Sermon - Attitude of Gratitude

This week in our service and in our daily devotionals we are going to reflect on the attitude of gratitude that we each need to cultivate in our lives and in our spirituality. We are used to thinking of prayer as asking God for things we need, we may be used to thinking about prayer as being silent contemplation, but we are often bad at thanking God for all that is good in our lives. We are often awful at remembering to continue to thank God when things are going badly in our lives – that is quite a discipline.

Giving Thanks for All that Is Good

One of the attitudes we need to cultivate is that of counting our blessings – giving thanks to God for the things in our lives that are going well, the love that we have, the security and shelter we have, the friends and relationships we enjoy, the church we attend, the faith we’ve found. There are so many good things in our lives that we take them for granted. Those who come here from poorer countries can’t believe the luxury we have; those who come here from repressive societies can’t believe the freedoms we have. People from pervious generations in the UK wouldn’t believe either. We need to learn to thank God for the freedoms we have and the material wealth we enjoy. Even the poorest amongst us have more than previous generations could have dreamt of. As we thank God for what we have then we need also to become aware of those who do not enjoy the freedoms and material comfort that we enjoy – and we are inspired to do something about it.

Our attitude in prayer should always be one of thankfulness; in our daily prayers we should spend some time giving thanks to God for all that is good in our lives.

Giving Thanks for Those We Love

We also need to give thanks for the people closest to us, our friends, families, partner or lover, even our pets. The people and things we share our lives with and which lavish love upon us are given to us by God. God lives in communion and desires to know us and be known by us. God allows us to live in community where we desire to know and be known by others – sometimes well, sometimes intimately depending on the nature of the relationship. For this we too should thank God. Often when we are coming to terms with the rightness of the love we feel we may wonder if it’s appropriate to thank God for the love we feel – yet love is always good and we should always thank God for the love we find in our lives. The moral issues with love come with how we act out our love, if we let the love we have turn nasty or let it become obsessive. Love itself is good; what we do with it becomes entwined in our humanity and our fallen-ness.

Giving Thanks When Things Go Wrong

Of course if you are sitting there thinking that your life is a mess, or that things have gone wrong, love has gone sour, or you are living in emotional or physical pain then giving thanks is perhaps furthest away from your thoughts. How can you give thanks when everything is horrible?

The Jewish people dealt with the same problem when they were in exile in Babylon when the locals wanted them to sing their songs and explain their religion to them. Yet as they wrote in the Psalms – by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept….how could we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Yet it was by learning to sing the Lord’s song in Babylon that they eventually expanded their notion of who God is and they found their faith again.

Our reading today comes from the prophet Habakkuk who clearly holds that God should be praised even if natural disasters befall him. Habakkuk writes in a time when Israel’s economy was firmly agricultural and so each of the things that he mentions would lead to disaster: the fig tree not flourishing, no grapes on the vine, no olives coming to fruit, fields producing no food, sheep and cattle not being present. Imagine an ancient agricultural society with no fruit, no wine, no oil, no crops and no animals. Yet in the midst of this disaster, Habakkuk holds that he will still praise the Lord.

This could be seen as an attitude of denial, of not really understanding the reality of the situation or of a Polyanna approach – yet there is a deep spiritual truth here, we need to thank God, to be grateful for all that is good in our lives regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Of course we may ask for things as well, we may be in the most desperate situations and need to ask God for help – but we still have the responsibility to thank God for the things that are good in our lives.

Why?

We do this partly because it reminds us that God is God, partly because it is our responsibility to thank God for the good things He has given us and partly because it is good for us. It helps us to refocus our minds which are so often fixated on what we want or need, and it reminds us of the good things that are already happening, of the wonderful ways in which God already showers love and goodness on us and of the blessings that are already ours.

Sermon - 16th November 2008

Attitude of Gratitude

Scripture - Habakkuk 3: 17-18