Gratitude seems to be in short supply in America these days. Grateful people are generous people and willingly help others. Both the giver and receiver benefit. Ungrateful people hoard what they greedily possess while other equally ungrateful people demand that they be given what they enviously desire. Both sides lose. Ingratitude is the source of class and racial warfare we see tearing up our country.
Greed and envy have no place in the hearts of those who trust God. Replacing these sins with the gratitude that comes from trusting God would go a long way to curing our cultural ills.
There is so much for us to be grateful to God for!!! Start with each other. There is not a single person we have ever known or ever loved - including ourselves - that was not created by God.
There is not a single thing we possess or built from those possessions that did not originate from God. Spaghetti to spaceships. Eyeglasses to iPhones. Minerals to medicines. Just think about it. There is nothing you can create without the building blocks that are gifts from God.
So often we think of God as only the Creator of the physical world, but He is also the Creator of our intangible world. Love and affection, joy and sorrow, anger and peace, emotion and intellect, justice and mercy, curiosity and patience, charity and generosity, forgiveness and tolerance, work and leisure, beauty and creativity, equality and freedom are all gifts from God.
God’s greatest gift to us is Himself. God is not a distant and disinterested deity, but a living and loving Father who wants to be an active participant in our lives. Everything He has created, everything He has done for us, is because God, like a good Father, loves us. God always has our best interest at heart - even when we disappoint Him and reject His guidance. In the ultimate act of love, He sent His Son Jesus to sacrifice His life in order to remove our sin and reunite us with Him. How can we not be grateful?
If we say we trust God, but show no gratitude for all He has done for us, our trust is hollow. Trust and thanks go hand in hand.
Thank God for His generosity to you. Thank God today for your life, for love, for friends and family. Thank God today for forgiving your sins and walking with you every day. But don’t stop there.
Show your gratitude to God by being generous to others as God has been generous to you. Love the people God loves. Serve the people God serves. Forgive the people God forgives. If we even tried to be as generous with each other as God is with us.....imagine how different the world would be.
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