Hinge Points Pt. 4: Gratitude

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Thank you very much. Thank you, church, for supporting us all these years. I have been given the job of putting 35 years in about five minutes. So let's see how we do. Here we are, Dave and Sue Rousseau, and we've been your missionaries. And I thank you for your support over the years. A little background on who we are. David grew up in Zimbabwe, Africa, and he does talk a little funny. You'll notice that when it's his turn to talk. I grew up in Portage, Wisconsin, and people say, how does Portage meet Africa? Well, we met at Bible College. We both went to Moody Bible Institute many years ago, and it was there that we met and dated and then soon married. And in 1987, we decided to join a mission organization and go back to David's home country of Zimbabwe. When we first went, David began teaching at the evangelical Alliance, I mean, evangelical Bible college. And my job was to be mom, and that's what I really loved doing. We worked there for many years, and it eventually changed to the Harare theological college, where David continued to teach. And he even became the principal, and he was the interim principal for 14 years. Took him a little while to learn that job until he finally was able to hand over to a national to do it. My job during that time was raising my kids, but I also helped out with team serve, which is team short term program. And we had many, many different people in our home, mostly college students, but all ages, doing a variety of different things. And our favorite job was to take them eventually on a game drive, sometimes camping trip. And we've got so many stories about the elephants and the baboons and the hippos. But if you need to hear those stories, you'll have to talk to me later, because that's too long for now. In 2008, Zimbabwe just went through a major crisis financially. The place was just broken and there was nothing on the shelves. And daily, daily, we thank God for providing for our needs. And it was during this time that my daughter decided to get married. And so when there's nothing on the shelves, how do you put on a wedding? You do it in an african way. And we had the best wedding we could have ever put on in that country. It was at that time that we were exposed to a ministry called hands of hope. And they purchased a property where they had put on a camp for kids. And so we were invited to help with the campus development and the oversight of many things that went on there. It was great fun to watch these kids that had otherwise lost everything in their lives, their parents, sometimes their livelihoods and give them the special gift of coming to a week at camp. And we would have people come in and put on VBS programs for the kids, teaching them different Bible stories and crafts and games and have a really special time of pouring into those children's lives. It was really a rewarding time. And it was during this time that my son came across back to the states to go to college. And it was here that he met his bride. And in 2014 they got married. And they're living in Indiana at this time. So that's kind of fun. We got kids on both sides of the ocean. Also. Not long after that, my husband finally graduated, and he, in 2016, became doctor David Rousseau from the University of Cape Town. Bosch. It's down in Cape Town. And the first job he did after becoming a doctor of theology was build a dam at that camp. So that's just what every theologian would do, is build a dam. But anyway, you know, you just make yourself available for whatever God brings your way, and you call in people that God brings into your life to help you through those times. Many of you remember the year 2020. Yes, we had Covid in Zimbabwe as well, and we had lockdown, but we had a fun lockdown with another group of about 30 people, all the staff on the camp. And it was a really special time of becoming a community of Christ, just helping each other live through that period of time and building into each other's lives. And it was at that time that we are like goddess, what do you really want to do with us in our lives? We really think community is important. So we looked around, and in 2021, we moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa, and we joined a ministry called East Mountain. They are a ministry that specializes in community life. We bring in young people to live with us, and we teach them theology things, Bible lessons, how to do devotions, how to build things with their hands and do other projects, how to. What should they be doing with the rest of their lives? Is really a special time to pour into these young people's lives. East Mountain was taking a break to evaluate the program after ten years, and we thought, well, what are we going to do with our lives? Well, the leadership does this, and there's a church in downtown Cape Town that invited us to come. The message church said, please, we want you to come and help us. We're a very young church, a lot of college students. We need some wisdom thinking because we have gray hair, maybe we have wisdom. So we joined them, and it was a, is a really rewarding ministry. Once again, pouring into students lives and the people of this church. We help with their discipleship. We help with the children's programs and the college age programs and the, we call them GCS gospel community groups. I think you've got another name for your small groups, but, yeah, it's really a rewarding time. And one of their outreaches is to the University of Cape Town. And it allows us to reach out to those students that maybe at the first time in their lives are out there in the world being faced with lots of different things, and we get to help guide them along those steps. David also continued teaching at the George Whitfield College, which is a Bible college, training future leaders, christian leaders, kind of like Moody does. And that's again pouring into people's lives. I feel like that's what our life goal is, to pass on what we have been given in our upgrade. And so the one ministry that we really, I think is my favorite is our Sunday night dinners. We tell the students at the university, anyone who can make it to our house will feed you, and we'll sit with you and we'll answer any questions you have. And we lead them in a deeper relationship with Christ. And that is so fun to once again be a mom. My favorite job just pouring into these kids lives. We cross culturally connect everyone, bringing their own life and experiences to each other. And we rub off each other's bumps and sharp edges and just learn how to become a Christian in a christian world that sometimes brings you different ideas that you need to stand against. Many of you have experienced our lives with us over the 35 years. And so I just have a couple slides of my family. My daughter lives in Zimbabwe still with her four children, her husband and her mother in law. And then my son, I said, married a local lady. And they live in Indiana. And they have three children. Well, they had three children at the time of this picture. A month ago. They had their fourth little boy. So that's a crazy house. But we really enjoyed time that they met together. After six years, we had our kids and their extended families all together in one house. And the cousins who never knew each other got a chance to meet each other and become best friends. Friends. And now when we facetime, they really connect and have a relationship, which is really special for me. So I just ask that you might pray for us as we go back to South Africa. Many ministries happening there. We still are enjoying life, even though in a retirement state. And I ask that you'll continue praying for us then. There is a pad of paper in the back. If you want to continue hearing about what we're doing, just sign up on the pad. [00:10:37] Speaker B: There we are. Very good. Yeah. So I just want to echo what sue said in terms of thanking you for supporting us for all these years, 35 years behind us, and you guys have been a special church, and you've been one of our major supporters, and we thank the Lord for you. Yeah, I mean, how do you express gratitude for 35 years of encouragement and support? So thank you so much this morning. What I want to do, in keeping with this idea of gratitude, is I want to bring a message about gratitude. Now, you might be saying, well, you know, you're the one who's supposed to be grateful. Why are you coming and talking to us about gratitude? But I really want to just invite you on my journey of learning more about gratitude and how we can live in the light of God's goodness to us, what he has done for us, and that gratitude is a rightful response to God and his goodness to us. I want to begin with a quote, and it says, thankfulness is neither trivial nor inconsequential. On this one, quality pivots the difference between maturity and immaturity. That's quite a statement, isn't it? So thankfulness is not trivial nor inconsequential honour. It rests whether we are mature, growing in Christ, or not. So show me a grateful person, and I will show you someone who is growing in Christ. I want to look at a passage of scripture as the basis of my message this morning. And if you'll just look at it up there on the screen, it says this from one Thessalonians 516 18, says, rejoice, always pray, continually give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. It's God's will for you in Christ Jesus for you. As I stand here this morning, I want to make a confession. And this doesn't come out of sort of false humility. It's really, as I reflected on my own life, and I'm sure you can relate, that we don't always live out of a life of gratitude. Particularly in my younger years, I was sort of very driven. Go to the mission field and what's the job? Get the ministry done. And sometimes in that, there would be frustration and things are not always going the way you expect them to go. And sometimes there's a certain level of sadness, maybe, that we live in a world over which we have not very much control. And so what I've realized over the years is that gratitude is something that has to be fostered. It has to become a practice. We have to nurture it. When I was a young child, so I was one of five children, sometimes we would receive candy or a small toy, and as lots of children do, they grumble. It's not quite enough. It's not really what we want. And I remember my mom or my grandmother saying to us, oh, stop it. Just be grateful. Now, those were important words for me as a child. It took me a long time to realize the importance of that. But this morning I come wanting to say that being grateful is not just being nice. It's not just something that you need to learn as kind of a social nicety. Now, I believe gratitude actually is vital and reveals a lot about our growth in Christ. El Mollah writes, how grateful we are is the key to understanding what we really believe about God, what we really believe about ourselves, and what we really believe about the world we experience. Dallas Willard, a wonderful spiritual writer. He's now past. He wrote a great deal about these words. First, thessalonians 516 18. And what he would extend to his readers and to those whom he mentored. He would extend to them a double edged invitation, on the one hand, and this was the easy part, is he would invite people to memorize these words. Maybe some of you have memorized them. They're great words to have as part of the fabric of our thinking, as believers. But then he would extend another part of the invitation, which was the more difficult one. He would invite his readers and those he mentored to spend the rest of their life learning, not trying, but learning how to weave those verses into the very fabric of their daily existence so that they would become truly grateful people. And that's the journey that I want to invite you on to this morning, the journey from ingratitude to gratitude. I'm still on that journey. I still need help. I need the help of God's spirit. I need the reminders of other believers to be a grateful person. So perhaps we can look again a little bit more carefully at these words. And I want you to notice the last sentence. What does it say? For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you that what you give thanks. So people will come to me and say, dave, what is God's will for my life? Now, I realize that that has many dimensions to it, but what is very clear here, what is God's will for us? That we're thankful. That we are thankful people, that that's something that we are nurturing in our lives. And God wants us to be grateful. Not for God's sake. God doesn't need our gratitude. Yes, I think he loves to hear our gratitude, but he doesn't need it. Why does he want us to be grateful? It's for us. It's for our sake. Few things transform our lives more than gratitude. Gratitude is the key to coming alive. Gratitude is what it means to live a life of real faith. It brings color to our relationships. It infects our lives with new energy. It helps us to live, to relate, to work, and to lead. There are few things more transformative than gratitude. So I want to ask a practical question, and my wife always wants me, as the teacher, to say, well, how is this practical? How do we make this real in our lives? How does one become a grateful person, particularly in the midst of heartache and heartbreak and the struggles of life, when the media constantly tells us that we are worse off than we were before? How does one become a grateful person when on a daily basis we are bombarded by a troubled world, by a world that is always dissatisfied, and if we're not very careful, that begins to permeate our souls. That's the world we live in all around us. It's like that's what's the ether in which we live in gratitude. So I think somehow we have to learn. How do we go from in gratitude to gratitude with God's help? The first thing I want to say is this. Gratitude rises up within us when we make a clear choice to receive our lives as gifts. Can I say it again? Gratitude rises within us when we make a clear choice to receive our lives as gifts, our very breath, our salvation. Everything about us is what? A gift. A gift from God. The lives of those around us. When Paul writes these words to the church in Thessalonica, he is giving them a choice. If you think about it, you can't compel gratitude. You can't force it. At some point, what has to happen, we have to make a choice. Can I invite you today to receive the mystery of your own life as a gift? As a gift. That right this moment, right this moment, God is loving us. That right at this moment, God is sustaining you. That right at this moment, God is, as it were, breathing his life into you. The God of the Bible is the great. I am not the great. I was. He is the great. I am. He is always present. We live our lives always in his presence, under his sustaining hand. That God is loving us into being, holding our lives in his good hand. And gratitude begins to rise within me as I more deeply appreciate that mystery of God's life in me. John Claypool, a theologian, a pastor, and writer on the spiritual life, writes about his own struggle. When his daughter, Laura Lu was nine years of age, she was diagnosed with leukemia. And after a very brief struggle, she died as a ten year old. And after that, John found himself where he couldn't preach. He found himself in a dark place. And for some of you here, you know this from your own personal experience, it was a painful time. He went through a time of profound grief, but then, slowly, God helped him through that. And after a while, he began to write some thoughts down. And eventually he put together a book, and it was entitled tracks of a fellow struggler. And I just want to read to you from his book, one paragraph. I want you to listen very carefully to what he wrote. Who was Laura Lu, really? She had been a gift. She had been a gift. Not something I had created and therefore had any right to clutch as an own possession, but a treasure who had always belonged to another. She had been with me solely through the gracious generosity of the one who gave her. At every juncture, we humans are given the freedom to choose the attitudes we assume. And so it was with me. I could be angry that Laura Lu had died after only ten short years, or I could be grateful that she had lived at all and that I had been able to share in her wonder. I chose then, and I still do. The way of gratitude. I find these words incredible. I'm not sure I could say them, but I hear this call to making a clear choice, to see life as a gift in all of its fullness. And think about it. Every day we wake up to a day that we have not created, to a salvation that we did not construct. Every day we wake up to that which is given to us as a gift, undeserved. That's what grace is about, isn't it? And I think about it every day. We're invited to a choice. It's a fundamental choice in life. But can I say something more? Gratitude really needs to be expressed, and gets expressed in two ways. First of all, there's what we commonly call thanksgiving. We give thanks in worship. If you listen to the words this morning as we sang them, so much of it has to do about thankfulness. Thanksgiving to God in our worship, where we're saying to God, thank you, thank you, thank you. If you listen to the psalms, many of the psalms have to do with this idea of giving thanks to God, entering into his courts with praise going through the gates into, as it were, God's presence with God's people. But of course, we all know that words by themselves can be empty. We can say thank you. But I think what really completes thanksgiving is also what we could call thanks living. Let me illustrate. Let's say you're invited to have some supper with some close friends, and you're invited, and they know you, and they make your favorite dish, and you go and you receive this lovely meal, and you say thank you. And then you begin to eat, and halfway through, you push the plate away. Doesn't make sense, does it? It's your favorite meal. It's what you enjoyed. But imagine rather, after the third helping, you say thank you. What is observed in that thanks, living, thanks, eating, participating bodily, as it were, in this gift that you have received. And that's life, how it ought to be lived. Entering into what God has given to us with joy, with thanks, living, taking it all in. Taking in all that God gives to us. Even in the difficult times, we foster that concept of thanks living. Can I say one last thing? So, gratitude. It rises within us when we make a fundamental decision to see our lives and all of life as a gift. We have not created our own lives. They are gifts. Gratitude gets expressed in thanks, living. And then thirdly, gratitude. If it's going to become part of us, it requires practice. Let me say this, there is no gratitude button. You don't wake up one day and say, well, I'm going to be a grateful person. It just doesn't work that way. What we have to do is, in our lives, is we have to foster habits where we become grateful people. We have to incorporate into our lives certain practices. One person I know who's a wise man, older than myself, and he says that your habits will eat your will for breakfast. Do you hear what I'm saying? Do you hear what he's saying? Your habits will eat your will for breakfast. In other words, those things that you regularly do on a day to day basis, those habits that you fall into or those habits that you foster are eventually those things that are going to help you live in a particular way. So, as you think about it, we are habitual creatures. We have habits of negativity, of ingratitude, of complaint, of groaning and moaning. Those habits are in us. They're in our bodies, they're in our mouths, they're in our ears, in our tongues. We can't just switch them off. So what has to happen is I have to develop a new habit, and the only way we develop gratitude is through practice. We often say, practice makes what perfect? Okay, I think there's maybe a more helpful statement. I'd like to change it a bit. Practice makes possible. Practice makes possible. A man I greatly respect, older and wiser than me, says, watch your habits. Look at your habits. Your habits show your true desires. And all of us here, whether we realize it or not, are more motivated by our desires than just our heads and thoughts. So how do we bring our desires in conformity with that which should be? Can I suggest a practice that I have found helpful? Can I ask you very simply to develop the practice of saying thank you daily? Saying thank you to God. Paul writes, give thanks in all circumstances, not for all circumstances, but in all circumstances, in the good, in the bad, in the painful. I do that by learning to say thank you in the midst of everything. So when I wake up in the morning, and I'm now 67, so each day is increasingly a gift from God, I say, thank you today. There's nothing that can separate me from the love of God. Nothing. There's nothing that can separate me from the presence of Goddess. He is there walking with me. Thank you that all your resources, God, are available to me in Christ Jesus. Thank you for my dear wife, who still loves me in spite of my quirks and selfishness. Thank you for my children. And I thank God now for my eight grandchildren. What a gift. I thank you, God, for coffee, which I'm about to make, which is a sure sign of your existence. Thank you that I can work. Thank you that I can plan. Thank you that I can make a contribution. And then, as I go through the day, what I do is I punctuate my day by giving thanks, just pausing as often as I can to give thanks to God. And then, before I go to bed, pausing, quietening my heart and mind and thanking God for the way in which he has been at work in some way through my day. May God help us in this. So, in keeping with your practice here at village church, I want to suggest a few so whats? Take them home with you, if you can. Write them down. Make gratitude at daily practice, every day, even if it's just one thing, thank God for it and slowly develop that habit. Second, keep a journal in which you express your gratitude to God. Any of you keep a journal. Will you write some things down? Some of you might write down those things for which you are grateful. Keep a list. It will amaze you over time what you see. Preach gratitude to yourself every day in the light of the gospel and God's goodness. Preach to yourself. The psalmist would talk to his own soul to be thankful, to be grateful. And finally, two good books to read on gratitude. Gratitude by Cornelius Plantinger and practicing thankfulness by Sam Crabtree. I found those two books tremendously helpful as I think through this matter of nurturing gratitude in my own life. Shall we pray? Thank you, Lord, for all that you have given to us. We are in many ways blessed. Forgive us for the many times where we feel entitled, for those times where we lose sight of your good hand in our lives where we don't even fully appreciate our salvation. But thank you Lord for the many reminders in your word to be thankful people. Because we know, Lord, that as we practice gratitude out of that soil you will bring about maturity. You'll cause us to grow, to become more like Christ. Do your good work in us for your name's sake. Amen.