Below are my sermon notes on the theme of Thanksgiving taken from Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory. May it be a help to us to be a grateful people.

Colossians 2:7

Overflowing with Thanksgiving: Richard Baxter on Thankfulness taken from his work, A Christian Directory (p.142-146).

Sermon Preached on Lord’s Day Evening November 20, 2011

Introduction:

1. Thanksgiving theme for the past few Sundays.
2. Richard Baxter (November 12, 1615- December 8, 1691): English Puritan minister of Kiddeminster.

I. Baxter’s Introduction to the Subject of Thankfulness

1. Let thankfulness to God, thy Creator, Redeemer, and Regenerator be the very temperament of thy soul, and faithfully expressed by thy tongue and life.
2. Thankfulness is of no benefit to God.
3. However, God is pleased with thankfulness as it suits our condition. 
4. An unthankful person is a devourer of mercies.  ILLUS: They are a grave to bury the mercies of God within.
5. True thankfulness v. counterfeit thankfulness:
   1. True thankfulness prefers spiritual and everlasting mercies before those that are merely corporal and transitory.  Carnal thankfulness mainly values carnal; mercies, though it may acknowledge (at least in theory) that spiritual mercies are greater.
   2. True thankfulness inclines the soul to a spiritual rejoicing in God and to desire after more spiritual mercies.  Carnal thankfulness delights only in the prosperity of the flesh, or the carnal security of the mind and to desire only more carnal, empty mirth, fleshly pleasure.  ILLUS: Animal that is full after eating will skip, play, and show that he is pleased with his state.
   3. True thankfulness kindles in the heart a lover to the giver above the gift.  It brings our heart still nearer to God.  Carnal thankfulness springs from self-love and loves and thanks God only in so far as he gives or satisfies the flesh.
      1. [Boyd’s Application: Will you be thankful to God even if he does not give you what you want?  Will you still love God even if he delays or denies the desires of your heart? Or will you only be thankful when you get what you want from Him?].
      2. Childlike thankfulness makes us love the Father more than the gift.
      3. ILLUS: Your dog loves you and is thankful to you for feeding him, but loves you in subordination to his appetite and his bones.  [Boyd: I am not sure this is entirely true or fair to dogs.  If you put me on one side of the room and a stranger with food on the other, I still think my dog would come to me].
   4. True thankfulness inclines us to obey and please God.  Carnal thankfulness renders hypocritical, complimental thanks of the lips and spends the mercy in pleasing the flesh and makes it the fuel of lust and sin.
   5. True thankfulness is transcendent because His mercies are transcendent such as saving our souls from hell.  Thus true thanks causes one to dedicate themselves entirely to God.  Carnal thanksgiving allows one to dedicate oneself to self-love and giving God only a tithe, or only so much as the flesh can spare.

I. Directive I: Understand How Great is this Duty.

1. We are obliged to incessant thanksgiving because we are so dependent upon God.
2. Maintained every moment by God.  Fed daily.  Maintained by God’s bounty.
3. 2 Timothy 3:2 the “unthankful” are listed among great sinners as unholy monsters.
4. The design of God in redemption via the Gospel is to raise man to highest thankfulness.
5. Gratitude is the general duty of the Gospel!
6. The gift of mercy is the predominant or eminent part of the Gospel or new covenant.  Therefore thankfulness is the formal answer of the obligation of the Gospel (just as obedience is the formal answer to the law).  We are called to thankful obedience in the Gospel.
7. Obedience and thankfulness are to be conjoined.  We must repent of sin, but it must be thankful repentance.
8. What is saving faith, but even assent to the truth of the Gospel with thankful acceptance of Christ as Savior with the benefits of His redemption.
9. The love to God required is a thankful love of His redeemed ones.    We show our thankful love to Christ by forgiving our enemies.

II. Directive II: Let the Greatness of the Manifold Mercies of God be Continually Before Your Eyes.

1. Thankfulness is caused by a due apprehension of the greatness of mercies.
   1. The love of God in giving you a Redeemer.  The love of Christ in giving His life for us.
   2. Covenant of Grace, pardon of sins, justification, adoption, etc.
   3. Disposal of Providence for your salvation: instructors, care of parents, etc.
   4. God changing your will, opening your heart, giving you repentance, mortification of sin, purifying your nature, dwelling within you by the Spirit.
   5. Standing in His church: Care of faithful pastors, benefit and comfort of word and sacraments, public communion with the saints.
   6. The company of those who fear the Lord, their faithful admonitions, reproofs, and encouragements. The kindnesses they have showed you for your body and soul.
   7. The mercies of our relations, habitations, our estates, and the notable alterations and passages of your lives.
   8. The manifold preservations and deliverances of your soul from errors, seducers, terrors, distresses, dangerous temptations, many soul-wounding sins.  That we are not left to the errors and desires of our hearts, seared consciences, nor forsaken of God.
   9. The manifold deliverances of your bodies from enemies, hurts, distresses, sicknesses, and death.
   10. The mercies of adversity in wholesome necessary chastisements, honorable sufferings for His sake, and the support and comfort through it all.
   11. Communion with God in private and public duties in prayer, sacrament, meditations.
   12. The use God has made of you for the good of others.  Our time has not been wholly lost.  We have not lived as burdens in the world, but have been useful to others.
   13. The mercies of all our friends and His servants.  Our interest in the mercies and public welfare of the church.
   14. His patience and forbearance with us under our constant unprofitableness and provocations.  His renewed mercies not withstanding our abuse.  Our perseverance until now.
   15. Our hopes of everlasting rest and glory when this sinful life is ended.
2. Aggravate these mercies in your meditations.  See if they do not cause you to cry out:
   1. Psalm 103:1-4.
   2. Psalm 103: 8, 11
   3. Psalm 100:4-5
   4. Psalm 136:1 “O give thanks unto the LORD for His mercies endure forever.”
   5. Psalm 105: 1-3

III. Directive III: Be Well Acquainted with the Greatness of Your Own Sins, as They Are an Aggravation of God’s Mercies to You.

1. This is why God humbles believers over their sins so… Not because He delights in their sorrows, but to help you rightly esteem your saving mercies in Christ.  [Boyd: The more you understand the heinousness of your sins, the better you Appreciate the grace of God in Christ].
2. Think what sin is.
3. Think of the number of your aggravated sins.
4. Think how great are those mercies bestowed on you.
5. The humble soul is a thankful soul.

IV. Directive IV: Understand the Misery from Which You Were Delivered.

1. The greatness of the punishment your sins deserve.  You have been delivered through Jesus Christ and His shed blood.  Pardon has been secured.  You have His righteousness and eternal life.
2. Hell is a place of eternal punishment.  Ten billion years is no closer to the end.  The worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.
3. Remembering that you have been rescued from everlasting hell puts everything in this life into proper perspective.

V. Directive V: Imagine Getting a Look at Hell or Being in Hell Yourself.

1. ILLUS: Imagine You Saw the Souls of the Damned in Hell or that You Spent a Day in hell Yourself.
2. Imagine a preacher was sent to hell to preach the Gospel.  Would they take the message as lightly as many do today in this world?

VI. Directive VI: Keep Certain the Evidences of Your Title to Mercies in Christ.

1. Beware of Satanic suggestions, which cause you to think the mercies of Christ are not available to you.  Remind yourself of your position in Christ: Justified, sanctified, adopted, glorified.

VII. Directive VII: Think Much of Personal Mercies Shown from Your Youth Up

1. The care and kindnesses of God throughout your life.
2. The greatest mercies are the common ones shared by all Christians (regeneration, faith, sanctification, adoption, etc.), yet personal favors are more apt to affect us.
3. “Therefore Christians should mark God’s dealings with them and write down the great and notable mercies of their lives (which are not unfit for others to know, if they should see it).

VIII. Directive VIII: Compare Your Proportion of Mercies with the Rest of the People’s of the World:

1. Not one in many thousands has your proportion.
2. Small part of the world that are Christians.
   1. So few of these Christians are orthodox.
   1. Of those orthodox, fewer are Reformed.
   1. Of those who are Christians, orthodox, and Reformed, fewer are seriously godly.
   1. And even fewer among these do not fall into perplexities, errors, scandals, great afflictions, distresses.
3. You have cause for wondrous thankfulness to God.
4. ILLUS: Suppose God divided His mercies equally to all men in the world:  Health, wealth, honor, grace, Gospel, etc.  How many of you think you would have as much as you do currently now posses?
5. How many thousands in the world have less of the Gospel and grace than you do?

IX. Directive IX: Compare these Mercies You Want with Those You Possess

1. How many meals of plenty have you eaten for one day of scarcity or pinching hunger?
2. How many days of health for one day of sickness?
3. If you have one heavy cross to bear, how many crosses do you not have to carry, which you deserve?

X. Directive X: Think How You Would Value Your Mercies, if You Were Deprived of Them.

1. The want of mercies teaches us most effectually to esteem them.
2. “Think how you would value Christ and hope if you were in despair!  And how you would value the mercies of earth, if you were in hell!  And the mercies of England if you were among bloody inquisitors and persecutors, and wicked, cruel heathens or Muslims, or brutish savage Americans!
3. Think how good sleep would seem if you were deprived by pain or sickness.
4. Think how good would food, drink, clothes, house, friends would seem to you if taken from you.
5. How good would health if you were under some great sickness?  (i.e. cancer, leukemia, paralysis).
6. What a mercy time would seem, if death were at hand and time was ending!

XI. Directive: Let Heaven Be Ever in Your Eye.

1. Think of endless joy you will have with Christ.  Eternity with Christ is the Mercy of all Mercies.
2. He who has this hope truly, still has reason for the highest, joyful thanks, whatever worldly thing he wants.
3. He is unthankful indeed that will not be thankful for heaven.
4. The more believing and heavenly minded the mind is, the more thankful the person.

XII. Directive: Look at Present earthly Mercies in connection with Heaven

1. These mercies are to lead you to heaven.
2. Take every bit from your Father’s hand; Remember He feeds, clothes, protects you.
3. Go to Him for your Daily Bread.  Taste His love in it.
4. Think: “How good is this blessing with the love of God!”  “This and heaven are full enough for me.”
5. Coarse fare, coarse clothing (second-hand), coarse usage of the world, hard labor, and a poor habitation with heaven is mercy beyond all human estimation or conceiving.

XIII. Directive: Consider How Great a Mercy it is that Thankfulness is Made so Great a Part of Our Duty.

1. Sweetest employment in the world is to be always thinking and thanking God for His mercies.
2. Isn’t this thankfulness better work than consuming mercies in sin.

XIV. Directive: Make Conscience Ordinarily of Allowing God’s Mercies as Much Room in Your Thoughts and Prayers as You Allow Thoughts of Sins, Wants and Troubles.

1. Thoughts of sins and dangers may have a greater share of your thoughts in days of humiliation, notable falls into sin, or cases of special distress.
2. However, mercies ordinarily should take up more time in our thoughts and prayers than our sins.
3. If you can not be as thankful as you desire, yet you can spend much time in confessing God’s mercies to you, as in confessing your sins and mentioning wants.
4. “Thanksgiving is an effectual petitioning for more: it showeth that the soul is not drowned in selfishness, but would carry the fruit of all his mercies beck to God.”
5. Application: If you are not as thankful as you would like, see that you spend more time thinking on God’s mercies.  You will work greater thankfulness by degrees.

XV. Directive: Take Heed of a Proud, Covetous, Fleshly, Discontented Mind: They are Enemies of Thankfulness

1. A proud heart thinks it is worthy of more and thinks diminutively of all.
2. A covetous heart is still gaping after more And never returning the fruit of what it has received.
3. A fleshly mind is an insatiable gulf of corporeal mercies.  Devours one after another.
4. Discontented mind is always murmuring and never pleased. Always finds something to quarrel at and takes more notice of the denying of its unjust desires than of the giving  of many undeserved mercies.

XVI. Directive: Avoid Melancholy and Worry

1. These will inhibit you from tasting your greatest mercies, not be glad or thankful for anything you have.  Melancholy and fear misrepresent everything.
2. It is next to impossible for the melancholy or fearful to be thankful because they can not believe that anything good and comfortable is for them.  It is natural for them to be still fearing, despairing, complaining, and troubling themselves.
3. Befriend not this miserable disease.  Resist it by all due remedies.

XVII. Directive: Take Heed of Doctrines that Lead to Unthankfulness

1. Pelagianism that denies faith and saving grace to be any special gift.

XVIII. Directive: Do Not Just Give God Mere Verbal Thanks, but Give Him Yourself and All that You Have.

1. Thankfulness causes the soul to say “What shall I render to the LORD for all His benefits towards me?”  (Psalm 96:12).
2. Must give not just your tithes.
3. Romans 12:1 – living sacrifices, pleasing and acceptable to God.
4. Thankfulness is a powerful spring unto obedience. IOt makes men long to be fruitful and profitable, and glad of opportunities to be serviceable to God.
5. “A thankful obedience and an obedient thankfulness are a Christian’s life.”
6. Psalm 50:14-15, 23
7. Psalm 30:1-4, 11-12
8. Psalm 69: 30-31
9. Psalm 92:1-2
10. Psalm 119:62
11. Psalm 140:13
12. I Thessalonians 5:18 “in everything give thanks for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.”

AMEN.