This time I invite you to turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 1. Of course, we have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, then Deuteronomy before Joshua and Judges. So, Deuteronomy chapter 1, this is page 184. We'll begin reading at verse 9 and read through verse 40 and we're going to be looking at this in terms of seeing here the enemy of thanksgiving. We're looking especially at verses 26 through 36. But again, we'll start reading at verse 9 and read through verse 40. So, Deuteronomy chapter 1, beginning with verse 9, hear now the holy and infallible word of God. At that time I, that is Moses, said to you, I am not able to bear you by myself. The Lord your God has multiplied you and behold, you are today as numerous as the stars in heaven. May the Lord, the God of your fathers, make you a thousand times as many as you are and bless you as he has promised you. How can I bear by myself the weight and burden of you and your strife? Choose for your tribes wise, understanding, and experienced men, and I will appoint them as your heads. And you answered me, the thing that you have spoken is good for us to do. So I took the heads of your tribes, wise and experienced men, and set them as heads over you, commanders of thousands, commanders of hundreds, commanders of fifties, commanders of tens, and officers throughout your tribes. And I charged your judges at that time, hear the cases between your brothers and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with them. You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God's. And the case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me, and I will hear it. And I commanded you at that time all the things that you should do. Then we set out from Horeb and went through all the great and terrifying wilderness that you saw on the way to the hill country of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us. And we came to Kadesh Barnea. And I said to you, you have come to the hill country of the Amorites, which the Lord our God is giving us. See, the Lord your God has set the land before you. Go up, take possession, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has told you. Do not fear or be dismayed. Then all of you came near me and said, Let us send men before us, that they may explore the land for us, and bring us word again of the way by which we must go up, and the cities into which we shall come. The thing seemed good to me, and I took twelve men from you, one man from each tribe. And they turned and went up into the hill country, and came to the valley of Eshcol, and spied it out. And they took in their hands some of the fruit of the land, and brought it down to us, and brought us word again, and said, It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us. Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, because the Lord hated us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt to give us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us. Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, the people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. And besides, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there. Then I said to them, do not be in dread or afraid of them. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes and in the wilderness where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you as a man carries his son all the way that you went until you came to this place. Yet in spite of this word, you did not believe the Lord your God, who went before you in the way to seek you out or to seek you out a place to pitch your tents, in fire by night and in a cloud by day to show you by what way you should go. And the Lord heard your words and was angered, and he swore, Not one of these men of this evil generation shall see the good land that I swore to give to your fathers, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh. He shall see it. And to him and to his children I will give the land on which he has trodden, because he has wholly followed the Lord. Even with me, the Lord was angry on your account and said, you also shall not go in there. Joshua, the son of Nun, who stands before you, he shall enter. Encourage him, for he shall cause Israel to inherit it. And as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey, and your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in there. And to them I will give it, and they shall possess it. But as for you, turn and journey into the wilderness in the direction of the Red Sea. And thus ends our reading from God's word this morning. Brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ, from the earliest of ages, our parents have taught us that whenever someone gives us something or someone does something nice for us, it's important for us always to look them back, look back at them and to say thank you. One of the things that shows us very simply already is that thankfulness isn't something that necessarily is something we're born with. It's something we have to learn. We aren't born saying thank you. We aren't born showing appreciation for things people do for us. In fact, when we're the youngest, we continue to crave more. We simply demand more. We want what we want and we want it now. And so it's something we have to learn to show thankfulness, to be thankful, to express thanksgiving. And again, that may be part of the reason why we have this special day. We have this special day because it's all too easy for us to go about our lives every other day without really stopping and giving thanks and praising God and acknowledging that every gift we have received has come to us from His hand. Of course, thankfulness may come easier to some of us. Some of us may be very good and very quick to say thank you, but it still remains the fact that it's something we need to learn. It's something that's actually unnatural to us. And so it is, as one person has said, that the hardest math for all of us to do is simply that of counting our blessings. And that's true not merely for young children. It's true for the young and the old. It's true for the unbeliever and the believer. Even those of us who ought to be the most thankful people on the face of this earth, those who should be the most filled with thankfulness in our hearts and our minds, the sad reality is that thankfulness still comes so hard to us. And we quickly lose sight of reasons to be thankful as we go about our lives. You see, that is at the heart of even the passage we're looking at this morning. Moses, as you may have noticed, is here speaking to those children who were about now to enter the promised land. They've been wandering in the desert for 40 years, and before they go into the land, Moses speaks to them one last time. And Moses gives basically an extended sermon. The book of Deuteronomy you could consider as a sermon. The last sermon of Moses, where Moses works through the law of God, he works through the history of Israel, and he's seeking to apply it to the lives of those children now standing there as adults, ready to go in and conquer the land. And as we read, Moses is relaying here how God was faithful to his promise and made Israel as numerous as the sand on the seashore, and God had brought them there to the edge of the promised land, But then they turned away. Moses relays this story to their children because he's wanting them to learn from the history of their fathers. He wants this new generation of Israel to learn from the mistakes and the sins of their parents and so avoid what they had done. And the specific problem Moses is particularly warning them about is their unthankfulness. their refusal to be thankful for what God had done and to offer up to God thanksgiving and show confidence then as they went into the future. And so Moses here is warning the new generation about this enemy to thankful living, this enemy to thanksgiving. That's what we want to look at here in our time together. Moses warning Israel about the enemy of thanksgiving. And we want to see three things. First of all, the reality of our complaint. Secondly, the root of our complaint. And then third, the resolution to our complaint. So the reality, the root, and the resolution to our complaining. Well, to begin with, there really ought to be no question about the reality of our complaining. Each and every one of us probably need only think back to earlier in the day to come up with a time when we were complaining. Maybe we were wanting to sleep in a little bit longer, but mom or dad got us up or the alarm went off and we sort of grumbled to ourselves and think that we have to get out of bed and we complain that we have to get up so early. Maybe breakfast wasn't so much to your liking. Maybe you didn't have time for breakfast and so you complain that you're hungry, you complain that it wasn't good enough, you're not satisfied. Or maybe you went to your closet and you discovered or you felt that you had no more clothes to wear, that you didn't really have the proper attire to come to church this morning. Or maybe your children are moving their feet just a little too slowly and so there you are complaining about how they hold you up and have made you later than you preferred in coming to church. And so, if we're honest, we would admit that it really doesn't take very much for us to complain, does it? It comes pretty easily to all of us. And at the same time, even if we think more about this reality of our complaining, it's astonishing, isn't it? The kinds of things we can complain about. It's not just that we complain about small things, but that we even complain about good things. Now, we can go over to our refrigerator and we open it up and we complain there's nothing to eat, even though the fridge is yet filled with food. We can stand in front of our closets and we can say, I have nothing to wear, never mind that there are 50 hangers holding different kinds of clothes right there before our eyes. We can go out to the car and we complain it isn't newer, it isn't nicer, it's not as fancy as we might like. There are even those who have received the wondrous blessing of growing up in a Christian home who complain about the parents they've been given. There are those who have been privileged and blessed to be part of a church community filled with love and a desire to serve God and is filled with the faithful preaching of the Word of God who complain they actually have to go to church. There are those who have the awesome freedom of actually possessing the Word of God in their own language in a Bible that's their very own and they complain when they're told that they should read it and even memorize parts of it. You see, the sad reality of our complaining is not just that we complain about very small things, insignificant things that should not matter, but we even turn blessings into a cause for complaint. You see, that's exactly the kind of attitude that Israel was exemplifying in our passage Israel has been eating manna from heaven. Could you imagine 40 years mysteriously bread or a bread-like substance that just appears in the ground for you to just pluck up and eat however you like. They have their bellies stuffed with quail when they complain to God about the lack of meat. They were twice miraculously given water from a rock. And another time they came to a pool of bitter water and Moses throws in a stick and it becomes sweet. They were led by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. They were told elsewhere that their clothes and their sandals never wore out, even after 40 years of wearing them. They didn't get a hole in their clothes, a single hole, not a seam came loose. They had been given everything they could have asked for. They had been given everything that they needed. They had experienced the tender, loving care through 40 years of very obvious, very physical manifestations of God's care. And yet here they are, on the verge of the promised land, on the verge of possessing the great blessing the Lord had always held out to His people, a land flowing with milk and honey where they could live with their God and they're grumbling in their tents. They should be sharpening their swords and polishing their armor and fletching arrows for the archers and packing everything up to begin this march into Canaan, and yet there they are, sitting on the couch, grumbling about how miserable their life is. They say, the Lord hates us. The people are stronger and taller than us. The cities are huge, with walls up to the sky. We even saw giants there, the sons of the Anakim. Numbers 13.33 tells us the spies told them that we seem like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we look the same to them. See, this is just one example of many when Israel was filled with complaint. filled with a dissatisfaction about how God was doing things, their anger at the kind of life God had given them. Even after all they had seen, after all they had received from the hand of God, after all that they had experienced, the only thing they wanted to do was just sit there on their behind and complain to God about how miserable they have it. The reality of our complaint shouldn't be a surprise to us. We really complain about everything, don't we, given half a chance? But it should disgust us. How can those who are so richly blessed complain? How can we, who are so filled with many blessings ourselves, how can we so easily be given over to complain? Why is it that it is just so easy, so natural for us to murmur and to grumble about the life that we have been given? Where does this come from? Where does this arise from? Well, often we like to believe that the root of our complaint, the source of our complaint is found outside of us. It's found in our circumstances. It's found in our situation. It's the same thing Israel said. Israel said in verse 28, our brothers made us lose heart. It's our brother's fault. They came to us and they told us that there were giants. And our brothers came to us and they told us that the walls are up to heaven. Our brothers came to us and they convinced us just how horrible an idea it is to go into the land of Canaan. They're the ones that told us just how badly it would go for us if we dared to walk into the land of Canaan. They made us despair. They painted the bad picture. They told us how foolhardy this would be. Our grumbling, our misery, our complaining is their fault. And that continues to be our own temptation as well. And it's the reason why we often justify or feel justified in our complaining. If my spouse simply did what I wanted them to do, I wouldn't have to complain. If my child would just listen to me the first time I talked to them, I wouldn't have to complain. You see, if they would change or my circumstances would change, then I would change and I wouldn't be a complainer. They need to change. My life has to change. And only then will I stop complaining. You see, it's my situation's fault. It's my friend's fault. It's my family's fault. The responsibility for our complaining is deflected. It's a problem that's outside of us. It's not really my problem, you see. It's their problem. It's what they're doing. It's what they're saying. It's the life that God is giving me. See, we often try, don't we, to put the blame out there, outside of us. But really, we have to acknowledge at the end of the day that the root of our complaint is our own sinful heart. Complaining arises from this sinful heart. It's not the fault of my family. It's not the fault of my situation. It's not the fault of God. It's my fault. I complain because I'm a sinner. I complain because I have a broken, sinful heart. Forgetting and failing to give thanks is part of our sinful nature. And that's the very point Paul will make in Romans chapter one. He speaks there of fallen man and he says, although they knew God, they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. See, it's part of the very essence of the sinful nature that it refuses to give thanks to God, that it refuses to acknowledge the good, and that it instead dwells upon the bad, and that they deserve something more, that they deserve something better, that the problem is out there and not inside of them. It's because of who we are as sinners, that we are the thankless complainers that we often are. You can think in this respect how sin makes us self-centered. Why do we get so upset when there's someone on the road driving 10 miles or five miles an hour slower than us? Well, we're upset because we think that they need to operate according to our sense of time, according to our sense of purpose, according to what we want for ourselves. And so we're angry and we complain about the individual, we'll just say in front of us, driving slowly because they're holding us up, because our time is worth something and they're getting in the way. We want for ourselves what we want, and when people keep it back from us, we complain. We want a life of ease. We want a life of convenience. In fact, you could really say that we want to be sovereign. We want the entire world to revolve around us. I want to be able to go to the restaurant and have my order taken right when I want it, and for my food to come right when I ask for it. I don't want to wait in the doctor's office. I don't want to sit there twiddling my thumbs waiting for my teeth to be checked. My life, my will, my purpose, my desire should be of the utmost importance to every other person on the face of this earth. We want to be sovereign. We want to control. We want to have it all our way. But perhaps at the most basic level, the great depravity of our complaining is actually that it's a lack of faith. And that's what we really see in our passage this morning. It's not simply that Israel is selfish. It's not simply that they're proud and that they want to control their own life. But really, the problem is that their complaining is doubt. Their complaining is a lack of faith. Their complaining arises from a heart of unbelief. Look at what Moses says in verse 32. In spite of this word from God, you did not believe the Lord your God. You're sitting there in your tent, you're complaining, you're upset about your life because you refuse to believe in God, because you refuse to trust God. Your complaining arises from a failure to lay yourself before the Lord of all creation and acknowledge that His will is supreme, that His will is right, and that it's for you to listen and to obey and to trust that He is good and will do good to His people. And so Israel forgot that, and that's why they say in verse 27, the Lord hates us. See, if that's not an expression of unbelief, I don't know what is. The Lord hates me. The Lord doesn't love me. Whatever he says in his word isn't true. Whatever he has promised is false. The Lord is lying. The Lord hates me. See, here is the God who has so graciously blessed them, even as we've just recently recalled. was blessed them in so many innumerable ways. And their eyes are completely clouded by their current circumstances and they attribute not goodness, not love, not mercy, not compassion to God, but they actually attribute hatred to God. And this is the same story over and over again. Israel fled Egypt, and as soon as they saw Pharaoh coming with his army, they said, was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us here to die? They get to the Red Sea, and immediately afterward, they grumble because there's nothing to eat. They've been eating manna for a while, and they grumble because there's no meat. The Lord has brought us here to die, they say. If only we'd die. The Lord hates us. And you see, we look at these passages and we read this with our families and we often, don't we, we sit there and we're amazed, aren't we? We're amazed that they complain so much. And we think, we never act that way, we never talk like that. We may never say those things, but you see, that's what lives in our own hearts. How many times, brothers and sisters, have you faced illness? Have you faced loss? And you think to yourself, if God really loved me, He would do this for me. If God really, really cared, I wouldn't have to go through this right now. If God really loved me, he wouldn't have taken this away. It's very easy for us to think that way, don't we? Isn't it? To think when we're faced with loss, we're faced with trouble, we're faced with uncertainty, think to ourselves, this just proves that God doesn't love me. You see, there is no greater offense to the Lord than this very accusation of complaining. You know, the Lord repeatedly, in various passages, speaks of how Israel contends with Him. Israel accuses God. It's like Israel is seeking to sue God. Like they're bringing God into the courtroom and they're saying to God, Lord, you really hate me and you really aren't faithful to your word, you really don't care about me, and God has zero patience for that. God says, you're contending with me, you're accusing me, your Lord, your Savior, your God, of doing evil. You see that's why we find in verses 34 through 36 this condemnation of God. He says not a man of this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to your fathers except for Caleb. Not a single person of that sinful generation that was filled with complaining would enter the land of rest because this complaining spirit struck at the very heart and nature of God himself. See, and here we are, and brothers and sisters, haven't we been blessed in an even greater way than Israel? We often are filled with awe when we think upon their history, what they went through, what they experienced, what they faced. But we're not living in a desert. We're not surviving just on the bare minimum of what we need. We're not viewing Christ through a glass dimly. But we see the full manifestation of God's love in Jesus Christ. We live in a day of untold plenty and prosperity. We have the clear proclamation of the gospel of Christ. We have this revelation given to us in our own language which we can read whenever we want. We have so much more than Israel ever did. And so how much greater is our sin? How much greater is our sin of complaining? when we give in to the selfishness, when we give in to the doubting and the unbelief and begin to accuse God of evil. Well, then we need to think this morning especially, most importantly of all, how can we overcome this kind of selfishness? How can this lack of faith be overcome? How can we be moved to show God real, true thanksgiving? What is the resolution to the complaining nature of our own hearts that often seems to be the true of us? Well, before we get to the actual resolution, notice what Moses doesn't say. When he finds out about their murmuring and their complaining, he doesn't come to them and say, well, it's okay, it's okay. Don't complain. Because God's going to give you everything you want. Because God's gonna make your life perfect. You know, you've had a hard time now, but guess what? In the next few days, the Lord is just gonna fill your life with such blessing that you're never gonna have a worry, you're never gonna have a fear, you're never gonna get sick, you're never gonna get hurt ever again. You're gonna have your best life now. No, Moses says nothing of the sort. He says nothing to Israel about saying, well, don't complain because soon you're going to have everything you want. No, Moses does something entirely different. He says, the Lord here is with you. He doesn't point to God satisfying their every desire. He points to the great love of God that has gone before us, that has fought for us, and that has carried us like a father carries his son. You see, part of the issue that Israel is faced with is they looked on their past and they think to themselves, oh yeah, we were slaves and then we leave Egypt and then Egypt is chasing after us and wants to kill us. Oh yeah, and we came to the Red Sea and we were surrounded by walls and Egypt still was chasing us and nearly caught us and killed us in the midst of it. And oh yeah, we got through the Red Sea but then God tried to kill us by withholding water. And then God was trying to kill us by withholding food. And then God was trying to kill us by, or rather make our lives miserable by not giving us meat. See, what Israel failed to do in each of those situations was to remember that God had blessed them magnificently just prior to that. Yes, they were slaves in Egypt, but God delivered them. Yes, Egypt chased them, but God destroyed their enemies in the midst of the Red Sea. Yes, God let them go thirsty, but then he provided them with water. Yes, God let them go hungry, but then he gave them food. You see, Israel had forgotten, as they looked to the past, that the past was actually evidence of God's love and faithfulness through hardship and through struggle. See, Moses is saying, count your blessings. Look on the past. See what God has done. See how faithful the Lord has been. See how he has cared for you. Yes, you faced very trying circumstances. Yes, your life was in danger. Yes, you nearly died. But at no point did God's love truly ever forsake you. At no point did God truly ever surrender you over to death or into the hands of your enemies, but God was with you in every moment, through every moment, and he brought you to good, didn't he? See, Moses is calling upon God's people, remember, remember the past. and see that what you're facing now, the present, the present doesn't undermine the past. The present doesn't deny the past. Think of the character of your God. You have a God who's faithful. You have a God who does not lie. You have a God who's always true. You have a God whose love is eternal. You have a God who's always faithful. You can look on the past and if you see there evidence of God's love and care, you can have confidence that even with this mountain or this valley that you're facing, that God will still be with you. Don't you realize that in the midst of your disappointment, in the midst of your hardship, in the midst of your dissatisfaction, you are still being carried in the arms of love? Children, do you know why God made Pharaoh chase after Israel? Do you know why God made Israel almost die of thirst? And why he almost made them die of hunger? It was because he loved them. God loved them, and so he made them nearly die. God loved them, and so he filled their life with suffering. You see, we like to look at suffering and the sinful conclusion we often draw is that it must mean God hates me. But you see, Moses is telling Israel that you're actually coming to the exact wrong conclusion, that you should come to the opposite conclusion, that you're suffering, that your hardship, that your difficulty is actually proof of God's love. God loves you so much that he wants to fill your life with hardship and trouble and suffering. Because if you had everything you wanted, if you had everything revolve according to your desires and your wants, you would have no want of Christ. If you were never hungry or thirsty, if you never had lack, then how would you ever see your need for Jesus? because you have suffering, because you have difficulty, because you have sorrow, you are led by God in his grace to see your great need for Jesus and to rest in your Jesus and to believe that God is loving you and preserving you and leading you forward in Jesus. See, brothers and sisters, the most important thing for us to remember is the cross. because it's at the cross where we see the glorious mystery of good coming out of suffering. It's a crass way of putting it, but did God hate Jesus and therefore put him to death? Not at all. God loved his son, but God filled his son's life with suffering. because he sought to glorify his son. He loved his son, wanted to glorify him, and because he loved us, his people, and wanted to save his people. God uses suffering to prove his love, to show his love, to draw us deeper and deeper into his love. Yes, at the cross we see that the full measure of God's love is displayed even there in the midst of trouble, in the midst of sorrow, in the midst of grief. You see, when we look to the cross, the if God really loves me complaint becomes the because God loves me thanksgiving. When we look at the cross, the if God really loved me complaint becomes the because God loves me thanksgiving. Because God loves me, I have suffering. Because God loves me, the world doesn't revolve around me. Because God loves me, my children are sometimes disobedient. Because God loves me, he gave me a spouse. He doesn't listen to my every whim. Because God loves me. See, brothers and sisters, if we are going to be unleashed to render to God true thanksgiving on this day, if we're really gonna have bursting within our hearts and our souls this real desire to glorify God, to thank Him for all that we receive, to give Him all praise for His goodness and His mercy and His love, it has to come. as we see that even the bad things are evidence of His love and care for us in Jesus Christ. We have to see that every moment, every event, every interaction, everything that happens in our life is happening because God is staying faithful to us. God is always staying faithful. and not anything that takes place disproves his faithfulness but upholds the faithful love of our God. We need to look to Christ. And there we see the evidence, the evidence of God's love through all things. And that's where we're led to trust, to trust our God, to have faith in our God, and are really moved to give him the praise and the glory that he is due. It's this grace, this grace in Jesus Christ, this love in Jesus Christ that leads us to rejoice at all times because we know that in Christ we rest in the loving hand of a faithful father. Amen. Let's pray. Lord our God, we again give you praise and thanksgiving on this day. Father, we thank you. We thank you for saving us in Jesus Christ. We thank you for loving us in Jesus Christ. We thank you for filling our lives with many good things. And Father, we also give you thanks for bringing much hardship and suffering and trial into our lives. Father, we confess that it's our natural tendency to accuse you of wrong and to doubt you. Lord, truly you remind us here this morning that not one event in our life disproves your faithfulness, but really leads us to see the wonder of your faithfulness, to grow us in Christ, to sanctify in Christ through good and through evil. Oh Lord, our Heavenly Father, then receive our thanksgiving and help us, help us always. to be a people of great thanksgiving to you, rather than to be those who complain and are bitter at the circumstances and situations of our lives. So Father, fill us with thanks, we pray, to the glory of your holy name. In Jesus' name we ask it, amen.