Rewards of Living a Thank-Filled Life

Thankfulness is more than a feeling—it’s a lifestyle that unlocks joy, hope, worship, and spiritual growth. In this uplifting episode, Pastor Chris Teien walks through Psalm 100 to show how living a life filled with thanksgiving brings real rewards: deeper joy, stronger faith, meaningful worship, and a hopeful future. Find out how cultivating gratitude can transform your daily life and your relationship with God.

Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2285086/episodes/16335671

Key Points:

1. Thanksgiving leads to joy – Shouting joyfully to the Lord stems from recognizing His goodness and faithfulness (Psalm 100:1).
2. Thanksgiving opens doors to worship – Grateful hearts lead to serving and worshiping God with gladness (Psalm 100:2).
3. Thanksgiving leads to expressions through song – Singing joyfully to God becomes a natural overflow of gratitude (Psalm 100:2).
4. Thanksgiving rests in security – Knowing we belong to God as His sheep gives us confidence and peace (Psalm 100:3).
5. Thanksgiving experiences God’s presence – Coming before God with thanksgiving draws us deeper into His courts and presence (Psalm 100:4).
6. Thanksgiving sees hope for the future – God's unfailing love and faithfulness continue for every generation (Psalm 100:5).

Personal Stories from Pastor Chris:
 Pastor Chris shares practical prayer tools like ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) and memorable life stories about learning gratitude, helping others, and finding joy even in hard seasons. He highlights a moving moment when he received personal permission from singer Micah Tyler to share the song “Different,” illustrating how worship and thanksgiving shine even in life’s toughest challenges.

Notable Quotes:

• “Thankfulness fuels your joy, strengthens your worship, and anchors your hope.”
• “Sometimes we pray for God to change our circumstances, but He wants to change us through them.”
• “Gratitude is one of the most life-transforming habits you can cultivate.”

Actionable Takeaways:

1. Heart-level reflection: Spend time today thanking God not just for blessings but for who He is.
2. Daily-life application: Begin every prayer this week with thanksgiving before asking for anything.
3. Spiritual step or challenge: Create a gratitude journal and list three things you’re thankful for each day.
4. Practical next step: Express thanks to someone who has made a difference in your spiritual life.

Scripture References:

• Psalm 100:1–5 – Call to joyful thanksgiving and worship
• Exodus 23:5 – Help others with burdens
• 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18 – Give thanks in all circumstances
• Psalm 23 – Trust in the Good Shepherd’s provision
• Galatians 6:2 – Carry one another’s burdens

Keywords:
 Thankfulness, gratitude, worship, Christian joy, Psalm 100, God’s faithfulness, hope for the future, Christian living, gratitude journaling, spiritual growth

Closing Statement:
 Living a thank-filled life draws you closer to God, fills your heart with joy, strengthens your worship, and gives you hope that no circumstance can take away. Cultivate a heart of gratitude and experience the powerful rewards of walking closely with Christ.

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I hope this message helps you understand and apply God’s Word. Find sermon transcripts at Well.faith, learn more at ChrisTeien.com, or come visit us at Rockwell Church in Virginia, Minnesota. If this message encouraged you, I’d love to hear from you at wellfaith24@gmail.com.

Transcript

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Chris T 0:16

I want to talk about being thankful. So if I do this correctly, I'll be able to share with you some stuff about being thankful, and then maybe give you a few minutes at the end to maybe share why you're thankful. So that's been meaningful in the past as people have passed around the microphone to share what they're thankful for. And it is such a great thing to publicly give the Lord thanksgiving and praise. Not just for the bad times, good times, but for who he is, for uh the approachability of our God, for the uh holiness of our God, the consistency of our God. We are thankful for all of those things. So we're just gonna look at uh five verses in Psalm 100 to look at the rewards of living a thank-filled life. So the rewards of living a thank-filled life. Do you live a thank-filled life? Do you live a life that is quick to give thanks to God each day? Do you start each day by maybe uh the formula, the acts of prayer or the accounts of prayer? Those are two different ones. Or have you ever heard of those before? So they're prayer formulas. So some people pray the Lord's prayer, which is good, but acts of prayer. So you start out adoration, adoring, adoring God, uh, telling him how wonderful he is. So a adoration, and then confession, confession of any known sin, and confession of falling short, confessing that you don't measure up before God, but you do through Jesus, confession, and then ACT, thanksgiving, thanking God for what he's doing, what he's been doing, what he's gonna do, uh, for your confidence in him, for his word, thanking him, and then you pray for the stuff, supplication. So adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, acts, ACTS of prayer. Otherwise, you can do the accounts of prayer where you add in another C of consecration where you're praying, setting yourself apart to the Lord, uh, telling him that you're available to be used by him, uh, handing your life over, recommitting your life to Christ, adoration, confession, consecration, thanksgiving, supplication, asking for stuff. So many times we go straight for the stuff, and we pray, God, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me. And then when God gives us what we pray for, we're often not very thankful. We are quick to, you know. You ever made a bargain with God before? Like, Lord, if you do this, I promise I'll go to Africa and be a missionary. So if you make a promise like that, you should. Actually, I never did that, but I did say, Lord, if you give me this job, I promise to tithe. And so you should keep your promises. Be careful when you make a commitment to God, He'll hold you to it. So, alright, the first reward is Thanksgiving leads to joy. So, shout to joy, all the earth. So, this psalm happens to be at the end of some other psalms that are praising God, and uh the book of Psalms is actually a hymn book, and in the psalm, they're talking about going to the temple to worship the Lord, going into his courts. Um, so they would take a trip to go to the temple to worship the Lord, and it is a psalm to prepare people's hearts for that, to motivate them to be thankful, to motivate us to be thankful, to come together as a church and be thankful. It's one thing to be thankful on your own, it's another thing to come together as the family, as the local body of Christ, as the church and be thankful. Shout to joy, shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth. When we're thankful to God, when we're thankful for the things that he's done and the things that he's doing, when we have like recounted all the ways he's been faithful to us, then we can look back with confidence and say, Well, I don't know how I'm gonna get through it in the future, but I know God has been faithful in the past, and as we shout out joy to the Lord, you ever get excited about stuff and you're like, Yes, Lord, thank you so much. Shout with joy to the Lord. God likes that, God wants that. You know, just being like just showing gratitude, just being thankful can make a difference in your life. A few years back in the Wall Street Journal, uh, there was an article that says, a growing body of research has tied an attitude of gratitude with a number of positive emotional and physical health benefits. Adults who frequently feel grateful have more energy, more optimism, more social connections, and more happiness than those who do not, according to studies conducted over the past decade. They're also less likely to be depressed, envious, greedy, or alcoholics. They earn more money, sleep more soundly, exercise more regularly, and have greater resistance to viral infections. Now researchers are finding that gratitude brings similar benefits in children and adolescents. Studies also show that kids who feel and act grateful tend to be less materialistic, get better grades, set higher goals, complain of fewer headaches and stomach aches, and feel more satisfied with their friends, families, and schools than those who don't. The research concluded a lot of these findings are things we learned in kindergarten or our grandmother told us, but now we have scientific evidence to prove them that the key is not to leave it on the Thanksgiving table. I want some of that. So I want all those things that were mentioned in there. And gratitude leads to that. Being thankful leads to that. So being thankful leads to joy. Being thankful gives us hope in the future. Being thankful adjusts our attitude and helps us to not keep looking at all the bad stuff, but to look at the good. I have a tendency to say, and I don't know if it's appreciated or not, when things are going bad, I always seem to say, either to myself or sometimes I say it out loud, it could always be worse. And then sometimes I start to list ways that it could be worse, and most people don't find that helpful, but it could be worse. So in every situation you're in, no matter how bad it is, it could always be worse. So I'm thankful that I've gone through hard stuff. God has always been there. God has gotten me through the hard stuff, some of the stuff's still hard. But um I still have the Lord. So I'm still here. You're still here. Together we go through this life. We wake up in the morning and we say, God, we're alive, we're still here. What's your purpose? What's your plan for our lives? How can we obey you? How can we honor you? How can we pursue you? It's exciting to be able to pursue God and it leads to joy. Thanksgiving, giving thanks leads to joy. Number two, thanksgiving opens doors to worship. Worship the Lord with gladness. If you're following along in your Bible and you have an older translation, uh it says to serve the Lord. And here it says worship the Lord. And if you look at the Hebrew word, it is serving as an act of worship. So in the newer translations, they went for the thought instead of the word. And so it's not doing stuff for God, it's worshiping God and therefore doing stuff. So we serve out of an act of worship because we honor God. I mean, the psalm is about going to worship God in the temple. The psalm is about worshiping God in the temple. So we serve as an act of worship. Out of our worship comes our desire to serve, our love to serve. So we worship God and serve is a result of that. So worship is presenting ourselves to the Lord for a service. We are to pursue God and to worship Him in spirit and in truth. And remember that we are serving and worshiping a great and wonderful holy God. Number three, thanksgiving leads to expressions through song. So thanksgiving is expressed through song. We can listen to songs, we can watch songs, we can sing songs that we know or you know that we've heard. Some people are really into singing, some people aren't. But I was really curious to know how many people really can't sing. You know, and I guess I read somewhere that it said only 2% of the population really can't sing anything at all. Another research thing showed that some people sound better than others because of the shapes of their heads. So it's like, you know, professional athletes are built a certain way, professional singers are built a certain way. But what does the Bible say? It says make a joyful noise to the Lord. So you might not sound like the person on the radio when you sing, but I would bet that they don't sound always like the person on the radio either as they go through all of the sound editing and the computers and everything. I like to call it the Disneyfication of some of the singers. But nonetheless, come before him singing with joy. We are to sing. Have you ever gotten excited? And then you started singing. Mary sang, Moses sang. Um, there's all of these great songs that we can learn that we can express, we can sing with our radio. Um I've been watching, I got the YouTube red uh no commercial YouTube, because the commercials are sometimes really bad. But so now it's saying it's suggesting all sorts of Christian videos that I like. So it'd be like, Do you like this one? Yeah. You like this one? Yeah, you like this one? I really like that one. Do you like this one? Yeah, I really like this one. So yesterday, I'll tell you a little secret. I take advantage of the resources that we have as a church sometimes. So, you know, we have all these TVs that are around for adventure clubs. And then they come to my house afterwards and they're in the closet. So I decided to put them all across the wall in my office. So now I have four big screens all around. And I figured out a way to get them to do stuff that's helpful, like my computer and everything, YouTube. And so I'm watching these songs, they're playing, and this one song came on, and I'd heard it before, but the video in the beginning, the guy's testimony in the beginning, it's like he lists all these reasons why he shouldn't be singing. He lists all these reasons why his life is a mess, why his family's life is a mess, why he should be depressed, why maybe he should be angry at God. And he lists all these things, and then he sings the song, and then he has there's a section about behind the song. I'm like, that is really cool. I would really like to share that with my church today. But I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get sued for using something we don't have a copyright license to. So I think to myself, I wonder if I could contact this person. So I sent him a direct tweet and I said to Micah, Micah Tyler, I said, your quote, different unquote video is really encouraging. How can I get permission to show YouTube video to my church people on Sunday morning? A small church under a hundred people, so they can be inspired by your story and music too. So, and then uh not too long after that, he replies, Man, thank you, and you have my permission. And there's like two hands up like that. So I have permission to show you this. And I could say a lot, but I think what he's gonna say is better than what I could say. So Caleb's gonna get the lights, and I hope that you're encouraged by this.

SPEAKER_03 11:22

I wrote the song different a few years ago, but I feel like the Lord is teaching it to me in a whole new way right now. A few months ago, we found out that my grandmother has blood cancer. And as hard as it's been to watch her lose her hair as she takes her treatments, her faith has remained intact. A few weeks later, Hurricane Harvey came from my hometown and in two days poured 44 inches of rain on my house. As we're in the process of replacing flooring and re-leveling our foundation, we keep waiting on things to get back to normal. And then just a few weeks ago, we found out that my little brother Daniel had stage four colon cancer. After the shock and the tears, our family is preparing to fight by his side as he gets ready to start chemo. And in the midst of all this, the prayer that I kept saying was, Jesus, can you just change these things? Can you stop the cancer? Can you stop the storms? But he's chosen not to stop these things just yet. And I'm finding out that sometimes the best question is not, Jesus, can you change these things around me, but instead, God, can you change me so that I can handle the things that you're walking me through? So I keep singing and praying and believing the words of this song because I know that He is changing me. And that is making all the difference.

SPEAKER_14 12:55

I don't wanna hear anymore, teach me to listen. I don't wanna see anymore, give me a vision that you could move this heart to be dead apart. I don't need to recognize the man in the mirror because I don't wanna trade to play something familiar.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

And him showing up and being faithful back, there's still just these times, just whenever we go through life and things just get hard and things just kind of give us troubles and we just don't know what to do. And there's times where I'll just tell the Lord, I'll just go to him and just say, God, would you make the things around me change? Just so that I can be okay. Like I'm trying my best right now, and I I feel like I'm I'm I'm doing good, but the things around me, man, are just really jacked up and messed up and they're hard right now. And could you just make these things different? And there's times where God answers that prayer by just helping calm some storms around us and fix some things around us, but there's just some times, and I'm learning this right now, that we can't rely on him making everything different around us. There's times where God puts us in situations so that he can make us different, so that we can live inside of the moments that he's put in front of us, so that we can be the change that we feel like needs to happen around us. Um, and so now my prayer is instead of going to him first and saying, God, would you help these things around me? I just say, God, would you prepare my heart? Would you put me together in a way so that I can be the kind of change that I want to see in this world, that I want to live to glorify you with, and that I want to be faithful with in my own life.

SPEAKER_14 17:33

So come and be different. I just want to be different. So could you be different?

Chris T 17:55

All right, so if you were to see that YouTube video, if you looked in all the comments below, you could see person after person saying, Thank you, my child died, thank you, I have cancer, and it was helpful, or thank you, my loved one has cancer, and it helped them. And so um if you read his story too, he was like driving a sausage truck and decided to just give his life totally over to God and go on the road and do music, and so God's using them. But thanksgiving expresses itself through song. We are um God's workmanship, we're created to worship him, and he's given us the ability for us to praise him through song. So maybe you sing the words to the Lord, maybe you listen to the words and think of them and they inspire you. Maybe if you change the stations that you listen to and tune in to things that are more godly, you'll grow through it. But there is thanksgiving expressions through song. Come before him singing with joy. Number four, thanksgiving rests in security. So it also helps with insecurity. But acknowledge that the Lord is God. He made us and we are his. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. And when we think about the fact that God loves us and cares about us enough to send Jesus to have a personal relationship with us, to um help us to keep growing and moving forward in him through the power of the Holy Spirit, when we've got God's word and so many opportunities, and we've got all of these things when we're thankful to God. We are thankful because we can be secure in him. And we asked him to forgive us of our sin and to come into our life and save us when we decided to follow after the Lord, to give our lives to him, to commit our lives to him, then we became adopted as a child of God. We became born again, we became, we are assured heaven. We have all these things. We have the security in the Lord, and we need to acknowledge that the Lord is God and He made us, that He created us, that He knows how we're formed, He knows everything about us, He knows what we think, what we do, the things that we don't measure up in, the things that we really want to do, but we don't have courage to do it. All of these things, God knows, and He wants to guide us and direct us, and we need to keep pursuing Him. He made us and we are His. We are His people, the sheep of His pasture. You know, when you look at sheep, you think they're pretty, you know, they're not the smartest and they're pretty vulnerable, and we trust that the shepherd knows what he's doing. So I trust that somebody I saw recently uh nearby that had shorn his sheep right before winter. I mean, I I think I said this before, maybe in men's Bible study here, but I don't know. I was going down the road and I see these sheep and they're shorn, and I'm thinking to myself, they look cold. I have an extra coat in my car, I should pull over and wrap that little guy up. He looks like he's shivering. Then I did a little research and I saw that if you put your, if you shear your sheep and you stick them out in the winter and they can eat, and then you bring them back in and everything, that they grow better wool and things are supposedly better. But to me it seems kind of rough. But I trust that shepherd knows what he's doing with his sheep. And we need to trust that God knows what he's doing with us when we're following his plan, when we feel like he's left us out in the cold, that he's working. And we need to pursue him, we need to seek him, we need not to be angry or to run from him, but to keep growing in him to trust. And sometimes we want to trust in other things. Sometimes we want to trust in people's advice, sometimes we want to trust in man's wisdom instead of God's word. God's word rightly interpreted, rightly divided. I mean, you can take the Bible and prove just about anything you want if you take it out of context, but we are secure in the Lord, and we should trust in that. Um, you can read Psalm 23 for your devotions today, and the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. You can read that. And then number five, thanksgiving experiences, God's presence. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, go into his courts with praise, give thanks to him and praise his name. You're they're being told to go worship the Lord, and we're being told to worship the Lord, being thankful. There's many verses in the Bible that talk about being thankful, thanksgiving, uh, giving thanks to the Lord. So um give thanks to him and praise his name. We can come boldly before his throne because of what Christ has done. So when we are thankful, when we're giving thanks to God. We are moving closer into his presence, uh, walking closer to the Lord as we're thankful for all the good things that he's doing, and even the difficult things. You know, sometimes the difficult things in your life give you more strength, give you more endurance, uh, give you the opportunity to help minister to others if you didn't have that experience. God can do great things through your hard times. I'm not saying he causes all the hard times, but I'm saying that he can take your past and use it as a testimony for someone's future for somebody today. And number six, this is the last one. And then if we could get the microphone and you could share for a few minutes what you're thankful for. Number six, Thanksgiving sees hope for the future. So, hope for the future. Sometimes our future seems pretty hopeless. For the Lord is good, his unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation. So that means that God is as interested in the people today as he is as the kids growing up, as the young people in the future. I look at some of these young people that are pursuing God, wanting to pursue God, and what I fear is that their pursuit of God is messed up because of their bad theology. So they have a Christianity based on emotion. I mean, really good music, lots of emotion, no theology to back to back it up, and so that's kind of scary. So we as a church to do what we can to help with that. But his unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation. To us, to our children, to our grandchildren, to our great-great-grandchildren, his faithfulness continues to each generation. Alright, so who would like to run around with the microphone? Need a young person. There, you have the microphone. Look at you. All right, Mateo. Alright, so if you would like to share, you need to take the microphone and hold it close to your mouth because that's the only way that it works. Things that you're thankful to God for. Yeah, I'll be quiet.

SPEAKER_04 24:05

I'm thankful for family and friends. I'm thankful for the family I grew up with, my mother and my siblings, and the family that we grew together, my husband with my husband and girls.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

I'm thankful for my mom. I'm thankful for my family and friends. I'm thankful for God's unconditional love. I'm thankful for my education.

SPEAKER_12 24:35

I'm thankful for my family who is constantly sacrificing their own fun to have to give us fun, and I am thankful for my best friend in love with my life, Ashley.

SPEAKER_13 24:47

I'm thankful for the church family I grew up with here at River Rock.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

I'm thankful for what uh God has given our family.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

I'm thankful for all the things that um we take uh for granted every day that we we have and and the people we know and um our health and everything that um we might overlook every day.

SPEAKER_06 25:19

So I'm thankful for the ministries of the church and the many, many, many people that answered God's call to make those ministries possible.

SPEAKER_09 25:31

I'm just uh thankful for uh that God is a God of detail. He you know gives me talents for my job, he gives me my job, uh gives me the ability to do my job, the time to do my job. Uh just uh it all comes together and it's just there's nothing that separates it, and it's because of that I'm able to provide for my family, who I'm also very thankful for.

SPEAKER_11 25:52

I'm thankful that this life is temporary and we get to spend eternity with our Lord.

SPEAKER_05 25:58

I'm thankful for forgiveness and for the way the Holy Spirit answers our prayers and warms our hearts, and I'm thankful for Julie that she decided to marry Pastor Chris, and I love her humility, and I am very comforted by seeing her every Sunday.

SPEAKER_08 26:17

I'm thankful for Lindsay. She warms my heart, and I come every every Sunday morning she comes in and and we have a game we play where she kicks me. I try to hide from her, but uh she she just makes my Sunday morning. So I am so very thankful for Lindsay. But I'm also thankful for all of the uh talent that God has put in our church, um, both young musicians and ancient musicians. So uh thanks, Rick. And myself. So I I I am such you know, if I was if this was a church of 2000, I would not be able to stand up here and sing. Um I I'm not a good enough musician for some of the larger churches. So the opportunity to serve here um is just a blessing to me because music is the other way that I connect with God. It's so with nature and music, that's the beauty of things, I guess, that I see. I like art as well, um, which is weird because I grew up as a scientist and I really didn't want anything to do with people or art. I wanted to play with numbers. But God is great and and wonderful.

SPEAKER_10 27:35

I'm thankful that God is always faithful. And Dan, you'll hear music that you've never heard of before.

SPEAKER_04 27:46

I'm thankful for being uh blessed to live in America in this time and place, and I'm thankful that God helps me be aware that that blessing com carries a responsibility.