Telescopes or Microscopes - Pt 3

I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving. (Psalm 69:30 ESV).

The Hubble Space Telescope has given us some of the most incredible pictures of deep space. I have chosen one image, taken from the NASA archives showing the Milky Way. According to the scientists, the Milky Way is “a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years. It is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars and more than 100 billion planets.” Now, I’m certainly not a scientist, but two things are certain. It is HUGE; and, it is merely a small part of the universe which God has created and now sustains. God is GREAT! We must magnify that greatness to cause God to appear as great as he really is? Our reading tells us that when we give thanks to him from our hearts, God is magnified. Gratitude glorifies God. The reason for this truth is simply that givers are more glorious than receivers. When we thank God, we acknowledge and display that he is the giver; he is the benefactor. We pay him a high compliment. Saying "thank you" is a compliment; it magnifies people. But when you are angry at somebody, you don’t pay them a compliment; you want to belittle them not magnify them; you hate to think of them as your benefactor. Therefore, when gratitude springs up in the human heart toward God, he is magnified as the wealthy source of our blessing. He is acknowledged as giver and benefactor and therefore as glorious. But when gratitude does not spring up in our hearts at God's great goodness to us, it probably means that we don't want to pay him a compliment; we don't want to magnify him as our benefactor. And there is a very good reason that human beings by nature do not want to magnify God with thanksgiving or glorify him as their benefactor. The reason is that it detracts from their own glory, and all people by nature love their own glory more than the glory of God. There are only two groups of people in the world whose differences from each other are of any eternal significance: those who love to magnify God and those who love to magnify themselves. Genuine gratitude admits that we are beneficiaries of an unearned bequest; we admit Jesus paid the debt we could never pay and died the death we deserved. Natural man hates to think of himself in these terms. They rob him of all his glory by giving it all to God. Therefore, while a man loves his own glory, and prizes his self-sufficiency, and hates to think of himself as sin-sick and helpless, he will never feel any genuine gratitude to the true God and so will never magnify God, but only himself. Practice your thanksgiving. Don’t just celebrate it.