For the last few weeks we have been talking about the Christian Character ABC’s in our Children’s Church class. It has been fun as we began our new class theme of “Secret Agents” (or: CIA = Christians In Action!) by relating these characteristics with the attributes of a good agent! One of the four characteristics that I introduced yesterday was Gratefulness. I simply defined this trait as “Being Thankful.”
Some of our students were not real happy with me when I handed out quarters to everyone and then tripled the amount to those who had said “thank you” to me! This got their attention real fast. Then I really confused them when we read and discussed I Thessalonians 5:18 that says, “In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
When I asked them if they give thanks to God when bad things happen, they looked at me like I had lost my marbles! One girl exclaimed, “Why would you thank God for something He didn’t do?” I quickly explained that we are not thanking Him for what happened, but instead, by thanking Him we are showing Him that we trust Him for the fix.
This morning as I was reading to my wife from F.F. Bosworth’s definitive text on healing “Christ The Healer,” I had the thought that by thanking Him after a tough incident we are immediately placing our trust into His hands and closing the door to any further attack of the enemy through our responses of anger, self pity or physical or verbal retaliation. Bosworth stated that we should “blow the ram’s horn of faith and thanksgiving until the walls of our affliction (or hurt from something bad happening to us) fall down flat. Faith does not wait for the wall to fall down; faith shouts them down!” (as in Joshua 6:20) The giving of thanks immediately places us in God’s power of faith and out of the hand of fear.
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