Let the people of God praise the Lord! The people are His people and people will continue to be people; angels are angels, and to the best of my knowledge, angels are invisible; because the last stanza of that song says ‘let angels help us’, but the truth is that for angels to help you, you must be intentional, you must be prepared before you can be helped.
It’s our month of Divine Help, and whether you like it or not help will come your way; from above, help will come your way; from the north, help will come your way; from the south, help will come your way; from the east and west, help will come your way; those who are willing will be forced to help you, and of course there’ll be willing helpers all around you in the name of Jesus. So I want us to demonstrate readiness, intentionality by saying praise the Lord!
Father in heaven we want to say thank You; for thus far You have helped us, we want to say thank You; this morning we have come to do just one thing, is to present our Ebenezer for hitherto You have helped us; ten months have come and gone yet we are standing, that hymnal that we sang says ‘Your mercies yet flow’, another stanza said ‘glorious is Your faithfulness’, where will we have been if You have not been faithful? Accept our thanks in Jesus name.
Thank You for our lives, thank You for our health, thank You for strength, thank You because we can sing, thank You because we can speak, thank You because we can shout, thank You because we can see, accept our praises in the name of Jesus
Christ. As we have come to declare Your praise Lord today, please accept us, accept our worship in the mighty name of Jesus.
Every barrier, every inhibitor that will not allow us to declare Your praise properly and adequately today, please Father take away in Jesus name. Once again we plead for Your mercy, Your word says is not of him that runneth neither of him that willeth, but of God that showeth mercy; Lord we are not unmindful of our frailties and vulnerability, we pray this morning Father, let Your mercy cover for us and let Your name be glorified.
I pray for all Your children who have been faithful in the payment of their tithe and the giving of their offering, Lord we pray according to Your word that can never be changed, according to Your word that can never be subject to amendment, Father You will open the windows of heaven and you will bless them in Jesus name. You will make them a delightsome land, You will rebuke devourer for their sake and continuously You will glorify your name in their lives.
I pray once again that You will come through for us in the course of this service; let this month be the best month ever, send help to us from different corners, overwhelm us with so much of Your goodness and take all the glory. We declare that no man shall be god over us, but You’ll be God forever, in Jesus wonderful name we have prayed.
Good morning to you and happy new month of divine help. You are welcome to the month of November, the month of our divine help; our scripture is taken from 1st Samuel 7: 12, it came to a point that Samuel came and laid the stone between a Mizpah and the Shen and he said we have come to present our Ebenezer, for hitherto the Lord has helped us.
We have grateful hearts because people with grateful hearts are people that live in awareness of their environment; from January to date has not been a tea party but God has been faithful, here He has brought you and here He has brought me, and as we give Him thanks today, I know for the rest of this month and beyond, His blessings upon us shall be ceaseless in Jesus name. So I want to say congratulations to every one of you at least for making it to this moment, and having come this far, be rest assured of that that God will see us through this year and beyond, the Lord will bless us in Jesus name.
You will have seen me wearing something unusual, it’s just to create awareness for the program that is coming forth in December – the Holy Ghost Congress, is a yearly event and this year edition is themed “Onward Christian Soldiers”, we are marching on and the gate of hell will not prevail. So it runs from December 9 -15, 2024, it’s going to be miraculous and it’s going to be wonderful, and I want to encourage every one of us to make preparation physically and spiritually towards the event, and I have no doubt that at the end of it you will testify; I will testify to the goodness of God, you will testify to the goodness of God and so shall it be in Jesus name.
Let’s quickly open our Bible to Psalm 100: 1 – 5, and for your information, at the point Baba is ready is where I’m going to draw the curtain in order for us to have him; “Make a Joyful noise onto the Lord, all ye lands. 2Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. 3Know ye that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 4Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise; be thankful unto him, and bless his name. 5For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations”.
This morning very briefly as long as time permits, (but I’m sure the second service you have a full blown of it) I’ll be talking to us on what I call ‘Running with the Attitude of Gratitude’. We bless the Almighty God for the authority of this mission that have actually made the first Sunday of the month a Thanksgiving Day nationally or even internationally, so today we are here to register our deepest gratitude to God for hitherto He has helped us; ten months gone and two more left to crossover to the new year, we are here to present our Ebenezer to who against all odds has brought us this far, failure to appreciate God for all that He has done is a mark of rebellion according to Francis Cypher who once posited that the beginning of man’s rebellion against God was and is the lack of a thankful heart.
If you are here or wherever you are and you have no heart of gratitude, then something is wrong. The Yoruba version of that expression is that eniti a se l’oore ti o o dupe, won ni o dabi olosa to ko ni l’eru lo, in other words, someone that you have been so kind and wonderful to that fails to appreciate is not different from somebody who comes to you and takes your things at gunpoint. So it is ingratitude when we have so much that sometimes we cannot see the great value of all the things that God has done for us; the Sunday school department reached out to us today, they were talking about Divine Resistance and one of the things they referred to was the story of the rich fool who said now I have so much, let me put down my barn, let me reconstruct and put everything there and what is left now is for me to jolificate – to enjoy myself, to press on, and the Bible says God spoke to him that you are a fool, that night your life will be required of you.
It is an attitude that sees oneself as the source of strength; those who don’t thank God see themselves and will say look, I am self-made; when you claim self-made then you are removing God’s factor, you see your prosperity, you see your breakthrough as a source of your strength, happiness and prosperity which of course run against the biblical truth and it is inconsistent with the spirit filled life.
The need to run with the right attitude to gratitude cannot be overemphasized because according to Zig Ziglar, he said our attitude determines our altitude; the altitude means the higher or the highest height that you can go, and this simply means that attitude is more important than the aptitude in determining how successful a person will be in life. Yes, you may be well talented, you may be well experienced, you may have expertise, you may have capabilities, but lack of the right attitude may be a problem for you, it might spread through for you. We’ve seen it in workplace, somebody who is well talented, who is rounded, experienced and everything, but when you don’t have the right attitude, the management will say yes, he is very talented but this guy doesn’t have the right attitude and he will be shown the way out. And that is the reason why I am appealing to every one of us today to connect with the right attitude in every spheres of our life and especially when it comes to appreciating the goodness of God.
Now in the text we just read, Psalm 100, we are given admonition to thank the Lord for who He is and for what He has done; we are taught very clearly how, when and to thank Him, and look at those Bible verses we highlighted, the things that God asks us to do that we need to consider, they are five in number:
Number one in verse one, it says make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands; number one point I want to make today is that God is worthy of praise, we are to express our gratitude to the Lord in an audible and public manner. A man of God said there is no need for us to be ashamed of what is gainful; if it is gainful, you make a joyful noise and the word noise simply means to break forth with or to bust, it says the imagery of someone who is full of an emotion that they are unable to contain themselves.
And for those of you who are sports people, you know when football is being played and your team is scoring, you’ll hear all kinds of noise. Time will not permit me I would have shared my experience of what happened to me in South Africa, it was God that saved me: I was watching football with the people of the other side and it was a reverend that gave me a tap at the back and dragged me from , he said you are in the midst of opposition you saw your team is winning, these people will beat you, and yesterday it happened and since morning, all my Arsenal fans, I’ve not been hearing from them since yesterday, Arsenal was beaten blue black yesterday, sorry to all my friends.
Noise is an expression of emotion; sometimes you make this noise even without knowing, is a product of enthusiasm and if you find out the meaning of enthuse, you will find out that the word enthuse comes from a Greek word which means to be possessed by God, how many of us are possessed by the spirit of Thanksgiving? By their fruits, (the Bible says) we shall know them.
Number two (verse two), it says serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing; number two is that He is worthy of service. Brethren, service to the Lord implies three things – humility, and I want to say this, this morning that you can’t serve someone unless you have a humble attitude, that point was also made in our Sunday school today, I want to beg all of you go and listen to that tape, it will bless you, there is no way you will listen to the Sunday School of today that you will not be blessed. Humility is an attitude of service.
Number three, fidelity, service implies faithfulness, otherwise it will be nothing other than betrayal, and 1st Corinthians 4:2 is my witness, it says now, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.
Number three (when you talk about service), activity, you can’t serve someone if you don’t do anything, you can’t serve anybody except you are doing something, you must do something to qualify for service; to be part of this service you left your homes and you are here, don’t make the mistake of thinking that service is confined to vocational pastoral duties and think oh, it is the pastors, yes some of us are pastors but do you know that we are not that ‘vocational pastors’? We don’t have to be paid to do the job that’s what I’m trying to say, it’s a calling that we accept with the right attitude.
Everyone who knows Him as Lord and Savior are ministers or servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I want to say this brethren that remember, God is more concerned with who we are than what we do because who we are will determine what you’ll do, so when God was giving the law to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 28: 47, he told them that they will be cursed if they did not serve the Lord with joyfulness and with gladness of heart for the abundance of all things, in other words, we are under necessity to serve God, not grudgingly but with gladness, with joy, for the abundance of things that He has done. It says because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things; in other words, our service to God must not be out of greed, grudges or grind.
We find out today that a lot are serving God just to serve out their greed; I listened to a pastor last night who was pronouncing a curse on another Pastor because he said that Pastor preached against something also, why are you trying to be more Catholic than the Pope? Why do you always like to fight for God? Let God do His own fighting. It amuses me when Jesus Christ was attacked and Peter took a sword and cut somebody, He rebuked him, but today you see men of God fighting over what is not, why are they trying to be more Catholic than the Pope if not for ulterior motive?
God must not be served out of greed, out of grudges or grind; a man who is greedy is destined to a life of unhappiness and why, it is simply because a greedy man is never satisfied, he will drive himself to a state of shame. Brethren, we can never do enough to say thank you to our Lord.
Number three in verse three, He alone is God, that’s what verse three says, it says know ye that the Lord he is God and I like that, it is He that made us and not we ourselves; it says we are His people and the sheep of His pasture, let the people of God in the house shout hallelujah! I said that so that God will know you are here and also you can acknowledge the fact you are a people of God, no one else deserves our service like He does, He is God, He must be first in our lives before our career, before any other thing else.
God must be first because He is motivation for service with gladness. This is how we can live with our attitude of gratitude because the Lord we serve is God.
Let me stop there, by the grace of God if you want to have a full blown of this message, you wait for the second service. So at this point, I want to implore you stay tuned as we link up with the national to hear from our esteemed father in the Lord, Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, God bless you, it is well with you.
