There was some research done. The University of Michigan, they started this project back in 1991. They’re still doing it where they go and they interview teenagers. So eighth graders, 10th graders, and 12th graders. And here’s the chart. It doesn’t take much to look at the chart and figure out what’s going on that it’s, it’s, the chart really is representing depressive symptoms. So you can see back in 1991, pretty low, and now all of a sudden, pH it skyrocketed. There’s a book by Dr. Jean Twinge, and she really unpacks the data from some of this research and says, okay, well why that the University of Michigan, when they started this back in 1991, they would ask three different questions to eighth graders, to 10th graders, to 12th grad graders. They would ask, is this true or false? True or false, I can’t do anything.

Right? And then back in 1991, only about 26% of teens would say, that’s true. I can’t do anything, right? I said, true or false, my life is not useful. Only about 26 per 26% of teens in 1991 said, true, true or false, I do not enjoy life. Only about 23% of teens back in 1991, which say that is true. Now you see with those same three questions asking over and over and over again with multiple generations, how all of a sudden it has just skyrocketed. Now, when you look at that, you might look at that and say, well, that’s because of Covid. But interestingly, this data was from January and February of 2020. That’s pre covid data. So before Covid, they would ask these same three questions, I can’t do anything. Right? And now the teens, 49.5% would say, yes, I can’t do anything. Right?

44.2% would say, my life is not useful. 48.9% would say, I do not enjoy life. Now, naturally when you look at that, you say, why? What’s happened? For about the last 10 years, people have said, well, social media and cell phones are bad for teens. But we didn’t have the data to prove it. So it was the speculation, well, I think it might be bad for teens. And now we have data that says, well, no, a hundred percent we are sure that it is in fact causing mental harm to teens. But, but if you take a step further back than that and say, but why? What is it about social media? What is it about a cell phone that causes harm? In her book, she unpacks a few different things. One of those things is that the way that teens interact, how they spend their time looks very different now than it did in 1991.

That teens spend far less time in face-to-face community, far more time on screens and less time sleeping. Oftentimes because of the screens, teens sit on their phone in bed before they go to sleep, which means that they don’t sleep very well. She talks about how it’s really not just about depression, it’s about a way that we operate and view life. It’s a mental condition of how we process the world around us. And now to put it into context think about this, that if they would do the same study about teens from when baby boomers were teens, that they would’ve scored from an overall mental health and satisfaction significantly higher than teens today. But objectively, teens today have a far greater life than historically. What, what has been, I mean, think back not that long ago during Vietnam that a teen coming outta high school could have been drafted to go to war, and yet the data would’ve said that they had a overall healthier mental wellbeing than teenagers.

Right? Now, that doesn’t seem to make sense. Objectively, teenagers right now have a pretty good life. You look at the United States of America where we live compared to all of human history and life’s great, and we’ve got things like a refrigerator. That means that you’ve got food that can stay in there for days and weeks, and for probably some people in the room months and months longer than it should. That that when we get hot in our houses, we just turn on an air conditioning, we get cold in our houses, we turn on a heater, we have endless entertainment at our fingertips. I mean a an almost infinite amount. And yet we’re less happy than we’ve ever been when she peels back the, the layers as to why she would ultimately point to this one thing. And that is comparison. See, here’s what social media does.

Most of us, we see two different groups on social media. You see people that are your friends or people that at some point were your friends or people that at some point you feel guilty into following or becoming friends with on social media. Some of ’em you haven’t seen in 27 years, but they’re your friend on social media and they post the best parts of their life. And you see that. But then the other part of social media that we see the most followed people on social media are who their celebrities and what do they post about? They post about their house and their other house and that vacation house there and that vacation house there, and their private jet and their cars. And so, so here’s what we have a generation growing up with that teens that are unhappy with their own lives because they’re envious of someone else’s.

They’re staring all day long at the wealth, the luxury, the affluence, the celebrity of other people. And they’re saying, I want that. And it’s killing them. If you’ve got a Bible, turn with me to Luke chapter 17. Luke chapter 17. I encourage you to bring a Bible flip in a Bible. There’s a lot of value in that. If you don’t have one turn with me in the app or you can fall along on the screen. We’re gonna be Luke chapter 17. We’ll start in verse 11. It’s a common story, probably a story you’ve heard before. But the way that we teach it in kids’ ministry, although true tends to not quite get to the depth of what we can unpack in the story. I say it’s a story. It is a story, but it is true. This is something that actually happened. It’s not a parable.

This is something that Jesus does. It says, Luke chapter 17, Cerner, verse 11, on the way to Jerusalem, he, Jesus was passing along between Samaria and Galilee, and as he entered a village, he was met by 10 lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master have mercy on us. Now, pause for a second. ’cause Leprosy is not something that, that we have in the United States of America. It still exists in parts of the world. But there are cures for it, specifically a a few different types of antibiotics that they can give in heal leprosy. But in the first century, that was not the case. Leprosy was a, a terrible, terrible disease. That was a life sentence. And what would happen when you had leprosy is you would get lesions and cuts and just bruising all over your body.

You also couldn’t feel pain. So if you had your hand and you accidentally put your hand over an open flame, it would start to burn, but you would not feel it, that that would cause some of the issues that they had over their body. That they’d, they’d hit something and they’d start bleeding and they’d be unaware of the fact that, that they had hurt themselves. So lepers had these physical issues, but more significantly oftentimes in the physical issues were the social issues. That leprosy was highly contagious. So they were not allowed to go around anyone. They had to exist in a leper colony outside of town. If a family member got leprosy, you sent them away outside your family to a lepro colony in a different place most of the time, never seen them again for the rest of their life. That in the Old Testament, when someone is unclean, they had to announce that they were unclean.

So someone with leprosy was walking down a road and someone else was approaching them. They, by law would have to cry out unclean, unclean, unclean, pretty awkward social starter, if you know what I mean. <Laugh> immediately that person’s swerving away from you. You’re, you’re, you’re walking along the road on opposite sides because someone doesn’t want to come close to you. So you have these lepers that live in their separate leper colony, and they’ve heard about this guy Jesus, and they’ve probably heard that he’s like a prophet and that he is an amazing teacher. But the thing that sticks out to them is that he’s performed miracles that over and over again, that people have been healed by this person, Jesus. And so they line up wanting to have a conversation, wanting to hear from Jesus one thing, to, to see Jesus, one thing that maybe hope beyond hope, that Jesus could heal them.

And so they cry out, Jesus, master have mercy on us. Now notice they’ve never even met Jesus, but they’re so desperate that they’re willing to not just cry out to Jesus, but call out to him as master Jesus. Master have mercy on us. When he saw them, he said to them, go and show yourselves to the priests. It’s funny, Jesus heals people in all kinds of different ways in the New Testament that sometimes he just touches a person and sometimes he just says a word and sometimes he spits in the ground and makes mud and, and uses it. Like with the blind man puts it over his eyes and becomes whole again with them. He gives them a job. He says, I want you to go to the priest. Now, the priest was the only person that could declare someone to be clean if they were unclean.

There were a lot of things in the Old Testament that could make someone unclean. And so Jesus says, I want you to go towards the priest. And so responding to that, they start making their way. And what happens next is this. It says, and as they went, they were cleansed. Now there, there’s some parts of the story that we don’t fully understand exactly what’s going on. So we know that they were with Jesus. He tells them to go to the priest. It happens before they get to the priest. ’cause It says as they went, we don’t know how far away the priests were. We don’t know whether this was a 10 mile thing or, or a 200 yard thing, but somewhere between point A Jesus and point B, the priest, they’re healed. They look down and all the, the lesions that are on their arms, they are gone.

I says Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at Jesus’s feet, giving him thanks. Now, he was a Samaritan. That’s, that’s important. We will explain that in a second. Then Jesus answered, we’re not 10 cleansed. Where are the nine? Was No one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you. Well, I I think a lot of times when we look at this story, our, our tendency is to say, well, it’s a story about gratitude. One has gratitude. Nine, do not one gives thanks to Jesus. Nine, do not. But the story really has a whole lot more when you start, start unpacking the layers to it. That if you just ask yourself this question about the nine do you think the nine were thankful to be healed?

I, I would submit that the answer is yes. I mean, if you caught one of the nine and they’re walking along their merry way, maybe they’re still walking to the priest and they looked down and they’re healed, and you said, are you thankful to be healed? I’m sure that all nine would say yes. I’m sure there’s not one that says, well, maybe. I’m not sure. No, I’m ungrateful. But what we miss is that they have this turning point. They have this moment where they’re in between Jesus and the priest where they have to make a decision. You see, they physically had been healed, but socially they, they, they still were ostracized socially. Only the priests could declare them clean. And so they’re in between the priest and Jesus and they say, okay, I need to go finish the healing. I need the priest to declare me whole clean.

Therefore I can be in community with other people. And so probably it’s not a question of were they thankful or not, probably really the question is, where were they going to get their validation? And they believe that my next step in getting validated really comes from the priest. But the one he turns back and he does something different. Instead of going on to the priest, he turns around, turns back, runs to Jesus. And he doesn’t just say thank you to Jesus. It tells us he throws himself at his feet. And it tells us he’s worshiping Jesus. He’s grateful for what Jesus had done. So, so here’s a big question. What was unique about the one who returned? There’s a few things that were unique. One was the fact that he was a Samaritan. We don’t know exactly what the ratio or the combination was but we know based off of what Jesus says, that at least some, if not most of the nine were Jews.

Now we think of Christianity, we think of, of God’s kingdom as for everybody. But in the first century, they wouldn’t have thought of it that way, that Jesus was a Jew. Primarily all of his ministry was to the Jewish people. And, and Jesus was pushing back against something that they just expected to be true. They thought salvation was coming for Jews and Jews alone. And, and Jesus was bringing salvation for the Jews. But Jesus was bringing salvation in his kingdom for all people. And so it’s this Samaritan that comes back. It’s the Samaritan who responds with faith that the Samaritans and the Jews did not like each other. But interestingly, it says that Jesus was walking a road that was in between Galilee and Samaria. And so probably you have these lepers that their families have cast them out. And the only thing that you have in common and when you are a leper is someone else that has leprosy. Like you have more in common at that point than anybody. You’re both ostracized. You’re both kicked out. You’re both part of this leper colony. And so you had all of a sudden Jews and Samaritans hanging out together. And it was only the Samaritan that puts the faith into Jesus to turn back and go and seek him and throw himself down and worship and praise him. And so Jesus is saying probably the thing that was the most surprising for the Jews that were paying attention more so

Than Jesus healing a leper, was the fact that Jesus was bringing salvation to a Samaritan. But what was unique about the Samaritan is when you really dive in and unpack it, is the Samaritan understood the source of his healing. You see the one who returned it. It wasn’t just that he was thankful, although he was thankful. He was thankful for being healed. But he was also grateful to the one responsible for his healing. I’m sure the other nine that were thankful, they just didn’t trace it back to say, I’m gonna show gratitude to the one who caused my healing. You see, gratitude is different than just being thankful that gratitude is understanding the source of the good things in our lives. That when we take communion, there’s three different terms that we use for communion depending upon the church that you grew up in, depending upon the context.

We use the word communion. We use the word Lord supper and we use the word Eucharist. All of those mean the same thing. But sometimes people get kinda freaked out by that word, Eucharist. ’cause It sounds super churchy. A Eucharist is a Greek word from the New Testament that means thanksgiving. But if you unpack that word, Eucharist, the heart of the word Eucharist is the word carris, which means grace. So this New Testament understanding of thanksgiving of gratitude is grace. It’s understanding that what I have I do not deserve. It’s understanding that to show gratitude, I need to look back and find the source of where the good things in my life have come from. And that’s a hard thing to do. We tend to show gratitude in certain moments at certain places, but rarely do we live a lifestyle that exhibits gratitude. A GK Chesterton wrote this about it.

He said, you say grace before meals, alright? But I say grace before the concert and the opera and grace before the play and the pantomime and grace. Before I open a book and grace before sketching and painting and swimming and fencing and boxing and walking and playing and dancing and grace before I dip the pen and the ink, we tend to say a prayer of blessing or a prayer of grace before meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner may. Maybe your family does that, maybe your family doesn’t. It’s always funny to me when we bless food. It’s not really a scriptural thing. I mean it is sort of, we see Jesus bless food when he feeds the 5,000. Of course, when he blesses the food, it multiplies. I’ve never prayed for the food and said, God bless his food, and I open my eyes and po it’s everywhere.

Like, look at that never happened for me. Maybe, maybe it has for you, but typically that that’s really not what we’re doing. When we’re blessing food or praying for food, typically we do it just because culturally we feel like we’re supposed to. Maybe you grew up in a family that you prayed and so therefore your family prays. And that’s a wonderful thing. But if you look at the New Testament idea of giving things, giving grace, it’s really more than just about food. It’s about life. Paul says that we should pray continuously. He says we should give thanks in all circumstances. So it’s this idea of just how GK Chesterton, he describes it. That’s how we should live. That everything around us is God, thank you and God, every breath, every blink of my eyeballs, every step that I take, everything is your gift to me.

And so I’m just going to exude grace to God the source of my life. Everything I have is only there because he allows. When I got here three years ago, I shared a story that I’m gonna share again. It’s from when I was a youth pastor. I was a youth pastor and a children’s pastor when I was in college. So I was a college student full-time. And then I would run a youth ministry on Wednesday nights and on Sunday morning I would run kids’ church. But about once a month, some, some depending upon the year, sometimes once a quarter, we would do a kids’ sermon in big church. So I would go over to big church and I would tend to get up and we would call the kids from the service down to the front stage. And this one particular Sunday, it was approaching Thanksgiving and I had this idea for a brilliant illustration.

When you’re talking with kids, you need some type of an object lesson, some type of illustration, something to help drive the point home. And so it was leading up to Thanksgiving and I said, oh, okay, epiphany moment. I’ve got it. So I called down, I was about 50 to 75 kids ranging at age from kindergarten, so about five or six years old all the way up to fifth graders. And they just spread out along the stairs. And at my college apartment, I had this cup that was full of quarters. It was because I had Dr. Pepper in my refrigerator and all my roommates would steal those Dr. Peppers. And so I took a 44 ounce styrofoam cup and I wrote one Dr. Pepper equal one quarter. And so slowly over the course of a full year, a few years, that just filled up with more and more and more quarters.

So I had this cup. And so I took this cup in front of the 57 5 kids and I grabbed out one quarter. I said, how many of you would like a quarter? And I can just tell you that every kid wants a quarter, probably every adult in the room. Like you walk by a penny, you’re like, no thanks. But if you walk by a quarter, there’s something about a quarter that feels valuable enough to pick it up. And so with smiles on their faces, they all raise their hand. So I start tossing out quarters to every single kid, about 15 to 75 kids all get a quarter and they’re looking at their quarter. And I say, are you thankful for the quarter that you have? And all of ’em with big smiles say, yeah, we’re thankful. And then I asked this question, I said, did you do anything to deserve that quarter? I said, no, that is just a gift from me out of the goodness of my heart. And I want you to remember right now how thankful you are for that quarter. And then I pulled three random kids up on stage and to the first kid, I pulled out a $1 bill and I gave that dollar bill to the first kid. And

If they were excited about the quarter, they’re really excited about that dollar, but probably equally excited about the dollar as they are about the fact that no other child has a dollar. And so they’re looking at their di dollar and they’re smiling and they’re looking at the other kids and they’re pointing to their dollar. And now there’s a little bit of grumbling and complaining that starts to come from the quarter section because they’re looking at their quarter and they’re looking at their dollar and they start to say this phrase, well, that’s not fair. A phrase often said by children, often said by adults as well, but these kids were saying, that’s not fair. And then I pulled out a $5 bill and I handed it to the second child that I had brought up on stage. And now this child was just ecstatic. They’re looking at their $5 bill and they went from a quarter to $5 and woo, they they’re pumped.

And now the child with the $1 bill is not very excited because while a moment ago he had the most, he doesn’t anymore. And so he’s looking at that $5 bill and he’s a little bit disappointed. And this group right here, lemme tell you, they’re not excited at all. I’m starting to see a tear form and with this one little girl’s face right there, but I’m not done yet. I take out a $20 bill and I hand it to the third child. And when I hand that $20 bill to the third child, I ask the child, are you thankful for the $20 bill? And they had the biggest smile on their face, partly because there was no fourth child. So they knew they won <laugh>, they were gonna be the richest child that left that day. And they said, oh yeah. And I said, did you do anything to deserve the $20?

They said, no. I said, you just received that out of the goodness of my heart. And I was about that time that the little girl with the $5 bill crumples it up and puts it into her pocket. She’s no longer very excited. The kid with the $1 bill, he, he, he’s just kinda looking at it and he’s looking at that. He’s just shellshock. He’s not sure what to think. But this group down here, I never understood what the biblical term, the gnashing of teeth was until that moment in my life. This group was not happy. They were not excited, they were not smiling. Those phrases, if it’s not fair, there’s real genuine tears that started streaming down kids’ faces. And then this, this same little girl, she’s about six years old, she, she was maybe four feet from me. She stands up, she takes her quarter and she says this phrase, she says, I never wanted your quarter anyway.

And she takes her quarter and she pegs it at me, and it hits me right here in the chest. And it only takes one kid to start a movement because the other 50 to 75 kids, they get that same idea. And they decide, yeah, I don’t want your quarter. And so all of a sudden, I’m being pelted by 50 to 75 quarters coming at me from all different directions. There is chaos, there’s crying, there is yelling. Kids are making their way back to their parents. Parents are trying to console their kid. There’s only two children that were happy that day. One was the kid that had the $20 bill. They were doing great. And the other was this little girl who started going around and picking up all the

Quarters. <Laugh>. I don’t know what happened to her, but I bet she’s an entrepreneur. She definitely made the most out of the circumstance. <Laugh> illustration failed terribly and what I was trying to accomplish. And yet it works perfectly in illustrating the point. So often in life, we’ve got a quarter, but instead of being grateful for our quarter, we’re focused on somebody else’s dollar or their $5 or their $20. You see, the kids that were unhappy had nothing to do with what they had. It had everything to do with what they didn’t have. And so here’s my question for myself, for you today. It it’s just simply this, am I grateful for my quarter? Are you grateful for what you have in life? Are you grateful for what God has given you? And a culture that has become so obsessed, especially through social media and looking at all the things that we don’t have?

Can you look at your life and be grateful for today? Here’s what I learned a really long time ago. If you can’t be grateful today and be happy with where you are and with what you have, you will never be happy tomorrow. You don’t grow into gratitude. Getting more things doesn’t make us more grateful. That’s just not how life works. There will always be somebody that has more. There will always be someone who is better. There is always going to be someone that has something that you do not have. And you can live your whole life focusing on things that you wish you did have instead of recognizing and being grateful for what God has given us.

Author Henry Nowan, he describes it like this. He says, the choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort, but each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious. Because every gift I acknowledge reveals another and another until finally, even the most normal, obvious and seemingly mundane event or encounter proves to be filled with grace. Grace, something I don’t deserve, that God has allowed me to have every breath, every moment, every week. My life is filled with grace from God. And Psalm chapter 28, verse seven, it’s a Psalm of David, and as often is the case in the Psalms of David, he’s in a bad moment in life. He’s surrounded by enemies and he declares, the Lord is my strength and my shield in him. My heart trusts and I’m helped my heart exults. And with my P song, I give thanks to him that he’s surrounded by challenging circumstances.

And yet, in the midst of those circumstances, what does he do? He gives thanks. He shows gratitude. And now pause for a second. You say, okay, wait a second. In, in a sermon series that’s talking about generosity. Why are we talking about gratitude? And it’s because the two are so tightly linked together. You see, in my experience, it is impossible to be generous and less. It’s impossible to be generous. If we are not first grateful, they go hand in hand together. I, I can’t be generous. I can’t give to other people. I can’t give to something if I don’t feel like I have enough. I can’t give to others if, if I’m so focused on catching up to this person or that person. No. Generosity starts with a heart of gratitude that says, God, you have so richly blessed me. Everything that I have is a gift from you.

And so I’m going to give it back to the heart of generosity. Tim Mackey, who is the, the guy behind the Bible project, he, he puts it like this. Generosity is ultimately an act of trust. And those three things go so hand in hand with each other, gratitude, generosity, and trust. If I’m gonna have gratitude in my life, it’s ultimately about trusting God. I God, I am trusting that all that I have is from you and a gift from you, and I’m trusting you for tomorrow. And if I’m gonna be generous, it’s because I’m trusting that God has provided enough and will continue to provide enough. Those three things are so linked, and yet I would argue that gratitude today is harder than it has ever been. And the research behind our teens would say that’s the reason that they are so unhappy. Because we can go our whole life thinking about what we don’t have instead of changing that posture and saying, Jesus, you died from me on the cross.

My life is bought with a price from you that everything I have is from you, is for you. And it’s all through your grace. Eucharist, Thanksgiving, grace, a gift from God. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I just pray that we would be a church that is generous. And in order to be a church that is generous, we first need to be individuals that have such strong gratitude that we can understand this source of the good things in our life. Now, the story of the lepers nine kept on going their merry way. And they might have gotten that earthly validation. They might have had a priest declare them clean, but they missed out on the salvation that the one received when the one turned back and threw himself at your feet and gave you praise. And you said that his faith had made him whole. Lord, help us to be a church that doesn’t seek out our validation in the world around us, but instead to throw ourself at your feet, the source of all good things in our life, to give you praise, give you our faith. It’s the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.