In God We Trust Lesson Two: Gratitude

 Gratitude seems to be in short supply in America these days.  Grateful people are generous people and willingly help others.  Both the giver and receiver benefit.  Ungrateful people hoard what they greedily possess while other equally ungrateful people demand that they be given what they enviously desire.  Both sides lose.  Ingratitude is the source of class and racial warfare we see tearing up our country.  

Greed and envy have no place in the hearts of those who trust God.  Replacing these sins with the gratitude that comes from trusting God would go a long way to curing our cultural ills.  

There is so much for us to be grateful to God for!!!  Start with each other.  There is not a single person we have ever known or ever loved  - including ourselves - that was not created by God.  

There is not a single thing we possess or built from those possessions that did not originate from God.  Spaghetti to spaceships.  Eyeglasses to iPhones.  Minerals to medicines. Just think about it. There is nothing you can create without the building blocks that are gifts from God.

So often we think of God as only the Creator of the physical world, but He is also the Creator of our intangible world. Love and affection, joy and sorrow, anger and peace, emotion and intellect, justice and mercy, curiosity and patience, charity and generosity, forgiveness and tolerance, work and leisure, beauty and creativity, equality and freedom are all gifts from God. 

God’s greatest gift to us is Himself.  God is not a distant and disinterested deity, but a living and loving Father who wants to be an active participant in our lives.  Everything He has created, everything He has done for us, is because God, like a good Father, loves us.  God always has our best interest at heart - even when we disappoint Him and reject His guidance.  In the ultimate act of love, He sent His Son Jesus to sacrifice His life in order to remove our sin and reunite us with Him.  How can we not be grateful? 

If we say we trust God, but show no gratitude for all He has done for us, our trust is hollow.  Trust and thanks go hand in hand.  

Thank God for His generosity to you. Thank God today for your life, for love, for friends and family.  Thank God today for forgiving your sins and walking with you every day. But don’t stop there.

Show your gratitude to God by being generous to others as God has been generous to you.  Love the people God loves.  Serve the people God serves.  Forgive the people God forgives.  If we even tried to be as generous with each other as God is with us.....imagine how different the world would be.

In God We Trust: Lesson Number One

On July 30, 1956, “In God We Trust” became our national motto.  Is trusting God still part of our national DNA?   I believe it is.

It is a fact that American principles and values come to us through our Judeo-Christian heritage.  Our belief in the dignity of every human life, of equality, and of free will comes from God.  Our belief in hard work and charity comes from God. Our belief in justice and mercy comes from God. None of these ideas come naturally to human beings, they are godly values not human ones.

Trusting God begins with the humble recognition that these are His ideas - not ours. Our Creator has given us these things, and so much more, for our benefit!

John Adams famously said:  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  Human beings are not angels.  Human beings are not God. We are imperfect and selfish creatures. Human beings are sinful.

Isn’t it interesting that there are those who diligently work to purge the idea of sin from our culture?  Who tell us that people are “good,” when we are not? As a pastor, I fell into the trap of preaching and teaching about things that made people feel good about themselves, but rarely about sin. Please forgive me!

We need to fight back against the cancel culture that is trying it’s damndest to cancel God and at the same time put itself in His place.  They have already done a good job of purging God from our government, our schools, our entertainment and even some churches.  Enough is enough.

What Americans need right now is a refresher course in what it means to trust the One True God.

Lesson Number One:  “Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”

Until we recognize we are all sinners, we will never trust God, we will never know the good He has in mind for us, and we will never fully experience how deep His love for us really is.

Admit you are a sinner.  Admit that you are not perfect.  Admit that you are not always good.  Admit that you are selfish.  Admit you fall short of God’s standards.  Look around, everyone else is a sinner too.

Then, start trusting God.

“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.”  Romans 3:23-24