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Pray. Start with a simple request, making it the refrain of your day: “God, open the eyes of my heart.” This journey must be Spirit-led, everyday.
Receive. Open your hand to the simple, daily gifts, writing down all the unique and ordinary things you notice, from the grand and obvious to the humble and hidden.
Praise. Praise Him for the unexpected and the unlikely, for the daily and the difficult, ...
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Do not disdain th...
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This is what the Lord says: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances.” Isaiah 49:8
The first time thanksgiving is ever mentioned in Scripture, this is what we read: And this is the law of the sacrifice of peace offerings that one may offer to the Lord. If he offers it for a thanksgiving, then he shall offer with the thanksgiving sacrifice unleavened loaves mixed with oil, unleavened wafers smeared with oil, and loaves of fine flour well mixed with oil. With the sacrifice of his peace offerings for
thanksgiving he shall bring his offering with loaves of leavened bread. Leviticus 7:11 – 13 ESV
Could it be — no one receives the peace of God without giving thanks to God? Is thankfulness really but the deep, contented breath of peacefulness? Is this why God asks us to give thanks even when things look a failure? When there doesn’t seem much to give thanks for?
Questions to really ponder.Thankfulness the breath of peacefulness...
The thanks began for the thin things, the wafer things that almost weren’t, and the way the people of God give thanks is first to give thanks for even the meager and unlikely.
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Authentic thanks is always for all things, because our God is a God
kneading all things into a bread that sustains.
knew that which didn’t look like anything good might yield good, all in the hand of a good God.
He who is grateful for little is given much laughter … and it’s counting
the ways He loves, this is what multiplies joy.
God, cause me to know it afresh today: the life that counts blessings discovers its yielding much more than it seems. And my life yields most when I yield most to You.
His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory. 1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB
I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts.
He means to rename us — to return us to our true names, our truest selves. He means to heal our soul holes.
And yet since we took a bite out of the fruit and tore into our own souls, that drain hole where joy seeps away, God’s had this wild secretive plan. He means to fill us with glory again.
Grace, it means “favor,” from the Latin gratia. It connotes a free readiness. A free and ready favor.
God of all gifts, thank You. Thank You! For the grace to choose to see. I choose to say yes today to all You give. Do the work in me — I want to more fully live.
But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: … the mystery of his divine being. Romans 1:19 – 20 MSG
Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks. The pride of thanklessness always comes before the fall. God makes Himself plain and there’s no excuse — but they did not give Him thanks.
When I refuse to give God thanks? God lets our very lives become refuse.
Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise — the fruit of lips that openly profess his name. Hebrews 13:15
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”5
And I wonder if this is why thanks is the highest form of thought — because this is always the right order of things: Us laid low. Before God on High.
The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning “grace.” Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks. He took the bread and knew it to be gift and gave thanks.
But there is more, and I read it. Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, envelopes the Greek word for grace, charis. But it also holds its derivative, the Greek word chara, meaning “joy.” Joy. Ah … yes. I might be needing me some of that. That might be what the quest for more is all about — that which Augustine claimed, “Without exception … all try their hardest to reach the same goal, that is, joy.”6
Deep chara joy is found only at the table of the euCHARisteo — the table of thanksgiving. I sit there long … wondering … is it that simple?
The holy grail of joy is not in some exotic location or some emotional mountain peak experience. The joy wonder could be here! Here, in the messy, piercing ache of now, joy might be — unbelievably — possible! The only place we need see before we die is this place of seeing God, here and now.
I whisper it out loud, let the tongue feel these sounds, the ear hear their truth. Charis. Grace. Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving. Chara. Joy. A triplet of stars, a constellation in the black.
Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; Like a weaned child rests against his mother, My soul is like a weaned child within me. Psalm 131:2 NASB
What is the answer to anxiety?
Our worlds reel unless we rejoice. A song of thanks steadies everything. The answer to anxiety is the adoration of Christ.
The answer to anxiety is always to exalt Christ.
Calvin said that. “If we compare a hawk with the residue of the whole world, it is nothing. And yet if so small a portion of God’s work ought to ravish us and amaze us, what ought all his works do when we come to the full numbering of them?”11
Pisteuo is used more than two hundred times in the New Testament, most often translated as “belief.” But it changes everything when I read that pisteuo ultimately means “to put one’s faith in; to trust.” Belief is a verb, something that you do.
“Jesus replied, ‘This is the work (service) that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on,
and have faith in His Messenger]’ “ (John 6:29 AMP). That’s my daily work, the work God asks of me? To trust.
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Romans 8:32
Hurry always empties a soul.
Life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.
“Levi …” The Farmer sets a stack of sun-warm cobs on the table and turns. “Just slow down — take your time on each cob. Do it well.” He runs his fingers slowly across all the kernels of gold. “Just go slow — so you can get it all.”
It’s strange how the mind works. The mind would rather fret about the future or pine over the past — so the mind can cling to
its own illusion of control. But the current moment? It cannot be controlled. And what a mind can’t control, it tends to discount. Brush past … over. It’s the battle plan of the enemy of the soul — to keep us blind to this current moment, the one we can’t control, to keep us blind to Him, the One who controls everything.
What if all our running around is only our trying to run away from God—the great I am, present in the present moment?
What if I woke to now and refused to hurry because I didn’t want to refuse God?
What if I didn’t discount this moment but counted it for what it is — God here? It is only the present moment alone that holds the possibility of coming into the presence of God. Look...
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In God, there is no time, only eternity — or more simply, only now. His name is I am. Here — wherever my feet are — is where I can love Him.
