Only One Returned

Gratitude is one of life's biggest difference makers. To be grateful is to be happy, content, and humble enough to express that to others. Gratitude isn't looking for me, it is thankful to others for what they have already done or who they are. Level 3 Gratitude is taking appreciation beyond words and into action and will literally change your life.

But not everyone has a thankful spirit. In fact, a majority of people, it seems, do not.  Is that you? I want to share three stories taught by Ralph Walker, a gospel preacher from Tampa, Florida.  These will make you think about how you show gratitude to others.

- What does it mean to be grateful?

- How often and in how many conversations do you say "thank you"?

- Why did six people take the candy and not say thank you?

- Why did seventeen people not pour out their hearts in gratefulness for being saved?

- And why did only one man, healed by Jesus, come back to thank Him and worship God?

Transcript

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Welcome to the Excel Still More Podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in. Today's podcast is sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John Cunningham is a friend of mine and a brother in Christ, and he can help you with financial decisions and future planning. He's been a big help to me and my family, and I commend him to you. You can reach him at 205-913-1720. I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started. And so I really do mean it when I say thank you. Thank you for tuning in. If you've chosen to share this with others, thank you for that. If you are one of the truly wonderful people who have reached out to me, sent emails, Facebook messages, phone calls, and just expressed your thankfulness or shared your story or let me be a part of helping you through some problem, I genuinely am thankful for everyone's kindness, and it really does brighten my day to think about your support. Listen, I like to talk about gratitude on this program. This will be the third episode specifically designed to make you think through how content you are with the good things in your life and how often you return thanks to God or others for what you already have, not in anticipation for something more, nor out of some obligatory response, but a genuine emotion of appreciation. You and I both know how abundantly the New Testament teaches that. No matter their condition, God had already done so much that they praised him for it ongoingly day in and day out. And when you can become the kind of person who is so content with who you are that it becomes a central joy in your life to return thanks to others and make them feel amazing for the role that they play in your life, you will uncover true joy. Now I wish I could tell you that everybody's like that. Everybody's thankful and appreciative and kind and complimentary, but as you will hear in today's episode, that is not the case almost at all. The vast majority of people are so consumer minded, gimme, gimme, gimme. I want more, I deserve more, I've earned more, that they fail to see that that usually is not true, and instead they ought to just be grateful. If, after this episode, you want to hear more on this, let me reference you back to two episodes from 2019 that you might enjoy. Back in March of last year, episode 19, you can listen to Level 3 Gratitude. The Cliff Notes version on that is the following. Level two is expressing thankfulness to the person who provided you that thing. And level three, where so few people can get, is when you choose to do something to demonstrate to them how much that meant to you. Every relationship in your life will get better if you can get to level three gratitude. Several months later, episode I think 66, it was in September of 2019, we talked about say thank you. It was based on an article that I had found, which suggested that every interaction in your life should involve you saying thank you. And not just when someone does something for you or says something nice, I mean, even if you are interacting with your mortal enemy, there is still room for a thank you in there somewhere. It says something about the kind of person that you are and how you envision the future of that relationship. And if you'd like to know more about that, you can head back there. But today, today is different. The content you will hear for the next 10 minutes or so of this episode comes from a man named Ralph Walker. If you don't know Ralph, he preaches at the Henderson Boulevard Church of Christ outside of Tampa, Florida. And I cannot suggest strongly enough that you go listen to that guy online or wherever. He is easily one of my top five favorite preachers. By the way, Ralph, if you happen to be listening to this, thank you for your work. You've blessed me greatly, and it is simply out of respect for your work that I'm sharing this with others. So it's probably presumptuous of me to think that Ralph Walker would listen to me. He probably doesn't. So if you happen to be a student at Florida College and you see Ralph on campus, give him a big high five from me. Ralph was actually on the Florida College campus on September the 21st, giving a chapel talk on the topic of gratitude, and he shared three stories, and I have thought about them every day. The third one that he told comes straight from scripture, and that's where our title is derived, Only One Returned. So as you are listening to these other two events, try to figure out where in Jesus' life we will be reading. Okay, one more thing to say, and then we will jump in and I will share with you the stories that Ralph shared with all of us. These are not flattering stories. They aren't about gratitude, appreciation, and thankfulness. They are actually about the opposite of those things. In this episode, I want you to evaluate the way that you show your love for others who have done kind things for you or who are important people in your life. In other words, you don't want to be like most of the people you'll hear in these accounts. But maybe we all could take a few minutes and self-evaluate. Okay, so it starts with a 1960s game show where contestants come onto the stage and the game show host would give each one of them a box of candy. What they didn't know is that in his pocket was a check for $500, and he was going to give that check to the first person who said thank you when he handed them a box of candy. Now, you might think that that would have been the very first person. I mean, isn't that what you do? Someone does something nice for you or gives you something and you express thanks. Well, maybe that is the way it ought to be, but it's not the way that it was. The first person took the candy and walked away, as did the second and the third. It wasn't until the seventh person that he awarded them the $500 check. So Ralph didn't have a whole lot more to say about that, but I've just been wondering, like, why not? What would cause someone to receive something nice from others and just walk away? I don't know. Maybe they just expected more. Maybe they were super excited to be on the program, but that had already kind of worn off, and so now they were expecting a car or a trip to Hawaii or something like that. And so, you know, a box of candy is nice, I guess, but they wanted more. And by the way, everybody was getting it, so it's not like I'm super special. I guess we can't say for sure, but I know this the person who found the need to show appreciation for even the smallest of thing received the greatest reward. And so, as Ralph asked the student body at Florida College last week, I will ask you, would you have left with a box of candy or $500? Okay, so the second story Ralph told was much older. It was from 1860 and a lot more intense. And look, I will never be able to tell this as well as Ralph did. He is a level 10, like toastmaster general storyteller, but I'll do my best and hopefully you will find it helpful. It was 2 a.m., middle of the night on Lake Michigan, and this steamer vessel carrying 400 people was making its way from Milwaukee down to Chicago. It was stormy out, it was winter, and it was cold. The boat was called the Lady Elgin, if you'd like to look it up. At some point through the night, a schooner boat called the Augusta collided with the larger vessel and poked a hole in the side of it. It looked like everything was okay, so the schooner left, and the captain sought to continue the journey to Chicago. Unfortunately, however, the boat began to sink. There were three hundred and ninety three passengers plus the crew, and two hundred and seventy nine of them died, freezing to death and drowning in the dark, deep waters of Lake Michigan. It is still the worst disaster on water that the Great Lakes has ever experienced. Now here's a cool part of that story. On the coast at 2 or 3 AM, there was a college lifeguard and some friends. His name was Edward Spencer. He saw what was going on and he swam out and he brought back a woman alive. His friends tied a rope around him to help him come back to shore, and he went out and he rescued a child. He went out over and over again and rescued eleven people, after which he collapsed there on the ground. But then he heard continual cries, and he went back out six more times. He rescued seventeen people that night. But that effort took a terrible toll on him. He was taken to the hospital, there were complications, and he was paralyzed and bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. As a result of this, he became a national hero. But when asked about his most vivid memories of that night, he was often quoted as saying, not one of those seventeen people ever returned to say thank you. Can you believe that? Why wouldn't those people search him out? Was it because they were poor and calloused and didn't show appreciation to anyone? Was it because they were rich and entitled and none of this should have happened to them anyway? Were they just too excited and ran off to their families and didn't want to relive any of it ever again? Or maybe they just figured that Edward Spencer would understand how much it meant to them. But it sounds like he never really did understand. And maybe you listen to that and you think I would give that guy a gift every time his birthday came around and I would write him letters and I would never forget him. But I need you to understand, as you're beginning to see, that's just not the way people generally operate. Maybe it's out of a simple sense of selfishness. Everything's about us, not about the people around us, even if we are who we are because of the people around us. Perhaps we all have to fight that self-centered view. So at the end of his talk, Ralph turned everyone's attention to Scripture, and I would also like to do that. I will be reading from Luke 17, and maybe you picked up on this. Our title is Only One Returned based on an event, not a parable. It sounds like it should be a made up story. It is a real event in Jesus' life. Let me read it for you. While he was on the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten leprous men who stood at a distance met him, and they raised their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. When he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priests. And as they were going, they were cleansed. Now one of them, when he saw that he had been healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at his feet, giving thanks to him, and he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered and said, Were there not ten cleansed, but the nine? Where are they? Was no one found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner? And he said to him, Stand up and go, your faith has made you well. So there you have it ten men with a deadly disease, nearly no hope, separated from the ones that they loved, sent on a mission by Jesus and cleansed along the way, and yet only one returned to give thanks to Jesus, to glorify God. It is interesting that Luke points out that one of the men was a Samaritan, perhaps the other nine were Jews, which brings me back around to thinking that sometimes there is a sense of entitlement, maybe even pride, that goes along with not being thankful to others. Maybe you didn't deserve what had gone wrong, so why would you thank people for making it better? Maybe you're someone who should be blessed by God. Why would I thank everyone for doing things for me when this is just the way it's supposed to go? You would think that no one would ever behave like that, but I'm convinced that some do. Some commentators suggest that the nine Jews went on to the temple because they were Jews and they had the right to do that, and the Samaritan didn't, but I think that waters down the application here, don't you? This is about the heart of a kingdom citizen who would later read again in 1 Thessalonians 5 to rejoice always and in everything to give thanks. This man could go no further without praising the one who had changed his life. And maybe as we get toward the end of this episode, that's where you should begin your journey to greater gratitude. In the way that you interact with God every day, in the way that you speak with him about everything he has done, none of which are you worthy to have, not a one of the good gifts. Maybe it's not everything everyone else has, hopefully it's not that you feel entitled to more, but God has already done so much. You know, I can look back at these three stories and ask you questions. Would you have thanked the man for something so simple as a box of candy? Because six people didn't. Would you have looked up Edward Spencer to thank him and honor him and love him because all seventeen people he saved chose not to do that? And in our story where Jesus has cleansed you of the leprosy that would have ended your life, the spiritual darkness and decay, only one returned. Have you? You say, What do you mean? Returned. I mean returned thanks. Returned to give him glory. I would think that every day your life is filled with good things God has done. You would want to turn back, bowing your head in prayer, looking up in praise, writing words in your morning journal, just to tell God, I am content. I'm not entitled. I'm not jealous of others. I don't think you gave me what I had coming. I am content. If you give me no more gifts, God, if you do not one more thing for me than what you have done, I will praise you every day for it. And you can graduate that to level three gratitude. Level one is I have this thing in my life and I'm thankful that I do. Maybe it's my salvation or my health. Level two is I'm thankful to God for that. Thank you, God, for this yet again. And level three is when you want to actually return thanks to Him. You say, God, I can't deserve this, but I want to do kind things for you to show you how thankful that I am. If you have an Excel Stillmore journal, you know about this. Every day you write down something you're thankful for, you attribute it to God with glorification, and you determine what you're going to go out and do because of it. Now, if we can begin with that, and maybe you're already good at that, why not do so with others? With your spouse, with your kids, with your parents, with your best friend, with the people at church who labor over you and for you and around you. Maybe you aren't prideful, maybe you aren't jealous, maybe you aren't self-centered, but if you aren't returning thanks to the people in your life, how will they ever know? I don't know what was happening with the other nine guys, but it doesn't look good. I know about the one that returned. And honestly, I don't want my wife or my kids or my friends or the elders of the church or anyone who is good to me to question my gratitude. I want to show it to them. If only one returns, that person should be you, and it should be me. To do so may sound odd to others, there aren't many who live like this, and that's kind of the point. When it came to humility, appreciation, and love, only one returned. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the program, please remember to share with your family and your friends. Also, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for emails, order the three month journals, or just catch up on old episodes. So until next time, let me leave you with this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel stillmore.