The Purpose of Gratitude: Mini Sermon

This is a brief explanation of the power and purpose of being grateful. We are implementing a time of gratitude/appreciation before our regular service in order to incorporate a spirit of gratitude into our community and lives. I hope this challenges you and opens up your eyes to the power of gratittude!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Well, good morning. Glad that everybody's here. So, what uh what we have been trying to do is start the service with uh just a time of uh thanksgiving and gratitude. And what um what I don't want it to become is people feel like they need to make a production or or have a speech or anything ready. We're simply just exercising gratitude and appreciation. And really, we all should have kind of a list of things right now that we could come up with that we're grateful for and thankful for. But I wanted just to speak uh just for a minute to kind of share with you the heart behind why I think it's important and why I feel like the Lord has kind of placed it on my heart to start the service that way. One, this is not the Samuel show. Uh the Holy Spirit and God lives in every believer, and I love to hear Him through each one of us, not just one guy, because that gets that gets old. Especially when it's your own voice in your head. But no, just um gratefulness, one, it protects us. Well, how does it protect us? So if you look back in the Old Testament, the children of Israel, when they were in the wilderness, they'd grumble and complain, and then all sorts of havoc would break loose. So in 1 Corinthians 10.10, it actually says that because of their complaining, the destroyer came and destroyed them. It consumed them. And so one way that we fight the effects of sin and death and destruction around us is to be grateful. Because we are not opening up the door to the destroyer to come into our life and do all sorts of destructive things. Two, it's a way in which we enter into the presence of God. So Psalms 100, verse 4 says, enter his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Now we understand that this is Old Testament, so it's talking about the temple and the outer courts, there's a gate, and you come in through that way, but it's really representing a spiritual truth of being grateful and entering into the first gate, door into experiencing God. So one thing that's also very important to me here is that I don't want you to come in here and get really good teaching. I want you to come in here and experience Jesus Christ. And so if we are not entering in to the presence, which what do we know what the presence of God really means? The face of God looking upon us, happy to be with us, pleased that we're here, pleased that we're acknowledging Him, that's the presence I'm talking about. So if we are not entering into the first gate of the process that God has made for us to acknowledge that He's happy to be with us and that He's pleased with us, then we short circuit kind of this whole process of experiencing God. So for me personally, when I spend time with the Lord or I pray, I oftentimes start with gratitude. Because that's like the lowest hanging fruit. Thank you for today. Thank you for the beautiful weather. Thank you for my wife. Our anniversary is this week, along with my birthday, to help me remember it. And I'm grateful that my wife is still gullible enough to think I'm pretty cool. Jokes on her. And so I just start being grateful, God, for thank you for this and that. And okay, one, I'm shutting out the enemy. Two, I'm opening up this gate which I can step into to begin experiencing the love and joy of God. Three, it's oh, I'm already touching on it, it's the easiest way to begin experiencing God. When you experience joy or love or peace, patience, when you experience those feelings or that mental state, you're actually touching it on the nature of God. It's actually God communicating to you who He is. And so when we start to experience joy through being grateful, we're actually experiencing God. And four, if you want to be real scientific and nerdy, it actually scientifically, neurologically, opens your brain up to actually receive. It actually opens up the neural pathways for you to be able to hear and understand, and to also receive and to give to one another. So pick one of those reasons, if you will, and just think about that for a moment. That one simple step, like being grateful, can begin to open the door for you to experience God, to close out the enemy and destroy him in your life, to just to know him, to know what he's done, to acknowledge those things. And as we begin to do that, again, going to the scientific side, the normal pathway, it's kind of like this little trail in your brain that takes you from where you're at to joy or to the love of God, and maybe it's a little dirt path. But if you keep traveling that, you start to make a highway to where your brain will naturally begin to be grateful all the time. And that's a great place to live. But if we never begin to do that, then that path really doesn't get worn very well. And a lot of us will just stick over there and being pessimistic about everything. If I said come up with a list of ten things you're grateful for, for some of you that would be super easy, and for some of you that would be challenging. But if I said come up with a list of ten things that you're not happy about, you'd probably be able to do that without even thinking. Which tells me where our mental state's at at kind of a base level. So that's what this time of gratitude is. It's opening up our hearts and our minds to the Lord, it's shutting out the enemy, it's allowing us to experience God, but it's also training you to do that in your own life on a constant basis. Because I'll tell you, it's way more fun to live life from appreciation, gratitude, and joy than it is the other side. Okay? So that's like the heart and the nature behind this time of gratitude. And so, I don't know, sometimes it's hard to talk on a microphone about what you're grateful for and not feel like you're being prideful or something like that. But I think even now we can start just taking time and we'll just be quiet and we'll just be grateful ourselves. Because once we're able to do that, we begin to step into what the Lord has chosen as the gate to start receiving from Him. And sometimes it's not easy, okay? Psalms 103, David says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. He's commanding his mind, will, and emotions to line up and bless the Lord. It's not always uh, oh, I just feel it every time. No, sometimes you've got to pick yourself up and say, You're gonna do this. You're gonna bless the Lord, you're gonna thank the Lord. Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, but crowns you with loving kindness and tender mercies. Uh, he satisfies your mouth with good things, so your youth is renewed like the eagle's. So at base level, we can all be grateful for those things, right? In Jesus Christ. And what gratitude is not, is finding somebody else's life who sucks more than yours and being happy that you're at least it's not that bad. Right? That's not gratitude. It is an indicator of maybe things you should be grateful for, but that's ultimately not thankfulness. Thankfulness is personal, thankfulness is acknowledging what God has done and is doing in your life, and the good things that you find in your life. Okay? So that's why we do this. That's the science and the reasoning behind gratitude and gratefulness. Okay? So I just want to take. We'll start easy, 30 seconds. And I just want you to start listening in your mind everything you're grateful for. You can start now.