The Invitation to Gratitude
Today, I am so thankful to be writing this devotional from the dining room table at my new home. Since, the fall of 2021, my family has been on an journey of sojourning as God led us from place to place. There is so much that I could say about this season of life, but for now, I will just share how grateful I am for the faithfulness of God.
Thanks for your patience in the last several months as the devotional has had to take pause occasionally so that our family could turn the page of a chapter of our lives. Blessings!
1 Thessalonians 5:18 (ESV) says, “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Thanksgiving is one of the simplest and most accessible expressions of our faith in Christ. To be thankful is to acknowledge how good and blessed you are, and God makes it obvious how merciful and gracious he is.
Gratitude is a genuinely radical posture to take. The fact that we are invited to be grateful says so much about who we are in Christ Jesus. Our thankfulness is an expression of who God says we are. If the will of God is for us to be thankful, that means that his will is also to offer us the conditions that make us a blessed people. He freely gives the gift of salvation. He supplies everything we need. He welcomes us to a life of blessing and freedom. It’s no wonder David exclaims in Psalm 119:97 (ESV), “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.”
To be grateful is to enter into God’s courts, and to enter into God’s courts is to be thankful. Psalm 100:4 ESV says, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!” Could it be that gratitude is agreement with the realities of heaven’s courtroom? Under any reasonable circumstance, we would all be terrified to draw anywhere near the throne room of God. This seat is the center of truthful judgment and justice—of which we are all mortally guilty. Aside from God’s goodness and purposes of salvation, we might say, “Enter his gates with sobriety, and his courts with caution. Bring anything to appease him, and beg for mercy.”
When we recognize that we are invited to be thankful, meaning we are invited to live in freedom, the only thing remaining is our response. How will we respond to God’s will for gratitude? There will be plenty of opportunities to become frustrated, upset, or offended throughout the day, among other experiences. God isn’t leading us to shallowness of emotion. He is superimposing the story of grace over every circumstance in our lives so that we will learn the revelation that Paul had in Philippians 4:4 ESV, saying, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.”
