When God made you a new creature in Christ, He also designed you to be a creature fueled by thanksgiving. Only a Christian has the ability to express thankfulness from an eternal perspective. Gratitude for someone who does not know Christ is limited to the here and now. Anyone can be thankful for temporal things, but eternal gratitude is for those whom God has made to be his people.
When you lack thanksgiving you are being contrary to the person God has made you to be. In other words without gratitude fueling your heart you will not understand how God designed life to work. When God is not worshipped with joy, life no longer makes sense.
From the visible signs of the rainbow and the communion table to the joy of knowing Jesus, we are graciously reminded of why gratitude should dominate our lives.
Psalm 100 graciously gives seven imperatives, seven commands that are essential to worship God and making sense of life. These imperatives are:
- Shout for joy
- Worship with gladness
- Come to God with joyful songs
- Know that he is God
- Enter into his presence with thanksgiving
- Go into his courts with praise
- Give thanks and praise to his name
This short psalm is designed by the Holy Spirit to lead you and me to cultivate a heart of gratitude. The imperative to “know” God is at the center of the directives. Knowing God begins with being in continual, grateful awe of who he is. This type of gratitude is what you were made for.
Thanksgiving, the DNA of God’s people! Enter into each day focused on thanksgiving. As Psalm 100 describes, it is what you were made for!
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship the Lord with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.