Jennifer’s Reviews > One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Grace > Status Update

The fast have spiritually slow hearts.

"Stay calm, enter the moment, give thanks. Only in the slowing, the sitting down at the table, when His hands held the bread and the thanks fell from His tongue, do the open-eyed, the wide-eyed, see the Face they face.

Stress is the antithesis of stress. "Oh, the joys of those who trust The Lord." I can't fill up with joy until I learn how to trust. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow." The full life, the one with spilling joy and peace, happens only as I come to trust the caress of the Lover, who never burdens with shame or self-condemnation but strokes with grace.

Chesterton-"-I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder." The world needs fewer complaints and more thanks--those engaged in the highest thoughts. Thanking is the highest form of thinking! This is the art of life-to keep awake to the wonders in His Word and this world?

All the wickedness in the world begins with an act of forgetting.

"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God not gave thanks to him..as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done." It's the thankless ness that stirs the full wrath of God. Our fall is always a failure to give thanks. The pride of thanklessness always comes before the fall.

To choose to live as one filling with His grace? Choosing to fill with all He freely gives and fully live-with glory and grace and God?

The life that counts it's blessings discovers its yielding more than it seems.

Authentic thanks is always for all things, because our God is a God kneading all things into a bread that sustains. To bring the sacrifice of thanksgiving means to sacrifice our understanding of what is beneficial and thank God for everything because He is benevolent. A sacrifice by definition is a sacred thing. We give thanks to God not because of how we feel but because of who He is.

The first time thanksgiving is mentioned in Scripture, the Thanksgiving offering was part of the peace offering. Could it be-no one receives the peace of God without giving thanks to God?