Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
What are you thankful for today? This morning I woke up incredibly grateful for my family. I got to hear my kids playing as I came out to make my morning coffee. I was so thankful for my job that I love that I got to go to. I was thankful for friends and our church community. Coming out of an amazing Sunday, I was thankful that I had a roof over my head and food in the pantry.
There were just so many things to be thankful for. Even just waking up is a blessing in and of itself. I'll be honest, there's days where I'm not very good at being thankful or grateful, where I wake up and maybe the kids just seem a little too loud and I just want to hit the snooze button one more time, or I hit the afternoon and I just feel like everything's piling up and everybody needs something from me and I just wish that I could hide away in a corner and cry until the day is over. Or those seasons of wandering and questioning and asking, "God, what are You doing? Lord, where are You? Why aren't You present with me here in my circumstances?" My heart is anything but grateful in those moments.
A Psalm of Thanksgiving
I'm reminded of the importance of a grateful heart in verses like we have here this morning in Psalm chapter 100, verse 5. Our verse today is at the end of a short psalm of thanksgiving, five little verses that the psalmist shares to express a grateful heart to the Lord. In it the psalmist is encouraging the readers to come and praise the Lord, to enter into His presence with joy and gladness.
It begs the question, what do we do on the days when we're not feeling it, when we're not feeling joyful, where we don't want to come before the Lord and worship, where we would rather just sit on the sidelines and wait for our circumstances to change?
Four Reasons to Be Grateful
That's where verse 5 comes into play. The psalmist starts verse 5 with "for the Lord" - he's saying, we should be grateful. Here's why. He gives us four incredible reasons why we can be grateful always.
He starts off by saying, be grateful for God's unyielding goodness: "for the Lord is good." I know I try to be a good person. My guess is you try to be a good person, but I'm not always perfect at it. Maybe there's days where I'm only good to the people that treat me good, or I'm only good up to a certain point. The Lord's goodness is unyielding, it is consistent, and it never changes.
Then he tells us that we can be grateful for God's unfailing love: "His unfailing love continues forever." The love we experience from people - it's imperfect. There's going to be days where our love is imperfect, where we fall short, where we say something that hurts somebody else, where our love, our actions don't express a grateful heart, but God's love - it will meet us in every way we need, no matter what.
He says that love is unending. Not only is it perfect, but it continues forever. There's no end date. It doesn't run out. You can lean on that for eternity.
Then he says that we can be grateful for His faithfulness, this unrelenting faithfulness that continues throughout generation after generation. When I pick "me time" over "God time," when I pick myself over others, God is still faithful because it's who He is.
Living with Grateful Hearts
I don't know about you, but that seems like a lot to be grateful for. My encouragement for us today is to constantly remind ourselves of God's goodness and His love and His faithfulness for generations to come. From that place, let's live our lives with grateful hearts for Him.
