Radical Gratitude 3

Leslie Gultch, Oregon Idaho border
This is the third and last posting of excerpts from the book RADICAL GRATITUDE.

Obstacles blocking a grateful spirit:
1. Not experieicnging God’s forgiveness (not having a walk of faith in God.)
2. Carrying guilt
3. Self focus rather than a God focus.
Pride. Renoucing any higher authority than the self means that people are at the mercy of any other self who happens to be stronger than they are. There is no protection for the weak.

In the end, our heart reveals the reality of our worldview. Our habitual gratitude, or lack thereof, shows what we actually believe, not just the nice tenets we may acknowledge intellectually, but do not practice in everyday life.

The biggest obstacle to gratitude is refusing to admit that apart from Christ, we can do nothing.
So how do we slough off pride and all those layers of sin and self-sufficiency that block us from thanking and praising God? We can’t. We need to be stripped by ANOTHER.

Gratitude is not a dsicipline. You can’t resolve to be more grateful. Can’t conjure it up by your own determined effort, or it will blow away in the first strong breeze. No, if grace is the gift of God, so too is the gratitude that grace creates.

Four things that we an do to practice the presence of gratitude.
1. Remember. 2. Forget. 3.Look up to God. 4. look around to His people.
1. Remember our deliverance. Our deliverer. Tools to help us remember: journaling, stones of remembrance, jewelry, photos, music, eucharist (means to be thankful), smell. The more senses that are involved, the more fully the memory is encoded in our brains.

2. Forget: our sins, our shame, our successes. We get lost in cheap snares and doubts when we look to ourselves, preoccupied by our sin, our shame, our success as if it were all about us.

3. Look up to the grandeur of God. – even in tragedy.

4. Look around and connect with the fellowship of friends. Satan wants us isolated so he can gain footholds.

Gratitude is like a pair of glasses that progressively sharpen. The more I thank, the more I see to be thankful for, and the more I end up praising God. Gratitude unleashes the freedom to live content in the moment, rather than being anxious about the future or regretting the past