Deuteronomy 8:11-18 (NIV) 11 Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. 12 Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, 13 and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, 1415 He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. 16 He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, to humble and test you so that in the end it might go well with you. 17 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.
Psalm 103:2 (NIV) Praise the LORD, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—
Most of us want to be grateful. Gratitude feels good. Gratitude lifts our spirits, lightens our load, enlarges our soul’s experience of the goodness of life. Gratitude brings us into harmony and love with other people. We ought to feel grateful. We want to feel grateful. But sometimes neither the command nor the desire is enough to stir the grandeur of gratitude within us. What is it that makes gratitude so hard for us today?
Our affluence is usually blamed as the culprit for a general lack of gratitude. We suffer from a kind of sensory overload that dulls our spirit of responsive gratitude. Affluence can make us grasping, greedy, and ungrateful. And if affluence is the culprit in making us ungrateful, then poverty ought to cure us. But, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Both affluence and poverty can wear away a grateful spirit, but neither seems to be the real culprit. The real culprit that steals gratitude from our heart is not as threatening as poverty nor as slick as affluence. The crook is plain old respectable forgetfulness.
In the final analysis gratitude dies not so much from abuse as from neglect. Our thoughts and our worries and our feelings about poverty or wealth simply crowd out any thought of gratitude. The Psalmist does not say “O Lord do not let me lose the spirit of gratitude,” but rather “forget not.”
If gratitude can so easily be lost by forgetfulness, then the good news is that it can be recovered by remembering. And notice that it is the act of gratitude that we are to remember to do. There is nothing about remembering to feel grateful. Just do it, and the feeling will follow. Remember. Gratitude resists the growth of a callous spirit during the good times, and allows us to thank God for the benefits that come to us in hard times. Remember. Remember all God’s benefits.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope November 22, 1992
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell
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