Zephaniah 3:17 “The LORD your God is among you; He is mighty to save. He will rejoice over you with gladness; He will quiet you with His love; He will rejoice over you with singing.”
WOW. God SINGS over us with JOY?
GRATITUDE is in all 66 books of the Bible, and it’s an almost overwhelming exercise in joy to study it! Gratitude includes awe; praise; thankfulness; glory, joy, wonder, worship, exultation. God made us in His Image, and we are hard-wired for gratitude just like we are hard-wired for worship; it is in our spiritual DNA.
Reading through the Bible… through all the troubles, sins, wars, and heartaches; EVEN SO, there is a golden thread from Genesis to Revelation, running through the whole sacred cloth! ANYTHING repeated in so many different iterations, deserves attention. It greatly matters to God.
Gratitude shows up in Genesis 2:23, when Adam first saw Eve. If you dig into the original Hebrew and nuances, this short simple poem explodes with joy!
Judges, Job and Lamentations are perhaps the saddest books, but gratitude exists. Ecclesiastes is SO somber, but still gratitude! And Jude — that very dour, penultimate book — has it… Extremely tough times often cause extreme praise. Some of the most grateful books of the Bible are Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, and Jeremiah (“the weeping prophet”). In the midst of all of the troubles in these books, the golden thread of gratitude runs through it all.
Hosea, Amos and Obadiah are notable for their LACK of gratitude, and God makes a very big deal about it…
The Gospels and the NT letters are overflowing with living waters of love and praise. In fact, Philippians is “the happiest book of the Bible”, and Paul wrote it in JAIL.
The final book — Revelation: Glory, praise and ineffable joy are all over it, as God fulfills every promise starting in Genesis, and makes everything right!
So, what does that have to do with you and me, right now? Everything. Every generation has all the ups-and-downs of life. GRATITUDE is a particular type of ATTITUDE, and that can flow out of us in ANY situation, through the rivers of living water of the Holy Spirit; any time we choose, despite circumstances. GRATITUDE is RADICAL, COUNTERINTUITIVE, COUNTERCULTURAL, OVERWHELMING, and ALWAYS AVAILABLE.
We have the Word of God, from Genesis to Revelation, to assure us of this:
That after satan, the world and our own flesh have done everything that they are allowed to do…
After I have wrecked my life,
and maybe you have wrecked your life more than once
in every possible permutation
and just plain boneheaded scheme and idea;
after we have done our worst and called it our best:
It’s like God says, “You done yet?
MY turn.”
God says, "I will write the final Word on your life.
They've taken their best shot, and now it's MY TURN.
I will write the final Word on the final page in your life.
I AM the final Word on the final page of your life.”
And THAT is worth all my praise, for all eternity. There are a quintillion other reasons for gratitude, but that one RIGHT THERE is everything.
Father, if You never did another thing for me, I would never be able to thank You enough for all that You have already done. And Father, it’s not that my life is that great. Except it is. It’s my little life, and it’s a great life! (Because everyone has a great life, IF they have You.) There are things I don’t have, but oh what I have… And I’m nobody special. Every one of us has a great life if we can see it through Your Eyes. If we have You, even on our worst days, we have EVERYTHING. And that is beyond anything I could possibly deserve or comprehend. Thank You forever for loving me, before I even knew You.