Finally, here we are in the last month of the year 2023. What are those
nostalgic moments you want to celebrate or carry forward? Is your heart filled
with gratitude or regrets? Are you bereaving the loss of your loved one? Each
of us are fighting a unique battle to survive yet have found grace to survive
and exist.
Have you found a reason to be thankful and grateful? If not for anything, we need to be thankful for the gift of life. The Bible says, "Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!". Your existence is the greatest miracle and a gift from God. We are all usually excited over our material possessions. We live in a time where people are less thankful and feel more entitled for rights and privileges. Harvard business review found that higher-power people express less gratitude because they feel more entitled for favours and benefits from others based on their elevated standing in the hierarchy. Lower-power people, however, express more gratitude to cultivate stronger relationships with powerful people. Even here we find categorisation based on the above study. It looks like the poor and the needy are expected to be more grateful.
Being thankful and expressing your gratitude displays the state of your heart. It is crucial that we express our gratitude to one another we live with and most importantly to God. Your life is a gift from God, what you do with it changes your destiny. There are many benefits to being grateful. Gratitude is good for your psychological well-being, your relationships, possibly even your physical health and most importantly your spiritual well-being. However, the truth is that some people have more grateful dispositions than others. For some of us, gratitude just doesn’t come that easy.
Usually, we can easily find more reason to complain and grumble, but it takes careful thoughtfulness to appreciate and express our gratitude. In the Bible it is recorded of Jesus' parable about the prayer of a tax collector and a Pharisee. The Pharisee expressed his thankfulness by doing this Prayer, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like other people — greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I get.’. The tax collectors in Jesus’ period are counted as corrupt and morally degraded people. This tax collector beat his chest and asked, “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even raise his eyes to heaven but kept striking his chest and saying, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’. This parable tells us that we are all sinners struggling with regrets, guilts and consequences. Some are spiritually arrogant like the Pharisee, but few willingly seek to be transformed. There is hope in Christ because we can find forgiveness from our sins when we confess our wrongdoings and receive Him in our hearts. The first thing that fills our heart is love and gratitude and we live our lives intentionally thanking God and one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment