This Thanksgiving Day sermon focuses on three 'unspeakable' gifts for which we should be profoundly grateful: Jesus Christ, unspeakable joy, and the Bible. The examples emphasize that God's gift of His Son, Jesus, is beyond human description and should be cherished daily, especially considering Christ's sacrifice and intercession. The sermon contrasts this with human ingratitude, using examples like the ten lepers and a drowning boy to highlight the importance of thankfulness. It further explores the unspeakable joy found in salvation, knowing sins are forgiven and having eternal life, and the unspeakable words of the Bible, which provide the way to heaven. The message concludes by urging listeners to express gratitude for these divine provisions, for health, reason, and the opportunity for salvation.
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Hello everyone, this is Lester Wilson Stigging. Well, this is Thanksgiving Day, and I wish to speak on three unspeakable things for which we might well give hearty thanks to God. Unspeakable gifts, unspeakable joy, unspeakable words. Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gifts. We read in Second Corinthians nine, fifteen. You are fully aware that the gift referred to is our Lord Jesus Christ. Have we not all had the experience of receiving something of our material nature from a relative of friend in which it was hard for us to find language to express the emotions and gratitude of our heart? I have seen some so overcome with the thrill of the moment when presented with something they so much desired.
Break down and with tears of joy exclaims, all I can say is, thank you, is that not the way we felt when first paged? We were so grateful, the gifts were so real. What about it now? Has the gift lost its value? Has it become stale, commonplace, taken for granted? As the day is dark and when the end draws near, that gift should be even more precious than we should be more grateful. Ingratitudes are cruel things, even a crime. How many a wife and mother slays night and day, month after month, year after year, for her family, doing hundreds of little unnoticed things for their comfort and pleasure? and never getting so much as a thank you, a kiss, or a kind word of gratitude, which would have meant so much to her.
Rather has she been criticized and cut to the heart by words like the piercings of a sword, that makes the heart bleed and life a burden. Hardworking fathers, too, have suffered from ingratitude. All of us, no doubt, have felt at times that what we have done has not been appreciated. Let us now think of the greatest kindness and most liberal of all givers, God. who gave the best gift and with him all things to the most unworthy and undeserving of creatures, you and me. How do we respond? Are we thankful, grateful beyond words? Remember, God gets nothing from this world but their sins. All that he gets of pleasure out of this world is from his people.
May we be delivered from him, gratitude. Surely God's gift to us is unspeakable. Beyond our description, unable to find words to rightly value it. His gift, as you know, is His Son, excuse me, the Lord Jesus Christ. May we daily thank God for Him. Thank God for Christ's death for us when our sins were punished and put away. Thank God for Christ's present life in heaven interceding on our behalf. He knows all about us and sympathizes with us. We often pray for missionaries in the foreign fields. How little we know of their experiences. But supposing a missionary were to come into our midst who had spent twenty years in the foreign fields. passing through and enduring the trials, sorrows, and privations of the mission field, he could pray more sympathetically and feelingly for the distant laborers having been there himself.
Christ is able to pray for us, seeing he was once in this world as God's missionary, and suffered all that we now suffer and much more. Thus he is our sympathetic advocate at God's right hand, and then to think that he is soon coming back to take home his own to be forever with himself. Well, might we thank God for his unspeakable gifts. May we be delivered from ingratitude, and not like the boy I read about who was drowning, and the man, seeing his flight, died in and saved him. Just as they got to shore, the man owing to exhaustion dropped dead with heart failure. The boy ran home. The heading in the paper read like this. The boy who was saved ran away. Our Savior still lives, and craves our gratitude and thanksgiving.
May we not run away into the world and the paths of self-seeking and rob him. of the gratitude he deserves and longs for. We read in Luke seventeen seventeen about ten lepers being cleansed and only one returned to give Christ thanks and God's glory. May the listener and speaker be like the one that returned to give thanks and not like the nine who did not appreciate what Christ had done. Daniel kneeled upon his knee three times a day and prayed and gave thanks. May we do likewise, if saved, there is so much to thank God for. A man visited an asylum one time and was asked by one of the patients. As he looked through the bars, young man, did you ever thank God for reason? No, replied the young man somewhat surprised.
Then drew it now, for I have lost mine, came the unexpected but appropriate reply. When Matthew Henry, the famous scholar and commentator, was once accosted by thieves and robbed of his purse, he wrote these lines in his diary. Let me be thankful first, because I was never robbed before. Second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life. Third, because although they took my all, it was not much. And fourth, let me be thankful because it was I who was robbed, not I who did the robbing. Yes, thank God for health, if you have it. Thank God for the use of your faculties. Have you eyesight? Thank God for it. Have you hearing, ability to speak, smell, and taste? Thank God for these things. If you are not a Christian, be thankful you are still alive and have opportunity to become one.
Are you a Christian? Thank God unceasingly for it, for you don't deserve to be. He saved you by his grace through our Lord Jesus Christ. Give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good and his mercy endures forever. Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gifts. I'll not say much on unspeakable joy our next point. To having not seen with love in whom though, now we see him not, yet believing we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory, we read in First Peter one, A. Suffice it to say that this is the happy portion of every blood-bought heaven-borns. and heaven-bound individual. What joy when we are saved? When we first trusted Christ, he said, I write unto you that your joy may be full.
What did they know to make them so happy? Why, they knew their sins forgiven. They knew they had passed from death unto life. They knew they were the sons of God. They knew they had eternal life. They knew they would be with and like Christ forever. Joy unsteak rose. And he adds, full of glory. If we were full of the glory that is soon to be eternally ours, instead of being filled with this world's sin and self, we would know more of unspeakable joy. Then third, Paul was caught up in the paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Surely words that tell of sins forgiven, eternal life, peace with God, are unspeakable words. The unspeakable words referred to were God's words, Christ's words. Have we not heard the same person speak yet?
The Bible is God's word. Who can fully explain it? Who can fathom its depths or reach its heights? Who can rightly speak of its worth or expound its wealth and its hidden treasure? Surely his word is unspeakable and one feels dumb and ignorant in approaching it. But it is our happy privilege to read and meditate on it. May we do so, reverently. The person of Christ for the heart, the work of Christ on the cross for the conscience, and the word of God for the pathway. Unspeakable words. The Bible. John Wesley said, To candid, reasonable men, I am not afraid to lay open what had been the inmost parts of my heart. I have thought I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God and returning to God, just hovering over the great gulf till a few moments hence I am no more seen.
I want to know one thing, the way to heaven. How to land safe on that happy shore? God himself has condescended it each the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh, give me that book at any price. Give me that book, the book of God. I have it. Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be the man of one book, the Bible. So said John Wesley of the unspeakable words of the living God, and so say I. Friend, how about you? Let us on this thanksgiving day thank God afresh for his unspeakable gift, his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Then thank him for the joy unspeakable and fullness of glory. That is, yours now, if you are saved. And third, thank him for the unspeakable words, the Bible, printed in our own mother tongue, that we are in a free country where we can read.
And here it preached without being persecuted for it. If you are saved and know it, thank God that you are not saved. Thank God you still have an opportunity to be saved. Now our subject for tonight is the last week of our campaign. And here's my message. The one question, all the religions in all the world are trying to answer. There are hundreds of religions in the world, and everyone is trying to answer this one question. What is this one question? What is the one and only answer, according to the Bible? By this message, you will find out if you are right or wrong. Don't miss it tonight at seven thirty in the Sanford Chapel on South Third Street. That's seven thirty in Sanford Chapel on South Third Street here in Sanford. Let's listen speaking and back tomorrow at the same time with light at even time.