Lest in our busyness we overlook God’s love and precious gifts, can we take a moment to count some of our past blessings?
I’m thankful for memories of my Mama cooking while I sat watching her by the kitchen stove, and for the gift of my sisters, three of my very best friends. I’m blessed with a large extended family that shares our faith. I cherish memories of Saturdays when eager little children brought us breakfast in bed…the best burned, cold toast and spilled orange juice money could buy! I’ve grown to appreciate past hard times, when God made His presence known with provision and sustenance in every circumstance.
What cherished memories of your past give rise to a heart of thanks to the Lord?
How about our reasons to be thankful today? What compels you to praise God as you experience His Lordship over your daily life? Oh taste and see that the Lord is good! I like a passage I recently read in my morning devotions:
“The earnest Christian life is a perpetual paradox of gift and growth, of arrival and non-arrival, of perfection and imperfection: a gift of radical cleansing and a growth in radiant Christlikeness, an arrival at the principal of deadness to sin and a non-arrival at complacency over rebukes from the Holy Spirit, a perfection in love and an imperfection in service.”*
We’re all a work in progress, and I’m thankful that God loves us so much that He’ll be nudging us into Christlikeness forever. Even this very moment is an integral part of our journey toward completeness in Christ Jesus. Let’s make the most of His precious gift of today and all its possibilities.
Jesus taught that it’s not for us to know the future, or at least God’s plans pertaining to specifics, though we’re certainly given the big picture in the Scriptures. We can claim the promise that He loves us and has our future in His capable hands. He is able to do immeasurably more for us than we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). Praise the Lord!
PRAYER: Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing Thy grace…
*Paul S. Rees, Men of Action in the Book of Acts, page 89