This week we are looking at the difference between being sad and being ungrateful. I am also talking to the kids about why Jesus was all He had to be and how anything less wouldn’t have been enough to save us.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Even though we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving here in America, this is a time of year where people get weird about being unthankful. Oh sure, we are thankful for the food and the pie and the potatoes and the pie and the bread and the pie and the stuffing and the pie—I like pie. But people are also focused a lot on what they don’t have and what they want and they make lists and check them twice and worry about what they will and will not get as far as presents go—and that is a huge problem. You see, we will never have enough if we aren’t already happy with everything we have. We will always be miserable if we are thinking about all the stuff we don’t have or that our stuff should be even better. And especially if other people have that stuff we want. There will always be people with things we don’t have and will never have. And not everything can be bought with money.
It’s the things that can’t be bought that we often want the most—friendship, good health, and a happy family life. Those are the sorts of things we can be the most envious about and the saddest when people around us have those things and we don’t. I haven’t ever been able to have a baby and it still hurts me whenever a friend tells me she is going to have another baby. So, before I talk about thankfulness and Dayenu (the Hebrew word for “it would have been enough”), I want to talk about the difference between being ungrateful and being sad. You see, we can be thankful for so much good in our lives but that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to be sad over not having what we need or want. If your best friend moved away or someone you love died or maybe a pet ran away, there isn’t any reason to be grateful for that or happy. You are going to be sad and that isn’t wrong. Jesus was often sad, like when his friend Lazarus died. Jesus was sad and so were Lazarus’s sisters. Jesus even cried. No one said to Jesus, “You should be grateful that you still have so many friends who are alive,” or “at least he is in a better place,” or “you should be happy that he isn’t hurting anymore.” Nope. They said something very different, “Look at how much He loves him!”
Even if we are sad, sometimes it is because we are grateful. If we love someone and they are gone, we are crying because we miss them. We are thankful that we had them in our lives. We don’t have to be thankful that they are gone, that would be weird. We’d have to pretend and that’s just ridiculous. God gave us sadness as an emotion because it is good to be sad when something bad happens. Being sad can often mean that what we used to have was awesome and we are sorry it is gone. Being ungrateful is not about being sad. Being ungrateful means that we don’t appreciate what we already have. For example, if you have a bike and it gets you where you need to go but you spend all of your time complaining that it isn’t good enough, making the people who gave you the bike feel bad, that’s being unthankful. If people are always being nice to you and you aren’t nice to them in return, it’s because you don’t appreciate their kindness. When someone goes to a lot of trouble to do something nice for you and all you can think about is that it isn’t good enough, that’s being ungrateful.
And I totally get it because when we are young it can be really hard to be happy about what we have when we see so much stuff out there that we don’t have, right? This Friday, people in the stores are gonna go crazy trying to get stuff that they don’t really need and some of them will even hurt themselves and other people just trying to get stuff that they really, really want but that no one really needs. And it’s often just a replacement for stuff they already have but it is newer and the old ones will get thrown away. Being grateful is something we have to learn a little bit at a time. Being grateful means that we are glad to have food but being ungrateful means that we won’t eat it because we want something better. And we want something better because we think we deserve something better. Being ungrateful is always, in some way, because we think we deserve better and you know what? Sometimes we do deserve better than what is happening to us but we have to be careful. If you and your brother or sister are sitting at the same table and Aunt Tessie gives you a piece of moldy bread and she gives your sibling a fancy three course meal complete with dessert, I am not telling you to be grateful for that because that is messed up and she is obviously playing favorites and that hurts. But if moldy bread is all she has to eat and she shares it with you, you should definitely be thankful. Hopefully this will never happen to you.
In our normal, everyday lives, we have many things to be thankful for and things to be sad about. Life isn’t always fair or easy or fun but things can usually always be a lot worse. It is okay to be sad and unhappy about the things that are bad—it doesn’t make you a bad person. It is not okay to be the type of person who isn’t ever happy because nothing is ever good enough for them. One of my favorite thankfulness lessons comes from the Passover meal in the spring here in America but in the fall if you live someplace like Australia.
Passover is all about remembering how God rescued the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Actually, the entire Bible is about freeing people from slavery, did you know that? People in the Bible are usually in some sort of trouble that God has to get them out of. Usually it works but sometimes it doesn’t. Cain, for example, was angry enough to kill his brother but God tried to rescue him from his anger before it got to that point. Hagar was a slave but God made sure that she was set free. Joseph was a slave, and in jail, but God is going to set him free, in style, in future lessons. The entire book of Judges is about how the people kept getting themselves into terrible messes by not listening to God and how He kept sending people to save them like Gideon, Samson, and Deborah. Ruth and Naomi were suffering and hungry but God sent them a kinsman redeemer named Boaz. King Saul was hunting for David to kill him, for years, but God kept saving him. Even Jesus had to escape when the people from his own home town wanted to push him off a cliff. The book of Acts is full of amazing rescues—especially from jails! Of course, the most amazing rescue of all is when Jesus came alive again after dying. And when that happened, God was telling all of us that if we are loyal to Jesus as our King, we will be rescued too and won’t stay dead. We have a lot to be grateful for, for sure!
One of the biggest reasons we decide to believe Jesus is gratitude. We are thankful that He did everything He did and suffered everything He suffered so that we would be rescued. Nobody is happy that he had to be hurt so badly to rescue us, but we are thankful that He was willing to go through that to fix our mess. We have so much to be thankful for because of Jesus and so I want to talk about Dayenu and Passover so we can see what it is like to learn how to be more and more grateful for what He did for us. First, let’s look at the Dayenu song in English. Actually, it’s the Miss Tyler Version because I made it easier to understand. Maybe you can say Dayenu with me after every line to show God how much we appreciate everything He did to set His people free.
If He had taken us out of Egypt without judging the Egyptians for holding us as slaves; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had judged the Egyptian people but had left their gods alone; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had judged their gods but left their firstborn sons alone; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had killed their firstborn sons but didn’t give us all their treasure; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had given us their treasure but didn’t make a path through the sea for us to walk on; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had made a path through the sea but it was still muddy to walk on; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had taken us through on a dry path but hadn’t destroyed the Egyptian army; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He destroyed the Egyptian army but didn’t give us food and water in the wilderness for forty years; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had given us everything we needed in the wilderness for forty years but didn’t give us the miracle manna; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had fed us the manna but didn’t give us the Sabbath to rest on; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had given us the Sabbath to rest on but didn’t bring us to Mount Sinai; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had brought us close to Mount Sinai but didn’t give us His instructions on how to love Him and each other; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had given us His commandments but never brought us into the land of Israel; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu! If He had brought us into the land of Israel but didn’t give us the Temple; [it would have been] enough for us. Dayenu!
I love the Dayenu song because it doesn’t just focus on being rescued—which is absolutely epic! The Dayenu starts at the beginning and talks about every little thing God did to make Pharaoh give up his slaves. Slaves were like electricity in the ancient world. The work I do around the house now is so easy! I have a dishwasher and a washing machine for the clothes and an electric oven and a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner and all that so my work can be done very quickly. In fact, I bet I can get more stuff done in an hour than my grandmother used to be able to get done all day. Most people in the ancient world didn’t own slaves but the people who did got a lot more done than the people who didn’t. And for some of them, it meant they didn’t have to do anything themselves. People became slaves for a lot of different reasons in the ancient world. Some were born to parents who were already enslaved. Others might be sold into slavery by poor parents. During wars, a great many people were captured and forced to live as slaves. Some people even sold themselves into slavery if they didn’t have the money to pay their bills. If you remember back in chapter fourteen, Lot and his family were also taken as slaves by the four kings. I suppose it is safest to say that if you became a slave, something had gone terribly wrong because humans were created to be God’s images and not so that they could be used like farm animals to get things done. We aren’t supposed to do anything to anyone that we wouldn’t want done to us, which means that we can’t make other people into slaves. It’s one thing to make an ox pull a plow on a farm but to treat a human like that is hateful and insulting to God who made all people equal.
That’s how Pharaoh was treating the children of Israel—he used them to build his storage cities and to make bricks. They were slaves because someone more powerful than they were decided that they should be. They never got any days off from work. They didn’t get to choose the jobs they wanted. They couldn’t go where they wanted or do what they wanted. And whoever wanted to hurt them was allowed to, as long as the Pharaoh said they could. They didn’t get sick days or vacations. They had to work hard all day long making bricks from mud and straw which was heavy and dirty work. They didn’t have any gloves so their hands were all dried out and cut up and their backs hurt all the time. He even killed their babies just because he could. And they cried out to God and He heard them and remembered them. Remembering doesn’t mean He forgot about them but that He knew it was time to do something that the world wouldn’t ever forget. It was something that would show the world how God feels about bullies. The Dayenu song is all about how God helped people who couldn’t do anything to help themselves and how grateful we should all be about how God rescued people who were hurting when He didn’t have to do anything at all. It’s amazing that the God who created the universe and everything in it took the time to help out people who were the least of the least whom nobody else cared about. That’s amazing! Of course, the problem was that they started being ungrateful right away and made God really angry. We are happy and grateful now that it happened but they got pretty nitpicky about it at the time.
And that wasn’t the last time God rescued people whom no one else cared about. Over and over again in the Bible, God helped the people who were trapped in impossible situations. Sometimes, God even went against His own people when they were doing wrong to others like when King Saul murdered the Gibeonites. We can all be so thankful that God listens when people are crying. As a matter of fact, people were crying out to God from the very beginning because life outside the Garden was so difficult. By about two thousand years ago, the Jewish people had been crying out to God to send someone to save them for a very long time. They were waiting for someone they called the Messiah. Some people believed that the Messiah would be a fighting man, and others thought he might be a religious leader. But the people who believed he was coming knew that he would be specially sent by God to make things right again because they had been bad for a long time. Cruel people were in charge of the world and there needed to be a change.
That’s when God decided to do something amazing and unexpected. He decided to give the world something that would make people all over the world happy and grateful. He finally delivered on His promise to Eve and Abraham by sending His Son as a baby into a poor family, and that baby grew up to be a man who worked miracles and healed people and told everyone He saw about the Kingdom of Heaven taking over earth and all things being made new and right again. Powerful people hated Him and they had Him killed, but once He was dead He was in the perfect position to defeat Satan and all of the evil powers behind the scenes. Just like God freed the slaves from Egypt, Jesus’s job was to free us from all the evil that wants us dead and messed up. Our God has always been in the business of freeing slaves and people who are hurting. But you know what? Even if He hadn’t done that, everything else He did would be Dayenu, enough! So, let’s rewrite the Dayenu to talk about Jesus!
I am going to tell you guys a secret. You are going to hear this a whole lot from grownups when you get older. They are going to tell you that Jesus wasn’t really the Son of God, that He didn’t come from God at all and was just a regular guy. They will tell you, “Oh well, he was just a really wise man and a great teacher and we really should listen to him because he had a lot of amazing things to say but there wasn’t anything different about him from us. He got people really excited and so they imagined that he did miracles but he never really said any of that crazy god stuff about himself. I mean, that stuff just couldn’t be true because it doesn’t make any sense at all.” But, if any of that is true, what they think, then God never kept His promises to Abraham. I can’t think of anything more horrible than that. God said that the nations would be blessed by Abraham’s seed, which meant a child that would be descended from Abraham. But it couldn’t be Isaac, or Jacob or any of Jacob’s kids because none of them did that. It wasn’t Moses or King David. They all did some amazing things but they never blessed all the nations. Only Jesus did that because the enemy of the nations of the world since the beginning has been death, because we die and get sick and suffer from pain, and sin, because we hurt each other with the selfish and mean things we do; we hurt others and others hurt us. And mostly, we don’t even think about it being any sort of a problem because we naturally think about ourselves and staying alive and what we need and what we want and all of that.
If Jesus was just a regular man, it wouldn’t have been enough. We needed God Himself to be with us to show us the perfect way—not just any human being because all humans get things wrong. We need God to follow and not just a person, no matter how well behaved they are. If Jesus was born into a rich and powerful family, it wouldn’t have been enough because then it would look like God thinks the way we do and would play favorites with the people who already have everything they need. If Jesus’s mom and dad had him the normal way, it wouldn’t have been enough because we needed to see the sign of a seventh miracle baby in the Bible. If Jesus had gone to expensive schools and hadn’t worked as a laborer with wood or stones or whatever, then it wouldn’t have been enough. We needed to see the wisdom that comes from God and not just book learning and repeating what other people have said. If Jesus wasn’t tempted by the Devil, it wouldn’t have been enough because we had to watch Him do what no one else had ever been able to do—resist the temptation to do things the easy way. If Jesus was just a good teacher, it wouldn’t have been enough because teaching can encourage people to do what is right but it can’t change them so that they want to do what is right or know what is right.
If Jesus hadn’t been born to a people who were suffering from being pushed around by enemy soldiers, it wouldn’t be enough because people who are hurting need to know that He understands it too and isn’t blind to it. If Jesus wasn’t born in the Galilee instead of Judea, people wouldn’t have made fun of Him for being from the wrong side of the tracks and we might believe that God only does things when and where and how we think He should. If Jesus had done everything the religious leaders wanted him to, it wouldn’t have been enough because if doing things their way was good enough then Jesus wouldn’t have needed to come at all. If Jesus was popular and one of the in-crowd, it wouldn’t have been enough because everyone would have died for Him and not the other way around. If Jesus had just done a lot of good deeds, a lot of people would have been helped but once He died, everyone would have forgotten about Him. If Jesus was only a good man and not the Son of God who created the universe and everything in it, then once He was dead He would have just stayed dead because He couldn’t have trashed sin and death and we would be living in a much more terrible world. If Jesus was killed by the Jewish leaders, it wouldn’t be enough because it had to be all the leaders working to destroy Him—both Jews and Gentiles—so that He could forgive and save us all. If Jesus only died for the Jewish people, His own people, it wouldn’t be enough because it would mean that almost the entire world would just be in deep trouble unless they were Jewish.
Jesus had to be the Son of God, who created the universe and everything in it, never sinned, never failed any of God’s tests or the Devil’s tests or the tests that people threw at Him. His teachings had to always show us God’s character and the Kingdom of Heaven so we could see what He is really like and what He wants His world to be like. Jesus had to be a truthteller, so that we could trust God. Jesus had to be a miracle worker, so that people would notice that God had sent Him. Jesus had to be a healer and had to get rid of demons to show people that God wasn’t willing to put up with all that nonsense messing with His image bearers. Jesus had to be greater than Abraham, Moses, David, and Elijah so that He could be God’s final word on every question. Jesus had to be a King so that we could all be loyal to Him and obey His commandments to love one another. Jesus had to be everything He is and nothing less than that would ever be enough. We can be thankful for that.
I love you. I am praying for you. I am thankful to have you all in my life.