“The Power of Gratitude!”

By Lou Coleman-Yeboah

(EMPIRE NEWS NETWORK (ENN)— “How good it is to give thanks to you, O Lord! To sing praises to your name, O Most High! To proclaim your loving kindness every morning, and your faithfulness every night…” [Psalm 92:1-5].

I extend to each of you today an invitation. It is an invitation to cultivate gratefulness as your basic attitude toward life. It is an invitation to cultivate gratefulness as the very ground of your being. To be grateful is to recognize, acknowledge, and accept that we are a recipient of a gift – life.

You should be thankful for your families, health, food, and even a glass of water. Thank God for the simple things. You can even be thankful for the heartaches, the pains, and the suffering. [Romans 8:28] says, “All things work together for good…” That is, the thing itself is not good, but it is God Who is working all things together for good.

Do you want to live on the highest level of life? Cultivate the attitude of gratitude always and in all things I don’t care how bad, difficult, dark, or mysterious things get; take the ultimate step of faith and say, “God, You’re greater than this, and I thank You.”

Thankful people are happy people. “Well,” you say, “if I had something to be thankful for, I’d be happy.” You have missed the point! You do have something to be thankful for. You have life. You have Christ. If you didn’t have anything else but Jesus, you would have enough to praise God for all eternity.

You may say, “But my circumstances are not good.” The apostle Paul was in prison when he wrote this, yet he was rejoicing in the Lord. Gratefulness turned his prison to a palace, but ungratefulness can turn your palace to a prison. I’m telling you, the attitude of gratitude will change your life.

You’re not just simply to be thankful one day a year. One day is not long enough to thank God for all that He’s given you. His blessings come daily. [Psalm 68:19] says, “Blessed be the Lord, Who daily loadeth us with benefits…” Every day God has brand new blessings for you, and every day ought to find you thanking God. Every prayer that you pray ought be salted with thanks.

In everything give thanks. Not in some things, but in all things. Everything, every area of life is to be the subject of thanksgiving. There’s so much to be thankful for! Anything good that you have has come from God. You didn’t get it by luck, ingenuity, hard work, wit, or wisdom. It is proper to thank God for it.

Understand, living with gratitude is not a human way to live, not a natural way to live – it’s supernatural. And this kind of thankfulness only comes out of a vital relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.  The Holy Spirit is the substance of it, the source of it, and the strength of it. We are to be filled with the Spirit, and we are to be giving thanks. And that’s the only way we can do it!

[P.S.] Being grateful does not protect us from rejection, pain, or sorrow; it doesn’t protect us from any of that. But if we are able to incorporate gratitude into our basic attitude toward life and make it a part of the ground of our being, it gives us another way of responding to what is taking place.

I tell you, what a wonderful way to start the day and invite gratitude in!