Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall show forth your praise through Jesus Christ. We pray. Amen. There are a few occasions throughout the year in which we get to look out and see the holy remnant. This is one of those, given the heat and the occasion of the weekend. And I know what you're probably thinking. You're so thankful that the temperatures have tapered off so that we can have a normal length sermon. No, I misread the room. We'll be efficient and make our way through our gospel, at least the beginning of it. And in fact, I myself got no further in our gospel reading than the very first sentence because of the theme of thanksgiving and gratitude that we read about on Jesus' lips. Jesus, we read at that time, Jesus declared or said, I thank you, Father. And it was those words that informed much of my reflection for our message this morning in terms of a message on gratitude. And I want to simply offer three observations about gratitude taken from these words alone for our edification. First, Christian gratitude has a direction to it. That is, that it is good to know where to direct your thanks, where to direct your gratitude. Really, prayer in general, to be sure, the people of God have always had prayer directed to God, addressing God, Adonai, Lord. And for that matter, any attempt at prayer that has no direction to it or is aimless, you might say, is really nothing more than reflection or introspection at best. But when it comes to gratitude, which I would remind us is also a form of prayer, we can go to God simply out of thanksgiving. We are not to be grateful for gratitude's sake in and of itself. No matter how healthy that may be for us. You've probably seen articles online that thankful people live longer on average than unthankful people. Well, that is not the reason why we are to be spurred on to gratitude, but rather we as Christians, as God's people, are to be have grateful hearts for God and for God's sake alone. Even if it were to shave off seconds from our lives, it would still be the good and best thing for us to do. When we are grateful for various blessings in our lives, we are always, always encouraged, ultimately, to have to direct our gratitude to God. As the psalmist encourages us in Psalm 92, it is good to give thanks to the Lord. Not merely it is good to give thanks, but it is good to give thanks to the Lord. With regard to Jesus' own teaching and example, Jesus has already previously taught his disciples prior to this occasion how to pray in the most intimate of ways. And you will remember those words. He said, Here's how you should pray, our Father, and you know the rest. And the novelty in that teaching was not in praying to God, as I said, the people of God were accustomed to that, but it was in calling God Father in such an intimate way. Here in this passage, chapter 11, Jesus continues to build on his teaching by way of example in showing his disciples how to now express their gratitude. And it's with the same reference. Instead of our Father, now we have I thank thee or I thank you, Father. There's no shortage of reasons. Really, when I think about it, every day is filled with reasons to be thankful. There's no shortage of things in my life to be grateful for. Along again with the psalmist, I ought to be able to not just say but sing. I give thanks for your steadfast love in the morning, and I can give thanks all the way through the day for your faithfulness at night. But, truth be told, if there is any shortage to be had, the shortage is found in me. In here, I'm the one who often comes up short in showing and expressing my gratitude to God in the many ways that He deserves. And just as a simple application, it can be helpful for us to just stop sometimes and take an assessment of our lives and simply take the opportunity to show God thanks. Someone in my hearing recently said, sometimes I wake up in the morning and I just say, Thank you, God, for waking me up. That's enough. This is the pattern and model that Jesus gives us. I thank you, Father, fill in the blank. And when our eyes are opened to but a fraction of all of the blessings that God bestows upon us each and every day, known and unknown, when we see just a sliver of that, we realize that our gratitude to God is not merely just out of duty, although it is. We are his creatures and he's the creator and he deserves it, but rather it's a privilege. It's a privilege because we know God and He knows us and we know who to thank. As Christians, we are not those who are thankful but who don't know who to show thanks to. We know because he has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ. And because we know, we can thank God directly wherever we are, and under whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. Which brings me to the second point. Gratitude can be shown in any and all circumstances. Again, we see this clearly on display in the example of Jesus here in this passage, in these simple words. Jesus is speaking these words, of course, as he does in context. There are things that come before and after them. And in this case, it's really important what happens just before. When we read, we find that Jesus is speaking these words of gratitude in the immediate aftermath of just having been refused and rejected in multiple cities around Galilee, where most of his mighty works and marvelous works had been performed. That is, in front of people who saw what he was doing, they did not receive. They rejected him. Just as an aside, it can be a it's a common temptation to think that if only God would make himself known to me in clearer ways or in greater ways, that I and people in general would be perhaps more inclined to turn and believe and trust him. It's a question we might just want to ask ourselves sincerely, personally, would you? What makes you think so? Because all the people here that we read about, except for his small band of disciples, who saw him heal miraculously, who saw him deliver people from possession, who saw him raise people to life from the dead, they concluded that this Jesus was not from God, but rather that he himself had a devil. Which leads me to suspect and believe that there is more going on in our faith than mere miracles alone. However great those are, there's more going on in giving ourselves over to God than just seeing great things. Whatever the case may be, Jesus finds reason here to be thankful as opposed to growing resentful. I struggle the other way around. Here Jesus turns to his little band of no-name disciples, uneducated, overlooked, derided themselves as disciples of Jesus, and right there in their presence, after being rejected by multitudes, he says, I thank you, Father. And you can read the words yourself, Lord of heaven and earth, I thank you that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding, and that you have revealed them to babes or little children, as other translations put it. Jesus found reason and occasion to thank God the Father, not because of multitudes turning to him, but for each individual humble soul that turned to follow him, which is very consistent with his teaching on another occasion from Luke chapter 15. Jesus said, You know, there will be more joy in heaven over a single sinner who turns and repents and believes in me than over 99 people who think they have no need. Sometimes, if we're being honest, we reserve and hold back our gratitude for God. If we do show him gratitude, we reserve it for the big blessings. And we struggle to be mindful on a daily basis to be grateful for the smaller, more ordinary blessings from God that are right in front of us, that we enjoy day in and day out. I like how Charles Dickens put it. And in my years of life already, I've come to realize that it's not that we may come to realize that, but we will. You do look back and realize that small things were really big blessings in your life, that you didn't know it at the time. And this leads me to my third and final observation. Gratitude guards us from taking things for granted. Whether it's a small band of disciples here in Jesus' case, giving thanks for them, or whether it's our church community, our family, our friends, our daily bread, our necessities, or 250 years as a nation. All of it, small and great, is deserving of our gratitude. And on that note, we have just come from celebrating, haven't we? And in my experience, it hasn't been Americans alone. I was out standing on the street last night, surrounded by foreigners who were celebrating 250 years of America and making it widely known. We've been celebrating core values like our lives, our freedoms, our ability to pursue happiness. And it is good for us to remember how much sacrifice has been required to secure all of these things, how much blood has been shed, to make sure that we enjoy our lives under the forms in which we are most blessed to live daily. I submit to you that it is very much right, good, and true to pause together collectively and individually, and to simply show God gratitude for these blessings, lest we grow dull and take them for granted and just assume that this is the way life is everywhere for most people, because it's not. It's not. This isn't what our media portrays, but from other perspectives who have other experiences, in contrast, it's worth having our eyes open to and being reminded of what we have to be thankful for. And of course, in closing, I would just say that as Christians, we do not make an end point in the temporal, in the worldly things, but rather we are most of all thankful with grateful hearts for God for shedding his own blood for us, so that he would secure something that we take for granted regularly, opening up the way of salvation by way of our redemption. And for that, we are infinitely thankful, more thankful than we can be. In the words of one hymn writer who said, and put it this way To my Lord I will sing, for I have received endless mercy, love, and grace in Jesus Christ my King. I open my heart to offer praise to thee with unbounded gratitude for all you've given me.