With Thanksgiving Day a week away in the USA, many of us may focus on what we will serve for dinner that day. Perhaps before we eat, we will thank God for his blessings to us.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss says, “Gratitude should be an every moment, every hour, every day, lifetime commitment. Will we ever run out of things to be thankful for? Not a chance.”
Nancy says, “If you’ve always wanted prayer to be as natural as breathing, then pave the way with gratitude.” She spent many months looking at what the Scripture has to say about gratitude.
The book is full of specific Scriptures and examples from the lives of such people as Fanny Crosby, writer of eight thousand hymns, who thanked God for the blessing of blindness.
Nancy takes us on a journey “to confront those stubborn weeds of ingratitude and choose to cultivate a thankful heart.” With transparency and humility she gives examples from her own life of how God encouraged her to give thanks for that which broke her heart.
In her book, the author says gratitude is “not a second-tier virtue in the Christian life—it is vital.” She points out that blessings come disguised as problems and difficulties. She asks if the pain will draw us closer to the Father or make us want to withdraw from his grace and fellowship. I pray it will draw us closer to the Father, especially after reading this book.
Nancy calls gratitude her life preserver and says that choosing gratitude is choosing joy. As we read the book, hopefully gratitude will become our life preserver too and we will choose gratitude and thus joy.
Nancy points out that people fall into two categories: givers and takers, lovers and fighters, Type As and Type Bs, free spirits and list makers, and whiners and worshipers. Will we whine or will we worship?
Our journey to grateful worship of God is “going gratitudinal” according to Nancy DeMoss.
To help us to practice gratitude and thus choose joy, the author includes a 30 day devotional at the end of the book.
Buy this book and read a chapter daily. Let the gratitude that flows out of your life be as abundant as the grace that flows into your life.
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Yvonne, what a lovely attitude and I couldn’t agree more. The things it’s been hardest to be grateful for at the times are the very things that have proven to be invaluable to me later. Thanks for recommending this book.
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