Count Your Blessings

How many of you are grateful to be here this morning? Amen. So am I. I'm also, hey, I'm grateful for Bryce and Johanna hosting and getting us up to speed on what's going on. Let's thank them for serving us. Thank you. Way to go. My name is Mark, I'm one of the pastors here. And again, so glad that you're with us, grateful that you're with us both here in person and on our live stream.

And I just want to take one more opportunity to thank all of you for the sabbatical that I was able to enjoy and be blessed by this past summer and even into September. It is such an amazing precious gift that you, Twin Lakes Church, give to your pastors. So thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And among the many, many happy moments we had together as a family, we did have one moment of sadness or period of sadness. Our little dog Teddy that was going on 17 years old, he passed away in July. And yeah, we were sad as these things are. But the one who felt it the most is actually our other dog Boone, our big lug of a chocolate lab. He was just despondent. I mean no energy, visibly depressed. And when he wasn't just kind of laying around, he would howl, he would bark, and especially when we were gone. He was just not a happy camper.

And so it was actually kind of good that I could be home a little more than usual, kind of, you know, deal with that situation and also to keep him from driving our neighbors crazy as he vocalized his laments over his little buddy Teddy. So one afternoon I had an idea. I had to go to the grocery store and so I took Boone's bed and I put it down in front of the television in our living room and then I pulled up one of my sermons from our sermon archive. And I thought well, you know, he can see me, he can hear my voice, that'll be comforting. He's after all a Christian dog.

So he's down for one of my sermons. And sure enough, while I'm going out the door, he's just kind of very relaxed laying in his bed. And I go off to the store and I get back about 30 minutes later and on the television set, I'm closing in prayer as we do at the end of a message. And Boone is just out like a light. I mean, he is snoring like a bear in hibernation. And I thought to myself, I hope this morning I don't have the same impact on all of you.

Instead, what if I told you there is one thing that you can do that will make you happier, healthier, and even sleep better? One surprisingly powerful practice, scientifically proven to produce these results and more, and better yet, it's simple, it's free, and we can all do it. Care to know what that thing is? I'll tell you next weekend. I got that from Renee. Anyway.

If you want to change your life for the better, here it is. Count your blessings. It's not complicated. Just count your blessings. Check this out. Dr. Robert Emmons is a professor at UC Davis. Got any Davis grads here today? Not a few yet. You should be proud because Dr. Emmons is one of the top researchers in the world on the subject of gratitude.

In fact, in a book that he wrote called Gratitude Works, which is something we've mentioned before, he talks about a research project that he conducted in 1999, and to this day is the most published research he has done in his entire career. And in this study, Dr. Emmons randomly selected participants to be in one of three groups.

First group, they were instructed to write down five blessings, five things that they were grateful for each week, okay? Second group, they were told to write down five hassles. Let me just share with you some of the blessings that they actually wrote down. Things like the warmth of the sun on my skin. My checkbook balanced. The doctor removed wax from my ear. Hey, it's kinda nice when I do that.

Group two, like I said, was to write down five hassles. They wrote things like traffic, finding a babysitter, living with messy roommates were hassles. And then group three was told to simply write down five things that impacted or influenced them. Could be good, bad, indifferent. They left it up to them to write that down.

They all did this for 10 weeks. So five things a week, 10 weeks, and the results were stunning. Turns out people in group one, the gratitude group, were 25% happier. They slept 30 minutes more per week. They exercised 33% more, experienced up to a 10% drop in their blood pressure, and decreased dietary fat intake by up to 20%, all this simply by being grateful. Wow.

And you know, the results go even beyond these physical benefits because this is really about getting the most out of your life. This is about how to enrich your relationships and how to grow in your faith and even enjoy God more. So, for the next two weeks, I'm inviting all of us to go on a journey together. A journey where we practice gratitude and prepare ourselves for Thanksgiving.

And here's the thing. You get to choose which group you're gonna be in. I hope that you'll choose to be part of the gratitude group and that you'll want to focus on the things that you're grateful for. But if you do not, if you allow yourself to walk out these doors today and it just kind of evaporates from your mind, you will inevitably fall in either group two or group three. Fixating on hassles or things that just kind of come your way.

According to Emmons in fact, our brains are naturally predisposed to notice negative things over good things. That's why the news is the way it is. They want your attention, right? Another neuroscientist named Rick Hansen says this: "Our minds are velcro for negative information and teflon for positive." That's just part of being a human being. We have this built-in bias to remember the bad and to forget the good.

And yet I'm pretty sure all of us would like to be grateful people. But let's face it, we all have many things for which we can be grateful for. But like every virtue, gratitude is not something that we merely stumble into. It's not really a natural instinct. It's more like a muscle that we have to develop and train.

And so for starters, I want to share with you a verse that I've just—I've been fixated on this entire week. I've been ruminating on it. And it's a question that the apostle Paul raises in his first letter to the Corinthians. If you know anything about Paul's relationship with the Corinthians, they were a bit of a challenge for him. He loved them dearly, but among the various things that he had kind of dealt with in their midst was the issue of pride. They were somewhat characteristically proud. And so words like proud, arrogant, boast, puffed up, they are sprinkled throughout the letter of 1 Corinthians.

And so in chapter four, verse seven, he asked this question, and this is the one that's just been hounding me all week. He says, "What do you have that you did not receive?" What do you have that you did not receive?

And in context, it's kind of a bizarre thing that's going on. There's an argument in their midst around their spiritual heritage, like who shared Jesus with them and who discipled them? And there's a couple different mentors they had and they're like, "Well, my guy's better than yours." "Oh no, the guy that told me about Jesus is better than your guy." And Paul's like, "Well, time out. What do you have that you did not receive?"

And it's a very good question, especially when you find yourself feeling, well, you know, just a little bit superior, right? Or entitled. And so I wanna broaden that question for us this morning. What do you have that you did not receive? Your every breath, your next heartbeat, where and when you were born, your ability to walk, to talk, to work. And if you are able to see the sunset, to hear birds sing, to taste the sweetness of an apple, what do you have that you did not receive?

God's love, God's goodness, God's grace, forgiveness of all your sins, a place in his kingdom, a life of meaning and purpose, the promise of resurrection and the life to come. What do we have that we did not receive?

And listen, gratitude is not just for when, you know, the sky is blue and all is well in our world. Your attitude is actually a choice, a choice that we make every single day. I'll give you a very powerful example of this. You've probably heard the name Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel survived not just one, but two Nazi concentration camps, perhaps two of the most notorious: Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Here's a picture on screen of Elie Wiesel and others just after being liberated by Allied forces. At the time this photo was taken, Elie Wiesel had lost every single member of his family, every one of them. This unimaginable evil and pain. But Elie Wiesel says there is one thing that the Nazis could not take from him, and that was the power to choose his attitude, and in particular, gratitude. In one interview, he says this: "A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude towards gratitude."

And I think we can agree, you and I, are not gonna face the kind of horrors and losses he experienced in life, but we must still choose gratitude. And so in a nutshell, here's why being grateful is a big deal. It's a big deal because first of all, being grateful blesses me. And if you're a note taker, you might want to write down: it blesses me personally. Science proves this, scripture commands it, experience confirms it, it is a blessing to be grateful.

And think about it, honestly, would you rather be known as a grateful person or an ungrateful person? The question just answers itself. And as we grow in gratitude, we also grow in grace, in generosity, in goodness, in kindness, in others. We become better people the more we grow in gratitude.

And as a result, being grateful blesses others. I mean, earlier in announcements you heard about the kids in our middle school, how they are collecting food for this year's food harvest along with the staff. And you know what, no one's getting a grade for this. It's not an assignment. They're doing this because they know that they are blessed and in a position to be a blessing to others. And so being grateful blesses me, it blesses others.

And third, being grateful honors God. James, the brother of Jesus, writes this in the New Testament. He says, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights." James is saying, you know, the God who created the stars and the moon and the vastness of the universe. That is the same God who sees you and cares for you and provides every good gift you will ever experience in your entire existence. It all comes from him.

And so my goodness, how do you even honor and bless God in response to all of that? Well, by expressing gratitude and praise for who he is and what he's done for it. We were, that's the way we started the service that way. We were blessing God with our praises and acknowledging him for who he is and what he's done.

On a human level, some of you heard about it. Me talk about a man in my past who really impressed these things upon me. He was a gentleman I worked for while I was in college at a wholesale nursery down by Morro Bay. His name was Pat O'Brien. He had a delightful Irish accent. Say he was more like Patrick O'Brien. And along with myself and the other college-aged guys that worked at the nursery, he called us all his lads. He'd say things like, you know, how are me lads doing today? You know, are your lads ready to work? Sometimes even, "Are you lads always after me Lucky Charms?" He didn't really say that. I wanted him to say that. I thought it would have been awesome, but never had the nerve to ask him.

But he was always so attentive, always caring for us. He demonstrated his gratitude for each of us, his employees, by how he cared for us. And so for instance, if we were to—he'd catch us lifting something that he thought was too heavy, he would rush and go, "Aye, aye, aye, laddies! Don't try to pick up something by yourself so heavy. Don't you want to have children of your own someday?" I never understood the connection, but I was grateful, you know? Save my back.

But one of the ways that he really, really impacted me was how he just so freely, easily connected just everyday events with God's goodness and generosity. And so one time I'm moving some plants, these potted plants, and I come across a mama quail and her newborn chicks. There's like eight or 10 of them, they're just tiny, they look like they just hatched. And I just froze 'cause I didn't want to scare her or scatter her babies. And then within seconds, Pat, he sidles up next to me. He goes, "Oh, Mark, aren't the Lord's creatures magnificent?" He just had such a keen sense of God's goodness.

Another time, they were trying to drill a new well and the success of the business really relied on being able to find additional water. And yet after several attempts, they had struck out. And if you know anything about this, you pay the well rig either way. And so at the end of the day, he huddled us all together. And he says to us, "Lads, please pray and ask the Lord to give us success." And I'll never forget, I was like, two days later I show up to work. No sooner do I get out of my car. Here's Pat, runs up to me and he says, "Guess what? The Lord gave us a new well and she's a beauty." So awesome.

And that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of grateful joy, it's contagious, it blesses you because there's something deeply inside all of us. We are wired to want to be able to connect the giver and the gift, you know what I'm saying? You see this in the book of Psalms a lot. In fact, in Psalm 103, David writes this: "Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget none of his benefits."

And then David just starts to count them. "Who pardons all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with loving kindness and compassion, who satisfies your years with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle." David is just leaning into God's blessings in his life.

And yes, even if we do not fully experience, you know, for instance, God's healing of all our diseases in this life, we will surely experience these promises in all their fullness in the life to come, in the new creation. And so church, can I hear you gratefully say amen this morning? Amen. Amen.

Now let's just roll back to verse two again. Why do you think David has to tell himself, "Forget none of his benefits?" Well, that leads us to this. Why being grateful is a challenge. It is a challenge. And I think in part because we think of, again, being grateful as simply an emotion. But gratitude is more than a feeling. Gratitude is something you express. It's something you do. It's incomplete without that expression.

In fact, you ever give someone a gift or you do something kind for them, only to be met by crickets? Yeah. And you didn't do it so that they would thank you. You weren't looking for the applause, but in that silence, it stings. And that's because of this. Unexpressed gratitude feels like ingratitude. Can even feel like rejection, like I guess, you know, what I did, what I gave, didn't even register, didn't matter.

And even Jesus experienced this. If you have a Bible with you, you might open it to Luke 17 because there's a story there that is fascinating. It begins at verse 11. And it says that one day, as Jesus continued to walk toward Jerusalem, he reached the border between Galilee and Samaria. As he entered a village there, 10 lepers stood at a distance, crying out, "Jesus, master, have mercy on us."

Now the border between Galilee and Samaria was an ethnic and religious no-man's land. In fact, you get an idea of just how attractive the real estate was there by the fact that they set aside a place for the lepers to live. Lepers who must remain at a safe distance from their family, their friends, their community, they are just cut off. And so these ten guys, they band together, form their own little group, and when they realized Jesus is approaching, from a distance they cry out, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us."

And I love this because without any fanfare at all, it says Jesus looked at them and said, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." Like, go on. The priests were basically like the health inspectors when it came to infectious diseases, leprosy and the like. And a priest had to declare that you were clean before you could re-enter society. I mean, like go back to your family, go back to your synagogue, even go to the temple, you had to be declared clean.

And so when Jesus tells him to go find a priest, the lepers must be thinking to themselves, did he skip a step? Because in that moment, nothing has changed, nothing. But to their credit, off they go. And it says, "And as they went, they were cleansed of the leprosy." How long into that journey, we don't know, could have been seconds, could have been minutes, could have been hours. But at some point, skin that had been covered with knobby sores, disfigured fingers and faces, suddenly they're healed. They're restored. They're clean.

And now these guys are laughing and they're high-fiving and they're jumping up and down. It's a miracle. And now they're in a foot race, man. They are gonna find the nearest priest because once they do, the next stop is home, where they're gonna hug their kids and they're gonna kiss their wives. I mean, it is best day ever.

But one of them, when he saw that he was healed, came back to Jesus, shouting, "Praise God!" And he fell to the ground at Jesus' feet, thanking him for what he had done. And this man was a Samaritan. Only one guy goes out of his way to express his gratitude and he's not who you'd expect. He's a Samaritan. He's an outsider. He's one with a lousy spiritual pedigree in the eyes of most.

And you would think that, you know, it would be pretty hard to shock Jesus, right? Yet in this moment, he seems to be genuinely taken aback. He says it, verse 17 and into 18: "Didn't I heal 10 men? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?"

See, here's the problem with the nine. They felt it. You gotta believe they felt it to their core. But they didn't express it. They didn't express it. So how can we be like the one and not like the other nine? Kind of the gist of this message.

And I'm glad you asked. Because it brings us to this final section, How to Become More Grateful. And we're going to make this super practical today because it doesn't do no good if it's just something that lives in our head and doesn't translate into action. I've got a 10-day challenge for all of us, and let me explain.

Starting tomorrow, there are 10 days leading up to Thanksgiving. And to put this in practice, the first thing I'm going to encourage, invite, challenge you to do is to commit. Commit yourself to keeping a gratitude journal for the next 10 days. Why? Because this is one of the single most powerful things you can do to cultivate gratitude, and that's not just opinion, that is proven by science.

You might be thinking, well, I'd like to do that Mark, I don't have a journal. Well, you might have some scraps of paper around your house or something like that or a phone, or we actually have gratitude journals for you here today. And so we can just eliminate that little problem. We've got these out in the lobby and they're free. I would just ask that you take one just for yourself. It's not like get a jump on Christmas shopping or something like that or whatever. We've been going through a lot of these, so maybe couples you might consider doing this together. That would be kind of a really fun thing, is to, or do this with your kids. But these are available right in the lobby after the service.

And your commitment then is to keep this journal, and here's what I want to encourage you to do. I want you to write down three blessings every day for the next 10 days. Just three, you can do more if you want, but don't do less. It could be a name, could be a sentence, some sort of blessing that you experienced, three per day. In a simple way to do this if you're like, I don't even know where to start. You can just simply say, I'm grateful to—fill in whatever the name or source—for and then what's the blessing? What is it?

And I gotta tell you, the kids in this church, they're already ahead of you. Because they were given these thankful turkeys and on their turkeys, there's wings and they can write down what their specific blessings are and they're doing that in the feathers. Also one of our pastors, Jessica Frankel and her husband Drew, they have in their house for their kids, Logan and Clara, a gratitude tree and you can see the leaves there, they're writing down their specific blessings, counting them. And what a wonderful example of wise parenting. My point is, is that if the kids can do this, I think we can too.

So commit, count, and then celebrate. Because on Thanksgiving Day, if you do this, three blessings a day for 10 days, you will have no less than 30 blessings to just go over, to share, to talk about, and just, I think it will be a wonderful moment that you are so glad that you arrived at if you do this.

And so, again, we want to make this super practical, so I don't even want to wait till tomorrow for us to get a jump on this. I think we can apply this message right now. And here's how we're gonna do that. I'm gonna ask the band to make their way back out onto this stage. This past week, Elizabeth Summers and Garrett Lackey wrote a song, a wonderful new song, it's just an expression of gratitude. And we're gonna learn this together here moments ahead. And so if you're able, I want to ask you to stand, please. Go ahead.

And if you feel comfortable, I want to encourage you to hold your hands out like this. As an acknowledgement of not only what you have received, but what you hope to receive, what you pray to receive in the future. Because after all, what have we received? What have we received? What do we have that we did not receive?

If you received Jesus, well, you've received the greatest gift of all, haven't you? Because Jesus stretched out His hands on a cross in order that He might pardon all our iniquities and heal our diseases, redeem our lives from the pit, crowning us with loving kindness and compassion, satisfying our years with good things and renewing our youth like the eagle. He has done all of that and more. He accomplished all of that on the cross. And so we praise him, we thank him, we honor him. Amen.

And so, let's pray. Lord, I pray that our hearts will rejoice in these moments ahead, in these days ahead. Rejoice in your goodness and for blessings beyond measure. So God, give us, fill us with much joy as we count even just some of our blessings in the days ahead. And we thank you Lord for what you are doing and will do in our lives.

And I just want to say to any of you who are here or within the sound of my voice, if you've never consciously received Jesus and the life he offers in your heart right now, you can say yes Jesus. Yes, thank you for your grace. Thank you for your compassion. Thank you for taking all my sins, even my death to the cross, where you defeated them. I want to follow you from this day forward. And church, if you've ever prayed the same thing in your own way at any time in your life, let me hear you say a grateful amen. Amen.