Think 4:8 - Exceptional Gratitude

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And thank you for being part of what God is doing at His Hands.

Hope everyone's enjoying the beautiful summer weather that we're running into.

It's awesome.

Actually, it's great because now all the flowers are gonna look great for the next week or two.

So this is good.

This is perfect.

Um got a few quick announcements that we want to share before we jump into what we're gonna talk about this morning.

Uh first of all, we've got to talk about the month of May, because May is going to be a really, really great month here.

It all starts next week, and next week is probably one of the two or three best Sundays that we'll have each year, and it's because it's Baptism Sunday, which is really exciting.

It is.

Um, the way it basically works is twice a year we have a Sunday that we dedicate to anyone who's ready to take that next step in their relationship with Jesus, follow in his footsteps, and just make that statement saying, I'm all in.

I'm all in with Jesus.

And that's gonna be next Sunday.

Every single year it's amazing how many people make that decision.

I mean, it if I'll just say this too.

If you want to stay behind and experience the Holy Spirit, watching 50 plus people go all in with Jesus is an incredible thing to be part of.

And you're free to stay after and cheer everyone on who does that.

If you're someone that's getting baptized, or maybe you have a son or daughter that's getting baptized and they've talked with you about that, the only thing we ask that you would do is help us out by signing them up or signing yourself up.

We'll have a sign-up table in the lobby when we're done.

You don't have to sign up, it just helps us sort of get an estimation of how many people are gonna do it so we can have everything we need ready.

So you can do that today, but even if it's a last second decision, even if it's you know the very last moment of next week, we'll have extra clothes and towels available for you.

So uh, but be here next week, because that that week, there's just something about that.

The Holy Spirit shows up in a big way when there's that many people that are gonna take a huge step in their relationship with him.

So it's gonna be really exciting.

A few weeks after that is bless the bikes.

It's kind of a fun tradition that we have here at his hands where we get a ton of bikers and bike enthusiasts.

They all bring their bikes, we pray for them afterwards.

There's you know, hundred-something motorcycles in our in our parking lot, and then afterwards they rev them all up at the same time.

It's very loud, very exciting.

And uh we have food, we'll have all kinds of stuff going on for that.

So that's May 19th, which is uh which is gonna be awesome as well.

One other thing I want to talk about, kind of a favor to ask.

First, though, I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who gives financially.

Uh, we're kind of a different church.

If it's your first time or you're new, you don't you may not know a lot of things about us, but we're a volunteer church.

We only have two people that work full-time here.

Everything else is volunteer.

We don't pass a plate or anything like that, but we have a big heart for this community and for seeing people get the help they need and connect with Jesus.

So whenever you give here, it's not just giving to his hands.

We give 15% of every single dollar given to three local charities that help people in crisis.

There's the Cherokee Family Violence Center, Papa's Pantry, and the Hope Center.

And I know personally, my wife and I just love that.

It's so cool to know that when we give to this church, you know, we're not just giving to what God's doing here, which is which is worth all of it, but we're actually giving to this community as well and helping people that really need it.

So that's always always exciting.

One other thing I want to talk about before we pray and jump into our message, um, and that's related to our high school group.

We are blessed to have an incredible group of teenagers at this church.

We really do.

And uh and I'm personally blessed to get to be a part of their lives.

And um what's really cool is I've been here for six plus years, and there was a group of students who were sixth graders when I first started working here, and now they're seniors in high school, so I've kind of got to see them all you know grow up and get taller than me and all that kind of stuff, which is fun.

Um, but but I'm serious in the when I say that that we have a special group of high school students.

You know, they meet every Wednesday night at 7 o'clock over in the arena, um, and we have a blast together.

We get closer to God, but they're not just part of some group that meets other times throughout the week.

They're a big part of this church.

I know a ton of you guys have talked to me about how much it impacts you to see them worshiping together on Sunday mornings and how passionate they are.

Uh, we have over 30 high school students that help out at least one Sunday a month, that volunteer a whole Sunday to help out on our teams.

We've got a ton of college age and young adult students that used to be in our high school group that are still involved here and help out a lot.

It's just a really, really cool thing that God's doing with our students.

So if you have a student, or if you are a high school student, you haven't been a part of that group yet, come on a Wednesday night at 7 o'clock, get plugged in because it will be worth it.

Probably the most important thing we do every year with our students is our summer road trip that we take every summer.

There you go.

That's where they sit, apparently.

That's good.

Um every summer we go on this great road trip.

We've done it, this will be our fifth year, actually.

We go up to Tennessee, we spend about a week together, uh, up in the mountains, we stay in these great cabins.

We have a blast.

It's the highlight of the year for most of our students.

But what makes it so special is that God shows up in a big way.

I cannot tell you how many high school students in the last two years we've had that have said that was the first time they encountered God's presence and they knew he was real and they knew that he loved them.

I mean, it's awesome.

It really is.

Love you guys.

And just to give you some perspective on that, in the last four years, we've had over 80 students get baptized on the road trip.

Just 80 kids, which is really cool.

Um, and that's coming up on June 10th.

We leave on June 10th, it's a Monday.

We get back late on Thursday.

So if you have a high school student or you are one and haven't signed up yet, you can get sign-up sheets and permission forms, all that kind of stuff at the info desk.

You can go online on our high school page.

But the favor that I wanted to ask you is really simple.

Every year we have students that go that can't afford it.

Every single year.

Last year, for example, we took 64 high school students, and 20 of them needed sponsored to be able to go on the trip.

We do what we do a lot of things to keep the trip really affordable.

It's$185, and that covers the cabins, the food, the transportation.

We don't make a dime on that trip as a church.

And that's not our goal, is to make any money.

We just want to cover the costs.

And we've never turned a student away for financial reasons ever, and we never will, but every once in a while we just want to ask your help to see if it's possible, if you can pray about it, or you feel led to, or even if you just can and you want to, to sponsor a student to be able to go.

I know this year we're gonna have about 20 or so students that need help paying for it.

And so if you can do that, it will bless one of our high school students in an amazing way.

I know$185 is a good chunk of change.

There's a lot of fun and enjoyable and important things that we can do with that money.

Uh, but man, I cannot tell you guys enough how big of an investment and how worthwhile of an investment it is.

I I've seen in the last several years so many kids who have gone on the trip and you know have kind of come up to me and said, Hey, who let me go on this trip?

Who was the person that you know gave that?

And when I when I talk to them about it, you know, their faces just light up.

And in a way, it almost makes them more likely to experience God on the trip because they feel so blessed and they feel like it's a gift and their hearts just kind of open to experiencing God after that.

So if that's something you can do, I know it's a big thing to ask, or even if it's something you can partially do, um, we just like to ask if you could think about doing that this morning.

You can write a check, make it out to his hands, just put, you know, student trip in the four line on the giving kiosk, there's an option this morning for the high school trip, and you can just select that.

Uh I know it'll mean the world to our students and as many kids as we can get to go on this thing.

I mean, as many kids as we can get to go.

We know it's gonna impact their lives in a huge way.

So thank you for that.

I just want to thank you in advance because I know that however many we need, we'll step up and do that.

Um, so yeah, so thank you.

Let's uh let's pray and let's jump into what we're gonna talk about this morning.

Daddy, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you for just giving us your presence.

Every Sunday morning that we get together and worship you, we feel your presence.

We know you're real, we know you're here, we know you're with us.

And we wanna we wanna hear from you this morning.

We want you to move in our hearts and lead us to a better life.

Lead us to a life that we can experience more of your blessings, that we can be more of a blessing to other people, and a life that we can just know that we're your kids, you're a dad, and you love us deeply.

We just pray that when we leave this morning, we're more excited about our lives than when we came in.

And Jesus, we just want you to be glorified in everything we say and do.

And we ask this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

I want to get started by telling the story of a woman whose story is a huge inspiration to my life.

I know it will be to ours as well.

I'll kind of explain the context of how this fits in with what we're talking about in a few minutes, but it's a woman named Juanita Scott.

Juanita Scott was born in 1927, and her life is one that would definitely be categorized as one of tragedy in a lot of ways.

She experienced an incredible amount of hardship.

She was born in 1927, like I said, when she was the third of three children.

She had an older sister that was six years older than her.

She had an older brother that was three years older than her.

And when she was four years old, the first major tragedy in her life struck.

Her older brother, who was seven at the time, she was four, uh, was killed.

He died of pneumonia shortly after suffering an injury from a horse riding accident.

So at four years old, she lost her older brother.

Her parents were going through an incredibly hard time during that stage of their lives.

The Great Depression was really starting to hit full swing.

Their finances were totally destroyed.

They had to live on an Indian reservation in order to survive because uh her father was 50% Choctaw Indian, and so they were able to do that.

But shortly after her brother died and everything was kind of falling apart in her family, her mother took her older sister and just left.

Just left her with her father.

So she was abandoned by her mother, lost her sister, lost her older brother at an incredibly young age.

Her father moved to southern Missouri and started a bar.

And that's the world that she grew up in.

He was friends with a lot of really rough people, people that you definitely wouldn't want a young child around if you were parenting them the right way.

But that's the world she lived in.

Just to give some context, one of her father's really good friends was a man named Pretty Boy Floyd.

That wasn't his name, that's what people called him.

I don't think it was his name.

But at one point in time, Pretty Boy Floyd was number one on the FBI's uh public enemy list shortly after John Dillinger was killed.

So that's the kind of people that she grew up with.

She waited tables in that bar.

She eventually met her husband in that bar.

She got married at a young age, had eight children during the course of that marriage.

When she was 22 years old, her father was shot and killed in a bar fight that broke out over a card game in that bar.

So at 22, she'd already lost her brother, her father.

Her mother had abandoned her and taken her sister with it with her to make things more interesting and potentially harder for her.

Her sister's life was the polar opposite of hers.

Her sister was six years older, and during World War II, she served our country overseas and worked in offices during the war.

She met a man named Marcel Albert, who was one of the most decorated fighter pilots of World War II.

He received the highest honors and the highest rewards that anyone could get in both France, because he was French, as well as the Soviet Union, where he served most of his time fighting Germany on the Eastern Front.

One of the most decorated fighter pilots in war history, actually.

And so her sister married that man and spent her years traveling, doing a lot of glamorous things, being in parades and all kinds of stuff, having this really storybook life.

And meanwhile, Juanita lives in southern Missouri and is experiencing tragedy after tragedy.

When she was still a young mother, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

And we're fortunate to live in a time when doctors know what to do with those kinds of diseases, but it in her time they didn't.

And the advice that they would give people who would get something like that is the polar opposite of what advice would be given now.

And to make things worse, her arthritis was in the top one percentile of severity.

By the time she was middle-aged, she had had both knees replaced, both hips replaced.

She had breast cancer and had to have a double massectomy.

By the time she was getting older, being a grandmother's age, uh, one of her legs was several inches shorter than the other.

She couldn't walk.

Her fingers had become so gnarled by the arthritis that she couldn't, she couldn't do anything hardly.

She could barely pick up a cup and drink from it.

She couldn't pick up her grandkids, she couldn't write.

She was immobile, she could basically just sit in a wheelchair, watch TV, spend time with her family.

After 40 years of being married, she and her husband actually divorced.

They had a really ugly, hard divorce.

And her two oldest boys, her firstborn children, died before she did.

So in her life, she experienced tragedy after tragedy.

Lost her brother, her father, her two oldest sons, dealt with an incredibly debilitating disease, had a marriage that fell apart.

Just thing after thing.

In fact, whenever she was in her later years, uh her neck actually broke on its own just from the weight of her own head.

That's how brittle and weak the bones in her neck were.

She had to have a halo put on to support all that kind of stuff.

You can't learn Juanita's story by reading a book.

Someone should write a book about it.

The reason I know her story is because she's my grandma.

She died when I was 20 years old, but but I was incredibly close with her growing up.

Incredibly close.

We would spend Saturday after Saturday at her house.

Um, and the reason this, the reason this matters with what we're talking about right now is that she is probably the most joyful person I have ever known.

Every single time I walked into her tiny little apartment, she was beaming.

I mean, her face would light up with a smile.

We used to spend Saturdays there, my brother and my mom and I, and we would just go there on a Saturday morning, spend the entire day, and it was it was like the highlight of our weekend.

She couldn't get around.

I don't have any memories of her holding me.

I don't have I have a handful of memories of her being able just to get up and use a walker to get to her kitchen.

But she just sat with joy.

I cannot picture my grandmother without her smiling.

I can't do it.

That's the kind of joy that she had in her lives.

For the last 20 days, we've been talking about how to live a joy-filled life.

Tommy Newberry came and shared the first few weeks in April with us.

He wrote a book called The 4.8 Principle based on Philippians 4.8, which which Paul urges us to focus on the good things we have in this life.

It says, summing it all up, my friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious.

The best, not the worst.

The beautiful, not the ugly.

Things to praise, not things to curse.

Tommy wrote another book called 40 Days to a Joy-Filled Life, and that's the one that we've really been encouraging people to grab and go through.

It takes about five minutes a day.

If you haven't picked it up yet, you can do it at the source this morning.

The exciting thing for all of us that have been doing it since the beginning is that today is day 20, so we are halfway through the 40 days to a joy-filled life.

And I've been going through it, and for me, it's been equal parts encouragement and challenge.

I'm a pretty positive person, naturally.

I smile a lot.

But as I've been going through this stuff, you know, thinking, oh, I'm a really positive person, this is going to be easy for me.

It's been challenging.

I've realized how often I let my attitude and my mood and my outlook on life, the level of joy that I experience, be dictated by tiny little things.

I constantly focus on the few things that are wrong with my marriage, with our finances, with our home, and neglect all the things that are working.

And as I was getting ready for this morning, I thought to myself, man, what would my what would my grandmother's attitude have been like had she allowed her joy to be dictated by her circumstances?

I've never known someone that dealt with that much in their life.

But if you had had the opportunity to spend 15 minutes next to her, you would not have heard a word about her tragedies.

All you would have heard her talk about were her grandchildren and her kids and the people she loved.

She had a joy that was independent of her circumstances.

And that's something that's really rare, but totally attainable with God's help.

This morning we're gonna focus on one of the most foundational aspects to having joy in our lives, and that's gratitude.

This last week, my wife's family invited us on vacation.

We spent the whole week up in North Georgia in the mountains, staying in a beautiful cabin on a lake.

We had a boat, we went fishing, we slept in, we played Scrabble, it was awesome because I won.

And it's awesome.

Don't ask my wife about it though.

She'll back me up that I won a couple times.

But you know, it was a great week.

It was an amazing week.

The weather was perfect.

You know, I fished with my son for the very first time ever, which was scary because those hooks just fly everywhere, and you're, you know, you gotta be on your guard.

I experienced a lot of gratitude on that trip.

I was very grateful for that experience.

But how could I not be?

I'm on this vacation, everything's perfect, all the circumstances are just right, and my heart is just overflowing with gratitude every single day.

I wasn't on a boat in perfect weather, fishing with my son for the very first time, you know, telling myself, Justin, come on, have a good attitude.

Come on, man, be positive, enjoy this.

I mean, that came naturally.

At a very basic level, all of us experience the feeling of gratitude.

Things happen to us or happen around us that make us feel grateful.

Someone gives you a compliment, you know, your spouse gets up early with the kids so you can sleep in.

Someone buys you a gift and you feel grateful.

Something happens in our lives around us that makes us temporarily appreciate what we have more.

Maybe there's a tragedy that we see on TV or in someone else's life, and it and for the moment it makes us go, wow, my life is really good.

I'm really grateful for this.

All of us feel gratitude in those types of situations.

In the 40 Days book, Tommy calls that normal gratitude.

It's a gratitude that we experience with little to no effort.

We just wait for something to happen to us, and that feeling comes naturally.

The thing is, we can't let our joy be dependent on normal gratitude.

Because we're not in control of what happens to us.

We have no control over that.

We want to experience exceptional gratitude.

A kind of gratitude that is not dependent on our circumstances.

In 1 Thessalonians 5.18, Paul wrote this be thankful in all circumstances.

For this is God's will for all who belong to Jesus Christ.

All circumstances.

That means the good and the bad.

That's what God wants for us.

He wants us to be able to have a heart that is truly grateful in any situation.

And Paul knew all about that when he wrote Philippians 4:8, which is what this whole thing's based on.

Philippians 4:8

He was in prison writing to us, hey, focus on the good, not the bad.

Things worthy to praise, not things to curse.

And he wrote that in prison.

Just a little while later, in that same chapter, he wrote that he had learned to be content whatever the circumstances.

It's because Paul experienced exceptional gratitude.

Exceptional gratitude is deliberate, it's intentional.

It's a decision that we make and a commitment that we make and keep.

That no matter what happens, we are going to find the good in every situation and we're going to focus on that.

That's the kind of gratitude that my grandmother had.

That's the kind of gratitude that I want.

I think that's the kind of gratitude that all of us want in our lives.

So I was thinking this week, what would our lives look like if we lived every single day with exceptional gratitude?

What would our marriages look like?

If we made the decision to make ourselves focus on the good qualities about our spouse and ignore the things that we don't like.

Marriage is kind of the perfect lens to see this through because there's always good, there's always bad.

There's always things that we're gonna love about the person we're married to, things that are admirable, there's always things that we can complain about.

Always.

It's our choice which ones to focus on.

And if we chose to focus on the good, would that make our marriages better or worse?

Would we have more intimacy?

Would we have more fun?

Would we have more connection with the person we were married to?

What would our relationships with our kids look like if we chose to be exceptionally grateful for them?

To not let a day go by that we don't tell them something about them that we love.

How would that affect our relationship with them 10 years from now?

Maybe they're out of the home.

Or full-blown adults with their own kids.

How would that affect how they see us?

What about our jobs?

If we drove to work and made ourselves think about the things about our job that we like, the things about our job that we enjoy, and we did not let ourselves focus on the things that we dreaded, how would that affect our performance at work?

Would we do better?

Would our superiors notice that?

Would we have more favor in the eyes of our bosses?

Exceptional gratitude changes our lives.

But it's different than normal gratitude because normal gratitude is dependent on what you experience.

Exceptional gratitude is dependent on how we think.

It's a mental decision.

One thing that Tommy wrote really stuck out to me.

He said, When you experience a sense of gratitude, it means that you've been harboring thoughts of appreciation for the abundance in your life.

When you feel a sense of deficiency, on the other hand, it doesn't necessarily mean That you're lacking something important.

What it does mean is that you have recently been thinking about what is absent, very likely to the exclusion of what is present.

Exceptional gratitude is not dependent on what we experience, it's not about what happens to us, it's about how we think.

And God can help us renew how we think all the time.

So it says in Romans, to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

So how do we do that?

How do we have exceptional gratitude?

I think it's really easy.

I do this all the time.

When things don't come naturally to us, when it's not just like an automatic, oh yeah, that's easy, I got this.

It's really easy for us to go, oh, well, okay, this is this is hard for me.

I don't naturally just walk around with that kind of gratitude.

She's adorable, by the way.

I know you.

It's the Donna Hoos.

I know you guys, see?

Shout out.

When we we don't naturally have something like that, it's super easy for us to go, oh, well, you know, that's hard for me.

I don't normally just wake up, I'm not a super chipper person, so I I I would love to do that, just not who I am.

The great thing about life is that we can force ourselves to do things we're not that good at.

And even if it's forced, the results are the same.

I'll give you an example.

I am not an early riser.

I grew up, this is this, I think it's just a result of how I grew up.

I grew up living in all these homes where I had basement bedrooms with no windows at all.

In fact, there were three homes in a row where I had a basement bedroom, no windows at all, and so you have no idea what time it is.

You know, there's no window to let you know the sun has come up, and you can wake up and it's 10 o'clock, but it feels like midnight.

And I just developed this incredible, uncanny ability to sleep uninterrupted for long periods of time.

It's a gift, really.

It's a gift.

And then I had kids.

Exactly.

You know, and we were on this trip this last week.

We at we had a room in this cabin that didn't have any windows, and it was like right back to seventh grade for me.

I was waking up the latest of anyone every single morning.

I felt like a total bum.

I just don't naturally wake up early.

The thing is, I need to wake up early a lot of the time.

If I'm gonna have a good day, I need to get up early enough to, you know, spend some time with God, to eat some breakfast, to do some things before I go to work, so that I can have the best day possible.

So what do I do?

I set I set an alarm.

I don't naturally get up early, but the result is the exact same.

I wake up, I have time to do what I need, and it didn't take that much effort.

There's a lot of things in life like that.

This is the same.

Experiencing this kind of gratitude, it may not come naturally, it may not come easily, but with very little effort and doing a few things that, yeah, they might be forced.

The great news is we experience the exact same result.

And the result is what matters.

So I want to spend a few minutes and talk about three simple things, really simple things that we can do to start experiencing exceptional gratitude in our lives right now.

Today.

There's three things.

Number one, notice your blessings.

Notice our blessings.

That's easy to say, it's harder to do, right?

How do we notice our blessings?

As A, a man and B someone that is not extremely detail-oriented, um, I I fail to notice a lot of things.

Jerry Seinfeld, one of my favorite comedians, and he has this bit where he's on stage and asks women if they want to know what men are thinking.

Men would like to know what women are thinking too, but that's impossible.

So you just have to give that up.

Um it's really easy for women.

So he asks that.

He says, Hey, you know, do you want to know what men are thinking?

And all the women in the audience cheer, like, yeah, we want to know.

And he goes, Okay, I'll tell you.

Nothing.

We're not, we're not thinking about anything.

We're just, his words, I think, are we're just walking around, looking around.

And he says that and I laugh, but I think about all the times I'm out somewhere with my wife, and I'm, she's like, she has to say my name five times, and she's like, Justin, what were you thinking about?

And I'm I was not thinking, I wasn't thinking about anything.

I'm really glad you, I could have walked in front of a train, I could have fallen downstairs, I could have done anything.

I'm so glad you were here.

Because that's true.

And so then the unfortunate result of that is that I miss a lot of important details and especially small details.

And so when it comes to noticing things, and our blessings definitely count with this, the key is to ask the right questions.

I'll give you a great example, and I know all the men here can relate to this.

There, there's a question that my wife has asked me at least probably once, twice a year for the last seven or eight years that we've been married, and it's it's a very terrifying question for me.

It's five words.

And it's when I first walk in the door from getting home, and she says, Do you notice anything different?

All right?

Five words.

Five very dangerous words.

When she says that, the only way I'm gonna notice anything is if I start asking myself questions.

So I go through this laundry list of questions.

What color is her hair?

What color was her hair when I left this morning?

Those are the first two, always.

You know, and have we do we have new furniture?

Has the furniture been moved around?

Did I accidentally walk into a stranger's home?

Where am I?

Those are the questions you just have to get those out of the way.

And if I ask the right questions, I can nail it within like four or five guesses easily.

If I don't ask the right questions, I'm hopeless.

I have no, I have no chance.

I just have to, you know, cause a distraction or something, do something to get out of the situation, but I have to ask the right questions.

The key to noticing anything is to ask the right questions.

If we want to notice our blessings, we just have to ask ourselves questions.

In Tommy's book, he calls these four eight questions.

They're questions that we ask ourselves that basically force us to see our blessings.

They make it impossible not to see them.

They're questions like, what is going really well in my life right now?

Who is someone that I am extremely thankful for?

What parts of my health are working really well right now?

How has God shown me grace today?

What was the best part of my day?

What's an exceptional quality in my kids?

The way life tends to go, we don't ask ourselves those kinds of questions very often.

We tend to be focusing on our problems and how we can fix them.

But if we took two or three minutes a day and asked those questions, our blessings would become so apparent.

We actually have a link on our on the homepage of our website, on our Facebook page, and then on the connect page of the mobile app that has a list of all those four or eight questions for you.

So if you want to just start with that, start there, you can pull that up and spend time, you know, two minutes each day this week asking yourself some of those questions.

And it'll be impossible not to notice the blessings that you have.

That's what those questions do.

If you want to notice anything, you've got to ask questions.

If you want to notice the blessings in our lives, if we want that, we just have to ask ourselves those kind of questions.

So that's number one, notice our blessings.

Number two, thank God for those blessings.

Thank God for those blessings.

Philippians 4, 6 through 7.

It's the two verses right before Philippians 4.8.

Says, don't worry about anything.

I love that, by the way.

It's my favorite part of the verse because that's such just a, hey, don't worry about anything.

Okay.

Go on.

This is what he says.

Instead, pray about everything.

Tell God what you need and thank him for all he's done.

Then you will experience God's peace, which exceeds anything we can understand.

His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

He says, pray about everything.

You know, ask God for what you need.

And that's easy.

Because when we're in prayer, we're really focused most of the time on what's happening now or what's right about to happen, or what we're worried will happen.

But just taking that moment to say, what has God already done in my life?

And thanking him for what he's already done, that's powerful.

It's powerful because that kills one of the biggest gratitude blocks that we experience, and that's worry.

When we're reminded of all that God has already done, it makes it really hard to worry about what we're focused on.

So many times that we'll be praying, where if we took a second and just said, okay, I'm gonna thank God for what he's already done in my life, what has he done?

How has he come through?

And we we see things that he's done for us that are way bigger than whatever it is we're worried about at the moment.

And that's not always the case.

Sometimes we're going through something extremely hard.

But focusing on what God has done in the past reminds us that he's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

If he cared about that small problem in our life and he solved it and helped us get through that, he's definitely going to work with us and help us with this big one.

When my son was in the newborn intensive care unit right after he was born, I had a moment like that.

I was extremely worried about my son.

We were driving home one night from the hospital and I was praying, and I just started to think about these little things God had done in my life that year.

Little things, things that he had done, prayers he had answered that were really inconsequential compared to something like what my son was going through.

And the thought hit me, it was like God speaking to me, saying, If I cared about that, don't you think I care about your son?

Just trust me.

And the only way that I could experience peace was to focus on what God had done.

When we focus on what God has done in our lives and thank him for it, it makes us look forward to what he will do.

Then all of a sudden, when we encounter problems, instead of worrying about them, we go, okay, God, how are you gonna do this one?

I know you're going to.

I need you to do it soon.

I'm excited to see what's gonna happen.

That defeats worry.

So number one is notice our blessings.

Number two is thank God for all that he's done.

Number three, and this is the one that might take the most effort right off the top of the bat, but it's but it's awesome.

And that's express our gratitude to other people.

Here's a great question we can all ask ourselves.

Do the people that we love and appreciate know that we love and appreciate them?

And if so, how?

How do they know that?

When was the last time we told them?

When was the last time we pointed out the things about them that we're really grateful for?

One of the things that Tommy talks about in his book is something he calls the law of familiarity.

And it's really easy and it definitely applies to the relationships that we're the closest with.

And that's that the longer we're we spend with someone, the easier it is to take them for granted.

The longer we spend time with someone, the easier it is for us to focus on the negatives and take for granted all the great things about them.

You can definitely see this in our marriage.

You know, sometimes it's the thing that we were most excited about our spouse when we first started dating, and now that's the thing that just frustrates us.

You know, when we first started dating, my wife would be like, Justin is so spontaneous.

I never know what he's gonna do.

As a father, it's not as helpful to be spontaneous.

You need to be able to count on someone to do something consistently and not just go by the seat of his pants.

I have a hard time with that.

I'm a very spontaneous person.

So sometimes the things that are the positives become negatives later on.

You know, for Megan and I, I know she's extremely organized.

We were in college together, she would take her schedule and my schedule and make these incredible color-coded spreadsheets so we would know.

And I was like, wow, this is awesome.

This is so great.

And at first I was like, yes, this is so helpful.

By the time it was done, though, you know, I'm like, I can't, I no, I don't want to have an organized schedule.

I just want to be able to do what I want to do.

And something that was so good, I took for granted.

And those are small, small little details, but when we're married to someone, it's so easy to take the good things for granted.

Things we used to praise 10, 15 years ago.

So, how do we combat that?

We decide to focus on the good and express it.

The more we express it, the more we think about it ourselves.

So we experience a blessing, the other person experiences a blessing, and our capacity for gratitude grows.

Think about our relationship with our kids.

When they're really young, it is so easy to see all the potential.

We believe they're destined for greatness.

And part of our role as parents, as they get older, is to start identifying things that could be roadblocks to them having a successful, healthy life and steering them in a different direction.

But it's so easy to start focusing on all those things at the expense of whatever makes them so special.

My son's three years old, and he is awesome.

About two months ago, I was I was hanging out with some people and they asked me about him.

And I'm like, hey, how's Liam?

And the first thing that came out of my mouth was, oh, he is so strong-willed and defiant.

It's driving me crazy.

You know, and that's true.

He is, he's very strong-willed.

And in a lot of ways, that's a real positive about him more than anything.

But I I caught myself and I was like, Justin, what are you doing?

Someone just asked you about your son who's this incredible blessing in your life, and the first thing that comes out of your mouth is a complaint about him.

Where is that?

Where's that coming from?

And I hate to say it, it's not the only time that I've done it.

We used to go to the doctor when he was young, and the doctor would say, Is he is he hitting his milestones?

Is he how many words does he say?

Does he say 10 words?

And we'd be like, Yes.

He says 10 words a second.

You know, he talks a lot.

I have no idea where he got it from.

And I found myself, when people ask, how's Liam?

instantly, first thing off the my tongue is, oh, he does not stop talking.

From the time that I was a little kid until now, um I have had so many people tell me that I talk too much.

You know?

My dad, we used to take car trips, and and my dad, he wouldn't even have to tell me to stop talking.

His thing was I'd be in the backseat, just talking, talking, talking, kind of like I am now.

And he would just take the mirror and adjust it so I could see him and just say, Justin.

And I kind of look up and I knew I'm talking too much, I need to stop talking.

And I thought to myself, when I said that, like, how in the world can I take something that that people have criticized me about and then turn that right on my son?

Why do I focus on the negatives about him?

Because he's he's amazing.

He's funny, he's smart, he's beautiful, he's he's a joy.

And that's just the law of familiarity.

The longer we're around someone, the easier it is to focus on the negatives.

How do we combat that?

We just express every chance we have the great things about that person.

When we do that, it's like hitting a reset button on our minds, and all of a sudden, we see the good.

So if you're really stressed with someone, if you're frustrated with someone close to you, students, it might be your parents, it might be a brother or sister, it doesn't matter what relationship it is, but when you're frustrated, just stop for a second and go, okay, what is something I really appreciate about this person?

And then just say that.

Express it.

In his book, he's got a number of things that he suggests that we would do.

And this last week I was like, okay, I'm gonna talk about gratitude.

I should do one of these things.

One of the things that that I've done this week is I've written someone a thank you note every single day.

Just a little two-minute long thank you note, put it in the mail and send it to them.

I've done it every single day this week.

I've probably sent two thank you cards in the last seven years.

I'm not proud of that.

But this last week I've sent seven.

It's been awesome.

It's been really, it's been great.

And at first I was like, man, this is gonna be hard.

But now I'm actually at the point where even just after seven days, I'm excited about who I'm gonna send the next one to.

And I have a list that's growing, and I don't think it's gonna run out.

It takes very little effort.

But it affects me, I'm pretty sure, even more than it affects whoever I'm sending those to.

It helps me see the good in people, things that I would probably take for granted if I didn't take just a few moments to think about it.

Very small things we can do that have a huge impact on our capacity for gratitude.

Two, three minutes a day.

You get on someone's Facebook page and just leave them a post on their wall, something you appreciate about them.

You can send an email.

What if we decided that the very first thing we're gonna do with our wives, with our kids, with our parents, the very first thing we're gonna do after we see them and say good morning is point out something we really love and appreciate about them.

How would that change our relationship with them and our our mindset for that entire day?

That's the kind of stuff that we can do.

It's like setting an alarm clock to get up early.

It takes very little effort, but the results are powerful.

Three things notice our blessings, thank God for them, and express our gratitude to other people.

My grandmother lived with exceptional gratitude in her life.

Exceptional gratitude.

And I know that that wasn't an accident.

She sat in her house every single day, unable to do anything, and that was the perfect opportunity to focus on all the things that had happened to her that were unfair.

All the things out of her control that happened to her that could have made her bitter and angry, but she didn't do that.

And I look back now and I realize that it was a choice.

She was deliberate in what she was doing.

She surrounded herself with pictures of her grandkids.

So as she sat in her little apartment home every single day, she was surrounded by her blessings.

She filled her refrigerator with all the foods and all the snacks that we loved.

Just in case we would come over.

I mean, there was no way you could go to my grandma's house and open the refrigerator door and not just see tons and tons of candy and soda and all kinds of things.

Things she didn't like, but we did.

And I would only imagine that every single time she opened up her refrigerator, it was a reminder that her grandkids might be coming in a day or two.

It was something that blessed her and helped her be grateful.

Exceptional gratitude is a choice.

It really is.

And the great news is a choice all of us can make.

All of us can make that choice.

And experience the blessing.

Experience the joy.

Joy is not a warm, fuzzy feeling that we get when something good happens to us.

Joy is a choice.

Joy is what God craves for us.

Nehemiah 8.10 says, the joy of the Lord is our strength.

It's not just this nice thing we need to have, it's our strength according to God.

So we should have it.

And a lot of it.

And there's no way to have real joy without exceptional gratitude.

So let's commit this morning as a church to practicing that this week.

Just doing one of those things.

It doesn't really matter what it could be.

It could be that this week is just I'm gonna notice my blessings.

I'm gonna ask those four or eight questions and I'm gonna focus on my blessings.

It could be that I'm gonna I'm gonna spend time every day in prayer and I'm gonna thank God for what he's done.

I'm gonna make myself think about things that happened 10 years ago, two weeks ago, whatever, things he's already done in my life.

I'm gonna express my gratitude to someone every single day.

The more we do it, our capacity for gratitude grows.

We experience more joy.

It's awesome.

You know what's great about this?

I'm just thinking, and we're about to wrap up and pray.

One of the things about this church that's awesome is this is a bunch of joy-filled people already.

You guys are an incredible group of really positive people.

Every time we do something as a church, 4th of July, or bless the bikes, and we all hang out afterwards.

I mean, it's smiles and excitement and joy and serving.

You guys are amazing.

We have an incredible church.

God has blessed us with a great group of people that love each other and love Him.

So we're already doing pretty well on the joy department.

Can you imagine what it would be like for all of us to take it to that next level?

How incredible that could be for the people in our lives, the people in this community.

It's gonna have a huge impact on people experiencing God and experiencing what He's blessed us with.

And all I have to do is start with a choice today.

So we're gonna do something that we haven't done in a while.

We don't have a last song this morning.

And uh we're gonna do this thing called Hands in the Pile.

There you go.

I'm glad you guys have that reaction to it.

The first time I was here and we did Hands in the Pile, I literally thought to myself, that's the goofiest thing I've ever done in a church.

And I liked it.

You know, it's one of those things we're like, that's weird, but I'm I'm enjoying I like this.

And here's what it is, it's real simple if you're new.

Um we're just gonna stand up, we're gonna group up in little clusters.

High school students, if you want to come up here and help me lead it, that'd be awesome.

And we just put our hands in one big pile like we're a team, because that's what we are.

We're a team, we're God's team.

And we say Jesus on three.

We kind of stir the pot, we go, oh, we say Jesus on three, and that's our commitment to saying, hey, we're gonna go out of here and we're gonna live with exceptional gratitude this week.

And it starts by thinking Jesus.

So let's do this.

Let's pray.

Sure, come on up.

Let's pray, and then we're gonna do some hands in the pile.

All right, let's do it.

Daddy, thank you so much for this week.

Thank you for uh for filling our lives with your joy.

We want to experience exceptional gratitude in our lives.

We want to live completely grateful for the blessings you've given us to the point where we can ignore the things that aren't even working in our lives and trust that you're gonna work those out in time.

I pray that you would bless everyone here this week.

Thank you, God, for all you're doing in this church.

Thank you for so many amazing people that love you and serve you.

We just ask that you bless our weeks, increase our capacity for joy, and bring us back together next week.

Ready for more?

We ask all this in your name.

Amen.

All right, let's do it.

Let's throw the pot.

Here we go.

All right, you ready?

You guys can all do it with us.

Here we go.

One, two, three.

Jesus! All right, guys, have a good week.