Over the course of the last several days I have been delivering excerpts from my New Year’s Day sermon to you. The hope has been to strengthen our prayer lives in 2012. To do that we have been discussing coming to God through:
Faith with a
Listening spirit
Adoring God before everything else
Confessing both the strengths and weaknesses of our situation
Thanking Him for His move in our lives as we recognize it and finally
Supplicating with the Lord in regards to the things HE wants to give us.
Today we are going to discuss the spirit of thankfulness.
One of my friends recently made what I though was an accurate, if generalized, observation about Christians. He noted that we tend to be really good at asking for prayer in negative circumstances but when it comes to recognizing the prayers that God has answered and thanking Him for those answers we tend to be a little less enthusiastic. I know his words were a dope slap for me. I am the guy who doesn’t even realize a prayer has been answered until four days after the answer has arrived.
This year I am determining to do some practical things to increase my own thankfulness in prayer:
1. I am making a list of requests and reviewing it monthly to see which ones were answered
2. I am going to celebrate daily the good things God has done in my life. I will take time in prayer to thank Him and also thank Him publicly.
3. When God does something I will try to post it to the social networks I use. Are you with me here? Instead of OMG, and LOL, I’m bored, or I ate hamburger let’s fill cyberspace with the little praises and the big praises of God.
Tell me, how do you maintain a thankful spirit?
Reinventing the We'll 