Sermon preached by Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
November 18, 2007
Copyright © 2007, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.

Give me a challenge with a prize attached to it, and my juices flow.

That's how I happen to know by memory Psalm 103. I forget what grade in school I was--fifth or sixth grade. It doesn't really matter. My Sunday school teacher, Nate Babcock, was a very special man who took interest in us kids. The project? Memorize Psalm 103! The prize? A brand new major league baseball. So I concentrated, training all my youthful intellectual capacities to memorize words which only years later have impacted me with their full meaning. How appropriate they are on this Thanksgiving Sunday.

Bless the Lord, O my soul,

and all that is within me,

bless his holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul,

and do not forget all his benefits--

who forgives all your iniquity,

who heals all your diseases,

who redeems your life from the Pit,

who crowns you with steadfast love

and mercy,

who satisfies you with good as long as

you live

so that your youth is renewed like the

eagle's. (Psalm 105:1-5)

I.

This is a reminder to remember!

The psalmist is alerting us to a spiritual fact of life. Out of our lives can stream a continual praise and thanksgiving to God for the fullness of life that He has shared with us.

It's nice to make a statement like that, isn't it? Although most of our life is not lived quite that way. That's why we need this reminder to remember.

You and I have so much for which to be grateful. Our privilege is to praise God. And it's important for us to realize that He appreciates our adoration as much as we enjoy praise given us by someone else. None of us grows past the need for appreciation, do we?

Even tough, hardened characters thrive on praise.

Remember the Ohio State football coach, Woody Hayes? He was as tough as they came. Back during the peak of his coaching career, he began to philosophize about fan fickleness. Football fans can turn around in their emotions so quickly. One day they're cheering you, and the next day they're jeering you. He said, "When you come out of that stadium an hour and a half after a game and there's no one there to congratulate you, it gets pretty lonely. You love it when the little kid happens to come up and say, 'Good game, Mr. Hayes.'"

God deserves our praise. "Bless the Lord , O my soul. . ." calls us to give thanks in response to all the blessings God has shared with us. To truly bless the Lord is to express praise combined with personal affection and gratitude.

The word "bless" is a word that, through the years, I've tried to use less and less. Why is that? Because I was raised in an environment where many people punctuated all their prayers with that word to the point that, for me, it became an empty, meaningless cliche. Too many times I had prayed and heard others pray, "God bless mother, God bless father, God bless my brother, God bless my sister, God bless my uncle, aunt, the minister, the church, our football team, our country," to the point that I didn't have the foggiest notion about what the word "bless" meant. It, for me, was a prayer cliche.

It has been only recently that I've allowed myself to once again use that word. I became so turned off by what I saw as its misuse. Every group of people have their cliches, don't they? Perhaps there is "God talk" that people use that turns you off.

One day, a friend of mine was making a phone call, and the person on the other end of the line didn't say "Hello." Instead, he said "Praise the Lord." My friend was sort of taken back by that abrupt greeting from one who had no idea who was calling. That's a little extreme for some of us, isn't it? Some of us feel quite comfortable saying "Bless you, brother" or "Praise the Lord" with great frequency. Others of us may find this a bit much.

Every denomination has a slightly different way of expressing itself. You move to different parts of the country, and you'll find that the expressions vary.

I once took a seminary course on psychology and sociology that alerted us to the fact that there are differences of expression and practices, as one moves up the "church/sect" ladder. Personalities change. One is attracted to a different style of worship and speech expression as one develops emotionally, materially and educationally. You can see this sometimes within the individual life of a person. More likely, it happens over the sequence of generations, as a person or a family develops from an open-souled, expressive type of religion to, ultimately, as highly sophisticated, more contemplative and cerebral approach.

One person observed how the Salvation Army picks them up out of the gutter. The Baptists convert them. The Methodists work the second work of grace. The Presbyterians educate them. The Episcopalians sophisticate them. And the Salvation Army picks them back up out of the gutter.

Let's get beyond some of the superficial associations we make with religious language and try to rediscover what the core meaning is of these expressions. They can once again become precious to us.

The word "blessing" in the Bible means primarily the active outgoing of the divine good will of grace, which results in prosperity and happiness among human kind. The final circle of this blessing is completed when you and I bless God. Or to put it in different words, we are "reciprocating" that affirmation, that love, that care which God has directed toward us. We are now giving that back to Him. We are persons in relationship. There is a sharing dimension.

When the psalmist says, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is in within me, bless his holy name," he is expressing an authentic visceral sense of gratitude to God. Study the Hebrew and you'll find that this literally means that, from my very internal organs, from the very being of my life, I sing praise and gratitude to God. When he writes, "Bless the Lord, O my soul," he's talking about a sensual part of one's human personality, one's very being, that which makes you and me the human beings we are. We are creatures of God, created in His image. We are more than animals. We are bursting forth in gratitude and appreciation to Him. True worship involves your soul, all that is you. Real worship is letting the whole you, even your internal organs, cry out in appreciation to God. In true worship, you and I are the actors, and God is the Spectator who observes our adoration and praise.

So, whatever your particular temperament happens to be, you will worship God in your own individual way.

For example, the Afro-American Pentecostal may roll on the floor, shouting his appreciation. Whereas, the cool, cerebral Presbyterian pauses in intense, meditative worship. One is not right therefore making the other wrong. Thank God for these differences! However, God pity the person who can't, in his/her own way, cry out in adoration and blessing to Jesus Christ.

The key, then, to real praise is not the visible emotion. Instead, it is the depth, the interpersonal response to what God has done for you in Jesus Christ. If you are a converted person, an authentic believer in Jesus Christ, one who has repented of sin and put your trust in Him alone for salvation, you are called to bless the Lord in a spirit of praise and adoration. That's what worship is all about.

Some of us forget to bless Him. Ours is a spirit of ingratitude. Ingratitude is dangerous stuff, isn't it? It's the spirit of the spoiled child who has been given so much that he fails to appreciate the things he has.

The psalmist writes, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits-- ." You and I have a tendency toward perverted memories. We tend to remember the bad and forget the good, except when things are bad.

For example, in my case, I remember how good it is not to have a cold only when I have a cold. When I'm healthy, I forget how nice it is to be healthy. It's when I'm uncomfortable that I remember what it's like to be uncomfortable. When I'm comfortable, I reach out for something else that I don't have at that moment. It's pretty easy to forget all our benefits, isn't it? It's much easier to drift into a complaining mood.

The late Martyn Lloyd-Jones, for many years the minister of Westminster Chapel in London, in his preaching and writing, compares some of us to little children. He describes a child as being a person who remembers what, at the moment, brings discomfort. This Bible expositor is really saying, in theological terms, what developmental psychologists and sociologists such as Erikson and Piaget have observed and what they refer to as the stages in child development. There are stages of which a child functions thinking only of immediate gratification. As they mature, they are able to see their own needs for gratification in relationship to the needs of others.

For example, you've seen an infant grab for a bottle when he's thirsty and push it away when he isn't. The infant doesn't say, "Isn't it wonderful, right now, I have something to drink!" Or the infant doesn't say, "I'm so happy that all my needs are met, and I don't need anything to drink now!" No, instead, the infant remembers its immediate wants and needs and pushes away what it doesn't now want or need.

Some of us adults are just like that spiritually. Some of us never get beyond our childhood in terms of God. We forget His benefits. The sign of Christian maturity is not only to remember what you and I need, but to remember to thank God for what He has given, remembering the provision He has made.

That's why it's so important to celebrate Thanksgiving. We do it this one week in November. How much more important is it for us to celebrate Thanksgiving three hundred sixty-five days a year. What a privilege to bless the Lord genuinely, constantly, forgetting not all His benefits.

How about you? When was the last time you made a list of all the good things in your life for which you could praise the Lord? Every time I do it, I'm amazed at how many good things He has shared with me. The list of positives has a way of eclipsing the list of negatives.

This whole concept was driven back to me Tuesday morning as I read a front-page Los Angeles Times November 13, 2007, article titled "Lining up for loaves and life." This article went on to describe in detail the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, with food and petroleum shortages exacerbated by, catch this, 7,900 percent inflation. Can you imagine that? It describes the lifetime savings of people wiped out in no time at all by inflation. Fifteen percent, or even ten percent inflation, would wreak havoc, would it not, on your and my lifestyles. Imagine inflation running at the rate of almost 8,000 percent per year.

This article describes all you have to do is go anywhere in any Zimbab-wean town these days, and you'll find lines everywhere ". . . like an invasion of giant pythons slithering into every super market door." People will give up just about anything to get a loaf of bread to keep the children and themselves alive.

I sat in my study reading this article and thinking about the topic I had announced for this weekend, and it suddenly hit me that I do not always practice what I preach. I, who had given this sermon topic to the printer weeks ago, on the Tuesday morning of the week in which I would prepare the message, needed "a reminder to remember" myself! In 1989, I traveled extensively through Zimbabwe with Bob Seiple, the then-president of World Vision, Alex Trebek of Jeopardy fame, and a film crew, visiting the poorest of the poor in villages where children had malnutrition, and the first evidences of the coming HIV/Aids epidemic were emerging. Yet, overall, Zimbabwe was a reasonably prosperous country. President Robert Mugabe was then revered by most of the citizens as a leader who had helped them gain their independence from Britain nine years earlier. Few, if any, could have predicted the disastrous impact of his totalitarian regime to bring about this exponential increase in the inflation rate, the scarcity of goods and the horrendous social and economic instability.

Moses grappled with the tendency of the people to forget. He warned the people of Israel before they ever came into the Promised Land. He stated it in this way.

"Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Deuteronomy 8:11-14).

You see, you and I are not the only people who, when we have it good, forget what it was when we had it bad.

We have a wonderful person on our staff by the name of Carmen Resendiz. Many of us know her as the person who cooks such wonderful meals for us. Now with the lack of a kitchen, she is helping with the custodial work. I'll never forget, on one occasion, we were talking about World Vision's sponsorship program, and we were also talking about Thanksgiving. She described how difficult her childhood was with her mother in Mexico, who tried to raise her and her brothers and sisters by selling tortillas in a marketplace. Depending on how many she sold determined what kind of a meal they would have that night. Many a time they went to bed hungry. And then she talked about how blessed she has been, and she feared that her children might never appreciate what they have, not having experienced the degree of poverty in which she was raised. Do you catch that? It's amazing how relative things can be. Here this person, who works so hard to sustain her family in this culture, thanks God that she has it better and her children have it better than she had in her childhood years. And she's reminding herself and her children to remember!

Remember the good things that the Lord has done for you. Don't forget, He has blessed you with many benefits. Every good and perfect gift comes from Him! Remember this.

Take that piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle. Put a heading on one side labeled "negatives." Put a label on the other side of that line "blessings." Then start listing items. You've heard me encourage you to do this every Thanksgiving every year I've been here, but do it frequently through the year. We tend to concentrate so much on the negatives that we forget the positives. We forget God's many benefits to us. I'll assure you that the list of positives will far outstrip the list of negatives in no time at all. You'll run out of negatives, and you'll never run out of blessings if you remind yourself to remember!

The wonderful gospel chorus expresses it so well: "Count your many blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done!"

II.

The psalmist lists five benefits that you and I are reminded to remember.

Benefit One: We are reminded to remember God's forgiveness.

He is the One ". . . who forgives all your iniquity. . . ."

Let us never minimize this business of forgiveness. How exciting it is to know that you and I can stand before God just as if we had never sinned.

There is such a thing as pardoning mercy. God in Jesus Christ wipes the slate clean, as far as you are concerned, if you accept Him as your Savior. No other religion in the world puts the emphasis on sin in as straight forward a manner as does Christianity. At the same time, no other religion in the world offers total, complete forgiveness. Every other religion, including that which calls itself Christian but denies the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, is based on salvation by works. In some degree, these religions say that we can atone for our own sins. Concentrate on good works, and perhaps the gods will accept us.

Biblical Christianity emphasizes that salvation is God's work, not ours. Jesus is the One who provides the forgiveness for sins through His death and resurrection. The angel of God said to Joseph in a dream to take Mary as his wife. He went on to say, "'. . . for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins'" (Matthew 1:20-21). The Bible says there's no other name in heaven or on earth whereby we can be saved.

So, you're haunted by some skeleton in your closet? You have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You'd like to believe that there's forgiveness. But you just can't believe that God forgives everything. He does! That's what is so exciting. It doesn't mean that He excuses our actions. It means that He accepts you as you are and really does forgive. Death-bed conversions are possible. But don't put your commitment to Jesus Christ off beyond the present. Now is the acceptable time. At the same time, do not despair if you feel you are too old to come to Jesus or you've done too much living for Him to ever forgive you. At the moment, just before he expired, the thief on the cross came to trust in Jesus as his Savior. The words of Jesus were clear. "'This day shalt thou be with me in paradise.'" Those are words of forgiveness.

There is nothing that you've thought or done that goes beyond God's capacity to forgive.

First John 1:9 reads, "If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The psalmist goes on. Psalm 103:10-12 reads:

He does not deal with us according to

our sins,

nor repay us according to our

iniquities.

For as the heavens are high above the

earth,

so great is his steadfast love toward

those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west,

so far he removes our transgressions

from us.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, for the fact of His forgiveness!

Benefit Two: We are reminded to remember His healing.

The psalmist says that He is the One ". . . who heals all your diseases. . . ."

This does not refer just to physical ailments. Thank God for the fact there is healing from physical sickness. What a blessing it is to know that you will recover. Built in to human life is the recuperative capacity. You cut your finger, it bleeds. But it stops bleeding, and the healing takes over. There is that restorative process which is part of God's healing power.

How grateful I am to God for the medical profession, gifted men and women who are His vehicles of physical healing.

How grateful to God I am for those visionary leaders of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, the Laguna Presbyterian Church and some others who, sixty years ago, dreamed of a hospital right here on the coast. They had the faith to believe it could happen and the tenacity to persist in helping that dream come true. Today we're blessed with Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian. Who of us has not been touched by God's healing touch in our community through that great hospital?

Then, there is the reality of supernatural physical healing. I have never had one of these dramatic interventions. Some of you have. I have been healed many times from the discomforts of life, from the pain, from the hurt, from physical infirmities. And I thank God for the reports of those who have had His supernatural intervention.

But there is a dimension that goes beyond that of simple physical disease. Sin is a producer of all broken relationships, both physical, interpersonal and psychological. God is the One who brings help. John Calvin pointed out that there are two types of spiritual healing. One is the blotting out of guilt. You can be released from your guilt. The second is the healing of corruptions in our nature by God's regeneration. You are not cursed to go on committing the same sins time after time. You can claim His capacity to live above your own sinful bent.

I am talking about how God can remake you as a person. Sometimes this healing doesn't happen overnight. You may experience what the Apostle Paul did. The things you want to do, you don't do. The things you don't want to do, you end up doing. Paul discovered that there is a recuperative healing process in which Jesus Christ touches your life and changes your nature, not just in forgiveness but in a reworking of some of the temperamental problems.

You look at my life closely enough, and you can point out those areas in which I still need healing. There are times in which I still talk brusquely to my wife. I am not always as sensitive to my colleagues and family members as I would like to be. I don't like some of the things I see in myself, and I end up defensive in the process. Yet I ask myself these questions: "What would I be today without Jesus Christ? Where would my marriage be? How would I be with my children? What would I be like in my business relationships?"

Let me turn these questions around to you. Are you a different person because of Jesus Christ? Have you already been touched by His healing?

It seems to me that forgiveness even goes beyond the physical and spiritual in a way that repairs with a kind of plastic surgery the scars of sin. When I look around the congregation this morning, I can see couples whose marriages have been healed by Jesus Christ. These individuals do not claim perfection. They do claim a brand-new relationship in marriage where divorce once seemed inevitable. God has the capacity to heal you. For many of us, He has. Bless the Lord, O my soul, for His healing!

Benefit Three: We are reminded to remember His redemption.

The psalmist says that God is the One ". . . who redeems your life from the Pit. . . ."

The King James Version uses the word "destruction." Though you and I were dead in our sins, we are now alive. God preserves the lives which He saves. His dealings are righteous. Love is not weak indulgence. Jesus Christ is your substitute. He took your sins upon himself. He saw you and me headed toward disaster, eternal judgment. Then He made a way of escape possible. This is called redemption.

Many years ago, workmen were blasting some rock in the British town of Sterling. Explosives were laid and lit. The explosion was momentarily expected. Suddenly, innocently, running around the great wall of the cliff came a little child headed straight to where the fuse burned. The workmen shouted. But, by their very shouting, their alarm bewildered the little child. By this time, the mother also had come around the wall. The moment she saw the danger, she opened wide her arms and cried from her very heart, "Come to me, my darling!" Immediately, with eager pattering feet, the little child ran back and away, and did not stop until she was clasped in her mother's arms, not a moment too soon, as the roar of shattering rock blasted forth. God has released you and me from our inevitable destruction. Bless the Lord, O my soul, for His redemption!

Benefit Four: We are reminded to remember His steadfast love.

The psalmist says that He is the One ". . . who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. . . ."

Frankly, this excites me. It is so easy to think of God as the Creator, Sustainer, the God who became a man in the person of Jesus Christ to forgive us. At the same time, it is difficult to think of God as having the tender, sensitive touch of a lover. His love is not fierce. His love is mellowed by kindness. He brings loving kindness into your life. He puts a crown of tender mercies upon your head.

One writer has said, "Mercy is pity going forth to action." God's mercy is tempered by tenderness. We can say that God deals with us in the most sensitive way.

The man who wrote these words could well have been King David. His life was torn apart by great sin. He was an adulterer, a murderer and a liar. He had suffered the aloneness of broken relationship with God. Stubbornly, he had refused to admit his sin, for he was king. Depression came. Melancholy of life settled in. He finally called upon the Lord in repentance and sorrow. We find restoration of joy. We find the crowning of God's loving kindness and tender mercies a much more significant crown to David than his earthly symbols of kingly power. Bless the Lord, O my soul, for His steadfast love!

Benefit Five: We are reminded to remember His satisfactions.

The psalmist says that He is the One ". . . who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's."

This means that God makes adequate provision. No human needs are left unsupplied. He nourishes your whole being.

This does not mean that you'll receive everything you want. God does not promise material affluence. He promises basic provisions of a physical, spiritual, mental and social nature. God has given us so much. Look at the life you and I live. I've met very few people who see themselves as wealthy. Yet, we are the wealthiest people in the world. Even the poorest one of us in this sanctuary is wealthy in terms of some in this world.

My travels with World Vision take me to remote parts of the world, where we work with the poorest of the poor. How my heart breaks for these little children suffering from malnutrition and dying of HIV/Aids. And I complain when I don't get my way. It's so easy to trivialize the satisfactions we receive from the Lord, isn't it?

I had a most interesting conversation with a man who once was a multi-millionaire. This man had lost everything he had. He told me, "For the first time in my life, I am satisfied." Satisfied? He told me, for the first time, he was able to sit down and realize that he didn't have a whole lot of material things to grab on to and hold on to and get all that excited about. Things had spoiled his joy. No longer did he have to worry about losing those things. "I've found such a satisfaction of life when I realized that everything is not bound up in things." God does satisfy.

Not only does He give things we need, He actually renews our strength. There are many Old Testament references to the eagle. Some of the rabbis felt that the eagle was a unique bird in that its youth was literally renewed. An elderly eagle was refurbished with strength to fly high as the king of birds. They made the parallel with human experience, noting that God restores strength to human beings who trust Him as He provides strength for the aging eagle. Others deny that the eagle's strength is restored. They say this means that God restores our strength, so that we who are tired can, once again, soar as does the eagle to new heights.

Whichever the interpretation you prefer, there is no question that God does lift us out of ourselves to new power with strength. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not His satisfactions!

Well, it's Thanksgiving week, and we've been challenged by God's Word with a reminder to remember. Why don't you, right now, take a few minutes to simply say, "Thank you, Lord, for all your benefits!"

Thursday morning on the Today show, some viewers' questions were asked of the four principals, Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira, Ann Curry and Al Roker. These questions were put to them separately, then their responses were recorded by video. Normally, I'm not too interested in trivia about the lives of celebrities, but this question and the answer caught my attention. A viewer asked, "What is your favorite holiday?" Each one of them, not knowing the answer of the other three, quickly responded with "Thanksgiving!" Then, quite surprised that separately they'd come up with the same answer, they began to talk about it live before the cameras. And what they concluded was that it was the one opportunity to slow down. Unpressured by gift-giving and social obligation, they could have a good meal, watch some football, enjoy family and even grab a few moments "to be thankful."

I don't often end a sermon with a poem. Preaching of yesteryear used to often follow this model: introduction; three points; and a poem.

However, today, I am going to conclude with a poem written by a friend of mine, J. Barrie Shepherd. It's titled "Cold Turkey Days." It reads,

For those who can deny the malls,

and flying footballs on the screen,

there lies, tucked in between the feasting

and those first December days,

a blessed intermission, several hours,

at least, when nothing must be done,

perhaps a little clean-up time,

the daily paper to be read, for once,

from front to back, a walk through woods

or city streets, no matter where,

don't hurry, find a way to see,

a fire to build with branches, log

and flame, then fall asleep beside,

a child--yours or your child's child--

to forget time with in play that is

as old as time itself. These,

and a wealth of easy open moments,

wait within the unclaimed hours

of these rarely gifted,

all but holy days.

A reminder to remember! Not just on Thanksgiving Day but 365 days a year.