Life as a Christian Woman

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23

We celebrate Thanksgiving. We give thanks before meals. We thank others for gifts on our birthdays and at Christmas.

But what does it mean to be truly thankful? For example, how many times have you thanked someone for a gift, when what you are really thinking is, “What in the world were you thinking when you got this for me?”

To be truly thankful, in the Biblical sense, is to look beyond a gift. We should be thankful in everything… EVERYTHING! The Psalmist said,

It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to the Most High. It is good to proclaim your unfailing love in the morning, your faithfulness in the evening.
Psalm 92:1-2

David went to far as to appoint certain Levites to give constant, continual praise and thanks to God.

Thanks to God should never be relegated to before meal prayers, or bedtime talks with God. Thanksgiving should be a constant in our daily routine. We take His blessings for granted, and we minimize Him when we fit our thanks to Him into a little box, a routine that we rush to get through.

It drives me totally crazy to hear someone say, “Thank God!” for something like a win in a game, or something along those lines. These are empty words when spoken in haste, without the true thankfulness that the Spirit bestows on us. Once again, it minimizes the process of thanking our Father.

If God is in everything (and He most assuredly is), then our thanks to Him should be in everything, as well. In fact, one of the first identifiers in rejecting God is to forget to thank Him. We shouldn’t throw out those little one-liners and let that be the end of it. He deserves more. He deserves all!

We need to thank God for everything that He has placed in our lives, because there is a reason for for everything in our lives. So we should not stop at thanking Him for our “toys” as my little girl should say. There should be thanks in things that are perhaps sad, things we don’t understand.

I have a friend who has a strong and abiding faith. She is ravaged by cancer, and yet thanks God daily for her condition. Her reasoning? God is teaching her through the cancer, teaching her husband and her children. She looks beyond the sadness for a greater good.

Have you lost someone you loved? A parent, a child? The grief can be overwhelming. In those times when sadness threatens to tear you heart to shreds, turn the grief into a prayer of thankfulness. Thankfulness that God placed that person in your life, even if it was for a brief period. In the bigger picture, God’s grace in planting those folks in your life made a difference that lasts beyond their years, beyond your years.
Finally, we fail to thank God for the most important gift that we will ever receive, the gift of salvation. He gave us this gift freely, all we had to do was accept it. And yet, once we have become believers, we rarely think to thank our God for this gift.

God saved you by His special favor when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.
Ephesians 2:8-9

Salvation is truly the gift that keeps on giving… for eternity! As Paul points out in his letter to the Ephesians, God gave it to us, not because we deserved it, but because He wanted to.

When you think about all that we have and realize that all of it is through God’s love for us, you should be humbled… and very, very thankful!