Gratitude: The Cornerstone of Christian Faith

Like a huddle with all of our volunteers, I say, "Katie, here's the deal. Next week, you only get 20 minutes." She looked across the room and gave me a thumbs down. So we have a little work to do this week with her to make sure that she's ready for next week so we can walk into this celebration, which we want to do. It's both 9:30 and 11. We're gonna be celebrating an outward expression of interchange through baptisms.

Now, I don't know if you ever think about things that are too good to be true. Like, in my life, I'm 47. I've received this email or this letter multiple times, and I'm just gonna read it to you because you might have received one like it.

"Dear Mr. Davidas, I'm Paul Kofi, and I'm writing you in respect of my deceased client, the late Mr. P.A. Sargees, who died on the 21st of April with his entire family." So, the letter's kind of sad to open up. "I have been trying to locate any member of his family. I did not know I had Nigerian roots. We're trying to locate any member of his family to assist in repart trading." I didn't even know that word; I still don't. "Repart trading, the fun he deposited in finance house, value that USD $10.5 million." Right? "Please, I would like you to contact me through my private email." I'm not gonna share that with you because this is specifically to me. "I can give the detail concerning the claim. I'm looking forward to hearing from you soon."

And then I'm like, is this real? Look how they close it: "God bless you." Clearly, it's real.

All right, so, and I don't know why. I've received that letter, a sum version of it, so many times in my life. And every time I get a Nigerian inheritance letter, I'm like, this one might be real though. Like, I mean, I know the last dozen were fake, but this one, what if this one's real? And I don't follow up on it, and I miss out on this like $10.5 million inheritance that I'm waiting for.

Today, our songs of the summer conversations are gonna be about something that sounds a little bit like snake oil, like it's too good to be true. Can it really do all those things in that way? And snake oil showed up in the U.S. in the 1850s. It was actually from the Chinese water snake. It was a legitimate ointment that could work on muscles, kind of like a Ben Gay rub or one of those things you'd use if you're feeling sore.

But then proprietary medicine blew up, or patent medicine, which was like over-the-counter secret ingredient medicines to cure everything or snake oils. And these claims, and they're still around. The amount of times that basement beast shows up in my Instagram feed and tells me that I can eat as many carbs as I want and not work out, and I'm gonna look incredible. All right, and I'm like, maybe it's true this time. It's never been true before, but maybe this time.

This idea that there's something out there that can cure your sciatic nerve and your rheumatism and neurologia, which I haven't had much of that, but I'm sure it's bad. And this is St. Jacob's oil, the great remedy for pain. There's even the soft drinks we enjoy started as patent medicines. They started as over-the-counter magical cure-alls. If you're a 7-Up fan, it was originally called Bib Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, and it contained lithium citrates, which was a mood-stabilizing drug until the 1950s, when it became the 7-Up that you know and love today.

Or Coca-Cola was originally marketed as a cure for ailments, including morphine addiction and impotence. It was eventually reformulated as the soft drink we have today with no medicinal ingredients. Or Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper, when it came on the scene, aided digestion, and it would restore these three things if you were lacking them: vim, vigor, and vitality. But if you actually drink too much Dr. Pepper, you lose vim, vigor, and vitality. So it's a very interesting thing.

So some things sell themselves as a cure-all. And as I prepared for this week, I was like, oh, this is one of those. I'm gonna stand up here. I'm gonna talk about gratitude. You have to be grateful for the sermon because that's kind of the whole thing today. And I'm gonna say things like gratitude's it. Like it's the thing that will transform every aspect of your life, the whole revolutionized how you view your coming and your going. And when built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, there's nothing that will be a greater expression of the love you've experienced in Jesus Christ. I'm gonna say that today.

So before we get to that, I just wanna ask you a question. I do a couple of questions on our morning. And one of our faithful introverts sent me this like morning calendar. They said, "This is what you do to me every Sunday, okay?" And so they sent this to me. They said, "Here's my morning. It starts at 6 a.m., I prepare to turn and greet my neighbor the whole morning. Then I know you start the message and you're like, here's a question for you." And I do that for like a couple of minutes in the morning. Then I go home and I spend the rest of the day recovering from turning and greeting my neighbor.

So now that I'm armed with this information, I wanna say sorry, not sorry. We actually have a question. I'd like you to turn to your neighbor, and you can recover after church today, okay? So here's the question: What is or was something that is too good to be true? So think about, you know, maybe it's a scam or a letter you received or a diet you tried or a nutrition plan you walked down or education. Something you encountered that you were like, this is it. And then you're like, oh, I got catfished. Like, that wasn't it. That wasn't what I thought it was. It was too good to be true.

Take a minute, just chat about that. Can something come to mind? And we'll be back and we'll explore gratitude.

'Cause it ain't even fate. The plan falls apart, but you still choose to follow. If it doesn't make sense right now, you will end it so well. And there will be joy in the morning.

I take like 10 seconds. I can't even smell anything. So I want to just get that out up front and say that today's conversation is going to sound a little bit like a church religion, too good to be true, a platitude you throw up. But we're going to dive pretty deep into it.

We're going to allow this song. So this whole series has been songs that are sung in churches or songs about Christian faith. So a spiritual playlist to guide our hearts. And so the band has come up, and they're going to sing a song today called "Gratitude." The contents and our mystery, that's about gratitude. I'd love for you to hear it, hear the words. And we're just going to walk through a road and look at some story of gratitude and hopefully leave with a challenge to all of our hearts. I know mine has been, so I hope yours is as well.

Mhm, hmm.

And oh my, where is for sure? I'm not gonna know. How could I express?

Oh my, where is for sure? I can sing these songs as I often do. Every song I sing, and you never do.

So I throw my hands, praise you again and again. So that our head is a heart, play you, hallelujah.

And I know it's not much, got nothing else for you except for heart singing, hallelujah.

And I know it, I got one response. I've got just one move with my arms stretched wide, and I'm wishing you.

So I throw my hands and praise you again and again. So that our head is a heart, play you, hallelujah.

And I know it's not much, got nothing else for you except for heart singing, hallelujah.

And I know it's not much, got nothing else for you, just one move.

Come on, my soul, don't you get shy. I'm going to lift up your soul 'cause you've got a line inside of those cells. Get up and praise the Lord.

Come on, my soul, don't you get shy. I'm going to lift up your soul 'cause you've got a line inside of those cells. Get up and praise the Lord.

Come on, my soul, don't you get shy. I'm going to lift up your soul 'cause you've got a line inside of those cells. Get up and praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord.

So I'll throw my head, praise you again and again. So that I have this of how they knew, how they knew.

And I know it's not much, got nothing else here for a kid except for hearts in the heart. They knew, how they knew.

Thank you, guys.

You may be familiar with that song. I have playlists for a variety of things. I have playlists to break things, and I have playlists to rebuild things I've broken. I have playlists to fight things. I have playlists to love things. My music really guides my heart and my emotion and what I'm doing in the world around me.

And the song you just heard is a song that says, in essence, there's something that needs to happen that doesn't want to happen. There's something that should take place, but it's not going to be easy. And I'm going to have to work with my soul and my brain and my words. I'm going to have to force it out because it's the thing that needs to take place.

And I was thinking about getting ready to come up and share this talk today, and I thought, okay, well, I should probably do a little gratitude assessment of myself before I stand up here and say, "Be thankful." I went to a pretty easy place to be grateful. This is the backside of Bogus Basin. I wish I could go there every day. And I just parked my bike and I sat there. I'm like, all right, time to be thankful.

And my brain was like, headlines, what's going on? And then it was like people, all those people. And none of you were in that part. But then it was like life situations. And I'm like 60 seconds in, and I'm mad at the world because look where I am, right?

So I stopped. I set a 20-minute timer, and I swear it took me about 18 minutes to get out of obsessing stress. And I'm not an obsessive, stressful person. Generally, I tend to be unaware of the dangers of the world. Yet there I was in my gratitude place, full of them.

It took so long to say, "Come on, my soul, this, come on, cut it out. You've got a line inside of your lungs. Just praise the Lord, praise the Lord." And I started by saying, "God, thank you for, wow." And then gratitude started to come out. Most of it was pre-selfish to start: "Thank you for this great thing and that great thing and that great thing."

But eventually, it mellowed down to, "God, thank you for the love of Jesus Christ that's available to all of us that changes all things." That was so my own journey. And I thought about speaking to you today, and I'm like, oh my goodness, I hope they're better human beings than I am because I was stuck in this place of ingratitude. They're going to come sit, and I'm going to talk about gratitude.

So let's do this journey together because everything else aside, gratitude, it's this cure-all. It has power and it has potential, and I want to talk to you about that. I want to link gratitude. Obviously, it's a powerful emotion. It's a firmational practice, but it can increase happiness and well-being. It can reduce feelings of depression. It can diminish negative emotions like envy and resentment. It can strengthen relationships to increase empathy and promote kindness. It can enhance your social bonds, whether they're personal relationships or work relationships.

It can give you better sleep. It can increase your autoimmune system's resilience. It can improve your sense of self-worth, give you a greater ability to cope with adversity. Practicing gratitude in the workplace creates greater teamwork and greater outcomes for teams. It gives you an increased willingness to help others, and gratitude fosters in communities a more compassionate and supportive community.

I read all that, I look at some rays of some things, and I'm like, come on, it's snake oil. Gratitude does all that? What's behind it? And if it does, what does it cost me? I mean, what's it going to cost me to be grateful? Because the benefits are so incredible.

And I started looking; there's over 400 cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in recent years on human gratitude, and they all say essentially the same things. And that's fascinating because over 400 studies, and that way usually don't, they say the same type of thing.

Robert Emmons, one of the doctors involved in this, here's a quote from him: "Gratitude," and this isn't tied to faith, this is just studying people and thankfulness, "Gratitude has one of the strongest links to mental health satisfaction with life. It's stronger than any personality trait, even more so than optimism, hope, and compassion."

And then he goes on and he says this: "In the face of demoralization, gratitude has the power to energize. In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to heal. And in the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope." He says gratitude blocks toxic emotions.

Do you want a little toxic emotion blocker right now? Gratitude blocks toxic emotions such as envy, resentment, regret, and feelings of depression—things that can destroy our sense of well-being and happiness.

So I'm looking at this, and I'm going, gratitude is so good. It's worth not just passing over, giving a pithy nod to, but it's worth kind of getting down and grabbing a hold of and saying, so what is it? How do we experience that? And is all gratitude equal? Is it just like cheer up, little pup? Like find that turn that frown upside down? Is that what we're talking about here, or is it this deep gratitude that's gritty and life-framing and perspective-altering?

Is it this gratitude that, let's put it in this scenario, but when you're out trying to do good, you're wrongly dragged to the city center, you're stripped of your clothes, you're beaten to near the point of death, you're dragged off to prison, you're put in shackles. Is it the kind of thing that can work there? That's not my story; it never happened to me. But we're going to read some of the story today who that is.

But before we jump in, I thought I found an idea that frames up what kind of gratitude I want to talk about today, the kind I think that Jesus gets at in our lives. If you don't know Corrie ten Boom, she wrote a book called "The Hiding Place." It's a quick read; it's about her experience in a Nazi concentration camp. She was a survivor, and the book is worth the read. It's better than your Instagram feed, promise, okay? It's a good read, and it will bring some hope and some challenge to you.

And she says this, so where she was at Ravensbrück, in the tournament camp, concentration camp, and at Ravensbrück, 30,000 to 50,000 estimates people were put to death through poor living conditions, forced labor, executions, medical experiments, and no medical care. So that's where she experienced and said this idea: "No pit is so deep, but He, Jesus, is not deeper still. With Jesus, even in our darkest moments, the best remains, and the very best is yet to be."

And I was thinking about that, and I was going that this deep gratitude recognizes that there are several fundamental truths. We're going to explore this idea of how can we get to this place? Is this possible? Is there a typology or a study for how this plays out?

So I see a few things I want to present to you to start, and the first is that gratitude experiences every good thing as a gift. Gratitude experiences every good thing as a gift. But here's the challenge I ran into up at Bogus Basin. Those first 18 minutes, I couldn't find any good things. If you hang out with me, I think everything is good, so what happened in my brain?

Right? Gratitude experiences every good thing as a gift, even in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where 30,000 to 50,000 people were brutally and unjustly put to death. Somehow, Corrie ten Boom experienced gratitude in that place. I'm intrigued. I kind of want to know how do you get to that place? What is it?

So gratitude experiences every good thing, and maybe the first step to this gratitude is starting to see what you should be thankful for, what is good that maybe we've written off as an expectation or something that we deserve.

Because the second thing I'd say is gratitude is at the absolute core of human experience. It's at the core of a unified church. It's at the core of a mother-daughter relationship or family bonds. It's at the core of friendships. It's at the core of good work relationships. It's at the absolute core of the human experience.

And we know this; you might be in a relationship right now that's kind of broken down, and here's why it broke down. You're one of these two people. Someone was in need, and you love this person. And to help them, you had to sacrifice work time, money, energy. You had to say no to something else. But you did it because you loved them. You didn't do it for anything in return. But then they never said or acknowledged, "Thank you." And it just started to eat away at you.

You did it; you would have done it. You weren't expecting a thank you, but they didn't appreciate what you did. Like parenting, we all feel this a little bit. Like, guys, we love you, but man, say thanks, please. Okay, now I preach to the crowd in the front, okay?

So then what happens? Then what happens is this, or maybe you're on the other side. You're like, "Why do I have to say thank you? You said you would help me. Like, you love me. I don't understand why I've got to give you this gratitude back."

And I've seen relationships literally sever and drift all because there's an expectation of something in our human relationships, some form of appreciation, some form of gratitude.

Another thing I would simply say is this: gratitude is a recognition that life owes me nothing. This is the most transformational message Jesus gave to me when I was a hurting, angry, and objecting young man. I thought life owed me something, at least a little bit of something. Like maybe some of you guys looked at people around me, and I was like, "Why doesn't life give me what they have?"

And it was actually one of the first Christians I spent time with. They said, "You've got to shift your thinking. This idea of being owed will eat away at you and destroy the quality of your life. You're owed nothing, so be thankful for everything."

I thought about that, and I go, well, let's explore what this looks like. This is a pretty dramatic statement. Like, really, life owes me nothing? It doesn't owe me a little something?

So what we're going to do as we think about these ideas and we kind of dig into them is I hope to have an invitation to look at our lives and say, am I grateful? Do I want to be grateful? Can I be grateful? What are the benefits of increasing the gratitude in my life?

Now remember, I started with prison and beatings and being beaten to the death of your life and wrongly accused. So we're going to go back to that story. We're going to be in the book of Acts. Acts is the story of the early formation of the church. We're going to be in the book of Acts, and we're going to be looking at Paul and Silas.

Now here's what's happened: Paul and Silas, two followers of Jesus, they've shown up in a city called Philippi. If you look at the Bible, the book of Philippians, higher love, if you remember that journey around here, that was a higher love study we did. Paul and Silas show up, and they meet this woman Lydia. Lydia is like a rich fabric trader, and she becomes a follower of Jesus. She invites them to her house, and the first church starts to form there.

Paul and Silas are just telling people about Jesus, and they're excited about what's happening. They're out in the street one day, and this girl who's a slave, who has the ability to tell the future is what it says. So her owners make a ton of money off of her. She's like a palm reader, and they just make money off her.

And so she's following Paul and Silas, and she's yelling out, "These guys are following God the Most High." Sounds like a compliment, but it's not. And eventually, Paul stops. He's like, "Hey, the spirit, this demon, the spirit that's tormenting her, cut it out," and the girl's set free.

But when she's set free, you know what she loses? This whole mystical magical thing that's making money for her owners. Well, the owners are outraged. They're outraged because they lost their money. They're not concerned about the freedom of this girl; they lost their money.

And this is what unfolds. So Acts chapter 16, verse 19: "When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities."

Now while they're there, they bring them before the magistrates and said, "These men are Jews, and they're throwing our city into an uproar." They accuse them of breaking certain customs and say they're just no good for Philippi. And so they strip them of their clothes in the middle of the street and they beat them with rods.

And the text says after they are severely flogged, they're thrown into prison. The jailers commanded to guard them carefully, so he takes them to the inner prison, the inner cell, and he fastens their feet in metal stalks. So that's what happens here, okay?

This is a gratitude conversation today, so what unfolds next? So far this is not going that way, okay? This is where it picks up. About midnight, Paul and Silas, stripped, beaten, shackled, are praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners are listening to them.

There's something about the bedrock of their understanding of who they are and who God is that in this lowest of moments, most likely the final moments of their lives, their backs laid open, chained to a stone wall, hungry, thirsty together, they look at each other and they have a jailbreak plan: "Let's just thank God for His goodness. That's all we have left."

Look how it unfolds as the other prisoners listened to them. Suddenly, there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and at once all the prison doors flew open and everyone's chains came loose.

So you see the scene now, like the prison doors are open, the prison chains are loose, and the jailer, seeing this commotion, panics. The jailer wakes up. When he sees the prison doors are open, he draws his sword and he's about to kill himself because if he kills himself, maybe Rome will go easy on his family for not doing his one job.

So he draws his sword; he's about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. And Paul shouts—Paul's probably at a distance. If you were to visualize this, there's probably some lantern light, and Paul sees the jailer pull his sword. He sees he's about to kill himself, and he says, "Wait, don't harm yourself. We're still here."

These guys are horrible at breaking out of jail. He says the jailer called for the lights, rushed in, and he falls trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"

They replied, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you'll be saved, you and your household." They look him in the eyes and they say, "Everything you just experienced, these two beaten-down men who are dragged to the depths of your prison, who sing songs and prayed prayers of thanksgiving, that's because we have received the goodness, the solid rock, the foundation of Jesus Christ."

And the story goes on. After they speak to him, he brings him home, gives him some hot supper, washes their wounds. And then it's the morning; he's like, "Oh, we got to, let's all go back to jail." So they all walk back in jail, and he straps them back up. It's pretty wild.

Now, the next day, the magistrates realized that they took two Roman citizens and beat them without a fair trial, which was against the rules. And so they're like, "Let those guys go. Let those guys go."

And so Paul and Silas are freed, and there's just a few things I know there's someone to talk about with you here. And the first is this: you can see the effects of a life centered on gratitude. I'm going to one of the hardest and most difficult places because if it can be tested and it works there, then it can work on all the different scales of our lives.

You suffer differently when you experience gratitude. When Paul and Silas are put into prison, they have a choice in front of them. They can yell and shout, "We're Roman citizens! This isn't fair! We want a fair trial!" They just make a ruckus, and they'll probably get more of a beat down. But instead, they suffer differently.

They're sitting next to each other, facing the uncertainty of what the night's going to bring, and one of them starts to sing a song, and the other one's like, "Oh, yeah, that's a good one." So I'll throw up my hands, pray to you again and again. "All right, Jesus, you're still good. You were good when we met Lydia down by the river and she became a Christian, and this church started. You were good when you set that girl on the street free, and you're still good. You're still good."

So they pray and they sing, and they suffer differently. And through that, they impact others. All the prisoners are listening. The jail doors open up, the jailer is about to run himself through. And this is how this is supposed to go. Paul grabs Silas. They run out as the over the body of the dead jailer, and they all go in.

And then it's like, you know, season one ends, and we can't wait for the drop of season two because now they're going to start a revolution and take over Rome or something, right? No, they see the jailer's about to take his life. And even though he's in the way of their plans, which is to go from city to city and tell people about Jesus, they say, "Wait, don't, don't."

Out of our different suffering, there's impact that flows to you. This is an interesting opportunity for us because the jailer is converted, his family is converted. But also, the Philippian church is essentially formed out of these few moments. If you've read the Bible, you've read the book of Philippians. We have this letter shaping our lives today out of this moment that happened right here.

The last thing, and it's my favorite, is it breaks destructive cycles. When you return injustice for injustice, you just get more injustice. When you take matters into your own hands, gratitude flees. You can't so hard to take matters into your own hands and have gratitude. It's nearly impossible.

So you go, here's the thing I need to fix or solve about the world or about my life or about people I love. And if it's not led by gratitude, you're going to introduce destructive cycles. But what we see, they suffer differently, which leads to an impact on others, which leads to the breaking of destructive cycles.

They resist the temptation to solve their problem, and they say, "God, I'm going to praise your name. We're going to sing songs to you." And I want to just give you a moment to think about this. But it's not, what about us? I started to take inventory of how gratitude has transformed my life, and it has touched my life in the deepest places, the deepest relationships, the ones that we tend to stay stuck in for many all over the years of our lives.

I looked at this, and I thought, I wonder what stories you would tell. I know minutes not a lot of time, but what if this is a set up for lunch? I don't want you to pick it back up, and you go, let's talk more about where we have seen gratitude take us from A to B. And we had to get to B because we were stuck at A. Or where we've seen it in the lives of people we love.

So just a moment to start that conversation, and we'll come back.

I'm calling on the God of Jacob, who's loving to us through generations. I know that you will keep the cup.

I'm calling on the God of Jacob, who's loving to us through generations. I know that you will keep the cup in this.

I'm calling on the God of Moses, the one who opened up your soul. I need you now to do the same thing for me.

Oh God, my God, I need you. Oh God, my God, I need you now. How I need you now.

Hopefully, that just got you thinking because what we're going to do to end is we're just going to explore. So you have this story of Paul and Silas, and you have this picture of what's going on in this place.

So what was the life of the early church like? Because our mission around here is we want to inspire you to follow Jesus and deepen your faith in relationship with Him. And it happens within this community space. We have this opportunity to be unified as a church and do this together, to be a community of gratitude.

And so I wanted to scroll through a couple of the instructions, just a few to the early churches. They're recorded in these letters like Thessalonians and Corinthians and Philippians and James. You'll find them in the New Testament.

And if you all think about it, those letters are written to people like us who would come together and go, "Who is Jesus? How does following Him work? And where do I put my hope?" And they were beginning to learn how to do this together.

And what's important about this is remember Jesus was talking to His friends. There are people listening in, and He said, "I want to tell you how life works."

And so when Jesus says that, I was my years for a cup, okay, how does it work? There's a guy who got a great deal on some land that was in the flood zone. It was good land though, and it's not going to flood. So he built his house; it was a nice house, and neighbors talked about it. It was a good place.

And the wind came, and the rain came, and the floods came, and the whole house crashed down. Everyone in it crashed down with it. And his audience is listening and goes, "There is another builder who searched out for some bedrock land that would never shake, that nothing would shake the foundation of this house."

And he built the house. And then Jesus says the same wind and rains came. Turns out he still got the same wind and rains. But he built on the foundation. The wind beat against the house, and the rain pounded on that house, but the house held strong.

And Jesus is looking at everyone and goes, "This is the one who knows my way of living and follows it." And that's what the church is about, the way of Jesus and following it.

And so these are some of the ways it was talked about to the early church. So here's Thessalonians: "Rejoice always, now pray continually. Give thanks in all circumstances." You know who wrote this? Paul, the guy who was wrongly dragged into the center of town, had his clothes stripped off, was flogged, was dragged into the middle of prison.

So as the Spirit's inspiring him and he's putting these words down, he goes, "Oh man, can you imagine what a community would look like if they just rejoice always, if they pray continually, if they give thanks in all circumstances?" And people are like, "Yeah, but what about, you know, when it's too hot out?" "Yeah, even then." "What about when I'm hungry?" "Yeah, even then." "Well, okay, Paul, but what about when I'm in prison? Wrongly, I've been beaten, and I'm about to die." "Oh, even then. Let me tell you about what happened with the Philippian jailer. Even then, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

And sometimes we stumble upon little moments like this. I know my desire is to know the will of God and follow it all the days of my life. I'm given a key here: "Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances."

That's to the church in Thessalonica. To the church in Philippi, Paul says this: "Don't be anxious about anything." And already this is out the door. Like if you have a good friend and you're like, "I'm really struggling," and they go, "Rejoice always and don't be anxious about anything," you're like, "I do not talk to that person when I have a problem."

But he doesn't. Here it is: "Don't be anxious about anything. How? But in every situation by prayer and petition, asking with thanksgiving, present your request to God."

So Paul and Silas are in prison, and they say, "God, thank you for your goodness. Thanks for rescuing us. Thanks for allowing us to serve you. Thanks for letting us love people who are hurting and set people free. And God, if you can free, if you want us to keep doing this work, then find a way to get us out of this prison."

And all of a sudden, there's an earthquake, and the prison doors open. Instead of running for their freedom, they stay on mission. Like, "Oh no, no, no, but there's a jailer here who needs us." And they stay with thanksgiving; they present their request to God.

And look what happens: "And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding." And I love the unintentional nod to brain science here. Our brains don't want to work this process. Understanding is against gratitude. But the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

James, the half-brother of Jesus and the leader of the first church in Jerusalem, a church that ended up being heavily persecuted and scattered throughout Rome because they were blamed for a fire that happened. They said, "This fire must have happened because of these Christians, so let's get them out of our city." There are famines as well; there's a bunch of stuff that they got blamed for everything.

But this is what James says: "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance."

And as I read these, this pure joy, I get this picture of gratitude not just about like working my dopamine system. It's something more than that. It's about framing my world around the reality that Jesus Christ is for me, that He has paid the price for me to be restored and reconciled and to partner with Him in doing that same thing.

And if it ends up that I'm in prison and about to die, I know this: He's also prepared a place for us, for people. A place with no pain and no suffering, no tears and no crying, no starvation and no diagnosis. A place where there is just life as it's meant to be.

And so I consider it pure joy when I face trials of many kinds because you know the testing of your faith produces perseverance.

And as I was sitting up at Bogus Basin, something struck me. It was just this: that gratitude is an identifying characteristic of Christian faith.

So I want to talk to my Christian community real quick. Not everybody in here is. Many of you have questions, and you're exploring. But to my community that would say, "I have been found again in Jesus Christ," then there's a challenge for us here.

If your life is not marked and identified by gratitude, you might just be missing what God has for you. You'll be marked by a lot of things—the things you stand against. There's important things to stand against. You can be marked by your commitment, your integrity, your character.

But if you just take a minute and assess your gratitude and you go, "It's hard for me to be thankful," you're drifting from what Jesus has for you. You're beginning to go, "I know I can build on this solid rock, but if you've seen how much land there is over here on this flood zone, and it's probably not going to rain."

It's an identifying characteristic. The very first churches were known to pray for their oppressors as they were being put to death, to pray for their enemies as they were being persecuted, to give grateful shouts of praise and songs in all situations—famines and fires and floods and shipwrecks and nakedness.

And Paul runs this list. He's like, "I've had it all. I've had nothing. I've had everything. I've been hungry. I've been full. I've been in prison. I've been beaten 40 minus one lashing multiple times in my life for the message I teach." He runs through it all, and you realize he's got one indicator of how he handles this. It's this gratitude that marks him.

In Philippians, he says this. He's in prison when he writes this. He goes, "Kill me? Great, I get to be with Jesus. Keep me in prison? Awesome, the poor prison guards have to hear about Jesus every day. Set me loose? Great, I'll go tell people about Jesus."

Like when you read this text, you realize Paul's just marked by gratitude. He's like, "Whatever you've got to throw at me, throw it because I've got one move: gratitude." And it's good for everybody.

So I'm going to end by looking at something he said to the church in Colossians. Colossi, a new group of believers. And in September, we're going to get those little Bible books that we pass out around here, and we're going to study Colossians together, get some lessons from that together.

And so he says this in Colossians 2. He's a little bit far, and he's talking about the supremacy of Jesus Christ. It's kind of the theme he's writing to this church in Colossians. He says, "So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness."

Notice Paul doesn't say, "Hey, be thankful. It's good for you. It'll help with your rheumatoid arthritis, whatever that is," right? He starts with, "Look, you've received Christ Jesus, solid rock. So continue to live your lives, your day-to-day lives, live them in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in faith as you were taught."

And the key word: overflowing. Gratitude just keeps coming out; you can't stop it. When you're winning on every level and you have so much in life you can identify to be grateful for. But if you're like me, I suspect those are some of the hard times to be grateful too because you get tricked into thinking you did it all.

So when you're winning or when you're wrongly dragged to the city center, stripped of all your clothes, flogged, and dragged to the inner prison, overflowing with thankfulness.

Now Paul goes on in this message; he talks about, for the next few verses, how Christ shapes all of our lives and invites all of us to be grateful. And then he bookends it, this section, this is the critical sections of Colossians. He bookends it with this, and he says, "And let the peace of Christ rule in your heart."

So something's going to rule in our heart—the peace of work, whatever peace that is, the peace of the headlines, the peace of broken relationships that are keeping you trapped, the peace of trying to save yourself, the peace of your school or your hopes, your dreams, your hobbies, or your sports.

Something's going to rule in our heart, and Paul says just let the peace of Christ rule in your heart, to which indeed you are called in one body. And here he is again: "And be thankful."

I almost feel like he got an assignment that was like, "Add and be thankful four times to pass this assignment." And he just, "And be thankful," there it is, "and be thankful." And then he goes on, and he goes deeper.

"Let the message of Christ dwell among you all so richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit."

Let's just stop right here. This is Paul, his friend Silas, and he's gone, "I'll let the message of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs." And he's gone, "I remember when Silas and I were in prison in Philippi and how he encouraged me with prayers and songs. And we sang together because the message of Christ just dwelled so richly in our hearts that even imminent death in prison, unfairly in prison, couldn't stamp it out."

Singing to God with gratitude in your heart. When we do music on Sundays and the band works really hard and they bring their gifts and their talents, our hope is always that as you follow Jesus, you would start to go, "Oh, just gratitude. I just want to sing with gratitude. I want to overflow with gratitude."

In the end, he says here, "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."

You do realize how dramatic this sentence is, right? Whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus. And here's this overflow again, giving thanks to God.

So when you're thrown in prison and you think you're going to die, in word indeed, give thanks to God the Father through Jesus Christ.

This community in the churches I've been part of are full of people who have embodied this in the most painful places, in the most hopeless places. And it always bolsters my faith because I go, it is true, gratitude overflowing from a deep indwelling relationship with Jesus Christ.

It's it; it's snake oil, but the real deal, it's too good to be true, and it's available for everyone.

I want to end just by thinking about this, but there's a little formula in here. You do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, and you give thanks to God. And so you realize doing something in someone's name means acting in someone's name, representing them, actually being empowered to do so.

So Paul looks at it; he's writing everyone, and he goes, "Guess what? You represent Jesus. Your reflection of gratitude is an indication of the very God you say you follow."

People—and this was me; it's probably some of you or was you at some point—people will watch you if you're a follower of Jesus, and they'll say, "Show me your gratitude. I want to see if you're just like me or different." And then they assess; they go, "We're the same. You just go to church on Sunday. Like, I get to sleep in, eat bacon, and go for a bike ride. Like, why is this your issue?"

A gentleman came up to me after the first service. I didn't know he was visiting. He came up; he had a journal in his hand, and he starts crying. And so I've got to tell you about this. I lost my wife a few years ago, 40 years. And he goes, "And then my son, who's your age—I'm 47—my son died suddenly."

And he starts crying, and he says, "This guy's a journal." And he goes, "And I got this journal, and I just started to say all the things I was thankful to God for."

And he goes, "It has been my lifeblood, and people have looked at me and said, 'How in the world have you navigated this?'" And he doesn't say, "Because I'm such a strong, built-up man who just like, you know, I'm soldiering on." He would say, "I have been firmly established in Jesus Christ, and all my wives and my wits in my house have not been overwhelmed or have been overwhelmed by gratitude."

And he sat right down there, and we hugged him, and I said, "Can I share that just briefly?" And he said, "Yes, you can. I think God brought him up to me to share that with you."

Acting in someone's name means representing them and being empowered to do so. So what happens for you and I is gratitude checks our actions, and it encourages our perspective.

This is true in your marriage relationship. This is true in your singleness. This is going to be true in how we navigate love, how we navigate friendship, how we navigate sex and money and career and purpose and meaning, how we navigate winning, how we navigate losing.

Gratitude will be a check on our actions. Should I say and do this? I don't know; is it an overflow of gratitude? Just can't slow down and think about it. I'm going to check it, and then that check, there are things I will not do. And you know what will happen? I'll suffer well.

I'll suffer well because it will encourage perseverance in me. And so we find ourselves—at least I find myself—sometimes I wish that the Bible and Christian living just had a code, and it was like, "Do this here, watch this movie, listen to this song, don't talk to this person, talk to this person." I could be like, "Yes, Jesus, I'm doing all the right things, and you love me."

But that's not how it works. It's not based on that system at all. It is walk with me, build your life on me, and I will, in my name, I will become—my Spirit will become a checker.

I will be a checker for your actions and will encourage perseverance in your life. So I'm met with this like, okay, can I really do this, whatever this is? Can I really do this? Can I really say this? Can I really act this way? Am I representing the Lord Jesus?

I'm going to go down, and I now have a check for my actions. How am I supposed to live in the realities of my day-to-day life? And the more I lean into Jesus, I realize the center of a satisfied, fulfilled Christian life is a life that's guided by, "Can I really do this in the name of Jesus? Can I really say this? Can I really act this?"

Whether it's manual labor, whether it's a job I sought long and hard for and people call me white-collar, whether I'm crushing my relationships or I'm getting crushed by my relationships, whether I'm writing a book or playing tennis or playing pickleball, right?

Whatever it is, can I do this in the name, thanks? I'm going to got the pickleball tennis tension; I like that. But can I do this in the name of Jesus through the power of Jesus? Can I get a little bit of Paul and Silas on in my life?

And so I think I want to be practical, whether you visit today for the only time or whether this is where you're pursuing Christ or pursuing to understand who Christ is in community.

And so I thought, okay, what if—and I've been trying this—what if, and the gentleman who opened his journal to me, he had "THNKS:" colon, and every day he was filling something in that he could be thankful about. There's some power in that.

So what if we walk through the week ahead, the month ahead, your fall? Let's make it to Christmas. Every day, I am thankful to God for.

And if you're like me, you'll be up at Bogus Basin, and you'll start thinking about headlines and budgets and college bills and FAFSA—what a ridiculous process, right? And you'll be, and you'll start thinking about all this stuff, and that's where you'll be.

And you'll know, "I am thankful to God for," and sometimes my default is simply like, "I was not His best bet, and He still loved me." That's all I got today.

And then I move on, family or community, I'm thankful to blank for. And what if you not only thought it and wrote it down, you started to make a phone call or send a text message?

There are people who have shaped your life for good; they don't know that. They've never heard it, and you might even have forgotten because somewhere along the way, you got convinced you shaped your life for good. You had a part to play.

But what if you just said, "I'm thankful to for." This is a formula. If you're more eloquent, make your own sentence, but this is a baseline sentence for you.

And then work in school. School's coming back. I've been for weeks telling the high school students, "School starts soon," and they hate me for it, okay? But what if you head into your school year, and you did sort of a general approach that says, like school, like it's utilitarian. I get grades to go to college, do this, do this, do this.

Or I don't get grades because I don't believe in that system, and you go, "You know what? I am thankful to for." I'm going to start being thankful for my teachers, for people around me. I'm going to start noticing people around me who normally bother me.

And the same thing at your workplace and in your neighborhood. What if we take these three things, every day try to hit all three? But this might be too much for some of you. You might go, "I can't start with this because that's not what I believe."

Start here: I believe that if you embody this quality of gratitude, it will bring you to a place of finding Jesus, the ultimate source of gratitude.

So this is the invitation for us, and the dream is that we as a community would be people who don't take 18 to 20 minutes in a beautiful place to find one thing to be grateful for, but that we would just be people like the song says, "Come on, my soul, don't you get tired on me? Lift up your voice; you've got a lion inside of your lungs."

Let's just find gratitude.

So I'm going to give you a minute to think about this, and we're going to sing our closing song.

All my words for you, I've got nothing else. How could I express all my gratitude? I could sing this song as I ought to do, but every song must end. And you'll never do.

So I fold my head and pray to you again and again because all that I have is the only, the only, the only, the only.

And I know it's all that, but I'm the only, the only, the only.