6. Practicing Thankfulness

Practicing Thankfulness: Cultivating A Grateful Heart in All Circumstances. Sam Crabtree. 2021. [February] Crossway. 144 pages. [Source: Review copy]

First sentence: Thankfulness is neither trivial nor inconsequential. On this one quality pivots the difference between maturity and immaturity.

I loved this book. I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it. I loved it because it was convicting, challenging, relevant, insightful, timely, and above all else scriptural. It is subtitled CULTIVATING A GRATEFUL HEART IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. Note the words GRATEFUL and ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

There are twelve chapters: 

• The Rightness of Gratitude
• The Wisdom of Gratitude
• Portrait of a Grateful Heart
• The Fruitfulness of Gratitude
• Dangers of Ingratitude 
• Thankfulness in Action
• Thankfulness and Contentment
• Thankfulness and Wonder
• Thankfulness and Suffering
• Hindrances to Thankfulness
• Various Questions about Thankfulness
• One Hundred Ways to Be Thankful

As a Christian, it is easy to *think* you know what thankfulness and gratitude are all about. Also it is easy to make a thousand plus excuses as to why you don't *have* to be thankful in *this* situation or *this* circumstance. Sure, it would be *nice* to live out that aspect of the Christian faith, but what difference could it really make?! Surely it's not essential-essential, right? You can be a Bible-believing Christian, a God-loving, heart-and-mind-renewed Christian without applying those *pesky* little verses about being thankful and rejoicing always?! If I fail in this aspect, surely it won't impact my witness, right? right?!?!

Practicing Thankfulness is a POWERFUL read. It led me to do a lot of thinking, reflecting, questioning. I think every Christian would benefit from reading this one! Crabtree says, "This book is for two kinds of people. It’s for those who have doubts about God’s goodness, and who therefore don’t often feel grateful. And it’s for those who believe God is good but want to grow in their faithful expression of appreciation for that goodness; they want to be more earnest and creative in thanking God as well as thanking those who are instruments in his hands. They’re dead serious about wanting to produce the fruit that gratefulness can produce. They’re hopeful."

Quotes:

• Thankfulness is a powerful force. It wins or loses the war for your future. When practiced, it works toward beauty and produces fruit. When ignored, it works toward ugliness and chokes out life. At stake is the vitality of every human relationship, without exception.
• The thankfulness of Ephesians 5:20 expands that of 1 Thessalonians 5:18 into something far bigger—not just in everything, but for everything.
• A Hungarian proverb says, “When the bridge is gone, the narrowest plank becomes precious.” I suppose that’s one way to embrace a 1 Thessalonians 5:18 approach to life; in the collapse of the bridge, we express gratefulness for the part of the bridge that remains. But are we also thankful for the part that collapsed? From Ephesians 5, we’re instructed to give thanks when the mosquitoes are thick and also for the part of the bridge that collapsed. God is at work in both the presence and the absence of mosquitoes, and he’s at work not only in the bridge portion that survives but also in the collapse of the rest. He’s working all things for our good.
• Oh, that gratitude would come as naturally to me as breathing! It’s not that we need more for which to be thankful. Rather, we should naturally be more thankful for what we already have.
• Generally, feelings stem from thinking. Feeling grateful erupts from thinking rightly about God’s good provision. Every good and perfect gift comes from God. Our problem is that in our human frailty and inability to see all things, we can sometimes be inclined to think that some of the circumstances coming to us from God are not good but bad—certainly not perfect. In fact, we sometimes consider all of them bad and none of them good. We err in thinking that way. And when our thoughts err in that way, our feelings follow. We don’t feel grateful.
• Gratitude need not and must not hinge solely upon the presence or absence of certain circumstances (triumph versus trouble), but on the presence of God. Our God isn’t finished producing fruit through your circumstances, no matter how painful they may be. If Lazarus has died, God is not done. If your bridge has collapsed, he is not done. If the mosquitoes have swarmed, he is not done.
• What is God doing now in your life to carry on to completion that which he has begun? In this very moment he is using your current set of circumstances as one link in the unbreakable chain of links forged by his unrelenting love and infinite wisdom to accomplish for you the unspeakably valuable privilege of being conformed to the image of his Son. Therefore we’re wise to be thankful not only for the promise that he’ll complete what he has begun—and not only for the chain of completion as a whole but also for every individual link in that chain.
• Both thanking and pushing assume and require an object, a recipient of the thanking or the pushing. You don’t just push, you push something. And you don’t just thank, you thank someone.
• It would be irrational to say that practicing gratefulness is just a feeling, without conveying any of that feeling to a benefactor—just as it would be irrational to say that pushing is a “feeling” when you aren’t actually pushing on something. “I feel pushy” means nothing unless you push something. Similarly, you can’t merely “honor”; you have to honor something or someone.
• I’ve heard wellintentioned adults ask children, “What are you thankful for?” Failing to ask “To whom are you thankful?” places the emphasis on the what, not the who.
• To what shall we compare an atheist at Thanksgiving? Imagine an Olympic gymnast on the balance beam who beautifully completes all her moves. After the performance, as she’s being interviewed, she tries to give the impression that no beam was ever actually there—that all her moves were performed in midair. She even refers to the event as simply “the balance,” trying hard to ignore what everyone intuits and plainly sees: the event is called the balance beam, and she could do no balancing whatsoever unless there was something to balance on.
• God wills our thankfulness, and he wills it “in Christ.” He accomplishes our thankful hearts through the transformative work accomplished in our hearts by his word when it dwells in us: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Col. 3:16–17)
• In the doing of whatever we do, we’re to be full of gratitude. Our hearts pivot on the word of Christ. Either they swivel toward him in wonder and gratitude and affection, or they swivel away from him in stubborn, truth-suppressing pride or apathetic indifference. It’s through Christ and in the name of Christ that the grateful heart erupts with thankfulness to the Father for all things, especially the word of Christ that indwells the heart richly.
• The degree to which I’m not thankful is the degree to which I should ask myself if I’m as rooted and built up in Christ as I may think I am.
• One reason we find it unnatural and difficult to feel grateful when suffering is that we’ve tricked ourselves into a set of expectations that don’t match God’s. We think our expectations are perfectly understandable; that’s why we have them. We think our expectations are perfect. Oh, we would never come right out and claim that we’re always right, but at any given moment we think we’re right. In fact, at every given moment we think we’re right. If we discover we’re wrong, we change our minds, and then once more think we’re right. All of us do this, all the time. Our expectations are warranted—so  we think. Then when something doesn’t go according to what we think God should have done, we get bent out of shape, perhaps angry, or sullen, or vengeful, or bitter, or suicidal, or gender dysphoric. Actually, we don’t get bent out of shape; rather, we reveal the shape we’re already in: namely, God-dismissing. The task before us is to yield our expectations to God and to his actual agenda flowing out of his infinite unassailable wisdom. 
• None of us live the life we would plan. We live the life God planned for us.
• Ingratitude is rooted in our mistaken assumptions about our rights, our sense of entitlement.
• All a person has to do in order to be ungrateful is: nothing. Thanklessness can creep up on us. We might even be good thanksgiving theoreticians, while remaining poor practitioners. We’ve fallen asleep perhaps.
• Grateful hearts have to say so, because they very much want to. If we aren’t saying thanks, it says something about our thankless hearts.
• Gratitude is the divinely given spiritual ability to see grace, and the corresponding desire to affirm it and its giver as good.
• Do you love God? Even in the midst of God-appointed suffering, we can love the God who appointed the suffering when we have confidence that he’s using it to produce a weight of glory for us far beyond all comparison.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible