Have you ever stopped to ponder Jesus' question, 'Where are the other nine?' Imagine the profound echo of gratitude resonating within that inquiry. Today, we're guiding you through a transformative reflection on the biblical story of Jesus healing ten lepers and the striking difference between thankfulness and thanklessness in our lives. We get to the heart of the matter, that it's our attitude towards God, the giver of all blessings, not our circumstances, that shapes our gratitude.
Now, imagine penning a book on scraps of paper, each line a testament to your relentless spirit despite crippling poverty. That's what a Brazilian poet did, sharing her reality through "Child of the Dark". We navigate through her life, contrasting the glittering façade of Sao Paulo with the grim reality of its slums. As I share my own tryst with poverty, we uncover the healing power of gratitude. This episode isn't just about being thankful; it's a call to acknowledge and remember every hand that held us up on our journey. Don't miss out on this enriching exploration of gratitude, humility, and thankfulness.
Have you ever stopped to ponder Jesus' question, 'Where are the other nine?' Imagine the profound echo of gratitude resonating within that inquiry. Today, we're guiding you through a transformative reflection on the biblical story of Jesus healing ten lepers and the striking difference between thankfulness and thanklessness in our lives. We get to the heart of the matter, that it's our attitude towards God, the giver of all blessings, not our circumstances, that shapes our gratitude.
Now, imagine penning a book on scraps of paper, each line a testament to your relentless spirit despite crippling poverty. That's what a Brazilian poet did, sharing her reality through "Child of the Dark". We navigate through her life, contrasting the glittering façade of Sao Paulo with the grim reality of its slums. As I share my own tryst with poverty, we uncover the healing power of gratitude. This episode isn't just about being thankful; it's a call to acknowledge and remember every hand that held us up on our journey. Don't miss out on this enriching exploration of gratitude, humility, and thankfulness.
Come on, leper. Amen popped out behind the building and stood right in front of Jesus. Please don't run away, jesus. What's the matter with your skin? Ask Jesus. Can't you see I'm covered with ready swords and crusty scabs. No one wants to look at me. My face is so horrible. What do you want me to do? You can make me better. I know you can, said the man falling on his knees in front of Jesus. If you don't, I'll scratch myself to death.
Speaker 1:Jesus felt sorry for the poor man. Don't touch me, said the man. That's how you get it. I'm not afraid to touch you. Jesus reached out and took hold of the man's arms and pulled him to his feet. The itching was gone, the sores started to dry, the scabs began to fall off. Thank you, thank you, oh, thank you, shouted the man. What can I do to thank you? You can go to the temple, show yourself to the priest and say prayer of thanks to God. Yes, yes, I will, I will Promise a man hurrying off. One more thing, said Jesus. Anything, anything, said the man. You don't have to tell anyone what I just did. I won't tell a soul, said the man as he skipped towards Jerusalem. But the man was so happy and walked then. The walk to the temple was so long that he forgot to tell everyone he met. Then all the lepers along the road began to look for the wonderful man with the healing touch.
Speaker 1:The story well told of the gratitude of good lepers. Good lepers are those who are healed and never forget the disease they once had. They remember how good clean feels. Bad lepers, on the other hand, are those who are healed and go on acting as if they never had the disease. 90% of all the lepers in Luke 17 are ingrates, bad lepers pretending they never met Jesus. What a shame. They went so completely healed that there was not a smidgen of their former state of decay left to them. They were so healed they headed back to the social centers of their communities. These pretenders were free to run for office, any office they might imagine. They were free to return to their former bridge clubs, kalana's clubs and even their golf clubs. Their once former Scourge Word confession, unclean, had been replaced by give me five. The untouchables were now the embraceables. The infected had become the respected. The isolated tomb dealers had become the officers at Toastmasters.
Speaker 1:However, all the joy of their cleansing. We never would have known about them all, except for the 10% of their group who knew the art of gratitude. The one out of the 10, when he saw you as healed, came back praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus feet and thanked him, and he was a Samaritan. Jesus asked a most perplexing question we're not all 10 cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at the once eroded feet of a thankful Gentile leper and learn from him. It is the season of the year for us to come before God with the old 100th on our lips and give him praise to him for all of our abundance. I don't know if all lepers are pictured here to indicate that all praesless people are the 90th percentile of the blasé lepers who came and received so much from God and mentioned it so little.
Speaker 1:Cs Lewis said that ancient man approached God out of a strong feeling that he was approaching a judge. For modern man, the rules are reversed. As Lewis said, modern man is the judge and God is in the dock. Maybe this is why we feel we have no obligation to thank him. I suspect this is what lies behind the reason we are developing a culture without a sense of thankfulness. For me, our thankfulness smacks of a lazy atheism. Remember, one old definition of atheists is someone who sometimes feels gratitude but absolutely has no one to thank for it. There are two sides in the issue of all self-righteous abundance. These two categories are the thankful and the thankless. The thankless tend to act as though they are. Their circumstances are entirely self-made. The thankful see the province of God and all they hold. The thankful believe that it is not how much we have or have not in life, but what we see is the source of what we have or don't have. That is the real issue.
Speaker 1:I once sat down with a missionary couple in Mexico who obviously were living on a shoestring. I studied the very meager tables as we sat down as a host said grace. His prayers swelled with so much gratitude over God's abundance that I was tempted to open my eyes to peek to see if there was something on the table I had missed. I had missed nothing. It was not what was on the table that really produced gratitude, but because his Christian gratitude was a way of life. I have sat down with the great many people who fed me mortis sumptuously, but their sign to begin eating was not about head, but the green light signal of a fork which the host picked up back to the long Samaritan leper, whose thankfulness mandated a bent neck and said God, you are the giver of this feast. The 90th percentile lepers are those who begin to eat when the host picked up his fork.
Speaker 1:All of this goes to prove the Eau Cluchet gratitude is an attitude. Gratitude has abundantly nothing to do with what we have, but is a lifestyle. It rehearses pray so continuously that God is always the giver and the lepers are cleansed by his giving. Is Jesus sorry? He cleansed and great? Of course not. It is God's nature to cleanse, heal and give. But he does ask a very profound question in Luke 17. Where are the other nine? It's a fair question If 10 lepers are healed and only one comes back, where are the other nine?
Speaker 1:We are eating out of the other nine and I happen to look around the restaurant filled with people 39% of whom were born again asking to a gallop pole, and saw one person praying before beginning a meal. When he was finished praying, I asked him sir, I couldn't help but notice you were praying. Are you a Christian? Yes, he replied. The Lord saved me four years ago. Even since then, I've been filled with gratitude for all God is doing in my life. I cannot cease to thank him.
Speaker 1:The lone believer reminded me that Jesus taught a very practical principle of rejoicing in the things that mean most to me. I enjoy singing the chorus. Thank you, lord, for saving my soul. It has old fashioned words in the new world of upbeat worship. Still I think about it often. My thankfulness is not rooted in the grace of meal time, but in the awareness of my own salvation. If the Thanksgiving your own table is more sparse than you'd like it to be, just thank him for saving your soul.
Speaker 1:Remember this great hymn excuse me for crying. Could my tears forever flow. Could my zeal no longer known? Bees of sin would not atone. Those must save, and thou alone, nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to the cross I clean. In that hymn, which celebrated the death of his family, he wrote that beautiful stanza oh my sin, the bliss of this glorious thought. My sin not apart. But the whole Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, oh my soul. It is well with my soul, written by Horatio Stafford. Therefore, let us live in a constant attitude of God's abundance, along with the writing of Hebrews, 12 and 28, who said therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be there thankful and so worship God acceptably, with reverence in all. I know, god does not always provide us all the abundance we want. But Psalms 37, 25, says I am old, but I have been young and I've never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. My suspicion is this that most of you will sit down to a fine meal this holiday season. I hope, as you do, psalms 104 will come to you. Enter his gate with Thanksgiving and enter his courts with praise. God is the keeper of your feast. He is the maker of your feast.
Speaker 1:Tony Campo said that as he was eating a meal in Haiti, he started to pick up his fork and eat when he glanced at the window which was near his table and saw the faces of little hungry Haitian children's faces pressed against the glass. Watching him eat, mesmerized For a moment, he said, I had the awful feeling of guilt and sat poised, not knowing whether to eat or not. Then the waiter stepped over and said sir, don't let this bother you and pulled the blinds. I laid down my fork, unable to eat that meal. He said it's so like the American culture, to forget to thank God for what. We have, to pull the blinds and forget that we are part of the six percent of the world that has enough continually to eat again and again and again. Enter his courts with praise and enter his state with Thanksgiving While he eats your Christmas turkey and ham.
Speaker 1:Consider this 600 people will die of starvation while you're eating that meal. On Thanksgiving Day, 12,000 people will die of starvation and more than 12,000 people will die of starvation on Christmas and New Year's. 800 million people in this world have not had enough to eat. Today, one of every 10 babies born this week will die within the first week. 25% of those babies will never reach age 5. I now understand what it means to be a nation upon whom God has reigned his blessings. I understand how Malcolm Mudridge must have felt when he watched Mother Teresa take from a dust-banded baby someone had cast aside, believing it dead. Then suddenly chirping sea, there's life in it. Most of the world is not dying under nuclear annihilation. Rather, by the thousands may die weeping and denied. Ts Eliot's line haunts us. This is the way the world ends for most people not with the bane but with the whimper.
Speaker 1:We all sometimes complain that God is unfair, but gratitude is an attitude. Hameca, chapter 3, verses 17 and 18, shouts out obligation to praise whatever our financial circumstances. Though the victory does not bud and there are no grapes on the vine, though the olive crops fail and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in my God, my Savior. There's no ye-swimpering. Harry Kushner says he once had an older teacher who said to say life is unfair is like saying a bull on a charge of man who happens to be a vegetarian. God has a plan for his world and that plan is that everybody would know Christ. Somehow we are involved in that plan. If that plan does not speak in our lives or sense of worship and praise, we miss the whole point. Jesus' lone leper is a picture of great gratitude, a picture of grace of those of us who have been redeemed by the living Lord Jesus. Can I help but say thank you God, thank you for eternal life, thank you for our daily bread.
Speaker 1:We're from that crowd of fakeless lepers long enough to remember Somalia. Somalia is a land where there aren't any title holders anymore. There are no grain fields. Everyone there lives in extremes. Somalians spend their days waiting on you and grain trucks. Consider the children of Somalia. Each morning send their children forward for rice. They are cheering and goading their children to be first in line so they can be part of the 100, 200, or 500 who are fed. 300 return to weeping parents weeping themselves because there wasn't enough for everyone.
Speaker 1:A few years ago, one of my very favorite poets was picking up scraps of paper in a park in Brazil. Quite a poet she was. She saved the big pieces of paper that she found and wrote poems on them. Nobody really knew it then, but on those big scraps of paper with rough pencils, she wrote a book that was destined to be published in America as Child of the Dark, a woman starting to death with her poor little family. Who writes these words Today? I am sad, I'm nervous. I don't know if I should start crying or run until I fall unconscious. At dawn it was raining. I have a few tin cans and another little scrap of metal that I'm going to sell to Senor Miguel to buy food for the children.
Speaker 1:Oh, sao Paulo, a queen that vainly shows her skyscrapers and her crown of gold, all dressed up in velvet and silk but with the cheap stockings of the slums underneath. Sometimes I imagine I am a grandlady dressing a satin gown with diamonds shining in my black hair, but then the smell of the sewage come in through the tin walls and my satin gown turns to rags and the only thing shining in my hair is lice. Carolina, maria de Jesus, this Christmas, enter his courts with thanksgiving and enter his gates with praise. Where there are not ten leopards healed, where are the other nine? Didn't answer Lord. I did not know where the other nine had gone. I only know I have received healing. And not to praise you as a sin. I must not condone. I have been loved, I am clean. I must enter your gates with thanksgiving. I must come into your courts with praise.