Cultivate Gratitude
A thread of thankfulness runs through the Bible from Adam’s gratitude for Eve in Genesis 2 through the twenty-four elders’ song of thanksgiving in Revelation 11.
I know God calls me to be thankful, and yet I struggle with a verse such as 1 Thessalonians 5:18—“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” I know I should be thankful, but the word all in the verse trips me up. I don’t give thanks in all circumstances. I battle anger, frustration, worry, and bitterness. You probably do too.
Cultivate Gratitude is a four-week series that we hope will prime your praise pump. We’ll study four passages that remind us of what we can be thankful for regardless of the circumstances we currently face.
C. S. Lewis once observed, “We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is ‘good,’ because it is good, if ‘bad’ because it works in us patience, humility, and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.”[1]
We pray that the four devotions in this series will cultivate such an attitude of gratitude in our hearts and yours.
[1] C. S. Lewis qtd in Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root. The Quotable Lewis: An Encyclopedic Collection of Quotes from the Complete Published Works of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1989) 579.