Open Windows, Part 5: Evening Prayer (Reflect with Gratitude)

Hi, welcome to the Vine Life Church podcast.

We're in Boulder, Colorado, and we're following Jesus by staying limited in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission so that hearts are awakened with his auspiring love.

And if we can help you in any way, reach out to usivinelife.com.

For now, here's a short sermon from last weekend of my life.

Again, thanks for joining us.

I will bless the Lord at all times.

His praise shall continually be on my mouth.

My soul makes its boasts in the Lord.

Let the humble hear and be glad.

O magnify the Lord with me.

Let us exalt his name together.

Let's go one more round.

I will bless the Lord at all times.

His praise shall continually be on my mouth.

My soul makes its boasts in the Lord.

Let the humble hear and be glad.

Oh, magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together.

See, guys, I broke a guitar string this morning and I'm not happy about it, alright?

It ruined the first three songs for me.

So I am I am cheerleading for myself because I'm a confident believer that before we need someone else to lead us in worship, we have to lead ourselves in worship, right?

I'm gonna read this again.

I want you to join with me because I'm not gonna preach another word this morning until we're together here to exalt the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Are you guys with me?

Let's stand to our feet.

I will bless the Lord at all times.

His praise shall continually be on my mouth.

My soul makes its boast in the Lord.

Let the humble hear and be glad.

Oh, magnify the Lord with me.

Come, let us exalt his name together.

Come on, Jesus, we love you in this place.

We love you in this place.

You are given.

We give you praise, we give you glory, we give you honor, you're worthy of our lives, you're worthy of our songs, you're worthy of our breath.

In the name of Jesus, we must send.

All right, you can sit down.

All right, we can move on.

We can move on.

Thank you for obliging me.

Brandon, would you come up, please?

Everybody welcome, Brandon Kelly.

Coming up, coming up.

Here you go.

So you heard in the announcements today, one of the uh one of the experiences that we have coming up in the next couple weeks, we call uh it's called the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Course.

We ran it the first time this last spring.

And really what it is, it's it's tools to be able to cultivate um an inner life with God.

And some of us have rich rhythms with God, but the way this course is able to kind of strip away some of the layers that we often live with and help us live in a new level of depth, it's it's really powerful.

I asked Brandon, because Brandon took the course for the first time this last spring, and uh he just he wanted to share uh a couple a little bit of his experience, and I hope this encourages you as well.

So, Brandon, what what was the experience like for you?

So this is it's on, yeah.

Is it on?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

So this is what it's like to be on stage.

Um so Luke asked me to share some experiences that I had in in this class, and it was it was wonderful.

But before I I say that, um this is not about me, this is about God.

So let's let's have a shout of praise.

Yeah, come on.

Thank you.

Put this in perspective.

Um so I I would say uh some of you know my story already, but I've I've had a challenging year.

Uh it's been really tough.

Uh the season has been fraught with uh a lot of pain and a lot of struggle and a lot of uh heartbreak and that sort of thing.

But it was very timely that this class came about because I was emotionally unhealthy at the time.

So uh how many of you know that God's timing is perfect?

And anything that we need, he knows what we need when we need it.

So uh this was a blessing.

This was a huge blessing for me.

Um so there's two highlights that I would go over.

Yeah, uh these are these are some takeaways.

There's many takeaways in this class.

It's wonderful.

It was it was life-changing for me.

But uh one of them is is what's called the daily office.

And I know Luke has preached on that for about a month now or so.

But uh it's basically time with God.

It's daily time with God.

And I had a powerful one this morning.

But uh it's uh through the class it it teaches you how to do that because I really didn't know how.

I was I was confused, uh, my head was foggy, and I I just wasn't sure how to how to do that.

There's a routine that needs to be developed.

It's like it's like training a muscle uh, you know, for a workout.

It gets stronger the more often you do, but you have to have to begin to to do it and and have this routine.

So it taught me how to do that for one, which was amazing.

So it was spiritually nourishing.

Um there was a lot of joy and there was a lot of peace in that and and those are things that I needed because I was I was really broken.

Yeah.

Um second thing is is something called the wall.

And the wall, uh all Christians go through a crisis, you know, we all do that.

Um but there's a wall that we hit, and the author says uh he he talks about how Christians just for the most part don't know how to get through that wall.

Okay uh and they get stuck and they never get through it, and it's tragic.

But that's where the healing takes place is in that wall.

And until we get through it, you know, there's really I found there's only one way to get through that, and that's with God.

I can't do that without Him.

So there were some techniques that were offered in the class uh that were just life-changing for me as well, and it it allowed me to kind of see in your vulnerable state when you surrender to God that He works internally in you to to fix you, to heal you.

Uh it was it was wonderful.

Um those two things, and I I wanted to share this as an excerpt.

I'm getting used to holding this mic, sorry.

So this is what the author says about the wall.

He says, I meet many believers who are stuck at a wall.

They often fail to see the larger picture of the transforming work God seeks to do in them at their wall.

The pain of their present circumstances blinds them.

And I I I could certainly relate to that.

I'm sure all of you can relate to that.

So this is the key.

He says what most don't understand is that growth into maturity in Christ requires us to go through that wall.

We have to go through it in order to mature, in order to heal, and toward in order to have a closer relationship with God.

Failure to understand and surrender to God's working in us at the wall often results in long-term pain.

But receiving the gift in the wall transforms our lives forever.

So I I would say if you haven't signed up for this class, take that leap of faith.

Try it, do it.

Um, it blessed me so much, and there's so much to be gained for it from it.

So there's there's so much that that you can learn about your spiritual faith, but I would suggest that you sign up for that.

And it'll bless you like it blessed me.

So amen.

Thanks, bro.

There you go.

That was so good.

Thank you, Brandon.

Yeah, and Brandon's actually leading one of the tables.

It's it's basic it's a course, it's around table, so you get to know other people.

He's leading one of the tables, so if you want to be at Brandon's table, you get signed up.

All right.

Brilliant.

Father, we thank you.

We thank you this morning for the gift of being able to come to you with the our body of believers, Lord God.

I thank you that this is a privilege to be able to worship you and freedom.

And this morning, God, as we open up the word, we thank you to speak to us.

We thank you to read us.

Make us into your people, God.

Make us into the image of Christ.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

So, uh, if you are a guest with us today, I'm gonna catch you up here on a conversation we've been on the last few weeks.

We've been in a series called Open Windows.

And uh it's been a kind of a consistent theme over the last several weeks.

Um, and it's been teeing off the story in the Old Testament of Daniel in a time of hardship when he was in Babylon.

He had a habit of returning to his his upper room, his bedroom space that had open windows, and three times a day he would turn his attention to God.

And we see that this is part of what Daniel did to develop strength, to develop resilience.

And it's what honestly uh believers have done for the last uh several thousand years.

Um, uh develop, cultivate a life, an ordered life before God.

And so over the last few weeks, we've been casting this vision for this year of um for Vine Life, the Vine Life community, an invitation to enter into a daily prayer rhythm, putting, and we put our kind of our own twists on a rhythm we're recovering from this global historic church.

And that is three times a day returning our attention back to God, believing that a simple rhythm like this actually allows us to cultivate a lifestyle of unceasing prayer.

Because that's really what the heart of God is after.

As his believers, we're it's not just moments of the day, but moments of the day that lead to all of life.

And that's what we're really in it for together is developing communion with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Billy Graham said it like this true prayer is a way of life, not just use, not just for use in cases of emergency.

Make it a habit, and when the need arises, you will be in practice.

So I want to ask an honest question.

We're about three, four weeks in now.

I just, this is totally fine.

Be completely honest with me.

Who here has tried a stab at some kind of regular daily rhythm of prayer?

Just put your hand in the air.

It's okay.

Awesome.

Some of you are lying, it's okay.

It's okay.

Um, I'm just joking.

Um, that's awesome.

And if you haven't tried it yet, I want to encourage you, um, don't just write it off as one more thing, or don't just one more thing to add to your plate, so to speak, or or something that's not for you.

This is something that we want to lean in together.

And I believe it's gonna be an important building block this year.

In fact, um we're gonna have uh some guys pass around some cards.

And what this is, it's kind of a cheat sheet for the things that we've talked about.

Um could somebody help Graham here?

Oh, he's got it.

Okay.

So we'll get some cards around, and basically what this is it's a card that talks about a morning rhythm of being with Jesus, a midday rhythm of praying for the loss, and an evening rhythm, which we're talking about today, which is about praying gratitude, reflecting in gratitude.

And um, this card as you get it, it's something that you can keep in your Bible, you could keep it in your journal, you could keep it by your nightstand if you want to, you could keep it on your refrigerator.

Somewhere that if you need a prompting of, okay, how can I turn my attention to the Lord?

And what are some questions I can be asking right now?

I hope that this is a good tool for you this year.

And so this uh this morning, we're gonna dig a little bit into what we're calling our third window.

The first window being mornings with Jesus and starting our days from belovedness, the second window being midday prayer, which is turning our attention beyond ourselves and our own personal growth and development, to the world that God is loving, the world he has sent us to, and turning our attention to those he has given to us to pray for, and like we talked about last week, laboring in prayer, that they would know the voice of the good shepherd, right?

And this evening we're or this this morning we're talking about evening prayer.

I'm just gonna read a few passages to get us started.

First Thessalonians 5, Paul writes, Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

James 2 or James 1, 2 through 4.

James writes this.

He says, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

And then Paul writes again to the Philippians chapter 4.

Philippians 4 · chapter mention

He says, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Who could use some of that today?

So rejoice always, count it all joy.

Let your request be made known to God with thanksgiving.

These are common themes.

In fact, um, all throughout scripture, um, these these instructions appear all over.

Can I ask you this morning, how many of you know what is the most common command in all of the scripture?

Who knows?

If you're not, don't be afraid.

It's not it's not serve, it's not even pray.

It's not uh give more, it's it's not uh you know go to church, it's don't be afraid.

It actually appears about 365 times in the Bible, do not be afraid.

But followed closely behind it is another command that that appears both in Greek and Hebrew about 250 times all throughout the scripture.

And what would that be?

Almost.

It's remember.

Remember, do not do not be afraid and remember, be not afraid, and remember.

These are the two most common things that God wanted his people to know throughout the whole of Scripture.

Don't be afraid and remember.

And in fact, uh they're very they're very linked, aren't they?

Um, not being afraid is equally linked to the command to remember.

Why?

Because, as you know, we are prone to forget.

And it's a story we see this tendency all throughout scripture from beginning to end.

The children of Israel, after witnessing miracle after miracle in their liberation from Egypt and the supernatural provision in the desert for year after year, would moments later be gripped by the fear of not having enough to eat or drink, and then they would openly complain that God had abandoned them.

And it's it's it's it's actually when you're reading through the scriptures, it's sometimes a little shocking at how fast that happens, isn't it?

It's like literally one thing, Moses strikes a rock and water flows out of a rock.

And like the next chapter over, where is God?

He's abandoned us.

I'm like, did you not see the rock?

Was that not just a thing that just happened?

Like literally the chapter before this, right?

And so we're reading it kind of at a fast pace, and it just seems absurd because it's like, how are you so quickly forgetting the provision of God?

Did you not literally just see flakes of bread fall from the sky every morning?

And it happened again the next morning every day?

But it's like, God, you've abandoned us.

Take us back to Egypt.

We liked the leeks and the soup better.

It's like, what?

But you know, I when I read those scriptures, sometimes I'm just like, oh my gosh, I can't believe how forgivable they are.

But there but the truth is, and you know, you know this, we're the same.

We have the same tendencies, the tendency to forget, the tendency to have a short-term memory as it relates to the work of God and the faithfulness of God.

And there's a couple reasons this happens.

Some of us is because we live our lives at a pretty steady clip.

And it means that we're always moving from one thing to the next.

And I have three kids at home.

We have a lot of things going on, and even as we're trying to develop healthy rhythms as a family, I gotta be honest, it's it's sometimes there is a lot that's happening, and so sometimes it's hard to take a breath and to even think about what you just did because you're already planning for the next thing that you're about to do.

Anybody else?

And we're constantly preparing for what's next.

And even now in this room, some of us are already thinking about what's for lunch.

You're trying to pay attention to it, you're thinking about something on TV later today or something that's waiting for you at work tomorrow morning because that's the kind of lives we live.

We live these lives that are kind of on edge, tripping into the next thing from one thing to another.

And so this makes it hard to consider the work of God in the moments of our days.

There's others of us, however, that maybe your life isn't quite that exciting right now.

Maybe you wouldn't consider it eventful.

In fact, you remember every moment of your day, but you're just not that impressed.

And so when somebody asks you what's new or what's up, you always kind of stumble because there's really nothing new to report on, it feels like.

And so when this happens, and if you're living if kind of the season of life, if maybe you're more homebound than other seasons of life, or there's not quite as much going on, it's also easy to miss out on the works of God because we're missing an opportunity to actually give attention to the quiet and hidden places where God is moving on the interior of our life.

And so, on a surface level, even, we can miss the work of God even if our lives are slow.

So we can forget whether our lives are fast-paced or whether our lives are slow-paced, forgetfulness is something we are all prone to.

That's why the biblical command to remember and to reflect and to rejoice always and to overflow with thanksgiving.

Traditionally, it's something that happens that would be practiced in the evening at the tail end of a day.

Why?

Because gratitude is almost always in hindsight.

Gratitude is almost always in reflection.

They say that hindsight is 20-20, which isn't exactly true.

But we know that hindsight and being able to reflect on what our lives have become and what our lives are becoming is critical to staying in touch with the ongoing work of God in our life because gratitude practice and hindsight results in gratitude practice in foresight.

When we learn to be thankful for what has happened has transpired, we're actually rewiring our brains to also expect opportunities to receive every moment with thanksgiving and praise for the day we're going into.

We're training ourselves.

In the New Testament, Paul has a lot to say about training yourselves for righteousness.

And training part of training ourselves is actually training ourselves for Thanksgiving.

Most of the times we wait for things to be thankful for rather than training ourselves to find things to be thankful for.

That was really good right there, by the way.

I could be done right there.

I'm not gonna say it again.

I'm I'm you gotta take notes.

Okay, well, you can go back and listen online because I would I forget what I said.

It's gone.

It's over, it's gone.

So God is serious with his people about practices of celebration and thanksgiving.

In fact, for the Jewish people, about a third of their calendar year was given to feasts and celebrations.

About a third.

They were parties.

These guys partied hard.

They went for it.

Because every one of these feasts and celebrations were all connected to something that God had done and they baked it into their calendar year that they would never forget.

It's a little bit different than our, you know, than your office Christmas party.

Um, because we have a lot of parties and celebrations.

But the difference is for the Jews, through parties and celebrations, we're always connecting the gift to the giver.

A lot of times our parties and celebrations don't have a connection from the gift to the giver.

They're just party for the sake of party, but there is a way of partying that connects the gifts to the giver.

And this is why I love about Jesus too.

Um, he knew how to do it, he knew how to live.

In fact, somebody argued that, I think it was in the Gospel of Luke, um, but you probably could say in all the gospels, that Jesus was always either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.

He was always on his way to go eat something and drink something with people he loved.

And sometimes it was Pharisees, and sometimes it was sinners, hopefully both, right?

But Jesus, he there was a practice, I mean, uh the the meal time and the table and having moments to stop and to celebrate and to turn our attention to the Lord.

This is how the Jewish people, the people of Israel, actually baked it into their way of life.

And it's something that we have to recover because we We don't often live like that.

But one of the things that they did as well, that I think is really cool to take a look at this practice.

There's a traditional Jewish song that is sung during Passover that tells the full story of the Exodus at the Passover Seder.

And the song stands as lists a series of kindnesses God performed for the Jewish people during and after the Exodus and concludes each with the word Dianu, which means it would have been enough.

Dianu, it would have been enough.

And so they would, they'll actually sing this at Passover.

You know, if He had if He had taken us out of Egypt and not made judgments on our enemies, that would have been enough.

Or if He had supplied our needs in the wilderness for 40 years and not fed us the manna, that would have been enough for us.

And so it was a way of acknowledging one part of what God is doing and say, that alone would have been enough, but we serve a God that continues to outdo himself.

So Dainu is a way that the Jewish, the Jewish practice, it was a way of finding the hidden gifts of God rather than taking them for granted.

And it would be much like us saying, having lunch, you know, ending a day, just think about a conversation with God of, you know, having lunch today would have been enough.

But you actually let me pick what I got to eat.

Thank you, God, for overdoing it.

Getting to pick what I ate would have been good enough.

But you gave me a selection of spices and cultures and cuisine that I could actually choose from.

Thank you, God, for overdoing it.

Getting to eat green curry from my favorite Thai restaurant would have been good enough.

But you gave me somebody to sit across from to have a conversation with.

God, thank you for overdoing it.

Dayanu.

See, Dayanu is expressing gratitude in the journey and not just the destination.

Which is what the which is the invitation that is just woven in.

It's the through line.

Through the people of God living faithfully in his presence is not waiting for something to be thankful of, but training our eyes to see the God who was in all of it.

It's actually declaring the enoughness of God in a world that says there is never enough.

How many of you know that we need to end every day declaring the enoughness of God over our lives?

In a world that says you don't have enough, you didn't accomplish enough, you're not good enough.

God is enough, and He's given us everything we need.

So declaring the enoughness of God, living a dye and new kind of life, a gratitude-soaked life, it does a few things for us.

And just like the morning prayers with Jesus, quiet and solitude in the morning with Jesus, it actually is resistance against noise and speed.

We've talked about that.

Prayer for the lost, stopping ourselves and pulling, pulling off, pulling ourselves out of our life for a moment in the afternoon to think about the ones that God is calling us to pray for.

That's a resistance to both escapism and distraction and individualism.

Um, I would say evening prayer is a resistance to the the snares of entitlement and discontent.

Gratitude loosens us from the grip of discontent and entitlement.

I don't know about you, but that's something that I need.

There's days I come home loving life on top of the world, riding high in some of the winds of the days.

Other days I come home affected by conversations or disappointments or feelings of confusion or failure.

And I drag those types of things in with me as I peel myself out of my car and go into my home and you know, do my best to be present with my wife and my kids that I love so dearly.

But I have things that I'm carrying with me.

Most days I didn't get done everything that I had intended.

There are still unfulfilled desires, tasks unfinished, loose ends.

And when I leave, when I take all those things home and I leave the interpretation just up to my flesh, I have to complete, I have to every day fight the temptation of both insecurity or the not enoughness that comes from an incomplete day.

But when I take a moment and I review the day and I look at both my wins but even my losses, and I look at my triumphs and my needs, and I allow God to show me what He was doing inside of each one of those and how He has shaped me into His Christ-likeness through every single one of those.

There's something inside of me that begins to rise up and says, God, you've outdone yourself.

And actually invites me out of discontent.

But it also helps us resist entitlement.

I don't like to think entitlement is something I often deal with, but it does rear its ugly head from time to time.

I remember a couple years ago, I was meeting with my counselor and uh and I had a scheduled appointment with him, and and um, and he was just asking me how things were going.

And it was one of those weeks.

I don't know if you guys know this, but sometimes as a pastor, it's not super neat and pretty on a week-to-week basis.

Okay?

Not everybody's happy with you, or not everybody's you guys are fantastic, by the way.

But I'm just saying, in in general, there's a there's a lot of nuanced conversation, there's things you're misunderstood.

You're there there's things that are happening, and it which is which is fine, but it was one of those weeks a lot of that stuff started to catch up to me.

And so I was processing with my counselor and I was talking about these relationships I was disappointed with and things that weren't going as I planned, and and this and that, and how I was just kind of feeling disappointed.

And after I went on for a while, he stopped me and he said, he said, Hey, Luke, he said, Do you ever just step back and think to yourself, wow, what a privilege it is to serve the body of Christ.

What a joy it is to actually be able to give yourself to this kind of work.

And it's one of those comments, and I'm like, dang it.

I'm supposed to be the one that says those kinds of things to people.

Right?

Like, and I probably have.

I probably said the same thing to all kinds of people, but he said it to me, and I realized, oh my gosh, when was the last time I stepped back that even in the midst of the stuff, what a joy and a gift it is to serve the people of God.

This isn't something that I take lightly, but sometimes I get into this mindset of I don't deserve that kind of conversation.

I deserve better than this, I deserve more than this, I deserve.

And listen, entitlement is really interesting because people who walk in entitlement, there's something they get right.

They actually believe that there's something, a good gift available to them.

So it's possible to live in such a way where you're where you're trying to live in peace and joy and freedom.

But the problem, what makes it entitlement is we grasp for those things rather than receiving them as a gift.

Entitlement is grasping and taking hold of things as something I deserve, which is rather than receiving the gifts of God as a gift from a father to a son, which I can I can receive in thanksgiving versus something I have to take as if I deserve them.

And so a lot of this shows up in a lot of different ways.

I thought if I followed Jesus, I'd have more money.

Or I thought if I followed Jesus, I'd have more fulfilling work, or a better sex life, or I wouldn't have tension with my spouse.

I I thought if I followed Jesus, I wouldn't still be waiting on love.

I thought if I followed Jesus, people would actually recognize the gifts inside of me.

And those types of things, what happens is when we start to walk in gratitude, it starts to loosen the grip of entitlement.

That we're no longer looking at things through the lens of what we deserve.

We're surrendering ourselves to the God who wants to freely bless us and actually bring good gifts to us, but not because we deserve it.

I'm just telling you right now, I'm up here, not because I deserve to be up here.

I don't deserve anything.

I'm here because God has allowed me the gift and the privilege to come and give my life to the things that He cares about, which is His church.

And He calls us to give ourselves to the things that He cares about.

He calls us to our work, He calls us to our families, He calls us to give freely and to lay down our lives.

What a joy, what a gift it is to spend your whole life serving Jesus.

What a joy it is for him to be able to do with whatever he wants with your life.

It's a joy, it's actually a joy to be able to spend your life and lay down your life for Jesus.

And that's what gratitude does, is it releases us from a sense of I deserve to I get to you and what a joy this is.

But obviously that's not exactly easy, which is why the scriptures call this kind of thing a sacrifice of thanksgiving and a sacrifice of praise.

Has anybody ever heard made an actual sacrifice before?

Actually, don't raise your hands because that might get weird.

But sacrifices, just read it in the Bible.

It's not pretty and it's costly.

But Hebrews 13, 15 says, through him, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God.

That is the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.

Why is it a sacrifice?

Because there are times that thanksgiving actually costs us something.

It requires something from us.

So even when we come in here for worship on a Sunday morning and we sing songs about Thanksgiving, but our actual experience hasn't quite caught up with that yet.

We're still waiting for that coffee to kick in.

We're still waiting for our mind to believe what our words are saying, what our mouth is singing.

Thanksgiving is a sacrifice that we don't wait to happen to us.

We step into it and we say, I'm gonna take everything I got, and I'm gonna take all of my grief and my sorrow and my successes and my joys.

I'm gonna put it in a box, I'm gonna gift wrap it, put a bow on it, and I'm gonna bring it to Jesus.

God, this is all I got.

This is my life.

It's not pretty, but it's what I have.

I thank you, God, that you've given me this one life to live.

That's why Thanksgiving is one of our greatest weapons in the kingdom of God, because it's not passive, it's active.

It's something that we actually get to choose to do.

We get to choose to step forward in gratitude when we show up for worship.

We're not waiting for somebody to tell us what to be thankful for.

We're showing up, taking responsibility for our own lives and our own days, and saying, I'm not gonna wait for you to tell me.

I'm going to bring it to God because he's worthy of thanksgiving and praise.

He's worthy.

However messy and costly this is, I'm gonna bring it to him because he's worth it all.

And it retrains us, guys.

It's a new way of thinking and it's the thinking that we have to take hold of.

Henry Nowen says this: gratitude is the awareness that life in all its manifestations is a gift for which we want to give thanks.

The closer we come to God in prayer, the more we become aware of the abundance of God's gifts to us.

We may even discover the presence of these gifts in the midst of our pain and sorrows.

The mystery of the spiritual life is that many of the events, people, and situations that for a long time seemed to inhibit our way to God become ways of being united more deeply with Him.

What seemed a hindrance proves to be a gift.

Thus, gratitude becomes the quality of our hearts that allows us to live joyfully and peacefully, even though our struggles continue.

Amen.

So, a few ways that we live this out.

It's a lifestyle of day anew, it's a lifestyle of a sacrifice of praise, it's a lifestyle of gratitude.

And I just want to remind you, thankful people are usually more enjoyable people.

I tend to gravitate towards great thankful people.

I tend to stay away from people who are not thankful.

How annoying is that?

There is so much to be thankful for.

That's not to minimize our pain, but it's to invite us to open our eyes to the gifts of God.

Here's a few ways that we practice this in our home in the evenings.

When I come around my dinner table and I'm with my kids, it's an easy way just to say, hey, tell me about your day.

Let's review our day.

Tell me about one way that you experience God today.

What is one thing, one thing that you're thankful for today?

Sometimes we share highs and lows.

Give me a high spot and a low spot.

And sometimes it's hard.

I've found even our family.

It's hard, it's easy to think about the low spots.

It's hard to often identify the high spots because we have to be trained.

We have to develop those muscles, right?

So we do that around the dinner table.

If I don't do it around the dinner table when I'm tucking my kids in at bed at night, I ask them, hey, tell me, let's review your day.

What did you do?

Where did we find God today?

Where do we find God together?

And it's it's it's it's amazing.

And again, it takes some time.

But then if I'm, you know, sometimes I'm by myself at night or with my wife, and we're talking about the day.

And this is on the card, by the way.

This is an ancient prayer called the prayer of examine, and it's a gift from the 15th century from uh um Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

This is a very simple condensed version of it, but there's a few questions you're gonna see as you're reviewing your day.

Where did you discover gifts of joy?

Where did you experience grief?

How did you receive gifts of God's love?

How did the day affect you?

Were you today, were you pulled towards the love of God, or do you feel further than the love of God?

See, these kinds of questions are important because it it starts to shape our prayers.

We start to let God reinterpret our day through what He's doing.

And there's times we need to rejoice, and times we have to repent.

And that's a good time, it's a good thing because it means we get to wake up in the morning.

Let's do this again, Father.

So we review our day, we pray gratitude, and then we rejoice or repent.

I don't know about you, but I have to be reminded of the promises of God over and over and over and over again.

Over and over and over again.

I've got to get him deep into my bones.

We're gonna end here shortly.

I'm gonna ask my dad to come up.

Well, we're gonna receive communion together in a second as just the end of this time, as a way of remembering the body and blood of Christ.

But I just want to take this full circle.

Um Together, we we've been in and out of the story of Daniel.

Daniel 6, 10.

We read how Daniel, it says that Daniel knew that the document had been signed.

It was a document that was essentially his death warrant.

It was a document that that um some people, his enemies had signed to try to get him to stop praying to God.

And what he did was in Daniel 6.10, it says he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber, opened towards Jerusalem.

He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before God as he had done previously.

So it is a little odd that upon signing the signing of your death warrant, you would get on your knees and give thanks to God.

Is that weird to anybody else?

They made it illegal for him to do what he could not stop from doing.

And so he got down on his knees and he gave thanks.

Why would he give thanks as he looked towards Jerusalem?

Because he's holding on to a promise.

And you guys know this promise.

We probably you probably have this on a coffee mug at home or a or a calendar for the year.

Jeremiah 29, 10 and 11.

We typically know Jeremiah 29, 11, but we got let's start a verse ahead of that in Jeremiah 29, 10, and I'll read it.

It says this for thus says the Lord, when seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill you, fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.

Plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

So for Daniel, his motivation in gratitude was not the fact that everything was neat and pretty and he had all these reasons to give thanks.

His thanksgiving was rooted that God keeps true in his promises, and God said that we will be here for 70 years.

But there will come a time that he is intending to bring us back, and his plan for us is not to harm us, it's not to do evil to us, it's to prosper us and to give us a hope and to give us a future.

For Daniel, that was enough to bring him to his knees and say, Every day, thank you, God.

You have a promise that you have not given up on, and we are part of that promise with you.

That's a word for some of you today.

That's a word for some of you today, where it's been whole it's been hard to hold on to the promises of God because your life is not matching up with it.

I'm telling you, you use the weapon of thanksgiving to dismantle the lies that would keep you bound in discontent, that would keep you bound in disappointment, that would keep you bound in shame, that would keep you bound in not enoughness.

Resist the devil, flee from those thoughts, return to the Lord, not just in wishful thinking, but in but anchored into the one who does not give up on his promises.

That is who you are called to be.

That is that is your destiny, that is your identity.

He is given to you, and no man can take that away from you.

No man can take away the hope of God's promises from you.

It has been secured in the person of the work of Jesus, and that is yours today to receive as a gift from the Father.

Amen.