The Beauty of a Grateful Heart

Scotty Smith

Psalm 103:1– Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. 

2 Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—

Heavenly Father, King David’s words provide the perfect vehicle for us to engage in one of the most beautiful and effective forms of spiritual warfare—gratitude. The devil fuels our discontent, whining, envy; so giving of thanks sabotages one of his favorite forms of attack.

No matter our challenging circumstances, difficult stories, or fresh disappointments—you have been outrageously generous with us. Here are a few of your grace-gifts we want to remember today, and every day.

3 who forgives all your sins

Through the finished work of Jesus, you’ve forgiven all our sins—not just the 2% we’re aware of, the other 98% as well. Though we’ll be more like Jesus one Day, we’ll never be more forgiven, known, and loved than we are on this July Wednesday.

and heals all your diseases,

     When it comes to healing, you’re not a slave to our timetable, Father. But, through the work of Jesus, you have secured perfect health for us forever—mind, body, and spirit. One Day, there will be no more disease, only delight; no more “gunk,” only glory; no more brokenness, only beauty; no more “common colds,” only extraordinary health!

4 who redeems your life from the pit

Father, you haven’t only redeemed us from the ultimate pits of death and judgment, you also rescue us from other kinds of pits. There are the pits we naively fall into, pits we get pushed into, and pits into which we foolishly jump.

And you come after us in the waterless pits of self-pity and self-righteousness; dark holes of bitterness and soul-sucking resentment; caverns of toxic shame and vain regrets; bottomless craters of comparison-based living, and the cold dungeon of graceless-living. Continue your pit-rescuing mission in our lives, and in the lives of those we love.

and crowns you with love and compassion,

Indeed, Father, in Jesus you have removed our grave-clothes of death and have dressed us in garments of your grace. We are no longer condemned for our sins, we are crowned with your compassion. We are righteous in Christ—beloved and delighted in, and desired and enjoyed. May we be done with a navel-gazing spirit of self-pity and ingratitude. So very Amen we pray, in Jesus’ wonderful and merciful name.

Posted at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/scotty-smith/beauty-power-grateful-heart/

God Knows What You Do Not Have

Abigail Dodds

“God has promised to supply all our needs. What we don’t have now, we don’t need now.”

When Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) says it, I perk up. I nod in agreement. I remember her life, her murdered missionary husband, her devotion to the gospel, her absolute earnestness about Jesus, and the congruity of her words and practice, and I say, “Amen.”

The circumstances of her life were the stuff of legend for me as a growing girl. It was undeniably evident that God was orchestrating all the hardships and massive disappointments she experienced, at the very least, to help all the rest of us. I wanted to be like her, because I wanted to know her God as deeply as she did — the kind of God who made every trial worth it.

But I hadn’t fully reckoned with the means of her unflappable faith in God. I thought, or at least hoped, that the intimacy and trust she had in Jesus could come through a life of ease. I found out that in order to be like her, and to know God in such a way, I would need to learn the glad surrender of discipline. I would have to walk a path through suffering, and I would need to discover the beauty in my own strange ashes.

What Are Our Needs?

I stood in the doorway of the biggest ER room at our state-of-the-art Children’s Hospital. There was barely room for me as thirteen medical staff moved with urgency, bumping into each other, with forceful words coming from the doctor in charge. And in the middle of it all, our 13-month-old son, looking still, pale, and lifeless. I wanted to cry loudly, or yell my son’s name, or make someone tell me how this was going to turn out.

I did none of that. I stood quietly, not moving, clenching my hands, while my heart did not pound, but seemed to dissolve. I thought that if I was quiet and composed, they would allow me to stay near my son. I watched them put an IV directly into his bone to get the meds into his marrow as quickly as possible. And I followed behind the gurney with a dry face as the nurse rhythmically pumped the manual ventilator, breathing for our son, until we arrived in our room in the PICU and he could be hooked up to the machine.

I had learned years before (perhaps not as well as I should have) that God doesn’t owe us children. And that sometimes he takes them away after he’s given them. My naïve twenty-something self was shocked by this reality. Subconsciously believing myself to be immune to miscarriage, I was surprised when it happened. The simple words of Job comforted and frightened me: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away” (see Job 1:21).

And now, with five living children — the youngest with serious medical problems — I was faced with another plan that didn’t match mine. Which, to be fair, is a daily occurrence. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a day go according to my plan. But the differences between my plan and God’s have, with some notable exceptions, generally been of a small scale. Watching my son’s life hang in the balance was not a small-scale difference between God’s plan and mine.

What It Means to Thrive

That night in the hospital, alone with my unconscious son and the sound of the ventilator making a terrifying sort of silence, God was reworking my understanding of neediness and flourishing. Over the coming years, I would be faced with lots of questions about what I needed and what our family needed in order to thrive as his people.

Did I need my son to be healthy? How healthy was healthy enough? Did our older kids need a childhood untarnished by suffering? Did they need a family with fewer “needs”? Did they need me to homeschool them full-time to develop into decent Christian people? Did I need sleep? How much? Did I need less vomit in my life? How coherent did I need to be in order to be a kind human?

You likely have your own questions. Do you need a healthy marriage? Do you need your child to be saved? Do you need to move to a different city, a different house, a different neighborhood? Do you need to be rid of your chronic pain? Do you need God to give you a “yes” to the request that you’ve been bringing him for the last twenty years? Do you need to be rid of your aloneness? Do you need stability or change?

What exactly does Paul mean when he promises, “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19)?

The Calm After the Storm

My son made it through that traumatic hospital stay. So did I. Although it wouldn’t be the last time we were there.

I felt like declaring victory. We survived. My faith was intact — even strengthened. But one discovery of the last decade of my life has been that the big trials aren’t always the test we think they are. Somehow, we get through those Big Scary Trials. By grace and prayers and the help of God’s people, we hold on to hope in God’s promises and endure. But often, it’s the little trials that follow the big ones that threaten to unravel us.

A couple years after that ominous hospital stay, when I should have been thrilled at my son’s progress and how well things were going, I found myself telling God at two o’clock in the morning, “I can’t. I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t do the things I’m supposed to be doing each day with so little sleep each night. I need you to give me relief. I need you to relent of this nightly disaster.” You see, our son has disrupted sleep because of his neurological problems. It’s improved in fits and starts, but by and large, the five years of his life have been challenging in the sleep department. And it was this small trial that was threatening to undo me.

Beware of Small Trials

I had the idea that in order for me to disciple my children, I needed to be coherent and less desperate. I had the idea that in order for God to use me to point them to him, I needed to shed this raw, at-the-end-of-my-rope status. I was okay with being brought low — I’d been there many times — but just how low did I have to go? I mean, I’d read Christian articles that declared, Sleep is an act of humility. So, why would God deny me that humility? I wanted to trust him with my eyes closed.

But God wouldn’t let me set my heart on lesser needs. We have bigger needs than sleep. We have bigger needs than our health or the health of our kids. We have bigger needs than a spouse or relief from chronic pain. We have bigger needs than coherency. We have bigger needs than that job, or career, or home. We have bigger needs than serving God the way we hoped.

What I really needed was to read more closely in Philippians 4 in order to discover that Paul himself had gone without his basic needs met. He says it like this: “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12). Paul faced unmet needs, and he had learned how to abound in them.

In Every Circumstance

God’s ideas about our flourishing are different than ours. We think flourishing means eight hours of shut-eye, a good job, being surrounded by people who treat us with respect, being given the opportunity to succeed at something, good medical care, a loving marriage, and happy children. Those are good things, but they are not the things God is most concerned about supplying us in this life for our flourishing.

In God’s economy, we flourish when our need for him is met in him. Dear brothers and sisters, there is no circumstance under heaven that God isn’t using to grow us into oaks of righteousness. There is no need that he won’t fill with himself. The promise is really true: God really will supply all our needs according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19). There is nothing we truly need that is not found in Christ.

Even more, the circumstances of being denied an earthly need or desire are often his tailored means of accelerating our holiness and happiness in him. When we want, we are given more of Christ. When we suffer, our solidarity with him grows.

As usual, Elisabeth was right, “God has promised to supply all our needs. What we don’t have now, we don’t need now.” And what we do need now, we do have now: God the Father’s loving, sovereign hand working all things for our good (Romans 8:28); Christ the Son as our advocate, Savior, and righteousness (1 John 2:1; Philippians 3:20; 1 Corinthians 1:30); and the Holy Spirit’s intercession, help, and comfort surrounding us day by day (Romans 8:26–27).

So, at the end of our lives, we truly will be able to say, “I never wanted for anything. I never had a ‘no’ from my Father that wasn’t a ‘yes’ to better and deeper things.”

Posted at: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-knows-what-you-dont-have?fbclid=IwAR31N1mJ1rsut1ELmO3EmcBnEBgbbLAKZw4iEmMMTqsY3fb7xLxywcKNWyA

10 Resolutions for Mental Health

Article by John Piper

Founder & Teacher, desiringGod.org

On October 22, 1976, Clyde Kilby, who is now with Christ in heaven, gave an unforgettable lecture. I went to hear him that night because I loved him. He had been one of my professors in English Literature at Wheaton College. He opened my eyes to more of life than I knew could be seen. Oh, what eyes he had!

He was like his hero, C.S. Lewis, in this regard. When he spoke of the tree he saw on the way to class this morning, you wondered why you had been so blind all your life. Since those days in classes with Clyde Kilby, Psalm 19:1 has been central to my life: “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

“Stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, and start drinking in the remedies of God in nature.”

That night Dr. Kilby, who had a pastoral heart and a poet’s eye, pled with us to stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, but instead to drink in the remedies of God in nature. He was not naïve. He knew of sin. He knew of the necessity of redemption in Christ. But he would have said that Christ purchased new eyes for us as well as new hearts. His plea was that we stop being unamazed by the strange glory of ordinary things. He ended that lecture in 1976 with a list of resolutions. As a tribute to my teacher and a blessing to your soul, I offer them for your joy.

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

8. I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

Make The Choice to Be Thankful for Jesus

Article by Colin Smith

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. (Colossians 3:15)

In the verses leading up to verse 15, the Apostle Paul is in many ways like a coach telling his team how the game should be played. He says if you are going to make it in the Christian life, you need to clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, and gentleness (v. 12). You need to forgive people who have hurt you (v. 13). Then in the middle of all your relentless activity, you need to know the stillness of the peace of Christ ruling in your heart.   

While there is much to say about this verse, I would like to draw your attention to just two words that are found in the passage above: Be thankful.

Thanksgiving Is a Choice

The first thing that I want us to notice is that Thanksgiving is a choice. There is an interesting transition from the passive to the active in this verse. First, there is the passive: Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart. He does not say ‘be peaceful’. The source of peace is not us, but we must let it work on us.     

The peace that we need is found in Christ, and Paul says you need to allow that peace to fill your own soul.

One of the most beautiful features of the vision of heaven given to John was that the sea was like glass (Revelation 4:6). Have you seen the sea looking like glass? Sea is normally a picture of turmoil, upheaval, and collision between tides and waves. But God is not in turmoil. No forces compete with God in heaven.

So when the Son of God comes from heaven, he confronts the violence of a great storm on earth. And he is able to say, “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39), and there is a great calm. Let this true peace rule in your hearts. And this is passive—something that Christ must do for you. All you can do is open your hand to receive it.

But then notice the change to something active: “And be thankful!” The gift of peace is something that can only be given by Christ, but the response of thankfulness is something can only come from you.

So, be thankful! It’s a choice! There’s something intentional about it, and this choice involves three things. With this choice, we:

1. Recognize the role others have played in our lives.

The thankful person remembers the people who contributed to his or her life. The ungrateful person forgets these contributions and takes all the credit.

Think of all the people who have contributed to the course of your life. Parents and Sunday school teachers, people who have given to you, those who love you. People who have worked with you to achieve things that were important. Friends who were thoughtful. That person who said something at just the right time when you needed a word of encouragement.

Make a conscious choice to recognize and remember the people who have touched your life.

It is very interesting that in Romans 1, Paul gives a description of what he calls a godless and wicked person. He tells us that this person makes three very clear choices

1. They suppress the truth about God, although the evidence of God is all round about them in creation.

2. They refuse to worship God.

3. And, they do not give thanks. 

These are the marks of a wicked godless person! The result is that their thinking becomes futile. They live in a make-believe world in which they enjoy the gifts without any acknowledgment of the giver.

In contrast, the choice to give thanks to God is at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian:

1. We choose to embrace the truth.

2. We choose to worship God

3. And, we choose to be thankful.

So when Paul writes to Christians and says “Be thankful,” he is saying something that goes to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian: We recognize that all we are and all we have comes from the hand of God.

2.  Affirm the value of something done for us.

Our gratitude should always reflect the value of what is done. Gratitude should be in proportion.

If you hold the door open for someone, they will say thank you. But it would be inappropriate to say, “Oh thank you so much, I really cannot tell you how grateful I am.” If next week they came up to you and said, “You know all week I have been reflecting on what you did for me,” you would fairly quickly be heading for the door yourself.

The value of the gift determines the appropriate level of gratitude.

Suppose God were to send his son into the world and stand in your place experiencing the hell that you would otherwise certainly endure. Suppose he were to rise and then make you a member of his own family. What would be the appropriate level of gratitude then?

Of course, sometimes our problem is that we find it difficult to know what is of true value. If you give two gifts to a young child,  and one is a check for 10,000 dollars and the other is a shiny red car, he will show no interest at all in the check, unless it is to put it in his mouth and eat it.

Have you understood the value of what Jesus did for you on the cross? 

It is a choice in which we recognize the role other people have played in our lives. It is a choice in which we affirm the value of something that is done. So choose to affirm the value of what Christ has done for you.

3. Express our pleasure at something received.

You cannot separate gratitude from pleasure. Where there is pleasure gratitude is easy, without pleasure gratitude is difficult, and often false.

Reflecting on this my mind went back to childhood. The day after Christmas was always writing thank you letters. It was always more fun to open the parcels than to write the letters.

Have you written your thank you letters yet?

Think of the gifts you really value, and then Thanksgiving is the most natural thing in the world. The expression of pleasure is at the very heart of thanksgiving.

If you give a gift to someone else, the reason you do it is to give them pleasure. That’s what you want to happen. If it brings pleasure to them then your goal in giving is fulfilled.

Parents know all about this. You give a gift and as the kids open it, their pleasure is your pleasure. In that experience, we have some insight into the heart of God.

Be Thankful

As you celebrate Thanksgiving this year, I want to ask you three questions:  

• Do you recognize the blessing of God in your life, or are you among those who choose not to give thanks?

• As you think about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, what value do you place on what he has done?

• As God looks at your life, would he see that you take great pleasure in the gift of his Son, or would the truth be, that the Son of God is something of an unwanted gift?

Posted at: https://unlockingthebible.org/2018/11/make-choice-be-thankful-jesus/

In All Circumstances?

Article by Nicholas Batzig

Often, the most basic of God’s commands are the hardest for us to obey. We may ask ourselves whether or not we would have the faith to offer up a child to God–as Abraham did when he was called to offer up Isaac–while never really stopping to ask ourselves whether or not we have the faith to obey the most basic New Covenant commands. Take, for instance, Paul’s statement in 1 Thess. 5:18: “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you all.” When we consider such a command, we must ask ourselves the following questions: Am I thankful in all circumstances? What about when times are difficult? What about when I have experienced some particular trial. The Lord commands us to “count it all joy when we fall into various trials?” How can I be thankful and joyful in the midst of a painful trial? The answer, of course, is found in all that the Scriptures teach us about trials.

1. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we deserve eternal judgment and whatever we are experiencing short of that is a mercy.

2. We can be thankful in trying circumstances precisely because we have already been redeemed by Christ, blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ and sealed with the Spirit until the possession of the eternal inheritance.

3. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we know that our God doesn’t make mistakes. There is nothing that falls outside of His sovereign eternal decree. As the hymn writer put it, “What e’re my God ordains is right.”

4. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because all that God is doing in our lives is for His glory and our conformity to the image of His Son.

5. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we can be confident that God will not waste any of the lessons that He is seeking to teach us in the difficult as well as enjoyable circumstances in which He places us in life.

6. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because know that we will be able to extend to others who experience similar difficult circumstances the same comfort that we receive from the God of all comfort.

7. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we know that God’s purpose is to make us whole and complete lacking nothing.

8. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because it is better for us to be in a place of weakness that shows us our need for God than to be in a place of plenty and prosperity and forget about Him.

9. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because we are being pruned to bear more fruit. The Lord is removing the dross and refining the gold.

10. We can be thankful in trying circumstances because they serve as a stage on which the deliverance and provision of God’s grace in Christ may be displayed in our lives.The Lord brought Shadrach, Meshach and Adeb-nego into the fiery furnace in order to teach them that he would stand with them in the furnace and bring them out unharmed. Jesus brought the disciples into the storm to teach them about his power to still the wind and the waves with a word.

So, this Thanksgiving, if you find yourself in a place where you are having a hard time being thankful, meditate on these ten biblical truths that will strengthen you in faith to give God glory and to give thanks in all circumstances–no matter how difficult they may be.

Posted at: http://feedingonchrist.com/in-all-circumstances/

THANKING GOD FOR EVERYTHING

Article by Lore Ferguson Wilbert

Nestled among a long list of exhortations and blessings in 1 Thessalonians is a line we’ll see in plenty this month. Distressed on barn wood at your local craft store, printed on banners hung in the dining room, embossed on the ceramic plate the turkey is served on, and rife in sermons everywhere, “Give thanks in everything,” is the rally cry of November. But, like Aunt Jane’s consistently overcooked turkey, the truncated statement can also leave a dry taste in our mouths.

Gratitude will be on the rise for the next two months, followed by a sharp decline on January first when we resolve to change all the things our mere gratitude couldn’t change: love-handles, schedules, relationships, the project we’ve been putting off. There’s nothing like a full serving of gratitude to show us just how many things exist for which we’re still not thankful. We will give thanks for everything except all the things for which we’re still bent on changing.

“For what is God’s will for me? This.“

I have a stack on my desk of books to read and review, menu-plans to make, a driver’s license to renew, and a book contract to fulfill within the first month of 2019. As grateful as I am for a job I love, the freedom to eat and cook whole, healthy food, and a license to drive, I’m decidedly unthankful for the work they all will require of me. I can trick myself into being grateful, topping my cake of grumbling with the frosting of thanksgiving, but it’s still a dismal cake beneath. I need the words with which Paul follows up his exhortation: “For this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

For what is God’s will for me? This.

This everything. This messy desk, these deadlines, this schedule I can’t wrangle into submission, this monotonous line in which I’ll stand to get an unflattering photo of me laminated onto a card I’ll carry for the next eight years. All of this is God’s will for me. And not only this, that which I can see directly in front of me, but all that I can’t see either. The unfulfilled longings for children we’ve been unable to have, the suburbs in which we feel landlocked and stifled, the community of friends in which there are struggles to connect and experiences of conflict, the unrealized hopes and smothered dreams—these too are the will of God for me in Christ Jesus.

If we are only ever grateful for that which we enjoy or love or can see the eternal good in, we aren’t really thankful. We’re merely counting our blessings. True gratefulness means seeing and trusting and believing entirely that what comes our way is God’s good and best will for us. It means trusting—really trusting—that if we don’t have a thing we desire, we aren’t intended to have it today. It doesn’t mean we can’t still long for it, hope for it, and ask our Father for it (and we should), but it does mean the troubles we face today are sufficient for today. And the manna we’ve been given today is enough for the day.

This holiday season, I want to make a practice of thanking God for everything—even the really, really difficult things. Not because I’m a super-Christian, but because in Christ Jesus, and by the grace of God, everything right now is the will of God for me.

ABOUT LORE FERGUSON WILBERT

Lore Ferguson Wilbert is a writer, thinker, and learner. She blogs at Sayable.net, tweets and instagrams at @lorewilbert. She is a member at The Village Church in Texas and the wife of a man named Nate.

Posted at: https://lifewayvoices.com/culture-current-events/thanking-god-for-everything/