A Way to Happiness                                                                         11/20/49

 

Scripture:  Psalm 34: 1-10.

 

Last Sunday, we were thinking of the blessedness of sharing, and giving concrete expression to our thought by indicating what we are expecting to share with others, through this church, in the coming year.  Today, we are near the season, peculiar to the United States of America, when all citizens of this land are asked, by presidential proclamation, to give thanks to Almighty God for His blessings to us.  The themes of last Sunday and this week are connected in that both are joyful.

 

I suppose that a time in the spring or early summer could have been deemed particularly appropriate for thanksgiving by those sturdy Pilgrims who had weathered the first winter to be endured by a pioneer group on that particular spot of New England coast.  They were a small company anyway.  They were a long, long way from those neighbors of their former homeland with whom they might formerly have shared a more comfortable and assured existence.  Many of the little company had not survived the cold, the illnesses, the lack of balance nourishment which went with a pioneer tussle with winter.  And the little settlement had a flourishing cemetery plot about as soon as it had anything else.

 

But now the bitterness of winter’s cold and privation was past.  There was prospect of raising the first crop of food and getting their houses in better shape.  A ship had brought new supplies of clothing, food and tools; also more people of a mind, like theirs, to be free of the regimentations of the old world, so that they might turn to God in the way that seemed right to them.  Almost any time that summer could have been a day of thanksgiving for those determined folk who wanted only the chance to survive and prosper in this new place.

 

We are well accustomed to a Thanksgiving Day set late in November.  It is particularly appropriate as a harvest festival.  Every farmer, every orchard grower, every gardener knows the satisfaction that comes with the completion of a good harvest.  To many, it seems the logical time of the year to express one’s thanks, as indeed it is - especially if part of the harvest is dedicated to the special service of God.  The latter is important - as it is important to the right enjoyment of the substance entrusted to all of us.

 

We should be a diabolically wretched nation indeed if we received our harvests without gratitude.  Does it not startle you to realize that through all these years of the world’s hunger and desolation and despair, God has sent one good harvest after another to this good land.  During all those war years, I used almost to tremble at the divine providence wherewith one good crop after another filled the bins of this nation while all its resources were so desperately needed both at home and abroad.  Once again it has happened.  Weeks ago a fruit supplier was remarking to his customers: “Apples will be plentiful and inexpensive for all this year.  There is a bumper crop of them!”  And corn fills the cribs of this state as seldom before in its history.  The national blessings of this entire nation are so constant that we are prone to take them as our due -- even to worry about having too much of some things -- and to forget to praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

 

Two suggestions I have recently read might, if earnestly followed, keep even the dullest of us broad awake and roused from the ugly sin of ingratitude.

 

1)  One is this: consider what it would be like if everything you have is suddenly swept away.  That is hard for us, here, even to imagine just now.  But it isn’t hard for some across the seas.  A splendid English Christian remarked not long ago, “When you have nothing left but God, then you become aware for the first time that God is enough.”  Some have found, even in the loss of all things, a sense of gratitude to God not known before.  How much more heartily should our gratitude rise in the midst of plenty which can be enjoyed both in using and in sharing.

 

2)  Again, consider when you rise in the morning that God has not only raised you from sleep, but has given you another day of life itself.  You have a new day, your home your work, your friends, your church.  What new and grateful persons we should all be!

 

And beyond life for a new day there is yet another cause for limitless joy and thanksgiving.  Paul points it out in his first letter to the Corinthians, wherein he is discussing the Christian triumph over physical death.  Happily, eagerly, Paul nears the end of his discourse with the words: “Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord, Jesus Christ.” 

[I Corinthians 15: 57].  Probably our greatest cause for praise and gratitude is in this living faith for a continuing, eternal, spiritual life.

 

Actually the mood of praise, of thankfulness, should be the chief part of our regular daily and weekly worship toward God.  Our prayers are burdened with petition - asking for the good and the benefits we seek.  They are, and should be, given in confession and repentance.  Oft times we pray in sheer adoration of the splendor and majesty of God.  But the soul that has adored the Most High, poured forth its burden of longing desire and of sin, offered the sacrifice of repentance, been assured of Divine pardon -- that soul should soar in profound and eelevated gratitude.

 

Actually the mood of exultant thanksgiving is a way to happiness.  It is a first.  It is a must.  Are we not children gathering, repeatedly, around our Father?  Do we not then come to One we love, and of whose love we are sure, with sunny faces, and with spirits that sing with grateful joy?

 

Our New Testament is the happiest series of books in the world.  Its various portions were written by men who had heard news too good to be true -- and yet it was true!  They had had spiritual experiences so extraordinary that it seemed that they could hardly have happened - and yet they had!  As Paul puts it, they had passed out of the cold and dark of night into a glory of full sunshine.  Those who had been slaves of evil were now spiritually free, new creatures needing a new name to describe them!

 

It is a startling fact that this happy-heartedness characterized all of those of that time who entered into vital relationship with Christ.  Peter confidently assumed that all those to whom he wrote possessed a joy unspeakable, bursting through inadequate language.  Probably that was a chief characteristic that drew people to Christ against such tremendous obstacles and despite such cruel opposition.  People were so happy in that fellowship that others, seeing or hearing about it, sought the same exultant peace even though it be, in some times, at the risk of their lives.  Others, unable to make the leap of faith, looked that way wistfully, finding their unsatisfied lives drab and tame and lacking, beside the zestful happiness of the Christian folk.

 

Augustine tells us that it was what he calls a certain seemly hilarity in the Christians whom he met that drew him toward the faith.  I suspect that the worship of the earliest Christian churches was mostly praise, thanksgiving and adoring joy.

 

There was once a Scottish saint - or so he was known - named Holyburton.  For all his supposed saintliness, his mind was pitched in a minor key.  Gloom often came like a fog to settle down on him.  At length he lit on a device for combating these gloomy moods. If both sides of the street seemed shaded and shivery, the sun gone and the weather gray, the prospect so bleak for him that he could think of nothing for which to praise God except that he was not yet in hell (though he felt certain he should soon arrive there!) he would make a determined start to give thanks.  As he seized upon each good thing, each blessing, each hopeful matter upon which he might lay hold out of his gloom, giving thanks for each item he remembered, it was as though the stars came out one by one, then in ever-increasing numbers, until at length the whole canopy of his universe was ablaze with their light and loveliness.  His depression would vanish, and he would be praising God for a multitude of mercies.  “I can always be pulled back into the sunshine,” he said, “through the duty of thankfulness.”  For most of us it should be no such heavy duty, and will surely be just as surely a joyous blessing.

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                        Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 20, 1949.