Christian Thanksgiving Quotes

The Christian who walks with the Lord and keeps constant communion with Him will see many reason for rejoicing and thanksgiving all day long.

Single life may be only a stage of a life’s journey, but even a stage is a gift. God may replace it with another gift, but the receiver accepts His gifts with thanksgiving. This gift for this day. The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived—not always looked forward to as though the “real” living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.

We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks. Because how else do we accept His free gift of salvation if not with thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is the evidence of our acceptance of whatever He gives. Thanksgiving is the manifestation of our Yes! to His grace.

How my eyes see, perspective, is my key to enter into His gates. I can only do so with thanksgiving. If my inner eye has God seeping up through all things, then can't I give thanks for anything? And if I can give thanks for the good things, the hard things, the absolute everything, I can enter the gates to glory. Living in His presence is fullness of joy- and seeing shows the way in.

If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.

If we ask God for a calm, thankful heart that sees all the blessings His grace imparts, He can teach us many lessons in illness that can never be learned in health.

I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earlierst sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.

My soul is exceedingly joyful.

My heart is filled with endless praise.

If you have life and good health, you have the greatest blessings.

God Almighty, I don’t want to ask for more. But to say more thanks.

Be thankful that you have clothes to wear, food to eat and a place to sleep.

Gracious words refresh, restore and revive the soul.

It was surprisingly difficult to find prayers of thanks—the least represented of any type of prayer.

The joy of living is the gratitude of the moment.

Wherever you are, you have to be joyfully alive.

Counting one thousand gifts means counting the hard things — otherwise I’ve miscounted.

Do they desire to join me in thanksgiving when they hear how, by your gift, I have come close to you, and do they pray for me when they hear how I am held back by my own weight? ...A brotherly mind will love in me what you teach to be lovable, and will regret in me what you teach to be regrettable. This is a mark of a Christian brother's mind, not an outsider's--not that of 'the sons of aliens whose mouth speaks vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity' (Ps. 143:7 f.). A brotherly person rejoices on my account when he approves me, but when he disapproves, he is loving me. To such people I will reveal myself. They will take heart from my good traits, and sigh with sadness at my bad ones. My good points are instilled by you and are your gifts. My bad points are my faults and your judgements on them. Let them take heart from the one and regret the other. Let both praise and tears ascend in your sight from brotherly hearts, your censers. ...But you Lord...Make perfect my imperfections

Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as “a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?)

If people begin to be more grateful, they will see the wonders of life.

Heavenly Father, thank you for the blessing that you bestow upon me daily.

My greatest privilege is being married to a gentle loving husband. I am very grateful God made our path cross.

An attitude of thankfulness keeps me centered when every attitude other than thankfulness promises me a center that it can’t find.

And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion of the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

Eucharisteo means 'to give thanks,' and give is a verb, something that we do. God calls me to do thanks. to give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living. That our lives become the very blessings we have received. I am blessed. I can bless. Imagine! I could let Him make me the gift! I could be the joy!

our prayers are rarely petitionary. We don’t so much ask for things that we don’t have as give thanks for what we have received.” “I don’t understand.” The rabbi smiled. “It’s something like this. You Christians say, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread.’ Our comparable prayer is, ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who bringest forth bread from the earth.’ That’s rather over-simplified, but in general our prayers tend to be prayers of thanksgiving for what has been given to us.

Do not say, 'But it is hypocritical to thank God with my tongue when I don't feel thankful in my heart.' There is such a thing as hypocritical thanksgiving. Its aim is to conceal ingratitude and get the praise of men. That is not your aim. Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude. You are not seeking the praise of men; you are seeing the mercy of God. You are not hiding the hardness of ingratitude, but hoping for the in-breaking of the Spirit. Thanksgiving with the Mouth Stirs Up Thankfulness in the Heart Moreover, we should probably ask the despairing saint, 'Do you know your heart so well that you are sure the words of thanks have no trace of gratitude in them?' I, for one, distrust my own assessment of my motives. I doubt that I know my good ones well enough to see all the traces of contamination. And I doubt that I know my bad ones well enough to see the traces of grace. Therefore, it is not folly for a Christian to assume that there is a residue of gratitude in his heart when he speaks and sings of God's goodness even though he feels little or nothing. To this should be added that experience shows that doing the right thing, in the way I have described, is often the way toward being in the right frame. Hence Baxter gives this wise counsel to the oppressed Christian: 'Resolve to spend most of your time in thanksgiving and praising God. If you cannot do it with the joy that you should, yet do it as you can. You have not the power of your comforts; but have you no power of your tongues? Say not that you are unfit for thanks and praises unless you have a praising heart and were the children of God; for every man, good and bad, is bound to praise God, and to be thankful for all that he hath received, and to do it as well as he can, rather than leave it undone.... Doing it as you can is the way to be able to do it better. Thanksgiving stirreth up thankfulness in the heart.

I think thanksgiving is the secret to a healthy Christian life.

We hope for what we long to behold.

You don’t need to have everything to be happy. Enjoy the moment.

From Thanksgiving until New Year's Sarah was a Christian by proxy.

Overflowing thanksgiving; glorious grandeur!

The priceless gifts (life, love, joy, goodness, family, nature) are freely given by the Creator.

This moment is spectacular!

While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.

The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving.

In the average home there is much work to be done, and God does not approve of laziness. But beware thinking that your schedule (whether it is a homeschooling schedule or feeding-the-baby schedule) is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Life in our homes should be characterized by joy and thanksgiving so that children are taught and nourished in a way that takes their souls into account.

Lord I thank you for the gift of breath, eyes to see, ears to hear, tongue to taste, nose to smell; mouth to speak, face to smile, voice to sing, body to dance, legs to walk, mind to think and hands to write.

I am a Christian because of God's grace. I find it in no other faith system. The Christian gospel is rather simple. I love the way Tim Keller puts it: "I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me." The result is that I neither swagger nor snivel; I live with thanksgiving, overwhelmed and overjoyed by grace. This path seems to lead us to a place of needing to be noticed less often, and being less concerned with how we're thought of.

To be able to enjoy fully the many good things the world has to offer, we must be detached from them. To be detached does not mean to be indifferent or uninterested. It means to be non-possessive. Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to. A non-possessive life is a free life. But such freedom is only possible when we have a deep sense of belonging. To whom then do we belong? We belong to God, and the God to whom we belong has sent us into the world to proclaim in his Name that all of creation is created in and by love and calls us to gratitude and joy. That is what the 'detached' life is all about. It is a life in which we are free to offer praise and thanksgiving.

Overeating at Thanksgiving is a case in point. It's a national tradition.

The joy of living is the heart of thanksgiving.

I have 365-days thankful notes. What a sacred-thanks?

Gratitude is the spirit of graceful sacred-existence.

A glorious life is a life live with gratitude.

All glory to the Adonai!

May my thanksgiving be my prayer.

God knows your every need.

Lord I thank you for the gift of life.

A joyful soul, a grateful spirit full of love and light!

May we never forget the greatness of God.

All that we are and will be, praise be to God.

I love today, it is a sacred time.

When you appreciate the blessings in life, your soul rejoices.

They have mourned how capitalism and Christianity have promoted individualism, acquisitiveness, and selfishness at the expense of traditional values such as community, giving, and modesty.

For Mary, the world is something to be mastered, manipulated, and made; for Fanny, the world is a gift to be received with thanksgiving. Fanny is the eucharistic heroine, giving thanks in all times and places.

Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love. Look at it now, plump and glossy, floating across Idaho as if it were a mammoth, mutated seed pod. Hear how it backfires as it passes the silver mines, perhaps in tribute to the origin of the knives and forks of splendid sterling that a roast turkey and a roast turkey alone possesses the charisma to draw forth into festivity from dark cupboards. See how it glides through the potato fields, familiarly at home among potatoes but with an air of expectation, as if waiting for the flood of gravy. The roast turkey carries with it, in its chubby hold, a sizable portion of our primitive and pagan luggage. Primitive and pagan? Us? We of the laser, we of the microchip, we of the Union Theological Seminary and Time magazine? Of course. At least twice a year, do not millions upon millions of us cybernetic Christians and fax machine Jews participate in a ritual, a highly stylized ceremony that takes place around a large dead bird? And is not this animal sacrificed, as in days of yore, to catch the attention of a divine spirit, to show gratitude for blessings bestowed, and to petition for blessings coveted? The turkey, slain, slowly cooked over our gas or electric fires, is the central figure at our holy feast. It is the totem animal that brings our tribe together. And because it is an awkward, intractable creature, the serving of it establishes and reinforces the tribal hierarchy. There are but two legs, two wings, a certain amount of white meat, a given quantity of dark. Who gets which piece; who, in fact, slices the bird and distributes its limbs and organs, underscores quite emphatically the rank of each member in the gathering. Consider that the legs of this bird are called 'drumsticks,' after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors, kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, of the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the best of the pulse of the heart of the universe. Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hungers from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to the table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder. Was Boomer Petaway aware of the totemic implications when, to impress his beloved, he fabricated an outsize Thanksgiving centerpiece? No, not consciously. If and when the last veil dropped, he might comprehend what he had wrought. For the present, however, he was as ignorant as Can o' Beans, Spoon, and Dirty Sock were, before Painted Stick and Conch Shell drew their attention to similar affairs. Nevertheless, it was Boomer who piloted the gobble-stilled butterball across Idaho, who negotiated it through the natural carving knives of the Sawtooth Mountains, who once or twice parked it in wilderness rest stops, causing adjacent flora to assume the appearance of parsley.

Today, the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas that many of us recognize as Advent is the biggest frenzy of retail spending. More than half of it, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, is spent as we celebrate the birth of the homeless Son of God in that stinky manger. (And he got only three measly presents. One of them was myrrh. What baby wants myrrh?) Hundreds of Christian congregations are now rethinking the Advent season as a time for compassion rather than consumption. (Check

One of the odd features of the Christian life, and Scripture more broadly, is that times of suffering and sin can be renarrated in our ongoing progress as God’s people such that failures become a source of joy and thanksgiving as they set forth more clearly the mercy of Christ.

This, then is the first work of God—that He is merciful to all who are ready to do without opinion, right, wisdom, and all spiritual goods, and are to be poor in spirit. These are they who truly fear God, who count themselves not worthy of anything, be it never so small, and are glad to be naked and bare before God and man; who ascribe whatever they have to His pure grace, bestowed on the unworthy; who use it with praise and fear and thanksgiving, as though it belonged to another, and who seek not their own will, desire, or honour, but His alone to whom it belongs.

Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of “prayer”, as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not: At any rate they do require standing in a crowd and uttering constant and uniform incantations. This is ordered by one religion to take place five times a day, and by other monotheists for almost that number, while all of them set aside at least one whole day for the exclusive praise of the Lord, and Judaism seems to consist in its original constitution of a huge list of prohibitions that must be followed before all else. The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not making him into a woman (or a Gentile), while the Jewish woman contents herself with thanking the almighty for creating her “as she is.” Presumably the almighty is pleased to receive this tribute to his power and the approval of those he created. It’s just that, if he is truly almighty, the achievement would seem rather a slight one. Much the same applies to the idea that prayer, instead of making Christianity look foolish, makes it appear convincing. Now, it can be asserted with some confidence, first, that its deity is all–wise and all–powerful and, second, that its congregants stand in desperate need of that deity’s infinite wisdom and power. Just to give some elementary quotations, it is stated in the book of Philippians, 4:6, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that “he is the rock, his work is perfect,” and Isaiah 64:8 tells us, “Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Note, then, that Christianity insists on the absolute dependence of its flock, and then only on the offering of undiluted praise and thanks. A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or, at the very least, a pathetic misunderstanding. It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine. And this, sad to say, opens religion to the additional charge of corruption. The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment. Eventually, and after a bitter and schismatic quarrel, practices like the notorious “sale of indulgences” were abandoned. But many a fine basilica or chantry would not be standing today if this awful violation had not turned such a spectacularly good profit. And today it is easy enough to see, at the revival meetings of Protestant fundamentalists, the counting of the checks and bills before the laying on of hands by the preacher has even been completed. Again, the spectacle is a shameless one.

The thing about burying a Christian mother is that, amid all the tears, you find yourself mimicking the grin that characterized her life. She buried a husband, a son, and plenty of dreams, but never the hope that propelled her forward. Hope gives birth to thanksgiving and thanksgiving to joy. It doesn't spread as fast as a cold, but pretty close.

Everything that comes from God must go back to God. They become dysfunctional when they remain with man. Blessings must turn to praise and praise is not just giving thanks for what God gave, it is giving back to Him what He gave. Don't give thanks to God for things that He gave and deny Him access to them for His use. Whatever blessing you don't return back to God in praise turns to pride.

Without any shame, the colonies asked for assistance from the same Christian Indians they had persecuted during the first nine months of the war and received a positive response. The praying Indians, whatever their trepidation, saw this as an invaluable opportunity for their men to prove their worth to the English and secure compensation to ease the suffering of kin still held on Deer and Clark’s Islands.

you move towards thanksgiving, and you understand thanksgiving as something more than just private acknowledgement of God’s goodness; you have to learn to approach it as a ‘soaking-in’ of what God is. ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory’, as the Prayer Book has it. When all these things come together (says Cassian) we are on fire with the Holy Spirit. And when we look at Jesus we see someone whose entire life is on fire in that way, with the Spirit.

But for the coming of Christianity, who knows how the history of Europe would have developed ? Rome would have conquered all Europe, and the onrush of the Huns would have been broken on the legions. It was Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome—not the Germans or the Huns. What Bolshevism is achieving to-day on the materialist and technical level, Christianity had achieved on the metaphysical level. When the Crown sees the throne totter, it needs the support of the masses. It would be better to speak of Constantine the traitor and Julian the Loyal than of Gonstantine the Great and Julian the Apostate. What the Christians wrote against the Emperor Julian is approximately of the same calibre as what the Jews have written against us. The writings of the Emperor Julian, on the other hand, are products of the highest wisdom. If humanity took the trouble to study and understand history, the resulting consequences would have incalculable implications. One day ceremonies of thanksgiving will be sung to Fascism and National Socialism for having preserved Europe from a repetition of the triumph of the Underworld.

When exactly did this all change, and what were the social and theological factors that led to the change? The answer seems to be in the second century and: (1) because of the consolidation of ecclesial power in the hands of monarchial bishops and others; (2) in response to the rise of heretical movements such as the Gnostics; (3) in regard to the social context of the Lord’s Supper, namely, the agape, or thanksgiving, meal, due to the rise to prominence of asceticism in the church; and (4) because the increasingly Gentile majority in the church was to change how second-century Christian thinkers would reflect on the meal. Thus, issues of power and purity and even ethnicity were to change the views of the Lord’s Supper and the way it would be practiced.

And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaks off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff—no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people—one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

THIS IS THE DAY THAT I HAVE MADE! As you rejoice in this day of life, it will yield up to you precious gifts and beneficial training. Walk with Me along the high road of thanksgiving, and you will find all the delights I have made ready for you. To protect your thankfulness, you must remember that you reside in a fallen world, where blessings and sorrows intermingle freely. A constant focus on adversity defeats many Christians. They walk through a day that is brimming with beauty and brightness, seeing only the grayness of their thoughts. Neglecting the practice of giving thanks has darkened their minds. How precious are My children who remember to thank Me at all times. They can walk through the darkest days with Joy in their hearts because they know that the Light of My Presence is still shining on them. Rejoice in this day that I have made, for I am your steadfast Companion. This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. PSALM 118 : 24 I will sacrifice a thank offering to you and call on the name of the LORD. PSALM 116 : 17

Sometimes silences are pregnant and sometimes not. It is hard to know what to make of the silence of much of the New Testament about the Lord’s Supper. Perhaps it is simply an accident of time and circumstance. There was not a felt need to address the matter. What we should not likely conclude is that it was not seen as an important matter in the latter part of the first century A.D. What we can observe is that the Lord’s Supper continued to be an in-home ceremony taken in the context of a fellowship meal. We also now know it was important in both Gentile and Jewish contexts in the church in the second half of the first century, and beyond. We see no evidence anywhere in this material that clerics of any kind are in charge of the meal and its distribution. Even in the Didache, prophets, who were mouthpieces for God, are only allowed to say the thanksgiving prayer as often as they like. The low ecclesiology, coupled with the ever-present eschatology, suggest that the Didache does indeed go back to the end of the first century A.D. But one precedent in the Didache does stand out: the Lord’s Supper is for baptized Christians, and in particular for those who repent of their sins. We are on the way to the church of the Middle Ages in some respects, but we have not begun to localize or confine grace to the elements of the Lord’s Supper itself and then have it controlled by clerics.

The most consistent execution of this project is to be found in the Letter to the Hebrews, which connects the death of Jesus on the Cross with the ritual and theology of the Jewish feast of reconciliation and expounds it as the true cosmic reconciliation feast. The train of thought in the letter could be briefly summarized more or less as follows: All the sacrificial activity of mankind, all attempts to conciliate God by cult and ritual—and the world is full of them—were bound to remain useless human work, because God does not seek bulls and goats or whatever may be ritually offered to him. One can sacrifice whole hecatombs of animals to God all over the world; he does not need them, because they all belong to him anyway, and nothing is given to the Lord of All when such things are burned in his honor. “I will accept no bull from your house, nor he-goat from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving. . . .” So runs a saying of God in the Old Testament (Ps 50 [49]:9-14). The author of the Letter to the Hebrews places himself in the spiritual line of this and similar texts. With still more conclusive emphasis he stresses the fruitlessness of ritual effort. God does not seek bulls and goats but man; man’s unqualified Yes to God could alone form true worship. Everything belongs to God, but to man is lent the freedom to say Yes or No, the freedom to love or to reject; love’s free Yes is the only thing for which God must wait—the only worship or “sacrifice” that can have any meaning. But the Yes to God, in which man gives himself back to God, cannot be replaced or represented by the blood of bulls and goats. “For what can a man give in return for his life”, it says at one point in the Gospel (Mk 8:37). The answer can only be: There is nothing with which he could compensate for himself. But

a. Seek to worship and preach in the vernacular. It is impossible to overstate how insular and subcultural our preaching can become. We often make statements that are persuasive and compelling to us, but they are based on all sorts of premises that a secular person does not hold. Preachers often use references, terms, and phrases that mean nothing outside of our Christian tribe. So we must intentionally seek to avoid unnecessary theological or evangelical jargon, carefully explaining the basic theological concepts behind confession of sin, praise, thanksgiving, and so on. In your preaching, always be willing to address the questions that the nonbelieving heart will ask. Speak respectfully and sympathetically to people who have difficulty with Christianity. As you prepare the sermon, imagine a particularly skeptical non-Christian sitting in the chair listening to you. Be sure to add the asides, the qualifiers, and the extra explanations that are necessary to communicate in a way that is comprehensible to them. Listen to everything that is said in the worship service with the ears of someone who has doubts or struggles with belief.

The little woman was herself a sincere and earnest Christian. She rejoiced beyond measure over the fact that the lines had at last fallen to her in a Christian home. Morning and evening the son Richard, with the family gathered about him, read a few verses from the Bible and led in a heartfelt prayer for guidance and safekeeping. These daily gatherings were like fresh springs of comfort to Miss Stafford’s thirsty soul; she had so long been tossed about the world from hotel to boarding-house that to have dropped by what the world would call an accident, but what she hugged to her heart as a blessed providence, into the very centre of this sweet Christian home, was to her a daily cause for thanksgiving. She looked forward, only her own heart knew how sorrowfully, to the time, steadily approaching, when she must go out from it and find a new resting-place.

And the Christian who knows what he or she is about will constantly reflect that the most natural modes of God-talk are adoration, thanksgiving, confession, supplication and proclamation, not theorization.

When you awake in the morning, your first thought should be to raise your mind to God and offer Him all the actions of that day, asking Him to help you by His grace. Then make the other morning Christian acts of thanksgiving, love, petition, and the firm resolve of living during that day as if it were the last day of your life.

Smith suggests that we are more driven by our loves than our ideas because we are more desiring beings than thinking beings. We have thoughts and ideas, but what’s behind them is our deeply held loves, idols, hopes, and imaginations. To bring it home to our own school communities: if what really drives people is their affections rather than their thoughts, the primary task of the Christian school is to shape our students’ loves and desires. Smith says, “What if education ... is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions – our visions of ‘the good life’ – and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?”29 Bold implication: How do we use student literacy to shape loves and desires? What about science? Chapel? Recess? I get excited to think about our schools grabbing students by the gut! That’s truly distinctive. It’s infectious and contagious. We should hope to find new ways to employ our curriculum to love God, what He loves and His gospel, because it’s life-giving. Yes, we want students to get excited when they learn about Van Gogh’s sunflowers, but we also hope that through their learning, they come to love God and others more. That’s a challenging task; it’s a lot harder than attaching a verse to a lesson. However, we must dare to accept the endeavor because we don’t want to see students merely conform to boundaries set before them. We want to see them transform, and we fully believe that this only happens when students come to love God because they see how much they need Him and how good He is. This is where life-long change happens. This is where a foundation built at our schools can stick with them into college and life. This drives our missional hope and confidence because we believe the gospel restores people; it restores families; it restores culture. Maybe, we should speak of a worldview as engaging the world through an embodiment of beliefs. As Christians, this looks like embodying the core tenants of the faith – embodying need, embodying thanksgiving, embodying hope, embodying rescue and restoration. When we take on these beliefs, our desires change. This is especially true as the Spirit transforms us through our habits being brought into conformity with these beliefs. As a result, much of the conversation about the Christian worldview must consider what it will look like when the gospel starts to seep and ooze out of us.

Be thankful always.

Enjoy the beauty of a sacred day.

I live happy in the holy moment.

You ought to give thanks to the Lord.

When I wake up each morning; my heart is filled with thanks to God!

But, someone will say, does God not know, even without being reminded, both in what respect we are troubled and what is expedient for us, so that it may seem in a sense superfluous that he should be stirred up by our prayers-as if he were drowsily blinking or even sleeping until he is aroused by our voice? But they who thus reason do not observe to what end the Lord instructed his people to pray, for he ordained it not so much for his own sake as for ours. Now he wills-as is right-that his due be rendered to him, in the recognition that everything men desire and account conducive to their own profit comes from him, and in the attestation of this by prayers. But the profit of this sacrifice also, by which he is worshiped, returns to us. Accordingly, the holy fathers, the more confidently they extolled God's benefits among themselves and others, were the more keenly aroused to pray ... Still it is very important for us to call upon him: First, that our hearts may be fired with a zealous and burning desire ever to seek, love, and serve him, while we become accustomed in every need to flee to him as to a sacred anchor. Secondly, that there may enter our hearts no desire and no wish at all of which we should be ashamed to make him a witness, while we learn to set all our wishes before his eyes, and even to pour out our whole hearts. Thirdly, that we be prepared to receive his benefits with true gratitude of heart and thanksgiving, benefits that our prayer reminds us come from his hand. (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960], Book 3, chapter 20, section 3.)

Morning, September 30 "Sing forth the honour of his name, make his praise glorious." Psalm 66:2 It is not left to our own option whether we shall praise God or not. Praise is God's most righteous due, and every Christian, as the recipient of his grace, is bound to praise God from day to day. It is true we have no authoritative rubric for daily praise; we have no commandment prescribing certain hours of song and thanksgiving: but the law written upon the heart teaches us that it is right to praise God; and the unwritten mandate comes to us with as much force as if it had been recorded on the tables of stone, or handed to us from the top of thundering Sinai. Yes, it is the Christian's duty to praise God. It is not only a pleasurable exercise, but it is the absolute obligation of his life. Think not ye who are always mourning, that ye are guiltless in this respect, or imagine that ye can discharge your duty to your God without songs of praise. You are bound by the bonds of his love to bless his name so long as you live, and his praise should continually be in your mouth, for you are blessed, in order that you may bless him; "this people have I formed for myself, they shall show forth my praise"; and if you do not praise God, you are not bringing forth the fruit which he, as the Divine Husbandman, has a right to expect at your hands. Let not your harp then hang upon the willows, but take it down, and strive, with a grateful heart, to bring forth its loudest music. Arise and chant his praise. With every morning's dawn, lift up your notes of thanksgiving, and let every setting sun be followed with your song. Girdle the earth with your praises; surround it with an atmosphere of melody, and God himself will hearken from heaven and accept your music.

Almighty Saviour, thank you for the gift of the moment.

I fear that we who have grown up in church and have been Christians for a number of years have become far too familiar, and far too flippant, with the holy.  Such a flippancy manifests anytime we enter into His gates not with thanksgiving and into His courts not with praise, but with a ho-hum attitude and a “when’s it over” spirit.

To God be the glory, great things He has done and greater things He will do.

Glory to God, He has done marvellous deeds.

Our life is to be bound up with the life of Christ; we are to draw constantly from Him, partaking of Him, the living Bread that came down from heaven, drawing from a fountain ever fresh, ever giving forth its abundant treasures. If we keep the Lord ever before us, allowing our hearts to go out in thanksgiving and praise to Him, we shall have a continual freshness in our religious life. Our prayers will take the form of a conversation with God as we would talk with a friend. He will speak His mysteries to us personally. Often there will come to us a sweet joyful sense of the presence of Jesus. Often our hearts will burn within us as He draws nigh to commune with us as He did with Enoch. When this {130} is in truth the experience of the Christian, there is seen in his life a simplicity, a humility, meekness, and lowliness of heart, that show to all with whom he associates that he has been with Jesus and learned of Him.

The glory to God is the act of great thankfulness.

Joyful gratitude creates a happy life.

When you are unsure whether or not something is wrong, ask yourself these questions: Does this glorify God? Can I offer a prayer of thanksgiving for it? Does it draw me closer to Christ, or does it make me preoccupied with this world? Will it harm my health or hurt me in some other way? Will it cause someone else to stumble spiritually or morally? I have never forgotten what a wise Christian said to me many years ago: “When in doubt—don’t!

My heart is filled with thankfulness to God.

I live each day with the joy of blessed moment.

I thank God for an amazing life.

Dear Christian, look to Christ, live in contentment, and rejoice in thanksgiving, and send covetousness scurrying from your heart and life. It is a deadly foe not to be trifled with. Rather, let us live in love for God and one another—storing our treasures in heaven above.

Live simply, share your wealth with others.

My soul is filled with exceedingly joy.

You never know how much you are blessed until you have nothing.

Thank you O Lord my savior.