I find that one of the more challenging questions that I can ask when we have a meeting is the first one that, as a team, we nearly always ask:
What are you thankful for this week?
Very often, I can much more easily get responses to theological questions about a particular scriptural passage:
What do you learn about God from this passage?
Or, what do you learn about people from this story?
But unfortunately, I find that we aren’t always very good at giving praise to God or very good at offering thankfulness. We aren’t really very good at remembering the things that God has done for us.
Instead, often when I ask this first question, the response is… silence.
Why is that?
We could probably make a long list of reasons, but for today, I want to point to one possibility: As human beings, we tend to focus on the negative things in our daily lives. And even further, as followers of Christ, we do a good job at losing sight of what is really happening around us, the true nature of reality of that which God has done and is still doing all around us, even today.
We live in the wrong story. We see the world through the wrong lens. We look at the situation and the circumstances around us with regard to how we believe it affects us and the negative consequences, either perceived or real, directly upon us. We do an excellent job of making ourselves the center of our own stories, and therefore our own circumstances – which admittedly may not be, or may not seem, all that positive – become the primary driver of how we feel about our lives.
That can, of course, have several downstream consequences: emotional consequences, physical consequences, and much more, both upon us and even further, upon other people in our interactions with them. We can continue to be wrapped up in our own story and our own circumstances that we can therefore wrap ourselves into knots and create a life that is far from who we were made to be. We can end up far from that which is God’s plan for us.
I was reminded of this when I read the first chapter of Ephesians today, remembering that Paul was in prison when he wrote this:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Ephesians 1:3
Paul is looking at his life through an entirely different lens. He is clearly not focusing on his own circumstances. He is looking at everything – his life, the situation around him – entirely through the lens of what God is doing and the work that he has been given to do by God. Paul found the purpose of his life, not in his personal circumstances, but instead in God’s story.
Paul had been nearly beaten to death several times. He had been stoned. He had been put in prison several times. He was often without food. He was regularly threatened by thieves, threatened by cold, threatened by angry mobs.
If Paul was focused on himself, he should have given up long ago. But Paul didn’t consider his own circumstances, his own personal situation as the lens through which he saw his life. Instead, after all of these negative events above, he was also now being kept in prison in Rome and yet was able to give praise and thanks to God, even despite his circumstances.
Paul is an extreme example, but he is also a good one. He is an example of an ideal that helps us to see that we should not focus on ourselves because our story is not just our story. Our lives are not just about us. Our lives are to be lived for God’s glory. The story of our lives should be found within God’s story. This is the only way in which our lives make any sense. This is the only way in which our lives have meaning. Otherwise, we have no foundation for living a life of gratitude because everything depends on each of us and depends upon an accident of nature in which I do not have enough faith to believe.
Instead, we need to maintain a life of praise and thankfulness because God has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every kind of spiritual blessing. In this way, our lives have meaning and we can live for him. Praise God!
