Thankfulness to God

G. Thomas Sharp • November 22, 2021

Thankfulness to God taken from Nov. 3, 2016 post

During Thanksgiving week, I began contemplating areas of my life and experience for which I am deeply thankful to God. I have identified dominant spheres in my life that fall into this category, and I want to share them with you, and especially thank God for them.

First and foremost, and the one reality without which, I could never hope to please God, is the continuous presence, the power and potential of the crimson stream of holy blood that Christ vicariously spilled at the cross. It speaks better things than the blood of Abel! It paid the horrible price for my salvation. It provides a sacred influence that colors all my fleshly attempts to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. It sustains me when I am without strength or resolve to remain engaged or to finish a formidable task. It undergirds all my frail efforts to achieve holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

These divine intrusions have poignantly formed a particular edge in my point of view. And it is because of these seasoned realities that I love to bask in the effulgent glow reflected from many of the old hymns. Songs like “There’s Power in the Blood,” or “I See a Crimson Stream of Blood,” or “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” and there are others, all of them causing me pause and a time of sacred rejoicing in the sacrificial provision that our Lord made for us all. None of this is available on “Black Friday”; it cannot be bought or sold!

The next most significant reality in my life is the comfort and spiritual counsel that I receive from my sweet wife, Diane. In fact, in a couple weeks we will celebrate 53 years of marriage [58 yrs in 2021!]. WOW, that sounds like a long time (and I guess it is), but it has all passed as a vapor in the night! Nevertheless, I thank God for this very special and dedicated woman, who was chosen by the Lord and given the task to come along side of me, and to face with me the challenges of life because of this unique ministry. She is my most faithful, determined, and dearest friend. In this prioritized list of exceptional people, I must thank God for my children—all grown, with families of their own—but they have been, and still are, frequent causes of thanksgiving. These four offspring are comprised of a daughter and three sons (and now grandchildren & great-grandchildren); most all are faithful disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Finally, I am thankful for the excitement and difficulty posed by the past years of ministry. It was during this time (from August 1989 until now) that God gave to me the penetrating and tearful invitation to develop the CTF ministry. I am overwhelmingly thankful to the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ for His faithful enablement…and I thank all our faithful partners for their prayer and finance (Isaiah 40:28-31).

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As many of you may know, I appreciate space. Not space around me, although the older I get the more I appreciate that as well. The things in the heavens fascinate me and have for a large chunk of my life. I love working with our telescopes, allowing people to see for themselves objects that the Lord made on the 4th day of history. When I was younger I followed our Space Shuttle program, and over the years I have had the opportunity to see a couple of those shuttles around the country. Now it is great to see all the renewed interest in exploring the heavenly creation. I know most of it is for evolutionary reasons, yet over and over again something is discovered that points to the trustworthiness of God’s Word. After all, we are to study His creation as Genesis 1:28 states. On a recent trip to El Paso, it occurred to me that Blue Origin’s launch facility is in west Texas somewhere. After some quick searching I realized we were within an hour and half of it, and there was a rescheduled launch window during the time of our meeting. So, with some persuading of my colleagues, we arose early one morning to make the launch. We made it with just minutes to spare. It was spectacular! The whole launch to just beyond the Karman Line (space boundary, 62 miles/100km) and return of the rocket and capsule is about ten minutes total. While Blue Origin is best known for its New Shepherd rocket that carries paying customers to space and back with the biggest windows ever in a capsule, this NS-29 launch was purely experimental with a payload of instruments to measure simulated lunar gravity. Even though it was not a Saturn V, Space Shuttle, Starship or Falcon launch, it was great to hear and feel a launch for the first time, from blast off to the sonic boom return. It has piqued my desire to see a bigger launch now. As I began to reflect on what I experienced, the Lord reminded me of His design. Earth, our home planet, is so well designed for life. There is literally nowhere in all the universe like it. Yet He gave us the ability to discover creation beyond it. The only reason we can launch rockets and do space exploration is because He set it up in an orderly way. Physics works because He established it to work in a predictable fashion. As much as we may never understand everything in the universe from our position here, it works on an ordered reality that is reinforced by God’s Word. This is what drove Sir Isaac Newton in his understanding of physics. He wrote, “The motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone but were by an intelligent Agent.” Evolutionists may come up with theories about the origin of things in the heavens, but over and over again they are being shown through experimentation and observation to be wrong. The Lord set the order of everything in the beginning and sustains it by His Word (Hebrews 1:3). So as you look to the heavens tonight, gaze into the depths of space and observe the different facets the Lord placed up there for our eyes (Genesis 1:17). Peer through a telescope at the lesser light of the moon with marvel and anticipation of further human study in the coming years. Check out the amazing observations being made by the James Webb telescope from deep in space. All of these place a perspective of how awesome our Creator is and how much we depend on Him. Our design becomes more and more obvious with every discovery, yet in our universe we appear so minuscule and fragile. Thanks be to God that His infinite focus has, is and always will be here on us! Blessings.
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