By Dr. Jimmy Braswell
Chaplain, Home Hospice of Odessa
As the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays come upon us, don’t try to create your own thankfulness.
Don’t try to create a world of profit and performance to be thankful for, just be thankful for a relationship with God. Performance bandits try to make us feel we must be deserving to be thankful; as if, unless we have achieved a great deal or made a lot of money, we have nothing to be thankful for.
In the mind of performance bandits, you must deserve Thanksgiving. We can never be deserving.
We are loved by Him and pursued by Him always. He can’t stay away from us — always wanting a relationship, you don’t have to deserve it. The false gods (The Baals) of the world want you to bleed for them.
Like the worshippers of Baal in the Bible, cutting themselves to please the false gods — The Baals of the world want us to bleed for them – to keep trying to please them. Jesus bled for us, so stop trying and rest in Him. God wants so much to be close to us — He came in the flesh as a child — born in a manger — Immanuel (God with us).
He doesn’t want a performance or to “be somebody” for Him to love us all our efforts and achievements are as the Scripture calls “filthy rags” —just be a “manger tramp” — who we are, shepherds and laborers in the field invited to tramp in with our poverty of Spirit and be thankful spending our lives to be close to Him and yet not to deserve Him. Allow Him to pour on you true abundance.
