Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church
November 26, 2023
“If You're Thankful and You Know It”
Rev. Hardy Kim
Greetings!

This is Thanksgiving week, and I hope you have had a good meal and quality time with people you love. We all deserve to have the warmth of a bountiful table and of community, don’t we? If it’s been a hard week, that’s understandable too. This season can also be a time of noticing what is wrong in our lives or the world too.

In either case, a lot of our focus in on the idea of being thankful, isn’t it? But what is the point of that gratitude? To feel good that we are doing well? Is it to feel relief that we aren’t the ones suffering from the hard things going on in the world? What difference is our gratitude supposed to make?

In the story of God’s people, there are a few points where they take a moment to consider what they’ve been through and what’s ahead. Where there are clear points to consider what God has done for them and, what is promised to come. We can learn from how they mark these special times as we dig into their story this Sunday. Please come to learn and worship together with us!

Faithfully,
Hardy


Please join us immediately following the Sunday service for our Coffee Hour (in-person in Trinity Court or online via Zoom).

Theme for Sunday

In gratitude to God, empowered by the Spirit, we strive to serve Christ in our daily tasks and to live holy and joyful lives, even as we watch for God’s new heaven and new earth, praying, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

A Brief Statement of Faith, PCUSA
Questions for Reflection
  • What is something you are grateful for in the world today? What is something that makes you feel the opposite of that, or that is dissatisfying?

  • Is there any connection or relationship between them?
Deuteronomy 8:7-18

Because the Lord your God is bringing you to a wonderful land, a land with streams of water, springs, and wells that gush up in the valleys and on the hills; a land of wheat and barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey; a land where you will eat food without any shortage—you won’t lack a thing there—a land where stone is hard as iron and where you will mine copper from the hills. You will eat, you will be satisfied, and you will bless the Lord your God in the wonderful land that he’s given you.

But watch yourself! Don’t forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commands or his case laws or his regulations that I am commanding you right now. When you eat, get full, build nice houses, and settle down, and when your herds and your flocks are growing large, your silver and gold are multiplying, and everything you have is thriving, don’t become arrogant, forgetting the Lord your God:

the one who rescued you from Egypt, from the house of slavery;

the one who led you through this vast and terrifying desert of poisonous snakes and scorpions, of cracked ground with no water;

the one who made water flow for you out of a hard rock;

the one who fed you manna in the wilderness, which your ancestors had never experienced, in order to humble and test you, but in order to do good to you in the end.

Don’t think to yourself, My own strength and abilities have produced all this prosperity for me. Remember the Lord your God! He’s the one who gives you the strength to be prosperous in order to establish the covenant he made with your ancestors—and that’s how things stand right now.