Deuteronomy 8:1-10
“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you and your foot did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. So you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God, our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ. Amen. Happy Thanksgiving Eve. I'm sure many of you have spent some time, if you're already doing the cooking this morning, making sure that dishes and preparation are all in order if you're cooked turkey is not cooked already, because sometimes that's how you do it, right? We are getting ready to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving, and Our Old Testament reading is about a day when Israel was giving thanks for all the goodness that God had given them. Deuteronomy is our reading, and it is a speech that Moses gave the people of God at the end of a long period of difficulty they had been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years as a punishment for their disobedience. God had brought them to the promised land, and the generation said, Thank you God for doing miracles all the way in Egypt, all the way through our trip to the promised land. But we don't think you're strong enough to defeat our enemies. And so God put them in the wilderness until that generation had died off. Now they are back, getting ready to cross over into the promised land, and Moses is looking ahead at the joy they will have in this beautiful, beautiful land. So first, he recalls the goodness of God in the wilderness, he says, And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor your fathers know that you might know that bread man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell these 40 years, he recalls the goodness of God in the wilderness, that despite their complaining, which they did a lot. God still fed them. He gave them water from rocks. He fed them with meat from the sky and bread that showed up right outside their their home. They didn't even have to send for Amazon. But Moses knows Israel, and he knows that very shortly, they are going to head into the promised land and faced the most difficult challenge in their history. This is what he says, For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of Brooks, of water, of fountains and springs flowing in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing. This is the big danger for Israel, the most dangerous thing of all for them was not wandering in the wilderness, where they had to depend on God every single day, knowing that only the Word of God would feed them. The most dangerous thing they could face was prosperity they would enter into the promised land, and the trees would produce good fruit. The ground would grow their food. They would enter into homes that they didn't build, but God had provided them with conquering. And he worried that they would look around and see these things and forget God. In fact, that's exactly what Moses says in the next section. Right after this, he says verse 11, take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart will be lifted up and you forget the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the Great and terrifying wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your father did not know that he might humble you, to test you to do you good in the end, beware lest you say in your heart, my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this. Well, we spend a lot of time in the Christian church talking about the comfort that God gives us in difficult circumstances. We talk about Christ being a rock that we can cling to in the storms of life. We talk about him being someone who can comfort us when we mourn, someone who can promise eternal treasures, when our bank account doesn't have a whole lot in it, someone who can be with us and forgive us, when we feel guilty, but what about When we're feeling prosper, when we sit around a table that has a giant turkey on it, the biggest bird you've ever seen, and the family is gathered around, and they're all the dishes so many that if you had a scoop of everything, You wouldn't be able to eat everything. How do we deal with prosperity? How do we deal with the good times? Because I think those are sometimes more dangerous and more difficult to stay faithful in than the bad times. Cuz when things are bad, you know you need God. You need the rock to cling to. You need a Christ who died for you to promise eternal life, to comfort you when you mourn. But sometimes, like Israel, we can say, my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this well, and you forget the Lord your God and your prosperity turns you away. That is exactly what happened to Israel, isn't it. They got into the promised land. They forgot all about God and everything from the end of Deuteronomy all the way up to Jesus. Is a description of how badly that went. Fortunately, we don't have to work like that. We have a Savior, Jesus, who came to guide us through prosperity and difficulty. And what we're going to do today is ask a very simple question, how do we remain faithful and thankful in a time of prosperity and learn from the mistakes of ancient Israel? I think the first thing we need to think about is to remember that everything we have comes from God. Today, on this day of Thanksgiving, it's actually a day when we set aside to say thank you, God for all the good gifts. It's while it's a national holiday, we have gathered here in preparation for it, to take that time and say, God, all good things come from you, and that is key to understanding how to manage prosperity faithfully, to not forget God. In the Large Catechism, Luther contrasts two characters from the Bible about managing the gifts that God had given them well, the first one was King Saul and the second, King David. Both were alike in that King Saul and King David were chosen by God to be kings and given a wonderful promise. If you are faithful, your kingdom will last. Saul, unfortunately, even though he had been given this amazing promise and made king over all of God's people to guide them in their faithfulness, he very quickly grew unfaithful. He turned to his own wisdom, disobeyed God's commands, and his management of all the gifts that God had given them, ended up turning him away, until finally, at the very end, he turns not to God for guidance, but to a witch to ask the spirit of Samuel to guide him. David, on the other hand, was different. He didn't let the promises of God and the gifts
turn him from faithful. David grew up in poverty. He grew up being chased by King Saul, who wanted to kill him every single day, running through the wilderness, hiding in caves, he knew that he could only survive by God's power. And then when he finally made it to be the king, he grew in wealth and power, and even when he committed some pretty terrible sins, he repented and turned to God, knowing that all of it came from him. And because of this, God gave him a promise that his son would be on the throne of Israel forever, a promise we see in Jesus Christ, in these two figures help us to see that faithful management and Thanksgiving of prosperity is about seeing these gifts not as something that we earned or we trust In, but as things that God has given us things that are not supposed to be ours by right, but blessings that God has meted out, and we must always remember to be thankful for him, because he is the source. Whether these gifts are the prosperity that we feel in our daily lives, or the gifts of salvation that we have in Jesus, it is all from God. And I think the best way, the best habit that many of us have to live this out every single day is that a simple thing we do before our meals is to say thank you. To say thank you to God just a short prayer. And even if you do that, that prayer that we sometimes do, like do you do? Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let thy gifts to us be blessed, like 15 seconds, right? Or Luthers prayer, Lord God, Heavenly Father, bless us in these your gifts we receive from your bountiful goodness through Jesus Christ, our Lord, it takes no time, but it's just a few seconds of saying thank you to God, then you get to devour the turkey, right? But it is. It is this good gift that we have from God. Think the other thing we can do is remind ourselves that all things remain God's when he gives them to us. When I was a youth pastor, I stumbled across a video that was supposed to be about tithing. The video was kind of clever. What they did is they they started with a pot, and then there was a table, and each table, the table had place settings. And at each place setting was a label where a person sat, and so the first, the first label was housing. They take a big chunk, plop it on his plate, have a little they pass the pie down to the next one, and maybe it was food, little chef's hat, you know, that sort of thing. Take a plop, put it on the place, take the pie, pass it down to the next one. And they all took various things. It was, you know, fashion and whatever, the kinds of things that you would need. And you get all the way down to the end, and the pie gets shrinking smaller and smaller and smaller until you get to the like the video games budget. And the guy looks next to next to him, and there's a gentleman, and his name is God, and he looks at the pie, and he looks at God, and he cuts a big chunk out of it, leaving just the teeny weenies sliver. Plops it on his plate, and he's about to hand it over to to the to God, and the guy next to him goes, dude, he brought the pie and. It's clever, right? But there's a problem with this video, because what it does is it's supposed to tell you leave a peace for God, right? Not a little peace, a big peace. But the problem with this is that all of that was God's how we use it in our in our housing and our our clothing and providing for our needs, and how we use it for friends and family and taking care of people. Every piece of our life belongs to God when people try to make it about giving back a portion to God, as if he doesn't own it all. They're missing the point. Every moment, every part of our life, every good gift that God gives us, in health and prosperity or in not it all belongs to God, Saint Paul in Romans, chapter 12 says that we are to be living sacrifices. A living sacrifice means that we offer up everything that we are because it belongs to him anyway, and we do that in the in the view of the amazing mercy of God, who sent His Son, Jesus Christ, not to be a living sacrifice, but to sacrifice himself on the cross and then rise from the dead. And when we remember that God owns everything, we see all of the things, the joys, the happiness, the goodness and the wealth of life simply as a tool that God has given us to take care of others. Martin Luther writes about that in the Large Catechism. He says, Let us then learn well the first commandment that we may say, how God will not tolerate presumption nor trust in any other object, and how he requires nothing higher of us than the confidence from the heart for everything good, so that we may proceed right and straightforward and use all the blessings which God gives. No farther than a shoemaker uses his needle all and thread for work and then lays them aside. Or, as a traveler, uses an inn, food and his bed only for temporary necessity. Each one in his station according to God's order, without allowing any of these things to be our Lord or idol, all of it is just a tool for our stewardship of God's thing. And when we just see these things as that, we can remember that the one who gives them is really behind it all, who offered His Son to die for us. And I think the final thing that helps us to remain faithful in prosperity is to remember that all these things eventually pass away as we know this life is temporary, but the goodness and gifts that God has given us will eventually fade, whether it is just they disappear because of life's difficulties, or we die and go to heaven to be with Christ, we must always remember the goodness of God's eternal gift, Jesus, Christ and His salvation. This is really the key to understanding our place in prosperity. Is because if you do not know yourself as a creature whom God sent His Son to die for the Creator, for the creation, we cannot truly understand what it means to be thankful and faithful in prosperity. We end up seeing ourselves as the one in charge and God simply as provider. But when we come to hear his word, He guides us and leads us when we receive His sacraments. He focuses us on the gift of life that is to come. We can look around and see everything around us as a temporary thing, like a hotel room that you use when you go on vacation for a tool to take care of the people around us today. It's the word in sacrament that give us something that lasts forever, and we can be thankful for God's goodness and His gifts, both in the temporal things that we have every day, but especially for the goodness. And peace and salvation He provides us through Jesus Christ, we keep these things in mind, whether in poverty or prosperity, sadness or joy, we can remain thankful and grateful to a God who loves us in Jesus name Amen.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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