All-Encompassing, Overflowing Thankfulness Is Our New Life-Element

All-Encompassing, Overflowing Thankfulness Is Our New Life-Element

“Let us be thankful, and thus serve God according to His pleasure1 . . . .” Thus, our life and our ministry are pleasing to God by being thankful. Otherwise, we neither live nor serve in a proper, pleasing way.

In the Swedish Bible it is written, “På det sättet [in this way] we serve God, according to His pleasure.”

When we are filled with the Spirit, we give “thanks always for all things to God the Father.” See Ephesians 5:18-20. We can say that a continuously flowing thankfulness is our proper and natural habitat.

As the fish must obviously be in his natural element (water) in order to continue to live, so we must just as surely live in an overflowing thankfulness to be able to live and serve God according to His pleasure, and in the true sense of the Word, to live.

Being totally and thoroughly thankful is in perfect harmony with living in constant acknowledgment and in consideration of the fact that everything is of grace.

“He is kind to the unthankful and evil.” Luke 6:35. It is not by chance that “evil” and “unthankful” are mentioned in the same context. It is very significant and to the point! The reason people do not overflow with thankfulness is because they do not sufficiently appreciate God’s unspeakably great grace, and because they have still not put off all remnants of wickedness. They are unthankful because they are evil. People are as unthankful as they are evil, and they are as thankful as they are good.

We can justly state that the aim of God’s work is to make us thoroughly good. With that also follows a typical indicator—that we are unusually thankful on all our ways.