With A Grateful Heart

As  2010 draws to a close, I realize how much the Lord has done for me this past year. He has done so much for me every year but somehow, this year has seen an acceleration of things pertaining to ministry for me. And yet, I see that this is just the beginning, the touching of the tip of the iceberg and I have not even begun to scratch at the surface just yet. My heart is grateful to the Lord, not so much for what He has done for me in terms of how much He has given me or how much He has blessed me. Indeed, for those things I am grateful as well. More than anything, I think I am eternally grateful to Him for where He has taken me out of. I know without a shadow of a doubt that my life would have been a horrible mess with me spiralling downwards in depression or something in that vicinity, had it not been for the grace, mercy and love of my Lord to reach down to me and pull me out of my muck and mire. He not only pulled me out of that, but also placed my feet firmly on solid rock, the rock of Yeshua or Jesus Christ. 


In return, I have nothing to give Him except for my thanks and my worship and my praise and my life. So, while I listened to Amy Grant's El Shaddai tonight, I am overwhelmed by the unchangingness of my Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the One who is and is to come, the I Am. I am overwhelmed that He remains faithful when I am not. And I am struck by shame when I think that I dare to pout thinking that I should have this and that when I should just raise my hands up in praise to Him for where He has taken me out from and for what He has done for me on the cross. As it says in Psalms 50:14, offer to God thanksgiving and pay your vows to the Most High. What I understand from it is that the one thing we can give Him that we are obligated to give Him (vows) is our thanksgiving. We owe Him thanks and yet how many of us do that? I think it is easier to ask and ask and ask and then when we don't get what we want in the time we want it, we shake our fist at God and get upset at Him. Yet, how many of us actually thank Him for what He has already given us?


Yeshua healed 10 lepers and only one came back to thank Him. I am struck by how much I ask from Him and appalled by how little I thank Him. When we thank Him, we place our focus on what He has given us already and the blessings around us but when we do not thank Him and keep asking Him for things we do not have, we focus only on the negative and we forget from where our blessings come. Therefore, we take the Lord for granted and forget that God is God and He does not have to give us anything and with one word He can take from us our life. Yet, we tend to minimize His immensity and awesomeness to make Him like one of us. God is God, the maker of the universe, the creator of life, so who are we to think that He is like us? 


Thanksgiving is a vow or a debt we owe God. He owes us nothing and yet we have a different perspective of things and think that He owes us this and that when in fact we are the ones who owe Him everything. Give thanks with a grateful heart, not just with our lips. As we close this year by celebrating with loved ones, let us make a resolution to give thanks to our God all the time and every time we open our mouth and with a grateful heart. Whether we receive or not all that we want from Him, let us remember that He has already given us all of Him and we need to thank Him from the bottom of our hearts.