Reflections on gratitude

“All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.” — 2Corinthians 4:15

We are well into November which means we are creeping closer and closer to one of my favorite holidays: “Thanksgiving Day.”  

As a teen growing up in the Midwest, my Thanksgiving was mostly rooted in gratitude for a few extra days off school during the best time of year to be in the woods or on the water trapping or shooting any number of critters. 

But as I have aged and particularly as I have grown in my relationship to God, my gratitude has broadened to include so much more and taken on greater depth.  It’s a gratitude born out of struggle and difficulty as much as a gratitude rooted in ease, blessing and provision. 

It’s a gratitude that swells from my experience of grace. Just like the verse says, “as grace reaches more and more people it causes thanksgiving to overflow.”  While this verse is clearly talking about God’s grace reaching out and impacting more and more people resulting in growing thanksgiving, I think the same effect comes from grace as it reaches deeper in the individual. 

The longer one walks with the Lord, the more an individual encounters His faithfulness and love, the deeper grace reaches…until it permeates the deepest places of the soul. God’s grace cannot remain dormant or passive in the life of the believer. It is an active, dynamic force. And the Apostle Paul says grace unleashed, grace on the move … results in an overflow of thanksgiving. And it’s this thanksgiving I want all of us to experience this season and beyond

This is a thanksgiving bigger than circumstances. This is a thanksgiving that eclipses a day on a calendar or even a month. This is gratitude unshackled from our situations both good and bad. This is a gratitude that finds its source in an infinite God and the work that He has done and the lengths that he has gone through to restore relationship with us and bring us life. And that’s why Paul describes it as overflowing to the glory of God. How can gratitude that wells up from  infinite grace from an infinite God be contained?

My question to you: Have you known His grace? Has it brought salvation and life? Are you allowing free reign to do what grace does … and overflow with thanksgiving today and into eternity?

(Aaron Gesch is pastor of Basin First Baptist Church.)