In general, gratitude is sorely lacking in the world today. It is most noticeable in children, as parents are no longer teaching them to be polite and thank others. But the problem doesn’t start with the children; as they are only portraying what they’ve been taught by their parents and society at large. With the entitlement mentality that exists in society today, people are more concerned about what they haven’t received, than they are in being grateful for what they have received.
This lack of gratitude goes far beyond our attitude towards one another, reaching all the way to heaven. Whether it is because of the influence of the society that we live in or an unintended result of the “name it and claim it” prosperity gospel, there’s a general lack of any expression of gratitude towards God for the many blessings that He bestows upon us. Rather than being grateful, people are looking at the blessings that others receive and “praying” in a way that is more like complaining to God for not having received those same blessings themselves.
Gratitude Towards God
Believers are to maintain an attitude of gratitude towards God, or Father and the Creator of the universe. More than anywhere else, the book of Psalms is filled with expressions of that gratitude towards God, amidst its many other themes.
Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. – Psalm 107:1
There is much to explore in that one verse, but I only want to talk about an amazing contrast that it holds; a contrast between simplicity and depth. To start out with, the reader (or hearer, as the Psalms were originally sung) is instructed to give thanks to the Lord. That is the essence of Christian gratitude. Even though it is written by the people of Israel, in Old Testament times, it applies as much to us today, as it did to them back then. As God’s people, whether in Old or New Testament times, we are to give thanks to God, even without any overt reason.
But the verse doesn’t stop there, it then goes on to provide us with reason to give thanks to the Lord. That is, “He is good.” We need no other reason to give thanks to God; because it is through His goodness that He blesses us in so many ways.
The challenge here, at least when talking to people who don’t believe in God, is defining what is good. What one person or group of people identify as good may be the literal opposite of what others identify as good. The dictionary definition of “goodness” is the quality of being morally good or virtuous. But that just opens another can of worms, as different people define being “moral” differently.
For much of the world, the word “moral” is defined as not doing harm to others. That sounds like a good definition; but who is defining what is harmful and what it not? We are living in a time where people define withholding gender mutilation surgery from children as harmful to them, denying them the opportunity to be their true self. That ignores the fact that such surgery inflicts pain, which is harmful in and of itself. It also ignores the potential that those children may change their minds once they grow up and find that the surgery which was performed on them cannot be fully reversed, so they will never be able to have children of their own. Society is therefore calling good evil and evil good.
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! 21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! – Isaiah 5:20-21
Hitler’s Nazi regime still stands as the greatest example of the dangers of man-defined morality. Their “good” that they were seeking was the purity of the Aryan people. As part of that quest, they enslaved and murdered millions of innocent people; jews, gypsies, physically homosexuals and the handicapped, for no other crime than not being examples of perfect Aryan people. Had they been allowed to continue, they would have killed or enslaved many hundreds of millions more, in their quest for racial purity. That was moral in their eyes; but the world condemned them.
As long as mankind is able to define morality for themselves, and therefore goodness, such atrocities will exist. The only solution is to have our morality defined by someone outside ourselves, who is inherently moral and good. Hence, the necessity of accepting the standards laid out by God in His Word. He is good because the Bible says that He is good.
That verse in Psalms 107 goes on further to give us even more reason why we should give thanks to God, defining his goodness by telling us that “His mercy endures forever.” In other words, one of the things that shows that God is good, is that His mercy towards us never ends. Oh, we can choose to remove ourselves from His mercy, refusing to accept it, but the mercy itself doesn’t end. It can’t; because it is an integral part of His character.
God’s Goodness Carries Blessings
Because God is good, His goodness is expressed towards us in the many blessings that He bestows upon us, each and every day of our lives. Many of those blessings are things we don’t even see, like rain so that the crops will grow and we will have food to eat. Yet they exist nonetheless, even if we don’t notice them.
Our modern western society has become accustomed to equating “blessings” with material prosperity; what we understand as “prosperity.” Yet that isn’t God’s focus. The word translated as prosperity in the New Testament doesn’t actually make reference to material or financial prosperity at all, although it can be interpreted to mean that. It literally means “to have a good road.” One who is wealthy beyond measure, with every possible material possession you could think of, yet is dying of cancer doesn’t have a good road, by any stretch of the imagination. Their road is leading to death and what happens after that depends on whether they have received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
Many people don’t recognize the blessings they receive every day, simply because they are looking at things the wrong way. They don’t see waking up healthy in the morning as a blessing, but just as the way things are supposed to be. Positive things that happen in their lives are easily overlooked, while the bad things that happen to all of us are magnified, making them seem bigger than life. They have a negative focus, so they see the negative.
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or we can rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” – Abraham Lincoln
How many times do we miss seeing God’s blessings, because we are too busy looking at the negative, to see the positive? How many things have happened in our lives, which weren’t so much prosperity raining down on us, as God stopping bad things from happening? How may blessings have we merely overlooked and not even seen?
Expressing Gratitude Towards God
If we have gratitude towards God, it follows that we should demonstrate that gratitude in some way. That would have to either involve some expression towards God Himself or doing something that God wants us to do. We could do an extensive study on that, searching through the Scriptures; but let’s look at just a few of the prime ways we can express gratitude towards God.
Prayer
God desires a continual, ongoing relationship with us. one of the prime ways that we maintain that relationship is through speaking to Him; what we commonly refer to as prayer. Unfortunately, it is easy to get sidetracked in our prayer life and focus it on asking Him for things. But true prayer, as shown to us by Jesus, in the Lord’s Prayer, includes much more than just asking for things. That’s the smallest part of the prayer. The biggest is praising God.
Psalm 100, verse 4, shows us why Satan can’t get into heaven, as it gives us the means by which we can enter and come before God’s throne. It says:
Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. – Psalm 100:4
It is through thanks, both in our praise and in our prayer, that we are granted admittance to heaven, so that we can come before the throne of God; a right granted to us by the blood of Jesus.
Praise
Prayer and praise should be tied together in our minds. Praise is more than just singing songs about the Lord in church; it is any expression we make, speaking about the greatness of our God. It not only provides us with a means of declaring to those around us how great God is; but to show God that we believe He is great.
Clearly defined, praise is our declarations about God; how great He is. That can be talking about a specific attribute of God or talking about something He has done for us. In either case, we are declaring to all who hear, which includes God Himself, our thanks for who He is and what He has done.
Worship
There is much confusion in the Body of Christ about the difference between praise and worship. Many will say that praise is the fast songs and worship is the slow songs. While it is true that most praise songs and fast and most worship songs are slow, that isn’t the defining difference, especially when you consider that both praise and worship can be other things in that song. The defining difference is contained in the simple word “You.”
When we praise God, we declare His greatness to others, but when we worship Him, we talk directly to God, declaring our love and how great He is. It is one thing to tell others how great we think God is. It’s something else entirely to tell that directly to Him.
Witnessing
One of our greatest services to God is to share His love with others, so that they can come to know Him too. Sharing our Christian witness, talking about what Jesus has done for us, is a true act of gratitude. We can’t honestly witness, without having gratitude in our hearts. If we were ever to attempt to do so, it would be sales pitch, not witnessing about our Lord.
Serving
Besides witnessing, there are many acts of Christian service which we can perform, either in the church, in some parachurch organization or alone, as believers. As long as we are doing it for God, with the intent of serving Him, as we serve others, it demonstrates our gratitude towards Him. Not only that; but it demonstrates that in a way that others can see, adding to our witness for the Lord.
Obedience
I can’t finish this list, without talking about obedience. Jesus said to His disciples, “If you love Me, keep (obey) my commandments” (John 14:15). Love towards God comes out of our gratitude for what He has done for us. According to Jesus, that is best demonstrated by our obedience. Looking at it from the other side, we could say that a lack of obedience is a clear sign that one does not love the Lord or appreciate what He has done for them.
One of the beautiful things about obeying God is that everything He has commanded us to do is actually for our benefit. While it may seem to the world that God is trying to keep them from enjoying life; the things God tells us not to do, He has told us for our own benefit; to protect us from harm. Therefore, our obedience not only shows our gratitude, but shows that we want to take care of the thing that God loves the most… ourselves.