what God has done here.

We will also be revealing the pledge totals for the 2020 vision phase two. I am super excited. It is going to be a great historic weekend, uplifting, inspiring weekend, please don't miss it. Now, let's start the message today with a Thanksgiving pop quiz since we are headed into Thanksgiving. Are you guys ready for this? I said, are you ready for this? Okay, because I want you to shout out your answers after I give you some options. These are all multiple choice. Okay, don't want it to be too hard. It's early on a Sunday.

The first question is this: how many calories does the average person consume on Thanksgiving Day? Is it 3350, 3700, 4100, or 48,000? What's the answer? Shout it out. Let me hear you. What do you think it is? Okay, well the answer is 4100. But how many of you honestly are closer to 48,000 if you're just gonna be honest, right?

Okay, here's an interesting one. What popular Christmas song was originally written for Thanksgiving? Was it Jingle Bells, Deck the Halls, Little Drumstick Boy, or Home for the Holidays? Shout it out. What do you think it was? A lot of you got this one right: it was Jingle Bells, believe it or not. All right, Black Friday is the busiest day of the year for what job? Is it personal trainers, dietitians, cleaners, or plumbers? What's the answer? Shout it out. Busiest day of the year for plumbers, and I don't even want to know why.

All right, what was the first store to do a Thanksgiving parade? Wait until I give you the multiple choice. Was it Sears, Pennies, Gimbals, or Macy's? Shout it out. And the answer is Gimbals. You were all wrong. You think you know so much. And finally, why is Thanksgiving so awesome? Is it football, food, family, or fun? Shout it out. What's the answer? I heard a lot of all of the above. I love everything here, but scientifically, the answer is actually none of the above. Even though all those things are super fun, the reason Thanksgiving is so awesome is because there's something that happens on Thanksgiving in many, many, many homes that actually has been scientifically clinically proven to lead to a richer life.

Thanksgiving, we briefly touched on this earlier in the series, and this week since it's Thanksgiving week, let's dive in deep. Watch this: researchers have scientifically proven that one of the greatest contributors to overall happiness in your life is how much gratitude you show, not feel, show. And in fact, that's the theme for our message today: showing gratitude. And let me tell you how they know this statistic is actually true. Here's the way they do these tests. It's fascinating.

First, researchers do tests on a bunch of people to determine how happy they are, and this is a standard psychology test to determine somebody's happiness index. Second, they have those same exact people write about someone who has impacted their lives in a positive way, maybe somebody from years ago. Then third, they hand them a phone and they say, okay, right now we are calling that person that you just wrote about and you are going to say hello and then read them out loud over the phone what you just wrote about them. And then after they do that, they give them another happiness test and their happiness levels just soar.

In fact, the happiness level after they showed gratitude compared to their happiness level before they showed gratitude is so far off the charts that these researchers say it goes beyond any other way that people try to find happiness. How much gratitude you show, not feel, show. That's the key. In fact, this is the key concept for this morning. Jot this down in your notes: gratitude is more than a way of feeling; it's a way of seeing and a way of acting. Gratitude is more than a way of feeling; it's a way of seeing and a way of acting.

And you see this come out in a story in the Gospel of Luke in the Bible that we're gonna look at today. We are in Luke 17:11–19. Now, if you're maybe new to all this church stuff, let me maybe I just need to refresh your memory. There are four books of the Bible that start out the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Those are the four Gospels, and they tell of the life of Christ. The Gospel of Luke is unique because Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts in the Bible, is the only non-Jewish author of any book of the Bible. Luke is the only Gentile.

He kind of acknowledges that his gospel is a little different because he's writing it to a Greek person named Theophilus. And he says, I took it upon myself—Luke was a physician, he was a doctor—so he liked to investigate stuff. And he says, I took it upon myself to investigate all these stories that are floating around about Jesus and check them all out and write them out in what he calls an orderly fashion. He says, so that you may know the certainty of what you've been taught. So he's writing to somebody and he's got an agenda. He wants them to know the certainty of what they've been taught, and that's gonna play a role in it a few minutes in our sermon, so keep that in mind.

That's the origin of the Gospel of Luke, and one of the stories that he chose to include is the story that we're going to see today. This must have fascinated Luke as a physician, and you will see why. Luke 17:11 starting in verse 11: now on his way to where? Jerusalem. That fact becomes important later on, so keep that filed away in your brains. On his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. Now, so that you can picture this, it's like going from Northern California to Southern California in a way—only kind of compressed, a shorter distance.

But Jesus had his home, the base of his ministry, was up north near the Sea of Galilee, and there's two ways to get down to Jerusalem. Down at the bottom of your screen on this map, and he chose to go the way that kind of skirts the border of Samaria. And this was a dangerous way to go because in those days between the Jewish people and the Samaritan people, there was huge tension. It was racial tension, it was religious tension, it was political tension—every kind of tension you can imagine all rolled into one. In fact, many Jews refused to eat with Samaritans; Samaritans refused to eat with Jews. They viewed each other as heretics. A Jewish person would look at a Samaritan as an absolute outsider and outcast.

All right, so this is where Jesus is traveling. And it says next verse, verse 12: as he was going into a village in this region, ten men who had leprosy met him. Now stop right there because these days we see the word leprosy in our country in our time, and we don't really connect with us because we don't see any leprosy in this country at all anymore, which is quite remarkable because just a few decades ago, leprosy was the most feared disease on planet earth. In fact, while I was researching this this week, I found this: in the last 20 years, like within most of our lifespans, just 20 years, 16 million people have been cured of leprosy on planet earth. Twenty years ago, there were over 16 million people with leprosy on the planet, and you know how many people currently have leprosy? A hundred and eighty-nine thousand. A remarkable degree of progress, but in those days there was no hope. Leprosy had no known cure.

Leprosy can be cured today by a simple course of antibiotics, but for centuries, of course, they didn't have antibiotics. Leprosy is a bacterial infection, and what it does first is it deforms your skin like this man—you get spots, you get lesions on your skin, so there's no hiding it. And then it leads to numbness. You cannot feel pain. And feeling pain is a gift from God, did you know that? Because when you can't feel any pain, you don't know if you're cut; you don't know if you're wounded. And so what happens is you don't even—you're not even aware that you stub your toe and you're bleeding. And so an infection gets in because you're not taking care of it, and people with leprosy commonly lose toes and fingers and limbs because they don't know they're infected, and they get a secondary infection, and they have to have it amputated or it falls away due to gangrene. And it is contagious—not highly contagious, but leprosy is contagious, and people suspected this for centuries, so lepers were just completely marginalized and rejected even by religious communities. Lepers were thrown out of the community. Many feared lepers; they were not, for example, in Jesus' culture, were not even allowed to go to the temple to worship God. They had to live outside the city, outside of society, outside of their families. And to make it worse—could it get worse? Yes, many people thought lepers were being punished by God for sin, and that's why they had leprosy, so there was a total disincentive to help them out.

So all this explains why it says in verse 13 they stood—Jesus is on this road, he's walking through a village, and they stood at a distance calling out in a loud voice, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us." And the word used there to describe the way they shouted is the word that we get our English word megaphone from. They're just shouting at the top of their voices, "Jesus, can you just please help us out?" Now I want you to watch what Jesus does next because usually the way he heals people in the Gospels is he goes up to them and he touches them and he heals them in a special way—not these guys. He basically just yells back at them. He kind of—you just see him just keeps motoring, and it says when he saw them he said, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." What's all that about?

Well, the lepers knew something that maybe you don't know. In Leviticus 14, this was the book of the law in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures—this was their Bible—Leviticus 14 in your Bible, this existed for a thousand years before Christ. It says there what to do if you have a skin disease like leprosy and you believe you are healed. You have to go to the priest, and the priest checks you out and waits a week, and if he gives you the seal of approval, then you can go back to your life, go back to your family, go see your kids again. You can go earn an honest living again. So when Jesus is saying, "You know, boys, go show yourself to the priest," what he's saying is just start making the journey now because you're gonna have a reason to show yourself to the priest by the time you get there because the priests in Jesus' day were all located at the brand new temple, which was about a two-day journey by foot, maybe one to two days depending on where he was on this road through Samaria.

And so they were headed down to Jerusalem to see the priest, and then look what happens: as they went, they were cleansed—all ten. And we don't know how far they went; it might have been 20 minutes down the road, it might have been a day down the road. But you know what happened was something like this: they're walking along, you know what's weird? I can feel the ground; my feet can feel again. My hands have their sensation back. Your nose is growing back; your skin's normal again. Look, all of us were healed! And you can imagine at that moment they just started sprinting for the priests because they are on the verge of getting their lives back, and so they all had to have just picked up their pace and practically run to Jerusalem—all of them except one.

One of them, when he saw that he was healed, one came back praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him, and he was a Samaritan—one of the outcasts, one of the bad guys, one of the despised minority. I mean, in those days, a Samaritan leper? It does not get more outsider than that. And yet he falls at Jesus' feet. This means he essentially worships Jesus, and Jesus asks an interesting question: "We're not all ten cleansed?" And then here's the question: "Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?" And then he said to him, "Rise and go; your faith has made you well."

This morning I want to talk about the topic of ingratitude. Flip over to page two. Ingratitude is a problem. Very few things sting in a relationship like ingratitude, would you agree with that? You put yourself out for somebody or you raise them from infancy or you hire them or you do something great for them, and when there's no gratitude expressed, it stings. Now most of us would look at this word and say, well, this doesn't apply to me because I am NOT an ingrate. I'm not ungrateful. I feel all kinds of gratitude in my heart to all the people in my life and all the blessings I have. That's great, but when we talk about gratitude, we usually think of the feelings that we have of gratitude, and we say you need to be more grateful. We think I need to work up feelings of gratitude, but the problem is we often—often, in fact, I would almost say usually—do not express those feelings of gratitude, and listen, that omission is poisoning relationships all over this room. So this is a really, really, really big deal.

I love this quote from Andy Stanley, from whom I got so much good material on this topic today. He has a great saying: he says gratitude and ingratitude are both relationally determinative—both relationally determinative. Your attitude or ingratitude determines the fate of your relationships almost more than anything else. Gratitude can start a relationship; gratitude can kick-start a dead relationship, but ingratitude can slowly poison a relationship until there's nothing left. So in today's story, we have people showing both gratitude and ingratitude, right? So I want to look at the story again and look at how we can be the one and not the nine. And to be the one and not the nine, I want to look at three things. I want to look at the pattern of gratitude, the poison of ingratitude, and the principle that makes the difference that moves me from one to the other.

So first, the pattern of gratitude. This leper in this story, he does three things that you and I need to learn how to do to be the one and not the nine. First, he saw that he was healed, and the first thing you need to do for gratitude is I need to see my blessing. Would you agree with this? There are blessings showered down upon us all the time, every day, that sometimes we don't even notice. We don't even see because we're not looking for them. Would you agree with that?

There was a church on the East Coast that did a little 60-second video last year right around this time. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, and within three weeks, this video went viral. It got five million views in three weeks—just a little video this church put together with no budget, but it's all about framing the things in your life so you see them as the gifts they are. I'll show you what I mean. Watch this.

Hey Christine, you're here too! I love you! Honey, the power works! It goes on and off whenever we want! We've got clean water! Bring down the glorious water! Ah, shoes! Oh, what do we got here, guys? Oh! And don't forget your coffee!

Isn't that good? I love it! See the gifts? You gotta frame everything in your life so you actually see the blessing in your life all around you. All right, then the second thing he did: he came back. He stops moving forward, and this is a really big deal because he was on an important, life-changing errand. He was on his way to get the approval from the high priest to be declared clean. I mean, that was huge, but he stops the forward motion, and he comes back in order to thank the one who enabled the progress in his life. And this is sometimes the hardest thing to do—to stop my task, my relentless forward motion, my busy schedule, and take the time to go back to somebody who helped me get to the place where I'm doing all the stuff that I'm so busy with.

And then third, it says he was praising God, and he threw himself at Jesus' feet and he thanked him. So to be the one and not the nine, I need to say my thanks, right? I need to see my blessing and then stop my task and take time to actually say my thanks. It may seem obvious, but my point is this: gratitude is not just an emotion; it's an action. Gratitude is not just an emotion; it is an action. You know, I bet if you could find a time machine, you could go back in time 2,000 years and find the other nine lepers in the story, and you tracked them down. You said, "Guys, guys, you're those nine guys from that story! Hey, um, it's kind of a good news, bad news thing. Good news: you're in the Bible!" Seriously, we still learn about you 2,000 years later. Yeah, they're giving each other high fives. Bad news: you're examples of ingratitude. That's the bad news.

And I bet they would say, "What are you talking about? We're totally grateful! We're super grateful! Who wouldn't be grateful? We've been healed of leprosy!" Yeah, but only one of you went back and actually said something about it. And see, so often you and I are that way in relationships. We go, "Well, I'm absolutely positively grateful," but we forget to say thank you. So to be the one and not the nine, I need to go back and thank the one who enabled me to move forward, and if I don't do that, I will damage that relationship. And that leads to point two: the poison of ingratitude. Three quick observations I want to make here, and these are playing out in every single relationship in this room in some way or another, either positively or negatively.

First, unexpressed gratitude communicates ingratitude. Unexpressed gratitude communicates ingratitude. The gratitude you feel in your heart is perceived, is felt by the other person as ingratitude if you don't express it. All right, and it actually goes deeper than that because over time, unexpressed gratitude is experienced as rejection. Because what it communicates is, "I deserve that," right? Have you thanked your mom? That's just mom. Moms are supposed to do that. Have you thanked your employee? I pay him. I don't have to thank him. I hired him. I give him benefits. Have you thanked your spouse? Hey, we're both just doing what we're supposed to do, doing your best, earning a living, doing the chores around the house. We don't need to be thanked.

Here's the thing—and again quoting Andy Stanley on this—he says our hearts are magnetically attracted to acceptance and magnetically repelled by rejection, right? We're attracted to acceptance, repelled by rejection. And if unexpressed gratitude is experienced as rejection, that means you can ingratitude somebody right out of the house. You can ingratitude an employee right off your staff. You can alienate a spouse and essentially write them right out of your relationship when over time, over the long haul, ingratitude, unexpressed gratitude is experienced as rejection.

So regardless of your personality, regardless if you're an introvert or an extrovert, at some point you really have to express gratitude. You say, "But I am grateful! I'm totally grateful! I'm blessed!" You gotta get that out of your heart and make sure people know it. Now, to take this even one step deeper, unexpressed gratitude may indicate an inflated view of self. It may indicate an inflated view of self. If it's hard for you to say thank you, you really need to ask yourself why. Because researchers in gratitude say the biggest thing keeping people from expressing gratitude is this thought: ultimately, I kind of deserve everything I get because I work hard, I've been through tough times, I put my nose to the grindstone, I deserve it. And there's a word for that: entitlement. And the more entitled you feel to the blessings in your life, the less grateful you will be, the more you'll harm your relationships, and the more unhappy you will be.

Now, before our final point, I just want to show you one more video. This is a great example of what it looks like to be the one in your relationship with God. There's a TV show called Soul Pancake, and this is a science show. This is not a religious show; this is not a Christian show at all. In fact, I can't even really recommend it fully because there's bad language in this show sometimes. But in one episode, they gave people—it was a show on happiness—and they gave people the same standard happiness test that psychologists used to measure happiness. And for the first time ever, someone got a perfect score. And so they decided to talk to this person and find out why. And here's what they discover. Watch this.

Let me tell you a little bit about what's going on, okay? These surveys that we gave you, they're designed to measure basically how happy you are. You scored a perfect score, higher than anybody that we've given this test to since we've been doing this. It's really quite remarkable. Good. I think we're all anxious to know, why do you think that is? Well, I'll give you a very brief little summary. What I do every morning when I wake up, I wake up and I say, "This day I choose to be happy." Well and complete, that's first. I thank God to let me get up. Then I thank God for the fact that I have running water in a toilet. I have soap; I have toothpaste. There are people in the world who don't have any of those things, and for food. Because sometimes we get along, think I can make it today, I don't think I'm—but we have to realize that we are truly blessed. Then I thank God for peace in my house. I have a peaceful house. I meditate, and then after I meditate and have my prayer, I just say, "Okay, God, who helped me? I serve you today, and who can I help today?" And finally, I watch cartoons. When I watch the cartoons, I wait for the answers. I just ask, and that's a very happy, beautiful day for me because I don't have any cartoons; I never have a problem. There's always an end to it, right? Something good happens at the end, and I have several cartoons that I watch until my day begins, and so therefore I don't have an attitude. I'm glad to be here.

I think you just told us in two minutes more than any of the studies we've looked at. We've looked over half. Isn't that great? Good, good, good example for all of us. And of course, the moral of the story is watch cartoons. I want you to write that down in your notes. Actually, you know what? Even that had some wisdom to it, didn't it? Because she's not stuffing negative, nasty, frightening, fearful things in her brain. But if you look at the way she answered the question, what it reveals is she knew point three, as you'll see: the principle that makes the difference. The key for moving from ingratitude to gratitude, it's all about seeing the gift of God toward us as gifts of grace. As always, it always comes down to grace.

Because there's common grace—that means the things that everybody receives freely from God, like life, breath, sunshine on your face—and there's special grace, the grace that we receive when we respond to God's call and we receive salvation and we receive transformation and we receive spiritual gifts that we can use to help other people. And when my heart overflows with these gifts of grace from God, that's what I want them to just overflow through me to other people. You say, where do you get that out of this story in Luke? This is where we need to see the really big picture of the Gospel of Luke. Now follow me here.

Because if you think this story is just in the Bible to teach us about being grateful, then you might be missing the bigger picture. It is there to teach us about being grateful for sure, but it plays another even bigger role in Luke's gospel. This story of Jesus and the lepers, it is in Luke. Why? Remember I told you to file this; it would become important later. Luke says at the beginning of his gospel he's bringing his physician's mind to bear on these stories about Jesus, and he's making sure he's writing an orderly account so people would know the certainty of what they've been taught. And so this one story is significant in light of everything he's been unfolding in his gospel and everything he's about to unfold. Luke has been answering one question: who is Jesus and why did he come? And every story in Luke contributes to an answer to that question.

Like earlier in Luke, John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin, is thrown in a jail. He's having some doubts about Jesus. He sends messengers from jail to say, "Are you the one who was to come, the promised Messiah, the Savior?" And Jesus says, "Tell John this: the blind see, the lame walk, and lepers are healed." Now why did he tell him that? Well, in the book of Isaiah, written centuries before Christ, Isaiah says Messiah will come, and one of the ways you'll know it's Messiah: his blind will see, and lame will walk, and lepers will be cleansed. And Jesus knew John knew that because he was all about the Messiah, and he'd said Jesus was the Messiah. So Jesus is saying, "Tell John, it's happening." And so every time Jesus does one of these miracles in the Gospel of Luke, Luke's saying, "Credibility, credibility, credibility! Jesus really was who he claimed he was." Now think about that.

Now also think about this: all through Luke, Jesus has been hinting that everything was going to come to a culmination on his final visit to Jerusalem. He's been kind of ominously predicting, "I gotta go to Jerusalem, and stuff's gonna happen in Jerusalem." And do you remember how the story started? He's on his way where? Jerusalem. In Luke, that's basically like Tom Tom Tom in a movie score. It's like, it's gonna, it's happening! And Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, and he's walking because he knows he's going to be crucified for the sins of the world. And while he's going to, he's thinking of that, he's preparing his spirit for that. Ten guys with leprosy just on the side of the highway go, "It's Jesus! Have pity on us!" And almost as an afterthought, he again does what establishes his credentials. He says, "Go, go talk to the priest; you're healed." And the reason Luke puts that story in here is he says, "Now what happens is all ten of these guys experienced this blessing from God, but only one guy—only one—only one saw the same evidence as all others and went, 'Whoa! This doesn't just mean that I'm cleansed; this means that's the Messiah!' And he goes running back and he falls at his feet, and he worships him." And what Luke is saying to his readers is, "Now that you've seen all this evidence, I've checked this out, I've talked to eyewitnesses, now that you've heard these stories, will you be the nine who are grateful for God's blessing, but I don't know about Jesus? Or are you gonna be the one? Are you gonna be one of those people who runs back and falls at Jesus' feet and says, 'I thank you for all the gifts, but I worship you for being the giver, for being the one who was prophesied?'

See, of all the people, the point is that the leper saw past the gift and he saw the giver, and Luke's saying, "Will you do that too?" You know, when I think about throwing myself at the feet of Jesus like this man, I gotta tell you one thing I pray for you and for me more than anything else during this Thanksgiving season. Because we do have that extra time, maybe I hope you take it to think of what you're grateful for, and I pray that you would have that moment where you're walking along like these ten guys must have had, and all of a sudden you'll realize, "I've been cleansed! I've been made clean!" And he did that for me. Jesus Christ did that for me. And I pray you'll have that moment where you'll go back and you just throw yourself at Jesus Christ's feet. Because see, what the leper realized was that he had a need he couldn't do nothing to meet, right? He had leprosy; there was nothing he could do in those days to combat that. And he received as a free, undeserved gift the grace of healing. And do you see how that's that exact same thing is true of you and me today? And this is the principle that moves me from ingratitude to gratitude still today: realizing I had a need I could do nothing to resolve. He had leprosy; we have the disease of sin, all of us. The Bible says we were dead in our sins and transgressions, but I've received grace. I did nothing to deserve it. Jesus Christ went to Jerusalem, and on the cross, he forgave my sin, paid the debt so I could be cleansed.

And you see, if you really see this, you will want to be the one who thanks and who worships and who praises God because Jesus is the one who gave. Now before we wrap this up, I want to make an application to every relationship you've got: your relationship with the Lord and every other relationship, all the relationships you're in. Are you gonna be the one or are you gonna be the nine? Because you're one or the other in every single relationship. All right, so let me give you some homework since this is Thanksgiving week. This week, will you reach out to three people and thank them specifically for blessings they have given you? People who've done something great for you and them, and you are grateful, but you're sort of secretly grateful. Will you let them know? Write them a note, give them a phone call, see them face to face.

Now let me just tell you the problem with this message because here's what some of you are thinking: "Oh, he is so right, but if I express gratitude to my wife or my kids, my husband, they're here right now, and if I express my gratitude today or this week, they're gonna think the only reason he's doing this is because of that sermon René preached." So what I'm gonna cleverly do is I'm gonna wait a couple of weeks till they maybe forget the sermon, and then I'm gonna do this. It will never happen if you wait; you and I both know this. And part of the reason I know this is because this is exactly what I would do, right? Nobody likes to be told what to do; we rebel against that, me too. But let me tell you the flip side of how this works: if the person you need to thank is right here, right now, and you do not thank them, it is going to sting even more. So just own it. Just go, "René was talking about that thing today in church. I just—it just reminded me how much I really do appreciate it." Don't wait until they think it was your idea because they know you; they know that's never your idea. So just own it and thank them.

Think to whom do I owe a debt of gratitude? Who am I sort of secretly grateful for and I haven't laid it out in detail? Because you know what? When you do that, that's the way to a richer life, scientifically and biblically. If there's a big idea to the message, it's this: gratitude, it's not enough to feel it; you gotta reveal it. It's great if you feel it, but reveal it to each other and in prayer to the Lord. And in fact, let's do that right now. Would you bow your heads and your hearts with me and let's pray together?

Heavenly Father, this morning we just want to collectively say thank you to you. Because if not for what you have done for us, where would we be? We've got life as a gift of grace; we have salvation as a gift of grace. You've healed us of our disease and given us a new start in life, and you've given us people in our lives who've blessed us with so much. So help us to be the one and not the nine. And God, I pray specifically that if there are people here this morning, maybe as a recommitment or as a first-time accepting of Jesus, people who want to spiritually run to you and fall at your feet and say thank you. I'm not just grateful for the gifts, but I'm grateful for you as the giver. Thank you for being my Savior, Jesus. Thank you for being my Lord. I want to be like the one who saw you for who you are, and I want to worship you and thank you that you received worship and devotion even from the most outcast of outcasts because that's how some of us feel today. We just want to thank you, God, for how great you are, and we pray this in the matchless name of Jesus Christ, for whom we are most grateful. Amen.