Philippians 4:6 Gratitude
“Don’t worry about anything, but pray about everything. With thankful hearts offer up your prayers and requests to God” (CEV).
I have a great feeling of gratitude today. A situation or problem that I have been working on for about seven months was resolved this morning at about 10:45 A.M.
Gratitude is defined by Webster as “a feeling of thankful appreciation for favors or benefits received; thankfulness.” He got that right. I am thankful to my Lord for resolving this situation for me.
I am also thankful for His patience with me over this seven month period. When it began someone said that I should “just give it to the Lord.” I did, and then I “just took it back.” I didn’t do that just once or twice or even five times, but God was patient with me through the entire process. The Lord told me several times, “I’ve got this,” and I believed Him at the moment. But when things didn’t go quite as fast or in quite the manner I expected, I “just took them back,” and did it my way. I soon found out that my way wasn’t working, so “I just gave it back” to the Lord, and He accepted. Guess what? I did that several times over the seven months. I am amazed at the giants of the Bible like Abraham who waited twenty-five years for the son He was promised. Wait a minute. One time in the middle of the twenty-five years, he took matters into his own hands and fathered a child not of his wife Sara. But that didn’t work out quite right. Abraham came back to God, and the son he was promised was born. I think I detect a pattern here. First God calls us to something and we accept it. Then when things don’t go the way we want them to, we leave God behind and do it our way. When that doesn’t go well, we offer the situation back to God. Since He is a patient and loving God, He takes it back and finally brings it to resolution. The steps—1. We are called to something. 2. We accept the call and start working on it. 3. We mess up. 4. We give it back to God, and He completes it. That seems pretty simple and straight forward except that we often get stuck in the middle of step 4 and we “just take it back.” And then we start the process over again. The great thing about our Lord is that no matter how many times we “just take it back,” He is always ready when we “just give it to Him.”
Thank you, Lord, for resolving my problem, and thank you, Lord, for your great patience with me. You are so good to me!