Being Thankful
Deuteronomy 8
During this Thanksgiving season, it is a good time to stop and truly say “thank you Lord” for all His kindness and blessing. As we travel in different countries, we are continually reminded of the Lord’s blessing and leadership in our life, especially in our wonderful country.
Throughout the entire Bible we are told to be thankful to the Lord for all that He does for us. So many times we enjoy the blessings and provisions of the Lord and either act like we deserve them or forget their origination. In our text God warns us to be careful how we live, and to follow every command that He gives so He can keep His promises to the faithful. It is compared to the way we train our children in that reinforcing wrong behavior will be an embarrassment later in life. He tells us in verse 2 that He led us through the things we have gone through to humble us and to test us, in order to know what is in our heart. He allowed some uncomfortable experiences to come our way to teach us that we need Him to be involved in every facet of our daily lives.
The Lord promises us that His desire is to bring us into a good land with good experiences, but He cannot, because we have not learned to give Him the praise and recognize Him as our only provider and sustainer. Otherwise, when you have everything, you will forget the Lord, build fine houses and settle down, our heart will become proud and we will forget the Lord. We begin to think that our own intelligence, strength and savvy has brought us our earned us our blessings.
I think this is a profound word for us today. So many blessings and we still want more! Our children are following suit and doing what we have taught them. We are raising a generation of “Xers” who are humanistic in their philosophy of life. They are making their own way rather than depend on the only one who can teach them the facts of The Creator, Sustainer of the whole cosmos.
God help us as we approach a whole generation of selfish, materialistic humanists who do not even recognize their ignorance because of their blindness from the information blitz!
