We all know we should feel grateful to God for his many blessings. But if you are a normal human being, you have moments where the gratitude and praise in your heart are nowhere close to what it should be. We get busy and distracted. We face trouble and pain. And before we know it our hearts are filled with anything but gratitude and praise to God. So we go through the motions for a bit until we finally recognize something has changed in our faith. Or perhaps, we spend much of our lives wondering why others seem to overflow with praise when it feels unnatural for us.
So how do you fill your heart up with genuine feelings of joy and gratitude toward God and his blessings, especially when life is full of distractions and hardships? The Psalms give the script for how our hearts relate with God. And in the Psalms of praise, we see how we can genuinely, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!” (Psalm 106:1)
One example the Psalms point us toward is to simply remember and recount what God has done in the past. “Remember the wonders he has performed, his miracles, and the rulings he has given…” (Psalm 105:5) That means that we can recall the stories of scripture and the stories of his movement in our personal life. Retelling these stories to ourselves and to other people is one of the best ways to open your heart back up to God and feel that inspiration you might have once known.
Another surefire way to get your heart beating for Jesus again is to go through difficulties that bring you to the end of your rope. This is not where you believe you can get through on your own, however uncomfortable it might be, so you ignore God until you solve your own problems. Instead, it is when the diagnosis or the situation is so overwhelming or impossible that you must depend on God to get through it. It’s what David wrote from his heart in Psalm 108:12, “Oh, please help us against our enemies, for all human help is useless.” These moments force us to turn to God in faith, where we can see God’s faithfulness and promises come through when we cannot. It leads us to find our praise in the deep, dark valleys of life. And it is that kind of praise that can bring us back to the mountaintops again.
Questions for reflection:
- How many blessings from God can you write down in 60 seconds? Set a timer and after you make your list, take a moment to express your gratitude to God. Try this for a few days and see if your feelings of gratitude and joy start to grow.
- What is a story about God’s goodness in your life or the Bible that you can tell someone else about? Who do you think could or would listen to you share this story?