Pastor Ralph Douglas West - We Are To Thank God Not For Everthing... - 1 Thessalonians 5:18

0:00 For those of you that are not familiar with the characteristics of the African-American church experience. john

0:23 Joh You see what I'm talking about? is that I've been saying to the media team, I said, now, you have to know when the choir is finished.

1:03 And you can't see what I'm talking about? You see what I'm talking about? Is that what I'm saying? Because when you got this many people in a room, you have too many expressions. of what the Lord has done for. There you go. I love it. I wouldn't take nothing from a journey. So let me give a commercial to get you calmed down. Where is Journey Tonic? where the journey at?

1:59 Where you at? See if you can find a little hand waving at that. I see her, see if the cameras can find it. You see her? Now I'm expecting a lot out of Journey because she was one of the invited, young, inspiring actors on Abbott Elementary. So yeah, thank you Journey. So we're excited, excited for you. We're going to pray that you make a lot of money.

2:40 And when you're being interviewed on The View and being interviewed by, you know, different people, you tell them, say, well, I don't know how it works, but I know my pastor expect me to bring the time. time. And then to the parents and family, yesterday during the UT Vanderbilt game, the two young men that played wide end, opposing each other, grew up in this church, in our children and youth ministry. So it was a real joy to have them and to their mom and dads. so what a joy now I had to give those to get you calmed down to come back this for the next it'll only be a couple of weeks the way that our month is designed and a couple of weeks from now we'll celebrate and we'll start bringing a culmination with the 50th preaching anniversary of our pastor along with 38 years as pastor of the church and 30 years as founding past and all that kind of stuff.

3:55 And as a congregation, which is made up of all of you. And so for this month and for the next Sundays, I want to talk about gratitude and thanksgiving. In America now, we almost have dismissed thanksgiving. We go from Halloween to Christmas. And I don't ever want to live my life where I don't punctuate it with periods of celebrating who God is and what God has done. but not only theologically, humanly to thank God for the different people in my life who have shaped it and encouraged it and how they've made an investment in my life. And so today I want to talk about the inclusiveness of thanksgiving from one line in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5.

5:03 You know this line, but I want to look at it and say a few words about it and then sit down, if you let me. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 Verse 18. In everything, give thanks. for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. This is the word of God. You may be seated. In everything, give thanks for this is the will of God for you.

6:00 One translation reads, in everything give thanks to God for this is the will of God for your very life. It's an inclusiveness of thanksgiving. It's been attributed to the poet and laureate Oscar Wilde,

6:27 the couplet, two men stood behind prison bars, one saw the mud, the other saw the stars. It's one of the favorite references that I have in the way that people and different people look at life, That some see the mud, some see the stars.

6:51 It was Wow's way of saying that there has been placed on the shoulder of every woman and man a responsibility to be able to interpret where they are in life. How do you look at life, analyze life, summarize life? There are some people when they look at life, they see only the mud. and there are others when they look at life they only see the stars and when we read the couplet then the question is how do you interpret life? Is it mud or stars? It's what the preacher George Arthur Buttrick said in a different way when he talked about the sun that for some the sun melts the wax but it hardens the clay. In both cases, you identify that wax or clay, mud or star, it is how you have determined to interpret life.

7:57 This happened to Pastor Martin Rinkart in 1636 during the Thirty Years' War. Where this German pastor experienced real devastation caused by death. his congregation had been ravaged by death and disease, where in one year he buried 5,000 of his parishioners, 15 funerals a day. And he too was faced with how does a pastor look at life through prison bars? Do I see the mud out of the stars? How do I interpret the sunlight? Does it harden the clay or does it melt the wax? And Reinhardt wrote these words that became a prayer then, a poem then, a song for his congregation as he looked every day for 52 weeks. 15 funerals a day.

8:59 Caused by death in his 30 years war. And this is what he said. Hear his words. now we thank we our God now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voice whose wondrous things have done in whom his world rejoices who from our mother's arms have led us on our way with countless gifts of love and still ours today.

9:40 I believe if we could engage Rankhart into a conversation, he could say, well, I could have seen the mud, but I chose to look at the stars. I could have said that the death and the devastation caused by death has hardened my heart, but I chose to see that the same sun that heartens is the same sun that melts the wax. Now to 1 Thessalonians. This is a letter that is written to the church from the pen of a pastor who's in the distance and gives the letter to the hand of Timothy to go and say, take this to the people in Thessalonica and let them know that I have chapter one, verse one, remembered them in their prayers.

10:36 For those of you who love outlines, you could shape it this way, that it begins with an invocation of appreciation. That is, it's a prayer of appreciation. How do you know? Look at chapter one, verse one. Paul now praises God for the works of faith inside of the congregation. and he identifies it this way, that I thank God and he makes mention of you remembering, look at this, your work of faith.

11:13 Labor, love, patience of hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. After the prayer, he moves into at the end of chapter 1, 2, 3, 4 instructions on how you are to live. And he covers a ground of experiences. In chapter two, he looks at how ministry is conducted in the face of the congregation, the motive and the motivation, and finally the method. And then he gets to the practical areas of life in chapter five, four and five, where he says, and you've heard this, you know more about this letter than you're letting on to. If you buried anyone that you love and they have gone through a Christian service, you've heard some preacher, somebody stand up and say, I wouldn't have you be ignorant.

12:08 that your mama, your daddy, your brother, your sister, your grandparents, they are not all dead, they are asleep. And one day at the return of Jesus Christ, those who are asleep shall be awakened and we shall meet up with them again in the air. and then it's almost as if Paul is trying to get to the next service when you get to chapter five, and so you move from chapter one, the prayer and invocation of appreciation, to chapters two, three, and four, where he looks at instructions for the congregation, and then in chapter five, he ends with the conclusion of exhortations.

13:03 Now, when I'm reading the Bible, and I've been reading the Bible for a good while now, and I still get excited about reading the Bible. So I know I'll be preaching to you and I know how critical you are about me, how you give me such a tough time in preaching. So I called my TA, my teacher's assistant. You've met him. You'll be here in February at Marcus Jerkinson. I said, MJ, I said, you have written the commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians that appears in this new wonderful commentary, but that's for another day. I said, what is Paul saying in chapter 5? He said these words. He said, Pastor, Paul is simply saying this. I ain't got time to write no dissertation.

14:02 Notice in chapter 5 at the end that Paul is not writing a commentary. He uses language that everybody in this room understands. No child misunderstands chapter 5. No teenager, young adult, adolescent, nobody misunderstands. You say, that's the one verses, the one verses I know what I'm doing that I understand and Paul simply says at the end of chapter 5 here's some things that I want you to do and I don't want you to forget it and I don't have time to elaborate on it so let me give you the words that you use immediately so you don't have to guess at what I'm asking he said verse 16 he said rejoice always You don't need a dictionary for that Some of you, I can look at you You stayed up too late Even though you got an hour Looking at Toronto and the Dodgers I shouldn't even mention that But confession is good for the soul Not that good for your pastoral reputation And you know what I didn't see at the game?

15:28 No, I'm serious. I was waiting on somebody to get on the microphone and say, come on, give the God of athletics, Apollos, praise. Nobody said a word. You missed that. I was waiting on somebody to get up and say, put your hands together and give praise to Apollos for the Dodgers winning. Nobody said a word.

15:58 Without cue, without drum major, without cheerleader. When that team won, they just broke out into a rejoicing. It sounds like good church to me because if you know God and what God has done, Nobody ought to have to motivate you to give God praise for who he is in your life. Church, you were dead today. No, you were dead. and be careful for always letting other people set the temperature for your life. No, you were dead. I wasn't dead. I rejoiced.

16:47 And then it says, pray. Pray. And for those of you here talking about, well, I just don't know how to pray. You know why? Because you don't pray. You don't need another seminar on prayer. You don't need another book on prayer You don't need another time living on prayer All you just need to do is just pray On your knees, on your feet Jogging around the park Riding your bicycle in your cubicle Just pray And the reason I can say that is because I've done them all. I've sat down and let other people try to set an agenda on what prayer ought to be like and here's my reply. That's how you pray. That ain't how I pray. I pray this way and God and I got a good relationship in our conversation with each other and more of you would love God more if you would love God out of your authentic personality, out of the origin of who you are.

17:53 You look at the first 5, 10, 15, 20 years of my pastoral ministry, I've gone down to pray for an hour, pray this way, pray the prayer of Acts, pray the prayer of this, pray the prayer of that, then it dawned on me.

18:13 You reading all that and you don't even pray. The more I read it, the less I pray. And then authentically, as I began to think about God, it led me into my own prayer. And so prayer ain't how long you pray, it's if you pray. Prayer is not if you're praying in the morning. Do you pray? And notice that rejoice, rejoice when? Always. There you go. Pray without ceasing. Time doesn't permit because I could go to Luke 18, because Paul has probably read what Jesus was talking about, a woman who had been oppressed, who went to a judge, and Jesus says, pray without ceasing. But rejoicing and praying, what I'm talking about.

19:08 The point of mentioning what Paul said leading up to verse 18 was for one reason, to say that you don't need a dictionary to know what he's talking about. the question this morning for you up there who blames everybody where the past day he he ain't he can't talk pastor he he ain't that deep he ain't like reverend so-and-so come on tick tock he ain't like that this preacher here this preacher here Will you do it yourself?

19:51 Verse 18 and I'm done. In everything. Give God what? Thanks. All right. Now, so we got an outline for the letter. Now let me give you an outline for the sermon. So the purpose of the letter is to encourage a group of Christians who have faced a crisis of persecution and they are growing in their faith. And remember this, faith is only faith when it has been tested. you let it soak in and you'll say man I almost missed faith is only faith when it's been tested You want to know how deep you believe?

21:02 Let your faith be tested. And you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to ask for it. One day your faith will be tested and that's when you have to say, do I look at the mud or do I look at the stars? My faith has been tested. I mean, we live in a culture and a time, I'm not going to get all in that, but you sit down and you just go down the list and you start saying, faith is being tested in America. It doesn't matter what part are you partisan with, that's not the issue. That faith has been tested. How do you look at 42 million people inability to access nutrition? Or what do you say to the person Who has pledged their life To a government of wealth Who can't get paid Or what do you say to a group of people who live in Houston, Texas with one of the best medical facilities in the entire world but you can't get to it?

22:27 And then Pastor Wes got the nerve because it's November to stand up and want to talk about Thanksgiving. This is why I'm leaving this church, because this man is out of his brain. He's talking about being Faithful in this situation. Let me unpack what that one line mean and I'm done. The first thing that I believe Pastor Paul would want me to pass on to you from reading his letter over the last week is to say the Christian life is not based on thanking God for everything.

23:26 I can hear in my head some English teacher nudging his son, her daughter, said, if you had been listening to my lesson last week on preposition, you would get happy over what he just said you was looking but you wasn't listening Paul says, for everything.

24:14 That's not what he said. And the Christian life is not based on you saying, well, I just thank God for everything. That's why I spent those five minutes talking about language that you don't need a dictionary to define. You just read it in verse 18. At verse 18, Paul is saying, I never thank God for a thorn in my flesh. I never thank God for losing my physical vision. I never thank God for being arrested in Philippi. And I never thank God for being shipwrecked. I don't know who you've been listening to, but I ain't never thank God for seven years of my ministerial life being lived behind prison boys.

25:07 I never thank God for any of that. And the problem with some of you, you've been trying to figure out how you're going to thank God for something that God never told you to be thankful for. Preach Ralph West. Sick is sick. Hurt is hurt. Pain is pain. Death is death. And God never asks you, and I know many of you, bless your heart, come from these traditions where these people who thought that it was something wrong with using your brain along with your Christianity, God never asks you to think my child died. God ain't never asked you to shout and praise him for the death of your child, for the death of your mother, for the death of a grandparent, for the death of a friend.

26:06 He never said that. Never one time. I remember in my religious studies when I came across Mary Baker Etta, the founder of Christian scientist religion, who understood medicine, theology, and science. And they would have these book props out downtown. And I said, well, the word Christian in it, that sounds good. And science is there, that's good. But I learned later, you can say God, Jesus, Spirit, Bible, and don't mean anything that historical Christianity promotes.

26:47 And so Mary Baker Ellis says, if you are suffering, it is not the will of God. It is a figment of your imagination. For if you can dismiss the idea of suffering from your head, then you can dismiss it as an experience. It is illusionary. This is why Tom Cruise, who I love as an actor, but I wouldn't listen one word when it come to him talking about theology, gets in trouble when he goes after Brooke Shields. about postpartum depression. And she said wisely, well, you ain't never had no baby. When you have one, come talk to me. Come on here.

27:39 I'm trying to help you this morning how to understand this. Paul never said, now shout for death. He said, no. In the same way that that movement is wrong, You're wrong when you start saying to God and the others, well, you know, God just wants you to be thankful for everything. It's easy for you to say that. You ain't never been diagnosed with cancer. But the rest of us who know that journey, you can't get us to buy into that wrong conclusion. So that's why prepositions matter. So the first thing is Is that He says Being a believer Being a believer Does not mean That you thank God For everything I'm looking at y'all Bless your heart I thought you Were more mature Than that 8 o'clock Them sinners in there But they got it Read it This is why you read it For yourself Verse 18 says Starts off what?

28:48 In everything. There's a difference for everything and in everything. The prepositions matter. In everything. So God is saying, I want to move you in your thinking far to end. Pastor West, I'm confused. No, you're not. You just ain't listening. So you start biblically. Is there anybody in the Bible that I can look at that started the way you're trying to get me to process? Absolutely. Where you want to start? Abraham? Abraham doesn't think God fought having to offer Isaac on the mountain as a sacrifice. He'd been waiting forever for his son.

29:43 Now he finally get him and now he got to crucify? He doesn't thank him for the sacrifice. But he thinks him in the reality that when he obeyed God, God offered up to him a ram in the bush. Jehovah Chira. You ain't got to do it. I'll provide for you. Yeah. Joseph doesn't thank God for being betrayed by his brothers, sold into enslavement, in prison in Egypt, but he thanks God that in prison, God moved him from the prison to the palace to save the nation. We are here this morning, regardless who's listening and who's in this room, in church history, because Luther doesn't thank God for being expelled from the Roman Catholic Church.

30:42 But in exile, he thanks God in exile that he found the doctrine of justification. That is that when God looks at you through Jesus Christ, he ain't looking at your past. He ain't looking at your present. He's not looking at your future. He's looking at what Jesus Christ has done on Calvary for you.

31:10 Wesley ain't shouting for being thrown out the Anglican church, but he's rejoicing in the Wesleyan revivals. Come on closer than that. John Bunyan is not rejoicing for being put in the Bedford prison. But he writes in Bedford the best-selling book other than the Bible for years until Rollins came along and wrote Harry Potter.

31:51 You're missing it. Martin T. ain't thanking God for being in the Birmingham jail. But in the jail, he writes a letter to the moderate white denominational pastors and say real Christianity means that we get involved in the human brokenness of the world. We don't thank God for it, but we thank God in everything. Okay. Man, I thought y'all be shouting about this. Maybe we spent too much time.

32:27 For those of you that are conversing with scripture, some of you are saying, wow, Now, this sounds like another verse that Paul writes, which is one of the ways when you read the Bible, you know, you hear these people, be careful about these armchair scholars that's always trying to tell you something and they ain't never studied it themselves. They didn't listen to two, three programs, memorize something. But one of the ways that you read the scripture, you say, oh, this is Paul. Verse 18, in everything, give God thanks. sound very much like Romans 8, 28. Where he says, and you know. Now, when he says, and you know, he's not just talking about educational knowledge.

33:22 He's talking about intimate knowledge. He said, you and I have journeyed together. We have experienced one another. This is not the first time that you've talked to me. You remember when you were a child And you believed And you did not allow rational thinking To compromise Question Interfere how you relied on me And Paul says And you know Wait a minute You're making me work hard But I'm up for the fight this morning Because I got an extra hour of sleep but I don't want you to leave here ignorant this morning and you know because there are some things that your mama know. There are some things that your father knows.

34:19 There are some things that your brother and sister know but that knowing is not what's going to be your imprimatur of faith by God's hand. It comes a time that you can't rely on me on mama, on daddy, you got to be able to say, I know. And here Paul says, and we know what all things work together for the good of them who love the Lord and who are called according to his purpose. You don't like it when you're going through it, but when you get on the other side of it, you rejoice about it. Oh, I know who I'm preaching to. Oh, I know who I'm preaching to. So let me give you one example. Is that some of you today after service, you're going to go and you're going to buy something and y'all are going to go out to eat or somebody's cooking and you're going to taste something on the plate.

35:17 And say that can stand just a little flavor. And so you say, I have some salt, sea salt for you healthy people. and you go sprinkle, not too much, just enough to make the flavor pop, the zest of the flavor, to explode on the palate of your mouth.

35:48 Just, not too much, because if it gets too salty, then you don't want it. But just enough to bring out the flavor. and so you get, you go get salt. But then somebody says, you know what you're putting in your body, don't you? And you say, salt. I say, no, you're not. You're putting sodium and chloride. You take your phone and go to the dictionary and you say, oh my Lord, sodium can kill me. Chloride, how dare you bring these toxins, these poisons and put them on the table and the chef comes in and says oh yes this is true separate they could kill you but when you synergize them they bring zest all of us have gone through enough experiences that separate they could kill us but when God takes the positive and the negative and bring them together He brings zest, yeah, out of life.

37:01 I'm done now. So in everything, give God what? Thanksgiving. Now I'm through. But now I know my church, and I got to use my last three minutes. You're saying pass. Now you've been telling us all these years that you don't just drop no text like that because after that, there's another line. In everything, give God thanksgiving for, wow, this is the will of God for your life.

37:40 And so what the text is tailored to teach us is that that last phrase speaks of thanksgiving as a volition over against an emotion. And that's why many people don't rejoice. They only rejoice when the sun is shining. When you understand Thanksgiving as an act of volition that I choose because two men who stand or two women behind prison bars, you have to choose whether you're going to look at the mud or look at the stars. And I made a decision some time ago and this ain't got nothing to do with being a preacher because I know a lot of preachers who got a vision on mud and not the stars.

38:34 Then I don't care how bad it gets. I choose to lift mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help. My help comes from the Lord. And so the volition is you make the choice to make the choice to be grateful, the choice to say thankful. Do I feel like it? No. Do I want to? No. So you think in 38 years Of walking in this pulpit That the death of a loved one doesn't affect me? I mean, because that's the way people are just assuming Like, oh, he just preaches through it So you think when I got to bury my mama That don't affect me? You think me burying my first cousin yesterday Doesn't affect me? Somewhere you have to say I notice that he doesn't say nothing in these vacations.

39:31 It's too much for me. But then on Sunday morning, I got to show up as my vocation and my volition. That is, I may not feel like it, but I'm going to get up anyway because in everything,

39:53 hurt, death, life, Life, job, without it, I choose to give God praise. But Pastor West, but you ain't got no job, I know it, but I'm thankful that it woke me up this morning. But the government shut down, that's all right. It wasn't the government that woke me up. But snap is gone, that's okay. I belong to a community of people that ain't gonna let me go hungry. I'm done now church. I'm done. You get the idea. So in everything, everything, and I can do it because I got an example. One Friday, one Friday little boy, little Jew boy from the hood of Jerusalem in Nazareth grew up in the ghettos in Palestine, took a cross upon himself and was nailed to that cross.

40:59 And I'm going to tell you something, he died on that cross. And the death reminds us that regardless of how bad things get, in everything, because he died, they buried him. But then earlier, I'm going to just stop right there because I ain't getting ready to do all of that. But my soul got happy. But earlier,