Grateful

Welcome to Twin Lakes Church. My name is Adrian. I'm one of the pastors here and today I'm really excited to share God's Word with you. And yeah, it's the holiday season though it is... I went outside I was like, "Whoa, this day turned very summery." It's very nice out there, but Christmas is right around the corner and Thanksgiving is on Thursday. We're gonna be gathering around our tables and eating some sort of something cooked some kind of way.

But I thought for fun I looked up some Thanksgiving facts. A little fun intro to the sermon and here. Got a question for you. Do you know how many pumpkin pies are consumed in America on Thanksgiving Day? Shout out. Any answers? What do you think? 200? 50 million! That's a lot of pumpkin pie. I don't really like pumpkin pie, but I eat it because it's there. Do you know how many turkeys are murdered? I mean prepared on four things. Give me a number. Turkeys. A billion! Almost 46 million! 46 million!

Alright, alright, I'm gonna switch it. I'm gonna give you a number. 4500. 4500. This is the average number of calories consumed that day. I want to apologize for that fact. Oh, some people are excited about that. I have a fact about how many grams of fat are also consumed, but I thought, "No, let me not share that one." Depressing. Nine hours and 27 minutes. That's a very dry turkey. No, it is the amount of time you would need to run a treadmill to burn all those calories. So get started.

Now, really the last one. I thought this was very interesting. I never knew this. In 1953, the Swanson Company had 260 tons of leftover turkey. Frozen turkeys after Thanksgiving. So they packaged the turkey into trays, along with popular side dishes to create the very first frozen TV dinner. It happened because some guy ordered way too many turkey. 260 tons of turkeys. Anybody remember eating these TV dinners? Yes. Anybody? I wasn't around that picture, but I did have my Salisbury steaks in my day.

I was talking to René earlier. He said, "I remember the aluminum taste in the food," which I don't know what that means, but all right. That's a long time ago. There is something missing for... I looked at a ton of lists of these lists of facts about Thanksgiving. There is something glaringly missing from all these lists. I found it on one list, all the way at the bottom. There is a list of fun Thanksgiving facts, and then there's 45. Number 44, right before some green bean casserole thing that nobody likes, was this fact... Number four, I'm sorry. This fact, number 44, giving thanks can make you happier.

Do you think, possibly, we've lost the point of this holiday? Now, I want you to... I hope you enjoy your food and family and friends and green bean casserole and everything. I hope you enjoy it all. I know I will. We have a Thanksgiving party to go to today. There's gonna be a deep fried turkey there and brisket and all the likes. I'm very excited about that. I'm very hungry as well. The clock is ticking closer, but I hope you do enjoy all that. It's a really fun holiday, but my prayer is that today we leave this room with a better perspective about Thanksgiving.

My wife and I wanted to do this. Recently, we wanted to grow in our gratitude and get ready for Thanksgiving, get ready for this message, and so we took on a gratitude challenge that we found in this book, Gratitude Works, by Dr. Robert Emmons. He is a professor up at UC Davis. He is the foremost voice in the study of gratitude, and in this book, he writes this, "Clinical trials indicate that the practice of gratitude can have dramatic and lasting effects. Grateful people experience higher levels of joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism can cope more effectively with everyday stress, sounding pretty good."

And then he goes on to say, "Those that keep a gratitude journal, they are 25% happier, they sleep a half hour more per evening, they even have a 10% reduction in blood pressure." So Jamie and I started Gratitude Journals, and it's a three-week, you know, challenge, 21-day challenge. Jamie did it diligently every day for 21 days, and I also did it most of those days. I tried my best. But I wanted to like hear what she thought about the process. I mean, we did it together, but we didn't really talk about how to go for you, so I interviewed her earlier this week in my office on video, and here she is.

So the Gratitude Project, it was 21 days, and it was easy. The easy part was every day, just do this thing. And then it would repeat three times, so three weeks total. So day one would be a certain activity to do, day two. And I'm not a huge journaler. I don't like write tons of stuff, but it was just for me just writing out specific things and answering the question. I feel like it was more helpful than I thought it was going to be. The questions are good. Some of them would make you think back in time. Some of them would just say, "List five things that you're grateful for for today." So going into the day, I'm already looking for those five things.

And so I was actually reading over the gratitude journal that I wrote, and I was getting emotional because it's little things that I think I would have forgotten. But writing down a really kind word somebody said to me, or a really considerate action somebody did towards one of our girls, it really made me focus and be grateful. And then remember those things that had happened, which I think a surprising thing for me is I consider myself a grateful person, but when you do activities, it makes you stop and have a moment with whatever you're grateful for.

And then when you spend that extra second, it's like the dividends of how grateful you are just multiplies by a million. So I knew, yeah, I'm always grateful if somebody's kind to me, but when I really stop and think like, "Gosh, they just said the word I needed to hear at the right time," and then writing that down, it just, all those emotions just, yeah, are just multiplied. I would say the hard part, sometimes you have to think of something that maybe was negative, and then try to see the good in it. And I think the exercise taught me how to have a balance of recognizing that something was really hard and it's okay to acknowledge that, but then also redeeming it and finding that there were little glimpses of good in that hard circumstance. It was a really cool experience.

Thank you, Jamie, for sharing with us a tag team preaching today. Thanks, babe. It was a cool experience. You know, we're practicing gratitude in that practice that we did. It changed our perspective on life, on our relationship, our kids. Helped us not to overlook the daily gifts that we receive, like life itself and this beautiful place we live in. And it made us even look back at those moments in our lives that were not positive and negative things that happen and see what things we could be grateful for, or maybe looking at something that's gonna end, and how can we be grateful for that while we have time with it.

Gratitude has scientifically, clinically, and we can tell you firsthand proven benefits, but this is not school. Like, I could end the talk there and it would just be some TED talk about gratitude. We're in church, right? What does God have to say about gratitude? Because this is the truth. Science isn't discovering the power of gratitude. They're just confirming what we already know through God's Word. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says this, "Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you who belong to Christ Jesus." I'm gonna read that one more time. "Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you who belong to Jesus.

For a Jesus follower, practicing gratitude is a command." You are commanded to be thankful. And this is the thing, he doesn't tell us to be thankful because he needs our thanks. He's not sitting somewhere in heaven like, "I wish they would just notice me up here and say thank you sometimes." There are other things in the Bible he calls us to do, like pray and read, you know, meditate on his Word. Again, it's not like he's waiting, like, you know, prayers, like a phone call. It's like, "Can they never call?" Prayer, gratitude, those are benefits for us. Those are things that benefit you and me. And not only that, like it says, it is God's will for you to be thankful.

So here's the question, church. Do you want to be in God's will? Do you want to improve your physical, mental, and spiritual habits while being in his will? Yes. So if that's you, take out your message notes that you got when you walked in, and we are gonna dive into this subject. We're gonna look at how we can become more grateful. You know, the science on gratitude isn't new and scripture isn't brand new. We've known that, you know, gratitude is good. Being grateful is good. Growing in gratitude is good, and it's God's will. Then why don't we do it more?

I think it's because there are some obstacles to gratitude. Today I'm gonna point out four obstacles and jump right in. The first one is this, it's casualness. We think gratitude just is gonna happen, you know. Like good things are gonna happen, I'm gonna be grateful. But that's not what biblical gratitude is. That's just feeling good when things, good things happen. Or we think we're grateful because we say thank you, but if you just say thank you to somebody who does something nice to you, you know what that's called? It's called manners. That is not biblical gratitude.

What biblical gratitude is something we have to actively do and pursue and practice. The second obstacle is busyness. Our lives are getting busier and busier, and technology is allowing us shared calendars, is allowing us to fit as much as we can into our schedules, right? I mean we're experiencing this right now. Our daughter turns 11 recently and she's in the sixth grade, and in the sixth grade you get so busy, I guess. We didn't know. But here's just a list of things that she's doing. She is in school, then she has homework, then she has tutoring, she has piano lessons, voice lessons, dance lessons, lacrosse practice, and games.

She wants to hang out with her friends, she likes to read, and the list goes on and on and on. And our other daughter has choir and other things that she's doing. We both work, we have schedules, we have things to go to, and our schedule is filled, and I know what's happening. Some of you in here are like, "That's nothing! You got two kids!" But that's the point. We are filling our days with so much stuff, and I'm not saying those things are bad. You should work hard, you should have fun, but if you frequently feel like at the end of the day you have no time left to do anything and that you wish there was just a little bit more time, chances are you're not pausing to be grateful.

The next obstacle is when we go into autopilot. This is what that looks like. You've seen this interaction. A child is there and somebody does something for that child or says something nice to that child, the parent is nearby, and as soon as somebody gives something to that child, the parent comes in and says, "What do you say?" They're like, "Thank you!" Now, is that child like truly grateful for the thing that they've received to this person? No. They don't want to get in trouble, and it's like a Pavlovian response to that, not just the words, but even the tone of that question. "What do you say? I could do it this, and you know what I'm saying." Right?

And any child right now is like, "Thank you!" Like they want to say, "Thank you!" right now. Nobody's done anything. "What do you say? Thank you!" But we can do the same thing. We say thanks to, you know, we say thanks to people and maybe you like, "We pray every day at the dinner table, but does it ever sound like this?" "Aww man, let's eat!" Like, you just like got to get through it. It's just on autopilot. Are we actually thankful? Or are we just responding like with an automation that our brain has made?

The final obstacle to gratitude is entitlement. This is by far the biggest and most detrimental obstacle to gratitude. There was an interesting benefit to our gratitude challenge, this challenge that we took on. You know, we didn't make our kids write journals, but we wanted to be more intentional about our kids like thinking about gratitude. And so we spent more time at our dinner table pausing, you know, before dinner. Because we were just like that. Like we would pray and like as quick as I can. Because I don't have that much time for pre-dinner prayer with my kids for some reason. Like sometimes I look at them, it's like, "Guys, listen. All I'm asking for is like 12 seconds, okay? 12 seconds. Don't squeeze your sister's hand too hard or too soft or something. I don't know what's happening that you guys are getting upset in 10 seconds."

And I'm like trying to pray and it's like, "What's happening out here?" So we took that time. I was like, "Let's be way more intentional. Let's be grateful. Thank God for the blessing of this meal of a parent who cooked it and for, you know, the blessings in our lives like our family or our friends." And it was interesting one day one of my daughters, who's not here, asked a question. She said, after we prayed, she goes, "Why do I have to be thankful for my friends? I made my friends. I went up and I had to be friendly and talk to them and we became friends."

And you know, I thought I'm like, "That is a great question." She did do stuff, right? I love that she just didn't like swallow what we're, you know, feeding her. She's considering. I love that and it led us into a conversation about gratitude. But it's the same question we ask ourselves sometimes, "Why do I have to be grateful for this thing? I did it." Right? Dr. Emmons writes to this, "No gift will bring grateful joy to a person who thinks that they have a right to everything." Entitlement is a dangerous road because you know what happens when you feel like you're entitled and you have a right to all the good things in your life?

When something you think you're entitled to or you ever write to doesn't happen or you don't get it, you feel wronged or cheated. Entitlement can lead to resentment and bitterness and then what soon happens as you feel more entitled is that you begin to, you stop thinking about the things that you have and you only think about the things other people have and you only think about the things you don't have or those opportunities you didn't get. You forget about all the blessings in your life.

So what do we do about these obstacles? We're going to go to the Psalms today. If you have a Bible, you can open it right in the middle to Psalm 136. We find the Psalmist here, by the way, Psalms is a book of songs in the Bible that the church and Israel for many thousands of years have been singing these songs and this specific song, this Psalm, I believe the writer is showing us sort of a road map to growing in gratitude and we're gonna do something interesting today. We're gonna read the whole entire Psalm all together.

It is 26 verses and we're gonna read it how it has been traditionally read for many years or sung. This is a song. We're gonna just read it. I'm gonna make, I'm not gonna make you sing. Alright, I'm sure it'll be beautiful. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read a part and then you're gonna read a part. I'm gonna read what's in white and you're gonna read what's in yellow or italicized or in your notes it's italicized at the end. But just a spoiler alert, it's the same thing over and over. Okay, here we go. You guys ready? Psalm 136 verse 1, "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love endures forever." Give thanks to the God of God. Say it. His love. Give thanks to the Lord of Lords. To Him who alone does great wonders, who by His understanding made the heavens, who spread out the earth upon the waters, who made the great lights, the sun to govern the day, the moon and stars to govern the night.

To Him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt and brought Israel out from among them with a mighty hand and outstretched arm. To Him who divided the Red Sea asunder and brought Israel through the midst of it, but swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea. To Him who led his people through the wilderness. To Him who struck down great kings and killed mighty kings. Sihon, king of the Amorites and to awe king of Bastion and gave their land as an inheritance, an inheritance to His servant Israel.

He remembered us in our low estate and freed us from our enemies. He gives food to every creature. Church, give thanks to the God of heaven. His love endures forever. Amen. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, give a hand to God's word. I mean you just read. That's power. We're gonna dive right into this psalm. The first two words we see are give thanks. This command again and the original Hebrew here is the word yada. Yada means to acknowledge or confess. Biblical gratitude is more than just thanking someone for something. It's an acknowledgement of who God is, what He's done, what He's doing, and is going to do.

It is an acknowledgement that God is the source of all blessing of every good thing, every good and perfect gift comes from our Father above. And in the rest of Psalm 136, I believe we see four ways we can overcome obstacles to gratitude. First, how do we overcome casualness? It's to be intentional. It's not just going to happen, right? It doesn't say when you feel like it. It doesn't say when gratitude comes upon you. It commands us give thanks. Make a plan. You know, one idea I know that works that the way you can grow in gratitude is keeping a gratitude journal.

You can buy a cheap notebook or you can use a notes app in your phone, but whatever you do, however you want to record it, you make a plan to take time out of your day. If you think that if you're, I'll be grateful sometime today, it's not gonna happen. The author of The Little Prince said, "A goal without a plan is a dream." You need to make a plan. Set aside. I'm gonna tonight at this time, I'm gonna take five minutes, ten minutes. When we say that here, when we're in church, five, ten minutes. That's not that long, but in the middle of your day, you're like, "I don't have one second." So make a plan.

Put it in that digital calendar of yours. Take time to look back and be thankful. That's exactly what Psalm 136 is doing. We read it. It took a while, right? But it was a reminder. It was, it took time. It was this plan to give thanks for what God has done. It doesn't have to be a journal. You could maybe go for a gratitude walk. You go out and instead of listening to music on your walk, you can just take that time to be grateful. Look back at what God has done. Maybe on your commute to work, if you drive over the hill every weekday instead of that podcast, or like a friend of mine who told me he watches Netflix on his drive to San Jose, please stop that. Close your new laptop.

Whatever, but you know, let's change it. You could put on worship music, you know, just for like that 30 minutes. Just really thinking, like, you know, worship music just reminds us of God's goodness. Or maybe you can turn, get the Bible app and it'll read the Bible to you. If you're not sure what to do, get your Bible, open it, and read a psalm. There's 150 of them. Just take time to read it. Here's the point. It's not just gonna happen. Be intentional. How do we overcome busyness? It's be persistent. We have to be persistent.

The key to any change that you want to make in your life or grow in an area of life in your life is to make it a habit. This psalm, if you see, it shows us that secret. It makes you say the same thing over. I could tell, like, as you were reading in the beginning, "His love endures forever!" The 20th time, "His love endures forever." It's like, but the point of the psalm is that you repeat it and do it over and over and be persistent. And there's another thing about it, you know. You might feel like, "Oh, I don't want to say it," but you kept saying it and you did it.

You know, sometimes you're gonna, you're gonna mess up. You're gonna forget to schedule a it in and it passed and you're the next day, "I didn't do it," and you're gonna be tempted to quit. Like I said, my wife, she diligently did it every day for 21 days in a row. And I did it my best, you know. And there were days where I missed, but you know what I realized? That tomorrow is a new day. If you've been at church here for any length of time, you've seen me and maybe you've known me for a long time. You've seen, I've gone through a transformation in my life, a health transformation and fitness, and I've made some really big changes in my life.

And what I found out in my, like the last eight years as I've lost a lot of weight and gotten very fit, I found out that there are days where I definitely messed up. Where instead of having a slice of pizza, I had a pie of pizza. And then what would usually happen is I would think, "Well, I have failed and it's over." And so then I would reach for a bag, "I'm gonna eat this bag of chips. I'm gonna eat this. It's all done." But what really changed is when I realized the next day is a new day. The next meal is a new opportunity for me. If you miss a day, miss a couple days, you miss a month, the next day is a new day. Be persistent. Just pick up where you left off.

How do we overcome being an autopilot is to be specific. Gratitude isn't really gratitude unless you name the gift and name the giver. And that's exactly what Psalm 136 does. If you look at this Psalm, the psalmist begins, "Give thanks for what? For who God is. He is a God who is good. He is the Lord of lords." And then it moves on more specifically to the God who created the earth and the stars to govern the day. Then it goes specifically to these moments in Israel's history to look at the wonders of God. Then it goes even more specific to their daily blessings of food. And then each verse ends with a confession of who to be grateful for, for what his love endures forever.

Be specific. You know when you pause to be grateful and you want to be specific and when you try to do that in the beginning, it's kind of hard. I remember, I remember we talked about this, when we like that first day of our gratitude journals, "What are three things you're grateful for?" I'm like, "What? What's my name?" Like my brain just goes blank. Like, "I don't even know who I am anymore." You know, and so it just took some time. But once you get going, it's like anything you practice. So I want to help you out. As you start your gratitude journal tonight, maybe, here are some things you can write down. Just not cheating. These are things we all can be grateful for. Life.

Some of us know this better than others. That life is a blessing. Breath. Now I know my wife's been sick this week and it's like a lot of coughing and each breath is a blessing. Water is a blessing. Food, you know, we've been talking about the second harvest food drive. One in three members of our community, our neighbors, which means one in three of us in this room are food insecure. Food is a blessing and we can help be a blessing to others in that fall food drive. This place we live, is a blessing. Which is kind of cliche to say, "Be grateful for Santa Cruz. It's so beautiful." But let me, you know, I was funny. I was at the gym the other day and a couple people at the gym were having like getting all heated about tourists. Some people in Santa Cruz, man.

I know you like it here and like, but you really don't like people to come here. All the business owners like, "We like tourists." But let me tell you, as you get all upset and grumbly about the traffic and all whatever is the weekends and if you're a surfer, you're getting all bent out of shape about the water and it's like so many people are in their valley go home. When that happens, when that happens and you're grumbling, you can be grateful that you live in the place people want to go to. Don't take it for granted. Be grateful. Everyday blessings. Take time. Be specific. How do we overcome entitlement? Be humble.

The psalmist writes this, "He remembered us in our low estate." What the psalmist is saying there is that he is admitting, it's an admission that we can't do anything to earn or deserve God's blessings, His love, His mercy, or His grace. Anything that we have in life we have is worthy of gratitude to God because it is all a blessing. But here I want to make a little bit of a course correction. You know, we'll hear about this when we talk about God's grace. We don't do anything. We can't deserve His love and we can't earn His love. Sometimes we can go to this weird dark place where we're like, "Yeah, I'm trash and I'm just garbage and God pities me." That is the opposite of what God wants.

That's not what this humility means. Being humble is acknowledging our dependence, our God, and when you think about His goodness, His blessings, His mercy, and those acts of kindness He does to us, He doesn't do them out of pity. He does them because of His love for us. He loves us so much. And in Romans 5:8 it tells us exactly that. He showed us His great love by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Don't miss that. He didn't come to die for you and for me when we got our acts together and when we made our lives look pretty and made it look nice. No, He came when we were sinning and when we rejected Him, He still died for us.

You know why? Not because He pities us, but because He loves us. And that's what this Psalm and that's what gratitude is all about. Acknowledging God's unending, amazing, gracious love. And it's something we need to practice and be intentional about, be persistent about, be specific about, and be humble about. Because there will be obstacles, but we need to do those things. Be intentional, be persistent, be specific, and humble. I want to end with one final thought on gratitude.

You know, because I know in this room and people listening, there are people and you are in the middle of something and you're like, "It is hard. If I pause to be grateful, I have nothing to write." Because all I can think about and see are tragedies or mistakes or despair. But I want you to, if you get that paper you have in the notes or if you have your Bible open and you look at Psalm 136, if you look in the middle of that Psalm, you'll see the psalmist talk about Israel's history and these amazing miracles that God, you know, did.

Those memories are not happy. The Passover it talks about there. That Passover is a reminder that you were slaves in Egypt for so many years. The Red Sea, parting, that sounds really cool. Moses puts a stick in the water and boy, it splits open and they get to walk across the sea because Pharaoh's army is approaching and wanting to take them back or kill them if they don't want to come back. So they're stuck. And so the people in the front of the line, it's awesome. Have you ever thought about the people in the back of this million people like crowd? They don't know what's going on up there.

All they see are like their countrymen and Pharaoh's approaching army. I just think about one guy in the back. His name is Joey and he's like, "Guys, what are we doing? There's a water, there's an army. What are we gonna do?" And then he doesn't see Moses do all that stuff and then he just notices everybody starts marching to the water and he goes, "What are we, we're just gonna go into, we're dying in the water? That's drowning? Is that better than what's gonna happen? Okay, I guess." And he just walks and then he gets to the shore and he sees, the seas have split and he goes, "Wow, this is cool." But he's still in the back of the line and that army is getting closer and he's like, "Let's go! Come on!" In the front they're partying and they're like not getting out of the way. "Let's go!" It's not a great reminder. It was scary.

The psalm is a repetitious reminder of one thing. In the Hebrew, that last part, "His love endures forever," when it talks about God's love, it is the word "chised." This word "chised" has no direct translation. There's no perfect word that fits what "chised" means. And so many translations have different ways of saying it, mercy, love, but basically the definition of "chised" is this. It's a loyal and enduring love put to action. It's a love that you experience, like Israel is remembering, in your best times when you're thinking about the amazing creation of the world and your worst times in slavery.

It's the same love that we talked about for eight weeks when we looked at Joseph's story, when he was in the pit, when he was in Potiphar's house, and when he was a prisoner. He could rely on God's "chised," his unfailing, enduring, loyal love. It's easier to be grateful when things are going great, but biblical gratitude is the practice of thankfulness even when things aren't going great. Give thanks in all circumstances, the Bible tells us. Not for everything, you don't have to be thankful for every bad thing that is coming your way and say, "God, thank you for bringing this upon me," but you can be grateful in those moments to your God who loves you.

And it's something we see modeled by Jesus himself. This is a very special psalm, Psalm 136. I was doing some research and this psalm is also known as the great Hallel, or the great praise, like Hallelujah. It's a great praise. Like I said, psalms are songs and this specific song is a song sung during Passover and specifically at the end, many times traditionally, the end of the Seder meal. If you don't know what Seder is, it's this practice that Jews have been doing for many, many years to remember Passover, to celebrate Passover, which is a holy holiday that we just read about when they were freed from Egypt.

And in the Seder, it includes a meal, it includes singing and storytelling, time together with family, and at the end of this amazing remembrance of God's goodness, they sing one last song. And scholars believe it is Psalm 136. So that same psalm you recited with me earlier that you said 26 times over and over, that same exact song, those words have been sung for thousands and thousands of years at countless dinner tables, including one specific one in a little small room in Jerusalem.

Jesus is having a meal with his friends during Passover and check this out, Matthew 26:30, the gospel tells us, "Then after dinner they sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives." And we believe that Jesus sang those words you said, right before he walks the path to the cross. He sings about God's faithful enduring act of love and mercy 26 times over and over. And he hears the echo of that song in his heart, "his love endures forever." As he agonizes for what lies ahead of him, his love endures forever. As one of his friends looks at him and kisses him on the cheek to betray him, his love endures forever.

As he is wrongly accused and convicted, his love endures forever. As he has tortured his love endures forever. As the crowds turn on him and yell, "Crucify him!" He remembers his love endures forever. As he is nailed to the cross, his love endures forever. As he takes his last breath, his love endures forever. And then three days later when he wakes up, his love endures forever. And then when he goes around and surprises all of his friends on Easter morning, his love endures forever. And church, that same truth is true for you today.

If you are facing fear and anxiety or a heartbreak or divorce or sickness or death or you're battling addiction or you look at your past and you think you are not worth anything, let me tell you something. His love endures forever. Growing in gratitude is not just God's will. It's not just good for you. It is an intentional, humble, persistent, specific practice that will sustain you in the best of times and in the worst of times. It is a confession and it is an acknowledgement that one last time, let's say it all together, his love endures forever. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your love. God, you don't pity us. You love us. And you are with us. You pursue us on our best days and on our worst days. When our circumstances are great and whether because of somebody else or because of our own mistakes, Lord, our circumstances are terrible. Lord, your love endures forever. And just like Jesus clung to that truth as he faced the hardest thing, God, we can cling to that same truth today. And God, I pray specifically for people in this room who are having a hard time. May they hear these words that your love endures forever. God, I pray that even today as we repeated that phrase, as we read that psalm, as we said those words that Jesus himself sang, may our gratitude grow. And from today on may God help us to take those times to pause and acknowledge and confess that your love endures forever. That's in your name we pray, Amen.