Gratitude: A Dare to Cultivate Joy

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Ann Voskamp: It’s miraculous grace, grace upon God’s kind, grace that you are here, that you are alive in this moment, my fine farmer husband and I’m going to pause to clarify I once shared in Australia and those dear Aussie women’s after I had spent the whole afternoon sharing about my farmer husband, were so concerned for me and my former husband. So I’m here in Indianapolis to say my farmer husband and I, we have, we have seven kids and our youngest, little, one, teeny, tiny, nine year old Shiloh. When Shiloh wakes up in the morning, she comes and she finds me. She crawls up on my lap, and I kiss her forehead, and I always say to her, honey, today is not just a good day. It’s a grace day. And then she whispers back to be alive because Shiloh. Shiloh was born with a congenital heart defect, and she has come through three open heart surgeries. And if the Lord doesn’t dramatically intervene, otherwise, shiloh’s heart will begin to fail, and she will need a new heart, a heart transplant. So we know in every fiber of our being, every single day today is not just a good day. Today is a grace day, a gift day from God to be alive. We as a family, often return back to that poem from G K Chesterton. It says, Here dies another day during which I’ve had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me and with tomorrow begins another Why am I allowed to why in the first place do we get the miraculous grace of today as a gift from God? Why should we be allowed to so much of our lives we live with entitlement that we deserve another day, whenever we live with that concept of deserving, we are destroying joy in God, gratitude to God. We are allowed to only by the great grace of a great God for you, the miracle of you, exactly you, just as you are, to ever exist. Our sovereign God had to have your mama out of 7 billion people, she had to meet your dad. And he got brave, and he asked her out on a first date. And get this? She said yes, and that was kind of a miracle of grace on its own. And then she said yes the second time, but this is where it gets. Really mind blowing. Our sovereign God had to have every single one of your ancestors in every branch of your whole family tree going back hundreds and 1000s of generations, every single one of them had to have these extra two cells, exact two cells meet all the way down the chain to result in the precise miraculous making of exactly You, and for all of that, exactly you to exist here in this moment. I’m going to quote the math people who are better at mathing than I am. Quote, it’s the probability of 2.5 million people getting together. That’s about the whole population of San Diego, anybody from San Diego or Southern California, you’re right. Okay, the whole population of San Diego getting together each to play a game of dice with a trillion you tracking. I know it’s hard math, and the math a trillion sided dice, and all 2.5 million of those people would roll that trillion sided dice and all exactly land. The number two, what are the odds that you exactly you and who you are sitting hear this today, the best way to express that, the only odds of that are, God. I. I say it with me today, my life is a miraculous gift of grace from God. It is a rare and miraculous gift just to even get to exist. And this afternoon, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude to a good God that worked through all of time and history, through all branches of family trees, for us to have a fourth

son named Malachi,

who married a beautiful young girl named Hannah, who loves Jesus with all of her heart and for all the right exact DNA to create their first baby, our first grandbaby, Theodore. And theodore’s very name means gift of God. It is such a gift day, a grace day that we would even get to exist at all, Hannah, I called you up here really. I mean, does every grandmother, grandmother want to like, here’s my grandbaby. But I really called you up here because I have a question for you, Hannah, if I offered you this afternoon a million dollars? Would you take it? Yes, I think I would. You would Okay. And what would you say if I gave you a million dollars? You’d say, thank you. Your mama raised you well. You’d say, thank you. Okay. Hannah in my pocket, let’s just pretend I had a million dollars. There’s only one string attached. I will give you the million dollars today, Hannah. The only catch is you don’t get to get up tomorrow. You don’t get to kiss your sweet babies. You don’t get to take deep breath into your lungs. You don’t get to pray for another person to come know the saving knowledge of Jesus. Okay, Hannah, would you take the million dollars? But the only catch is you don’t get to get up tomorrow. No, no, no, you wouldn’t exactly that. Do you get up every morning and realize today is such a priceless gift from God that all I could do is say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Hannah. When we get up tomorrow morning, we remember Hannah saying, No way today is worth the grace and kindness of the Lord that we get to breathe is worth more than all the cheap money in the world, do we live with a constant posture of gratitude? Thank you, Lord, thank You, Lord, thank You, Lord. I’m so with you. I know that every one of us sitting here, we’re all in the middle of tender, painful situations that you’re trying to navigate through in a fallen world, and yet your heart is beating. You feel that. And King Jesus, who sits upon the throne of the universe, has your name, Hannah, Malachi, Anne, Celia Sue Ruth, all etched into the palm of his hands. And it’s a rare and miraculous gift. Even get to exist and enjoy God and glorify Him forever. Why take anything in our lives for granted, instead of taking all of our lives as a gift to take it all as a priceless gift of grace that we wouldn’t trade for anything in the world, every morning as my feet hit the floor in our little my little bedroom back home on the farm, declaring the truth about today, this is the day that the Lord has made, and I’ll do what I will be rejoice and be glad in it. When we turn, I don’t know if you have your scripture with you, we turn to the book of Nehemiah and read what where there’s that dedication of the wall of Jerusalem. When the Israelites come to Jerusalem, the word tells us Nehemiah 12 to celebrate the dedication with gladness, with thanksgiving and with singing and cymbals and harps and lyres. The Word tells us that Nehemiah brought the leaders of Judah up onto the wall and appointed two great choirs that did what they gave thanks and they offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, for God has made them rejoice with great joy. Nehemiah, 1227, to 43 as the choirs of Thanksgiving sang their thanks around the wall, what they are doing is remembering God. All of their thanking is actually a remembering God’s goodness to protect them and strength. Strengthen them as they rebuilt the wall. See what is happening here in the text, what is happening here in every one of our hearts. Remembering to give thanks is a way to keep remembering God too often, life is like a white sheet of paper and we see one black spot, and we focus on the black spot, and we don’t see the expansive white all of the grace and the goodness of God right here right now for us remembering to give thanks. To give thanks to God in everything, so that you remember God all the time, so that you’re paying attention to God who wants all of our affections, forget to make gratitude a daily part of your life, and you are forgetting God and His grace in your life all the way through the Old Testament. What do we see the Israelites doing? They are a people who remember to give thanks, because this is how they keep remembering the character and the goodness of God. So much of the book of Psalms is the people of God remembering to give thanks to God for all his miraculous gifts of grace in the past, because this is how you remember how a good God is going to provide all the graces you need in the future. Psalms, 136 Give thanks to the Lord for He is good. His steadfast love endures forever. Give thanks to God of gods for his steadfast love endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of lords For his steadfast love endures forever. Now look what they do to him who divided the Red Sea in two. His steadfast love endures forever and made Israel pass through the midst of it for his steadfast love endures forever, and he overthrew Pharaoh and his house in the Red Sea, for his steadfast love endures forever, to him who led his people through the wilderness, for his steadfast love endures forever. Last verse of that psalm Give thanks to the God of heaven for his steadfast love endures forever. It’s right there the people of God are covenanted with God to be a people who remember to thank God. Why? Because it is thanksgiving to God that shapes a theology of trust in God. When you recall all of the ways God has provided for you in the past, you are building trust in His character is good, his heart is for you, and He will provide everything that you need in the future. If you’re in a dark, hard place, if you have trust issues with God, start thanking God in that hard, dark place. Remember to give thanks to God exactly when it is the hardest to because you are remembering that the glory and the goodness of God is still here in this dark. Remembering to give God is a way to keep remembering God and to let God take the bits of your broken and shattered heart and remember you, put you back together again, the remembering of God in thanksgiving is what actually remembers us. Give thanks to God, a good God, for His faithfulness in the past. Not just strengthens your trust in that same good god to provide in the future, but listen to Nehemiah 12 in the text, Nehemiah brought the leaders of Judah up onto the wall, appointed two great choirs and gave thanks, and they offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, for God made them rejoice with great joy, remembering the past with thanks to God is what gives them joy in God right now, with hearts full of thankfulness to God, their hearts are filling with joy. Giving thanks is what gives you joy. The bottom line truth is that we too often get the order wrong. We we don’t actually wait till we’re joyful to finally be grateful. That’s often what happens in the world. Oh, if something good happens when I’m finally happy, then I will be grateful. No, the order is all wrong. God tells us it’s this practice of being grateful that is what makes you joyful. And if God’s people were overflowing with thanks for God’s faithfulness of rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall. How much more should we who live on this side of the cross and the empty tomb be overflowing with thankfulness to Christ, who broke down the dividing wall between us and God. Amen,

thanks to God is what gives us joy in God and His Word tells us, Nehemiah 18, the joy of the Lord is my strength. When you lose your perspective to see something, you can give God thanks for you, then lose your joy. You then lose your strength. And it’s your family that loses it’s. Your people who lose, it’s your testimony to the goodness of a good God in all things that loses. And the people of God in nehemiahs time are not the only ones with their cymbals and tambourines singing their songs of thanksgiving to God to build their trust in God, to strengthen their joy in God. If you go back Exodus, how the people of God were looking for a way out of bondage and oppression in Egypt under Pharaoh, looking for a way out when they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. And you read how, just like we read there in Psalms 136 how God parts the waters of the Red Seas and makes a way where there seems to be no way, so that the people of God who built and held in bondage to Pharaoh, could miraculously escape the approaching Egyptians by walking through the Red Sea on dry ground, miraculous grace. And in the wake of that amazing, miraculous grace, Exodus 1520, to 21 standing there beside Moses, is who Miriam? And what does Miriam do? The word tells us, Miriam took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out with her tambourines dancing. And Miriam answered them, saying, Sing to the Lord. Sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted, both horse and driver. He is hurled to the sea. There’s Miriam so moved by the miraculous grace of God, who himself is the only way that she’s singing Thanksgiving with her tambourine. But do not miss this when Miriam and the Israelite women left Egypt with their families, they had to leave so hastily that they were not even able to do what finish breaking their bread. But instead, they carried this unrisen, unbaked dough out on their backs, though Miriam and all the Israelite women had left Egypt in such a hurry to escape with their very lives, what Miriam and all the women had made sure to certainly have in their hands was there tambourines. Why? Why in the world when the clock is ticking down and we are in a crisis and we have to go, go, go, why would they make sure that they had their tambourines so the Jewish women had little time to prepare their food, they made sure they brought their tambourines because they were prepared to give thanks to God no matter what was up ahead, because they trusted that our God was always working miraculous grace and good out of everything. Miriam and the women ensured that they made time to grab their tambourines, because thanksgiving to God is what feeds our soul. Real joy in God in every wilderness that tempts us to only taste bitterness instead of having complaints at the ready. Do you have your tambourine at the ready? Because just three verses later, right there in Exodus, 1524, three verses later, we read the people murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we drink? Exodus 16, two, next chapter, and the whole congregation of the children murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. That word we translate murmur there is Lun, l, u, w, N, and it means to complain. And it’s the very same word, loon l, u, w, n, that also means to remain all night. To abide all night is the exact same word that we read in Genesis, 3213 and He lodged there that same night, Loon, l, u, w, n, when we complain, we abide in the night. We get stuck in the dark. We lodge ourselves where there is no light. And when we give thanks, we abide in the light of Christ when we give thanks for the miraculous gift of common grace, the miraculous gift of saving grace, the miraculous gift of grace upon grace upon grace, we abide in the glory of God alone. Complain and we abide in the night, give thanks and we abide in God’s glorious light that my sisters, is always the choice before us, doxology or dark. We all get to choose when a situation feels out of control, we have to reach out. Reach out for your instrument to give thanks to God, who is in control and who is always reaching out to hold us if you don’t have a literal tambourine at the ready, dare I say, the next best thing, the next best instrument to have at the ready is a pen to write down you’ve got. Attitude, journal, gift upon gift, miraculous, grace upon grace. Because if you came in here to TGC, W, 24 saying, Lord, what is your will for my life? Thessalonians, 518, says, in everything, give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ, Jesus, concerning you, no matter what, hold on to your instrument of Thanksgiving, so you can hold on to what is truly life giving, which is to know the good character of the good heart of your good God, Martin Luther said, if you want to change the world, pick up a pen. If you want to change your world, pick up a pen and start to write down every day that what you are grateful for, and it will change your world, because it will start to open the eyes of your heart to see the whole expansive grace of God everywhere. Martin Luther also said, quote, Satan hates the use of pens. Why? Because the enemy of your soul doesn’t want you to see the grace of God in the world. He wants you to stay defeated. He wants you to lose your strength and to lose your joy. Look the research, brain scans have shown that to give thanks activates the amygdala and the hippocampus of your brain, the area of your brain that regulates your emotions, emotions like stress and anxiety. And when you feel these emotions of stress and anxiety, your brain releases a stress hormone called cortisol. And when you give thanks, which is activating that amygdala and hippocampus, it regulates the cortisol production in your brain, which reduces the feelings of anxiety and stress. It is impossible to feel gratitude and fear at the same time. Pick up a pen and wield it like a sword against the enemy and give thanks to God, and you’re giving fear and anxiety and cortisol a kick to the curb, taking captive every thought, making it obedient to Christ, thankful to God, which is exactly what We read in Philippians 46 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with what with thanksgiving, present your request to God that Thanksgiving reduces The stress and anxiety. Give thanks to God, and you’re giving anxiety. It’s eviction notice. Give thanks to God and the emotion, the emotion of gratitude to God, moves out the fear of the things of this world. Too often, most of us are operating out of really two emotions that have grown large in our hearts and minds, either anxious, anxiousness. You don’t have to raise your hand really high. Are you one of the anxious people? Really low. It’s okay, it’s okay. Or you could be operating out of the other emotion. You can really love, really love, anger. Anger is the other emotion. Those are the two. Those are the two emotions, look at the enemy of our souls. Really tries to expand in our hearts and minds, anger or anxiousness, which never leads us into the joy of the Lord in all the universe, where do we find the joy we all so desperately are seeking? Psalm 1611, tells us you reveal the path of life to me in Your presence is what fullness of joy, what brings you into the joy of His presence is to remember him with thanksgiving to pick up a pen and write down and remember the goodness of God, picking up a pen and writing down your gifts, this gratitude is your grenade to decimate Satan, who always wants to hiss in the middle of the heart. Is your God really good

for me every morning. Hannah’s too. She has the same gratitude journal, my tambourine like instruments, my pen and my gratitude journal, and me writing down gift after gift of gratitude, all of his miraculous grace. It’s just like in the middle of the night, in the middle of the crisis. And the fleeing Miriam’s priority was to reach for her tambourine because she trusted that in the end, she was going to give thanksgiving for the goodness of his way maker, we too believe with every fiber of our being, Faith gives thanks in the middle of the story, in the middle of the story of this hurting relationship in the middle of this story of a challenging health journey, in the middle of this story with a challenging prodigal child, Faith gives thanks in the middle of the story, because when you have enough faith to give thanks to God in the middle of a heart story, You are declaring that you trust God with the whole of the story, if in your gratitude journal, you’re only writing down the gifts that feel good to you you have miscounted. Can you write down the hard things in that gratitude journal? Because you believe that God is working good and redemption, even in these things, when you have faith to give thanks, in the middle of a hard story, you’re declaring that your Creator, God is the word. So he is the author of your story, and the author of the story is the one who has authority. Etymologically, those two words are related. Author has authority. The author of your story has the authority to write your story his way, his time, for his honor and his glory, and you can trust that the good author of your story, he only ultimately writes good stories, one of your most miraculous weapons against hopelessness in a grieving world is gratefulness to a good God at home on the farm. Don’t laugh at me. I literally have a basket with three tambourines. I bought this one in Israel. I wanted a collection of tambourines to remind me a metaphor, to always keep my instrument, my pen, my heart close at the ready, because I trust that no matter what happens, there is going to happen to be more than enough opportunities to give God thanks for his good grace, to taste and see the Lord the land of the living. This last season, as a family, we’ve been facing some difficult challenges and saying to each other simply this one word over and over again, white horse. White Horse. White Horse, which refers to an old story out of South America how a White Stallion had unexpectedly rode into the paddocks of an old man’s village, and the villagers danced around and congratulated this old man on the great good of suddenly owning this beautiful White Stallion. And the old man had only offered this we don’t know all things. All we can see or say is that God’s ways are always good. All is Grace, and he’s redemptively working all things into a good gift. Then the man’s only son broke his leg when thrown from the White Stallion, and the town folks all bemoaned the terrible that the stallion had brought to this family and the old million only offered. We do not know all things. All we can see or say is that God’s ways are always good. All is Grace, and he’s redemptively working all things into a good gift. And then a draft for a war took all

the young men off to battle, except the young son

with a broken leg, and the villagers all danced and proclaimed the now seemingly good of that white horse. But the old man said, only this, we don’t know all things we can all we can see or say is that God’s ways are always good. All is Grace, and he is redemptively working all things into a good gift throughout this last season as a family, as one difficult, tender, confusing thing unfolded into the next. We kept saying, as a family, white horse, white horse, white horse. Say it with me. White Horse, white horse, white horse, which is to say we aren’t God. We don’t know all things. All we can see or say is that God is always good. All is Grace, and he is redemptively working all things into a good gift, no matter what. We are to hold on to our tambourines, so that we will be ready to give God thanks for all of sufficient grace and goodness in the middle of our valleys, in the middle of our hard stories and our dark nights, because it is a rare miraculous gift just to get to even exist, to be in his presence, which is full. This of joy, and we turn to the New Testament, to Jesus, we see what that is, exactly what he did in his deepest Valley on the night when Jesus was betrayed, when he sits down at the table before going to the cross, where he’s about to hold all the sin, hold all the injustice, all the loss, all the grief, all the wrongs of the world, and every last bit of all the bad, broken and busted that this fallen world has ever known. What does Jesus do? Luke, 2219 and Jesus, he took bread, he gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them, If Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, chose to give thanks for the cup of suffering and out of a cosmos of possibilities, Jesus chose Thanksgiving as his preferred weapon to face and fight the dark. Do we have any better way than giving thanks to God to fight against the dark and fight for joy in God. If Jesus can give thanks, even on the night he was brutally betrayed before the greatest suffering in all of history, all for the joy set before him at the cross, what if we practice giving thanks to God in the midst of everything? Because Giving thanks is what sets God before us, who is all our joy in the original language he gave thanks. Reads eucaristeo. Write that word down. Eucarasteo, e, U, C, H, A, R, i, s, t, e, o. The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning grace. Jesus took the bread of suffering and saw it as Grace and gave thanks. But there’s more Eucharist, yes, it has that word grace in it, charis, but it also holds its derivative of the Greek word Kara, meaning joy. Where can we find that joy that we are all so deeply longing for, that we all keep seeking? That’s what it says right here in the text, deep Cara, Joy is found only at the table of Eucharist Dayo, the table of Thanksgiving, where you take what God has given, whatever God has given, and you receive it as Grace, and you give thanks to God because you trust God is going to do deep, redemptive work through even this. There it is. The height of your car. Joy is dependent upon the depths of your youcharisteo, Thanksgiving, which is to say, joy in God is always, always, always possible, because there is always, always, always so many things to thank a good God for. Charis, grace you. Charis tale, Thanksgiving. Chara, joy, my very first vivid memory is being four years old and standing at a chair pulled up by the kitchen sink beside my mama in the farmhouse, washing dishes and looking out that kitchen window Sink. My 18 month old baby sister, Amy, stepped in front of a service truck that didn’t see her, and Amy was run over and crushed and killed in front of my mother and I, and because of that trauma, I grew up to be a very terrified little girl, but picking up a pen and starting writing down all of God’s good gifts and graces you can’t simultaneously feel fear and gratitude at the same time. It radically changed my life. I began to see there’s a good God here present. Count all the ways he loves you. Never stop counting all of his good gifts and grace. And then only three years ago, in the very same farmyard where my little sister, Amy, was killed in front of my mother and I, and just exactly like my father, my sister was killed, my father was run over by a tractor and crushed and killed. Though the grief may slay me, yet I will give thanks to a good God. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord and I will give will give thanks anyways, always in all things, because His ways are higher and better, more full of love than any of my ways. We don’t know all things. All we can see or say is. Is that God’s ways are always good, all his grace and he’s redemptively working all things into a good gift. It was Tolkien who said a divine punishment is also a divine gift. Let that sit there for a moment. It was Stephen Colbert who, as a young teen, lost both his father and his brother in a plane crash, and he shared through tears, his own paraphrase of Tolkien, what punishments of God are not gifts. What seeming punishments of a sovereign good God are not actually gifts from a sovereign good God, which is to say, everything is a gift from God. All is Grace. We can only give thanks in all things when we realize that we and God define good gifts and good things very differently. Our definition of a good thing is whatever puts us in a really feel good position. God’s definition of a good thing is whatever puts us in a position to really need him. Our definition of a good thing is whatever makes for easy conditions. God’s definition of a good thing is whatever makes for sanctifying conditions. Our definition of a good thing is that it meets whatever expectations I envision God’s definition of a good thing is whatever makes me rely on him for all my provisions. Ultimately, we can define blessings as what makes us feel fine. God defines blessings as what is going to refine us and make us more like him and joy in God will define our lives to the extent that we accept how God defines a gift and a good thing differently than how we define a gift and a good thing. It’s been a gut wrenching, bewildering wrestle for me how to count that a gift which I have countless times wished never happened, but this, this is what I’ve come to rest in. God is always lavishly good, and we are always lavishly loved. Gratitude for the gift of your story means being grateful for all the pages of your story, because to tear out some of the pages of your story would tear up God’s sovereign story of you.

And ultimately, what griefs in life are not gifts, if those griefs move you closer to comfort other grieving hearts. If those griefs move you closer to the comfort of God and that cross, that cross on Calvary hill with those steel nails driven right through it, it binds the heart of God to all the willing and wounded hearts. And what heals us is that God suffers with us too. The people who choose to give thanks still give space for grief, but they don’t give themselves over to grieving without hope. The truth is, whatever you focus on is what you’re formed into be consumed by despair, and despair will consume you, which is what Jesus meant when he said, For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. For all who take up bitterness will perish by the bitterness. All those who take up cynicism will perish by the cynicism, be consumed with God’s grace, and the grace of God will let nothing else consume you. Be one who takes up your pen and uses a sword to fight for joy to write down the gifts and grace of God and we become God’s gifts and grace and God’s joy out into a heartbroken world you may be. Here, sitting here today, thinking, Well, I am thankful for the miraculous gifts, grace of Jesus Christ and Him saving me at the cross, but thankful in this crisis, thankful for this crisis. We’re thankful in this chronic heartbreak, thankful for it. Thankful in a situation I never expected or dreamed of after my father was killed. It’s really hard to think about tambourines and anyone dancing on tables. I mean, our tables were filled with with bouquets of sympathy and all these vases of blooms that were sent to bring comfort. And you know what you can feel like everyone else is dancing at the party of their lives, carrying around big bouquets of flowers for winning at their one miraculous life, winning at family, winning at close relationships, winning at dreams, winning at a really life tied up pretty and neat with a bow, and You can feel like you’re sitting in a dark place where it feels like your life is just life just keeps hammering you all to smithereens. And you can keep buying yourself flowers. Sorry, couldn’t help myself, but you can feel like everything’s just hammering at the blooms of your life, you can you can feel like all you’ve got are the thorns that you were given a bouquet that really doesn’t have a whole lot of blooms on it, but more thorns. Can you learn the special practice of giving thanks for all of the thorns? Habakkuk, 317 in the Easy English Bible reads quote, whatever happens, I will continue to thank the Lord. If there are no flowers on the fig trees, if there are no grapes on the vines, if there are no olives on the olive trees. If there are no crops in the fields, if the sheep are dying in the fields, if there are no cows on the farms, I will still give thanks to the Lord, which is to say, even in the hardest, darkest seasons, there is still a way to look and remember God’s goodness, to look to the cross of Christ and be overwhelmed with gratitude for the salvation and Resurrection out of a wreckage that is ours. And to daily grab your gratitude journal and your tambourines and count the gifts of miraculous grace upon grace upon grace, and sing thanksgiving to God, because that is what the practice of our faith is. We give thanks to God, not because of how we feel, but because of who he is, because the practices of our faith is that we can find ways to give thanks even for the tender thorns in our lives, because those thorns are miraculously piercing us our heart right to the very heart of Christ, you can find a way to be thankful in the midst of the thorns, even that thorn in your side, when you let the thorns miraculously drive you into the deeper comfort of Christ. It’s the thorns in your sides that can miraculously affix you to the pure side of Jesus, so you can be miraculously shaped and formed more like Jesus Himself. It’s the thorns in your life that make the comfort of Christ your absolute everything, the Lamb of God or a crown of thorns for you. How can we not even give Him thanks for all of the thorns that press us into him? Psalms 104 to five. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courtyards with praise. Give thanks to him. Bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting, and his faithfulness is to all generations. Enter into His gates. Enter into the presence of the joy of the Lord with thanksgiving. Eucharist, Dayo, it is a rare and miraculous gift just to even get to exist in the presence of the joy of the Lord. Might we close in prayer? Abba Father, forgive us, Lord for not giving thanks for the thorns. Lord, forgive us, Lord for the ways. We have not been a people of gratitude, but a people of entitlement. Lord, if we want to end. Enter into your presence, that we enter into your presence through the gates of thanksgiving. Lord, you know in each one of our hearts that one situation that we’re facing right now that we don’t know how to give you thanks for, but giving thanks to you, Lord right now for that situation is to declare that you are sovereign over that situation, that you are redemptively working all things together for good Lord, make us into a people who do not have complaints at the ready, but have our tambourines at the ready, a people who will go up on the wall and give thanks to our God that we will declare to a world that is filled with the hissing of the enemy saying, really is your God still good? That we would be a people with our tambourines in hand, our pens in hand, fighting to see your grace and your gifts, that the enemy may not steal our strength, which is our joy in you, we just thank You Lord that You have made us into a people covenanted to you to remember your goodnesses, that we might be remembered in Jesus, Christ, the only one who ever loved us to death at the cross and brought us back to the realest life in him. How can we not be a people of great joy and great Thanksgiving, And all God’s people said, Amen.