How thankful are you? How much time do you spend throughout the day praising God and giving joyful thanks to Him for who He is and what He's done? How we answer this question will reveal a lot about the state of our hearts.I've been greastly enjoying Joe Thorn's new book, Note to Self. He has these insightful and challenging words to say on what our thankfulness says about us:
Does gratitude characterize your thoughts of God? Thankfulness is a good test of your faith.Its absence demonstrates that your faith is more lip service than experimental knowledge. Your days, whether easy or difficult, should be filled with thanksgiving because while life changes drastically, your God remains the same forever. He is constant - constantly good, loving and faithful.If I'm honest with myself I'm nowhere near as thankful as I ought to be in light of the fact that we have an eternally good, loving and faithful God. I have a suspicion that I'm not the only one. This question is a deeply uncomfortable one if we ask it seriously of ourselves. Our lack of thankfulness reveals that we have not grasped the glorious truths about our glorious God as much as we think we have. The more we recognise who God is and what He has done in Christ, the more grateful people we will be. The more clearly we grasp the gospel the more we shall be people who bubble over with joyful thanks.
This means that we need to come back again and again to the gospel. One way of doing this is getting into the habit of preaching the gospel to ourselves. Check out last Wednesday's post to think more about this. You can view it by clicking here.
